Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

I stared around wildly, but he had gone. I had no time to worry about it. I had to get out of here. The car squealed backwards, and I caught one last fleeting glimpse of my redundant front door, swaying restlessly back and forth over the entrance to my dark and empty house, and then roared forward into the night.

My hands were nerveless jelly around the wheel, and the bloodied knife lay next to me on the passenger seat. It was not dripping in gore, just lightly laced with it, blood beading minutely on the stainless steel. Blood…

My shirtfront was a huge crimson stain, gently spreading. I had to go to a hospital. But I was so tired… so very tired and faint. Not frightened at all now, just tired. The hot liquid was gelid now, settling on my skin.

The bleeding was stopping. I was too exhausted to be relieved.

The uneven road shook me slightly… I was so tired. I couldn’t go on. I would faint over the wheel… a horn blared at me out of nowhere, and suddenly a man in another car was making an obscene gesture and screaming at me. I had to get off the road. My eyes kept rolling shut. At least the bleeding was stopping. Stopping… I had to stop. The engine thrummed gently in my ears, like a lullaby, and the road rocked me like a baby. I had to stop…

When I woke up, I was in pitch blackness and absolute silence.

Katie wakes in darkness, as always, but there is a strange burr in her sleep-dazed brain that tells her she is not normally awake at this time.

Something is different, but she doesn’t know what it is. It is cold, true, but no colder than usual, and in any case, now the nights are drawing in, her captor has recently upgraded her thin blanket with the addition of a musty-smelling candlewick bedspread.

She sits up, stretching her wasted limbs, and suddenly realizes what it is.

The house is in utter silence.

She cranes her face upwards, towards where the ceiling is, forcing herself to become perfectly still as she concentrates.

Normally, at any time of night or day, Chris is in evidence through his media spoor. Rubbish TV plays loudly round the clock – talk shows all day, old movies all night, and she suspects that he sleeps in front of it. Certainly all of the bedrooms he occasionally takes her into have the perfect, sterile look of a show house or museum. Even when he works in the gardens, facile talk radio carries through the air, its lively mutters audible even down here through the medium of the pipes.

Sometimes she can hear him swearing explosively at these electronic voices, and at one point he threw something hard and the television went silent, which produced even more angry outbursts until the problem was corrected.

The music he sometimes plays on Sunday is his only concession to peace – but even then, it is not listened to, it is merely noise, an aspirational ambience.

Katie thinks of something Brian always says – wise men speak when they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something. Chris cannot bear his own company, and since she cannot bear his company either, this makes perfect sense to her. This cocoon of empty, oblivious one-way chatter and white noise exists around him so that he is never alone with himself, and yet never in danger of being confronted by anyone else.

She wonders, darkly, if she is also a part of this strategy.

The silence now, however, is absolute.

Wrapping the candlewick bedspread around herself, she shuffles over to the door and, as carefully as she can, conscious that this might be a trap of some sort, she tries the lock. It is as thoroughly bolted as ever.

The thought comes to her, in a blinding instant of panic, that perhaps he has abandoned her. The message to Bethan Avery has sent him running, and he is never coming back.

She is to starve to death in this cellar.

No. No. She refuses to believe this. She is going to get through this. She has given up too much, lived through too much, for any other outcome, and besides, she is going to see her mum and Brian again. Her mum and Brian, who must be going frantic, who maybe even believe those stupid lies spread about Katie running away.

When she thinks about how she spoke to Brian the last time she saw him, before she charged out of the house on that fatal night, a hot runnel of shame flows down from her head to her gut, burning everything in its path.

Brian, not her dad, was the one that had always been there for her.

She has to get out of here. She has to make it up to him, and to her poor mum.

Katie crushes down these thoughts as they are too painful – she can barely manage her own horror and dread; contemplating her mother’s is more than she can bear. She raises her chin in the darkness and grits her teeth. She is going to get out of here. She is going to make it up to them both.

As though she has conjured him, she hears his feet on the stairs – not his usual heavy tread, but something quicker, more irregular, and when he throws up the trapdoor she can hear his ragged breathing from where she sits, and the click of the switch in the passage. She remembers to scrabble back to her bed and lie down just as the cellar door swings wide and blinding light floods in.

She blinks, slowly, deliberately, as though he has just woken her. She is amazed to find, considering her fears of being entombed alive a few minutes ago, that she is pleased to see him.

The feeling lasts roughly ten seconds, ending as he stands over her, pulling off the candlewick bedspread with greedy haste. His face is in shadow, the light behind him, but the lit planes of his cheek and neck are shiny with sweat and, she thinks with a little burst of horror, she can smell blood.

‘It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right.’ His hands are freezing. ‘I’m going to fix this. Don’t worry. Now, come here.’

My first thought was that I was dead.

I was curled into a foetal ball on the driver’s seat of my car, and I was shivering violently with cold – I’d shivered myself awake, in fact.

I put my hands out to lift myself up and felt the hard matte plastic of the steering wheel. It was smeared thinly with something viscous and sticky that had a familiar smell. As I raised my arms even this slight distance, the pain wound about me like a serpent. My left shoulder was jelly, exquisitely painful jelly. It could take no weight at all, not even the weight of my arm. I touched it lightly with my other hand and it was boiling hot.

I wanted to cry. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t move. I had no idea where I was, and it was dark – the hateful darkness was following me. The last thing I remembered was trying to drive to the hospital and then realizing, with the giddy objectivity of a dream, that I would never make it that far, and I would need to call them on the mobile to come and get me. That’s the last thing I remembered thinking; that I’d never make it. The last thing I remembered feeling was hunted – even as I’d left the man on my front lawn, I’d had the mounting paranoia that he was right behind me.

Had he caught me?

Was that why I was here? And where was here?

After a minute or two feeling completely helpless I decided I had best try to do something.

With my good hand I made a few vague weak passes at the car door handle beside me, without much success. Just as I was about to give up for a brief rest my fingers recalled the movement to open the door and it swung wide with an echoing creak.

I rested for a moment in the faintest moonlight. The car was pulled up beside a big building, a warehouse, and there were some gigantic trucks parked nearby, blocky and silent. Their wheels were as high as my chest, or they would have been had I been able to stand up straight. There were a couple of thin windows in the very high walls of the building, and that was all I could see in the miserly amount of moonlight. I was parked before a huge roller shutter bay door, now closed and padlocked for the night.