Clopwyck River - revised version

Chapter Twenty-two

I close the church door behind me, looking around for Dan as I do. The church is still except for the dust that floats through the columns of daylight from the stained glass windows. I walk down the aisle to the front of the church, my footsteps echoing up to the intricate vaults above me.
​"Demi-Louise. I'm glad you made it."
​I whirl round to the sound of the hidden voice. Dan looks up at me from where he is hunched forward on the front pew, his hands clasped together in prayer.
​"Reverend Linton." I put a hand up as I catch my breath. "I didn't see you sitting there."
​"Please, call me Dan. Sorry if I gave you a fright. Thank you for coming." He indicates for me to sit next to him on the pew, but I sit across the aisle, putting my bag down and turn to face him.
​"You wanted to talk to me about something?"
​He nods, and looks over his shoulder towards the closed doors of the church.
​"Did you tell anyone you were coming here?"
​Now it's my turn to look at the church door. "Uh, yeah, my friend. And my brother-in-law. Why?"
​"Did you tell Leo?"
​I shake my head, wondering whether that was a good thing or not.
​Dan turns towards me, crossing his legs and puts his elbow on the back of the pew. His beard bristles as he smiles at me and he puts both of his hands up.
​"I'm so sorry. What must you be thinking, me asking you here to talk, all alone? You've got nothing to worry about. I just thought we should talk, after you and Leo have become so close."
​My cheeks illuminate like traffic lights. "I...Leo....isn't Leo allowed to..."
​"No, nothing like that at all. I just thought that you may find yourself spending more time with our family. With me and Ben."
​Wow. This is going to be easier than I thought.
​"How do you know about Leo and me?"
​He smiles at the high ceilings. "I recognise the first flushes of romance just as much as anyone does. That, and the fact that he's been glued to his phone since the weekend. He hasn't stopped talking about you since you arrived, so I figured you must be the lucky girl."
​I bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smiling, and wait for him to go on.
​"Anyway, you bound yourself to my family on the first night that you arrived, and I should have told you the truth when you first came to me, looking for answers. You seem like a very determined girl, and I think part of me thought you would find out what happened in your own time, when it was the right time."
​He turns the gold band on his ring finger. "As I told you, Ben has always been a troubled boy. His life hasn't been easy, especially when his mother died, but between Leo and me, we've managed to keep him on the straight and narrow. Keep him safe. Until now."
​I daren't breathe, in case the sound makes Leo's Dad change his mind and stop sharing what he's about to say. He drops his hand to his knee, and looks back at me.
​"Demi-Louise, I need to warn you that what I'm going to say will shock you, and you'll probably find it difficult to believe."
​My shoulders shudder but I inch forward in my seat, the cold wood uncomfortable under my legs, but I won't leave this pew until I know the truth. I nod my head, and he continues.
​"When Ben was little, just five years old, his mother and I hired a baby sitter. I had not long been in this job and we were both working hard at the church, trying to build our relationship with the local community, which is a full time job in itself, let alone with two young boys to look after. So, like I said, we got a babysitter. Someone to help look after the boys, pick them up from school, take them to the park, that sort of thing."
​"We put a notice up at the school, your school, asking for someone to help out and that's how we found her. She was the only applicant and at that point we were so busy we just hired her." He looks down and shakes his head. "I've spent years wishing that we'd spent more time getting to know her, vetting her or something, but she was so good with the boys when we first introduced them, she seemed like the perfect solution. It was ideal that the primary school is right next door to Clopwyck Academy, as it meant she could walk the boys home on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, then cook them dinner, and look after them until we came home from our commitments here. I remember the details like it was yesterday."
​"So what happened?" My voice makes Dan jump, and he looks at me as though he'd forgotten I was there.
​"Looking back, I think it was too much responsibility for a teenage girl, but there were other issues too. Ben began getting tearful on those days he would be picked up from school, but we just assumed he was being overly clingy, not liking change. We carried on with the arrangement because we didn't have any choice, and in our eyes, it was all working. Until that day in the woods."
​"From what I understand, and from what the police reported to us, that day was no different from any other Tuesday or Wednesday except that Leo had stayed after school for swimming club. She picked Ben up, as she had been doing for weeks, then walked him home. But for some reason, instead of going the normal route to the vicarage, she decided to take him through the woods."
​Dan's words spread a frost across my skin, speeding my heart up as icy fingers squeeze my spine. I don't want to hear what happened to Ben, but I'm frozen in my seat, a captive audience to Dan's horror story.
​"I don't know what came over her, and I certainly don't believe that Ben did anything to provoke her, but that girl possessed an evil streak that she couldn't contain any longer, and that day in the woods she unleashed it on my boy."
​"Wh-what did she do?"
​Dan shakes his head, and sticks his palms into his eyes. I don't know whether to stand and comfort him, or give him the space to gather himself as he recalls the memory of what happened. He rubs his hands down his face, then sits back in the pew.
​"She attacked him. She turned on Ben when he was all alone with her and she beat that little boy, my little boy, within an inch of his life. He was lucky to have survived with no broken bones, but he was covered in blood when I found him, his beautiful eyes almost swollen shut inside his face."
​"Oh my God." Dan looks at me. "Sorry, I just mean, that's horrific."
​He waves a hand. "Please, don't worry. I found myself saying the same thing at the time. Over and over, why my boy? Why didn't I protect him?"
​"And you found him? In the woods?"
​"I did. I picked Leo up from school later that evening and when we got back to the vicarage my wife was out of the door before I'd even taken my seatbelt off. I dropped Leo off and went back out to look for them, but I was just doing it to appease my wife, I didn't really think anything was wrong."
​"I drove around for about forty minutes, expecting to find them at school and perhaps we'd all got our wires crossed. I stopped and asked a couple of people whether they'd seen them, but nobody had. I started to get more anxious with each passing minute, the sun going down rapidly, taking my nonchalance with it. I decided to try the woods and that's where I found him, unconscious. My baby boy."
​I stare at Dan, and he looks so small sitting in this empty church. I shake my head, ashamed of myself for pushing this with him, and with Leo, because of my own personal obsession with finding out about a past that I have no business prying into.
​"What happened to the girl?"
​"She disappeared. The police said that her family had no idea where she went, she didn't even go home to pick anything up before she left. Apparently she had some issues with aggression in the past, but her family never thought she would......"
​"I'm so sorry. Poor Ben."
​Dan straightens up and turns to face me, his face grey and worn. "Thank you. I thank God that she didn't take him from us, but the trauma he suffered, we never got over it.....he never got over it. How can you? He was just a boy and he trusted her, but she....anyway, Ben struggled after that, even as he got older and seemed more confident he was just a walking shell, fragile, and the slightest knock would open a crack, spilling trauma everywhere, all over us. I knew he hadn't dealt with it properly, but I never thought that...."
​I stand and move next to him. "He's going to be fine. Maybe when he wakes up he can get some help? Professional help."
​"We've tried therapy, psychiatrists, and he seems okay for a while, but then he has some sort of meltdown. We tried to hold things together, but my job can be demanding. Sometimes I feel like I focused more on supporting my parish than I did on Ben. And then his mother got sick, and things just got worse."
​How can a family bounce back from an experience like that? "If there's anything I can do to help Ben, I really would like to. I'm so sorry to make you talk about all of this again." I stand and pick up my bag. "I should leave you alone."
​Dan grabs my wrist as I walk past him, and I frown at his hand, alien on my arm.
​"Demi, there's another reason that I needed to share this with you." He lets go of my arm as I turn back to face him.
​"Okay." I look at the door of the church, all of a sudden wishing that it was between Dan and me. I swallow, waiting for him to go on.
​"I don't know how to...." He scratches the back of his head, frowning at the stone floor, then looks at me. "Do you want to sit back down?"
​I shake my head, not wanting to sit, not wanting to stand.
​"Right. Okay."
​"Um, Dan, you're making me kind of nervous."
​"Sorry, of course I am. You're standing in a church with some old geezer telling you about how his son almost died." He shakes his head.  "I just need to, I need to tell you that....when we arranged to hire a babysitter for the boys, we made an arrangement with another family here in Clopwyck, just to share the cost."
​"Right."
​"Right. We met the family through one of the church groups, a single mother who was struggling to juggle work with childcare, so it seemed like the perfect solution. She had a daughter who was in Ben's class, so it meant he would have a little friend with him while he was being looked after."
​I stare at Dan as I pick at a piece of skin on my thumb. I can feel the warm pulse of blood seeping onto my flesh, but I can't stop picking.
​"That day that she took Ben into the woods, the little girl was with them as well."
​I look down at my thumb, just as a droplet of blood falls to the ground, covering a tiny patch of the dusty floor, turning it crimson.
​"Demi-Louise, you know what I'm going to say don't you?"
I shake my head, making myself dizzy.​
"Demi, that little girl was you."
"No." I back down the aisle.
"You were there as well, Demi-Louise. She knocked you unconscious after you saw what she did to Ben."
I shake my head, tears springing from an unknown memory.
"No. That's not true." I whisper.
He stands up, and walks towards me, slowly, as if he's scared he's going to spook me and I'll run away.
"I'm sorry but it is, Demi-Louise. If you look deep within yourself, maybe you can remember it. We used to call you Lou-Lou back then. Do you remember that?"
"Dad, no!"
Dan looks up the aisle to the open doorway, and I spin around, knowing who the owner of the voice is before it finishes echoing around the church.
Leo closes the door behind him, shaking his head and as he shouts again.
"What did you tell her, Dad? What did you say?!"
"I told her the truth, Leo, the poor girl needed to know. She's been through enough."
I stand between them, looking at Leo as his chest rises and falls, his eyes darting between me and is Dad. He hurries towards me, and my perfect moment in the school hallway crashes to the ground and splinters around my feet.
The air has been sucked out of the old building, and I feel like I'm breathing in the dust of its ancient visitors as I stand captive in the truth of what Dan is saying. I run my hands through my hair, pulling hard on my roots to bring myself back to life and I storm towards the door, colliding with Leo as I try to escape.
He grabs me by arms. "Demi, please don't go, let me explain."
I shake from his grasp, scared that his touch still makes me feel like I've been electrified. I swallow back tears and growl at him. "Get away from me, Leo."
He stumbles backwards, trying to put his hand on my shoulder but I shove him away. "No, I need to tell you why, why I didn't...I haven't..."
I shove him away from and he falls backwards onto one of the pews, broken and tired. "I don't care what you need! I don't want to hear what you've got to say! You lied to me!"
I get to the church door, and fumble with the handle, as I fight back hot, angry tears. My shaking hands feel like they belong to someone else, but I finally manage to open the door.
"I didn't lie, I, I just-"
I take a deep breath, letting the air outside the church fill me with strength, then I turn to Leo.
"That's the first thing that liars say. I don't ever want to see you again."
"Demi, please, I-"
"Leo, you need to let her go." Dan's calm voice rings from the front of the church.
Leo looks back at his dad, and I turn away from him, my face crumpling as I charge from the vestibule of the church, down the pathway lined with gravestones like crooked teeth protruding from some old witches gums. I slam the gate open, my feet carrying me away from the church, and all I can hear is my name chasing me on the wind as Leo shouts after me