Dear Amy

18

Katie wakes in darkness, as always, but there is a strange burr in her sleep-dazed brain that tells her she is not normally awake at this time.

Something is different, but she doesn’t know what it is. It is cold, true, but no colder than usual, and in any case, now the nights are drawing in, her captor has recently upgraded her thin blanket with the addition of a musty-smelling candlewick bedspread.

She sits up, stretching her wasted limbs, and suddenly realizes what it is.

The house is in utter silence.

She cranes her face upwards, towards where the ceiling is, forcing herself to become perfectly still as she concentrates.

Normally, at any time of night or day, Chris is in evidence through his media spoor. Rubbish TV plays loudly round the clock – talk shows all day, old movies all night, and she suspects that he sleeps in front of it. Certainly all of the bedrooms he occasionally takes her into have the perfect, sterile look of a show house or museum. Even when he works in the gardens, facile talk radio carries through the air, its lively mutters audible even down here through the medium of the pipes.

Sometimes she can hear him swearing explosively at these electronic voices, and at one point he threw something hard and the television went silent, which produced even more angry outbursts until the problem was corrected.

The music he sometimes plays on Sunday is his only concession to peace – but even then, it is not listened to, it is merely noise, an aspirational ambience.

Katie thinks of something Brian always says – wise men speak when they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something. Chris cannot bear his own company, and since she cannot bear his company either, this makes perfect sense to her. This cocoon of empty, oblivious one-way chatter and white noise exists around him so that he is never alone with himself, and yet never in danger of being confronted by anyone else.

She wonders, darkly, if she is also a part of this strategy.

The silence now, however, is absolute.

Wrapping the candlewick bedspread around herself, she shuffles over to the door and, as carefully as she can, conscious that this might be a trap of some sort, she tries the lock. It is as thoroughly bolted as ever.

The thought comes to her, in a blinding instant of panic, that perhaps he has abandoned her. The message to Bethan Avery has sent him running, and he is never coming back.

She is to starve to death in this cellar.

No. No. She refuses to believe this. She is going to get through this. She has given up too much, lived through too much, for any other outcome, and besides, she is going to see her mum and Brian again. Her mum and Brian, who must be going frantic, who maybe even believe those stupid lies spread about Katie running away.

When she thinks about how she spoke to Brian the last time she saw him, before she charged out of the house on that fatal night, a hot runnel of shame flows down from her head to her gut, burning everything in its path.

Brian, not her dad, was the one that had always been there for her.

She has to get out of here. She has to make it up to him, and to her poor mum.

Katie crushes down these thoughts as they are too painful – she can barely manage her own horror and dread; contemplating her mother’s is more than she can bear. She raises her chin in the darkness and grits her teeth. She is going to get out of here. She is going to make it up to them both.

As though she has conjured him, she hears his feet on the stairs – not his usual heavy tread, but something quicker, more irregular, and when he throws up the trapdoor she can hear his ragged breathing from where she sits, and the click of the switch in the passage. She remembers to scrabble back to her bed and lie down just as the cellar door swings wide and blinding light floods in.

She blinks, slowly, deliberately, as though he has just woken her. She is amazed to find, considering her fears of being entombed alive a few minutes ago, that she is pleased to see him.

The feeling lasts roughly ten seconds, ending as he stands over her, pulling off the candlewick bedspread with greedy haste. His face is in shadow, the light behind him, but the lit planes of his cheek and neck are shiny with sweat and, she thinks with a little burst of horror, she can smell blood.

‘It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right.’ His hands are freezing. ‘I’m going to fix this. Don’t worry. Now, come here.’