Hidden

by Shalini Boland

  The smell of fear and death filled his nostrils as he picked up the limp form of his wife, a wide smear of blood congealed on her neck. He kissed her mouth and rocked her back and forth.

  ‘Victoria, wake up. Victoria, you must wake up! We must leave and get you to a doctor.’ As he spoke the words, he realised it was futile. ‘My love, my beautiful Victoria ... No ... no. How can this be?’

  He laid her down and gathered the bodies of his children to his chest. Leonora’s hair was matted with blood, her neck broken. He kissed her hair and then kissed all of their unyielding lifeless faces.

  Refet stood in the doorway, taking in the scene, unable to speak. He saw Agha Kaya’s vacant eyes, his limp, lifeless form. Then he noticed two other uniformed bodies - his comrades. Dead. He walked woodenly over to Harold and shook his shoulder.

  ‘We must go,’ he whispered. ‘It is not safe here. We go now. They killed by bad creature … or murdered ... a wolf? I don’t know. Maybe the killer … the killer here still.’ He had other thoughts which he didn’t give voice to. Thoughts fuelled by rumours he had heard around the camp.

  ‘What animal could have done such a thing? Surely no person would do this?’ Harold choked out the words.’

  ‘I not know. We leave now,’ Refet insisted, trying to pull Harold to his feet. The young guard sensed lingering danger in the room. He could not identify it, but he knew it was present.

  ‘You go,’ Harold said. ‘I will not leave my family.’

  Refet gripped his pistol and tried to keep his rising terror in check. He knew they should not remain here, but he felt strong sympathy for this man who had lost his family and friends.

  ‘You wait. Hold gun. I come back,’ he said, leaving Harold hunched over the broken forms of his wife and children.

  A minute later, Refet returned. The young guard walked over to the lifeless body of Isobel, picked her up and carried her out. He had found a small room, that could be closed from the inside with a millstone and he planned to carry all the bodies there for safekeeping. He worked tirelessly.

  ‘Come,’ he said to Harold who was now sitting vacantly with his dead family around him. ‘We will bring you wife, you children.’

  Harold did not heed him, so Refet bent down to pick up Victoria’s body.

  ‘Do not touch her!’ Harold shouted. He stood up. ‘Please,’ he said more gently. ‘I will carry her. You bring my boy.’

  Refet inclined his head and carefully picked up Freddie’s flaccid body.

  ‘I will wait with them until you return,’ Harold said lifelessly. ‘Then we will take Victoria and Leonora together.’

  Finally, the bodies had all been transferred to the small room.

  ‘They will be safe here,’ Refet said. ‘We go now. We come back tomorrow with help.’

  ‘I am not leaving my family.’

  ‘It not good to stay. Please to come back with me. We return in the morning.’

  ‘No. You go. I want to stay with my family. I will seal myself inside. No one will get in.’

  ‘I not want to leave you, but if I stay, they send more guards look for us. Not good for people to come here tonight. Too dangerous.’

  Harold did not even look as though he was listening to Refet. He stared at the wall, his face contorted in shock and grief.

  ‘I take one light but leave you all others, you use only one at a time, yes? You have food and water. I return tomorrow. I very sorry for you and you family. I sorry.’

  Harold did not reply and reluctantly Refet left the grieving man with his slaughtered family.

  ‘You push stone to close door,’ he said. But Harold was not listening so he gently shook his shoulder. ‘I cannot go until you close door. Come.’ He helped Harold to his feet and guided him over to the millstone. ‘I go, after you close door.’

  Harold somehow found the strength to wheel the circular stone into place and then he sank down next to it. The light from the lantern flickered and danced over the bodies, which Refet had laid out neatly in a row along the back wall of the room.

  Harold squeezed his eyes tightly closed. He did not feel as if he belonged to himself, he felt as though his real self had left his body and he had been transferred into hell. He crawled across to his wife’s body and wrapped his arms around her. His tears dripped onto her lifeless face and he lay with his cheek next to hers. He could not process his thoughts and soon fell into a half-sleep breathing in the scent of her hair.

  *

  Harold awoke some time later. He did not know how long he had slept. The lantern still burned, but the flame was low and the underground chamber had almost succumbed to the darkness. Harold did not care that his body was cold and thirsty; all he felt was the slice of pain as the memories rushed into his mind.

  ‘Dead,’ he whispered. ‘All dead.’ He gave a half-strangled cry, ‘No! No, no, no. My beautiful wife. My children. How can this be? What evil has befallen us? God, why did you not take me also?’

  He took his wife’s cold hand and kneaded it in his own. As he knelt there, sobbing into her chest, he heard a gasp in the darkness.

  ‘Who is there?’ he asked looking around at the shadows. He felt a moment of acute fear and then he found he did not care. ‘Do you mean to kill me too? Take me then. I am not afraid. I should like to die. You would be doing me a service.’ He heard another gasp and a hissing sigh.

  ‘Father.’ It was a voice that sounded like his daughter, but with a strange rasping quality to it.

  ‘Leonora?’ Harold sat up and his heart began to hammer with hope and joy. ‘Are you alive, child?’ He crawled towards her. ‘But you were dead ... Your body was …’

  He scrambled to where she lay and felt her cold cheek. In the dim light, he saw her eyes snap open. He could not deny she really was alive. He had been right not to leave them alone. Imagine if she had woken and found nothing but a sealed chamber filled with the dead? She would have been traumatised beyond imagining.

  ‘Father,’ she gasped again. ‘I am so thirsty.’

  ‘Wait child,’ he said. ‘I have water.’ He unscrewed the lid to his canteen and held it up to her mouth, tipping the liquid onto her lips. She gasped again, spitting out the liquid. Then her hand shot up and swatted the canteen away with such force it flew across the small chamber and crashed against the rock wall, clanging and clattering to the ground.

  She reached out both of her hands and clutched her father’s face. She pulled him towards her in an embrace and sank her teeth into his neck. Harold opened his eyes wide in shock as he realised what was happening. The legend of the blood-drinking demons flew into his mind, but then he relaxed, sinking into a trance-like ecstasy, flattening out his thoughts until they melted into nothingness.

  Leonora took only a few draughts of his blood before she began choking. She twisted away from him, clutching at her throat.

  ‘I want it, but it burns, Father,’ she cried.

  Harold emerged from his trance-like state, as the shock of what had just happened hit him.

  ‘Child, what have you done to me? What have they done to you?’ He touched his fingers to his neck and squinted in the gloom. He saw a small smear of blood on his fingertips and saw blood at the corner of her lips.

  ‘Leonora, my daughter. What is it you have done?’

  He stared into her glassy eyes as she entered delirium.

  ‘Thirsty. I am so thirsty.’

  Harold spun around and saw his son and Jacques had also woken up from death. They tried to reach him and now he knew what they wanted from him. What was he to do? His thoughts were a jumbled mess. His children and his friends’ children were turned into blood-demons and they needed his own life-blood to survive. And what of his wife and his friends? Were they too transformed into creatures?

  Harold Swinton reached a sudden moment of clarity and he made the decision to willingly give his blood if it meant he could save his family and friends. But he feared he was only one man and there may not be enough of him to go around. In an
y case it had not hurt him when he had yielded to his daughter’s embrace. It had been a sublime feeling, like being free and floating into nothingness and it was infinitely better than the searing pain of loss.

  Aah, here it was again. Freddie had found him and was sending him back into his trance. But again, after a short time, his son too began to choke and gasp.

  ‘Fire in my throat,’ he cried. ‘A burning fire! Help me!’

  Harold stroked his icy cold forehead, trying to soothe him in his distress.

  All of the young ones were now awake and all craved Harold’s blood, but none could stomach it – Leonora, Freddie, Jacques, Isobel and Alexandre.

  Next to him lay the body of his beloved Victoria. Was she still dead? Was her neck still snapped? He moved his children. Please let her be healed. Please. But she was unchanged. Still dead and broken on the ground.

  They all soon drifted back into unconsciousness. Harold’s beloved Victoria and the other adults remained as they were, dead and cold. Harold too sank into unconsciousness and the dim cave went quiet save for the sound of his uneven breathing. Soon the lantern burnt out and all fell to darkness, cold and silence.

  *

  Alexandre felt the drumming of the earth, the heartbeat of all humankind in his bones and blood and skin. In his soul. It sang a song to him that he had known forever and in that instant everything became clear. He knew the reason for it all; the key to life and it was so obvious. How could he have not known this simple truth before now? He was becoming one with the earth, his body turning to dust.

  And then, as suddenly as it had come, it left. His beating heart slowed, the song faded and the knowledge slipped away like an elusive memory refusing to come to mind. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge something, but he was not trying to dislodge anything, he was desperately trying to regain what he had forgotten. He felt a devastating loss, worse than if his dearest love had died.

  A heavy melancholy descended, so profound he felt like he could sleep for a thousand years. In the cold darkness, tears rolled down his face and they stung his cheeks like acid. He closed his eyes and tried not to think. It hurt to think.

  It hurt.

  God, it hurt.

  The acid tears on his cheeks spread throughout his body and he felt as though the skin was being stripped from his body. He could not breathe and his eyes burned white hot with a searing pain.

  He tried to speak but his throat constricted, closed shut. Was he in hell? Was this the fate he deserved? Please, God, no! Help me! he silently screamed. Save me! I promise … I promise anything. I will do anything. Just please … make … it … STOP.

  Chapter Seventeen

  *

  ‘Mads, I’ve got loads to do. Why are we going down here? Old clothes and pictures aren’t really my thing.’

  ‘It’s not old clothes and pictures. It’s something much better than that.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  She dragged the boxes away from the opening and switched on the halogen light, beckoning to her brother. Maddy walked over to the crate at the far end. She prised open the lid and slid it off, standing back to let her brother see. Ben peered into the crate. His eyes widened and he stood back in shock, glancing at Maddy.

  ‘A person!’

  ‘No, look closer. It’s a statue.’ Maddy smiled and put her face next to Ben’s so they were looking together. She took his hand and guided it down to the hard sculpted face of the dark-haired female figure.

  ‘Oh,’ he breathed out. ‘Yeah. For a minute ... I thought ... well ...’

  ‘You thought it was a spooky girl in a coffin,’ Maddy laughed. ‘Yeah, they do look real, but they’re statues. There are five and they’re all amazing. Really old. I think they might even be our ancestors. Imagine that. They could be what our actual family looked like. It’s pretty incredible.’

  ‘She looks just like you,’ Ben said, glancing from Madison to the statue.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s weird, but she really does.’

  ‘It’s just the dark hair, probably,’ Maddy said, trying to see if she could catch any resemblance.

  ‘The hair and the shape of her face,’ Ben said. ‘It’s a pity her eyes are closed, I bet they’d have been the same colour as yours.’

  ‘Do you wanna see another one?’

  ‘Yeah go on then.’

  ‘Help me prise this next one off.’ Maddy beckoned him to another box and soon they had all the lids off. Ben went from one to the other, studying them carefully.

  ‘They’re a bit spooky, Mads.’

  ‘No they’re not, they’re gorgeous.’ Maddy thought Ben didn’t know the half of it. If he thought a bunch of statues was spooky, imagine what he’d have made of a sleeping corpse, tucked up in bed.

  ‘I might go and start my homework now, if that’s okay.’

  ‘Yeah, course it is. I just thought you’d like to see them.’

  ‘Definitely. Cheers.’ Ben wandered back up the stairs and Madison felt strangely deflated. She had spent the afternoon getting quite excited at the thought of showing the statues to her brother, but he didn’t seem to be that bothered.

  To her, they were exotic links to the past, like travelling back in time. She’d never really thought about history before, it was just some boring subject you did at school, but now she figured she’d enjoy finding out about the past and stuff, especially when it related to her.

  Maddy looked again at the dark-haired statue of the man – her favourite. She put one of her hands on his forehead and combed her fingers through his dark hair, her nails grazing his cold, stone scalp. She wished she knew his name and what he used to do all those years ago. Was he a real person? Or was he created from someone’s imagination? The air smelt of stone, sawdust and bleach. The thump of Ben’s music wafted down the cellar steps and she heard the distant drone of a lawnmower.

  Maddy walked between the crates, running her fingers along the edges and studying the faces. She was getting to know them already: the handsome dark-haired eldest, the fair-haired boy and girl who looked so similar to each other, the boy with wild brown curls and the older girl from the portrait. Five statues … and a corpse.

  Over the next few weeks, Madison kept finding herself back in the small cellar room. She’d be in the library reading or practicing her driving, exploring the grounds or watching television, but her mind would always return to the chiselled face of her favourite statue. Whenever she thought of it, she couldn’t stop herself making her way down below the house to gaze at him and satisfy her craving.

  In her dreams she would encounter him as a living man with his eyes open, looking at her. She worried about the intensity of her feelings and wondered if she might be going a bit mad. She couldn’t concentrate on anything properly. But then, she didn’t really have anything much to concentrate on.

  *

  Ben’s radio alarm filtered through his dreams. He resisted the urge to turn over and go back to sleep, opening first one eye and then the other. He dressed quickly and galloped downstairs for breakfast. That was odd. Maddy wasn’t down here even though all the lights were on. She was always down here first on school days. Then he saw the cellar door open, light filtering upwards.

  ‘Maddy!’ he called down the steps. ‘Mads, you down there?’

  He descended the steps, but saw no immediate sign of her. He walked in through the small opening to the hidden room. Maddy wasn’t in here either, but one of the crates lay open, revealing that creepy statue Maddy liked and he wondered what she’d been doing down here so early. Well, she wasn’t here now. Maybe she’d gone outside to get something.

  He trudged back upstairs and tried the back door. Locked. So she couldn’t be out there. He went into the kitchen and poured himself some cereal. It was getting near to the time Morris usually picked him up to go to school and there was still no sign of his sister. It wasn’t like her. She usually fussed around him, making sure he didn’t forget his school stuff. It was wei
rd and he felt a small flare of panic in his chest.

  Ben raced up the stairs two at a time and opened her bedroom door. She was there! Asleep still. Relief washed over him and he felt stupid for worrying. Her alarm mustn’t have gone off. But that didn’t explain why all the lights had been on downstairs in the cellar and everything.

  Ben tiptoed over to the bed and saw her fast asleep, but as he looked more closely, he saw her face covered in a film of sweat and her teeth chattering. She was talking to herself, strange mutterings and whimpers.

  ‘Mads?’ He shook her shoulder – it was sopping wet with sweat. A car horn sounded outside. Ben rushed downstairs and flung open the front door.

  ‘Morris!’ he called. ‘It’s Maddy! I think she’s ill!’

  ‘Let’s take at look at her then,’ he said, following Ben up the stairs and into her room. Madison was still rambling incoherently. Morris took one look at her sweat-soaked brow and called the doctor immediately. Then he called his wife.

  ‘Your sister’s got a spot of flu, I shouldn’t wonder. Doctor Wilson will sort her out.’

  ‘Should I stay off school today?’

  ‘I don’t think you need to do that. I’ll drop you in once the doctor’s been. We’ll have a cup of tea while we wait for him. I’ll make one for Esther too. She’ll be here any minute.’

  They went downstairs and Morris busied himself making tea. Ben didn’t tell him that he didn’t like tea. He accepted the drink and grimaced, taking an unwanted sip. Surprisingly, he actually didn’t mind the taste of this milky sweet liquid. It wasn’t anything like the tea Angie used to make. Hers was almost black, with no sugar and tasted how he imagined soil would taste.

  He took another large sip as Esther bustled into the kitchen, dumping her large brown handbag on the table. Morris filled her in on Madison’s condition, but she wanted to see for herself. They all marched up the stairs again and Morris and Ben stood by Madison’s bedroom door, waiting for Esther’s pronouncement.