No Contact

"The worst part of being afraid was never the thing itself. It was learning how few people were left to tell."

Morning came anyway, sleep or no sleep — thin grey winter light finding the gaps in the curtains and laying itself across the bed in long pale stripes. It found all of it: the sheets I'd twisted into knots, the glass of water I hadn't touched, the phone lying dark and silent by my hand. I had not slept. Every time I let my eyes fall shut she was there behind them — Serena, in my bathroom, in the steam, that soft wrong smile on her face while she talked about us being a family.

The phone stayed dark. Sharon had not called — no word about what we'd seen at Luke's house, nothing about the thing in the cellar or the man who'd screamed at us to run, not one line to say she was even alive or that any of it had been real. The silence sat heavier on me by the hour.

Getting out of bed took everything I had. My body felt filled with wet sand, every movement a fight against it. Downstairs the house sat in the weak daylight and gave me nothing — the walls felt thin, no good against whatever was out there — and I went round the whole of it like something haunting the place, checking the locks, pushing at the window catches, dragging the curtains shut against the feeling of eyes on the glass.

Calling in sick was a relief and a defeat both at once. I couldn't stand in front of a classroom today; I couldn't stand the thought of her in it, three rows back, watching me with that patient, knowing look. But staying home was its own kind of surrender — it meant she had already changed the shape of my life.

The school secretary picked up on the second ring, sympathetic and smooth and entirely untroubled. "Of course, Mrs Triffett. I'll let your classes know. Will you be able to email through some work for the students?"

"Yes, yes, of course," I said, too fast, the thought of Serena sitting in my empty drama room with no one watching her turning my stomach over. "I'll send it through shortly."

I spent the next hour building busywork, enough to keep a class of teenagers with their heads down, Serena most of all. My hands were unsteady on the keys, and when I came to her name on the class list they stopped altogether — those were the same hands that had shoved her the night before, that had felt the give and then the sick solid crack of her head against the bath. The memory brought the bile straight back up my throat.

The morning crawled. Every sound went off in me like an alarm — a car door out on the street, the house ticking as it warmed, wind moving in the trees out the back — and every one of them was Serena at the door with that smile, or Sharon finally breaking her silence, or something else I couldn't name and didn't want to.

I went from room to room and couldn't settle in any of them, checking the same locks over and over, my fingers running the cold metal and taking nothing from it. Some part of me already knew the checking was pointless. Whatever I was afraid of wasn't out there any more. It had got inside — inside the house, inside my head — and there was no lock made for that.

The phone going off cut through the quiet and had me halfway out of my skin before I saw the name on it. Dr Carmichael. Even that landed wrong now, after everything the night had turned over — the thought of talking through Sammy's trouble had got heavier than ever, tangled up in things I couldn't begin to say aloud.

"Mrs Triffett," he said, and there was a warmth in his professional voice that felt almost wrong against the tightness in me. "I hope I haven't caught you at a bad time?"

I'd just backed out of the driveway, the old familiar run to Rowena's laid out ahead of me. "No, not at all," I lied, thumbing the phone onto speaker, working to keep my voice level. "What can I do for you?"

"I've been speaking with Dr Petrov regarding Sammy's case," he said, precise, careful with each word. "She's very interested in the patterns you've described - his behavioural changes and the physical symptoms, particularly the bruising."

The word bruising put a twist through my gut. Serena's voice came up out of nowhere, soft and sweet and poisonous: He likes it when I sing to him. The same songs you use, but he says I do the voices better. My hands went tight on the wheel. Had she done that to him? Had all of it — the terrors, the marks nobody could account for — been her the whole time, some slow patient cruelty I'd slept twenty feet from and never once seen?

"Mrs Triffett? Are you still with me?"

"Yes, sorry," I said, pushing her back down out of my head. "You were saying about Dr Petrov?"

"She's available to see Sammy next Tuesday," he went on. "She's particularly interested in the connection between his sleep disturbances and the physical manifestations you've noted. The patterns you described are... unusual."

Unusual. The word sat there, clean and clinical, next to everything churning in me that had no clinical word at all. I turned into Rowena's street, her rose beds coming up on the left, no comfort in them today.

"Dr Carmichael," I started, feeling my way, slow. "What if... what if there's a simpler explanation for Sammy's symptoms? Something more... mundane?"

A pause on the line, the weight of him thinking. "What kind of explanation did you have in mind?"

How could I even say it? That the explanation was a girl I taught — a student, a child — who had a key to my house and had been letting herself in at night. That she'd stood dripping in my own bathroom and all but told me she was the thing hurting my son. There was nowhere to begin that didn't sound like I'd lost my mind.

"I just..." The words snagged as I pulled up outside Rowena's. "I'm wondering if we're looking for complicated answers when the simple one is staring us in the face."

"Mrs Triffett—Jenny," he said, gentler now. "I understand your reluctance. But Sammy's symptoms aren't simple. The language he uses, the patterns in his behaviour, the physical evidence—they're complex and warrant a thorough investigation. If there's anything you haven't shared, something that might help us understand..."

Rowena's front door opened and Sammy came out onto the step with his dinosaur hanging from one fist, and the whole grey weight of it lifted off me for a second at just the sight of him — the grin taking up his entire small face, the sun caught in his curls. "Mummy!" It carried right across the garden, bright and clean, and he was off down the path at a run, the dinosaur's chewed tail dragging behind him.

"I need to go," I said into the phone, my eyes on him. "Can I think about the appointment? Call you back?"

"Of course," he said, and there was a concern in it that pulled the knot in my stomach tighter. "But please, Jenny, don't wait too long. Whatever's happening with Sammy, he needs help. Professional help."

I ended the call as Sammy reached the car and pressed both hands flat to the window, that smile going full and unguarded, a child with none of the horror of the last days anywhere near him. I got the door open and he threw himself into me, small arms locking round my neck.

"Hi, sweetheart," I managed, holding him in tight, my voice going thick on it. Under the love, the same question kept turning over: how much of what was wrong with him was her, and how much was something else — something I couldn't see the shape of yet.

"I missed you, Mummy," he mumbled into my neck, his arms tightening in a way that undid me. "Did you catch all the bad dreams?"

My throat closed. "What bad dreams, sweetheart?"

He pulled back and looked at me, and it was there again — that seriousness far too big for him, a weight in that small face no child his age should ever have to carry. "The ones that make the shadows dance," he said, low, as though he didn't want them to overhear. "The night-time friend says they're getting stronger."

The cold went through me all the way down. "The night-time friend?" I kept my voice as level as I could make it. "Can you tell me about them?"

For a second I thought he would. His little brow worked, hunting the words — and then something took his eye, a single leaf spinning down past the car window and away on the breeze, and whatever had been there was gone, and I was left reaching after it with nothing in my hands.

Rowena came to the door with that particular worry on her face that only she could do. "Jenny, love, you look exhausted. Come in for a cuppa before you go?"

I hovered, pulled between wanting to run and wanting to sit in her kitchen and be looked after. "I should really get Sammy home..."

"Ten minutes," she said, already turning back inside. "You look like you could use it."

Inside, the smell of it folded round me — scones just out of the oven, Earl Grey — the smell of every safe afternoon I'd ever had in that house, and it made my eyes sting. Sammy went straight for his corner of toys and set about arranging his small world, chattering to the dinosaur as he went.

"Now then," Rowena said, setting a steaming mug down in front of me, watching me over it. "What's really going on? And don't tell me it's nothing—I know that look."

I looked down into the tea, the milk still turning in it. Where would I even begin — Luke's house, the thing in the cellar, Sharon, Serena in my bathroom, Nial gone and no word of him anywhere? "I'm just worried about Sammy," I said instead, and the half-truth sat like a lie on my tongue. "His appointment with Dr Carmichael last week..."

"Ah." She nodded, her face softening. "The night terrors are getting worse, then?"

I glanced over to be sure Sammy was deep in his game before I said it, low. "He talks about shadows, Rowena. About stars falling and gateways opening. And now this... 'night-time friend'..."

"Children his age often have imaginary friends," she offered, gentle and not quite sure of herself. "Especially when they're going through difficult times. With Nial missing..."

"It's more than that." It came out before I could stop it, down to almost nothing. "The bruises, the strange patterns he makes with his toys, the way he speaks sometimes—like he's not himself anymore."

Rowena's hand came across the table and settled warm and steady over mine. "Have you considered that maybe he's acting out because of Nial's disappearance? Children process trauma differently than adults."

I nearly laughed, and God, I wanted her to be right. If she'd had the first idea of it — Serena in the dark of that little bedroom, the thing crouched over the body in that dark room, all of it pulling tighter around us by the hour — she'd never have said it so gently.

"The specialist Dr Carmichael wants us to see," I said instead, stepping around it, "she's flying in next week. But I'm not sure... I don't know if..."

"Jenny," she said, gentle but not letting me off it, "if there's a chance this doctor can help Sammy, you have to take it. Whatever's causing these changes in him, he needs help."

I nodded, and left the rest of it sitting there unsaid between us. If it ever came out — Serena, the house, the cellar, every last piece of it — it would take my whole life down with it. Victim or not, innocent or not, there'd be no surviving the telling.

"Mummy, look!" Sammy's voice pulled me round. He'd set his toys out in a ring on the carpet, the dinosaur standing in the middle of them, and I knew the shape of it at once — the same ring I'd found laid out on his bedroom floor more times than I could count.

"That's lovely, darling," I said, and heard the strain in it. His own idea? Or something she'd shown him how to do, patient in the dark, while I slept down the hall?

"The stars want to dance," Sammy said, and his voice tipped over into that other register, the older one, the one that had put the unease into Dr Carmichael's face. "But the shadows keep getting in the way."

Rowena's eyes went from him to me and back, and the fear was on her face now, plain as day. She opened her mouth and shut it again with nothing to put in it. Whatever had hold of my boy — Serena, or something I had no name for — it was getting worse, and we both felt it, and neither of us could say the first true thing about it.

My phone went off in my pocket, a hard buzz that jolted through me. For half a second the hope leapt up — Sharon — and then I saw the screen and it dropped away. A number I didn't know. I answered anyway; that small stupid ember of hope wouldn't quite go out.

"Hello?" I said, moving off down the hall out of Mum's hearing. Nothing came back. Not the ordinary empty-line kind of nothing — a full, deliberate, listening kind. "Hello?" I said again, and it came out smaller.

Then I heard it. Breathing. Slow and even and unhurried, close to the mouthpiece, the sound of someone who wanted me to know they were there and had chosen not to speak. Every hair on me stood up.

"Who is this?" It came out low and hard, fear right at the edge of it. The line went dead in my ear. The suddenness of it made me flinch, and I stood there gripping the phone and staring at the screen as if it might give me a single thing about whoever had been on the other end. It gave me nothing.

"Wrong number?" Rowena asked as I came back to the table, curious, a little wary.

"Something like that," I said, and slid the phone back into my pocket as though it were nothing. It was not nothing. The dread had pulled itself tight and low in me, and the sense of being watched had swollen up until I could barely breathe around it.

"We should go," I said, too abruptly. "Sammy, sweetheart, time to head home."

"But Mummy," he said, looking up from his ring of toys, earnest about it. "The pattern isn't finished yet."

"We can finish it at home," I said, bright with a brightness I didn't have anywhere in me — because I was never going to let him finish it, that ring, whatever it was for. "Say goodbye to Grandma."

Rowena held Sammy long and close on the step, and when she straightened her look stayed on me a beat too long, all the worry in it she hadn't found the words for. I gave her the best smile I could manage. "I'll call you later."

The drive home went on forever, the car thick with everything I wasn't saying while Sammy chattered away in the back, running through his morning with Grandma in bright happy detail. I couldn't shake it — the certainty that we weren't on our own, that something was keeping pace with us just out of sight.

At every red light my eyes went to the mirror, over the cars behind us. The silver of Sharon's car. Serena's face at a windscreen. Neither of them there — and still the certainty of being watched wouldn't lift, and every turn felt like something I was being made to pass, every car I didn't know a thing to be afraid of.

By the time we turned into the driveway I was strung wire-tight, every sound too loud, every shadow a question. In the mirror I watched Sammy wrestling his seatbelt buckle, that easy small smile on him, and it landed like a weight — the whole reason I had to hold myself together, right there in the back seat.

I let us into the house and shut the door behind us and turned the deadbolt, and the small solid click of it went through me and left nothing behind — none of the safety a locked door was supposed to give. Sammy ran off ahead down the hall, calling for the dinosaur he'd left that morning, home and easy and entirely mine. I stood with my hand still flat against the door, listening to the quiet on the other side of it, and could not have said whether I had just locked the danger out, or in.