The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  My phone rang and I’d accepted the call with the car’s Bluetooth in seconds.

  “It’s me.” Erin’s voice was strained.

  “What’s up?” Alarm hummed through me.

  “It happened again,” she said. “I think. Somebody broke in through my kitchen window. While I was sleeping. They were gone when I woke up. There was this shape made out of burning candles in the middle of the room.”

  “Erin, that’s awful!” I exclaimed. “Did they take anything? Did you tell the police?”

  “I called the police, yeah. An officer came and had a look, but he said it was probably a joke. I couldn’t find the key for the window, so he said it might be my – friends. He told me off for wasting police time. Like a caution, if you can believe it. I just want to—”

  “What? A caution?”

  “Just a mild one, but maybe he was right. The officer said there wasn’t any evidence of anything except somebody leaving candles in my kitchen. Who does that unless it’s a prank? He found my candle-making stuff and I guess the police didn’t find anything last time either because it was like this guy definitely thought I was some dumb student or something.”

  “Erin, do you want me—”

  “I need to get away from my house,” Erin blurted. “I’ve got to think about things, calm down. I’m so angry. I need to distract myself.”

  I thought for a second. It had been my suggestion to go to the woods yesterday and I wasn’t sure whether that had helped – but Erin seemed to have recalled something. Was it worth trying something similar? Maybe afterwards she’d feel ready to talk about what had happened and it might help her to calm down.

  “I think I have another idea for something we could do,” I said. “But—”

  “As long as it’s not the woods,” Erin said, “I’ll try anything. I just want to get these memories out of my goddamn brain. Are you at work? If not, can you please come and pick me up?”

  * * *

  I knew from the original missing person’s case that Erin had grown up in a small detached house right on the edge of a village called Little Merton, about half an hour’s drive from the car park where she’d turned up after her abduction. The village was like a smaller version of Arkney, most houses built in the last twenty years. Like Arkney, too, it had a sort of false quaintness to it. Houses styled as if they’d been built much longer ago, little parks dotted between rows of biggish homes. A safe place to raise a family.

  I’d googled the property before leaving the office car park, only to find that it was currently up for sale, and the sellers were eager. The building had lovely golden brick walls and a chocolate slate roof, two little circular windows downstairs making it look like a gingerbread house.

  I sensed Erin growing tenser as we drove. She knew before I told her where we were going. She’d probably known it was on the cards from the moment she opened up the other night, maybe even before that. It was, after all, the last place anybody had seen her brother. Except maybe her.

  I thought of her disbelief when I’d told her that my aunt and uncle still lived in the same house Jem and Mikey had been taken from, and wondered whether that was strange. I’d assumed the way Sue and Greg dealt with things was – well, normal. But maybe we were the strange ones?

  As we pulled to the end of the street where Erin had spent a lot of her childhood, I slowed the car – the house just out of sight. Erin’s expression was closed.

  “Do you…” She wrung her hands together, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. Her hair was wild, her makeup darker than usual, as though she’d applied a fresh layer right before I picked her up. “This morning I remembered what Molly – Mrs Evans – said. About feeling like she was being watched. I just brushed it off before, but do you think I ought to talk to her…?”

  She looked at me hopefully.

  “Maybe?” I said slowly. “Or I guess you could talk to your liaison officer again, right? Maybe you just got subconsciously affected when she said it to you,” I said, partly to reassure her and also partly to quell the growing disquiet inside of me. “The break-in shook you up, and Molly sensed that and that’s why she talked to you but that’s made you feel worse?”

  Erin sat silently for a moment, her gaze fixed on a point outside the car where a small bird was hopping between branches in a hedge. I wondered for a second if I’d offended her, but she made no move to leave.

  “We don’t have to do this,” I said. “We could get something to eat instead. Just take your mind off things—”

  “I want to see it.” She didn’t look at me, but she wasn’t avoiding my gaze. The awkwardness between us was secondary to Erin’s fear. “I think you’re right. It might help. I’ve been so determined to block everything out, but it’s different now. I’ve only been back on this street a couple of times since we moved out in… 2000, I think? A long time. I wonder if they’ll let us have a look around.”

  “I called ahead on the way to come and get you,” I admitted. “It’s for sale. I asked if we could look around. I didn’t tell them who you were.”

  “Well.” Erin let out a long breath. “Let’s do it then.”

  There was a big tree out front. It had great gnarled boughs that stretched way up in front of the house, blocking the view from the neighbours’ windows. The current owners had strung it with fairy lights, plastic solar-powered bulbs like the ones Mum had in her garden, though right now they looked sad and unloved in the grey daylight.

  “I learned to ride my bike down here,” Erin said. She gestured at the street. It was probably the most personal thing she’d told me yet. A story without a punchline. “Alex learned and then he helped to teach me. He was… He was good. He was always better at stuff than I was. Could ride with no hands. You know – kid stuff. He…” She stopped. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “No, it’s nothing. I was just thinking about something he said once. He said he taught me because nobody taught him and he didn’t want me to hurt myself. But that can’t be right. Dad must have taught him.”

  I handed her a cigarette, not wanting to push her. I’d bought a new box this morning, on the way to work, subconsciously picking up the brand she seemed to favour. She took the offering. Neither of us spoke until we were finished.

  “I don’t really remember what Dad was like when Alex was around,” Erin said eventually. “But I know he was different. He died quite a few years ago now, while I was in sixth form. He had a heart attack, totally out of the blue.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Erin shrugged. “It’s fine. I don’t think about it that much any more.” She frowned. “I guess I’m just a cold-hearted bitch.” She laughed but it was forced.

  “Do you want to talk about last night?” I asked then.

  “Off the record?”

  I ignored the pinch in my chest – that this was what she still thought of me.

  “Yes.”

  “It… What if it wasn’t a prank, Harriet? I heard somebody in my house, in the middle of the night, and came downstairs to burning candles. These fucking red candles. It wasn’t funny. It triggered… not even a memory. Just this feeling. Like I should know who left them. And why.”

  I tried to hide my reaction.

  “Were they candles you made?” My voice sounded tight.

  “No,” she said. “I guess that makes it worse, huh. Somebody brought their own.”

  “You’re right. That’s not funny.”

  Erin shook her head. “But the policeman – he didn’t believe me. And I’m worried it’s some kind of message.”

  “A message? What do you mean?”

  Erin wet her lips nervously.

  “In my bedroom, before, there was a doll on the bed. I don’t know where it came from. I told Wendy and she said it was probably my mum who’d left it. But Mum said it wasn’t her, unless it was in with some other stuff. I hoped it was her, that she’d just not remembered. Maybe it’s part of the same thing.”

  “W
hat kind of doll?”

  “I don’t know, just a doll. Like the kind you have when you’re a kid. I don’t remember having one but I thought maybe I’d forgotten. It was… it was familiar, though. Freaked me the hell out.” She rubbed her arms.

  “Do you think the same person left the candles?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Erin muttered again. “I don’t know what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter. Can we – can we just get this over with? I already feel shit enough.”

  Baffled, I let her lead the way.

  * * *

  “It just doesn’t look the same,” Erin said sadly. “I don’t know what I was hoping for. What do you think of it?”

  The owners had left us to it. They’d shown us around downstairs, but now they abandoned us to trudge up to the bedrooms without supervision. They were clearly eager to sell.

  I glanced around at the beige carpets, the magnolia walls. It was like the whole house had been stripped of any character. It was hard to imagine what it had looked like once upon a time, when two small children lived here instead of a couple with kids long grown up.

  “There’s – a significance. To this house,” I said. I tried to choose my words carefully, but Erin still blanched.

  “Significance…? I thought we were just here to see what I remembered.”

  I hadn’t been prepared for how little she knew.

  “This is the only known sighting of the Father,” I explained. “At least, that we know about. People have theorised that, like the first, the final abduction is just as important in solving these sorts of cases—”

  “Sighting?” Erin fixated on that word. Oh… I realised. She really didn’t know anything.

  It had started to drizzle. One of the windows was open and the air tasted like fallen leaves and mud. Erin’s face was a map of heartbreak.

  “Your dad,” I said quietly. “He saw something. He didn’t know what. He was drunk. He said he saw a shadow in your bedroom, by the window, when he went to use the bathroom. He told the police he thought he’d been dreaming. But when he went to check on the two of you the next morning you were gone.”

  “My dad…?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I mean I thought you must know…”

  “This is what I mean,” Erin murmured. “I don’t know anything. You know everything. How can there be so much I don’t know? I didn’t… My dad.” She frowned. “My dad. Jesus.”

  “Did you remember something?”

  “No. No, not like that. But after I came home Dad tried to talk to me. He – he was trying to explain, I think. Maybe. I don’t know exactly but I was impatient with him because he started to drink more. I hated it…” She let out a huff of laughter. “I didn’t really get that it was a problem, you know? Before, I mean. I didn’t like it when he drank, he’d just sit for hours in front of the TV with beer after beer, but I didn’t really allow myself to admit that until afterwards. I think Alex understood it better than me, and he shielded me. Maybe all those times he took me out of the house to play… maybe he was protecting me.

  “And when Dad tried to talk to me I just, like, totally shut down. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I don’t know if he was going to apologise or… or maybe it wasn’t about that at all. Maybe it was something else.”

  She stopped. Her expression shifted again, something unreadable passing over it.

  “Did you and your dad get on before that?” I asked, thinking of my own dad. We’d never been super close, but he was always easy to talk to.

  Erin shrugged. “I guess, yeah. He was fun. You know. Most of the time. But he got belligerent when he drank. Alex…”

  “Did Alex get on better with your mum?”

  “Alex got on with everybody,” Erin said. “I just can’t believe Dad saw something and I never knew. I can’t believe I never let him talk to me.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up about that,” I reassured her. “You were a child.”

  Erin raised her chin and looked me straight in the eyes as she said, “Yeah, but so was Alex.”

  She sighed and turned away, heading for the bedroom at the end of the hall. The one, I realised, which had been hers. And Alex’s. Perhaps the last place she ever remembered seeing him alive. I hadn’t missed the tears welling in her eyes.

  I decided to give her some privacy.

  I stood in the front yard, breathing in the autumn smells. So many questions swirled in my head that I felt dizzy, the large tree in front of me giving me a sense of vertigo as I gazed into its thick branches.

  I couldn’t imagine how Erin felt. Knowing that her father had seen something the night of her abduction and been too drunk to properly comprehend what it was – understanding as an adult, too, that his drinking was a problem.

  I lit a cigarette, watching the greyish smoke plume upwards to coil between the branches of the tree. As I stood I wondered whether it would have been different if Erin’s father hadn’t been drinking that night. If he’d been able to articulate exactly what he saw. Who was the man who took them? How did he do it?

  I gazed at the tree. It was big, with solid, knotted limbs. Easy to climb. I thought of my aunt and uncle’s house – they had a tree similar to this out front. A shiver ran through me. Was this how he’d gotten access to the houses of the children whose bedrooms were on the first floor? I’d read true crime junkie posts about the Father’s method, and a few had mentioned trees and ladders and bungalows but it had never felt so real before.

  Finally I heard footsteps behind me. Erin flew out of the house, her jacket flapping.

  “I’m sorry,” I started. “I hope I didn’t upset you about your dad. I didn’t know—”

  “Never mind that,” she blurted. Up close I realised she was crying. “Can we go?”

  “Erin—”

  “I think I know what happened. The window,” she panted. “Alex. Me. God, I must have been stupid. I went first – I don’t know why. Maybe I was carried? I felt so light, so strange. But Alex… he came after me.

  “That’s how he did it,” she explained. “That’s how the Father got us both out of the window. He carried me. I think he must have said Alex had to come with us if he wanted me to live. Alex was trying to protect me. Like he always did.”

  AFTER

  Mother

  THE DAYS AFTER BEAR’S death were like a nightmare. She drifted around the house in a fug of gin and tonic and cigarette smoke. She’d quit almost ten years ago but that small fact didn’t seem to matter any more. Even the old tapes didn’t help her to feel anchored now. She couldn’t stop picturing him – all blue and cold, the life frozen out of him by the December lake. She saw it every time she closed her eyes.

  Nothing made sense. Before Jack she had been happy, had lived without fear of the future. And then he swept in, wrapped her up in his magnetic plans. It had been grand, at first. She gave up acting – willingly, for him. Or so she thought. Then she had had Mouse and Bear, and she had got all that money and the big house, and her life had shifted again.

  In the last couple of years she had begun to think of things as Before Jack and After Jack, ignoring the time in the middle and the fact that there was no After Jack – not really. He was still here, a presence that she couldn’t unstick, his shadow falling across everything. Sometimes she wasn’t sure he had ever left, like a ghost haunting them. Maybe he was living in the grounds, like she’d told Mouse. She wouldn’t put that sort of persistence past him.

  But since Chris died everything had changed again. Now it was Before Bear and After Bear. And the After was a black void that sounded like a leaky roof and smelled like dust. Tonight was the worst it had been. One month exactly. She never thought she could hold such pain as she had inside right now, like a thousand jagged knives.

  They had spent the evening sitting quietly by the fire. It was cold, snow frosting the grass. Mouse was quiet, even for him. She wondered if he was sick again, but she didn’t have the energy for that. When she put the boy
to bed he was solemn, watchful. And when she looked away she could have sworn his expression morphed into something like thunder clouds.

  There had been an incident two days before. A dead cat in the back garden. Not one of theirs – they didn’t keep pets any more. She’d cried when she found it and made the mistake of asking Mouse if he knew anything. She hadn’t meant it in a bad way, she just wanted to make sure she wasn’t a bad mother.

  But in asking she had breached some sort of truce they’d reached since Chris died and now Mouse wouldn’t speak to her. Wouldn’t look at her except if she asked him a direct question. It was only her duty to ask, wasn’t it? But the boy had taken offence. She felt like she couldn’t do right by him at the minute.

  She rolled onto her side. She’d been plagued by indigestion and lying on her back was uncomfortable. The darkness in the bedroom was soothing. She could virtually taste the silence of midnight outside. She thought about going back to work tomorrow. She couldn’t bear the thought of all those sympathetic questions. Are you okay? What happened to your son? How’s your other boy holding up?

  All the worse because she didn’t know the answers. Maybe she should start working for herself, because she couldn’t deal with this. She felt like she was one crack away from an avalanche.

  The house creaked and settled. She let out a sigh that tasted of old gin. She preferred the darkness despite the shadow – because in the dark she could pretend that everything was still salvageable. That she still had two perfect sons and a perfect marriage and a perfect house. That she wasn’t afraid.

  She rolled over again and felt it. A presence in the room. A shadow darker than the rest. She stopped moving instinctively, her breath trembling in her chest. Her heartbeat stumbled. It was the ghost again; even now he was gone she could have no peace from his control. Was he even really gone?

  “Jack…?” she hissed.

  The shadows slipped and twisted but she couldn’t see anything. Except maybe the outline of something smaller than Jack. Was it Mouse? The curtains twitched. Somehow that scared her more. How much of her fretting had he seen? She closed her eyes and tried not to cry.