Stephanie

Now

I am in hospital. Confused, in pain, broken.

Desperately, I try to find something about my situation that might calm me, and try to force my brain to focus on the ambient sound of nurses hurrying around and patients demanding food and medication – continuous white noise that’s distracting, yes, but not exactly soothing.

Sinister shapes and sounds move through my mind, like a shifting fog, sometimes obscuring, sometimes revealing. I can remember snatches of what happened. Broken fragments that are never quite properly defined. It’s like I’m behind a wall of glass of ever varying density and transparency.

How did I end up here?

I try to take myself back to the moment right before the pain thudded through my body. Small details start to take hold. Fingernails scratching on wood. Some sort of scrabbling. Trying to pull myself up. Hunting for something. Searching for something.

I’m pulled away from my thoughts by a kind-sounding nurse, who asks me if I’m up to taking a sip of water. I do my best, but my throat feels horribly dry and there’s a strange taste – something acidic, perhaps. Like orange juice past its prime. When I mention this to the nurse, she says it’s quite normal – a mixture of the shock and the pain meds. I ask if she knows what happened to me, and she nods and says, ‘Yes, I heard, dear, when you were brought in yesterday.’

I frown, causing a sore tugging sensation to spread across my forehead. ‘Yesterday? I’ve been here…’

‘You were kept overnight, dear, for monitoring. What a horrible thing to happen, especially… well, with everything that’s been going on...’

I notice her eyes flick over to the window, but I don’t trust myself to move enough to follow her gaze properly. She seems to think I’d know what she’s talking about. That I’d have the same details to hand as her. In my disoriented state, that’s the thing that seems the most incongruous right at that moment. Absurdly, my mind flicks to a scene in a movie – The Matrix, I think – of a man waking up in a pod filled with liquid, and he’s one of thousands in a strange world he doesn’t recognise. His whole sense of what’s real and what’s inside his head has been turned upside down. Like I’ve been shown two images in a spot-the-difference game, only I can’t even tell what’s the same. It makes me feel powerless.

But as I lie here, those vague memories start to take shape. Edges start to appear. Clarity begins to emerge. And the image of a house arrives, clear and fully formed at the front of my mind.

The Franklins’ house.

54 Oak Tree Close.

I remember what my son said, the day he first visited that place. ‘Something’s not quite right.’ It sent a prickle down the back of my neck at the time, and it does so again now. It’s all to do with that house. The things that happened there. What’s hidden in the attic.

I reach for another sip of water and realise my hands have started to shake.