‘They took blood from me once a day,’ she says.
‘With what?’ Marc asks.
‘A knife. But apart from that they didn’t hurt me. They just wanted me for – my blood.’ She shivers. ‘It was Nowhere, they took me – where I was kept.’
‘How do you know?’ Marc’s warm, inviting interview voice has dropped away. His tone is sharp; he hears it and Annie does too. Her liquid blue eyes go solid, hostile. He looks at Kimble, who widens her eyes.What are you doing?
‘They thought I was passed out when they carried me in,’ Annie says. ‘But I saw flashes of things. A broken Ferris wheel on the ground. Sometimes they whispered, “blood in the land”. Or “blood on the land”. I don’t know which.’
‘Cut,’ Marc says. ‘For a moment.’
Kimble doesn’t cut. ‘What does that mean?’ she murmurs from behind the camera. She’s talking to Annie but she stares at Marc. He has stopped doing his job.
Annie looks down, silent. Her eyelashes are dark on her cheek. She wants Marc to ask her, not Kimble. It’s not unusual for interview subjects to assume that Marc is in control.
Marc takes a deep breath, slow and silent. When he’s sure his voice will be steady he asks, ‘Blood?’
‘They took a little each day,’ she whispers. ‘It was the Nowhere children.’ Annie shivers again, clutching herself. She pulls back her loose linen sleeve.
Kimble zooms in. Annie’s skin is perfect, buttermilk, except for the red welts of old cuts, healing now to scars.
‘Why do you think a group of children would kidnap you and take your blood?’ Kimble asks.
‘They worship him. They live up there where all those people died.’
Marc pauses, letting Annie feel what she has said. When he sees it in her eyes he says, ‘Tell us about them. The Nowhere children.’
‘Most is just what I’ve heard.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘Well,’ Annie says. A faint flush spreads over her ivory cheeks; she’s enjoying being believed. ‘They’re all runaways. It’s a kind of cult but only for kids. They live up there on his old ranch and they worship him.’
‘Him?’ Kimble asks.
‘Leaf Winham.’
Marc nods. For a moment which seems to last an hour, he stares at Annie.
‘Did you report it to the police?’ His voice sounds slow and thick in his ears.
‘I filed a report but nothing happened. They think I’m lying. They think I was with my ex-boyfriend.’ Annie’s pink lips purse and fold in on themselves. ‘I wasn’t surprised, somehow, when they took me. When I woke up there.’ She shrinks into the chair, becomes even more fragile and delicate, as if collapsing from within. ‘Maybe all women feel this.’ Annie looks at Kimble, appealing, and Kimble smiles a little, just enough to suggest empathy.
‘Feel what?’ Kimble asks.
‘That it’s your fate. Something like this. Like,I’m just waiting to meet my killer.I was sure every day that the knife would go into my neck. But it didn’t. I don’t know why not.’ She gasps, wipes her eyes quickly, brushing away the tears. ‘Do you know what they fed me?’
Kimble zooms in.
‘Two things,’ Annie says.
‘What were they?’ Marc tries to keep his voice level.
‘Mushrooms,’ Annie says. ‘The kind that makes you see things. I was so hungry, I had lost so much blood I would have eaten anything. I saw – I was—’ She swallows. ‘And the other thing was formula. They gave it to me from a bottle like a baby.’
‘I need a minute,’ Marc says. Kimble nods. They have learned to give one another space when it’s needed.
‘Meet me in the square in an hour,’ she says. ‘Don’t be late.’
