Hydra

by Matt Wesolowski

  Anyway. When Arla is composed enough to continue, she does.

  —Every time I saw them – those kids – I’d be frightened. They were always silent, always staring at me, through crowds of people, all of them just sat there on something – stairs, a picnic table. They never did anything, just stared. But afterwards, after I’d see them, I’d forget. Like, almost immediately, I’d forget I’d seen them.

  Until I saw them again.

  —How many times do you think you saw the kids?

  —I don’t know … loads when I was a teenager and then … then the last time. That was the last time I saw them and I knew it was them … I knew it was them…

  We’re all aware of what happened to the Macleods on the 21st of November 2014, so I’ll be brief with the recap.

  The police were called to 41 Redstart Road, Stanwel at 2.40 am on the 21st of November 2014. A neighbour had expressed concern about a commotion at around 2.00 am, then a screaming that did not stop. So scared was the neighbour, she didn’t dare go and see if everything was OK, despite being on first-name terms with the Macleods.

  Crucially, that neighbour stated she had not, to the best of her knowledge, seen anyone enter or leave the Macleod house that night, nor had she heard or seen anyone passing by. In fact, she stated that she had spent the whole of that evening in the living room in front of the television and had seen nothing unusual.

  When the police officers arrived at the Macleod house, twenty-one-year-old Arla answered the door. She looked dishevelled and manic, her eyes wide and her hair tousled. She was wearing pyjamas that were streaked with blood and in her right hand she was holding a hammer, also covered in blood.

  In the hallway lay the bodies of her stepfather, Stan Macleod, sister, Alice, and mother, Lucy. All of them were covered in blood. Twenty-year-old Alice had been beaten so badly, her face was unrecognisable and her skull was shattered. Stanley Macleod was crumpled at the bottom of the stairs in a foetal position, bruises and blunt-object trauma marks all over his right side; his skull also broken in several places. Lucy Macleod lay in the kitchen doorway; like her husband, she had sustained blunt-force trauma to her body and head.

  Arla Macleod did not deny what she did to her family. She went willingly with the police and seemed unaware of what was going on around her, only repeating the words ‘I let them in. I let them in’. Arla never gave an explanation as to what she meant by this.

  —I knew it were them. Something inside me just knew. As soon as they knocked on the door. I knew it.

  —So let’s hear your story Arla, tell us what happened that night.

  There’s a long pause – it sounds like Arla’s phone has been muted. She is, perhaps, discussing something with the staff. There’s a part of me that thinks they might shut things down, that Arla’s story, which has taken me so long to track down, might vanish before me, dissolve into the air like kettle steam.

  When Arla comes back on the line, it takes everything I have not to cheer out loud.

  —Thanks Mr King.

  —For what, Arla? To be honest I’ve done little but disrupt your routine. I’m the one who should be thanking you.

  —Maybe.

  When Arla continues, her voice is different, lighter – dream-like almost. I wonder if in our short break she’s been medicated. Who can say?

  —Take your time, Arla. Just tell me what happened.

  —OK, I will. So, well … where do I start?

  —Wherever you feel comfortable, I suppose. Why not start with that day. Had you been at college?

  —Umm … yeah, yes I had.

  Arla was studying part-time at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, an hour or so south of Stanwel. At the behest of her parents, she was completing an MBA in Business Administration. It’s no secret that this was not Arla’s choice of subject. Arla tells me she wanted to study performing arts but Stan Macleod dismissed that idea entirely.

  —I always used to have a sleep when I got back from college. If I couldn’t get a lift, I’d have to take two trains. I didn’t mind when it was warm – it were a nice journey – but in the winter, it were horrible, sat frozen in one of those rickety little two-carriage jobs.

  —Did someone give you a lift on the 20th of November?

  —No. They was all going out straight after college. They were doing a super-hero bar crawl or something, getting dressed up and that.

  —Why didn’t you go to that?

  —I just … I didn’t fancy it, that’s all. Not my sort of thing.

  I find it strange that a twenty-one-year-old would not want to be part of a university social life. Yet it is worth bearing in mind that Arla was only part time at the university and was commuting from home. Maybe she never really felt part of the scene, or maybe her parents didn’t want her attending such events.

  I manage to track down a student on the same course as Arla: she wants to remain anonymous. She says she was not particularly close to Arla, but does remember her.

  —Yeah, she was very … umm … like she would only be there to study, you know? She was on her own a lot of the time, like, she was always walking to class on her own or sometimes with one other person.

  —She had friends though, right?

  —I’m not sure if she had friends. There were people who Arla talked to but sometimes she would like … she would eat lunch on her own. She reminded me of … umm … like me…

  —What do you mean?

  —Umm … like … my parents say I am not here for making friends, that I am here to do well at my studies and at work, you know? That is my reason to be here.

  —Do you think it was like that for Arla?

  —That was strange to me because Arla was … umm … when you talked to her, she was nice and happy, but she spent a lot of time by herself. She didn’t look keen to hang around in the group, you know? When I spoke to her sometimes, she said it was her parents that wanted her to study here. To me it seemed like she … she wanted to be somewhere else.

  What can we read into this? Perhaps nothing. As I’ve mentioned already, Arla was not particularly interested in business administration; but isn’t it the case for a lot of young people that their parents want to dictate what’s best for them? However, Mr and Mrs Macleod also had a hand in dictating how Arla lived her life outside classes.

  Is any of this a reason for what happened to Arla’s parents? Did her psychosis in some way enable her to act out her resentment? But why take her younger sister too?

  Let’s go back to Arla’s recollections of the night in question.

  —I were tired and cold, and, like I said, I always had a nap first thing when I got back home. It were lovely, just snuggled up in my bed with the heating on. I always woke up to the smell of Mam cooking tea. She would leave it in the oven while they went to watch Alice at training.

  —So this was a night like any other?

  —It started off that way, a night just like any other.

  Arla’s second train in the journey from Ormskirk to Stanwel was delayed due to a fault of some sort. It would have been around four or five pm, already dark and freezing cold.

  —So when you get near Stanwel station, there’s always a wait. Loads of trains go past and don’t stop; all the delayed ones going to London or the other way up to Scotland. Because you’re on the piddly little one, they take priority. It’s well annoying; you have to sit there for ages.

  The station’s high up on a hill so when you’re waiting, you look down on Bull Road, watch all the cars driving out of Stanwel.

  Bull Road’s got woods and stuff on either side of it. The woods are thick and you can’t really see much through the trees. In the spring and the summer it’s gorgeous, all green and lush. The branches spread out and you can hear them clatter on the train windows like they’re waving you off.

  In the winter, though, it’s horrible, just dark and spooky. That night, as we stopped and waited above the road, the wind had got going and the trees with their bare branches were crashi
ng against the train windows. There were a few folk looked a bit scared. The train carriages only had these flimsy doors and the wind was screaming in through the gaps, making them shake. I was in my gloves and hat. I had my scarf wrapped up round my face.

  Anyway, the train started moving again, but it went dead slow, like it does when the station’s only one minute away. I’m looking out the window and…

  Arla sighs at this point, takes a few deep breaths, and I’m worried she’s going to stop. Or else whoever’s supervising our call is going to tell me that it’s time to finish. Luckily, however, Arla comes back on the line and carries on with no explanation for her pause.

  —So we pass over the road and you could see it had started to rain, black specks all flying through the light of the street lamps that light the road. That’s when I saw them.

  —Saw who?

  —Like … a little way on from the road there’s a pedestrian crossing bit, but there’s never anyone on it. It’s a rambler’s track that goes round the edge of the wooded bit then up to the old coalfield. There’s just no reason for anyone to be there, especially not on a night like that.

  But that night there was someone – more than a someone. There were two of them – two kids. They were stood on the coalfield side of the tracks, as if they’d come from that direction, through the bit of woods towards the town. Just the sight of them sent this chill through me. They were stood there, holding hands – no coats or owt – just staring up at the train.

  —No coats? These were young kids, right? Were they alone?

  —Yeah. Yeah they were. It were horrible. One of them – the smaller one – was a boy; he can’t have been much older than six. I remember he was wearing a shirt: a dress shirt with a collar; it were soaked through. You could see his skin. There was an older one with him – his sister I suppose, maybe twelve. She were wearing a dress, like a frock thing, and that were soaked too. They proper freaked me out, gave me a right funny turn. They weren’t even waving, you know, like kids do. They were just looking. It were … ugh … I’m getting goose bumps just thinking of it.

  It’s gonna sound stupid but it … It felt like I were being watched. Like, I doubted they could even see anyone on the train, we probably looked like black shapes from down there, but still it felt like … it felt like they were looking at me, like it were me they was staring at.

  —Did anyone else see them, do you know?

  —That was the thing, I just don’t know. I wanted someone else to see them, to make a comment – some old biddy to say, ‘Eee, look at them poor kiddies in the cold.’ But the more I sat there, the more I stole glances at everyone, the more I thought no; no one else can see them. It’s just me.

  And I … I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. They were like a pair of twin shadows, hand in hand. The wind and the rain was coming down on them, and it was like they couldn’t even feel it, like they were … oblivious.

  It was them – those kids from all them years ago in the hotel. The ones I’d seen on other holidays, too.

  —Did you seriously believe it was them?

  —It … I … it’s hard to explain. Like, I’d seen those kids a few more times, always when we were away: once when we went to Scarborough, then the last time was in Cleethorpes when I were seventeen…

  Arla maintains she saw the kids from the hotel in Cornwall numerous times over the years, but never in Stanwel, not until that night in 2014 – until then she’d only seen them when her family were on holiday. She’d always seen them from a distance and there were always a varying number of them.

  —From that distance, and, of course with the weather conditions and the darkness, it must have been difficult, nigh on impossible to tell if it was definitely those exact kids, no?

  —Yeah … I mean, no, I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure it was them. Even now when I try and remember what those kids looked like, I just … can’t. These ones though, the ones by the train, they were … it’s hard to explain … it was like there was something wrong with them … ah … it’s hard to explain.

  —Was it just a feeling perhaps? The fact that these two sodden children were out of context?

  —Yeah, there is that I suppose. They could have just been some lost children maybe? Or else they were – what do you call them? – latchkey kids or something? Sometimes the gypsies … sorry, the travellers, they passed through Stanwel on their way to Appleby Horse Fair. So maybe it was a couple of them. Maybe it were nothing.

  —You imagined them, you mean?

  —Maybe. Maybe that’s right, cos, as the train began picking up speed, a car started coming down Bull Road and its headlights passed over those children. I followed its movement, and when I glanced back, they were gone.

  —Back into the woods?

  —Dunno. Maybe…

  If we think back to what Dr White said, and then compare it to the idea of these children, and to Arla’s assertion about the kids that have pursued her throughout her life, we could be talking about a clear case of psychosis here – paranoid schizophrenia. But I’m no expert and totally unqualified to dish out such diagnoses.

  —So later on that night, after you got home, did you see them again?

  —It’s not like I have a bad memory or anything. I remember loads of stuff – what happened in Cornwall, parts of my childhood – but those kids, they just seemed to have a strange effect on my brain. It were like they cracked open an egg, pulled a plaster off an old cut. It was like, as soon as they were gone, I forgot about them. I were left with only traces.

  Our brains have a strange way of forgetting things more easily if they’re not in a context we understand. Maybe this is why Arla has trouble with her immediate recollection of what she saw. Despite this, she remembers it now – quite vividly it seems.

  —Let’s move forwards a bit – until later that night, when you were at home.

  —Mam had made fishcakes that night; the whole house smelled of them. Even though it were a dead strong smell, I kind of liked it: smoky and fresh, mixed with chopped-up parsley from the garden. Those fishcakes were lovely. We ate a lot of fish. Protein, for Alice’s sake, protein.

  —Had there been any … disagreements between you and your parents that evening – arguments; anything like that?

  —No. Not that I remember. It were a really normal evening. After tea they took Alice out to training. I washed up, cleaned the kitchen, then I went upstairs to study. Just a normal night like any other really.

  It all … the … the bad stuff all happened later on…

  I’m amazed how matter-of-fact Arla is when she talks to me about the night in question. It’s as if she’s recounting a trip to the seaside. Maybe it’s the medication. Arla will be taking antipsychotics, among other things, I presume, and these may slow her down, or at least blunt her emotions.

  —It were really coming down outside by bedtime – sleet, I think. I could still feel the chill. It had got right into my bones, you know? I had a bath that night to try and, like, warm my soul up. I don’t usually have a bath. I haven’t got the patience to lie there in the water.

  —Was there anything about that evening that was out of the ordinary?

  —Not unless you think me having a bath was! No, it was just a normal night. I went to sleep at around ten or eleven. It would have been around then cos I had to get up the next day at seven to get the train to uni.

  —No lift?

  —No. Everyone was going out that night, remember? I was a bit sad cos I knew I’d be pretty much on my own the next day. The others would all be too hungover to come to lectures and that.

  —You never missed a lecture from being hungover?

  —Oh my God, no. I mean, I couldn’t miss stuff. What would people have thought of me?

  —OK, don’t worry about it, Arla. I’m sure you never did. Let’s move on to later that night, when you woke up.

  —I woke up and like – look, I don’t sleepwalk; or if I do, no one’s told me – but I sort of ‘woke u
p’ and I was stood downstairs in the kitchen, filling a glass with water.

  I hadn’t even put the lights on or nowt. I were just stood there, with the cold tap running on my hand. That’s what woke me up, probably.

  —Did you usually get water from downstairs?

  —Yeah. The bathroom’s upstairs but, you know, I don’t like drinking water from the bathroom. It’s just a thing I have, you know?

  —I think that’s fairly common, Arla.

  —So I think it was the cold water flowing over my hand that properly woke me up. There was a dream though, still lingering in my head. That’s even harder to remember, but I do know there was one.

  —What can you remember about it – the dream?

  —No images … just a feeling. Like a memory.

  —Do you remember what of?

  —I … no.

  With every second that passes I realise that I’m treading on thinner and thinner ice. A sense of anxiety fills me. I know that the Elmtree Manor staff member is within their rights to terminate this call whenever they like, and I’m worried that’s going to happen soon. At the same time, I don’t want to push Arla too hard, nor ask any leading questions. What I want is Arla’s version of that night.

  —What time did this happen, approximately?

  —Umm … it was pitch black outside. Our kitchen opens up onto the back garden and I couldn’t see anything. So I reckon it was about 2 am, something like that. Everyone was asleep.

  So I turned off the tap. I were a bit confused about being downstairs but … that’s … it kind of made a strange sort of sense. So I turned off the tap and had a drink, and that’s when I heard it.

  —Heard what?

  —The knock at the door.

  What Arla describes next is the passage you heard at the beginning of the episode: about the knock made by what she describes as ‘small hands’. It is important to note that Arla claims the knocking was at the back door of the Macleod house. Remember Arla’s description of the back gardens being connected by that path?