Free Panic by K.R. Griffiths Page A

stomach suddenly did not feel good at all.
    Jeanette had fallen straight into the plat e glass greenhouse belonging to the neighbours; the smashed shards tearing into her left leg near her hip, shearing it almost clean off.
    The horror of the moment would stay with Rachel forever, the sickening twist of fate, the way the world turned upside down in an instant. The way a brilliant summer's day could suddenly feel so very cold.
    There was so much blood, its metallic stench filling the air. Rachel screamed with her friend then, screamed until the neighbours and her father rushed into their gardens, their faces ashen as they saw little Jeanette torn apart in the wrecked greenhouse.
    The ambulance came promptly, and the doctors were able to sew the decimated leg back together. Jeanette, it turned out, would be fine. She limped for a while, and heights would make her uneasy for the rest of her days, but the physical damage was not as calamitous as it appeared.
    For Rachel though, things were never quite the same. She didn't speak much to Jeanette after that, and they slowly drifted apart, occasionally crossing paths in high school, their meetings marked by embittered stares and simmering anger that they didn't truly understand, and could never overcome.
    If anyone were to ask Rachel – and as a teenager rebelling more than most, they often did – what it was that caused her violent, rage-filled outbursts, she would struggle to put it into words, but the image of that day would always float across her mind. That bright August morning was the moment her childhood really died, the moment at which, on some subconscious level, she began to understand that life is like a fire: comforting, warming, nurturing, and ready to burn the instant you let your attention drift.
    All of those deeply buried emotions raced to the surface and delivered a sucker punch as Rachel looked at the pool of blood on the floor: the smear that led to her parents' basement. A blow hard enough to knock the air clean out of her, leaving her gasping; her vision blurred by hot tears.
    The blood belonged to her father. She knew it instinctively, and felt a small pang of fearful shame as she acknowledged to herself that she hoped she was wrong, and that whatever misfortune had happened in the kitchen, it had befallen her mother instead.
    The knots in her stomach told a different story.
    The basement.
    Her eyes fixed on the door, on the bloody hand print that adorned it like a Christmas decoration from hell. The long, glistening smear of blood that led to it.
    Someone had been hurt, and had dragged themselves into the basement. Rachel knew that she should be thinking about the why of it: the obvious implications of an injured person retreating into a dark prison, rather than seeking out help, but for now all she could think was that it was Daddy's blood, and that there was a slim chance that he might still be alive.
    Hands trembling, she stepped carefully over the blood and reached for the handle of the basement door. The metal felt cool and familiar in her hands, and memories of all the times she had walked down the narrow stairs in the past, helping her mother with the laundry, flooded back into her mind, jarring her with their familiarity in th e suddenly alien and hostile environment.
    For a moment she held the handle and stood still, head cocked slightly, straining to hear something beyond the door, hoping that she might hear her father's voice perhaps, calling faintly for help. Terror built up inside her, the fear at what she might see upon opening the door waging a silent war against her belief that her father was down there, injured, maybe dying.
    She threw the door open and found herself confronted by a black hole, as though the bright kitchen had opened a hungry mouth, ready to swallow her whole. The light from the kitchen illuminated a handful of bare concrete steps leading down, disappearing into impenetrable gloom.
    And now she could hear something. Soft,