9. A MIDNIGHT CONVERSION

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

The plot darkens...

Evana Craddock had a strange feeling that she was being followed. She might have ignored the sensation, but it was dark, the early hours of the morning, and her car had broken down in the sticks, and in this case the sticks was by a desolate farm on the way to Quarryvale.

She had tried to phone for help, but there was no signal for her phone to latch on to, so she decided to walk through the cold black of a night from Hell until she found a signal.

And she had that feeling she was being followed. It was uncanny, for every time she turned to peer into the total blackness of night she could see nobody.

But then, I wouldn’t, would I? It’s so black, and there’s not really anyone there… is there?

Holding her phone in one hand and aiming it in every direction under the moon and some that the moon never touched with its fingers of night, she found herself floundering off the narrow road she couldn’t see onto a field she knew nothing about, and she was sure that she was still being followed.

It had something to do with crunching sounds, the sort of sound that a size nine boot might make when being careful not to make too much noise when its owner was in pursuit of a victim.

Evana Bramble began to feel very much like a victim even though her other senses still suggested she was entirely on her own. There was nothing logical going on, not in her head and not out of it.

There comes a time when a cloudy night, miles from any light source, can overwhelm the senses and make a person believe they’re in a nowhere place where shadows grow flesh and insubstantial beings lurk ready to do whatever it is insubstantial beings want to do.

There was only one thing for it. Turn round and go back to the car, and safety. She could lock herself in the car, she could hide from whatever malevolence was after her. She would be safe in the car, even if she had to wait until dawn.

But if I turn round I’ll be walking straight into the arms of the monster who’s following me… That was what flashed through her mind, creating a substantial monster out of insubstantial fear, and made her sink to her knees into the mud of a December field just as it was turning into ice.

She wanted to stand up, to be as brave as she knew she usually was, but her spirit was flowing from her on waves of absolute fear. She’d not felt fear like this since she’d discovered, at the funeral of her mother, Betsy Craddock, that she hadn’t been her mother at all. And that Ernie Craddock had happily shared his name with a waif who was unwanted by the parents that created her.

She was never told, though, that she was one of triplets, and had to find that fact out for herself. It had been another heart-lurching shock when the private investigator discovered that gem for her.

She ought to have been given that slice of joy when he’d been young enough to file it away in a growing awareness of self, but she hadn’t, not even when she read her adoptive mother’s last note to her, the one that began for Evana, not to be read until after my funeral…

Maybe Betsy hadn’t known. Maybe Ernie had kept it from her as well, though he must have known all right. He’d chosen and accepted the bundle of joy they were to call Evana when Betsy was having a mastectomy in a battle against tumours. It wouldn’t happen these days, of course, but Evana had been a get-well gift for Betsy. Someone for Betsy to love, and if the treatment for cancer worked, someone for her to mother over all the years to come. If it didn’t, she’d still be someone for Ernie to do his best for. He was a good soul, really. Loving and caring and just that little bit inconsiderate.

The treatment had worked and now, almost fifty years later, Betsy had finally succumbed to the inevitable, and her funeral had been last week. Evana had loved Betsy during her life. After all, it’s natural for a girl to love a loving mother, isn’t it? Only now she knew that Betsy wasn’t a mother after all. Not her mother, not anyone’s. And the love she had nurtured for the better part of half a century turned to something else. Not hate, she would never hate her, she couldn’t, but there was a kind of distrust that smeared all her life with a film of grey doubt.

So now she was on the search for truth.

And truth was a search for her family history. She’d been born a Bramble, she was told that in the letter, and it didn’t take a huge amount of effort to work out which Bramble had brought her into the world, and come to some kind of terms with the fact that there were two others. There had been triplets, and she had been one of them. And the other two, both lads, were still alive and living next door to each other not a dozen miles away from where she had spent most of her life.

They might have passed each other on some street somewhere. Who could tell? A dozen miles isn’t far...

“Evana...”

A whispered voice in the shadows of a night from Hell, when you’re kneeling in icy mud and don’t know north from south or east from west or even life from death, can make a heart lurch until you start to believe you might be dead.

“Evana...”

The whisper came from everywhere, all around her, it held her name in its icy breath and spat it out.

“Who are you?” she demanded in a feverish fit of almost crying, almost shouting, almost yielding.

“Evana...”

Then it became crazy. Everything became like a hallucination after the dose of flu she’d had a year or two back, when the world had torn itself apart inside her head and shredded everything that resembled normality. And now, here in this mud, this ice, this nightmare field, her body did things it shouldn’t have been able to do.

After all, she was a woman, wasn’t she? And women can’t do that…

Then she knew who it was standing over her. She could tell, she could see quite plainly that it was the one person she knew better than all others, it was herself. She recognised the look in the shadowy eyes of the grotesque shadowy effigy of Evana. It was one of fear, of doubt, of guilt, of shame. It was all the emotions she’d pushed aside for all her life, when she’d chosen sweetness and light as her companions, and yet in truth her particular cloak of perfection had made her the devil incarnate. No relationship had lasted because they’d all been smothered with sugary clinging grasping, and now each and every one of them turned, the would-be lovers of a lifetime and that moment on a muddy field, into a damning, joyous hunk of pure lust, and suffocated her.