Taken

The gully runs down the back of the parking bay under the building. In the summer, it’s a dry trough, thick with drifted rubbish, clumps of dandelions, clusters of ants. From about September, when the weather turns, it becomes a constant, dirty trickle, like a kid with a runny nose. If you follow it along to the corner of the building, it spreads out into a muddy patch of scrub before dropping down into darkness through a crumbling fissure, like a tear in the hard earth. There’s a rough wire fence around that, to keep little kids from falling in, but you can climb over it easy enough, if you know where to put your feet.

All the kids from the flats know the gully; they’ve all taken turns throwing stones down into the darkness, to listen for the faraway splash. No one knows what’s down there though, why it’s been left gaping, not even the adults. Handy drainage, is the best anyone can guess. The kids tell each other stories: snakes and crocodiles, water monsters. Trolls. Scaled genies that grant your wishes if you can keep hold of their slippery skins.

It’s the first place they think of when Janine reads out what she’s found on the internet. “Make a poster about Halloween traditions,” her teacher said, so she’s begged Dani’s phone for half an hour because Grandma doesn’t have WiFi.

“How am I supposed to do my homework?” she’d moaned when Mom dropped them off, all done up for her fancy work party. “Why can’t Grandma come over to our place?”

“Because she can’t,” Mom had snapped, and that was that.

Mom snaps a lot since their father left. When she isn’t snapping, she’s out, or busy.

“Maybe she’ll find us a new dad at the party,” Janine muses hopefully. “Then she won’t be so angry all the time.”

Dani scowls like it’s a stupid idea, but Janine knows she’s thinking it too. That’s when she finds the web page, and reads it out loud.

“To find the name of your true love, take a wedding ring at midnight on Halloween and lower it down a deep well. Draw it slowly back up until something grabs hold of it. Then call out “who is my true love?” The voice that answers will say the name of the one you will marry.” Janine’s eyes are round as she scribbles notes into her jotter. “Dani, we should try it! We could ask for Mom!”

“Oh sure!” Dani snorts with a thirteen-year-old’s scorn. “That’ll really work.”

“We might as well try,” Janine persists. “What else are we going to do tonight?”

Grandma does have a TV, but it will be tuned to her shows all evening, and who wants to watch those?

“Sleep?” grimaces Dani, but Janine can tell she’s tempted, and when they find Mom’s ring on the hall table, where she must have taken it off to go to the party, it seems like a sign.

Sneaking out is easy. Grandma’s snoring peacefully in front of the flickering screen before ten. They take the spare keys and ride down in the lift, all the way beyond the basement, to Parking Three. The whole way down, they don’t see a soul.

As they step from the lift, fluorescent lights flicker on automatically, lancing off oil-bright puddles on the black asphalt. Janine pulls a face at the stink of exhaust fumes, and worse.

“Come on then if we’re going,” snaps Dani, and they slink along to the back of the bay, where the gully trickles and gurgles into darkness.

“Maybe we should go back,” murmurs Janine.

“Don’t be such a baby, we’re here now.”

“But what if there’s someone out there? Someone bad?”

“Nobody’s going to be there at this time of night. It’s too cold and there’s no shelter.”

Dani’s right. As they step out from the edge of the parking bay, a cold wind with spits of rain in it whips their hair into their faces. They blink, blinded, until Dani swipes the light on her phone. A little way across the scrub, spray-painted concrete rises up, blocking out the Halloween sky. At their feet, the gully runs down into its mud bath, then plunges in a dirty waterfall, down through the scar in the earth with its sagging wire fence. They climb that easily, like they have a hundred times before.

Fumbling in her pocket, Dani finds two plastic bags, and hands one to Janine. She flattens hers on the mud and kneels on it.

“Wow, good idea!”

“I have to do all the thinking!” But Janine sees the pleased smile her sister tries to hide. “Gimme the ring.”

“Here.” She holds a pink-mittened hand out and Dani carefully winds a long strand of string through the ring’s bright O, knotting and double-knotting it, to make sure.

“You want to do it?”

“Together.”

Painstakingly, they feed out a stretch of string, pausing to give each other a long look before they're brave enough to drop the ring down into the stony fissure. It disappears into darkness, and both of them feel their stomachs clench. If anything happens to that ring, they’re goners. Mom in a temper is scarier than any of the stories people tell about whatever lives in the gully.

Slowly they lower it, so slowly, a hand’s length of string at a time. Somewhere beyond the graffiti wall, a car screeches by. The time on Dani’s phone screen flicks to midnight.

“Now,” she breathes, and they begin to draw the string back up again.

“This is stupid,” says Dani, as the thread spools in the mud next to them. “Of course nothing is going to–”. She turns to Janine, mouth open.

“You felt that, right?”

“What?”

“The tug? There’s something down there!”

“Stop it, Dani! It’s not funny!”

But Dani turns wide eyes on her sister, and Janine knows she isn’t faking. Then she feels it too.

“Probably just caught on something,” she says uncertainly. “Don’t pull too hard and break the string!”

“Are we going to say it?”

Dani pauses, thinking. “May as well,” she murmurs, looking furtively about as if someone from school might be watching. “We’re here now.”

“Ok. You do it. I can’t”

“Baby!” mocks Dani, but Janine notices her voice wobbles a little as she calls out, “Whoever’s there, tell me who my mom is going to marry!”

They pause, their hands tight on the string. Above them, the wind plays chase around the building. Otherwise, silence.

“See,” snorts Dani, “I told you it was stupid. We could be–”

But she doesn’t get any further, because the string gives a huge wrench, and Janine is dangling down into the gaping pit, her scream echoing weirdly from the blackness inside.

“Janine! Hold on!” Dani scrabbles at her sister’s legs, panicked, and Janine’s screams rise higher, her feet thrashing as she fights something inches away, that Dani can’t see.

“Daniiiiiii!” Janine’s voice is swamped by a horrid grating sound, like heavy stones grinding. Panic plays tricks on Dani’s ears, so that it sounds like a harsh, rasping voice cries out from the dark pit, “Meeeeee.”

She clings on desperately, but Janine’s body pitches further down into the chasm, until all Dani has to hold onto is her feet in their polka dot runners.

“Meeeeee!” It comes again, the grinding, shrieking sound of stone on stone. Dani screams and holds tight to the shoes but they collapse in her hands as her sister’s feet slide out of them and she disappears into the darkness.

“Janine!”

Dani leans down into the gap as far as she dares, but all she can see is darkness, all she can hear is that awful grinding screech. There is no splash. She thinks and thinks about it later, and she’s quite sure about that.

“Janine!”

Helplessly she tugs the string back up, some childish hope in her that her sister will come with it somehow. But all that’s left on the end of the twine is the wedding ring, slicked with slime and leaf mould, and something stuck through the centre of it.

It’s long, and thin and grey, with the shape of a twig and the texture of stone, and Dani sits staring at it for a long time before her wits come back enough to let her run inside and sob out what’s happened to Grandma.

All the time the police are searching with their dogs and their flashlights, sending divers on ropes down into the scar in the ground, she stares at it, like it might explain things. It looks like a bony finger.

She keeps it, for a full year, as if it’s the clue that might bring her sister back. Long after the police have stopped looking, and the company that owns the building fills in the gully with cement. Long after Mom dries her eyes and starts going out in the evenings again.

On Halloween night, Mom brings someone home for Dani and Grandma to meet.

“Dani, this is Peter. He’s been a good friend to me since… since your sister disappeared.” Mom can’t meet Grandma’s eyes, and Dani knows it’s because she blames her for falling asleep while she was supposed to be watching them. Dani flinches. If anyone’s to blame, it’s her. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Janine’s feet sliding into darkness, hears that grating noise, like stone teeth grinding.

Then Dani looks up at the man Mom has brought around to Grandma’s, and there’s something about him that sends a cold trickle down her back, like dirty water. His eyes are granite grey, and there’s an ashy sheen to his skin. When he smiles, “Pleased to meet you at last, Dani,” she catches a sneering rasp in his voice, like he’s laughing at a private joke.

He holds out his hand to shake, and his skin’s dry and dusty, callouses on his palm as hard as rock. Those grey eyes stay on Dani’s face the whole time, watching, but out of the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of his other hand, before he hides it behind his back.

Its ring finger is missing.