Misguided Ghosts

Chapter Forty-Six

Forty-Six – Tay

My life became a patchwork merry-go-round of coffee on Ed’s breath in the morning; Ed giving me a lift to meet Jared and Char; throwing myself into my AS Levels with all I had; training harder than ever at the pool; coaching every other night; checking almost every shop to see if they were hiring; watching bad TV with Ed in the evenings while we ate dinner; taking it in turns cooking; playing with Rodent and falling asleep wrapped in the safety that came with Ed’s duvet.

There was something about living with him that made me so much happier. I knew that part of it was because my controlling parents were out of the way, but it could have been that I’d got what I’d wanted for a long time.  All I’d really wanted was to move out and to start afresh with Ed at my side, and I was doing exactly that. My grades picked up, I felt less stressed, my self-confidence rocketed and I ended up taking Caleb’s necklace off. I didn’t need him anymore, did I? Everything seemed to be fine.

One frosty evening, after Ed unlocked our front door and found me making macaroni cheese and stamping the frost from his shoes, I felt pain lance through my chest. It was a short, sharp pain, barely lasting long enough for me to acknowledge that something was hurting, but it was definitely there.

“You okay?” He asked, moving towards me and taking over the cooking duties. I got myself a glass of water, sipping at it cautiously. There was nothing. The pain was gone. I nodded and gave him a small smile. Ed’s frown disappeared.

Ed launched into a play-by-play of an incident Liam had with a particularly crotchety old man when he took his card out of the reader too early and managed to void the sale. I smiled while he told me all about his day, watching the light dance in his eyes as he spoke about the books. But my heart was still pounding in my chest, because I knew what was going on. I’d taken Caleb’s necklace off, and now I was going to pay the price for it.

After we’d eaten, I decided to go for a bath. I sank under the hot water, sighing deeply and trying to keep my minor breakdown silent from Ed. Caleb’s marks were healing well, and soon they would be nothing but a bad memory, right? I looked down at my thighs, where they were at their deepest. The majority had scabbed over, and some of the scabs were peeling off. I’d done my best to avoid mirrors and looking at them, but now that they were healing, I felt like I had control over myself once more. I could stand looking at my body once more. Trailing my fingertips along the surface of the water, I closed my eyes, letting my hand flop back underneath the surface of the water. I’d felt so much more relaxed ever since I’d moved out, like the weight of the world had finally been lifted from my shoulders.

But then I heard it.

Get out of the bath, Tay. I need to see you.

That hateful voice that had spent so long controlling me had tied the leash onto me once more. I didn’t want to need him anymore. I didn’t want his voice inside my head. I didn’t want to feel like a shell again. I wanted to be Tay.

“No,” I mumbled, trying to feel more defiant. “I don’t want to,”

But we both know that you’re going to do it anyway.

I sighed, pulling the plug out of the water and standing up. I clambered out of the tub and wrapped a towel around me. Drying myself quickly, I pulled on my pyjamas and sighed. There was nothing I could do about what was going to happen next. What was going to happen was going to happen, and I just had to let nature take its course. And hope that it was slightly kinder to me than it had been in previous times.

I didn’t even know when or where Caleb wanted to see me. What was I meant to do? Just ask him?

“Where? When?”

The woods, now.

Pressing my lips tightly together, I had to keep my shaky breath in. There was no way I was going to alert him to my internal panic. I had to be emotionless for this. Emotions had no place in whatever game I was tangled in.

It was dark outside, so I needed a plausible excuse for going outside. I went out into the living room. He was pretty much passed out on the sofa, but he looked nothing like when he fell asleep on the sofa. He wasn’t slumped like he normally did. His head was too far back, his mouth hanging open, his limbs sprawled all over the sofa. It wasn’t right, and my gut told me that Caleb had had a hand in Ed’s apparent slumber. So Caleb was expecting me to traipse through the woods on my own and in the dark. That wasn’t happening. I changed back into my jeans, shoving my feet into my boots and putting on a warm jumper and my coat and one of my many hats. I took the torch out from under the sink and slipped it into my coat pocket. There was no way I was going out without a light.

I walked briskly down the path to the woods, my breath trembling in fear, forming a shapeless cloud in the dark air. When I reached the edge of the woods, I froze. The trees loomed over me, bare branches stretching out to me like spindly fingers, beckoning me away into the woods, to lose myself in the trees and disappear from my life. The wind whistled, whispering for me to run through the woods, to become one of many who saw things that could only been seen in the night, to have dark secrets revealed to me and become one of the girls who vanished without a trace. I shivered, and then I felt the tug in my navel. Drawing in a deep breath, I switched on my torch and placed one foot inside the woods, refusing to close my eyes. My feet moved of their own accord and I let my torchbeam light the path for me.

My feet stopped moving at the clearing, where I’d joined the game that Caleb loved to play.

“Well?” I called out into the darkness, shining my torch all around me. “You wanted to see me!”

“Indeed I did,” Caleb’s silky voice whispered in my ear, making me jump. The light of my torch flickered out as he clicked his fingers and a fire ignited in the centre of the clearing, bathing us in an orange light. “There’s a small matter that we need to discuss,”

His fingers trailed along my collarbone, making me shiver even more than I already was. “You haven’t been wearing your necklace,”

“I thought I didn’t need it anymore,” I said coldly, keeping my eyes trained on the fire. “After all, you’ve been perfectly silent,”

“Because everything was going to plan,”

“It’s a shame. I was enjoying having some peace of mind,”

A sharp slap made my cheek sting. “You do not speak to me like that! Do you understand?!” My back was slammed against the nearest tree trunk, the bark digging into my spine, Caleb’s hands roughly gripping the front of my coat. “Now, you’re going to wear your necklace, yes?”

I nodded meekly. “Yes, Caleb,”

“Good,” He purred, releasing me. “Now, just to ensure that you’ve learned your lesson…”

There was a tight pressure wrapping itself around my throat, squeezing any air out of my lungs.  Dizziness engulfed me, making the woods whirl around me and my vision began to narrow. The sounds of the trees moving in the cold wind and the crackling of the fire became more and more muffled until the world was devoid of sound while it span past me before the clearing began to shrink. Every ounce of air had gone from my lungs and there was no way of getting it back.

I tumbled to the floor, my vision closing in around me as the enticing fingers of the trees reached down to snatch me away.

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I know that this chapter is short and bleh please bear with me