RLG9 - A breath of fresh air


Nobody was shocked to discover that Annabelle’s parents were murderers, all of us kids knew it.
But what do you expect when the whole neighbourhood kept losing animals and family members over the years, when only Annabelle’s kin seemed to escape the shadow of death, it just took us all a while to realise it.

For ten years, as I grew up all I heard were whispers of people vanishing without a trace. As boys we’d sit on a porch in the evening sipping our cokes’ and talk about the recently missing person and then one of us would remind the gang ‘what about Danny Williams, who lived close to there, an’ he vanished five years before!’

No one was ever found, it was as if people just up and went, got on a bus or were taken by flying saucers. We boys truly believed that aliens were responsible for some of the disappearances, we even thought we saw strange lights in the sky sometimes.
Would you believe it, they sent a News Crew round to try and film a sighting, but we never seemed to get the strange lights with all that commotion going on.

As we got older, and began to mix with the adult members of my neighbourhood, we all began to hear more of the missing people, with our growing awareness, we all began to notice which families had escape the bogeyman.
I was one of the lucky ones, both of my sisters, my mum and my dad were all still very much around and active in my life. Only two of our crew of eight boys also had losses, the rest of us were constantly watchful for the next disappearance.

About a year later one of my gang lost his dad, Bing’s father like all the rest went out one evening for ‘a breath of fresh air’ and didn’t come back. Bing was really upset and as a group we tried to console him, but what do young boys know of helping someone grieve and what to say at the right times.
It felt as if suddenly our little gang was being targeted, only two boys from the eight had complete families, Johnny and me. We were terrified and spent the nights watching from our windows to try and spy the culprit, hoping to prevent another one of our loved ones going missing.

Four weeks later we moved out of Charity Valley, we move clean over the other side of the county. My father had decided he wasn’t going to wait around for one of his family to disappear and a little while after that the exodus began in earnest.
No one from Charity Valley moved close to one of their old neighbours, it was as if everyone was suspicious of those from the Valley, no one quite knew what had happened to all those missing people, and that didn’t rule out any one from being the cause.

It seemed we all kept tabs on the goings on in Charity Valley, all the kids were morbidly tied to the mystery of the neighbourhood. I know my mother and father kept a healthy awareness of our old valley, but they tried to move on and make our world normal again.

With all the locals moving away, only Annabelle’s family remained in Charity Valley, steadfast and alone. Later other families began to move into the empty houses, Charity Valley began to bustle again.
Over the next few years it started again, people began to disappear and the FBI were called in, every one from the Valley was interviewed, the FBI came to our house and asked my Ma and Pa about the Valley.

Two weeks later it was all over the news, almost a hundred bodies were found, Charity Valley was an old community, built beside a cliff and cave, it turns out that the whole place was built over a network of caverns, crevasses and a huge natural gas pocket.
What the FBI say is that the pocket of gas was poisonous and sometimes it vented through a crack near some of the crevasses, people got caught in the gas release, suffocated and fell into the crevasses.

Some years later the local sheriff caught Annabelle’s parents pushing a body into a crevasse…
Apparently Annabelle’s parents went for late night walks, they’d meet one of their neighbours while out walking and take them to where the gas vented, then push the body into the crevasse.
When asked why, Annabelle’s parents stated that Charity Valley was on a land claim owned by their great great great grand father, that the land was theirs and every one living there was a trespasser.