Seven Days. Alex Lake

      Which meant it was one week until the twenty-third of June.

      Seven days away. That was all. Seven more days until it happened. She had been trying to ignore it, but seeing it there, the very next Saturday, made that impossible.

      It was a wonder she had the calendar at all. She had started keeping it on the fifth day after she had been locked in this basement. If she hadn’t, there was no doubt she would have completely lost track of how long she’d been held captive. There had been times – terrible, terrible times – when she had been unable to record the passing days and weeks as accurately as she would have liked. But as it was, she knew more or less how much time had passed, how many years – eleven, soon to be twelve – since she had seen her parents and brother and older cousin, Anne, who she had been on the way to meet when she made the mistake of speaking to the man in the car that slowed to a stop next to her.

      When she’d started the calendar, she’d had no idea that more than a decade later she would still be using it. She’d expected – foolishly, as it turned out – to be back with her family and friends well before this much time had gone by, although even after five days she was starting to understand that this might be something that lasted longer than she could have ever anticipated. She was glad she had the calendar though, glad she had asked for some paper and a pencil – the pencil was a short, yellow one from Ikea, she recalled – and sketched out a calendar in tiny figures on one side. It was her only link to the outside world. Even though it was not totally accurate, on the days she thought were the birthdays and anniversaries of her friends and relatives, she imagined them having parties and opening presents, and in doing so, she felt, in a way, that she was with them.

      Since Max was born, the calendar had assumed a new importance; she’d become obsessed with ensuring it was accurate. Her son – named after the boy in Where the Wild Things Are, because the storybook Max was able to escape his room through a magic door and travel to the island where the Wild Things lived, and freedom was something she longed for her little boy to experience – had been born on 23 June 2015. And ever since that day she’d had one dread eye on his third birthday.

      On the day her first son, Seb, turned three, the door to the basement had opened and he – the man whose name she still did not know and whom she thought of only as ‘the man’ – had come in. Unsmiling, as usual, but with a nervousness which was new.

      He pointed at her son. At his son.

      Give him to me, he said.

      Why? she replied.

       Just give him to me.

       No.

       I want to show him the world. I’ll bring him back later.

      She refused again.

       It’s his birthday. I’ll get him ice cream. Take him to a park. Think of what you’re denying him.

      She knew it was close to his birthday. At that point, the calendar was missing a few days here and there, but back then she hadn’t thought it mattered.

      And it would be nice for him to have a treat. So she agreed.

      It was the last time she saw her firstborn. The next time the man came to the room he was alone.

      She asked for Seb hundreds – thousands, maybe – of times, but he just shook his head, refusing to say where her boy was. Once, he told her, Don’t worry, he’s safe, but she didn’t believe it. If a three-year-old boy had suddenly appeared in his life, people would have asked where the child came from, who the mother was. There was no way he wanted those questions, so she thought she knew what had happened.

      The man had made the problem disappear.

      He’d taken her little boy and killed him, then disposed of his body somewhere it would never be found.

      Beside herself with grief, she’d lost weight – a lot of weight, enough that her skin grew loose and she could almost see the shape of the bones in her arms and legs – but it didn’t stop the man coming to the basement and gesturing to the bed in the corner with that curt little nod of his, then waiting for her to lie down and undress before he lay on top of her and did what he did while she closed her eyes and waited for it to be over and for him to be back upstairs in his house where she didn’t have to look at him.

      And, of course, the thing she had feared most came to pass. Another child. She tried to stop it. Tried to starve the baby to death inside her, but all that happened was she grew thinner and thinner herself until the man figured out what was going on and forced her to eat. Why, she didn’t know. Why he wanted the baby to be born was a mystery to her, but then most of what he did was a mystery to her. How could you understand a man who locked a fifteen-year-old girl in a basement for years, then stole her son? Why even try?

      And then the new baby was born. A boy again. Pink and beautiful and red-haired. She hadn’t wanted him, but now he was there she loved him uncontrollably. Leo, she called him. Leo the lion, with his mane of red hair.

      He was different to Seb. Smaller. More watchful. Quicker. By the time he was two he could talk, whole sentences. At two and a half he could read the alphabet. She had taught him by writing out tiny letters on a scrap of paper.

      At three he was gone. On his birthday, the man came. He pointed at Leo.

      Give him to me, he said.

      No, she replied. Not this time.

      Yes, he said, in his heavy, slow voice. Yes.

      This time she fought, but it was no use. It had never been any use, not since the first time she had tried and he had taught her – in the most awful, awful way – never to try again. But she had. She had held Leo to her chest, but the man hit her and forced her on to her back and held his forearm against her throat then prised her arms apart until he had Leo and she was unconscious. The last thing she saw before she passed out was her beautiful boy wriggling from his arms and running away.

      But there was only one place for Leo to go, and he went there.

      Through the open door and up the stairs, to the place the man lived.

      The next time she saw him she didn’t bother asking where Leo was. There was no point.

      And then, as though the universe was punishing her, the cycle repeated itself. The door opening. The nod at the bed. The disgusting act.

      Then the missed period and the cramps and the feeling of being bloated and uncomfortable. And nine months later, another baby.

      Another boy.

      Max, after the boy in Where the Wild Things Are.

      Max, the curly-haired, ever-smiling, bright-eyed button of joy who she loved with an intensity that surpassed anything she had felt before, even with Seb and Leo, if only because since the day he had arrived she had known she would only have three years with him, three short years into which she had to cram a lifetime of love.

      Max, who would turn three on Saturday, 23 June.

      She looked at him, sleeping on the mattress they shared, spread-eagled on his back, mouth slightly open and she shook her head.

      It couldn’t happen again. It couldn’t.

      But it would. She was powerless. The man would come and open the door and take Max from her, whatever she did. And even if she stopped him somehow, it would only be a temporary respite. He would put sleeping pills in her food or knock her unconscious and take her little boy.

      She couldn’t fight him every day of Max’s life.

      And so she had seven days left. Seven days with her son.

      Seven days until he was ripped from her arms.

      Or seven days to find a way to save him.