The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

60

June 2017

Tallulah doesn’t know how long she’s been down here. The last time she switched on her phone before it finally ran out of charge, it was ten forty-eight on Saturday night. It feels as if another six hours at least have passed since then. It must be early on Sunday morning, more than twenty-four hours since she drank the drugged hot chocolate given to her by Scarlett’s mother. Twenty-four hours since whatever happened, happened. The thing that happened when Zach threatened to take her baby away. The thing that means Zach is dead.

She closes her eyes again and then again, trying to bring that moment back into focus – and it never does. She’s sure it was Scarlett who did it. She sees the metal lump in Scarlett’s hands. She sees Zach on the floor. But then she feels the thrum of her own adrenaline around her own body, the thump of her own heart under her own rib cage and she doesn’t know what happened just before. Just before.

The fur blanket is wrapped high up her neck; she has made a spider-proof bag out of it, but still she feels the shiver of tiny feet on her flesh. She feels them in the places that the blanket doesn’t cover: her eyes, her nostrils; climbing into her ear canals. She’s needed to go to the toilet for hours now but is holding it, too scared to unwrap herself from her cocoon. She’s thirsty but she doesn’t want to drink the water because it will make her need to go more. She eats the biscuits instead. She hasn’t moved for hours and all her joints ache.

She assumes, because she is alive, because she has been left with food and water and light and a blanket, that she is to be rescued, that she is down here temporarily. But she can’t be sure. The thought of being wrong, the thought that she might die down here, is too much for her brain to process.

An hour goes by. Maybe longer. The need to go to the toilet has passed again. She imagines that her body has somehow absorbed the contents of her bladder, like a sponge. She braves sticking an arm out of the furry rug and lifts the candle up, lets the light it casts run down the tunnel, over the hump of Zach’s body. There are lamps at intervals attached to the walls and she marvels briefly at the age of them, imagines them lit and guiding escapees towards safety. She wonders how far the tunnel goes. She wonders if there’s an exit at the other end, an escape hatch. But in order to find out she’d have to take off the blanket and she does not want to take off the blanket. Because there are spiders.

A crack of light appears above Tallulah’s head. She’s been sitting on the steps, as close as possible to the opening in the room above, as far away as possible from the spiders on the tunnel floor and Zach’s dead body. She doesn’t know how long it’s been. Long enough to burn through a second candle. To have finished the biscuits. To have finished the water. To have slept twice. She turns at the sound of the stone lid creaking open and peers up.

‘Shh!’

It’s Scarlett. It takes a few seconds for Tallulah’s eyes to adjust enough to make out the slice of her face visible through the crack.

‘Shh,’ she says again. Then she says, ‘Are you OK?’

Tallulah tries to talk but no words come. She shakes her head.

‘Look,’ says Scarlett. ‘We’re going to get you out of here. Just one more day, I think. Police everywhere still. But I’m pretty sure they’re done with us. And then …’

‘What about Noah?’ she croaks.

‘Noah’s fine. I saw him. He’s fine. Your mum’s fine. Listen, Tallulah. It’s going to be OK? Yes? Just hold on in there. And look what I got for you. It’s a pecan Danish. Your favourite.’ She passes something wrapped in kitchen towel through the gap and Tallulah takes it. ‘Do you need more water? Anything else?’

‘I want to get out,’ she says, her voice still cracking, but growing stronger. ‘I want to get out now. I want to go home. I can’t be down here, with Zach, with his … I just can’t. And there’s spiders. Please. Let me out. I can’t … It’s …’

She sees Scarlett put a finger to her mouth, her eyes track quickly back behind her. ‘Shh,’ she says again, before sliding the stone cover back into place.

And then it is dark again.