The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

She was still screaming when the police found her, hours later, minus her
slippers and covered with mud, huddled among some trees in the park, almost
hoarse now, so that the noise she made was more of a wheezing moan than a
scream, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
After that she was wrapped up in warm blankets and treated kindly by lots of
people who made stupid noises at her and talked in near baby-talk in a pathetic
attempt to “get down to her level,” as someone (even Caroline, years later) might
have put it. She was made to tell her story again and again, but still she screamed
a lot, and therapists, in a hospital, gave her drugs to make her sleep, and told her
when she woke up that everything had been a bad dream.
But no one believed her story. Her father was gone, yes, but there was no trace
of blood, and nothing was broken in the house, and her mother, on visits, refused
to explain further. She overheard the doctors and her mom and someone who
might have been a lawyer talking about “desertion” once, but when everybody
realized Caroline was listening, they shut the door to her room and went down
the hall to the lounge.
What really must have been a dream, Caroline concluded, was the time her
mother slipped into her room after visiting hours and sat down beside her bed in
the dark. Mother was crying, which was amazing, and she whispered, “Honey, I
want you to know that whatever happens, I still love you.”
Then Caroline turned and buried her face in her pillow and screamed as hard as
she could, but no one heard her, and Mother was gone.
That was the greatest discovery in her life so far, that if she screamed into her
pillow and no one heard her, she could pretend she was getting better and would
be allowed to go home, and she could keep her secret from her mother, from the
therapists, from everyone.
Her secret, which indeed she had kept, even through the relentless
interrogations, was the real reason she made so much noise in the first place,
why she screamed—into her pillow now, unheard by everyone else, which was
actually much better.
It was because if she screamed loudly enough, it was like punching through a
barrier into another world, and sounds came back to her, not echoes, but
answers. She was conversing with something or someone very far away, and she
had to shout to make herself heard. Many nights she would scream into her
pillow for a while, then lie awake for hours, listening to the darkness make its
reply, comforting her and soothing her, telling strange stories and promising the
answers to things she didn’t understand.