Chapter 11
Twenty-eight years earlier
Amy Fox, a four-year-old sweet little girl, loved to play in the street in front of her house with other kids from the housing estate where she lived. Back then, it was common for parents to encourage their children to play outside in the fresh air and enjoy the camaraderie in the neighbourhood they all deemed safe, and if a day went by without the sound of children’s playful games, parents would peer out the window to see if rain had forced them back indoors.
But at the end of the estate’s perimeter lay fields and thick woodland, dark and mysterious, the kind of setting found in bedtime stories. Everyone’s read those frightening tales of bogeymen and scary monsters. And the children on the estate never ventured into those woods, those spooky fairy tales always in their minds.
They feared the bogeymen, witches, and wolves, and all manner of things that happened in the stories. So they remained just outside the boundary of the woods, as if an invisible magical perimeter kept them safe. They laughed and played all day… happy, carefree, and naive.
One sunny afternoon Dick Parker changed all of that. Amy and her friend, a little boy from next door, a few years older than she, played kick-about with a big red shiny ball Amy had received for her birthday.
The little boy accidently kicked the ball too hard, and with a skewed angle it sped away from them. The two of them stood and watched it roll cheerfully along a small winding path and disappear behind trees, landing in a clump of bluebells. Without thinking, Amy chased after it. She wouldn’t normally go into the woods, but she loved that ball. It would only take a second.
At the age of nineteen, Dick Parker was a loner without friends. Abused by his step-father, ignored by his drug-addicted mother, he hadn’t learned how to socialise, how to develop relationships, or what love even was.
Dick Parker liked the woods, how the trees kept him hidden in the shadows and made him feel safe. He didn’t have to talk to anyone. He could just be himself. He liked to watch the children play. They had what he didn’t: a childhood, a fantasy world of fun and games, parents to go home to and cuddle him at night. He had nothing.
Dick Parker had a plan to get close to these children, to feel them, to be a part of their cosy world. He would sit and wait for the right moment, the moment when he could pick off a straggler from the herd and initiate his plan. They had everything. Why couldn’t he have a piece of it?
Today, little Amy fulfilled his fantasy; she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As Amy ran into the woodlands, chasing her ball, Dick snatched her. With his hand shushing her squealing mouth, he carried her to a wooden hut deep within the forest and ‘played’ with her. After a few hours, he brought her back to the edge of the woods and set her free, warning her to never tell a soul or he would come after her and give her to the bad bogeyman.
Amy ran home and obeyed, keeping quiet. She didn’t understand what had happened, didn’t have the words to explain, but instinctively knew something was wrong. She didn’t understand why. It just felt bad. She vowed never to go into the woods again.
That night, nightmares about the bogeyman triggered her first panic attack. Her heart pounded as if it might burst. She thought she was dying. When she woke in the morning, she found herself in a wet bed. The carefree little girl in her had gone.
The following week the street bustled with Police and press. Amanda May, a little girl the same age as Amy, had disappeared. A dog walker had found her body three days later. She’d been raped and beaten. The police hunted for her murderer, for the evil bogeyman, for the sick monster who’d taken poor Amanda May from her grieving parents.
In the best way she could, with limited vocabulary, Amy told her parents about the strange man in the woods and what he’d done to her. They in turn informed the police. A very empathetic and consoling lady spoke to Amy, making her comfortable in a special cosy room with toys and sofas. With a pencil and paper, Amy drew a picture of the man in the woods. She sketched a stickman with dark curly hair, surrounded by trees. She held her nose and said, “Pooh!” He smelled bad. Soon after, her parents sold their house and moved to a new place, ready to let the incident bury itself and go away. They never mentioned it again.
But Amy did. She mentioned it every night in her prayers. She wanted God to stop the bad man and made a deal with Him. If she promised to be a good girl, when she died, she wanted Him to allow her to sit on a cloud for a while before going to heaven. She wanted to be invisible, to have special powers and stop all the bad people He and the Police didn’t have time to arrest. She’d like to deliver justice to the ones that slipped through his fingers. She wanted to be like a Superhero and save lives.
Years passed. Amy grew up and went on with her life, forgetting all about her deal with God, and at times, forgot about God. But He didn’t forget her. At the age of 32, on the way to work during a heavy rush hour, she fell on the underground tube train tracks, killed instantly, devastating her family and friends. She was way too young to die.
God had kept his promise.
She opened her eyes, dazed and shocked her life had been cut short, to find she’d not been the only one to ask for the same deal.
When Amy’s spirit revived to the startling truth she no longer lay on the subway tracks, the echo of Sally’s screams ringing in her ears, she sat dazed and shocked to realise her life had been cut short. Her hands reached out, passing right through a misty whiteness, an ethereal realm holding her up in some plane she didn’t recognise. Once her eyes adjusted and her mind oriented to the new world surrounding her, she saw other spirits wander about the clouds. Out of curiosity, she waved one over.
“Err…excuse me…err…do you speak English?”
The cheery dark-headed woman giggled as she walked towards her.
“We speak a universal language here. We are all the same.”
“Where’s here?”
“This is the afterlife, the place all souls are destined. Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t.” Amy’s face screwed up in question. “What am I doing here?”
“Did you make a deal?”
Amy rubbed the back of her head as if to nudge her memory. Then it flooded back to her.
“I may have…Yes, I think…when I was a child. Do you mean it worked?” she beamed. “Bloody hell…how effing fantastic…oops, sorry, I guess no swearing here.”
The woman waved away her apology.
“Yes, it worked. He always keeps His promises. Everyone here made a deal with Him. This is the world network of the Fallen, of souls involved in the business of dishing out karma. You’ve got work to do.”
The woman turned away and walked on, her words smacked Amy with such intensity she sat with her mouth wide open, staring into the mist, taking in the world around her.
“Oh my god.”
It didn’t take long for her to become acquainted with the other Fallen hovering the skies or learn the rules of the business, how they were to conduct themselves in serving comeuppance to evil, the ones who thought they’d escaped judgment.
Although excited to crack on and fight the good fight, Amy wasn’t too happy with the list of rules. Bad people didn’t play by the rules, so why the hell should she?