Follow You Home (17 page)

Part Three
Romania
August 2013

Chapter Thirty-Four

I
started by telling Edward what I’d already told Jake: the walk up the path to the house, going inside, looking around the entrance hall of the strange, secluded house. I told him how scared I felt, how I wanted to turn around, run.

The pub seemed to vanish around us as I told him my story.

The noise from upstairs.

It was an unmistakeable sound, even to non-parents like us. A noise that a mother or father is programmed to hear from a hundred feet, through stone walls and locked doors.

A baby. Crying.

That was it. From that moment, I knew that we wouldn’t be able to leave this place until we had discovered the source of the crying, had seen for ourselves that the baby was well and safe. It was a primal instinct. Protect the young and the helpless. Perhaps this place wasn’t bad after all. Maybe it was a family home, a woodcutter and his wife and kids. A happier scenario sprouted in my imagination. The woodcutter or hunter had been out in the forest checking traps and he had found the injured Alina—perhaps she had stumbled into one of his traps—and he had helped her, brought her back here to ask his wife to tend to her injuries. And all these goings-on had woken the baby. That made sense, was logical. I drew strength from it.

The cry came again, growing more urgent and frantic. Wherever the baby was, nobody had gone to comfort it.

Laura headed towards the staircase and I followed her. We trod as quietly as we could. The stairs were disintegrating in places, the floorboards loose and springy. I noticed something snagged on one of the steps and, looking closer, saw that it was a clump of hair.

There was a window halfway up the staircase, where it turned a corner. The view was of the back of the house and I saw, with surprise, that there was a narrow road that led through the trees into a backyard where a flatbed truck was parked. I had imagined that the house was only accessible through the forest. My spirits lifted a little further. We weren’t completely isolated here. The road was a link to civilisation. The woodcutter/hunter scenario seemed increasingly plausible. We had simply approached from the wrong angle.

The baby was still crying, its sobs ebbing away before returning stronger and more urgent. Where was the mother?

We reached the next floor. Like downstairs, it was in darkness and I wondered about the source of the flickering candlelight we’d seen from outside.

‘It’s coming from further up,’ Laura said in a hushed voice. The staircase continued to another floor and the crying was still coming from above us.

I took another deep breath and urged my legs to continue. I kept following Laura up the stairs, which were even more rickety here, creaking and protesting as we headed into deeper darkness. The walls around the staircase narrowed. As we climbed, the stench of mildew and rotting animals shifted, overpowered by other odours. Baby shit and human bodies. It stank like the part of a hospital where terminal patients spend their last days. Sickness and death, mixed with the smell of a dirty nursery. The more positive scenario I’d dreamed up receded with every step.

All I felt now was dread.

We reached the top of the staircase. Before us was another wooden door with a metal latch fixed across it, the type you just need to lift to open. A lock designed to make it easy for the person going in, but impossible for the person trying to get out.

The crying was coming from just behind this door.

I lifted the latch and, holding my breath against the stench and the fear of what we’d find, pushed the door open.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I
raised my eyes to gauge Edward’s reaction. He was staring at me, lips parted, enrapt.

‘Go on,’ he said.

I took another big gulp of my beer. It hurt to tell this part of the story. I thought about getting up, telling him I needed the toilet. Then I would slip out, run away like I had thought about doing back then. I hesitated for the final time, knowing how distraught Laura would be if she thought I was about to tell someone exactly what happened.

I would tell him what he needed to know.

On the far wall, against the windows, a number of fat white candles were lined up along the top of a pair of dark wood chests. Behind the chests, the windows were boarded up, so the light we’d seen couldn’t have come from this room. I stared at the candles because they were the only thing here that made sense. Both Laura and I were paralysed by the scene in front of us, rocked by the smell in the air, the baby’s screams echoing the sound that reverberated inside me.

There were four single beds and three wooden baby cots in the room. Two of the beds were empty, stripped back to reveal their thin mattresses. They looked like the beds you might see in war films—springs sagging, hard, like torture devices. The crying baby was in one of the cots, lying on its back, screaming, its face shining with tears. It waved its arms above it, clawing at the air, but was too small to roll over or sit up.

On the other two beds were a pair of women. The woman in the nearest bed was asleep or unconscious (
or dead?
), a filthy white sheet drawn up to her waist. She was wearing a thin pink gown that revealed how malnourished she was. Her arms were like pipe cleaners and her flat chest rose and fell jerkily as she breathed. Her head looked like a skull with stringy brown hair attached. Forcing myself to step closer, bracing myself against the acrid smell of urine and rot that emanated from her, I saw that her ankles were manacled to the foot of the bed.

Laura gripped my arm as I tried to step closer, holding me ba
ck. S
he raised her free arm slowly and pointed at the further
occupied
bed.

This woman was less skeletal than the first. She had blonde hair that was matted and stuck out at all angles. Her eyes were sunken, cheekbones like razors, arms skinny and weak. She was wearing a gown like the other woman, her sheet bunched up by her feet, which were also chained to the bed. Her skin was covered in bruises and tiny round scabs. Cigarette burns.

She was awake, her eyes screwed tight. Tears slid down her cheek, dampening her thin pillow.

Shaking, I approached the bed. As I did, the baby, who was in a cot close to this second bed, fell quiet, like it had run out of breath and tears. Laura walked over to the cot and leaned over it, her hand shaking as she brought it to her mouth, emitting a little sob. For a moment I thought there must be something wrong with the baby, but it was in a better state than the women. It was dressed in a pale blue sleep suit and wrapped in a wool blanket. A boy, I guessed. He had thick blond hair, a pink face, rosebud lips.

The blonde woman (his mother?) opened her eyes and saw me. Panic flared in her eyes, and I braced myself, sure she would start screaming. But she stayed silent, staring at me with wide eyes, then turning her head to look at Laura. She didn’t move, or attempt to sit up.

She whispered something, the act of doing so seemingly causing her great pain.

Leaving Laura by the cot, I moved closer to the woman, crouching beside her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. I’m English.’

She gazed at me with the look of a prisoner who has been tortured, broken.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

‘Help,’ she said. I held her hand, realising the reason she hadn’t sat up was that she was too weak.

To my right, Laura had lifted the baby out of the cot, was holding him against her, his head resting in the crook of her neck, one hand stroking the baby’s back through the blanket he was wrapped in. The woman in the bed looked towards the baby, a mixture of love and fear in her eyes. Then her gaze flicked towards the door.

‘My baby,’ the woman said. ‘Help.’

‘Who did this to you?’ I asked in my softest voice.

She stared at me. Maybe she didn’t understand. She whispered something else in what I assumed to be Romanian, then spoke in English again. ‘Please. Baby. Help.’

A scream came from below us.

Both Laura and I froze. The woman in the bed looked towards the door again.

‘Go. Baby,’ she said.

I looked at the door, then at Laura. ‘What shall we do?’

Edward’s mouth was ajar, his eyes wide. No one had ever listened to me more raptly. He was there with us, in that room.

‘For God’s sake, you can’t stop now. What did you do?’

‘I . . . Laura hugged the baby against her. I asked her again, “What shall we do?”’

I told him the rest of the story.

The scream came again. My heart was banging so loudly that I was sure whoever was downstairs, whoever had done this to these women, would be able to hear it.

‘We have to get out,’ I said, answering my own question. ‘We’ll go to town, get help. Send the police.’

I turned to the woman in the bed.

‘We’ll send police,’ I said. More tears fell from her eyes.

I turned back to Laura and reached out to take the baby, to put him back in his cot. But Laura backed away, hugging the baby against her.

‘He’s coming with us.’

‘Laura . . . We have to leave him. We can’t run through the
forest
with a baby. We have to get away.’

‘No,’ she snapped. She held the baby like he was her own, like I was threatening to take him and feed him to lions. ‘I’m not leaving him.’

‘Laura . . .’

‘Look, Daniel. Look.’ She pointed to the far side of the room, beyond the cots.

A small bench was positioned against the wall. Stacked on top of this bench were items you might find in a normal nursery: baby clothes, nappies, barrier cream, bottles, along with tubs of formula milk. There were a couple of small teddy bears too, lying askew. Their fur was stained with something dark that looked black in the candlelight.

There was something beside the bench. It was a tiny coffin, about two feet long. It looked like it had been built by an amateur, the angles not quite right. On top of the coffin lay a few flowers, the kind we had seen growing in the forest, along with another teddy bear.

I looked back at the unconscious woman. Was her baby in there? A small part of me wanted to look, to confirm the horror. But I tore my gaze away from the coffin, catching a glimpse of something else. It was a mind-snapping moment.

We both walked slowly to the wall, aware that we had to go, knowing the person or people responsible for all this could come in at any moment. Pinned to the wall were about two dozen Polaroid photos. Some of the photos were of women, staring at the camera lens with terror or surrender. One photo showed a woman on her back, naked, her mouth open in a scream. Beside her crouched a man, holding some kind of metal instrument which he held between her thighs.

The other photographs were of babies. Newborn babies. All of them lay on their backs. Some wore blue, but most were dressed in white. Some were crying, others placid. Some with eyes shut, some looking towards the photographer.

Each of the photos had a date inked on its white edge.
The ba
by’s date of birth, I wondered? And then I noticed: a few of the pictures had a second date added, with a large X beside it. The Polaroid in the bottom right corner had two dates. The first was 2.7.13. The second of July 2013. The second date read 13.8.13. The thirteenth of August. Just a few days ago.

I turned my head back towards the women on the beds. The blonde woman was weeping, the other still passed out. The baby in the coffin must be hers. It had been born here. And died here,
in thi
s squalid, stinking room.

From downstairs, the scream sounded again, a scream of pain that chilled my blood.

Breathing hard, I once again spoke to the blonde woman. ‘We’ll be back. OK? We’ll make sure your baby’s safe.’

She looked at me, then at the baby.

I realised I might need a weapon when we got downstairs, looked around for one. I blew out one of the candles and wrenched it free of its black metal candlestick. I weighed the candlestick in my hand. It was heavy, solid.

Laura was already opening the door, hesitating and peering down the stairs. I followed after her, passing the first bed.

A hand shot out and grabbed my leg.

I cried out, pulled away. The skeletal woman in the bed stared up at me with huge eyes, opening her mouth to reveal that most of her teeth were gone. The remaining teeth were white, healthy, suggesting that the missing teeth had been punched or pulled out. I accidentally kicked over a bedpan that sat by the bed, the foul-smelling, brownish urine slopping over the side and onto my shoe.

The woman smiled at me, insanity in her eyes, and I ran, pushing Laura through the door, letting it slam shut behind us.

Beneath us, the screaming had stopped. Instead, I could hear thumping. Someone coming up the stairs, very slowly.