The Special Ones (22 page)
The others slink away too, but a moment later one of them whispers at me from the darkness. ‘How is the farm? How are the
Special Ones
?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ I snap.
A thin, mocking laughter starts up. ‘We know something’s wrong!’ one calls back in a singsong voice.
‘You don’t know anything,’ I retort.
‘Yes, we do. We can read your mind.’
‘That’s not possible,’ I say and then, to try make them be quiet, I add, ‘You won’t be down here for much longer, anyway.
He
’ll be letting you out soon, if you behave.’
They all seem to find this hilarious. ‘Do you know what happens if you’re locked in the darkness for long enough?’ one of them hisses from the gloom. ‘You learn how to see the future. So we already know we’ll be getting out soon. And we know what will happen to you too.’
I fold my arms, raise myself up to my full height to show them that I’m not at all affected by this deranged nonsense. ‘And what is that, exactly?’
‘Bad things,’ they giggle gleefully. ‘Very bad things.’
I cannot stand being here any longer. Not for another minute, not for another second. I bundle everything up and hurry for the stairs. The husks laugh in that horrible, scratchy way and one of them even touches my leg as I climb.
The air in the factory above, which seemed a little musty when I first came in from outside, now seems blissfully sweet and clean. I close the trapdoor over the monsters below and bolt it.
You’re safe now
, I tell myself as I carefully rub the padlock with a handkerchief to make sure it’s free of fingerprints. I am still wearing my gloves, but you can never be too sure. Then I heap the rubble back over the trapdoor.
An urgent need grips me:
I have to get out of here
. I can almost hear the vision in my ear, urging me to run. And so I do – hurrying back to my father’s car without taking nearly as much care as I should.
Once I’m back in the driver’s seat, I close my eyes and take a little sip from my purple bottle. Get my breathing under control. The tonic spreads through me, cleansing and soothing.
The vision answers my question before I even let it form properly in my mind.
‘You’re done with them now,’
she says.
‘You can leave them there to rot.’
When I arrive at work, Mack is lounging around in the loading bay with the front-office girls, who are on one of their many cigarette breaks. Mack is a couple of years older than me – twenty-two maybe, or twenty-three. He’s tall – the sort of figure who could easily be intimidating, but his slumped shoulders and high, nasal voice reduce him to harmless. I’ve modelled my delivery guy persona on him.
A tabloid newspaper is spread out on top of a crate. The radio is on, turned up way too loud, as usual.
‘Police now believe that a number of other missing girls could be victims of the Prison Farm cult, as well as the three already released …’
‘Jeez,’ says Mack, bending over the newspaper. ‘What kind of a monster does stuff like this?’ He shoves it in my face as I walk past. ‘Have you
seen
this?’
There’s a photograph taken from inside the farmhouse – but looking nothing like how I last saw it. How it’s
supposed
to look. The orderly, spotless parlour is now completely chaotic. Furniture tipped over, mess everywhere. The copy of the Special Ones photograph, which usually hangs over the mantelpiece, is gone.
‘Looks like hell, doesn’t it?’ says Mack.
Below it is another image – crime-scene investigators in white disposable coveralls dusting the kitchen for fingerprints.
They won’t find anything
, I reassure myself. I have always been very careful about wearing my gloves when I went to collect my tonic.
‘I try not to look at that sort of thing,’ I say, moving away.
‘It’s just
awful
,’ says Judith from the front office. ‘I hate to think what happened to those poor girls while they were in there.’
Judith, whose skirts are always too short and whose necklines are too low. She has feelings for me – I can tell from the way she watches me, when she thinks I’m not aware. Of course, the feelings are in no way reciprocated but I am careful not to be rude to her. She never blinks an eye at the frequent ‘lost parcel’ or ‘invalid address’ forms I submit to her and never mentions when these undelivered items ‘mysteriously’ disappear from the company’s database.
‘They were starved for days on end. Woken up during the night to perform weird rituals,’ says the other front-office girl, Petra. ‘
And
they were brainwashed into thinking they were reincarnated saints.’ She looks around, her owlish eyes even wider than usual. ‘You know the worst bit for me, though? That they were forced to chat with people online and give out advice,
every single night
.’
Judith nods. ‘It’s just
awful
,’ she says again. ‘Can you imagine? Wondering the whole time why no-one’s realised what’s going on and raised the alarm. I know I would’ve, if I’d ever used that site.’
I don’t say anything, but I have seen our office’s IP address on the user logs for the Special Ones site more than once. And I have definitely spotted a scarf in the lunchroom that could only have come from the Special Ones shop.
I’ve been trying to stay out of the discussion, loading my orders into the van, but I can’t stand it any longer. ‘We shouldn’t believe everything the media tells us,’ I say, as evenly as I can. But no-one is listening.
‘I can’t stop thinking about the others,’ says Petra, leaning over the newspaper. ‘The missing ones. Have you seen this?’ She taps at a row of photos of the ex–Special Ones, all blurry screen grabs from the education films. Harry’s photo is there too.
Interesting
, I find myself thinking.
So the police don’t know where Harry is yet.
Petra shudders. ‘I guess they’re probably dead, but who knows? Anything’s possible with a creep like this.’
‘I think it looks like a pretty incredible place to live,’ I say tightly, tearing my eyes away from the newspaper. ‘You can tell that a lot of care and effort went into making it.’
The others seem to think I’m making a joke.
‘Yeah, it looks
real
cosy,’ guffaws Mack.
‘And so safe with that great big fence all around it!’ Petra titters.
Mack swigs the last of a takeaway coffee and stands up. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘They’ll find those missing ones soon enough – or what’s left of them. And they’ll find the nut-job behind it all and lock him up for life. They always do in the end.’
Nearby on the packing table is a staple gun. My fingers twitch, longing to seize it and close Mack’s mouth permanently. But instead I just slowly shake my head.
When my shift ends, I don’t return the van to the depot straight away. But I don’t go home, either. I go somewhere I haven’t been in two years.
The suburb where Esther’s parents live is the sort of place I usually despise – ugly modern glass boxes built so close to one another that their roofs nearly touch. Each one has a pseudo-oriental garden in the front – a combination of white pebbles and stunted trees. There is, of course, not a water tank to be seen.
But still, I feel a certain warmth as I near her block. This place is important to me. It’s where I first saw Esther, while delivering parcels for that shopaholic mother of hers. There’s a park nearby that holds special memories for me, too – I followed Esther there once, after I first spotted her, and watched while she played with her dog near the fountain. How I longed to walk up to her right then! I wanted to tell her how our lives were linked. But I knew I needed to hold back. Wait.
There’s a mind-your-own-business quality to Esther’s suburb that I can also appreciate. People don’t try to chat if you pass them on the street. They don’t make noise after 9 pm or create any kind of disturbance. Which is why it’s such a shock when I turn into her street to find it blocked by a wall of people and vans.
There are camera crews and photographers pressed up against Esther’s fence, boom mics raised and lights flashing. There’s even a group of girls mooching about who have made themselves up to look like Esther in long, floating white dresses, their hair pinned back.
I don’t bother to stop. I thought that I would at least get a glimpse of Esther. It even crossed my mind that she might take the family dog for a walk, like she used to, and that I might use the opportunity to collect her. But clearly I will have no chance to do that this evening, and so, deeply irritated, I return the van and head home. Esther’s popularity is proving inconvenient.
For once I manage to evade Mrs Lewis and, after quickly preparing something to eat, I go directly to the study. It’s occurred to me that Esther might still have the same computer, in which case I may be able to watch her through her webcam, just as I used to. But, although her original computer is still part of her family’s network, she never has it on. It’s frustrating, but at least I am able to access the other computers in the house. Surely Esther will come into view eventually.
First I take control of the laptop in the kitchen. The webcam is angled so that all I can see are the fridge and rubbish bin. But I can hear voices too. At first, with a rush of excitement, I think it is Esther’s voice, but it turns out to be her mother.
‘– get rid of anything connected with that place,’ she is saying. ‘So she can just forget it ever even happened.’
‘Really?’ a male voice answers. Esther’s father, I suppose. ‘But the doctor said that we should –’
‘Well, I think he was wrong.’ The mother’s legs stomp into view; the lid of the rubbish bin flips open and something white and crumpled is shoved in. Esther’s leaving dress. Something else is thrown in on top of it. A comb of some sort.
‘Does Tess know you’re throwing her things out?’ asks the father.
‘She’s asleep.’ Off-screen, I hear the mother sigh. ‘Look – it’s just that I’m worried about her. She feels
responsible
for what happened there, and for those missing girls
–
like she has to be the one to find them.’
The father mutters something. ‘I know,’ the mother replies, her voice cracking. ‘She’s constantly on the phone with the police, giving them every bit of information she can think of – I caught her calling them at 3 am the other day. She’s obsessed. You know what she asked this morning? She wanted me to borrow a bunch of books from the library about cult leaders and psychopaths.’
‘Oh, god. What did you say?’ asks the father.
‘I said no, of course.’ Hands reach down into view and yank the liner from the bin. The mother says something I can’t hear over the crackling of the bag, and then: ‘– going to completely drain herself otherwise.’
Then there are footsteps, the sound of a door opening. I picture her pushing the rubbish bag, containing the leaving dress, into an ugly green bin like it’s something worthless. But I do not allow myself to feel angry, because I can see this for what it is: an opportunity.
It’s so strange being back here. In my room. On my bed. It’s like being in a time capsule, where everything looks exactly as it did two years ago. My books lined up in the bookshelf, my clothes hanging in the wardrobe. Minnie lying on the rug, her ears pricking hopefully every time I move.
But everything
isn’t
exactly how it was. When we first moved in, I refused to put anything up on the walls – a kind of protest about being here. But someone has hung pictures in my absence, mostly just of me. By the door is a big family portrait in a black metal frame. It was taken a very long time ago, back when my hair was much fairer and I was still willing to say ‘cheese’ for the camera. I’d like to take it down – take
all
of the photos down – but Mum would want to know why.
The girl in the photographs is so naive-looking, so gullible. Is that why he chose me? Not just because I resembled a girl from a hundred years ago, but because he could see how easily I’d believe whatever he wanted me to? It’s hard to fight off thoughts like this, thoughts about
him
, about who he actually is. On the farm he was just a voice – a bodiless shadow – but now he’s taking on an actual form and every day that form becomes a little more solid and real. Whenever I see a crowd of people, I automatically scan the faces, wondering if he’s there, disguised as an ordinary person. I often think I can feel his eyes on me, watching for a chance to grab me again.
I have other ugly thoughts, too. About how it was that I ended up at the farm. I try to convince myself that it was the same way the others came to be there, but I know that’s not true.
I sit up on my bed. I need something to do. Something to distract me. On the farm I had a household to run, but now I’m stuck in my room with everything done for me. My days have no structure, no guiding word, no tasks. Worst of all, no-one listens to me any more, not seriously. It’s like my thoughts don’t really count.
Down the hall, I can hear the TV. I know I should go and join my parents on the sofa. They are so desperate to make things right. It’s hard for them, I know that. But I can’t just pretend – like they’re trying to – that the last two years didn’t happen.