by Cat Clarke
We stand on the road and wait until the bus has turned the corner. There’s a short row of houses on the other side of the street. They look like they don’t belong here, because here seems to be the middle of nowhere.
Sadie starts walking away from the houses, in the direction the bus came from. I have no choice but to follow. I stay a step or two behind so I can keep an eye on her. It will be getting dark before too long.
A couple of cars pass as we walk. Sadie keeps her head down, but I look at the drivers, half hoping that one of them will stop and ask if everything’s okay. But why would they? We are just two girls out for a late-afternoon stroll in the sunshine. They have no reason to notice us in the first place, let alone stop and talk to us.
After about half an hour, we come to a patch of woods. At first glance, it looks exactly the same as every other patch of woods we’ve passed. It’s the countryside—it all looks the same to me. Then I notice that there’s a track running into this particular stretch of woods. There’s a gate, with a sign that reads KEEP OUT. It’s hidden; you wouldn’t even notice it if you were driving past.
“What is this place?” My voice sounds too loud out here, without people and sirens and traffic. The only sounds I can hear are our feet on the road and the occasional tweeting of birds.
Sadie turns to look at me, as if she’s expecting some kind of reaction to the sight in front of us. There’s something not right here. Something not right with her.
“We’re here.”
Instead of opening the gate, Sadie walks around it. It’s not attached to a fence or a wall or anything. It can stop vehicles, but not us. She walks off down the track, but I hesitate. We are literally in the middle of nowhere. Anything could happen; I could scream for help and no one would hear. My parents could be about to lose another daughter.
I’ve come this far, though. I might as well see this through. Plus I’m not exactly wild about the idea of being left out here on my own. I edge my way around the side of the gate, trying to avoid stepping in the muddy ditch.
The track curves gently through the woods. It’s gloomy in here, the treetops tightly knit overhead. I think of Little Red Riding Hood, and suddenly I can’t remember the end of that story. Did she escape? Did she kill the wolf with her bare hands? Or did she curl up in a corner and wait for him to eat her up?
Finally there’s a house in front of us. I’m not sure what kind of place I was expecting to find, but it definitely wasn’t this. The house is ugly and gray and squat, with a flat roof and peeling paint around the windows. It’s best for everyone that it’s hidden in the woods, a house this ugly. That’s when I realize I was half expecting something from a fairy tale. A little white cottage with a thatched roof with smoke puffing out of the chimney. This place looks more like a military installation than a home.
The weirdest thing is the yard, which does look like something out of a fairy tale. There’s even a white picket fence around it. There’s an ornamental rock garden and ceramic pots of herbs, and ivy climbing up the wall next to the front door. It’s as if this ugly building has landed here in a tornado, crushing the little old lady’s house that belongs here to smithereens. If I look closely, I might see a pair of old-lady shoes peeking out where the wall meets the ground.
On closer inspection, the yard looks a bit neglected. Weeds are starting to take over. The little square patch of grass is overgrown; it clearly hasn’t seen a lawn mower in a long time.
Sadie watches me as I take it all in. “What is this place?” I ask for the second time.
“Home.” She laughs, but it sounds all wrong.
—
She doesn’t knock on the door or ring the doorbell (not that I can see a doorbell). She doesn’t take out a key, either. She just puts her hand on the doorknob and turns. She walks in, leaving the door open behind her.
The first thing that hits me is the smell. It seems to coat the inside of my nose and throat. It’s thick and cloying and deeply unpleasant. I stop worrying about someone else being here, because this house is empty. You can just feel it. I leave the door open in the vague hope that some air will start to circulate.
The inside of the house doesn’t match the outside, just like the outside doesn’t match the yard. A dusky-pink carpet runs through all the rooms, with various hideous rugs placed on it at regular intervals. Green patterned wallpaper. There is a lot of furniture, some of it antique, some of it from the seventies by the looks of it. Every surface has ornaments on it—little crystal animals or jugs in the shape of squat little men or dainty little teacups and saucers. I spy an ancient-looking TV in a corner.
There’s a hulking bookcase opposite the front door. The books are an odd mixture of true crime and romance, black spines stark among the pinks and peaches and purples. The bottom shelves are filled with textbooks and reference books.
None of the rooms have doors, not even the bedroom or the bathroom. It doesn’t even look like the doors have been removed—the house must have been built this way to someone’s (a weird someone’s) specifications. I peek into the bathroom—more dusky-pink carpet. Pink toilet, sink, and bath, too. Lots of bottles and jars lining the windowsill. Old-lady beauty products to match the old-lady decor.
The bedroom has an enormous bed with a flowery bedspread and too many pillows and cushions. In the corner there’s a much smaller bed—almost small enough to be a child’s. Next to this bed, there are three bottles of pills and a leather-bound Bible. Instead of decent bed linens, there’s a pancake-flat pillow and a filthy sleeping bag—a discarded cocoon. On the floor next to the bed lies a laptop, its once shiny casing smeared with fingerprints.
The bigger bed has been made neatly, all the corners tucked in. On the bedside table there is a cup. The cup has something dark green and mottled and foul in it. There’s a framed photograph of an old woman and a younger man. She’s sitting ramrod straight in a comfy chair. She is smiling (or grimacing—it’s hard to tell) and her cheeks are rosy with too much blush. A bright blue handbag sits on the floor to her left. The man kneels on her right. He is small and pale, with big, round eyes. There’s something nocturnal about him. His face is bland, almost but not quite good-looking. He isn’t smiling.
“What are you doing?” Sadie has crept up behind me, scaring the life out of me. Her voice is dull, toneless, her facial expression hard to read.
“I was just…looking around.” I indicate the photo on the bedside table. “Do they…? This place is so…”
“Weird?”
I nod. “And what is that smell? It smells like…” I have no idea what it smells like. Nothing good, that’s all I know.
She turns around, and at first I think she’s ignoring my questions, but then it’s clear that I’m expected to follow her. She heads into the living room and stands in front of the overstuffed sofa.
My view is obscured at first; the smell is stronger than ever. I cough, trying to clear it from my throat. Sadie steps aside, and that’s when I see it.
The stain is big. The size of a pillow or a medium-sized dog or a sweater. It’s remarkably even around the edges, as if someone has carefully poured a pot of paint onto the carpet.
The stain is dark. Black? It could be oil or treacle or balsamic vinegar.
But it’s none of those things. It’s blood.
Some things you just know, without having to be told. It doesn’t stop me asking, though. “What…? Whose…? That’s blood. Isn’t it? What happened here?”
Sadie is staring at the stain with a strange, almost dreamy look on her face. “Smith.”
I don’t understand. I take a step backward, knocking the backs of my calves on the sofa. I feel dizzy all of a sudden. The stench of blood is thicker and heavier, and I feel like it’s suffocating me. I want to sit down, but I can’t sit down here. Not in this place.
“I don’t…But you made that stuff up. About Smith and the basement and…”
I follow her gaze to a door in the hallway. I didn’t notice it before.
The only door in the house, apart from the one we came in. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about this door, but Sadie is staring at it with a look so intense that it burns. I walk over to the door, a little unsteadily. My legs feel like they belong to someone else.
The door has a lock with a key in it. It’s a Yale lock, big and sturdy. I turn the key and open the door. I look back at Sadie, still rooted to the spot next to the stain on the carpet. She nods at me.
I think I’m starting to understand.
In front of me there are stairs leading down. The stairs are rough concrete. There is a bare lightbulb overhead with a cord hanging next to the door. At the bottom of the cord there is a doll’s head. The cord is tied around her hair. The doll’s eyes are closed, as if she’s sleeping. Or dead. I don’t want to touch the head, so I grab the cord just above the doll and pull. The light comes on, illuminating the rest of the stairs.
I want Sadie to come with me, but something tells me I can’t ask her.
I count the stairs. Seventeen. One for each year of my life.
At the bottom of the stairs, there is another door, identical to the first. Another lock with another key. I unlock this door and push it. Darkness beyond.
I fumble around on the wall inside, searching for a light switch. I could use the light from my phone, but I’m too scared to go inside unless I can see every corner. You never know what could be lying in wait in the darkness. I look around me and realize there’s a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, outside the door, almost too high for me to reach. There is no good reason to have a light switch that high up. I manage to flick it with the very tips of my fingers.
I step into the room. I know this place.
The cot against the opposite wall. The small stainless-steel sink with a red bucket next to it. The bookshelf—again, almost too high for me to reach—with different-colored folders lined up neatly. Labels on the spines with neat black writing. Math. English. Science.
There’s a rickety chair and a Formica-topped table against the left-hand wall. On the table sits an ancient desktop computer. The keyboard in front of it is missing three of its keys.
There’s a pile of what look like old clothes and blankets in one corner.
Then I look up. Above the door, there is a tiny video camera, pointing at the cot.
This is not a room. It’s a cell.
The walls seem to close in on me. I’ve been standing here less than a minute, and the door is wide open behind me. If someone was to lock me in here and turn out the light, how long would it be before I lost my mind?
I turn and go back up the stairs as quickly as I can, not bothering to turn out the lights or close the doors. The front door is open. She’s sitting on the steps. I sit down next to her.
“How long?” I ask, staring at a patch of pink heather clinging to a rock.
“Fifteen years.”
“You killed him.” Not quite a question, not quite a statement.
She nods.
“And then…?”
“I had nowhere to go.”
So she came to us. She needed a family. We fit the bill.
I can’t get my head around it. It’s too much, too crazy. It doesn’t make sense….There’s so much that doesn’t make sense.
“I’m sorry,” she says, before I can even manage to form a coherent thought.
What is she expecting me to say? That’s it’s all okay and I forgive her for what she’s done to us? Because it’s not okay and I do not forgive her. She tricked us all. Lied to us.
“So all that stuff about Smith…the things he did…”
“All true.”
I wait. The sky is red. If I concentrate hard enough on the pretty garden in front of me, maybe the house of horrors behind me will cease to exist.
Sadie starts to talk. Slowly, haltingly at first. Then faster and faster, as if she’s racing to get the words out before darkness falls.
—
She is twenty-three years old now. She was eight years old when she was taken. It happened in a mall, lots of people around. She can’t remember much about her life before. “There were men,” she says. “Bad men.”
I ask about her family. Her real family. She tracked them down. It was the first thing she did when she escaped. Her mother is dead. Overdose.
“What about your dad?” I ask.
“Don’t have a dad,” she says.
I ask about Smith. “Is he the one in the picture?”
She nods.
“So you lied to the police about what he looked like?”
She nods again. “I couldn’t have them finding out who he really was.”
I think about this for a moment. If she had accurately described Smith, there would have been a good chance someone out there would have recognized him. Even if he did live like a recluse, someone would surely have been able to identify him. Then the police would have come here. Found the bloodstain on the carpet. “Where is he?…Did you bury him?”
“Back there.” She gestures with her head, nodding toward a path leading around the side of the house.
I try to picture her dragging his body through the house and out the front door. The head, thunking on the steps we’re sitting on. She must have wrapped the body in a sheet or something. There were no signs of blood on the carpet other than the stain next to the sofa.
I want to ask how she did it. What it was like to kill a man. Was it quick?
It’s as if she reads my mind. “I only hit him once. I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to knock him out. Give myself a chance to run. His back was turned. He was crying. I think he expected me to comfort him. I picked up the iron without thinking. It was just sitting there next to the fireplace. I’d never even noticed it before. It belonged to his mother, I think. Probably an antique.” She pauses and a ghost of a smile plays across her lips. “Caved in his skull. Didn’t know my own strength.”
What do you say to someone who is essentially confessing to a murder? But does this even count as murder? I don’t think it’s self-defense. Still, it’s hard to imagine a jury convicting her, after everything she’s been through.
I ask her if she ever tried to escape before. “A couple of times,” she tells me. “Mostly in the first year or two.”
“And after that?”
Sadie shrugs. “I stopped trying. I got used to it. Got used to him. He took care of me.” She sees the horrified look on my face. “I know how fucked up it sounds. You don’t need to tell me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No one can ever understand what it was like. No one except…me.”
Something isn’t quite adding up. Lots of things, in fact. “Why didn’t you just go to the police? After you…after he was dead.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I was alone. For the first time in my whole life, there was no one telling me what to do. I ate when I wanted and slept when I wanted and went on the computer and walked in the woods. It was…peaceful. It was only when the food started to run out that I realized I couldn’t stay.”
This is the part that doesn’t make any sense. The missing piece of the puzzle. Everything else I can sort of understand—or at least try. But how did she come up with the idea to pretend to be my sister? I wait for her to explain, but she says nothing.
It’s almost completely dark now. I’m not looking forward to walking back to the main road. “I can call Dad, you know. He could come and get us.” I stop and think for a second. Yes. This could work. “We can explain everything. I know it won’t be easy, and of course they’ll be upset….” Understatement of the century, but I keep going. “But they’ll…I think they’ll understand. In time. And I’m sure we can find someone—a family member or whatever—to take care of you. You must have grandparents or aunts or something. And they will have been looking for you, just like we’ve been looking for Laurel. Just think what it will be like, when you turn up after all these years.” I know exactly what it will be like. A miracle. And for them, the miracle will ac
tually be real.
“Faith,” she says, but I carry on gabbling about how everything will be okay and people should really know that this Smith guy is dead. Right now the police are wasting valuable resources looking for a guy who doesn’t even exist when they should be looking for my sister. I keep talking, hoping that something I say will get through to her. I know I could just call Dad anyway—I don’t need her permission—but suddenly it seems important that Sadie is okay with it.
“Faith! Stop! Just…stop.” Sadie gets up and starts pacing. Gravel crunches underneath her feet. She brings her hands up to her face and mutters something. When she moves her hands, there are tears in her eyes. She’s biting her lip so hard that it’s started to bleed.
I stand and put my hand on her shoulder, trying to reassure her. But she flinches at my touch. She backs away from me. “I need to…I didn’t want to…There’s something you need to see. I’m sorry.”
I follow Sadie around the side of the house. Her shoulders are hunched, and she’s sobbing. I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what’s going on here.
There’s no backyard. The trees are so close that the branches brush against the windows. I have to get my phone out and use the screen to light my way. Sadie doesn’t seem to have any problem seeing where she’s going, though. She’s used to the dark.
We walk past a mound of earth, about six foot long. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t look down as we pass. She doesn’t say anything at all to give me an idea of what is underneath that mound. She doesn’t have to. I wonder what the body looks like. Decaying flesh, sunken eyeballs. Worms and insects.
Finally, Sadie stops in a small clearing. The moonlight shines overhead. It might be a nice spot for a picnic, in the daytime.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. Why does she keep saying that?
Then I see. I see.
Another mound of earth, about the same size as the one we passed. Someone has placed lots of tiny stones around it, forming a border. A crooked wooden cross sticks up from the earth. There’s something leaning against the cross. I move closer to see what it is.
