The Shadow House(60)

‘If you’re bad,’ Amy whispered, her eyes still on the ground, ‘the monsters will get you. You have to be good, or they’ll come and take you away.’

On the road behind her, just out of earshot, Layla had turned back and was glaring at me.

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It is true,’ Amy insisted, her voice rising. ‘Bess told me, she saw them. She says that things arrive, and then they take you.’

‘I know. But Bess is old. She’s confused. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Amy,’ called Layla again. ‘Come on, please.’

Amy gave me a small nod. Her smile was as empty as mine.





RENEE





26


For twenty-four hours, nothing happened. No one did anything.

‘This happens all the time, Mrs Kellerman,’ said the officer on the other end of the phone. ‘These kids, they run away, and then they come back, and everything is fine again. I’m sure he’ll walk in the door at any minute. Either that or you’ll get a phone call from a parent at school, or a relative, to say that he’s with them.’

Renee shook her head over and over again. She knew in her gut that wouldn’t happen. She knew the way that only a mother knows that he would not walk back through the door that day, or any other day.

And she was right.

The day after the disappearance, lots of things happened at once. Police, phone calls, notepads, questions. People tramping through the house, a search continuing by torchlight.

April and Frank, their faces white, their eyes huge like the moon, What happened, where is he? Farm employees, the pickers, the morning team, everyone making suggestions: Have you checked …? Might he be …? Maybe he went …? Dom and Bess Hassop, sad heads on rubber necks, craning and peering around the door – What can we do to help? – their mouths falling open in shock as Renee finally cracked.

‘Get out,’ she screamed, ‘get out of this house!’

There’s something coming for me, isn’t there?

She hadn’t listened. She hadn’t believed him. And now he was gone.

She screamed and screamed until she had no voice left, until the people around her stopped staring and chattering and trying to solve the unsolvable, until everyone disappeared, backing away cautiously with their hands in the air, nodding insipidly as if to say, Give her time, she’ll calm down. But Renee knew that no amount of time would erase anything, this was just who she was now. This was all she was.

Gradually.

Little by little.

Everyone faded away.

Until finally.

Renee was left alone.





ALEX





27


After hiding my humiliation at home for a couple of days, on the day of the summer solstice party, I drove to the coast. Too afraid to let Ollie out of my sight, I pleaded with him to come along for the ride, but he point-blank refused. With Jenny once again ready and willing to look after both kids (‘I do not need looking after,’ Ollie yelled and stomped off into his room), I slipped away at lunchtime on my own.

The witch, I now knew, was not real. The mysterious grey-haired figure was just a sick old lady who kept getting lost. She’d got confused and repeated one too many scary stories to the village kids, who had taken the idea and run with it. I also knew, however, that there must be an element of truth in those stories. A boy had disappeared six years earlier. And someone had left me a message in that farmhouse.

I was haunted by that note. I was also haunted by the look Kit had given me as he’d walked poor Bess Hassop and her son back to their car, as well as the faces of the residents who’d witnessed the scene on the road with Bess. My behaviour had vindicated both Maggie’s and Layla’s opinions of me, and that stung.

After giving it some thought, I’d decided on two things. One – if my kids and I were going to stay at Pine Ridge, I had to be 100 per cent sure that nothing bad was going to happen to us. I had to find out who had left me that note and who was sending the packages. Until I knew the truth of those things, I wouldn’t feel safe. And two – I had to prove my sanity. I was not crazy, and I needed everyone to know.

So, using the phone number that Mark Oppenheimer had given me, I looked up the Kellermans’ home address and, as it turned out, they hadn’t moved far. Just forty-five minutes’ drive from Pine Ridge, right on the coast. There was a big shopping centre ten minutes from where they lived; I needed to pick up some last-minute Christmas gifts anyway, and if I just happened to be in the area, it made sense to drop by. Michael Kellerman’s phone manner had been far from encouraging, but it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick drive-by and scope the place out.

The drive to number twelve Bundeenah Close turned out to be more like an hour and ten, but only because I got stuck behind a tractor on the winding road to the coast. I drummed my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, glaring intently at the gigantic tyres as if I could make them move faster with the power of my mind, but the tractor turned off just before I reached the highway and it was smooth sailing all the way to the comparatively bustling suburbs of the Central Coast.

Passing a sign for Newcastle, I felt a tug of nostalgia. The first time I’d driven up this way I’d been a backpacker, fresh off the plane in denim cut-offs and a halter top, dirty feet propped on the dash of a battered campervan. I’d laughed at the irony of that sign. Look, I’d said to my boyfriend at the time. We’re on the other side of the world and we’re still going to bloody Newcastle! The Sydney skyline had been first impressive then disorientating – huge skyscrapers next to pure blue waterways; little green ferries sliding past the great white sails of the Opera House – but we found comfort in places like Kensington, Waterloo and Hyde Park. Might as well still be in London, we said. It had been surreal to find that, after flying thousands of miles across the globe, things really weren’t much different than they were at home, just a hell of a lot hotter. It was strange to think how much had changed since then, as if that part of my life had all been a dream.