He hopes he’s not too late.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Leah
Now
Twenty years ago I had made this trek, the security of my sisters dulling my panic. Now there is only me. Injured by my fall, my back shrieks with protest but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except finding my son. I burst out of the main building. It seemed inevitable that I would be greeted with a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, but the sky is a flat, cloudless grey and it’s worse somehow. The silence. A storm would no longer faze me. I am incredulous that I was ever scared of the weather. This sharp-tongued fear relentlessly licking at my organs, coating my insides sour, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
My baby. My boy.
At least the hammering rain would make me feel I wasn’t quite so alone. That I was recreating the past that, if not granted a happy ending, was at least satisfactory.
We were all alive.
Then.
My stomach roils. I push the image of the ballroom away. Glassy eyes staring up at me. Grey skin. Blue lips. I can grieve later. Now is not the time to fall apart. It is as though my feet remember where to go. This time there is no circling around back to the main building. The decontamination chamber looms in front of me. The rusting DANGER sign still in place. I have left the wooden post back in the ballroom and feel small and vulnerable but filled with an unmatchable fury. My mother’s instinct roaring louder than the beat of my heart, which I know thuds in sync with the life I created. The life I will save, even if it costs me my own.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. I hadn’t noticed that last time but I notice it now.
Simon, I am coming for you.
I step into the entrance where I once huddled with Marie while Carly covered our footsteps in the wet earth outside. This was where Carly had dropped her shoes and Moustache and Doc had found them. Holding the door open for light, I scan the floor. My body jolts as though it has been shocked when I see two small trainers I recognize. Thomas the Tank Engine’s face beaming from the heels.
Archie is here.
I try to calm my breath before I move on. Then, Carly had fumbled for our hands and I’d held tightly onto hers as we edged our way into the next room. Now mine are empty. I ball them into fists.
I am ready.
The smell of the shower room rises, slime still thick on the walls. I search through the gloom for a piece of the pipes that had littered the floor last time where they had been wrenched from the walls. There is nothing I can use for a weapon. The graffiti is everywhere.
This is the building it all ended in!!!
This is SO cool!
Creepy as fuck
I know what I’d do with three girls in here!
Wanker, someone had written underneath.
Lastly, by the open door, a sign. THIS WAY next to an arrow.
Ghouls and ghosts are everywhere. I rub my arms to feel my flesh, the warmth of my blood coating my bones.
I am here.
I am here again.
Following the arrow, I try not to think of the true-crime fans’ mounting excitement when I feel nothing but dread. In the corridor, the hole in the roof has stretched wider. I raise my face and can see both the sun and the moon vying for dominance, casting their glow into the place that I do not want to step into but must.
The morgue.
Although I am trying to be strong, I am crying as I tentatively open each of the lockers that are too small to hide an adult but would easily house a small child the way they had before. The memory presses down on me, heart-wrenching and overwhelming. Carly pushing Marie and I inside. The feel of dust and grit on my skin. The soft click of metal on metal as she closed the door. The sense of suffocation despite the stagnant air being plentiful.
Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
Has Simon locked Archie here?
See how they run.
Please don’t let my boy be here.
He isn’t.
That leaves only one place.
It feels as though I am walking towards the gallows as I approach the chutes – contaminated clothes, contaminated shoes. They are bigger than I remember but I still doubt that I will fit through the way I had before, the way Archie would now. Momentarily I wonder whether I should instead locate the end of the tunnel and work my way inwards, but my gut feeling is that I’d be wasting valuable time. There was no marker and it might be impossible to find. It might have caved in by now.
I pull open the hatch. Above hang large metal hooks. I jump and catch one in each hand, my shoulder sockets burning as I dangle there helplessly, feet scrambling for traction as I try to hoist up my weight so I can slip my legs inside the chute.
I can’t get the angle right.
My arms aren’t strong enough. I lift my legs once more. My hands slip from the hook. I have no choice. I’ll have to dive in head first.
Archie.
The thought of plummeting into blackness with nothing to break my fall is terrifying but not as terrifying as the thought of my baby being down there with the dark, and the cold, and the beetles. I steel myself, hands clasped together as though I am in prayer, ready to dive into a waterless pit. I am gripped by utter terror.
Archie.
I am free-falling through time and space. It takes an eternity and it takes no time at all. I crash to the ground. I can hear the snap of my wrist before I feel the searing pain. My mouth pressed to the ground is full of dirt.
I roll over.
My ears are ringing from the fall and my mouth is full of blood where my teeth clamped around my tongue, but I can see. There is a circle of light pooling from a torch. My head feels heavy on my neck as I look around the room. The ground is strewn with empty spirit bottles, shards of glass where some of them have smashed, crushed cans, cigarette butts. Quite the party. I can almost see the true-crime fanatics, torch pointed under their chins, faces waxy and pale as they recount our final steps. I shift my gaze and see something that lights me with happiness until fear dampens my fleetingly joyful glow.
Curled into himself is Archie. But he is too still. Too quiet.
And he isn’t alone.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Carly
Now
‘Leah,’ Carly says. ‘You found us.’ She begins to cry.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Leah
Now
‘Thank God. You’re alive. Marie is… Is Archie…?’
I begin to scramble over to him but Carly shouts, ‘Stop’ in a voice that doesn’t quite sound like hers. Confused, my eyes find hers. They are full of fear and regret, but something else.
Anger.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Carly
Now
Carly watches as Leah’s confused expression morphs to fear when she sees the glint of the knife Carly is brandishing in her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Leah’s voice is high.
‘Did you know?’ Carly demands as she bundles Archie onto her lap. He is warm and soft. She loves him so very much.
‘What’s wrong with Archie?’ Leah inches forward, stopping when she sees the blade swish dangerously close to Archie’s beautiful waxy face. ‘Carly!’
‘I gave him one of your sleeping tablets. Answer me.’
‘Answer what?’
‘About Marie. Did. You. Know?’ She shouts now, but it doesn’t really matter what Leah says, Carly knows she won’t believe her.