The Church
Chapter 1

No one believed their story. Why would they? The newspapers painted the four of them as dramatic conspirators who were perverting the case with fantastical stories to gain some fame. I didn’t agree with this though; if this had been true, surely they’d have been happy with the outcome. The girls I saw in the months following the incident were certainly not happy; anything but. They oozed sadness in their appearance and their eyes were cold, frozen with terror.

The newspapers never reported much to do with Annabel. There wasn’t much to say. Apart from how her life was lived before. They told of a popular, young girl with a promising future. Pictures of a rosy cheeked, blue eyed, blonde beauty were splashed all over the papers and tele for weeks; telling the story of the 16 year old who had loved music and dance and did well in school. She’d been going to college after school to study performing arts and had hopes to one day dance in a west end show. How sad it all was, they’d said. A life that could have been so great might never be lived.

It was sad of course, I’m not saying that it wasn’t. But I hated the way it was embellished for the news. People who hadn’t even known Annabel that well were suddenly on the news telling tales about how she had touched their lives in some way. The local newsagent got me the most. He was shown on the news reminiscing about the time she was short the full price of a pack of biscuits and cycled all the way home and back again to give it to him. He’d had a tear in his eye. The coverage that really made my heart bleed though was the clip of Annabel at 14 dancing in a school performance. They’d edited it so that she spun whimsically in slow motion. It finished on a still of her face smiling gleefully.
They never had much new to report about the case. Just the portrayal of the four lunatic, malicious girls that were ‘connected’ in some way. They never said that they’d gone to that Church together out of friendship. Just somehow implied that they’d been up to something sinister there and that now they were telling lies and perverting the investigation for some personal gain.

They never had anything new to report because the police and medical team never had any new information. Weeks after Annabel was first found, nothing had come to light about the condition she was found in. She was still perfectly in fine medical condition; brain still fully active; but still unconscious. No medical reason could be found for why she wouldn’t wake up and there was no evidence in the Church that gave any hints as to what had happened. More over the story the girls told about what happened that night was so fantastical that no one would believe them. They thought they were making it up.

The basics they knew to be true: they knew that Annabel had told her parents, my parents that she was going out to meet her friends; they knew that they all met up at Emma’s; and they knew that they had all then gone to the old abandoned church that sat on the hill behind Emma’s farm. They even knew that they’d taken tools for a magickal ritual: candles; little stones with strange markings on; bowls; oils; cloths; a strange blunt knife etc. The girls told the police that they had gone to perform a séance. Once they’d began the ritual though, things started happening that they couldn’t control and in their terror they ran from the Church. However, half way down the road they’d realised Annabel wasn’t with them so they went back for her. That is when they said they found her, lying in the middle of the Church, unconscious. They tried to wake her but couldn’t and so ran in search of help. That’s all the police knew.

Our parents were not quite the same after the incident. They struggled to come to terms with having a child in hospital because no one could tell them why she was there. There was no closure or definitive answer. They became these sort of unknown beings to me. We all sunk into a sort of unspoken routine. No one mentioned Annabel or what had actually happened, except to enquire after her latest condition. We’d get up, do our morning chores, I’d go off to school and my mum would go off to Annabel. My father didn’t ever really do anything, except everything he’d ever done. He still did all the work he had to do, still fed the animals, still cleaned out the sheds, still fixed things that were broken, but he never did it with a smile on his face or with anything to say. We all went about in silence.

School was strange, it was the noisiest part of my day and yet I never got talked to their either. I’d never been particularly popular, not like Annabel. I hadn’t really fitted in. I listened to out of date music, wrote poetry in an old tatty notebook, didn’t watch the TV programs everyone else did or go out to any of the clubs that the others did either. I was neither pretty nor plain. I had mousy hair and murky blue eyes, they didn’t shine like hers. I often wondered if we were actually related, we were so dissimilar in so many ways. We’d never really fallen out but there was an unspoken agreement between us that we didn’t get on. We didn’t really talk, or laugh together, or do things that sisters do. We just coexisted in the house we shared and at school we didn’t even acknowledge one another. Since that night in early February, people at school were scared to acknowledge me too. People I had once had a vague friendship with gradually stopped associating with me, some groups would stare at me and mutter under their breaths as I walked past and even the teachers tentatively approached me in case, I assume, I broke into floods of tears and they’d have to comfort me.

The four other girls didn’t have it easy either. If anything, they had it ten times worse. Not only were they avoided, but having been used to being popular and having tightknit friendship groups, they became social outcasts. They were ridiculed by the other kids in school who taunted them for telling tales. Voodoo dolls were stuck to the fronts of their lockers, and pentagrams were drawn on their belongings. Horrible chants were shouted at them from across the halls and I even saw Sarah spat on once.

Sarah, Emma, Daisy and Ffion. Those were their names. Together with Annabel they’d been close friends. But after the night when they’d fled in terror, they stopped talking even to one another. Day after day they grew further apart, unable to comfort each other or make sense of the whole thing between them. Soon, they stopped walking side by side or sitting at the same table at dinner. They retreated into their own individual bubbles and never looked up.

That’s what I didn’t get, if they had indeed conspired and came up with ‘the story’ between them so that they could get their fifteen minutes of fame, why didn’t they talk about it? They didn’t talk to the press, or news crews, didn’t embellish the events of that night for expectant school kids. They kept themselves to themselves and never told their story to anyone but the police. Nobody would have even known what they had said in their statements if the police hadn’t given some of the details in a press release. The headline had read “Girl unconscious after pagan séance stunt goes wrong.”

Six months after that night in February, school broke for summer, the girls who’d been in their final year graduated and I knew I’d never see them again. Annabel had still not woken up. My parents were still living a half-life. And I was still alone.