21 Days

By M K Farrar

Stay home.

 

For Lauren Kidwell, lockdown doesn't seem like much of a change to her normal life.

As an author, living by herself in a remote cottage in the Devonshire moorland, she works from home anyway.

She's used to being alone.

Even so, she finds the thought of the next twenty-one days daunting. It's not helped by a sudden bout of writer's block, and panic attacks that occur each time she tries to work.

As the days pass, and her sense of isolation grows, Lauren starts to see things. A footprint that doesn't belong to her in the flowerbed beside an open window. Items disappear only to reappear in a different spot. The food from her pantry goes missing.

Is Lauren's overactive imagination searching for an outlet and so is playing tricks on her?

 

Or is she not as alone as she thinks?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warwick House Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223819103

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The Final Day

My bare feet pounded on the spongy moss and heather-covered moorland. Every step sent pain spearing up my neck and thudding across my bruised face, but I couldn’t slow. My breath heaved in and out of my lungs, the air whistling through my constricted throat. My pulse whooshed like running water in my ears.

The sounds I made helped to disguise those of the person chasing me.

It was hard to believe such horror was happening in such a beautiful place. I’d always sought sanctuary here. Before our world changed, the open space of the moorland had brought me peace.

I pumped my arms by my sides, the knife handle clutched tight in my fingers. I pushed myself on. Sheer adrenaline kept me going. I didn’t even dare to look over my shoulder for fear of discovering a hand reaching for me to haul me back.

The moorland was on an incline now, the upwards slope forcing my muscles to work even harder. The backs of my calves threatened to cramp, and I leaned forwards, trying to increase my momentum.

My breathing grew harsher, and my heart thumped against the inside of my ribs. My head was spinning with adrenaline, but I kept going. Determination solidified in my veins. I was going to end this.

Out here, there was nowhere for them to hide. It was too exposed. Once I reached the top of the rocky outcropping of the tor—the exposed granite hilltop—they’d have no choice but to face me.

I risked a glance back over my shoulder, but it was so brief, I didn’t see anything solid. It was like catching sight of movement out of the corner of your eye—a sharp shock to the heart, that fresh spurt of adrenaline.

My foot caught on uneven ground, pitching me forwards. I circled my arms to keep my balance, the horror of falling filling me. If I fell, the person chasing me would be on top of me within seconds. Somehow, I managed to stay upright, and I kept on running.

The moorland stretched on for miles all around me. Silvery roads, that had been deserted for weeks now, wound through the patchwork of green, brown, and yellow. The white contrails of planes that usually crisscrossed the clear azure of the sky were noticeably absent. I’d been living in what felt like a post-apocalyptic world over these past three weeks, and that hadn’t even been the thing that had frightened me the most.

The terrain grew steeper still, and I fought to keep up my pace. My lungs and throat burned, and I gasped and gulped the air, trying to draw in more oxygen to keep me going.

They were gaining, though. Now the rasp of their breath sounded loud and horrifyingly close, as did the steady thump of their footsteps on the ground. My brain screamed for me to stop and rest, but I couldn’t.

If I stopped now, I’d die.

Day One

Three weeks.

Those were the words coming from the Prime Minister’s lips as he sat behind his desk on the television, his hands primly linked on the table in front of him. He was addressing the nation, telling us how we were going to stop the spread of the virus that was killing thousands. It was the amount of time we all needed to stay inside for.

It didn’t sound like a lot.

Twenty-one days. Not even a month.

I had potatoes in my cupboard that had been around longer.

Yet, right now, the thought of the next twenty-one days daunted me.

The virus was spreading. Thousands of new cases every day. Thousands of deaths happening overnight.

Over the past few weeks, I’d watched the news, as many had, with growing disbelief. At first, it had been with an eyeroll, commenting how all this would be over in a few weeks and we’d never hear the name ‘coronavirus’ again, but my scepticism had faded in direct correlation with my rising dread. It had been like a snowball, one that seemed to move faster with every passing day. Now we’d been instructed to stay inside, except to get food or medicine or to take one form of exercise a day—either alone or with our household members.

I exhaled a shaky sigh, trying to steady my nerves and, with my elbows on my knees, pressed the balls of my palms against my eyes. I was sitting on my twelve-year-old sofa in my low-ceilinged lounge, with its thick, cob walls and deep windowsills—deep enough for me to fill with cushions, so I could sit with a cup of coffee and gaze out across the surrounding moorland. I loved this place, but now my home had become a prison.

No, I was overexaggerating. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t allowed to leave completely. I could still go outside, take a walk or a bike ride once a day.

Like prisoners did.

Come on, Lauren, get it together.

I gave myself a shake, trying to clear my mind. My normal lifestyle was perfect for this situation. I was a writer. I loved solitude. Why else would I have chosen to live in this spot on Dartmoor, Devon, surrounded only by moorlands and forests? I liked to be on my own.

Perhaps it was simply that I was normally alone out of choice, but now that solitude was being forced on me. Maybe that was the part I was struggling with. The lack of ability to control my own choices.

The few routines I had during the day were coming to a halt. Though I was remote, I made use of all the local deliveries—from milk, to my veg box, and the meat box, too, from a different local supplier. Plus, the postman would still come once a day, meandering up the narrow roads, parking at the gate, and walking the track to the cottage where he’d often stop to have a chat.

That was all over now. The milk and veg box providers had already written to say they were only delivering to more local customers. Since the supermarket shelves had been getting emptier by the day, and people had stopped wanting to go into them, the delivery companies had been inundated with business. The post might still arrive, but there was no way the postman was stopping to talk to anyone. He must be so worried, going house to house, touching everyone else’s gates and letterboxes, wondering if this was the house that would have the virus, which he would then potentially take back to his family.

I would be fine, I mentally reassured myself. I’d always been a natural hoarder, stocking up on essentials, just in case. That I had plenty of supplies had nothing to do with the virus. I always needed to be prepared for any situation where I wouldn’t be able to get to the nearest shops, which were a good thirty-minute drive away in Okehampton. Things were always happening here that made it difficult to travel—floods, snow, even my old Range Rover breaking down. In the four years since I’d lived here, buying in bulk had become a habit. Besides, who wanted to drive half an hour to the shops every time they ran out of something? Certainly not me.

If the worst came to the worst, I also had my chicken coop in the back garden. Not that I intended on eating any of the pets I’d rescued from an egg producer, but the girls would keep me in plenty of eggs. I often had so many, I set up a loyalty box at my front gate for the tourists and locals who passed by. With no one travelling now, I guessed I was going to be up to my neck in eggs within the next couple of weeks.

Unsure what to do with myself, I left my living room, where the television was located, and wandered across to the other side of my eighteenth-century cottage, to the small reception room I’d turned into an office not long after I’d first moved in. The floorboards creaked beneath me, and I trod cautiously, certain that one day my foot would go right through one of them. My computer sat on the dark wooden desk that was a rescue from a house sale several years ago. On the far wall, bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling.

I’d dedicated one shelf to my own books—I always jokingly referred to them as my babies, since I’d never had any actual children of my own, and at the grand old age of forty-two, and still distinctly single, I most likely never would have any either.

Taking a strange kind of comfort in their presence, I ran my fingers across the spines of my paperbacks. Lauren Kidwell. Author of fourteen novels of romantic suspense. Each of my books were set in some far-flung, tropical location—Tahiti, Cuba, Bali—and always featured a tough, headstrong heroine who had no intention of falling in love, and the smouldering hero who was there for the heroine even when she believed she didn’t need anyone.

I had never found that hero for myself and I no longer thought there was much chance of him ever coming along. I wasn’t even sure I would want someone if he did. I’d grown too used to my own company, my own routines, and couldn’t imagine having someone inserting himself into my life. A man would only get in the way.

Right now, though, I found myself wishing I had been flexible enough to allow someone else into my life. I lived alone, and both the internet and the phone coverage were patchy out here. Some days, coverage was perfect, and I’d have no trouble at all, but other days I’d be lucky to pick up a signal even if I stood in the north-facing bedroom, where the signal was normally best, and hung out of the window.

The next three weeks were going to be lonely. I was used to being on my own, but I was never completely alone. There were always people passing by. Even just the sight of the tourists’ cars winding along the roads was enough to remind me that I was living in a world full of people. I’d spot hikers from my front step, the dots of brightly coloured jackets and the smaller dots of dogs running alongside them as they trekked up the tors—the huge rocky outcroppings that rose from the otherwise desolate moors.

Now everything was eerily quiet.

I went to my office window and stared out towards the wooden gate at the bottom of my drive, and across the barren wilderness of the moorland beyond. Strangely, it suddenly felt as though everything had changed, yet nothing had changed at all. Dartmoor looked just as it always had, though darkness was falling now. In a week, the clocks would spring forwards into spring—and fall back into autumn, as I was always taught—and then the evenings would be lighter, but for the moment, my beloved moors had been swallowed by darkness.

I wasn’t really sure how I felt about everything. It was as though I was veering wildly between believing I was overreacting, to not reacting enough. I kept thinking we’d woken to find ourselves trapped in the imaginary world of some dystopian fiction author, and at some point, I’d be able to shut the book and carry on as normal.

It didn’t work that way, however, and no matter how much I wished for things to go back to the way they’d been before, they’d steadily got worse. Daily updates on the news, with harsher restrictions each time, many of which people seemed to find ways to ignore or work around, only served to deepen my mounting dread.

I sighed again and turned my back on the night outside. Right now, our only defence against what our Prime Minister had called a ‘silent killer’ was washing our hands and staying away from people. I had the latter already covered, and the instruction to do the former had become somewhat of a compulsion over the past couple of weeks. I’d already stocked up on soaps and bottled handwashes.

The urge to wash them again crept up on me. I’d already washed my hands when I’d come in from outside, but still, the nagging worry crept into my brain that perhaps I hadn’t done a good enough job and now the virus was multiplying on my skin. There had been a lot of people around over the weekend, and any one of them might have touched my gate or fence. Giving in to the compulsion, I went through to my kitchen to run the tap and scrub my hands once more.

Things were definitely going to get worse before they got better.

Day Two

I’d gone to bed a few hours after getting the lockdown news but hadn’t been able to sleep, turning from side to side, unable to get comfortable. Though there was nothing to be immediately fearful of, my heart raced, and I couldn’t get it to slow. It was as though there was an unseen danger lurking outside my window, and though I couldn’t see anything, my body knew it was there.

I finally drifted off around two in the morning but woke every hour or so until the sun crept over the horizon, and I decided to get up. Though the days had been warm for this time of year, the temperature dropped close to zero overnight, and I often woke to find the world swathed in frost, ice clinging to the top of my gate and frosting the windscreen of my Range Rover.

I swung my legs out of bed, trying to keep as much of my duvet around my shoulders as possible, and felt for my slippers with my feet. The chill of the floor rose through my soles. The floors in this old house were either solid stone or bare wood, and the rug I’d thrown down to break up the sparseness of the flooring hadn’t done much to keep things warm.

My toes touched the fluffy faux fur of my slippers, and I slipped my feet inside them then grabbed my dressing gown from the back of the door and tugged it over my shoulders. The central heating was set to come on soon for a couple of hours to take the chill out of the air. It normally came on just before I got up, but because I hadn’t been able to sleep, I was up earlier than normal.

Everything felt too quiet.

Though I knew nothing had really changed from a few days ago, it all felt different. I might be in a remote location, but there would still be the occasional car that drove past. Even the planes that regularly crossed the sky far overhead no longer appeared as dots, the drone of their engines normally faint but still audible.

I navigated the steep, rickety staircase and made my way into the kitchen at the rear of the house. Before I could do anything else, I exchanged my slippers for a pair of welly boots at the back door and went out into the garden to let the chickens out.

Inwardly, I chuckled at this version of myself. A few years ago, I would never have imagined myself in a pair of wellies, heading out to look after my chickens. I’d always been more of an indoors person, but I’d changed over the years.

The birds scuffled around inside the henhouse, squawking and clucking as they heard me approach, impatient to get out. I had to make sure the henhouse was secure overnight. There were plenty of foxes around who would happily make a meal of my girls. Because of this, I had two layers of protection—a large aviary-style coop, that was tall enough to step into and had a layer of chicken wire covering the roof, and then the smaller coop inside which was also locked and secure overnight. During the day, they had the run of the larger space and at night they settled in to roost.

All four of the girls had been ex-battery hens that had arrived bald and with no experience of an outdoor world. They’d fluffed up soon enough, and I now thought of them as pets just as much as I would have a dog or cat.

I opened the henhouse door, and a couple of the chickens barrelled out, already looking for breakfast, while the other two emerged more cautiously, peering outside first before slowly pecking their way down the ramp.

Good morning, girls, I greeted them. All set for another busy day?

I refilled their water and food and then stepped out of the larger aviary part. I hadn’t had my breakfast yet either.

Instead of heading straight back inside, I paused at the greenhouse, debating if I should give my seedlings a quick water while I was out here.

Up until a few years ago,