FILE 005: FREYA
Freya McCormack was Eleanor's best friend. The two were joined at the hip. Both very much alike and both incredibly similar in looks. And notice that I am talking in the past tense about Freya.
I guess when Eleanor first disappeared I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head. Why had it been my daughter? Why couldn't it have been Freya? The McCormack's had five kids anyway... God, yeah, that sounds so awful. But when you're confused and consumed with grief your mind goes to all sorts of dark places.
What was even worse is that the only thing Freya remembered, as I mentioned in my previous post, was Eleanor standing over her in the tent on that dark night on Bluebell Hill.
I guess Freya had been in shock or something, but other than the usual grief of "losing" a friend, she hadn't seemed to have been effected by anything else that may have happened that night. It wasn't until I'd bumped into Janine McCormack, Freya's mother, in Tesco one Sunday afternoon when my quest for answers took a more supernatural turn. Janine looked like a woman haunted by something. Her skin pale. A vacant look on her face as she moved from aisle to aisle, loading up her trolley with essentials. No treats.
It turns out that not long after Eleanor's disappearance at Bluebell Hill, Freya had slumped into some sort of depression, locking herself in her room and refusing to come out. She'd stopped sleeping, instead spending all night drawing pictures under her night light. Janine told me that the pictures didn't make much sense. Mostly swirls of black clouds and scribbles, but amongst the scribbles were faces. Horrible, twisted faces. But the more she drew the clearer her pictures became.
Janine was naturally concerned and had confronted Freya about the images she had drawn. On one of the few occasions that Freya had spoken she had told her mum that she had actually seen the images. They weren't just in her mind. She had seen the smoke and the demonic faces on the night that Eleanor had disappeared. That, in her own words, "the night had climbed into the tent with them."
A few nights later they had found Freya standing in the shadows outside her bedroom door. Still. Unmoving. Like she herself had been possessed.
Naturally this had reignited my resolve to find Eleanor and I asked Janine if she minded me popping around in the week to speak to Freya. Janine must have sensed the desperation in my voice to find answers so she agreed. However weird Freya's situation, I felt that it was at least a step forward. It was a doorway to some answers.
Except it would have been. I'd arrived at the McCormack's house on Gelder Rd on the Tuesday night to find the house unoccupied. The neighbours told me that they had moved out without warning on Monday morning. Two unmarked removal vans had turned up and they'd just left. They hadn't left a forwarding address or number or anything. And Freya had been carried to the McCormack's car by her dad, Ian, underneath a thick blanket.
So, I talk about Freya in the past tense because, realistically, she's gone. There's no sign of any of them on social media any more and the police didn't want to know. My first solid lead into what had happened to my daughter had been killed dead. And of course, right now, it all makes sense, doesn't it?
At least it does to me.
This Horizon group knew that something supernatural had occurred on the night on Bluebell Hill. And when Freya began to remember they made sure that neither her nor her family could talk about it. And this is just another reason for me fighting to discover the truth. Nobody should possess that much power. Nobody.
I might just be plain old Zoe Parrish, but I know what's right and what's wrong.
Now, I think it's time for me to tell you about what I found in the box buried in the bunker. Because this is when my story takes an even stranger turn...
END REPORT
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