Imogen sits and stares out of the window of her parents’ bedroom.
So far, there hasn’t been anything to see, but everything out there spooks her. A squall of wind ruffling the leaves of the beech tree, opposite. A movement across the corner of the garden. The dark shadow cast by the roof of her dad’s workshop.
Neither she, nor Edie, have been in there since they lost him. Imogen can picture his woodworking tools as he probably left them. The shavings and dust on the floor. Components of some work in progress on the bench. He was making a chair for her when he died.
The weather has hardly changed in the time since she’s beensitting there. The sky is a clear blue. Perhaps it has whitened a little, she thinks, but perhaps not. It will soon. It’s as if time has stopped. And she wishes it had. Because the clock on Edie’s bedside table tells Imogen that it’s almost seven and Edie should have been home at least an hour ago.
She’s late. Dusk isn’t too far off and Edie hates to drive in the dark. She says the oncoming headlamps dazzle her.
Imogen wishes she’d paid more attention to her mum’s plans. Edie is usually punctual. I’m sure she said she’d be back at five or five thirty, Imogen thinks, but she’s not a hundred percent sure.
Has something happened?
The fear she experienced earlier has settled into a low thrum while she’s been waiting but her anxiety escalates now, so much so that she knows she can’t possibly just sit here any longer and feel it because it will make her crazy. She needs distraction.
The drawer of the old chest in her parents’ room is hard to pull out. There’s a knack to it that her dad showed her. Imogen lifts it a little as she pulls. She takes out their family photo albums and kneels on the floor to look through them.
This is her favorite thing to do when she’s on her own, but instead of her usual comfortable, indulgent perusal of the photos, the gentle easing apart of the album pages that are stuck together, Imogen starts to flick through them with a more desperate, demanding energy that feels as if its edging toward destruction. Her breathing is labored.
She wants to see her parents’ faces, wants to feel reassured by them, for them to make the fear she’s feeling go away, but instead all she feels is certainty that both her mum and her dad are stuck in the photographs and that she will never see either of them again in real life and it’s the most painful and frightening thing she’s ever felt. She slams the album shut, gasping.
Her skin feels hypersensitive, as if it might peel away. It hurts, all of her does, inside and out. She wraps her arms around herself,unsure whether she wants to hug or hurt herself and watches without acting as her tears fall onto the photo album cover and spatter there. Her weeping is silent. She didn’t even realize she was crying.
She looks up when she hears the car. It’s traveling up the lane. She hears it turn into the driveway. She casts the album aside and her knees ache as she gets up and she stumbles as she runs to the window and is too late to see whose car it is. She has a view of the entrance to the driveway, but not the parking area.
Mum?
She stands there, feeling the breath leave and enter her body as a solid thing that she might choke on.
She hears the front door open and catch on the chain.
The doorbell rings, a short, perky few blasts, the sort to tell you that you know who’s here, the exact kind of ring that Edie makes when she gets home. Not something he would ever do. Imogen runs downstairs and sweeps the chain off the door and flings it open, ready to embrace her mum so hard she won’t know what’s hit her.
But when Imogen sees who’s there her face falls and her gut twists hard because it’s not Edie.
Toby is smiling.
And he has two deep scratches down one cheek.
Emily’s been alone since Toby left. She’s in shock. Her ankle is a blaze of pain. She feels unable to move.
“Paul,” she whimpers.
She’s lying on the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees. Beneath the fingernails on her right hand are traces of skin and traces of blood, of Toby.
All she can think about is the letter. How it started this. How it’s malevolent.
She knew it, when she first held it, and she was right.
But she doesn’t know how this is going to end.
She lifts her head. There isn’t too much distance between her and the landline handset, not really, not if she tries. A tear slips down her cheek. The handset lies on the floor in the hallway, where it spun in circles after Toby knocked it from her grasp before she could call the police.
She should be able to reach it. So long as he doesn’t come back.
“Do you want to come in?” Imogen asks.
She’s upset that it’s not her mum at the door, but she likes Toby. Of all her mum and dad’s friends, he makes her feel most comfortable. He has an easy way about him that she likes. It’s compelling. And he’s a good tutor. Fun.
