1
Nightmares
Someone wanted me dead.
The feeling clung like a scent, irrational though it must be. It made me flinch from strangers. It made me flinch from non-strangers, in a way I knew wasn’t healthy.
But I struggled to question how I felt.
Someone wants me dead.
My jaw tightened. The words felt true, even prophetic.
I knew how crazy they sounded. I would never have admitted them to anyone else.
I glanced around the garden where I stood, having just walked through the squeaky iron door by the tall iron gate. It was getting light out now. I’d lost track of time, been out much longer than I should’ve, but I avoided sleep sometimes, if only to avoid the nightmares that came with it. I needed to go upstairs, have a shower and change, but I didn’t want to wake my brother yet, and the pipes rattled loudly whenever we used the hot water.
It was still too early to start breakfast.
So I stood in the garden in the cold, rubbing a pain in my chest, a hard, glass-like ball that formed there with more and more frequency.
I tried to shake the uneasy feeling that wanted to linger.
I felt like I was being watched. I felt it all the time now.
Worse, there was that feeling that someone wanted me dead?desperately, with an intensity that entered my dreams, colored my waking view of the world. It felt like I’d never not known it. But realistically, it must’ve started when my parents were murdered at a tube station in London, right in front of me.
Take it,the wind whispered.Take it. It’s time.
I frowned. I looked around carefully, my fingers white where they clenched around my thighs over my black, form-fitting jeans.
No one was there, of course.
No one. Nothing. There wasn’t even any wind.
So how did I know exactly what those words had meant?
Seconds later, I was in a different part of the garden. I knelt before the makeshift grave I’d fashioned for my brother and I in an overgrown corner of our aunt’s garden. My fingers smoothed over the grey-white stone I’d carved, not long after they’d died.
My brother watched me do it with my clumsy, ten-year-old fingers, using a sharp stone I’d found in another part of the overgrown sprawl of flowers, fruit trees, and gone-to-seed lawn. It was just their names, nothing more:Robert and Clotide Shadow.
I hadn’t thought to put a date.
Anyway, maybe the date didn’t matter.
I was well over nineteen, and I couldn’t imagine ever needing to be reminded.
As much as I couldn’t wait to get out of there, out of Southampton, away from my aunt’s house, on to university, I struggled with the thought of leaving the grave behind.
Even knowing nothing was buried there.
Even knowing it was just a stone with names carved sloppily by a ten-year-old hand.
Take it,the voice whispered.You must.
Louder that time. More insistent.
Take it, darling.
