No, Danny, she thinks, running her tongue over her dry teeth,but something found her. Something found your aunt Hazel and I’m frightened for her, more than you could know.
17
I hold my breath until it burns my lungs. Even after I lower the paper, that word—hello—hangs in front of my eyes in the dark, like the afterimage of a camera flash. I turn toward the door.
“Hello? Is someone out there? Can you hear me?”
Silence. I wait, itching with impatience, trying not to look behind me down the stairs where the shadows are growing long. I haven’t forgotten about what I’d glimpsed in the corner, that thick nest of tangled hair, a gummy slot where a mouth should be.
“Did you want to talk to me? Can you answer?”
Silence. Irritation gathers like dust in my throat. I peer through the keyhole but see only the grimy wallpaper of the opposite wall.
“If you can hear me, then please help. My name is Hazel Maddon. I’m being held here against my will. I’m cold and I’m sick and I need a doctor. Do you understand? Please?”
A shadow flickers beneath the door. Then, a soft voice. A woman maybe, or a young girl. It’s hard to tell.
“The beginning is always today,” she tells me, and there’s something about it—that insipid, New Age wisdom—that almost stuns me into laughter. Instead, I decide to humor her, because what other choice do I have?
“Those are wise words.”
“There’ll be more tomorrow. Then more the day after.” Her voice is muffled. It takes me a moment to realize she is chewing.
“Are you eating?”
“Bread. Jam.”
“That sounds good.” I’m not trying to flatter her here; I really mean it. I’d take anything right now except a fucking cereal bar. “I used to have jam and peanut butter sandwiches when I was a little g—”
“You nearly broke down the door. I heard you! Bang! Bang! Bang! All the way from the upstairs!” When she laughs, it sounds so merry. “Were you trying to get out?”
“Yes! Yes, can you help me?”
“Oh no. That wouldn’t be safe.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re sick.”
I stare at the door, feeling like I’m going crazy. My voice hardens. “You’re safer in here with me than out there with him, I promise you.”
She giggles again. It’s a young, naive sound. “They all say that. Then he pulls all the devils out of their heads. Hey, look at this. Is this you?”
The change in conversation is so jarring that I can only stare as something else is slid beneath the door. Another letter, I assume, but it isn’t. It is a photograph, folded to the size of a credit card. I know what it is immediately, because it is mine. I bristle with annoyance, which is such a futile emotion considering my situation, but there it is.
“Have you been going through my purse?”
“Who are these children?”
My mother had given me this picture a couple of years ago.Justso you don’t forget what they look like, she’d fussed, passing it furtively over the table like it was money for drugs. It was taken in my parents’ back garden and shows Cathy and her two boys in front of a large rhododendron bush, flowers bright, vivid as gossip. I’d kept it in my purse ever since, because looking at it made my heart ache with dreadful longing. Bitter as a pill stuck in my throat, slowly dissolving.
“The woman there is my sister, Cathy. Those two boys are her sons. Danny, he’s the oldest, and Scout is the baby.”
I try to pick up the photograph but there is resistance from the other side, as if she is holding on to it.
“You got any other sisters?”
A mass of skin and bone and hair. No teeth.