End of Story by Louise Swanson

Author:Louise Swanson [Swanson, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529396102
Published: 2023-03-22T23:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 27 November 2035 – 1.46 a.m.

I needed a breather from writing. I know what’s coming.

At nine, we were done. My penultimate session. Jasmine seemed in a hurry to get away, and Alfie followed soon after, saying that he’d see me on Thursday, perhaps with goodbye cakes.

‘Will I see you?’ I asked Lynda.

‘Yes. I’ll come. For you.’

‘Good.’

‘One more time,’ I said.

‘One final time.’ Her voice broke on the last word.

‘What did Jasmine want you to tell me?’ I asked.

‘About the arson plan for ALLBooks. She doesn’t know I already did.’

‘OK.’

‘Are you still writing your diary?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I have it with me.’ I motioned to my rucksack on the sofa. ‘What’s the point in stopping now if they’ve already been in my house and seen it?’

‘You need to know what they’re capable of.’ She wrapped her arms about her chest as though cold.

‘What do you mean?’ I felt sick, like someone had milk nearby.

‘I wasn’t fully honest.’

‘What do you mean? When?’

She looked at her black-gloved hand, then at me. She motioned with it for me to sit down and then she sat on the opposite sofa. The silence wanted to be filled. The room waited for a story. And she told me one. The darkest I’ve ever heard. This is it; this is Lynda’s story. How she told it to me. Or at least, how I recall that she told it to me. If it was in a TV show, there would now be a trigger warning. I remember a proposal before the full fiction ban to have trigger warnings in novels, which I found ridiculous. Real life doesn’t have a trigger warning. I did not have one when Lynda spoke. She didn’t when what happened to her happened.

But I guess this is yours.

‘They didn’t warn me,’ she said. ‘They just did it. It was two weeks ago, the day after you started here. They visited. We were at the table in my kitchen, an oak one I love that I got cheap at a charity shop. One minute they were asking me if I’d been writing, like they always do, and before I could open my mouth, the short one pinned my arm to the table. Tom wasn’t there. They knew that. I think I screamed, more in shock than to get help. The tall one took something silver from his pocket. Circular. Sharp. With a black handle. I had no idea what it was. Then he switched it on, and the silver part became a tiny spinning blade. The short one was still holding my arm down. The tall one said that they knew about Bedtime Stories. He knew I was reading to children. He said I should carry on as normal, tell no one they had visited. He said they knew about our arson plans (at that point I didn’t even know what they were) and he said if I told anyone they knew, he’d come back for the rest of my fingers. The rest, I thought, still dumb.

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