Page 76 of Breaking the Dark

“Jessica, are you okay?”

“I actually don’t know. I just know that I am done here. The local police have taken over the case from this end, and I have work I need to do back home.”

“Jessica. What’s happened? Have you been hurt? Just tell me.”

“I’ll tell you everything when I’m back. But I have to sleep now. More than anything.”

“Well, okay. I’ll let you go. But just call me if you need anything. You’ve got me really worried over here. And with your current condition, you know, I…”

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Just message me the flight details. I’ll see you back in New York.”

She ends the call and then finally crawls into bed and into an immediate sleep.

TWENTY-EIGHT

JESSICA AWAKES A few hours later at the sound of her phone buzzing numerous times in a row. She turns on her screen and sees that it is 5:30 a.m. and that the notifications are messages from Amber, outlining the details for her return journey. A car collecting her from the hotel at nine, a flight from Gatwick Airport at two, arrival at JFK at five in the afternoon.

The final message says:

I’d love for you to talk to the twins about what you saw in Essex, about what happened when you were there. It might help them to frame their own experiences and finally start to talk about them.

Jessica sighs. How the hell is she supposed to talk to anyone about her experiences when her experiences have been wiped from her mind? She downloads some guided meditations to her phone to listen to during the flight back. She needs to find a way into her own head, to unpick and uncover the mysteries of the past twenty-four hours. But first she needs to shower and pack and get out of this place.

At eight thirty a.m., she’s sitting in the hotel reception area, watching the village through dark glasses, tapping her passport on her thigh. An automated message to her phone tells her that her car is due in thirty-two minutes, and, feeling restless, she decides to go for one last walk.

There’s a cobbled lane just behind the main street that she’s noticed earlier in the week, with the tip of a church spire just visible at its crown. According to Miss Anne Satchel’s book, this is the church that contains a plaque memorializing the children who died in the 1400s beneath Sebastian Randall’s house.

The church is nestled in front of a small green space with three benches facing toward it. It’s tiny, around twenty feet wide. Jessica steps inside, where the air is cold and cloying. Small honey-colored pews sit in rows on either side of a narrow aisle. Red velvet kneepads hang from brass hooks. At the top end of the chapel, a small altar bears a pedestal draped in an embroidered cloth, and behind that a semicircle of stained-glass windows set high up the back wall casts colored light across the floor. There’s a small wooden pipe organ to the left and a door to the right that Jessica assumes leads to the room where the priest puts on his priest outfit. The vestry. The word finds her from nowhere, and she is surprised by it.

All along the internal walls of the church are engraved plaques and memorials. Jessica sets off in a clockwise direction to read them. A quarter way around, she sees it:

In

the year of our Lord 1436

the souls of twelve of the blessed children of this parish

all gone

hearts rent

joy paused

life blighted

pain no more

in the arms of the Lord

for all their perfect eternity

The words are strangely beautiful in their simplicity, and in the way in which they vaguely form the shape of a cross, but it is an etching just beneath the words that startles Jessica. It depicts a small child, their arms outstretched from a pile of earth, reaching up toward a ray of light. It’s the same image from the sketch Jessica had found in Fox’s bedroom. She takes out her phone and photographs the image and the engraving. Below the inscription there are more words engraved in a circle around the image, in what she assumes to be Latin:

o adolescentia admiranda semper bella sitis

Admiranda.

Bella.

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