Seasons came and went. I forgot the doctor’s promise that I would be adopted out. Seems like no one wanted an older child who had trouble with everyday ordinary tasks. I tried explaining that I was just learning those skills; I had only been born the day I’d wakened in the day room of the institution and at five years of age.
Tom Watson and his friends kept me from most of the bullies at school and those few that made it past him didn’t follow me when I escaped by climbing above them.
I climbed the ropes in the gym to the rafters, on top of the book shelves, onto the roofs, windows and ledges to retreat into a private world of my own.
I never saw Ned again. My need for an imaginary playmate or ghostly friend was pushed away in the need for simple survival. I was an orphan without a past or most memories, had discovered that to be safe, I needed to be invisible.
Suzy got older and moved into London proper, an apartment in government subsidized housing on the edge of the Moors. Traveling by the tube was beginning to become dangerous, kids were disappearing only to be found murdered in abandoned buildings, railroad crossings and lonely cut-offs to the Moors.
Tom and the three brothers had grown old enough to go out on their own and gone into a trade school, two of them had turned into hooligans and ran with the drug trade. Sometimes, I saw them cruising the street on their motor bikes and sporting thick gold chains, wearing sharp clothes and flashing big bankrolls.
They nodded to me but we kept our distance. The red headed boy who’d been my roommate had died that first year from some obscure disease; the doctors had called it leukemia. He’d wasted away to nothing, pale, white, and bruised easily. I stayed alone after that, especially after Suzy moved to the city.
I slept okay, never more than a few hours at a time. Most of my time left was spent in classes or roaming the rooftops of London like a ghost. I made it to the top of the Tower and Big Ben, unseen and untouched.
This particular night I had been awakened by a dark dream where I ran on the moors with someone chasing me. My heart galloped in terror, my breathing was a series of gasps, and I could feel my feet hitting soggy puddles of bog that sucked me down.
Waking was a sudden burst out of my bed to stand in the doorway and try to calm myself. Suzy was up and came to see what was going on.
Her hair was gray now, her eyes paled and her smoker’s growl had faded to a whisper. She had raised hundreds of us, seen us come and go, had used up all her patience and naivete.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me, cigarette dangling from her lip.
“Bad dream,” I answered. I was twelve, ashamed to admit I was still bothered by them.
“Oh yeah? What kind?”
“Something bad was chasing me through the moors.”
“You been reading the Daily Call about the Moor Murders?”
“No,” I shuddered. “Too many horrid things in the paper.”
She studied me as if she’d never seen me before. “You’re a good kid, Aidan. Not like the usual brats I’ve been given. You came from upper class. They never found your family?”
“No, Suzy. All I know is that they found me in Cheapside with a gold and emerald cross on me. The coppers kept it and gave it to the director to keep for me. They thought they could use it to trace my name but nothing ever came of it.”
“What do you want to do with your life?” she asked. “I’ve seen your forms. You’re as smart as any I’ve had, and you know languages like a native. You could go into Foreign Service, work for the government.”
“You mean be a spy like James Bond?” I was young enough to be intrigued. She laughed at that.
“Maybe. Go back to sleep. It’s only 2 a.m. and even Mr. Bond needed his sleep.”
“I’ll try.” I laid down and before too long, was back in the drama of the dream only this time, I was an observer watching someone else stalk a child and murder them.
The child’s face was clear and distinct; I saw a girl with curly brown hair, flat eyebrows, and pretty blue eyes. A dimpled chin, round face above a short, stocky body dressed in a school uniform. She carried a book bag heavy with books and wore a light coat and sensible brogues with white socks folded at the ankle.
The man who stalked her started at the train station as she got off and took the shortcut through the woods towards her house. Bordered on both sides by hedges, it was a lane that locals used to shorten the route from the depot to town.
He was taller than her, lean with good muscles and he easily held her struggling form. The sight of the knife made her faint in his arms and because he had been denied the experience of her terror, he slit her throat quickly, watched the blood spill into the mossy dirt with a thick coppery smell that excited him.
I watched as he cut her clothes neatly off, kneel between her legs and rape her. He spent an hour with the body; doing things to it I had no comprehension of what a human could do to another. When he was done, he stood, pulled up his zipper with satisfaction, and stared at the body. He was covered in blood and didn’t seem worried he might be seen.
Taking a tie out of his pocket, he tied the girl’s wrists together and dragged her deeper out into the moor, dropping her into the bog where she slowly sank out of sight.
Within minutes, all that was left of her was the blood stain and drag marks through the grass.
I woke up, screaming. Worse, it happened for the next week until I was afraid to fall asleep and walked around in a daze until both school and Suzy noticed and hauled me to the free clinic. The doctor pursed his lip, which bobbled his wart with a long gray hair, and I was fascinated by it. “He’s lost a stone in a week, Miss Mathews. His blood pressure is high, pulse rapid and he looks exhausted.”
“He’s not sleeping or eating,” she rasped. “Nightmares, every night this week. Sometimes, I can’t wake him from them.” I stared at her; I hadn’t known she’d been coming in to check on me.
“Aidan,” he addressed me. “What’s the problem?”
“What she said. Nightmares. Real,” I told him. My eyes were closing in the warm office.
“Tell me.”
“Walking on the moor,” I mumbled. “Someone’s following me. Stalking me. He grabs me, cuts my throat and then he rapes me.”
“Rapes you?”
“Well, not me exactly. I’m a girl. With curly hair, blue eyes, in a school uniform. You know, blue and green plaid skirt, green blazer with a red and gold crest on the pocket. With white socks, book bag packed with my school kit.
“He kills me, drags my body into the bog.”
“Do you know the name of this girl, Aidan?” His manner was sharp, urgent, penetrated my sleepy lethargy.
“Kitty---Caitlyn something. She wore glasses.” I yawned, felt myself spiral down into a sleep so deep that the nightmares couldn’t intrude.