The owner breathed deeply, counted to ten. Then returned to the diary.

The door creaks open. The girl smells that sickly, arresting smell. She stiffens, unable to move. She knows what is about to happen: he hasn’t been down for days.

She looks over at the wooden doll but she is hiding under the table. Good. She doesn’t want the doll to see her.

The girl closes her eyes and thinks of the church spire, just visible beyond the trees. Standing on the boxes, she can see out across the valley and to the top of the church. She finds comfort in this simple image, just an upside-down ice cream cone above a tree. But it makes her calm. It gives her hope.

‘Sweetie,’ the woman calls. ‘Sweetie. Are you dressed, sweetie?’

The girl does not reply but stands and opens her eyes, although the woman cannot see them. She trembles, feels hands around her shoulders and through her hair. Her pigtails are detangled and her hair straightened. It is long, like the princesses in the book, so it covers her back. Make-up is applied to her face, around her eyes, over her lips and cheeks. The girl hates make-up. A bow is tied in her hair and she is instructed to stand with her legs wide apart against the wall and look ahead, into the horizon.

‘Don’t blink, sweetie,’ the woman urges. Her grin reminds the girl of the witch who delivers the apple to Snow White. ‘He doesn’t like it when you blink.’

The girl does as she is asked. She waits. Until the door opens and the woman leaves. Even when she is alone, she stands with her arms apart and her fingers straight and tense.

She waits, until the door opens again, and as he comes in, she lets out a small gasp of stale air.

The owner placed the diary back down and went into the bathroom. Stared into the mirror. The face that stared back was sallow and weathered. The owner had observed that most people grew into their skin, shedding the early pastiness of youth and burgeoning into adulthood so that their later selves appeared as mature copies of their former selves. Not so the owner, whose features had not so much matured but warped into an unrecognisable parody of his younger self, a transformation compounded by the nose and cheeks, which had been surgically reconstructed following a car crash four years ago.

The owner felt less like a person who had grown up, and more like a snake that had shed its skin, only to find that what existed underneath was an entirely new animal.

No matter. Whatever was on the outside was of little importance. The owner’s soul burn fiercely. Soon it would be time. For justice, for balance to be restored. For redemption. For retribution.

And when the whole world knows the truth, there will be no place to hide.

Chapter 25

Chapter 25