Free We've Come to Take You Home by Susan Gandar

corset was jerked up bit by bit over her hips until the top was digging into the skin below her breasts. She looked down, throughsomebody else’s eyes, powerless to stop what was happening, as her hands tightened the laces, forcing her chest out and her waist in.
    Fingers she didn’t recognise did up the ten buttons on the long-sleeved, floor length, brown dress. They tied an apron securely around her waist. Her feet slid themselves into a pair of lace-up, black leather ankle boots lying on the floor beside a chair.
    Her hands straightened the bed and plumped up the pillow. Her feet walked her over to the door. Her right hand opened it. On the floor, directly outside the bedroom, was a glass jar. Inside the jar was a single white rose.
    Sam opened her eyes. Her heartbeat slowed. She was inside her own body, in her own room and she was lying on her bed. The ceiling was not too low. There were two windows and brown carpet on the floor. And the door leading out onto the landing was exactly where it should be, on the other side of the room. And it was seven o’clock at night. Not five o’clock in the morning.
    She’d definitely heard those chimes. But her mother had always refused to have a grandfather clock or anything similar; the constant chiming, on the hour, every hour, would keep them awake all night. And the chimes had sounded very distant. As though they were coming from a long way down in a much larger house, the sort of house that had attics, a basement and several floors. Not the modern, brick box type of house Sam and her parents lived in.
    She slid off the bed and padded over to the window. The lights along the promenade always came on at sunset, as late as eight o’clock in the summer and as early as four o’clock in the winter. Today was Sunday, it was November, and the wind was howling in off the sea and there they were, twinkling away off into the distance, even though there was nobody around.
    The first time she’d been at the fair, on the ghost train,sitting in the cab with Leo. The second time, she’d been running down the road, trying to reach her father’s car. She hadn’t really thought about it, she’d been so worried about the accident, her father being in hospital, whether he would ever come home again, but now this slip into another world had happened again. And this time when she was asleep, in her bedroom, safe inside her own home.
    She opened her bedroom door. There was no glass jar and no white rose. She padded down the landing. The door to her parents’ bedroom was closed. She raised her hand to knock and then lowered it. She should let her mother rest.
    She went on, slowly, down through the silent house. The rain started as she entered the kitchen, a single drop, then several, then a squall. She pulled down the blind and closed the curtains.
    It could have been any other Sunday evening. The kitchen was filled with the smell of her mother’s chicken casserole simmering in the oven. Apples, bananas and oranges were neatly stacked in the blue and white bowl her parents had brought back with them from Morocco and a bunch of lilies, pink ones, were sitting in a glass vase on top of the bookcase which contained her mother’s constantly expanding collection of cookery books.
    A bottle of red wine was sitting there, opened and only partly finished. She poured herself a glass. She took one sip. And then a second sip. There were some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and a packet of mixed peppers in the fridge. She would make a salad and then go upstairs and wake her mother.
    She sliced up the green and then the red pepper. And she poured herself another glass of wine. She cut the cucumber into thick slices and then cut each individual slice into four. She poured herself a third glass of wine.
    She couldn’t remember drinking her very first glass of wine. It was probably on holiday, with her parents, perhapswhen they were on one of their camping trips