Ghosts and Our Shells

by The Author's Mighty Pen

As a child, Anna Smith survived a year in the Yorkshire Moors all on her own. At least that's what people said. She claimed she was abducted in the dead of night and held hostage on an island. No one believed her. Until someone came for her again. Until John Bates appeared. Until she realized it was all real.

1. Prologue: Jumping at Shadows

No one believed my story.

It wasn't difficult to understand why. I lived it and I hardly believed it myself. How does one explain what they did to run away when they're convinced they never ran away?

That was what everyone asked. "How'd you run away?" Or even from my weeping parents, who then walked eggshells around me as if I might disappear at the slightest cross word, "Why would I run away?"

But I never ran away. I never wanted to run away. I was abducted.

All the reports claimed that was impossible. The police found no forced entry. The locks stayed as they had been when my father checked them. According to my mother he agonized over it until I returned. With such evidence what could have happened but that I escaped on my own?

I gave up then. I decided to stop trying to explain the shadow that crossed into my room, slipping through the crack in the door. I could not explain it myself. No more than I could explain the sensation of being flown away from my home. No one would believe it.

No one did believe it.

I settled on the story they forced on me. That I was an unruly, feral child that lost all those feelings after surviving on the Moors on my own. Not that I could've done that. Survivalist though I am, I would've died there. It was the dead of winter and I left in nothing but a nightgown and returned in the same state.

But people believed a young girl could do that. I was famous for it. They wrote articles about me, someone wrote a book, and eventually I passed from reality to myth. Those who met me in shops or ballrooms would interrogate me for details they'd been denied by the media.

No one cared that I couldn't sleep at night. That I jumped at the slightest of noises for a year. That I would lie awake for hours staring at the window just waiting for it to open of its own accord. That I trained myself in self-defense with hand and gun in case whatever took me the first time dared return.

We moved from our home in Whitby, my parents believing that a change in location would better my demeanor and the outlook of our neighbors on us, but it only served to make us faceless in London. They sent me to school there and finally I could vanish in the city with a million other faces that looked about like mine. There I dared to start feeling safe.

What a fool I was.