Chapter 2: 2

Dear Melissa,

Why have you not done what I've asked you? Yes, I know that you haven't done what I wanted, no, needed you to. You are in danger. Please, get you and Anna out of the house, before you're both killed! Every day is more dangerous than the last, okay?

They found me again. After they attacked me the first time I didn't run away, as you would expect. My work is too important. I see now that it was a stupid mistake. All I did was minimize my time alone, you know, stay either at work with everyone else, or at home with the windows locked. Well, that wasn't going to stop them, was it? I don't know what I was thinking.

Anyway, a bit off topic. This isn't about me; this is about keeping you safe. I'm safely hidden away, but from what I've heard, you haven't changed your routine at all. I can kind of understand why, I guess. I must sound like a creep or crazy to you. But I'm nothing compared to what these people can do.

Do you think that you can stop these people simply by telling them you want nothing to do with it? It isn't going to change anything. When they send people to come find you, and they will, they won't listen to you. They won't care that you have a twelve-year-old daughter. They'll murder both of you, but only after they torture and violate you. They won't care. They have no soul, no conscience.

Please listen to what I'm saying and go to that bank. I might sound crazy now, but just following these instructions should clear anything up.

Stay safe,

Andrew

Signed 05/05/2018

She read the letter, cradling Anna in her arms. This was the day that the pattern was going to change. And it did change. Because that man intercepted the mail he sent and came to her house with the full intent to kill.

Everything this Andrew had said was true. She sat silently at the shock of it all, wanting it to simply go away, to return to a life without remorseless contract killers, old family fights and weird letters. If everything he said was true... She couldn't let that happen. Not to Anna. Not to her.

The tone of the letters had changed as well. The first letter he didn't seem too worried. He was making jokes, he was casual in his writing, nothing to suggest that she was actually in immediate danger. But something had changed. Most likely the second attack against him. He wasn't messing around anymore. He didn't give off a sense of ease. He sounded shaken.

"Mum, you're crying on my face." Melissa looked down, and saw that the tears she hadn't even realised were coming out of her had splashed into her daughter’s eyes.

"I'm sorry, Anna. Okay, we need to go."

"Why, Mum?"

Melissa wondered whether to tell Anna the whole story. On the one hand, she had just been threatened by a large man with a gun. They were lucky to be alive. It was only her quick thinking that had kept them both alive in that situation. She deserved to know the whole truth. But she was still only twelve. She was still Melissa's baby.

"I'll tell you once we get going." The internal struggle had been decided. Melissa wasn't foolish enough to think that she was still smarter than her daughter. She wasn't dumb, but when compared to Anna, there was no contest, really. Yes, she was still young. But she had an intellectual capacity far above the average adult. The intellect of an adult combined with the maturity of a twelve-year-old. Melissa grimaced. This discussion wasn't going to be pretty.

She rifled around the contents of her desk drawer, before finding the original letter sent by Andrew. She had chucked it into the garbage, but after the letters became more and more frequent, she resolved to keep one copy. Just in case. That had turned out to be one of the best decisions Melissa had ever made.

HSBC Holdings. Canary Wharf. She'd been to the Canary Wharf with Anna once, when she was seven, but she didn't remember any banks there. Did Andrew have the location wrong? Melissa started hyperventilating. The bank was the only place that could save her and Anna from the monsters hunting them, and if she couldn't find that...

She didn't want to think anymore. Just closing her eyes, she let herself go for a few seconds. The bliss. The peace. She didn't ever want to leave the place she had found inside her own head. She looked at the blank plane that she could only assume she had created in her mind. She observed the space around her, rotating to absorb everything there, until her eyes happened upon a person.

"Aah! Who are you?" he shouted.

"How did you get here? This is... my head! You shouldn't be inside me!"

"I'm not! How are you here? I don't understand."

"What do you mean? You came into my vision!"

"No, I promise I didn't. I've come here heaps of times before. I've never seen anybody else. I just assume I was the only one who could come here."

"And where is here, exactly?"

"I don't really know. I just come here to think and relax. I don't know how you came into my astral plane."

"Astral plane?"

"Yeah. You know, complete darkness, alone time in a completely different dimension..."

"No, I don't really know, but whatever. I have to get back to my daughter."

"No, please stay. I know I said this was my alone time but it's still nice to find someone else here to talk to."

"I really can't. I'm sorry." She didn't know how to escape, however. She looked back at the man, but he had disappeared. She was panicking now, in a state completely separate to her physical body, she had no clue how to move out of her mind. She looked around wildly, probing, searching for any kind of escape, all the while blocking a faint buzzing that had worked its way into her ears. It wiggled into her head, past the mental block shutting it out, and magnified, gripping on to everything in her mind, until there was nothing but the mindless white noise, threatening to drive her insane...

She shot up from a sitting position and threw up onto everything in her sight. "Mum! Mum. Are you okay?"

"I-- I don't know, Anna."

"How did you manage to fall asleep? You were literally just panicking and saying that we needed to leave and then you just zoned out!" Melissa had no answer for her daughter. Her mind was still spinning, reeling from the confusing encounter with the man. And the noise. The static that would have made her suicidal. It was awful, a buzzing that quickly turned into something else, something that could have killed her if-- "Mum! Wake up! Come on, we need to go, right?"

"Right." She rubbed at her eyes, attempting to regain the grip on her mind that the dream had taken. "Okay. Get some clothes and essentials. You have ten minutes to get everything and then we need to leave."

Anna, seemingly satisfied that her mother was back to her old self, sprinted to her room. However, Melissa wasn't quite ready to exert herself like that. She stumbled to her bedroom, knocking over a lamp on her journey, and scraped together any clothes in her room, dumping them into her suitcase. She loved that suitcase. She hated the fact that it was going to be used for a purpose that she wouldn't remember fondly, rather for a trip that she would despise for the rest of her life.

She packed her clothes, picked up her phone and Andrew's letter, and walked out of her bedroom, with far more energy and enthusiasm than she had had walking in. Anna was beside the front door, tapping her foot impatiently.

"That wasn't even close to ten minutes, Mum. Try half an hour."

"Half a-- shit." Anna opened her mouth, probably to comment on her mother’s foul mouth, but Melissa cut her off, tugging her along in a desperate attempt to get to the car, before anything else happened. Before more death happens, Melissa corrected herself.

"So, Mum. You said you would tell me about why this is happening. Are you going to?"

Melissa groaned, and rubbed her forehead, which was quickly forming a throbbing headache. "Um, yeah, Anna, just give me a minute honey." And she explained the situation. As a librarian, she saw her fair share of books, and understood how storytelling and the mind of the reader/listener worked. So, she broke the situation down, allowing for Anna's brains, but also allowing for her maturity.

Anna was shocked. And angry. "So, this guy has been telling you something like this would happen for ages, and the only way you were convinced of his honesty was a man literally shooting at us and trying to end our lives?"

"Yes, but try and see it from my perspective, Anna. A random stranger just writes you random letters about why you are going to die soon. Would you believe him?" Anna didn't answer, just sunk down into her chair and turned to the window. Melissa looked at her with a sigh. "Anna, do you remember Canary Wharf?" It was a stupid question. Anna didn't forget anything. Which made the recent events all the worse for her, knowing that she could never ever forget the terror and violence that she witnessed.

Anna just nodded. "Was there a bank there?" Anna opened her mouth to speak, but Melissa cut her off with a hand. "I don't need to know all of the banks. Just if there was one called HSBC."

"Yeah. Do you need to know the way? We're only like ten minutes away."

"Ten minutes?"

"Yes. It is on the edge of the city."

Anna directed Melissa through the convoluted streets of London. Melissa's headache was only getting worse. She hated the city. The grime, the overpopulation, it was terrible. Melissa preferred the suburbs, the towns just on the edges of the city, where she could have room to move on the streets and could go where she pleased.

The traffic slowed. Melissa had been to the city numerous times, and every time she drove through, she was stopped by traffic. "Mum, it's just there." Melissa pulled her eyes towards the building at which Anna was pointing. It was impressive, no doubt, but summarised Melissa's view of the city so well: overly intimidating and very dark. No parking spots, obviously, and two circles of the block showed only one available space there.

The rain showered on the two as they sprinted to the building they had seen, albeit with some apprehension. It wasn't the most inviting place and seemed to give off an air of overbearing power. Not any power to Melissa, but power to those with money. Melissa made a mental note never to return to the city again.

Shivering and drenched in water, they stumbled into a waiting room, which gave off a far different vibe to the exterior of the structure. They walked on a red carpet, up to a woman, who looked almost too professional. "What now, Mum?"

"Just... hang on a second. I think Andrew said something about talking to the 'receptionist'. Just wait here a second." She walked up to the woman, who didn't look up for half a minute. Melissa cleared her throat awkwardly. The woman looked up. "Oh! I am sorry! What would you like?"

This was not the reception she had been anticipating. "Uh, my name is Melissa Mercia... Is that helpful?"

If the woman looked surprised before, it was nothing to how she looked at this. "Rea- Really?"

"Yes. Really."

She looked flustered, collecting her things before whispering in a low voice. "Follow me." She walked quickly out of the room.

"Come on Anna." Anna had been focusing on the work around the walls, which ranged from artworks to certificates to groups of sporting teams. An extremely odd collection, which was the reason that it captivated Anna's interest. "Anna. Let's go."

"Coming."

They walked out of the door the receptionist had disappeared into, which lit a long hallway. They looked at the lights on the walls, watching them flicker as the other woman's heels clicked on the ground ahead of them. She disappeared into a room on the side, and Melissa and Anna swiftly followed.

"I'm glad you finally came. We were thinking you were never going to show. They were coming after you... I hope you realise you're lucky to be alive."

"I know." Melissa didn't fancy getting into a conversation with this woman. Her headache was reaching critical mass, her skull threatening to explode from the pressure. She looked at the box the woman was opening through pained eyes. Box 1921-B. Something clicked in Melissa's head.

"Hey, wait a second! That's not--"

She was silenced by a fist to the side of the head.

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