Dead petals, p.30
Dead Petals, page 30
It was like heaven; like the door to a world long-closed had suddenly been reopened. A world full of bright and vibrant colours. She painted anything she could think of to brighten the room, birds, intensely colourful butterflies, caterpillars, the sky she could see through the window.
One time she painted a big ladybird climbing a stalk, bright red with huge black spots. She even managed a smile when she finished that one.
She sketched her bedroom back home as best she could remember it, with her untidy dressing table at one end and all her old toys at the other. She tried to sketch her mum and dad but got frustrated when she couldn’t capture their likenesses. She painted Mister Whiskers as she remembered him, but with his mouth turned up at the corner in a cheeky smile.
She missed them all so much.
She hid those pictures under the mattress, so he wouldn’t see them. No doubt he would be angry if he realised she was painting things from her old life. But it wasn’t only that. She didn’t want to share that part of herself with him. He owned her so completely, that at least she had this one small thing that belonged to her and her alone.
Another time, she painted a purple dragon with yellow horns and wings, a big plume of fire rolling from its gaping jaws. When she’d finished, she thought about her dad and tried to picture all the little things about him that she loved. The creases he got between his brows when he was working, or his smile when she told him a joke, or the gentle way he cuddled her when they watched TV together. She remembered his face when she’d given him the special pen she bought and how he’d hugged her for it. Most of all she remembered that last day on the park; blowing him a kiss and him catching it and blowing it back. He’d promised they’d play Mario Kart when they got back home.
Her face grew hot, tears blurring her vision, and she had to put the painting aside while she cried.
One night, screaming brought Charley into an unsettling wakefulness. She’d been dozing, and the light had faded from the sky, the room taking on a shadowy eeriness that frightened her. Even her paintings seemed dark and ominous. She sat up on the bed, her eyes darting, heart thumping as she listened to the cries and the clamour of a struggle.
“Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”
A girl’s voice.
Charley listened as the struggle moved through the house. Something smashed. Banging sounds like someone kicking the wall. Whoever it was, she was putting up a heck of a fight.
Why didn’t I fight like that? she wondered.
She heard him shout. The girl’s voice changed from angry to crying, to begging.
“Let go of me! Please let me go!”
A door slammed and then silence.
He’s taken her to the workshop, Charley realised. He’s putting her in the pit like he did with me and Hannah and all the others.
A cold shiver slithered through her. She felt sick. Did this mean he’d grown tired of her and had found a ‘new’ Christina? Would he take back the dress and put it on this other girl and start calling her Christina? Would he drag her screaming from the pit and kill her as he had Hannah?
Is this my last night?
It was fully dark when she heard the familiar creak of the stairs. She slid off the bed and stood up, her body rigid with fear.
He entered the bedroom carrying a plate of sandwiches and a glass of milk, seeming to be surprised at her standing there. “I’m sorry to have left you all day,” he said. “I’ve had things to do.”
Charley had no breath to speak. She watched him, looking for signs of his intentions.
“I haven’t had time to cook anything, so I’ve made some sandwiches instead.” He offered them, but she was too afraid to take them. “Not hungry? Okay, I’ll put them over here then.”
He picked up her paintings and leafed through them. “Oh, I see you’ve been keeping yourself busy. Christina, some of these are really quite good. I never knew you were so artistic.”
The only thing Charley heard in all that was that he still was calling her ‘Christina’.
He looked up from the sketches. “Have you ever tried wood carving?”
She shook her head.
He put the pictures to one side and smiled. “Maybe I’ll teach you one day.”
Charley swallowed down her fear. “Who was that I heard before?”
“Heard?”
“Someone screaming...a girl...”
He ran his hand over the bed linen. “Oh, I think you must have been dreaming, Christina. You know what a vivid imagination you have.”
Charley didn’t push it. He wanted to act like it never happened, but she knew it had. What she couldn’t understand was, if he hadn’t taken this other girl to swap them, what had he taken her for?
A few days later, when she knew he’d gone out, she tried shouting to the other girl, but never heard a reply or a bang or a knock of acknowledgement. Maybe she wasn’t there anymore, or maybe she just couldn’t hear Charley’s calls.
Whatever the reason, Charley didn’t hear anything of the other girl again.
Every day he brought her food and emptied the bucket. He told her he was very happy she was here and that he loved her. She knew it wasn’t true. He loved something he was pretending she was... a sister who had died or something.
As time went on, she got craftier at playing the game with him. She’d ask about when she was little, or when Christina was little, and he’d tell her some story or other, like the time she went missing and he looked all over the house for her until he’d found her sleeping in the little cupboard in the alcove. A few days later Charley would bring it up again as if it was her memory. Small things like that never failed to make him smile.
All the while she hoped she was gaining his trust and he would eventually let his guard down. Maybe even let her off the chain.
For a good while, things went on like that, every day like the one before, and it may have continued to do so.
If she hadn’t tried to escape.
Chapter Thirty-One
Gary searched the kitchen, yanking out drawers and checking along the greasy tops.
Nothing.
He tried the living room, searching high and low for spare keys or a landline. Marsden probably used a mobile, but Gary still needed to check the entire house, just in case.
Up on the landing, the dirty, musty stench grew stronger, pervading his throat and sinuses.
He entered the first bedroom. The bed covers were thrown back, the sheets stained and dirty. He didn’t initially take much notice of the torn papers strewn around, but he did notice the eyelets screwed into the walls. He curled his finger into one and pulled at it thoughtfully.
An eyelet on the other side of the bed had a chain padlocked to it. He examined it, running the chain through his hands to the steel hinged loop at the other end.
A torn piece of paper caught his eye, bright red and black. He flipped a couple of other pieces and found more parts from a painting of a ladybird. He recognised it immediately and knew that Charley had painted it. While she was imprisoned, chained to this wall, she’d painted pictures of home.
Emotion swelled inside him and he had to turn his face away. He couldn’t afford to dwell on the ordeal she’d endured all these lost months. He had to find a way to call for help, or to get her out of that hole. He cursed himself for coming here without a phone. What had he been thinking?
Or maybe that had been the idea.
The next room was dark as night. He flicked on the light and discovered a cast iron bathtub with a rusty brown tear-drop stain from a dripping tap. The one window had a chipboard sheet nailed over it. The bottom panel of the door was marked with dusty shoe prints, and a chunk of wood was ripped out of the frame. Someone had kicked it in. He wondered what might have happened here.
When he opened the door to the next room, he had to step back, gagging at the stink of something old and rotten.
Thin cotton curtains allowed light to seep through, staining the room in an eerie yellow glow. He fumbled around the doorway and found the sticky plastic casing of the light switch. He flicked the switch a few times but nothing happened.
He waited on the threshold for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The smell was like an old potato sack, earthy and rotten. But beneath that hung the putrid smell of decay. Covering his mouth with his sleeve, he went inside.
The room contained an old-fashioned double bed and tall oak headboard. The bed was unmade, the covers ruffled. To his right stood a wardrobe, the doors open and draped with multilayers of drab, old-fashioned women’s clothes.
Looking out of place among five vases of shrivelled brown flowers on the dressing table, stood a claw hammer resting on its scarred head, the wooden handle stained with dark patches.
Gary edged nearer to the bed. He had thought the covers were just ruffled, but on closer inspection, he realised there was something thin lying beneath them, something that looked suspiciously like a body.
This was no bedroom.
It was a crypt.
A mausoleum.
As he came closer, he felt like the walls were closing in around him, his nerves tightening like piano strings. Halfway between the bed and the door was about as far as he was prepared to go. He raised himself on tiptoe, craning his neck to see over the ruffled blankets.
Gary covered his mouth.
The faces of two mummified corpses lay huddled together, their rotted heads resting in putrid stains of brown, red, and green. Dark leathery flesh peeled away from the facial bones, the scalps shrunken and detached from the white domes of the skulls. Long brown hair sprouted from the dried scalp of one body, the other was short and white and tinged with dirty yellow. Gary recognised the nicotine stained hair immediately.
Marsden senior’s facial bones were shattered, the nose and upper mandible caved inward.
He looked again at the hammer on the dressing table.
The other body must be the mother’s. He couldn’t see what her injuries were, but he wasn’t getting any closer to find out.
Then something moved in Marsden’s empty eye socket. Something white and insect-like with long feelers.
It was a moth.
A second emerged from his mouth, followed by another and another. They walked and crawled and crept out of his broken face, some taking to the air, the soft sound of their wings like whispers in the still room, others tumbling onto the pillow where they flapped and writhed as if barely alive.
Gary remembered his dream and began to inch away, retreating all the way out of the oppressive crypt of a bedroom. Only when he was back out on the landing did he release the breath he’d been holding.
If mother and father were dead, only the son could have killed them and laid the corpses in bed together. So it must follow that the son was the Goldilocks Killer, not the father, as he had first thought.
Gary remembered them coming to the house. The son had been lean and strong even then; it was impossible to predict how he might have grown.
There was no more time to waste. He had to get Charley out of that pit before Marsden junior returned.
Chapter Thirty-Two
One day he had asked if she would cook for him. Charley had made cupcakes with her mother one Father’s Day and her dad usually let her toss a pancake on Shrove Tuesday, but that seemed more like having fun than real cooking. She’d made eggs and toast and heated stuff in a pan, but that was about as far as her culinary adventures had taken her.
When she explained that she couldn’t cook he had laughed and said it was about time she learned. Instead of taking prepared meals up to her, he began taking her down to the kitchen to teach her how to prepare it.
Each time she worked herself up, imagining all kinds of scenarios in which she could turn cookery lessons into an escape, but he kept her chained to his belt and checked her constantly.
After a time of only letting her watch him, he encouraged her to take part in the preparation, but always under his close supervision. Perversely, Charley began to look forward to the sessions as a distraction from reading, drawing or staring longingly out of the window. She’d asked for a TV or a radio, but he wouldn’t allow it. She figured it was because he didn’t want her to know what was going on outside her four walls. He wanted to be her entire world.
Sometimes he’d stand behind her while showing her how to do something, separating the yolk from an egg, for example, or correcting the way she used the vegetable peeler. The worst part about it was that he’d move real close, encircling her with his arms, hands over hers. Closer than he should be—closer than she felt comfortable—his breathing becoming ragged as he pressed himself against her.
When she felt him losing control, she’d take a step back and push him away from her. She’d turn to look him in the face and ask a question about what she was doing. She’d deliberately ask it wrong because he loved so much to correct her. He’d tut at how silly she was, take over and demonstrate. Most importantly for Charley though, the moment would pass.
But then came the time that her question didn’t make him stop. When she turned to look at him his eyes were dark and lustful, his lips wet. He pressed her against the table, pinning her there. She tried to push his hands away, but he was much too strong.
He tried to kiss her, his bristly chin scraping her cheek, his horrible breath in her face.
“Stop,” she begged. “Please stop.”
But he wouldn’t stop. She turned her face away, but he followed her with his ugly lips.
“No,” she whimpered. “Please, I’m Christina...I’m your sister.” And when that didn’t stop him, she used something she’d been saving, something she had understood from things he had said to her, and other things that he hadn’t. “Stop it!” she screamed at him. “You promised you wouldn’t do this to me anymore!”
He jumped back from her, his expression shocked. He tilted his face away in shame.
Charley smoothed out the dress, her heart thumping, hands shaking. Her eyes were full of tears, but she refused to let them fall.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m...I struggle…with thoughts… emotions.”
“I know,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice calm and even. She had seized control of the situation and didn’t want to lose it. “But it’s alright now. It’s just that you...you can’t touch me like that. That’s not what brothers and sisters do.”
He grabbed his face in his long bony hands and pinched the flesh. “I’m sorry!” he cried, and dramatically fell to his knees before her. He clawed at her, pulling her to him, his face pressed to her stomach. “I’m sorry! Please forgive me, Christina. It isn’t me, it’s him! He makes me do it!” He looked up at her, his face a horrible contorted mask of misery. “He told me he’d cut it off if I didn’t do it to you! He pulled out my thing and put a knife under it and said he’d cut it off if I didn’t use it like a man!”
Charley didn’t know what to do. She leaned away from him, her hands on the table, looking down at this craziness. She had wanted him to stop, but hadn’t expected this reaction.
“And I did it!” he cried. “I did it to you...and all those other… things. I’m sorry, Chrissy, I’m so sorry.” He hugged his face to her belly, his arms tightly around her, his tears wetting the dress. “And while I was doing it to you, you used to whisper to me, ‘It’s alright, Will, it’s okay. It’s not your fault. I know it’s not your fault’. I loved you so much, my sister. I’m so sorry for what we did to you.”
“Will?” Charley said quietly. It was the first time she’d ever used his name.
He hitched a few sobs and grew quiet.
“Will?”
He looked up at her, his eyes and nose streaming, his mouth wet and hanging open.
“He isn’t here now. He isn’t making you do anything anymore. You can stop it now. You don’t have to keep me here. You can let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you, I promise. Just...let me go.”
He searched her eyes, head moving minutely. For a moment she thought he would do it. For one fleeting moment she thought he would unchain her and let her leave, but instead, he seized her in a frighteningly powerful grasp, his hot face against her stomach.
“No!” he shouted. “I can’t! He is here, he’s always here! He won’t let you go. He won’t ever let you go! He’d kill you before I could ever let you go!”
Charley closed her eyes and knew that she would never be able to talk him into releasing her. She would have to continue to survive, make him trust her and hope for the chance to escape.
That chance came sooner than she thought it would.
After the incident, he appeared to mellow some, allowing her downstairs more often and relaxing around her. More importantly though, her ploy had worked, and he didn’t touch her inappropriately anymore.
Whenever he went out of the house for any substantial amount of time, he still locked her in the pit, until the day he announced he would teach her how to make the steak and ale pie she once said she enjoyed. He told her he needed to go out to get some ingredients for it.
Charley pretended to be excited, but prepared herself to spend the next hour or so in the chilly darkness of the pit.
He looked at her carefully and said, “I don’t need to lock you up this time, do I? You’ll be good?”
Charley had to catch her breath and nodded quickly.
He smiled and said, “You know, one day you might be able to come to the shops with me. We could go out together like we used to.”
“Wow, that would be so cool,” she said, and smiled disarmingly. “You can trust me, Will. I don’t know why you don’t already. I’m not going to run away or anything. I like it here. You’re my big brother and I…I love you. You take care of me.”
He looked at her for so long that she began to wonder if she had pushed too far. She’d never told him she loved him before, and she’d gone and stumbled over saying it. After all, she wasn’t his sister and surely somewhere deep inside he must know that?
