A/N: This very, very horrifying AU comes from the Criminal Minds episode 'Moseley Lane'. Criminal Minds is a TV series about finding serial killers. I didn't want to watch it at first, but I found myself eerily drawn to it. A little like how alluring a warning symbol can be.
The killers in Moseley Lane are a husband-and-wife duo who take children, hold them for years, and then drug them and kill them with their crematorium (which I thankfully left out of this). When I realised that children becoming 'too old' reminded me of when sixteen-year-olds leave care (no, I don't know what I was smoking, either) I decided to write this.
And this happened.
MoonSilverSprite (my brother, who has an account on ArchiveOfOurOwn): No, no, no! You are sick!
Breather89 (me): It's my imagination. And I haven't written a Dumping Ground story in two years.
MoonSilverSprite: We know why.
Breather89: …
MoonSilverSprite: I – why this story? You've written some pretty gruesome stuff but why did you think they'd read this?
Breather89: I can't help it if I'm naturally inquisitive.
MoonSilverSprite: What does that have to do with anything?
Breather89: You saw me read up those Criminal Minds episodes and then watch them online.
MoonSilverSprite: I suppose if you've written serial killer stories on this account before, you can write this. Don't blame me if they don't like it.
Breather89: Alright. I don't know if I'll ever write any more Dumping Ground stories, so I should go out with a bang.
MoonSilverSprite: Sometimes I wonder if you're a psychopath.
Breather89: Sometimes?
Sasha Bellman was an ordinary girl. Apart from her dwarfism, at any rate. She had friends, she had family, she had a lot of fun when she was out with anyone. Today she and her brother Dexter were visiting her friends Ryan and Chloe at the park near her home in Newcastle.
Sasha didn't really notice when she left them alone to go and have a drink in a copse of trees. Dexter was hard work at any rate and now he was getting older, it was unbearable.
The girl didn't notice the grey van parked on the corner, from which two people had seen her enter the park and pull at Dexter's shirt to hurry up. She didn't see the two of them walk up to her while their accomplice spoke to Dexter and her friends.
She didn't notice when she was injected with something in her neck and the two of them dragged her through the long grass, behind the rest of the trees.
Sasha woke up on the bed to see a blond boy looking directly at her. His clothes were scruffy, as was his hair. He didn't look as if he'd had a bath in weeks and his skin was unnaturally pale.
"Hello," he held his hand out, "I'm Harry. Harry Jones. Not Harry Milligan as Mike says so."
"Mike?" Sasha asked, getting out of bed.
"The guy who took us." Harry answered miserably.
"Us?" Sasha asked.
Harry took her hand and led her to the circle cut into the wall. On the other side Sasha could see three other children. A girl with curly red hair sat on a bottom bunk, holding a toy giraffe close to her chest. Two other girls sat on the top bunk. They were almost identical and Sasha wondered if they were twins.
"How many of you are here?" Sasha exclaimed in horror.
"There's two more," Harry replied, wiping his nose on his sleeve, "Jody and Tyler. But they live in another room. That's where I live."
Then the door slowly opened. Sasha stood back as she saw Mike, the nasty-looking guy from the park, standing there. Looking down at her, he sneered. "I didn't think I'd taken a midget."
"Oi!" Sasha darted forward to punch him, but Harry held her arm back.
Mike glanced over at Harry, who looked, in Sasha's opinion, positively terrified.
"Right," Mike wiped his oily hands on his dungarees, "I guess we won't be moving anybody out."
Harry looked slightly relieved. Then Mike held up a finger and scolded the boy. "You said that the girl looked young."
"I didn't know!" Harry argued, still a little nervous. Mike slapped him around the ear and then left the room. Harry sighed and also exited the room, locking the door behind him.
"I'm not sure!" Ryan snapped at the officer for the hundredth time. "She – she was a thin woman in a yellow dress and white cardy."
Ryan was sitting inside his house as another officer questioned Chloe in the adjacent room. Dexter had gone to find Sasha at the usual copse of trees she went to whenever she wanted to drink alcohol, but found her flask spilled on the ground.
That flask had been a gift from their dead father. She'd never leave it.
Ryan had said that a young woman had come to ask for directions and had seemed a little confused. She'd been Chinese, Japanese, that area of origin, and she had spoken with an accent.
Ryan ran a hand down the side of his face as he wondered if she had been a distraction.
Sasha looked at the names that were scrawled underneath Harry's bed. The door had been left open, but she found that the main door at the end of the corridor had a bolt on the other side. Harry said that a bookcase stood in front as well. He had taken her back into his room because he wanted to show her something. "Something Mike and May-Li don't know."
Liam O'Donovan, 9 – 15, 23/3/2012. Tracy Beaker, 10 – 21, 23/3/2012. Frank Matthews, 10, 8/2/2006. Sapphire Fox, 10 – 16, 8/9/2012. Toby Coleman, 7 – 12, 30/6/2012. Mandy Perkins, 14, 4/2/2011. Johnny Taylor, 8 – 16, 13/3/2015. Theresa Taylor, 6 – 14, 13/3/2015. Lily Kettle, 8 – 15, 7/4/2015. Carmen Howle, 9 – 16, 10/2/2015.
She swallowed. "Is that…how long they were here?"
Harry nodded. "I came on 8th January 2010. I was six."
Sasha calculated inside her head. "That means you're eleven now! How many kids have they taken?"
Harry shrugged. "These are all the ones they had while I was here. Frank was a disappointment. They took him with Liam, at a funfair down in St. Albans. They couldn't take Liam without him. They killed Frank and threw his body by the roadside."
Sasha felt her blood run cold. "And Mandy?"
Harry sighed. "She was here only two days. She wasn't to keep. She was for his pleasure."
Then Sasha asked, "What about the kids here? When were they taken?"
Harry shuffled out from under the bunk and pulled the wooden chest of drawers around, groaning. He then pointed at the dates here. These were arrival dates.
Tracy Beaker, 1/3/2001. Liam O'Donovan, 8/2/2006. Sapphire Fox, 8/9/2006. Toby Coleman, 27/2/2007. Johnny and Theresa Taylor, 24/9/2007. Lily Kettle, 8/1/2008. Carmen Howle, 8/11/2009. Harry Jones, 8/1/2010. Mandy Perkins, 2/2/2011. Tyler Lewis, 10/1/2012. Jody Jackson, 16/3/2012. Floss Guppy, 18/2/2013. Toni and Billie Trent, 28/4/2015.
Harry stood up and pointed at Geoff the Giraffe on Floss' bed. "Geoff was mine. I had him when I was taken. That was when Mike had Gina helping him."
"Gina?" Sasha raised an eyebrow.
"She used to help Mike before May-Li arrived. But Gina went crazy and Mike didn't want her to tell anyone about us. So he made her have 'an accident' in the woods. Then he found May-Li. She'd always wanted a family. And she was very happy to find us."
"What…what happened to the others?" Sasha felt as if she didn't really want to find out the answer.
Harry held back a sob when he explained, "I didn't realise until Johnny and Tee left. They were getting older and she kept hitting Mike and May-Li. So they held them down and injected the two of them in the necks. I came across them cutting up the girl's body in the basement. Then I knew what happened to the kids when we get too old. Mike saw me and I pleaded for them not to hurt me. So he made me dump the bodies in a wood outside Newcastle, inside four garbage bags. He said that I was getting older and I should help in 'the family business'. That's why he made you take you. It's why he made me take the twins. Maybe, if I do the same as Tracy, I'll live longer and have a chance to rescue everyone."
Sasha learnt a few things about Michael Milligan over the next two months.
He was aged thirty-three years old when he had taken Tracy from her home in south Wales. He had owned this house since 1992. A handyman, he knew all about plumbing and carpentry, making soundproof walls when he decided to first take children, back in 1996.
Before then, Michael Milligan had been cautious, only targeting children as they came home from school or at the park, all over Northumbria. He had held them at knifepoint, assaulting them in the woods.
Then he had gotten the idea of holding a child until they got too old for him. He had first taken a little girl called Adele, a girl who had very small even for eleven. She had still been living here when he snatched Tracy, but she died not long after.
Tracy was supposedly Mike's favourite child. He had kept her past the sixteen 'cut-off mark', thinking that she had grown into a pretty young lady. But then Tracy had started to secretly rebel. Mike had found her, soon after Jody's abduction – one that Tracy had been reluctant to be a part of – trying to take Liam out of a window. But Liam had fallen and Mike had caught them and thrown him into his van. He had beaten Tracy to death and stabbed Liam, before forcing Sapphire to help him.
Sapphire had been someone that Harry had loved. She had cared immensely for him when he had arrived. When she had died, two years later, Harry didn't even have a chance to say goodbye.
Harry had asked Mike where the bodies went. Mike said that it depended. They mostly ended up scattered about the A696. Some of them hadn't been found. Due to their age, Mike had confided in Harry, people wouldn't think they were kids who vanished ages ago. They'd think that these were teenage runaways and be buried as John and Jane Does.
But Harry remembered that most were found. He had seen an article on 'the Northumbria Strangler'. So far, according to the article, only Mandy and Frank had been identified. Harry had seen the facial reconstructions of his friends and recognised them. This broke his heart.
The only ones that hadn't been recovered were Carmen and Adele. Their bodies had been dismembered and hidden deep in the forests. But everyone else had been found.
Nobody guessed that these children had been held for years.
Why would they?
The only time Sasha ever saw the other children was at dinnertime. Jody, a tall, thin girl with a dark ponytail, didn't say anything. She only cried. Tyler, a slightly older boy with a lot of curly hair, was always with her, sometimes holding her hand under the table.
The twins Toni and Billie liked to scribble on their walls. They were the most recent victims until Sasha arrived. They had their own twin language, which Mike and May-Li told them not to use at the table. The adults didn't like it, in case the children were plotting.
Then, at night, one of them would be chosen. Mike and May-Li would draw straws and then they would enter one of the children's bedrooms.
At home, Ryan watched the news like a hawk.
He knew that the chances of Sasha being found alive after so long were relatively short. He had wondered how many stranger abductions were unsolved in the UK.
Clicking through news reports and missing persons sites, he found some that clustered around the counties of Northumbria, Cumbria and Yorkshire over the last several years.
The oldest of them was a girl named Tracy. According to the report, she had been out with her mum, Camilla, at a Yorkshire petrol station when she was ten. Someone had seen Tracy talking to a man in a grey van. That was the last time anyone had ever seen her. That was back in 2001.
The most recent, aside from Sasha's, was of twin girls from a car park. Toni and Billie Trent were nine years old. They too had been seen near a grey van. Someone had reported a man and a boy acting strangely.
But one report stuck out in Ryan's mind. In one abduction, that of a girl named Floss Guppy, who had vanished in 2013, a woman had asked some of the other people in the area where she had disappeared (the car park next to a nail salon) for directions. She too had an accent.
Ryan wondered if these cases were linked.
Maybe all of these abductions were connected.
Trouble was, he mumbled to himself, where are they now?
Several days later, Sasha heard Tyler inside his and Jody's bedroom.
"I don't want to!" he snapped loudly, hitting the walls.
Then Sasha heard Jody crying, "Tyler, don't! You'll anger Mike!"
"I don't care!" he had cried back, "It's disgusting! I'd honestly rather die than do this!"
Sasha had banged the paper-thin wall back, asking, "What's the problem?"
Tyler was silent for a moment before he replied, "Mike and May-Li think that we're 'a sweet couple'. He's told us that we can…stay…longer if we take it a bit further."
Sasha pulled a disgusted face. "But," she asked, "don't you like one other?"
"We do," she heard Jody walking around, "but we've grown up together. It's not right."
Then Sasha asked, "Do you have any brothers, Jody?"
One thing that everyone here agreed on was that they should never discuss their past life, the life before Mike took them. But now everything felt flimsy and not just the shoddily-built walls.
Jody sighed, before she spoke up. "Yes. They must be grown up now." Then she swallowed hard, as she looked back up at Tyler, who was pressing his head and arm into the wall in misery. "Tyler, we're getting big. You know what happens then. We should at least try to please them."
"I'm not touching my sister!"
At that point, they all heard footsteps. Heavy footsteps, coming down the stairs.
Mike.
Then the door to Tyler and Jody's room swung open. "Did I hear you correctly?" Mike cocked his head to one side. Then he smirked. "Tyler doesn't want to be a good boy, is that it?"
"I'm not hurting her," Tyler sneered at him, "Don't hurt her. I don't care what you do to me."
Mike shrugged. "OK."
Then he lunged at Tyler. Tyler was even taller than him, but when he had tackled him, Mike's hands were quick to inject a sedative into his neck.
Jody started crying. She had learnt long ago, from when Lilly had started fighting, that if you hit them back then you'd never come back here.
And never coming back was worse than living here.
Once Tyler's heavy body was dragged upstairs, Mike wondered if all this was doing his back in. he really wished Tracy was still here. Harry was good and all, but Tracy cared for him more. He missed the days when she applied cream or lotions for his back. Especially her pretty little hands.
"Harry!" he barked.
Soon, Harry had come up the stairs, out to where none of the others were allowed.
Mike opened up his 'box of horrors', as Harry called it. Kneeling down on the concrete floor, he surveyed the weapons. The axe, the spanner, the machete and the garrotte wire all lay there. Turning to Harry, he asked, matter-of-factly, "Choose one."
Harry pointed at the machete. He knew from experience that this kill could be fairly quick if done correctly. He'd learnt his mistake from the garrotte wire and Lilly's death.
"OK." Mike stood up and handed the axe over to Harry. The man stood on the other side, pressing one hand down on Tyler's face and the other on his neck, holding the head still. He nodded towards the thighs, where it could be done quickly.
Harry's hands trembled as he held the axe. He remembered the deaths all too well.
He remembered one of the rare times Sapphire had smiled at him, held him like a big sister. How Tracy had bathed him despite the fact that baths were few and far between. Liam's laugh, Johnny's quick wit and Tee's innocence.
And what he had told Sasha. That someday he wanted to get them out of here.
He promised himself that as soon as another abduction came up or another – another murder, even, Harry would instead use the weapon on Mike.
The next incident, oddly enough, was when police came by the following day.
Ryan had submitted his ideas to the police working on the case. They'd brought in a young specialist on child abductions, a quiet man named Gus Carmichael, to try and analyse the situation.
Carmichael had come up with the idea of children becoming too old. Then he'd looked at a reconstruction of a Northumbria Strangler victim for a while, before suggesting that they compare her DNA to one Tracy Beaker.
It took six weeks for the tests to return, but then Scotland Yard's worst fears were confirmed – the dead woman was Tracy Beaker.
Her mother, already devastated from drink, took it badly.
Carmichael took the results back to other analysts and psychologists over Britain, who had begun looking at owners of grey vans, namely those who matched the descriptions of the suspects from Floss and Sasha's cases.
It would have been an impossible task, but then, in the back of the files, they found one thing.
Police had been called to an alteration on a street near the docks, when a neighbour said that he had heard a man shouting and a child crying. This was back in 2010, five years earlier. The man, Michael Milligan, had said that no children lived at his house and the man was mistaken. Police had simply left him.
Then, earlier this year, someone had caught a glimpse of a little blonde boy inside of Mike's garage as the door opened up one night. They had been hauling garbage bags into the back of Mike's van. The police again investigated and Mike's wife, a Chinese woman named May-Li Wang, had said that there were no children in the house.
This was enough for the police. They'd brought sniffer dogs this time, just in case. Milligan excused himself to go to the bathroom. Since there were very few officers at this visit and the dogs were just in case, the officers let him.
May-Li had snuck downstairs into the basement before anyone could see her.
"May-Li?" Harry had asked, "What's wrong?" But she didn't seem to have noticed her.
Then he heard the sound of new voices upstairs. Instantly, he knew it was the police.
Harry wondered if he was tall enough to grab May-Li before she could do anything. But even so, she had the syringes on her belt. Before Harry could shout, she had gone into the twins' bedroom. Toni and Billie squealed as she gave them their injections.
Harry knew it was now or never. He went into Sasha's room, tugging her out.
"What's the big deal?" Sasha asked, before Harry went into Jody's room and yanked her out as well.
"Is that the police?" Jody asked. One look at Harry's wide eyes meant that she was right.
Harry blocked the exit from the twins' room, even as May-Li demanded, "Harry, out of the way! I said out of the way! Get off me!"
He turned his head to look at Jody and she went up to help push him off and slam the door. It was a slight risk leaving the drugged twins in with her, but if it meant that there was a small chance of escape, they would take it.
Sasha started yelling and banging on the door, shrieking, "We're down here! Let us out! It's Sasha Bellman!"
The police officers didn't hear, but the dog did. It gave out small, rapid barks, before it ran out of the living room and to the garage, pawing at the wall with the bookcase.
The three officers armed themselves and then felt at the door. Solid concrete.
An officer cried out, "We can hear you!" The noise died down. "Is there a key?"
"I think there's a bolt!" Harry shouted back.
"Right-o." Two officers heaved the heavy bookcase away from the door as the third unbolted it. Once the door was open, they saw three worn, dirty, teary-eyed children on the other side.
"Sasha Bellman?" the female officer knelt down and asked her. Sasha nodded. Even after three months she still had the multi-coloured strands of hair. The woman didn't ask who the other children were. She had a hunch that they'd been down there a long time, judging by how pale and skinny they were.
One of the other officers ran upstairs to arrest Milligan.
But unfortunately, he was too late.
"There's two more," Harry gabbled to the woman, "locked in their room. May-Li's there as well. I think – I think she was trying to kill them."
The other male officer ran down and found the keys still in the lock. Undoing the door, he was taken aback when a wild, snarling woman threw herself at him. When he realised that this was a police officer, she went very silent and still. As he cuffed her and his male colleague, having come back down, raced through the hallway with a torch shining, looked inside the room, May-Li was begging them to let her go.
"Hello?" the officer shone his torch inside to see two small girls lying on the floor. His heart beat inside his chest as he felt their pulses. Thank goodness, they were only sleeping. He'd call an ambulance anyway.
When the police had cordoned off the house, they found what Harry had scrawled on the walls.
"I think I want to see my mum," he had sniffed, "And I – I did bad things there."
"It's all right, Harry," the female officer assured him, "We know that you were scared."
But Harry wasn't entirely sure.
Jody's room, which had once been Tracy's room, also had names written down. In this case, it was a crumpled, yellowed sheet of paper stuffed inside a crack in the wall. The names and dates of more victims.
DNA tests were underway for all of the recovered 'Northumbria Strangler' victims, as well as four of the five captives. Harry and Jody had been away for so long that they didn't really know if they'd cope back home.
As Sasha looked out of the window and into the main part of the station, she saw Toni and Billie's mother come in and tearfully embrace her children. Sasha didn't want to think about how this almost hadn't happened.
Some parents had come in to hear about their children. Lilly's dad had come up from Wales, where he had been living with her two sisters. He had asked Harry what she had been like.
"She was very caring, but a little shut away," he had explained.
Lilly's dad took a deep breath and then stammered, "W-When did my Lilly…"
Harry finished for him. "Last April."
Lilly's dad thanked him and then went to speak to another officer.
Liam's big brother was next. He had only been thirteen when Liam had disappeared. He'd had to endure his childhood without knowing where his brother was.
He was distraught, as were everybody else, that their child had been forced to grow up in the basement before being murdered, but he said that closure would help, even in some small way.
Tyler's mother was last. "What was Tyler like?" she managed to mumble.
"He was great," Harry replied, "He was like a brother to me and Jody. He loved her very much."
Then Tyler's mother managed to ask, "How long ago did he die?"
Harry remembered holding the axe in his hands and felt a chill go down his spine. Almost instantly, the female officer started to take her out.
Through the walls, Harry could hear Tyler's mother screaming, "What do you mean, 'he was alive yesterday'?"
Harry heard Mrs Lewis howl loudly and then crash to the floor.
Harry didn't want to go outside. But when he told himself that he had saved them, he still wondered if there would have been a time that he could have escaped sooner.
