F E A R
The house was surrounded by identical semi-detached, red brick homes. They closed the house in, so that any moonlight that escaped the light pollution of London, did not fall on it. It was completely in shadow, metamorphosed into something far more sinister than that seen by day. The neighbours saw a respectable home, for a respectable family, when it was swathed in sunlight. A friendly family, a polite wife, two pretty girls, and their husband and father, who was a solicitor. A fine job, one might say. In fact, if the neighbours had been asked to describe Mr. Meyer, they might have gone as far as to say that he was a pillar of the community. On the side of the law, defending the innocent, finding evidence to incriminate the guilty. Making the area a better place. A very respectable man indeed.
That was the common belief. However, it could not have been further from the truth.
Caroline, a six-year-old, with long blonde plaits, stared into the gloom, trying to make out the shapes in her room. She was crying silently, the fat tears squeezing from the corners of her large eyes. She had learnt never to make a sound, or she would incur the wrath of her father. At such an age, a fear of the dark was all consuming, the most terrible thing she could imagine. She could see a dark face in the folds of her dressing gown, hanging on the back of the door. It leered at her, and she shrank back, pulling her duvet up closer to her face, so that only her eyes could be seen. She did not made a sound, but a voice in her head was screaming, and it never stopped. She longed for her mother, her natural instinct overriding common sense. Because Hermione Meyer was too afraid of her husband to go against him, she rarely really showed any proper love, just occasional affection. Sometimes it was different. When their father had gone for a few days, it started to show through the sort of mother that Hermione should and could have been. It never lasted though.
Hermione had married a handsome solicitor, a Muggle, when she was only twenty-one. She had fled Hogwarts after the tragedy that befell it, and pushing her grief for Harry away, she had returned to her original existence, a Muggle. She trained as a dentist, and made herself forget al that she had learnt throughout her teenage years. Now she had two daughters, and had lost her personality completely.
Caroline made her body as small as possible, and shut her eyes to hide. She rocked back and forth in the bed, her imagination even more terrifying than reality. She opened her eyes again, to get away from the swirling, storming mental pictures. This time, she looked at her dress, lying rumpled on the floor, discarded when she went to bed. The folds looked like teeth, and the monster reared up and bit, foaming at the mouth. Those huge pointed teeth looked like blades. The voice in her head yelled for help, and she threw herself out of bed, and raced up the stairs, to the converted loft, where Kirsten's bedroom was. Caroline crawled in Kirsten's bed with her, whimpering like a small puppy. Kirsten woke up sleepily, and put her arm around Caroline.
"Nightmare?" she asked Caroline.
"No…afraid of the dark," came the reply.
Kirsten rocked her little sister to sleep, knowing all too well that she was the only friend Caroline had. In all honesty, it was true the other way around. Kirsten was stared at, pointed at, called "the weirdo" and worse. Apart from that, she was ignored. She did not mind. She had no idea what it meant to have a friend. It was an alien concept to her. Caroline was a loner at primary school; she would sit on her own, drawing or just thinking, and she spent more time talking to the class guinea pig, than she did with the other children. She made no attempt to make friends.
She considered Caroline's fear of the dark. Kirsten thought that this was good, surely it meant that she did not have anything worse to be scared of in her life. Besides, surely even her father would not hurt a six-year-old? she thought, troubled. Kirsten certainly had more to worry about than the dark. In fact, she found the dark quite comforting, almost a solace. It hid her from the pain, cloaked her so that she wasn't so vulnerable, so exposed. And yet it was a fickle friend. She was never safe, no matter what time of day or night.
Kirsten listened to her younger sister's deep breathing. She was finally calm, safe in a dream world, the sort that six year-olds ought to know. Even if Kirsten was not safe, it did not matter. She was fifteen, old enough to look after herself, and she had a duty to protect Caroline. She gently scooped her up from the bed, and carried in her arms, down the stairs, back to her own room. Kirsten placed her back in the small bed, smoothed the pink sheets, and tucked the thinning duvet around her sister's slim shoulders. She crept back up the stairs, her movements as silent as a cat's, and fell into her own bed. She lay there, wide-awake, for what seemed like hours, before finally slipping into an uneasy sleep.
The sound of heavy footsteps jerked her instantly awake. Adjusting her eyes to the gloom in her bedroom, she shifted up to the end of the bed, so that she could peer out of the window. Her room was directly above the front door, two floors up, and so she could see the dark, burly shape, walking unsteadily up the path. He was swaying from side to side, and though just a dusky shape in the moonlit night, he was instantly recognisable to Kirsten. She flopped back on the bed, breathing in short, sharp bursts, cringing. She knew that he would always come home eventually, it was only a matter of time. She had long since given up hoping that he might never return. He always came back.
She could feel her heart racing; it seemed to pound so loudly, that she was sure that she could hear it. Her heart seemed to flip right over. All her senses were cut off, she couldn't move, she was paralysed with terror, and for each slow footstep on each stair, her heart had pounded a thousand times. She watched with an unhealthy fascination, the handle turning slowly, and the door creaking open. The shape filled the entire doorway, blocking escape, and suddenly the dread evaporated. She knew that what was to come was inevitable.
"Hello, dad." she said.
* * *
Kirsten sat at her desk, ignoring the throbbing pains in her shoulder, the cuts hidden by the sleeves of her school jumper. The rest of the class were working themselves up into a state of frenzy, a maths test was just minutes away. Kirsten sat alone, demurely staring into space. What did a maths test matter to anyone? How could it compare to the horrors that she knew? Last night, after her father had left her room, she had heard screams from Caroline's room, and afterwards, wails of pain and terror, as she cried herself to sleep. Her father had started to hurt her baby sister too. She had to tell someone now, she could bear the pain, but she would not let Caroline share it.
She looked wildly around the classroom. There was one girl who was not cruel to Kirsten. She walked over to the desk at the back of the classroom.
Anna Walker was hunched in her chair, frantically flicking through her maths book.
"…equals the square of the hypotenuse. Oh, hi Kirsten," she looked up at Kirsten's pale face, and misread it. "Scared too? My God, I only did a bit of revision last night, I'm going to fail, I know it…"
"Actually, it's about something else. I need to tell you something…"
"Great, but can you tell me at break time? I really need to revise right now."
At that moment, the classroom door opened, and the maths teacher came in.
"Sit down! Quiet," he said irritably, and started to deposit test papers on every desk.
That break, Anna had completely forgotten Kirsten, through forgetfulness, rather than spite, and had gone off with her friends, to gossip in the locker-room. Tarlia did not know where they were, so simply sat at her desk. She pulled off her jumper, because it was getting hot in the form-room. She looked down at her shirt sleeve in shock, it was soaked in crimson. A particularly deep cut had not stopped bleeding, still. She quickly pulled her jumper back on, in case anyone saw. Kirsten breathed deeply, her head pounding. She could find Anna if she really wanted to, but there was no point. The moment of bravery, when she almost told about her father, had past. She couldn't go back - there was no way out. She had to deal with . Life was not a fairy tale, there were no happy endings, and she just had to face up to reality and to be brave for Caroline.
Kirsten rubbed her eyes, black spots were forming in front of her vision. Her mind started to swim, and she put her hand out to steady herself, before collapsing on the floor. The girls in the classroom turned round to see what the noise was, and screamed.
* * *
"Are you sure we shouldn't call for an ambulance? You can't be too careful when they're in our care…" the deputy head said worriedly, looked at Kirsten's face, that was so pale, it was almost carved out of marble, her dark eyelashes resting in stark contrast on her white cheeks. None of the teachers could fault Kirsten at school, she was quiet, but homework was always in on time, she obviously threw herself into her work.
The school nurse, who had been at the school a lot longer than the deputy head, said in a voice that sounded very used to these sorts of matters. "Teenage girls today, all want to be stick thin, I'll bet she just missed breakfast. She'll be round in a minute or so. I'll just take this jumper off her, she feels hot actually…oh! You'd better have a look at this," said the school nurse, staring in horror at the blood soaked shirt.
Kirsten had been rushed to hospital by ambulance, and by doing so, caused wild rumours to fly around school. She had been more or less forced into telling the doctors what all the cuts and bruises were. Now, six months on from that day, she and her sister were in a children's home. It was peaceful, almost too quiet Kirsten sometimes thought, quite eerie. Her mother was going for counseling, and was being looked after by a social worker. Kirsten did not know that her mother had suffered even more than she had, and so did not miss her. Kirsten might have been freed from the terror of her father, but the fear was still there, embedded deep in her heart, mind and soul. It would probably never leave, and it would be a long time before she trusted anyone again. She had been scared physically, but the mental scars would last a lot longer. Her father would probably only get a ten year jail sentence. What he had put Kirsten through had sentenced her to life.
Mr. Meyer, so accustomed to courtrooms, was seeing the jury, the judge, and the whole courtroom through different eyes. He was no longer in the accustomed place, but stood accused, instead of defending. For the first time, he could relate to those poor unfortunates that paid for him to get them out of trouble. Knowing the legal system, he had tried every trick in the book to walk free, but nothing had succeeded. He felt remorse, though more for the predicament that his drinking had got himself into, than for his daughters or wife. The jury were all staring at him, with cold, disgusted expressions. They did not see the respectable lawyer, just the burly man with eyes that were only thin slits, and a harsh expression. They had heard how he sloped home, blind drunk, and in a foul temper. Then he would hit his daughter and wife, cut them with broken bottles, and kicked them around the room until they passed out. Mr. Meyer, the once liked and respected solicitor was shown for his true nature.
The verdict was unanimous.