Afraid

by Mandasue Heller

  Secretly terrified that she might be seriously ill, she longed to be a child being looked after by her mum and dad again. She knew they didn’t love her or they would never have betrayed her like they had; but she had created a romanticised scenario in her mind of them welcoming her home with open arms and telling the police that they had got it wrong and she shouldn’t go to prison.

  It was just a dream, though. A stupid, ridiculous dream that was never going to come true – especially not now they had decided to declare her dead.

  Skye didn’t understand how any parent could do something like that to their own child, but she supposed Tom had been dead right when he’d said that they hated her and wanted that chapter of their life to be over with so they could move on without her.

  When she stopped vomiting at last, she traipsed wearily back down to the kitchen and slumped down onto the chair before reaching for the photograph. She wished Tom hadn’t cut it out, because she would have liked to have been able to read the story that went with it. But it would probably be a pack of lies from her mum and dad; pretending to be sad, when really they were glad.

  Skye stared long and hard at the faces of the people who were standing by the grave alongside her parents, but the photo was very grainy and she couldn’t really see them clearly enough to gauge if she recognised them or not. The one she was really looking for definitely wasn’t there, though. She’d have known Hayley even if her back had been turned, and it saddened her all over again to think that her one-time best friend hadn’t even bothered to put on an act and go to her mock funeral.

  As another wave of self-pity washed over her, Skye angrily scrunched the picture up in her hand. She might as well have died for real, for all they cared. But they could all go to hell. If ever she had doubted Tom when he had said that they had never loved her, this was all the confirmation she needed that they were glad to be shot of her. And they hadn’t even done it nicely; they’d had to go and claim that she’d been murdered so that people would take pity on them and overlook what bad parents they had been. They disgusted her, and she was never going to think about them again.

  And this time she meant it.

  After his row with Skye, Tom drove further out into the countryside. He’d done a drive-around a few days earlier and had spotted several derelict barns that looked interesting. It was dark enough this evening so that he could take a closer look without fear of being spotted by any suspicious farmers or passers-by.

  The barn he’d been particularly keen to check out was set much further back from the road than the others, and the pathway which led to it had more or less merged into the untended field it occupied. It was pretty much obscured from view by the high, unkempt hedgerow which separated it from the road, which made it perfect for people who didn’t want to be seen coming and going in the middle of the night. But, best of all, the farmhouse to which it belonged was no longer occupied.

  He drove slowly up to the farmhouse now and got out to take a look through the windows. It was much larger than his house, and he might actually have considered moving into it if it hadn’t been in such a bad state of disrepair. Huge chunks of the roof seemed to be missing, which meant there would probably be a serious damp problem to contend with; and the windows and doors were so badly bowed it would be impossible to keep the place warm when winter hit. So, no, the house was out of the question. But the barn was definitely usable.

  Skye was fast asleep on the couch when Tom arrived back home later that night. He gazed down at her for a while, taking in the powdery white streaks of dried tears on her flushed cheeks, and the protective way she was cradling her belly in sleep even though she didn’t even seem to have realised yet that she was pregnant.

  That thing that was growing inside her was a major drawback to Tom’s plans, and he resented the sight of her slowly swelling stomach. He needed it to be gone before he started his next venture, but he was quickly running out of time and nothing seemed to be shifting the damn thing.

  He had taken down his website after having had second thoughts about the last video he’d uploaded of Chloe. His customers enjoyed watching the girls being abused while they were unconscious, because children were at their most helpless when they were tied up and knocked out. But he supposed that some might feel funny about watching a child being abused after death. The lead-up to it was okay, because it was undoubtedly a turn-on to see a child begging for its life. But showing the actual act had been a step too far, so he had taken it down before anyone could think about reporting him.

  Since then, he had gone back to trying to connect with girls on WhisperBox, but he still hadn’t found a suitable replacement for Skye. And that was disappointing, because there was a great market out there just waiting to be tapped. All he’d needed was a venue where the men could meet the girls in private, without it being connected to Tom in any traceable way. And now he’d found the perfect barn, he was eager to get started. But Skye’s growing stomach would be a major turn-off for his clients, and it pissed Tom off to think of all the money he could potentially lose because of her.

  As he stared down at her now, the anger churned his stomach. And before he could stop himself, he fisted his hand and rammed it into her belly.

  Skye screamed as the pain woke her immediately. She pulled her knees up to cover her stomach as tears spurted from her eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Tom said, squatting beside her and stroking her terrified face. ‘You were having a bad dream, but I’m here now – you’re safe.’

  Skye gaped confusedly up at him through her tears. She didn’t know what was going on. It didn’t feel like she’d been dreaming, but if Tom said she had then she must have been. But if it had been a dream, why did it hurt so much?

  ‘Are you okay?’ Tom asked as he watched the doubts flit through her eyes.

  ‘My stomach hurts,’ she sobbed.

  ‘That’s because you were hitting yourself when I came in,’ Tom told her. ‘I was just about to stop you when you woke up screaming. You must have been having a nightmare. I’ll go and get you a drink to calm you down.’

  Confused, Skye cradled her aching stomach when Tom went into the kitchen. When he came back a couple of minutes later and handed a cup to her before sitting next to her, she raised it to her lips. But then she gagged when she caught the scent of the wine.

  ‘I don’t think I can drink it,’ she moaned, her mouth flooding with saliva. ‘The smell’s making me feel sick.’

  ‘I’ve put something in it to settle your stomach and help you relax,’ Tom told her, guiding the cup back up to her lips. ‘You’ve let yourself go lately,’ he went on as she drank some. ‘But I’m going to help you get back on your feet, ’cos we can’t have you going to your wedding looking like this, can we? No one likes fat brides.’

  ‘Do you really think I’m fat?’ Skye asked, mortified. ‘I knew I’d put a bit of weight on, ’cos some of my clothes are getting tight. But I didn’t think I was that bad.’

  ‘Well, you are,’ Tom said bluntly. ‘And I’ll probably go off you if you get any bigger, so you need to stop being so greedy. Drink up.’

  Skye forced herself to take another sip. Then, frowning, she said, ‘You don’t think I could be pregnant, do you? Only I think I might have missed a period. Or maybe even two,’ she added uncertainly. ‘And with all the sickness …’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Tom scoffed, jabbing his finger hard into her belly. ‘That’s fat, not a baby. Anyway, I can’t have them, so if you are it can’t be mine.’

  ‘I haven’t slept with anyone else,’ Skye blurted out.

  ‘You’d better not have,’ said Tom, gazing down at her with suspicion in his eyes. ‘Because I’d kill you if you ever betrayed me like that.’

  ‘I haven’t!’ Skye insisted. ‘I haven’t even seen anyone.’

  ‘Then you’re just fat, like I said in the first place,’ said Tom. ‘And you need to stop being so greedy.’

  ‘But I hardly eat anything,’ Skye murmured. �
�Everything makes me sick.’

  ‘You must be doing it in your sleep,’ Tom told her, a look of concern in his eyes now. ‘If you’re doing that, and punching yourself as well, I’ll have to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Skye asked, unnerved by his serious tone.

  ‘It could be a symptom of mental illness,’ Tom explained grimly. ‘Like your mum.’

  His words sent a chill through Skye, and she gripped the cup a little tighter.

  ‘If you do it again we’ll have to think about taking you to a doctor, because it’s definitely not normal,’ Tom went on. ‘But don’t worry about it for now. Just finish your drink and let’s go to bed. It’s been a long day, and I think we could both do with a rest.’

  28

  The next few weeks were harrowing for Skye as, morning after morning, she woke with fresh marks on her stomach. Tom was being supportive, but she just couldn’t understand why she was trying to hurt herself in her sleep and the thought that she might have the same illness as her mum terrified her. And on top of the worry of that, she was still being sick and she felt bloated all the time.

  Sure that Tom was going off her, because she kept catching him giving her funny looks, she took all the different medicines he bought for her and prayed that one of them would eventually work and she could go back to normal.

  Unable to clear the gloomy thoughts from her head when she was alone in the house, Skye started working her way through the books from the living-room shelf unit. They all seemed to be historical romances, which she thought was an odd choice for Tom’s soldier cousin to have made, given that he must be – she assumed – fairly young. But the tales of downtrodden scullery maids being hauled through the fires of servitude by their evil masters before finding true love quickly caught her imagination. She found herself yearning to run carefree through a cornfield before falling into the arms of a real-life Prince Charming who would whisk her away from her troubles and devote his life to making her happy.

  But it was just a dream and, no matter how much Skye lost herself in the fantasy while she was reading, reality was always lurking in the background, waiting to slam her back down to Earth as soon as she put down the book.

  The pains started five weeks after Tom had told her about her parents ‘burying’ her. Terrified that the punches she’d been raining on herself during the night had seriously damaged her stomach, Skye took four paracetamol and then ran a bath, hoping that a relaxing soak in the warm water would soothe the awful pain.

  Not five minutes after she had climbed in and started reading her latest book, she heard Bernie barking in the kitchen below. Immediately nervous, because he never barked as loudly or as insistently as that, she climbed quickly back out and pulled on her dressing gown. She hadn’t heard anybody knocking at the door but she crept into her bedroom and peeped out of the window all the same. Nobody seemed to be out there, so she tiptoed down the landing to check out back. Again, she saw nothing, so she went downstairs to see if Bernie had hurt himself.

  The dog was standing at the back door, still barking, the fur on the back of his neck standing on end.

  ‘What’s the matter, boy?’ Skye asked, cradling her aching stomach with her hand as she walked over to him. ‘Has something spooked you?’

  He stopped barking when she stroked him, and wagged his tail. But he was still edgy, and she noticed that he kept cocking an ear as if listening to something she couldn’t hear. Guessing that an animal must have come too close to the house for his liking, she made herself a hot drink after giving him a cuddle, and carried it back up to the bath.

  * * *

  Outside, as Skye re-immersed herself in her latest romance, the man who had crept into the garden via the untended field beyond ran up the path with a pair of bolt cutters in his hand. After cutting through the thick chain that was securing the gates, he pulled them quickly open and waved to the man behind the wheel of the van that was parked a little way down the road.

  ‘All clear?’ the driver, Eric, asked when he’d reversed the van through the gates and onto the drive.

  ‘Yeah, the car’s not here, and the dog’s inside,’ his son John told him as he hopped into the passenger seat. ‘Best hurry, though,’ he cautioned, glancing nervously around for approaching vehicles. ‘There’s a shed round the back with a load of boxes in it. You start loading up while I check it out.’

  Eric nodded and reversed on up the path towards the house. They had meant to come back a lot sooner than this, but a short prison stint after being caught with a van full of stolen cable had forced them to put their plans on hold. Eager now to get his hands on the potential gold mine of scrap metal he’d seen the last time they were here, Eric parked up and jumped out, then opened the van’s back doors to start chucking stuff in while his son ran over to the shed.

  John gave the shed door a couple of kicks after finding that it was locked, but quickly realised that wasn’t going to do the trick when he saw that it opened outwards instead of inwards. Running back to the van, he grabbed the crowbar from under his dad’s seat and then ran back to jemmy his way in.

  A foul stench smacked him in the face when at last the door opened, and he grimaced as he batted his way through the cobwebs that were laced at eye level across the frame. As his vision adjusted to the dimness inside the shed, he noticed the black carcasses of a load of flies littering the floor and guessed that something must have died in here. Most probably a stray cat, he thought; or a rabbit, or a badger, or something like that. Whatever it was, it smelled disgusting, and he couldn’t wait to check out the boxes and get the hell out of there.

  A load of rusted old lawnmowers and other gardening equipment was standing in the far right corner of the shed. John gave these the once-over and made a mental note to have his dad take a look at them when they were done, because they might fetch a couple of quid – if they had any room left in the van.

  The first of the boxes that were stacked in the left-hand corner yielded nothing but old, musty-smelling clothes, so he pushed them aside and started on the boxes that were sitting behind them. It quickly became apparent that these were all empty, and he was pissed-off to think that he’d wasted all that time breaking in here for nothing. About to go and help his dad, he hesitated when he realised that the buzzing sound he’d been hearing since he came into the shed was coming from the old chest freezer that most of the empty boxes had been stacked on top of. Curious to know if the house owner was keeping roadkill in there, and that was where the smell was coming from, he raised the lid gingerly to take a peek.

  Eric was struggling to heave an old motorbike chassis into the back of the van when he heard John cry out. He dropped the bike, hopped out of the van, and rushed through the grass – colliding with John who was running hell for leather the other way.

  ‘What the hell’s up with you?’ he asked when he saw the look of horror on his son’s face.

  ‘There’s a fuckin’ body in there,’ John spluttered, pointing back at the shed. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ Eric scoffed, sure that John must have imagined whatever he thought he’d seen. ‘It’s that film you had on last night. I told you not to watch it on your own.’

  ‘It’s not the fucking film,’ John squeaked. ‘It’s a body – I saw it. Go and have a look if you don’t believe me!’

  A bemused smirk on his lips, Eric pushed his son aside and walked round to the shed. ‘I can’t see no bodies,’ he called, after standing in the doorway for a moment and squinting at the assorted junk.

  ‘It’s in the freezer at the back,’ John told him, keeping his distance.

  Muttering ‘Chicken-livered idiot’ under his breath, Eric made his way over to the freezer and raised the lid.

  At first, he didn’t realise what he was looking at. But when he leaned over to take a closer look and saw a pair of eyes staring back up at him through the thick layer of ice, a sharp pain tore through his chest.

  ‘Holy fucking shi
t!’ he gasped, taking a stumbling step back. ‘John! JOHN!’

  ‘I’m not coming back in there,’ John called from the doorway. ‘Let’s just sack it off. Come on, Dad, this is heavy shit.’

  ‘I think I’m having a heart attack,’ Eric moaned, clutching at his chest as he staggered back outside. ‘You’ll have to drive.’

  John put an arm around his dad’s waist and helped him back to the van. Then, mindless of the still-open back doors, and the things his dad had thrown inside falling back out as he drove, he gunned the van back onto the road, the wheel in one hand, his mobile phone in the other.

  ‘Police!’ he yelped when his call was answered. ‘I’ve just found a dead body.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the old man hissed, trying to snatch the phone away from him.

  Swerving wildly onto the other side of the road as he switched the phone to his other hand, John told the operator what he’d seen and where to find it. Then, disconnecting the call, he opened his window and tossed the phone into the field they were passing.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Eric gasped, his face pale and sweaty as the pain in his chest increased.

  ‘Don’t worry, it was a pay-as-you-go so they won’t be able to trace the call back to me,’ John assured him. ‘But I told you that fella looked like a weirdo when we spoke to him that time, and if you die ’cos of whatever he’s done I’m gonna make sure the fucker goes down for it.’

  ‘I’m not fucking dying,’ Eric protested.

  John cast a sideways glance at his father and thought otherwise. But he kept the thought to himself, and drove on in search of a hospital.

  29

  ‘Please stop it, Bernie,’ Skye moaned, clutching at her aching head when the dog jumped up from his blanket and started barking again. ‘It’s probably just a fox or something. But it can’t get in, and you’re not allowed out, so just give it up – please.’