Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

Author:Anna Snoekstra [Snoekstra, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises Pty Ltd Australia

10

Bec, 14 January 2003

At first Bec thought the screaming was in her dream. It was a nasty dream, the worst kind. Its sweaty, festering images lived for a moment when she woke and then recoiled back into her subconscious. But the screaming remained. She listened to it for a moment impassively. It was definitely real. It could be her mother or her father or one of her brothers.

Pulling herself out of bed, she tried to walk toward the door but it swayed and danced in front of her. The doorknob winked. She reached out until her fingertips brushed against its cold plastic and then she pulled it toward her. She held herself up by the wall until she got to the stairs, where she sat at the top, surveying the abyss. The muffled cry came again, strangled and panicked. Pulling herself up onto all fours, she shakily crawled backward down the stairs. She couldn’t quite get to her feet at the bottom, so she continued crawling toward the noise.

The inside of the laundry quivered with a strange energy as she crawled toward it. The noise was coming from beyond, though. On the other side of the door. In the garage. Pulling herself onto the tiles, she forced herself to stand. She reached for the door handle, the noise suddenly loud. Too loud. Crackling painfully in her ears. Her hand slipped off the handle. It was wet. Her fingers glistened red.

She woke early, her room shining with the pale morning glow. The wind outside sounding like waves crashing into the shore. For a moment she imagined she was at the beach. That she lived alone in a little weatherboard house and spent every day sitting with an easel on her front porch and painting the horizon. But she was a terrible painter. Bec pulled herself out of bed unsteadily, her forearms trembling under her body’s weight. She’d had horrible nightmares. The worst in a while. She blinked away the images of blood and torture.

Weirdly, she couldn’t really remember going to bed last night. Lizzie’s house, leaving and making a fool of herself and falling in the park were all clear. But after that it was all a bit hazy. There were fragments there: her brothers being angry with her, her mom looking at her head in the bathroom, but they were murky and confused. It was like she was trying to remember what had happened years ago, not just last night. She looked down at herself, realizing she’d slept in her clothes. Smears of dark red ran down her dress; it looked like blood. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screeching. There was more blood in the bed when she pulled back the sheets. And her hands, it was all over her hands. Her palms were red. She lifted her dress with shaking hands, expecting for a moment to see some shiny, gaping wound underneath it. But her skin was unmarked. The blood hadn’t come from her.

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