For the time I had with her, I won’t be sorry
What I took from her, I won’t give back
Jez didn’t take them into town; he took them back to his place, “for a smoke.”
“We have cigarettes,” Miriam said, and Lorrie and Jez both laughed.
“Not that sort of smoke, Miriam.”
Jez lived in a shabby farmhouse a few miles outside town. The house was at the end of a long lane, a winding road to nowhere, the tarmac getting narrower and narrower until by the time they’d got to the gate, it had dwindled all the way to nothing and they were bumping along a dirt track. Miriam’s stomach was in knots; she thought she might actually shit herself. Jez got out of the car to open the gate.
“I think we should go,” Miriam said to Lorraine, her voice quivering, urgent. “This is weird. He’s weird. I don’t like this.”
“Don’t be such a wuss,” Lorrie said.
Jez drove the car into the driveway, parked next to another car, an old white Citro?n; when Miriam saw it, her heart gave a little leap. Her mother used to have a car like that. It was the sort of car middle-aged women drove. Perhaps his mum was here, she thought, and then she noticed that the car’s tires were flat, the chassis resting on the ground. Despite the heat, she shivered.
Jez got out of the car first; Lorraine followed him. Miriam hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she should just stay in the car. Lorraine looked back at her, widening her eyes. Come on! she mouthed, gesturing for Miriam to follow.
She climbed out, her legs trembling as she walked toward the house. As she stepped from bright sunlight into shadow, she saw that the house wasn’t just shabby, it was derelict. The windows to the upstairs rooms were broken, the downstairs ones boarded up. “You don’t live here!” Miriam said, her tone indignant. Jez turned, and he looked at her for the first time, his face blank. He said nothing. He turned away, taking Lorraine by the arm as he did. Lorraine glanced back over her shoulder at Miriam, and Miriam could see that she was frightened.
They walked into the house. It was filthy, bottles and plastic bags and cigarette packets strewn over the floor. There was a strong smell of shit, and not animal shit either. Miriam put her hand over her nose and mouth. She wanted to turn back, to run back outside, but something prevented her from doing so; something kept her moving forward, one foot in front of the other, walking behind Lorraine and Jez, down a hallway, past a staircase, into what must have once been a living room, because there was a broken-down sofa pushed up against a wall.
Miriam thought that if she acted normal, then maybe everything would just be normal. She could force it to be normal. Just because this felt like the kind of thing that happened in a horror movie didn’t mean it would be like a horror movie—quite the opposite. In horror movies, the girls never saw it coming. They were so stupid.
They were so stupid.
The One Who Got Away
She wakes.
Joints stiff, hip aching, part blind, unable to breathe. Unable to breathe! She jolts, rocks herself upright, into a sitting position, her heart thundering in her chest. She is dizzy with adrenaline. She inhales sharply through her nose. She can breathe, but there is something in her mouth, something soft and wet, a gag. She retches, tries to spit it out. Hands behind her back, she struggles, pushing through pain. Finally, she pulls her right hand free, takes the rag from her mouth. A T-shirt, she sees, faded blue.
In another room, not too far away, someone is crying.
（She can’t think about that now.）
On her feet. Her right eye will not open. With her fingernails, the girl delicately picks a crust of blood from her eyelashes. That helps, a little. It opens, a little. Now she has perspective.
The door is locked, but there is a window, and she is on the ground floor. The window is small, granted, and she is not slender. It is not quite dark. Toward the horizon, over to the west, a murmuration forms, dissipates, re-forms. The sky fills with birds, empties, fills again, and it is beautiful. If she stays right here, the girl thinks to herself, right here on this spot, if she watches, it will never grow dark, and he will never come for her.
The sobbing grows louder and she steps back from the window. She can no longer see the birds.
Like the door, the window is locked, but the glass is a single pane, breakable. Breakable but not silently breakable—will she have time to get out before he comes? Will she be able to force her flesh through that small space at all? Her friend would be able to. Her friend is slender, she did ballet until she was thirteen, her body bends in ways the girl’s does not.