The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
58
June 2017
The slab lands in place over the steps down to the tunnel and Scarlett locks it into place with the old lever. All three of them are sweaty and grey. They get to their feet and rub their hands down their legs. The air in this tiny damp turret is thick with the smell of old alcohol, sweat and fear.
The dog is waiting anxiously outside the door to the anteroom, whining gently under his breath. He follows them into the kitchen where the tiny puddle of blood sits in the middle of the floor like a splash of spilled Beaujolais. Scarlett’s mum mops it up with kitchen paper and spray bleach and then burns the paper over the sink before swirling the ashes down the plug hole and cleaning the sink with more spray.
It is nearly 3 a.m. The glass of the sliding doors reflects the LED lights from the swimming pool, which swirl slowly from pale pink to hot pink to purple to blue.
Tallulah sits heavily on the edge of the big leather sofa and says, very quietly, ‘Can I go home now?’
‘No,’ Scarlett’s mother replies immediately and firmly. ‘No. You are in a state of shock. If you go home now, your mother will know. I can’t let you go anywhere until we’ve fixed this. OK?’
Tallulah stares at her and a thousand objections jump to the surface of her consciousness. But she is so tired. So tired. And all she wants to do is sleep. She watches in a kind of blank fascination as Scarlett’s mother makes them hot chocolate in a saucepan. ‘God,’ she is saying. ‘Just what we need with Rex coming home tomorrow. And Mallorca next week. Life,’ she says, stirring the chocolate slowly with a wooden spoon. ‘Life.’
She pours the hot chocolate into mugs and passes one to each of the girls.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Drink that.’
The hot chocolate is delicious, creamy, smooth, but with a strangely chemical taste to it.
‘I’ve put a tot of rum in it,’ Scarlett’s mother explains, ‘just to calm your stomachs. You must both be so, so exhausted. All that adrenaline. You know, adrenaline is terribly ageing. It’s a miracle hormone, but it’s terrible for you. In the long run …’
Tallulah watches Scarlett’s mother’s mouth moving as she talks and as she watches a kind of disconnect occurs, the words no longer match the shapes her mouth is making, they start to sound weird, elongated, as though they’re on a DJ’s decks and they’re being slowed right down and dragged out of shape, and Tallulah’s eyes, her eyes are so heavy and she wants to close her eyes but she wants to keep them open because she needs to stay awake, but she can’t stay awake and then all the lights in the room funnel inwards towards the backs of her retinas and then …
When Tallulah opens her eyes, it is dark. And cold. Her body sings out with aches and pains and her mouth is so dry that at first she cannot remove her tongue from behind her teeth. As her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees the flicker of a candle in a jar. She sees the outline of a large plastic bottle of water and she opens it and drinks from it greedily. She is wrapped in fur blankets and there is a pillow and there is chocolate and expensive-looking biscuits and a toilet roll and a bucket. Along the tunnel is a humped form and she knows that it is Zach and she knows that she is under the house, and that above her is solid stone, and that she is trapped down here with the dead body of her boyfriend.
There is a box of matches and more candles in a box. And there is her phone. She switches it on but there is no signal down here and she has only 16 per cent of her charge left.
She puts the phone back down and as she does she feels something run across the skin of her bare ankle. She looks down and sees a spider, sitting on her flesh, all angles and legs and coiled energy and she jumps to her feet and she screams and she screams and she screams.