Chapter 21
Sadie blinks her eyes open. For a moment she’s disorientated. Music is playing somewhere, but she can’t pinpoint where. Maybe her dad is playing something downstairs.
She flicks the bedside light on, sits up and swings her legs out of bed. She walks across to the window and pulls the blind. It takes her eyes a second or two to adjust. Not just because of the darkness. Because of the weirdness. What the actual fuck?
An ice-cream van is crawling slowly down the street.
It’s pink and white, and decorated with Winsom cartoon characters.
Two large plastic cornets stick out of the front like horns.
The music she can hear is being piped from a speaker on the van’s roof.
She can’t see the driver, but walking either side of the van are two figures dressed in what appear to be white hazmat suits, like CSI crossed with Mr Whippy.
The figures have flashlights strapped around their foreheads and they’re each holding a device, like some kind of scanner.
Occasionally, one of them turns and points the scanner around.
Sadie can see green lights at the end of the device.
Are they testing for something – some kind of chemical leak?
Radiation? No. Don’t be stupid, Sadie. If it was anything like that, they’d evacuate people, right? So, what the hell is going on?
The van is almost outside her house. Weirdly, the music doesn’t seem to get any louder, just the same low but persistent volume. Dad, she thinks. She needs to wake her dad up. He has to see this.
She walks across the hall, knocks on his door and eases it open. His bed is empty, duvet undisturbed. What? Has he fallen asleep downstairs again? She hurries down the stairs and into the living room. A lamp is on. Dad is a heaped lump on the sofa, slumped sideways, gently snoring.
‘Dad?’
She pads over and shakes his shoulder. ‘Dad. Wake up.’
He snuffles but doesn’t stir.
‘Dad.’ She shakes him again, harder. Still nothing. Which isn’t right. Normally, Dad wakes up at the drop of a feather. Uneasiness stirs in her stomach.
‘Dad?’ She bends down, close to his face. ‘Dad. Wake up. I need to show you something.’
She grabs his wrist and her hand closes around the Serenity band. It’s warm and pulsing slightly, as if with some kind of charge. She snatches her hand away, fighting the urge to wipe it on her shorts. Her dad murmurs sleepily and buries his face further in the cushions.
For one fleeting moment, it crosses her mind that he could be drunk, blacked out. But she can’t smell alcohol on his breath, and when Dad used to drink, it lingered around him.
This is more like he’s been drugged or something. He’s completely out of it. She pushes herself to her feet. The music drifts cheerily in from outside, singers chirping about someone to hold before they’re too old.
Of course, all of this is ridiculous. The van and those figures are probably just a cleaning team. Just another of Serenity’s quirky ways of doing stuff. Either that or she’s dreaming.
She walks across to the living-room window and peers out cautiously. She frowns. She can only see one figure standing by the van now. Where’s the other one?
And then she hears it. A brisk knock, knock on the front door. She jumps. Shit. Her heart wedges in her throat. The knocking comes again. She cranes her neck sideways. A shadowy blur of white is just visible through the bushes at the front of the house.
She tiptoes out to the hall. It’s dark, but in the light spilling out from the living room she can see that the front-door handle is moving, twisting and turning, this way and that, so hard she thinks it might come off.
Then, suddenly, it stops. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Her heart is pounding, sweat itching at the nape of her neck.
She runs back to the living room and peeks back out of the window.
Both figures are back by the van. One leans in and talks to the driver. A few seconds later, they resume their positions either side of the vehicle and the procession continues down the road.
She watches them go, relief washing over her.
It strikes her that she should try to document this.
Then she has something to show Dad. To prove it really happened.
She runs back upstairs and grabs her phone off the bedside table.
She hurries to her window and holds it up.
She’s just about to take a photo when the phone vibrates in her hand, making her jump and drop it with a clatter.
‘Shit, shit, shit.’
She picks the phone up from the floor. Unknown number. ‘Hello?’
The same distorted voice as before: ‘Never let them know you’re awake. Never let them in.’