His heart thumped as he wrestled with the grim fact that now his own little girl was lost somewhere in the heart of that same dangerous place.
Swallowing back a thick knot of dread in his throat, Ross forced himself out of the car and approached the thick metal gates that now guarded the gaps between the trees. The sky was darkening now, and he could still feel the moisture of more rain hanging like a forbidding fog in the atmosphere.
After the incident, the council had put up the gates so that people couldn’t enter in their cars anymore, and furthermore, they would not be able to enter at night time, when the monsters came out to play. Still, even in the daylight, Ross felt unease at the sight of the place. He couldn’t help but notice how his ankles seemed to grow heavier and heavier as he walked towards the nearest gap in the fence and stepped sideways through it.
“Annie?” he shouted, his throat hurting as his words came out surprisingly croaky. “Flo?” he added, not wanting to seem dismissive of his newfound niece.
When he’d realised that the girls had gone to Oakwood, he’d had to pretend to be calm. If he’d flipped out on the outside, like he could feel himself crumbling on the inside, he knew what it would do to Paul. And who knows what it would do to Minnie and Ronnie, who were probably still haunted by the traumatic memories they shared of the place.
No, Ronnie knew that he had to be the level-headed one. It was his job not to be so emotional. To be logical.
“Annie? Flo?” he called out again, louder this time. He widened his steps, so the satisfying crunch of twigs beneath his feet joined his voice in the crisp stillness of the air.
The man clenched his fists as a gentle but cold breeze rushed over him and stung his skin. As he walked, he continuously glanced around, searching desperately for anything to indicate the presence of the two children.
But, there was nothing.
Nothing but the rapidly increasing thump of his heartbeat, pounding away against the inside of his rib cage.
The seconds crept by agonisingly slowly like the victim of a severe burn dragging themselves out of a fiery car wreckage. Horrific images of what he had imagined the burning car to look like on the night when Minnie had been attacked blared inside his skull, her screams drilling deep into his eardrums.
It was then that Ross began to wonder if he should have just let Paul call the police after all.
Heart rate quickening, he delved into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his phone. He began to dial 999 when he suddenly noticed in the corner of the screen the small, bleak indicator that told him there was no service.
“What the fuck?” he muttered incredulously to himself, turning the phone on and off again. If Flo’s phone had worked well enough to answer a phone call, why couldn’t his?
Just as the screen lit up again, Ross felt a small sigh of relief at the tiny, single bar of service that appeared in the right-hand corner of the display.
“Hello, Uncle.”
The sudden voice startled him so much that he almost dropped the device down into the sea of leaves beneath him.
Standing just a few feet away from him was a little girl, maybe just a bit shorter than Annie. He’d only met her in passing, but he recognised the slow, smug voice as the same one he’d heard on the phone just before he’d left the house. It was also plain to see that this was Flo. Her childishly rounded face was nostalgic to look at, a perfect mixture of both her mother and father twisted together into something that was somehow so strikingly unique.
“Where’s Annie?” he found the words spilling from his jaw, much more harshly than he had planned. “I mean, are you okay?” he quickly corrected himself, although this did nothing to steady his nerves.
Flo’s lip furled upwards slightly into a smile that made Ross’s skin crawl. It was unnatural to him that this child made him feel so uncomfortable simply by looking at him. He likened it to how it might feel being trapped inside a cage, backed into a tight corner by a starved lion.
“Flo?” he continued, forcing himself to break the heightening tension.
“We’ve been playing medieval castles,” she told him gleefully, eyes gleaming.
“Ok…” her uncle swallowed, looking back and forth at the seemingly empty woodland space that surrounded them. “So where’s Annie? You know, she’s probably very frightened. We don’t let her play out alone.” He felt a flash of anger and had to bite down hard on his tongue, not to add that it was actually pretty out of order that Flo had clearly manipulated his daughter into doing it. He’d only just gotten his sister back. He wasn’t about to burn the small, spindly olive branch that connected them by upsetting her youngest daughter.
Flo nodded slowly, “…yes.”
“Sorry?”
“Yes.”
Ross’s brow furrowed, “yes, what?”
“Yes, Annie is very frightened.”
Bile began to rise up from the bottom of his stomach as he remained frozen, locked in an uncomfortable gaze with this unnerving, frankly fucking weird kid. He had no idea what to say.
“Then take me to her,” he instructed firmly, wishing that he’d brought Minnie along with him. How stupid of him to think that he could handle a child he’d never even met before, blood-relation or not.
“Sure!” shrugged Flo, before breaking out into a jaunty skip that was full of youthful energy, but at the same time painfully slow as Ross began to trail along behind the girl. In the back of his mind, he willed himself to say something else, to smooth things over. But his lips remained stiff and tight, enclosing the undeniable irritation that was locked inside him.
And so, the two skipped and walked in silence. The dark, dense atmosphere only
