You look so excited, like something nice might happen to you. I hope something nice does happen. But it won’t be because of me.
I’m a bad person, Amy. Why can’t you ever see that?
Snakes click in my head. Everything broken.
Tonight, I’m gonna show you that the monster I’m afraid of the most is . . . me.
And that you should be afraid, too.
I don’t want to hurt you. I only want to protect you. But like it or not, there are some things in this world that need killing. And the sooner you understand that, Amylocks, the better off you’ll be.
I’ve got demons, Amy. Bad ones. One sniff of sunshine is all it will take for them to hunt you down. I can’t let them kill you, too.
I’m gonna drag you to Hell, Amy. I’m going to make you hate my fucking guts.
It always hurts to look at you.
1
YOU
Six years later . . .
I’m not afraid of the dark.
I’m afraid of what’s in it.
That’s what you are to me,
the monster in the dark.
The man I hate the most.
MY WORLD IS ON FIRE.
It’s been on fire since I woke up.
It’s taking me a long, long time to get out of my room this morning. It isn’t the cold of winter. Neither is it the dark.
Getting up isn’t my problem, getting out is. Once I’m showered and dressed, I start the process of checking my room is secure.
It’s like a reverse of the process I go through in the evening, but worse somehow, because time is against me. I can spend all night checking if I want to, but I know I have to get to group therapy, so in the mornings I can only do it so many times.
I live in Swan Lake. A private clinic for addiction and depression in Greystone, a small town of Suffolk, England. The girls who stay here are volunteer patients. Lost, addicted, hurt. And rich. Only the prestige come here. Treatment costs the earth.
I use the term volunteer loosely on my behalf. I’m only here because of my father’s worries. I didn’t want to come here.
The other girls are gone now. My friends won’t be back until after New Year. Swan Lake is closed during Christmas time, but I’m allowed to stay and look after myself.
I can’t go home to my family. I can’t leave. The OCD won’t let me. And other dark things . . .
I have to leave my curtains open to exactly the right width every day or I can’t come back in the room again. There are sixteen panes in each of the patio doors. The curtains have to be open so I can see just eight panes of each door if I look up to my room from the stone path at the back of the old Victorian estate. If I can see a sliver of the room through the other panes, then I’ll have to go back up to start again.
My door is bad. I have to check and re-check it six or twelve times, and then the communal front door. Sometimes I have to go back and check my room door. If a staff member or one of the other girls has left the front door on the latch again, I definitely have to check my room door. Anyone could have been in.
This morning is the worst. The front door is on the latch and is slightly open. It must’ve been Rebecca, a staff member. She’s the only one who didn’t go home for Christmas. I think she did it because she feels sorry for me.
Poor Rebecca had the task of telling me the news of my mother’s death, last week. It hurt her to bring the news. She was so very sorry. I’m too exhausted to feel. My emotions have been put on hold since I started to wither away. I couldn’t even think of an appropriate response, of what a normal person would say, so I said nothing.
As I reach for the front door, a man in a suit pushes it open towards me. I flinch backwards. Behind him is another man.
Younger. Over six feet tall. Wearing dark jeans and a . . . haunting leather jacket.
My heart pounds, for all the wrong reasons.
It can’t be him . . .
I’ve spent enough time in despair that my face doesn’t give anything away. My pulse quickens some more and my pupils are like an abyss, but there’s no expression as my eyes meet the cold black eyes of my enemy.
Shepherd Lawson.
The boy who left me in the woods . . . fed me to the wolves.
He didn’t just break my heart. He took it. Whatever beats inside me now is broken.
It’s just my imagination. It’s just my mind playing tricks.
This is a dream. A nightmare. It has to be.
Or maybe I’m going mad. This is a hallucination of some kind. I must’ve taken drugs that have messed with the chemical reactions in my brain.
No, I can’t be asleep, I can’t be drugged. I can feel pain. And the smell of tobacco and worn leather make the nightmare real.
They walk up the grand dark-wood staircase, and I try not to freak out. I try not to look at him at all, but I hear the man in the suit say, ‘ . . . there’s a lot of interest in this building, you’ll have to move fast if you want it.’
I shut the front door firmly and unclip the latch. I rattle the door a few times, checking it’s shot home. With my fingertips I trace around the edge of the doorframe, feeling the door is flush with the frame. I turn the doorknob six times.
One, two,
