Watch Over You (13 page)

“You were adopted together?”

“We had to be, but I don’t think they wanted me. I was older. They wanted a baby, but they had to have both.” It wasn’t meant to be that way, though. He thought back to the day he was informed some people were coming to see him and his sister. “The supervisor of the home we lived in came for us. She dragged me to the bathroom one day with no warning. I didn’t even know what I had done wrong. She scrubbed my face until it was raw. Made me put on these stupid clothes and then told me that Sam and I had visitors and I better not fuck
it up or she’d make my life hell.” He imitated her in a mock voice. He could hear it in his mind as clear as if it had been yesterday. Even the memory of her fingers digging into his arms was vivid enough to make his skin crawl. He could even smell the stench of stale sweat and cigarette smoke that constantly surrounded her. She’d had long nails. Perfect nails. He’d dreamt so many times of snapping them off. Sometimes the anger from her alone consumed him.

“There was this couple, Gary and Suzie, who were interested in adopting us. It must have been a month or two that passed before they started to get sick of me.”

He paused for a moment, and Tara gave his hand an encouraging squeeze. “Then what happened?” she prompted.

”I did stupid things. Petty things. Stealing biscuits or chocolate bars. Daring to grab myself some of the coke they kept in the fridge. Not going to bed when I was told. Not bringing my dirty clothes down. Normal children things. Nothing serious in real terms, but to
Gary and Suzie, it was like the end of the world. One day, I got so sick of Sam getting everything that I opened the front gate so she could wander out. I wanted her to leave, to get lost and never come back. I thought that if she was gone, they would like me and not her.”

“Did she get out?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t get very far. Gary found her. She was maybe a few yards down, that was all; but that was enough for them. They took me back to the home. Told the manager there that they wanted to give me back. They wanted to un-adopt me.”

“People can do that?”

Devan almost laughed at the look of shock and horror on Tara’s face. She had no idea what people could really do. “No, they were told to keep me. That it was just normal adjustment behaviour because I was older. They still didn’t want me, though. They gave me this bedroom in the attic. I just spent all my time there. I didn’t want them either. I figured I’d do well in school, get a job and leave them all.”

“Sam was thirteen, I think, when she began to change. When she was little, there were always little things.”

“Little things?” Tara asked.

“Weird things. I don’t know. Just things.” He couldn’t think of the right way to describe it. “There was something different about her. When she hit puberty, she started to see things that weren’t there. She could hear people talking too. It used to make her scream so loud.”

“She was sick? Did your adoptive parents help her?”

Devan scoffed. “No. One day she was having one of her episodes. Some crap about someone outside the window. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Even I had had enough of it by then.”

“Why didn’t they get her any help?”

That question alone made Devan’s guilt spike through his veins and into his chest. They should have
got her help, but no one did - not even him. “No. Gary ran past me. He yelled in her face. Told her she better shut up. That just made it worse. Then he hit her so hard across the face she went flying. I thought she was dead. That’s how he used to solve it after that. It was the only way to get some quiet. I did nothing.”

Devan expected Tara to be appalled. He expected that she would tell him how awful he was for doing that, but she didn’t. She reached out and cupped his face, her hand was so soft and warm against his skin. He didn’t deserve a touch so tender as hers. “You were just a child yourself.”

“I was her brother.”

“That doesn’t matter. They were the adults. They were the ones doing something wrong.”

“Do you know the worst part?”

Tara shook her head.

“I did the same as our parents. I left. I abandoned her. I left her with Gary and Suzie and got myself out of there.”

“You ran away?”

“No, I went to university. I wanted to study art and history. I never went back. Never visited. Never called. To me, they were just gone. In my second year, just before Christmas, Gary called me. He never called me. Sam had left too. She was fifteen.”

“Where did she go?”

“Down south. To Somerset.”

“You met Eric down in Devon? When you were looking for her?” Devan didn’t answer but waited as he watched a million thoughts and questions spinning around in her mind. “Did you come up this way because of Eric too?”

His heart lurched and he was uncertain how to answer. Instead, he slid away from her, yanked his blanket off and stood up.

“Devan?”

Devan turned away from Tara. He didn’t want to see the disappointment on her face. “Sam took her own life,” he said quietly. “Before I could find her. She was already gone. I didn’t know how to stay down there after that, but I also didn’t know how to leave. She was buried down there, but I needed a fresh start. The place was killing me. Then I met someone and there was no reason for me to stay anymore. So I didn’t.”

“Someone?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want to say anymore. "You should get some sleep. We’ll be leaving in a while. I’m just going to check everything is locked.”

He jumped down off the stage before Tara could protest. He had said too much.

Chapter Fifteen

Tara was alone when she woke up. Pulling herself up, she shivered from the cold, not just in the air, but also from the coldness that had managed to cling to her clothes. Although they were now dry, they remained rigid and uncomfortable. Her shoulder ached as well, and her neck was so stiff that just stretching sent ripples of pain rolling through her muscles. She hadn’t moved in her sleep, evidently; not that she remembered falling asleep in the first place. She rubbed her eyes and yawned and, for just a second, normality snuck into her mind and she craved a nice, hot shower

As she stood, she clutched the blanket around her. It was itchy and hard, but the damn thing was warm. She noticed then that Devan wasn’t with her. He wasn’t on the stage at all. His blanket, she realised, had been added to her own for extra warmth.  “Devan?” She crept to the front of the stage to have a better view of the rest of the room. He wasn’t there. Panic threatened to engulf her. “Devan?” Desperation stole his name from her lips at a higher pitch. “Devan?” she shouted, dread pervading her every cell. 

“Shush. I’m here,” he spoke suddenly from behind her. Relief washed over her as she saw him come up the steps from the back of the stage. “I hope this tastes okay,” he said, offering her a small cup. “I found some coffee in the kitchen.”

“Thank you.” Using one hand to keep the blanket in place, she let the other slip out between the centre gap to take the cup. She noticed that he had bound his hand with a piece of cloth, but it hadn’t stopped the bleeding. She caught sight of the blood that had seeped through it already, but decided not to comment this time. They hadn’t said a word since he had told her Sam was dead, but her mind was filled with even more questions than before. Had Eric helped him move up north? Had they been great friends? Was it Eric who helped him to find Sam? What happened to the person he had met and left with? She couldn’t find the right words to say, though. Her mind just sent the images tumbling around. “Is it light outside?” she asked. Agitation at the entire situation was beginning to bubble to the surface. Silence and inertia made her uneasy. She needed to do something. 

“Almost.” He sat down beside her and took a sip of his coffee. Screwing up his face, he made an unintelligible sound, something between a choke and a laugh. “This is disgusting,” he sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

It made Tara wary to try her own coffee, but still she brought it to her mouth and inhaled. It didn’t smell too bad. She blew across the top of it. It was far too hot to drink yet. “Have they found us?” she asked Devan as she lowered her cup again.

“No, not that I can see. The sun is almost up, though. So it won’t matter soon.”

“They can't come out in the dark?”

“They need shadows.”

Tara sipped her coffee, it wasn’t too bad. Cheap and a little bitter, but it didn’t taste old. She had no desire to know exactly how old it was, though.  “What are they exactly? The black things. You said they come for the souls of the broken? Sounds a little late night television to me.” They didn’t scare her like they should. She was scared of what they wanted, but not of what they were. When she was a child, her mother had dragged her along to every kind of spiritualist church, medium or self-proclaimed clairvoyant. It had long lost its appeal and fear factor. Tara herself had toyed with the idea when Eric first died, but then she decided that if there were ghosts - spirits of loved ones - then that would mean there was a higher power. How could there be a higher power that would allow such suffering?

Tara wasn’t afraid. Her mother had once taken her to some weird séance at one of her friend’s houses. She was supposed to go and play with the other children, but she had wanted to see a ghost. She’d watched from behind the sofa as one of the women had suddenly pitched forward and vomited the most vile, white, transparent, viscous-like mucus thing she had ever seen. The entire room had fallen silent - but no one had heard the voice. Tara had, though. She had also seen a boy; he
may have been a little older than she was at the time. He wasn’t one of them. He had walked around them and no one had seen him, only her. When he had left the room, he had walked right through the closed door as if it weren’t there. Her mother hadn’t believed her when she had told her, casting it aside as nothing more than a child’s fuelled imagination. But the memory had always stayed with Tara, and she had never denied the
what if
. Yet, if ghosts did exist, surely Eric would have come back?

“They’re shadow walkers,” said Devan. “They literally walk the shadows. Like ghosts, I guess, like you said.”

“Shadow walkers? Why do they want me? What do they want?”

“Maybe you’re just unlucky,” he murmured. “We need to get moving.” Devan poured his coffee into a plant pot. It hadn’t occurred to Tara before that it was strange the plant was alive and green. If anything, it was thriving. She said nothing about that either, though. She just finished her coffee while Devan went along the
windows, spying through holes in the boards where they had rotted away.  The entire place was a contradiction. While on the one hand many things were old and rotted and indicated a place that hadn’t been used in a very long time, the rest of it looked no older than the last time she had been there.

Devan was standing on one of the chairs to peer out of a hole that he hadn’t been able to reach, face pressed against the board. When she finished her own coffee, which was too bitter to drink to the end, she went to stand by him. “Do you think we can nip back to my house? There are some things I would like to get.”

He froze at her words, body going tense. “We don’t have the time.”

“It’s five minutes.”

“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. We can't spare the minutes. We need to leave as soon as you are ready”.

“Where are we going that I can't just pop home?”

Devan shook his head at her. “We can't go back to your house.”

“I’ll go by myself.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“You said yourself that they hide in the shadows. I won’t go near any.”

“No,” he said.

“It’s just…”

He waved his hand at her like a parent dismissing a child. “I said no. You need to go and we need to leave.” He turned his back on her then, jumped down from the chair and went to another window. When she didn’t move from her position, he turned to look at her with a frown. “Now, Tara.”

“What if I just go? Are you going to stop me?”

Devan tensed. “Why won’t you listen?”

“These things are important to me. I need to get them. Why won’t
you
listen?”

He slammed his hand against the board and muttered something that she couldn’t quite make out. “Listen to me, Tara. You will not go back to that house. Whatever is there, it doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You said that if you could go back in time, you would listen to Eric and not get in the car like he had said. This is your chance now. We will not go back to the house, and I won’t discuss it with you anymore.”

Her temper soared and her face flushed bright red from anger. She stared in disbelief as he walked away from her unperturbedly after she had been dismissed like a petulant child. Tears threatened to spill, sadness mixed with anger. How dare he take her words that way. She’d give anything to have made a different decision that night. Not to have driven home. Tara stormed off to the bathroom to wash face and to calm her shaking nerves.

She wanted to slam the door behind her, but the hydraulics of the fire safety unit on it stopped her. She
smacked it with the palm of her hand and let out a soft, infuriated cry. Then she turned and, for a second, Devan’s words were forgotten. The bathrooms were just as she remembered - old and outdated - but clean and cared for. She ran her fingers along the rim of the sink, sweet nostalgia flooding her. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her face looked tired and her hair was a mess. She tried finger combing it, but that did little to help. She needed a good hot bath and some form of reality check. She turned the tap on to wash her face and was surprised to feel the water heating up. She pushed the thought aside; on the level of weird shit happening, a tap that produces hot water was not high on her list. She washed her face and cast her mind to other things. Things that weren’t Devan and what he had just said to her. She couldn’t get her mind off the house, though. She needed to go home. Those were Eric’s things she wanted to go back to get.