I hide in the shadows.

Watching.

Waiting.

I, in my ethereal form, am crouched and cramped; peeking over the floral duvet that bedraggles the bed. The house is empty. Her room: both her prison and hiding place, is the room she has chosen to die in; shrouded in an inky blackness – a comforting darkness – just as she likes it. The wall opposite the bed supports the defeated frame of the girl who, during these long hours, has shed a torrent of tears.

She does not know I see her folded there with the pink jingly-jangly elephant, faded and aged, sandwiched between her chest and thighs. She does not know that I hear the breath bursting in fits from her body as she sobs or that I know that she has remained in the same position for 6 hours. She thinks no one sees or hears her but I do. I see her pale drawn face and her blonde dishevelled hair revealing white knuckles that belong to hands that clench it in fistfuls.  Her mother and stepfather cannot see her. They currently dine on shellfish at a reputable restaurant, talking idly of their fraudulent lives but secretly wishing they were elsewhere. While many miles away, her brother sips a pint of ignorant bliss in the company of friends, far from the hell he calls home.

I want to grab her but I cannot. There are rules.
And those who break the rules pay the consequences. I have learned that lesson.

So I, uncontrollably mimicking her, am folded as she is and all I can do now is watch and wait. My watching provides no detachment. Watching means to live and breathe; though I have no life or breath inside of me. I am integrated into the secret agonies of the final moments of my charge; witnessing every erratic thought that spins through her haunted mind. I feel what she feels while, unknowingly, she manipulates my invisible form to mirror her actions.
It is she who has summoned me.

The flashbacks come.
I see the time she watches her mother leaving the driveway. At the window she stands, praying her mother will change her mind. Her muscles tense. Her throat tightens. Her eyes tingle with the sting of raw tears. She is clutching something fluffy and pink that I recognise: the thing that always absorbs her teardrops. She wants to bang on the window and scream for help. She hears footsteps and turns to seek out the source.
The man is there.

Perhaps I should steal her? I want to spare her from this painful review.
Oh, but I must wait!

A new memory comes. I see her sitting alone at a dining table. She hums along to a song that plays only in her head. She is told to shut up. She does as she is told and finishes her homework in silence.
She packs her books away and rises from the table, pushing her chair underneath. Wooden legs screech on ceramic tiles. The base of the milk bottle slams into the back of her head. Down she goes.
Darkness overpowers her vision
The man sips his tea.

She takes me to the summer she turned 7. She has been out riding her bike. She comes home to discover her mother is working an evening shift at the local pub, keeping her blind eye busy. The daddy long-legs are dancing clumsily yet menacingly across the garden path. She makes a run for it, through their lax formation, to the door. She enters; quiet as a mouse but I, and I alone, hear her prayers for invisibility.
The man waits.

Patience, I tell myself. Patience.

I see her asleep. Cosy in her bed. Skinny arms form a tight cage around her favourite thing: the pink jingly-jangly eared elephant she has had since she was 2 weeks old. His stitched-on, big, bright blue eye is eternally open, currently just centimetres from her face; looking at everything. Seeing nothing. The radio plays low. The room is covered wall to ceiling in posters of posing pop stars. So many faces. So many eyes. None that can see. She dreams of being a dancer while her mother dreams an unknowable dream just down the hall. A floorboard creaks.
She stirs as the stuffed toy is prised slowly out of its cage.
With a drowsy reluctance, she opens her eyes.
The man is there.
Together, we shift again, to another time and place.
She is racing through the house, through the kitchen, under the arch and left up the murky green stairs. Step after step, she inclines. Gasping; grappling for purchase on the bannister. I hear her heart thumping in her chest – faster than her footfalls – to the soundtrack of frantic jingling bells. A hand grabs at the swinging tail of the elephant but she yanks at the substantial portion of polyester already in her hold. I see the tail rip from its base as the main body is freed. A hungry hand finds her scrawny ankle and pulls her down to the bottom step then carries her up.
The man has her.

Next, in a bedroom with one whole wall covered in sliding, mirrored panels.
She is surveying the scene of a previous crime, looking for an elephant’s tail.
On her hands and knees she checks under the unmade bed and there, in the dusty space, hides a wooden box. I beg her not to open it but she cannot hear me. I remember that this is her memory and my begging now, just as it was then, is useless.
She retrieves the box, sits cross-legged on the flecked carpet and opens the lid.

I watch signs of confusion spread over her face as she takes in the contents.
Newspaper clippings, yellowed and folded neatly, guarded by her elephant’s bodiless tail. Frowning, she snatches it out. She was about to close the lid but curiosity seized her. Once open in her shaking hands her eyes flicker over the faded black print; skim, skim, skimming over the words

Draper. Aged 9.  Missing.

And underneath, a photograph. A pretty young murdered girl. Smiling widely with gaps in her teeth.

The slamming of a car door startles her away from the page. I see him walk briskly down the pathway towards the house. I beg and plead her to put the box back. She cannot hear me. I scream at her. I cannot help myself. The man is coming.

But instead of doing as I pointlessly insist she moves her gaze to a second page. I fill with dread as I see the man grope into the depths of his pocket to locate his keys.
She hears the key in the door. Moving fast she stuffs the papers back into their wooden enclosure and shoves it back under the bed. She grabs the tail and nimbly flees the room on tip-toes, trying to remember the emboldened words that will not make sense to her for years to come.
The man is home.

I rock back and forth, manically, as she does. I hold an invisible elephant and she holds the only comfort she has known for 14 years. I feel her weaken, her chest rise and fall, her heart slow to a beat that signals that soon it will end and all the while I hear her cries punctuated with shrill screams. Desperate, dying moans. Images flash and flicker. Voices tune in and out. Echoes from the depths of the past. So fast. Little snippets. Fragments of a life.
I almost resign to break the rules but then it’s too late. We are hurtling again, together, deeper into the crevices of her sub-conscious. Pillows. Scissors. White rope and teddy bears. I smell whisky, tobacco, engine grease and lemon cake; strong, sweet and putrid all at once. I hear Buddy Holly, the sound of chewing, and whispering in the dark.

We are thrust into an imageless void where only sounds can be heard. A cacophony rises up; louder and louder. I can hear them, all of them talking over each other but not to each other. We raise our hands to pound our palms into our ears, over and over, to make the noise stop. Our rocking becomes clumsy. Gradually, they drop out one by one by one until, only one chillingly morose voice remains; seeming to seep from in the darkness. In this shared space of memory where only she and I reside, it speaks: ‘You were the reason I married your mother.’

We scream out a terrified sound that comes from the deepest depths of our despair as pain shoots through our chests like fatal arrows shot into our hearts.

And then, silence.
Only silence.

An eerie stillness seizes the room. We are too weak, too sleepy, to react to the stabbing pain; dazed and drifting slowly apart.
She has released me.

She is nearly there. It will soon be over.
She moves only her eyes to the carpet beside her, to the brown bottle that lies empty and lid-less on its side. The back of her head is heavy against the wall barely supported by a limp, thin neck and a spine that is ready to flop. I see her fingers twitch to touch the matted fibres of the pink elephant with the jingly-jangly ear. Their tips move slightly as they stroke their farewell to a faithful friend.

I have lurked in these shadows many times – longed to take her – to free her from her hell but it was destined to be the man’s hand that took her life. That is what is etched in stone on the tablet of her fate. Yet, she beats him to it. She cheats the design and in doing so she prevents a duplication of the event in 1964. She will leave on her own tragic terms, not his.

For as long as she could recall she had yearned, fiercely, to climb out from her own skin. It has constantly itched and prickled at her from inside as if irritant nettle leaves and spikey thistles were growing in its layers. She knew what she must do before he did it. Tonight, empowered by the thought of freedom, she will leave him. She will leave all of them to become peaceful and mine.

She is ready.

I prepare to go to her when I see her arms drop limp to her sides, landing with a quiet thud, palms up. She blinks once, twice, and again. Her torso slides gently sideways, to the right, along the wall that has supported her for all this time. The elephant slides reluctantly from her lap to the floor with a sad and solitary jingle.
Her shoulder passes over the skirting board then meets the carpet. I see her head loll and come to rest, finally, softly, on the floor of her bedroom next to a familiar pink trunk.

Now it is time.

I dart across the room in one breezeless swoop to where she lay; serene and numbed.
I stand in her fading vision. She blinks slowly, heavily – just once; using the last drop of life left in her to focus on me. She can see me now. I know she belongs more to my world now than to hers.

I lean to her and hope that, if any dwindling consciousness remains with her, she will not fear me. ‘It is time’ I say as I place my mouth to her lips. I think the thought I am required to think and in only seconds my work is complete, my kiss has taken her last breath and ceased her failing heart.

Her wide eyes have fixed firm.  The beautiful blue of her irises are eclipsed by the blackened pools of her pupils and up from the beautiful yet ruined form, crumpled and defeated before me, rises a pure and perfect essence.

She gives me her weightless hand then glances back, not in sorrow at the empty human shell or in regret for the life she is leaving behind but in gratitude, at the tailless pink elephant with the jingly-jangly ear. She turns back to me then smiles a smile so almost divine.

I have given my kiss,
and now she is mine.