Chapter Two
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Meet the Harts: forty-eight-year-old Albert Hart and forty-five-year-old Jodie Hart, a benevolent couple who liked watching A Place in the Sun and eating rice pudding with cinnamon; awkward, gangly twelve-year-old Tommy Hart and the genius-level twenty-year-old Oxford student Lavender Hart whom Abby had yet to meet.
All in all, Abby Moncrieff felt as though she'd been dropped into an early sixties sitcom. She wanted out.
Albert and Jodie Hart had been told that Abby had recently been through a very difficult time and would have to be given lots of patience, understanding and sympathy. As Mr. and Mrs. Hart were currently learning the hard way, when the social workers said lots, they meant lots. They'd smothered Abby with enough of all three to last a lifetime and it didn't seem to be going anywhere.
It wasn't that Abby was misbehaving or lashing out. She was quietly pleasant at mealtimes, ate her food without complaint or compliment, said "goodnight", "good morning" and "good afternoon" and departed for her room. Every day. And she locked the door.
"Abby, open the door." Mrs. Hart said when she tried the handle and found it jammed. The woman felt her heartbeat quickening. Abby might have had a go at the sleeping pills she kept in the top drawer in there, she might be cutting herself, she might be…
"Sorry, no, Mrs. Hart."
There. No trace of anger or disrespect in the girl's voice, just a firm, civil determination. Mrs. Hart wanted to come down hard, to demand that Abby open the door, that she was in her house and would jolly well do as they said, but…
"Come down when you feel like it, then, dear," Mrs. Hart heard herself saying almost meekly as she descended the stairs.
Abby closed her eyes in relief when she heard the footsteps fading away. The Harts had wondered, amongst themselves, what she could possibly be doing up there in her room. If they knew they would surely be surprised.
For Abigail Moncrieff was praying.
She had never been a religious girl, but every night she lay awake wondering about the little girl's words, wondering and wondering, turning them over and over in her mind. Every night the pressure in her chest got worse; the fear was palpable, and she felt that if she didn't get an answer soon she would explode.
What was going to happen in ten whole years?
"Please, God, I… I need Your help. I know I haven't been a very good girl. But they say You know everything, so You must know why I did it. You must know that they deserved it. I don't know who that odd little girl was on the swings, but I know that she was evil and maybe I shouldn't have talked to her. But it's done now, so… please, what did she mean when she said ten whole years?" Abby paused, as though waiting for a response, but she got none and continued. "I'll be twenty-four. Is she going to come and kill me, is that it? Is that my punishment? I don't want to die at twenty-four!"
Another pause.
"I'm sorry!" Abby shouted, staring up at the ceiling as though she expected to see God there. "I'm sorry! I shouldn't have done it, I know. It was wicked. But I had to, they were ruining my life, and he was hurting me. And I don't want to die. Don't let her kill me."
But no-one replied and Abby started to cry.
What if the little girl didn't kill her in ten years?
What if it was something worse?
Months passed and Abby turned fifteen. Mrs. Hart baked her a yellow butter cake slathered in marshmallow icing and chocolate cream. There was one big candle and five little ones.
Abby hadn't quite forgotten about the little girl and the ten years, but it was close enough. She still wasn't the ideal child, but she stopped locking herself in her room and started school. She did her homework and watched TV with Tommy and her foster parents never got any complaints from her teachers. Things were getting better. The social workers satisfied themselves that Abby was making a steady recovery.
And then it came.
Abby had read in the papers that several families in her area had suffered the loss of a loved one in what seemed like freak accidents. Wilbert Westmoreland had slipped off a chair and landed on a knife that had happened to be sticking straight up on the kitchen floor. Donna Wren had been hanging up her washing when a gust of wind blew her clean out of the window. Morris Lee had entangled his foot with a long underwater weed when swimming in the lake and subsequently drowned.
"Kind of fishy, innit?" Tommy said as he read.
Abby agreed that it was indeed fishy and went to watch TV.
That night she was attacked.
She wasn't expecting to be woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat only to find a wide-eyed woman with tangled mousy hair and wide, desperate eyes leaning over her. Abby didn't expect the woman to have rope-burn marks on her neck, as though she'd been strangled with a string. And she certainly didn't expect the woman to shoot some sort of bolt out of her hands at the ceiling, and then vanish.
Abby screamed as the ceiling buckled and started to collapse. On her.
She was going to die. It wasn't fair; didn't that girl say "ten whole years"? Why should she die now?
"Abby!" she heard frantic hammering on her door and her head jerked towards the sound. Mr. Hart couldn't open it. She'd locked it out of sheer force of habit.
Abby flung herself at the door and fumbled to open the lock. But then—and it was the oddest thing—the lock jammed. It just stuck. She couldn't force it open.
"I can't open the bloody door!"
She was panicking. The ceiling was caving in. How was that even possible? How could this be?
An awful groaning, splintering sound met Abby's ears. This was it. She was going to die.
I am not going to die. Not today. It's too soon.
Those words rang out as clearly in her head as though she had said them out loud. Abby turned and ran for the window.
And then she dived straight out in a crimson shattering of glass.
