Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  He put his notes and Lucy’s statement away in their folder, then turned on Mastermind.

  *

  Steven sat at the kitchen table with his hands around the first cup of tea he had ever accepted from Lucy Holly.

  He was wearing a pair of Jonas’s trousers. She had told him where to find some in the bedroom cupboard. It had been strange opening the Hollys’ wardrobe, but no stranger than opening their front door. He’d tried several pairs before he found some newly washed jeans which were only too big, rather than ridiculous, and rolled them up, then cinched them with his school belt.

  He’d put his trousers and underwear in the laundry basket, as she’d told him to, and gone back downstairs to the sound of the kettle whistling.

  Now they sat on opposite sides of the table and Steven watched Mrs Holly pretending she was OK. He knew she wasn’t. He’d seen her hands shake while making tea and he’d seen her wince as she put her cup to her broken lip.

  He had registered these things but had detached himself from thinking about them too hard. Instead he had become a vague little ball with a shiny shell, so that he could protect himself. He knew now that that was his job, and his alone.

  She smiled faintly at him, so he moved his mouth in response.

  ‘You haven’t drunk your tea,’ she said.

  It was no longer hot, but Steven drank it anyway – for her – and saw that this gift made her smile much better.

  ‘I want you to have this,’ she said, getting up and rummaging in a cupboard. She took out a tin and removed the lid with difficulty, then handed him a thick wad of £20 notes, so he took it, even though it made his stomach roll over. It made him think of his nan sellotaping names to her nick-nacks, so they’d all know who was getting what when she died.

  Then Mrs Holly said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ and hugged him so hard that it squeezed tears from his eyes, which slid down his nose and fell on to her blue sweater.

  Halfway down the hill Steven stopped and took the notes out of his pocket and fanned them out. Even in the dark he could see there was about £600.

  He drew his arm back and threw the notes hard into the night sky, where the biting wind whipped them away.

  Then he put his head down and walked on through a blizzard of snow and money.

  After Steven left, Lucy took the knife Jonas had given her, and inched slowly upstairs with it.

  Steven had left the cupboard open and several pairs of Jonas’s uniform trousers on the bed. Leaning her sticks against the wall, Lucy started to fold them back into the wardrobe, the familiar effort of the task making her feel warm and calm.

  An errant sob emptied her of the final breath of unexpected drama.

  She didn’t blame him.

  He had worked so hard, under such pressure, to keep her going. Nobody could have done a better job than Jonas. He was so strong, so patient.

  The pills had been a bitter blow and her sense of having failed him was all-embracing. Her shame was almost unbearable. She couldn’t live properly and she hadn’t even been able to die properly.

  And for a while she had almost believed she would never try again. Contacting Exit had only been insurance at first. So she would know better how to do it if things got unbearable. Brian Connor had talked through her options and it was a relief not to pretend that she would never consider it. But she tucked the thought away and kept going. Kept battling. Kept telling her mother she was feeling better all the time. Kept being the Lucy that everyone knew and loved.

  And then Marvel had said that thing.

  And she had understood how the world saw her. That at some indeterminate point she had ceased to be Lucy Holly – teacher, daughter, athlete, friend, wife, lover – and had become that thing. She couldn’t even think the words. She was amazed she had been able to get them out to Reynolds, and thought she must have been more angry than she’d ever been in her whole life to do so.

  She hoped Jonas would come home soon. He was the only one who had never made her feel that way. She knew he’d hit her out of fear, and the pain of her split lip was nothing compared to the pain she knew he must feel at her planning to leave him alone. At the thought that she could want to leave him alone.

  She ached with sadness and pressed a pair of his uniform trousers to her cheek, feeling her lashes brush the rough serge.

  As she raised her head and lifted the trousers to put them away, Lucy noticed they were missing a button.

  The Final Day

  Jonas raised his face to the sky and felt the feathery snow turn slowly to needles of hot water on his skin. He opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself in the shower in the bathroom of Rose Cottage.

  He shook himself. He must have drifted off and dreamed.

  He noticed with surprise that he hadn’t drawn the blinds on the two little windows. It had become his habit since he had stood on the stile across the valley and seen into this very room. But still, it was late; past midnight, he guessed – although he didn’t know when he had last checked the time – and the bathroom was thick with steam.

  He must have been standing under the shower for a good long time.

  He was hungry. Starving. Even under the hiss of the water he could hear his stomach rumbling.

  He turned slowly, blinking the water out of his eyes, then wiped them and looked again at the window that faced away from the moor and towards Springer Farm. Although the black pane of glass reflected only the lit bathroom, something flickered at its centre. Puzzled, Jonas looked over his shoulder to see what might give such reflection but all that was behind him was the mirrored cabinet made opaque by the steam.

  Jonas stepped out of the stream of water and wiped a stripe of condensation off the little side window.

  Through it he could see quite clearly that Springer Farm was on fire.

  *

  The missing button changed everything for Lucy.

  She looked at the loose thread above the button’s surviving twin, and was stunned that it could be so. That this – this twist of lonely black thread – was what could make her doubt the man she loved with all her heart, when the slap had failed to do so.

  It made no sense. That Jonas would hand in a button from his own uniform trousers as evidence if he were trying to cover Danny’s tracks. It had made no sense when she’d said that to Marvel and it made no sense now.

  Unless Jonas hadn’t known what he was doing.

  Or what he had done.

  Was that possible?

  Lucy sat utterly still and stared at the place were the button used to be. She groped for sanity – for a fingerhold on any reality that did not sound like the plot of one of her horror movies.

  The Exorcist flashed to her mind. The child trapped inside the ranting demon desperately pushing the words Help Me up through the tender skin of her midriff. It made her think of Jonas’s face at her hospital bedside. The face of a frightened child staring into the void.

  Or out of it.

  Help me.

  She shivered.

  She had briefly covered cases of multiple personalities in her Abnormal Psychology lectures. Patients who lived their lives as two, three – even more – distinct and different people. Alters, they were called, she remembered now. One man had even beaten prison on a rape charge after the court accepted that he was unaware that one of his alters had committed the crime.

  Was Jonas such a case? Had something terrible happened to him as a boy that had caused his personality to fracture into several brittle parts?

  She thought of the photo of the carefree child. Something had changed Jonas; some trauma. Was it something to do with Danny Marsh? With the fire at the farm? With horses? Had Marvel actually been right? Lucy shuddered at the thought.

  Jonas had been under pressure for years. His parents’ death, her diagnosis, starting a new job all alone. And then she’d failed to kill herself, so that he’d had to come home from work every day not knowing whether he would find her alive or dead. Then Margaret Priddy h
ad been murdered and Marvel had treated him like shit, and someone had started to leave him notes telling him to do his job …

  Any one of those things could have pulled the trigger on the loaded gun of a damaged psyche.

  Did Jonas clear up the vomit? Or did an alter do it without his knowledge?

  Did an alter lose the button and Jonas merely find it?

  She believed Jonas was telling the truth. Then again, maybe his truth was not the truth.

  She still didn’t fear Jonas. She trusted him with her life.

  But she did fear the stranger inside him.

  She stood up suddenly and nearly fell. The jelly in her legs was not all the disease. She tried not to be sure. In her head, in her intellect, she tried to rationalize, to hypothesize, to justify Jonas’s contradictions so that she could disprove her own conclusions. But her body overrode her and made her shake with adrenaline.

  Hollywood had been preparing Lucy for this for years. She had learned from the mistakes of air-headed heroines, and determined to be different. But now that the fantasy was made real, it made her feel sick, and numb with confusion.

  She heard the front door open.

  Jonas.

  Her panic was only outweighed by her indecision. She had to hide from him! And yet that seemed ridiculous. Hide from Jonas? She would just feel like a fool.

  He didn’t call from the door. He always called from the door, to let her know it was him.

  Maybe it wasn’t him.

  The thought spurred her to action.

  She slid to the floor with the trousers still in her hands, and rolled under the bed.

  She heard the middle stair creak and felt fear trickle down her spine. Jonas always took care to miss that tread.

  Who was it that was coming up the stairs towards her?

  Suddenly, rolling under the bed seemed the smartest thing she’d ever done, even though she felt horribly vulnerable. If he saw her, she had no defence. He would lean down and grip her ankles and drag her out like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

  The man walked down the landing and into the bedroom.

  Lucy held her breath.

  She saw only his black trousers and boots, still with snow clinging to them. Jonas never wore his boots upstairs. Taking them off at the foot of the stairs was second nature to him.

  The man crossed the room as if he owned it. There was no hesitation, no caution, no fear that he might be detected.

  Lucy heard a drawer open and shut, and watched the boots leave.

  After a few moments, she heard the shower go on.

  She frowned.

  It must be Jonas!

  Relief made her shake.

  And yet something stopped her from coming out from underneath the bed. It wasn’t the fact that he had hit her. Somehow that seemed almost incidental now. It was something else. The missing button, the silent entrance, the boots upstairs, those things meant more to her now. Something – maybe something learned from years of horror films – made her lie there on the dusty carpet, hiding from the husband she loved until, at last, the exhaustion of fear – coupled with the familiar and homely sound of the shower – lulled her to an unlikely sleep.

  *

  Marvel awoke to the sound of flames.

  It was not the sound of a fire in the hearth, but the crackling roar of a furnace, accompanied by what sounded like small-arms fire.

  He checked his watch: 2am. He rolled out of bed and staggered straight into the wall-mounted TV, knocking himself over and almost out. His stomach protested the sudden activity and he burped the sophisticated aroma of Cinzano into his nose.

  He regained his feet and yanked the curtain aside to see two or three silhouetted figures backlit by the burning farmhouse. A section of tiles exploded off the roof in a volley of shots and arced into the white-spotted snow-sky like fireworks.

  He fumbled his damp shoes off the radiator, threw his coat over his vest and shorts, and ran outside – another stagger giving away just how recently he had left the house that was now an inferno.

  Reynolds, Rice and Grey were throwing water at the front-door handle – apparently in an attempt to cool it down enough to open it. They were using what looked like flower pots, and scooping water from an old trough in the yard. Singh staggered about in the snow with a ladder that was too short to do anything more than be a hazard to all, while Pollard shouted, ‘Mrs Springer!’ repeatedly and randomly at the house between staring at the flames, mouth agape like a tourist.

  What a bunch of fucking babies!

  ‘Where is she?’ yelled Marvel above the roar, but Pollard just shook his head.

  ‘Fire brigade?’ yelled Marvel again, with the obligatory mime of a phone at his ear, and Reynolds shouted, ‘On their way!’

  They’ll never make it, thought Marvel. Not in this snow.

  The snow had continued to fall and was knee deep in places. Great plumes of steam joined the smoke pumping from the roof of the house, as flakes sizzled and spat off the tiles like fat in a pan.

  ‘Help them!’ he yelled at Pollard, pointing at the others, then ran to the trough, stripping off his coat. He plunged it into the water, which was sharp with broken ice, then pulled it on once more, barely noticing the freezing cold against his bare skin. He pulled the coat up over his head, then rushed at the front door just as Singh and Grey broke it open with the ladder.

  Reynolds tried to stop him, standing in his way, grabbing at his coat like a fan.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ he shouted in Marvel’s face, without even the nicety of a ‘sir’.

  Marvel elbowed him in the nose – it wasn’t a punch, but it was something – then barged past him shouting, ‘Out of the way!’ and ran inside.

  Inside was an oasis of calm compared to the courtyard and for a moment Marvel stopped and swayed and took it all in.

  The flames were up the curtains and walls, but the flagstone floor was a daunting foe to fire. The bottles and the glasses he’d left just a few hours before were still on the table. Smoke obscured much of his view, and – not content with blinding him – now reached down Marvel’s throat with long, sharp nails and started to claw at his lungs.

  From outside he could hear Reynolds hoarsely shouting ‘Sir!’ with an irritable air – as if Marvel were a dog that wouldn’t come back – and Grey yelling something about hosepipes. They sounded shockingly close for people in another universe.

  He coughed and spat and shielded his face from the heat coming at him from the far end of the room as he edged closer to where he knew the sofa was.

  He staggered once and caught his thigh a painful blow on the kitchen table.

  Halfway there, Marvel thought maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. The smoke was making it hard to breathe and steam was rising off his coat, while his exposed hands, arms and legs were uncomfortably hot.

  He dithered.

  He almost turned back.

  But the thought of staggering back into the snow with nothing to show for his derring-do but a bit of a cough was anathema.

  Buoyed by bloody-mindedness and sweet vermouth, he carried on inching his way across the room until he could make out Joy Springer lying face-down on the hairy sofa with her four cats running frantically up and down her body as though she were the last piece of flotsam in the wake of a shipwreck.

  He reached out to take her arm and the big grey fluffy cat shot out a razor-sharp claw to keep him at bay.

  Fuck.

  Marvel dropped to his knees and huddled under his coat for a moment and he coughed until he retched – his eyes and nose and mouth streaming with fluids as his body tried to reject the killing smoke.

  Down here the air was clearer, and Marvel bent and touched his head to the flagstones as if praying, so he could breathe better. When he had refreshed himself he looked up blearily and saw the writing on the wall behind the sofa.

  He recognized it immediately, even though it was a foot high and on a wall. How he could ever have thought it might be a match for Danny Marsh
’s hand was ridiculous. He saw that, now that it was writ so large. And in what appeared to be blood.

  Marvel grabbed Joy Springer’s arm and yanked her unceremoniously on to the floor. Three of the cats leaped clear and disappeared; the grey one came with her – its claws firmly lodged in the wool of her old cardigan. It glared at Marvel and growled menacingly before darting away.

  He rolled Joy on to her back and recoiled at the bloody sockets where her eyes had been.

  He thought of Ang Nu. He thought of cocktail-onion jokes. He thought of Danny Marsh.

  Danny Marsh was not the killer. The killer had been here.

  The bastard had killed Joy Springer right under his nose!

  Suddenly there was not enough air. He gulped for it, needing even more than usual to combat his shock, and finding so much less than he wanted that his shock became panic in a hot, blinding second.

  He had to get out!

  He half stood, staggered, banged his head on the table, fell to his knees, rolled, crawled, gasped at the floor, lungs bursting, head about to pop, lost his way to the door, and finally curled into a ball and retched Cinzano-flavoured bile on to his own hands.

  He had to get out. He had to tell Reynolds. He had to—

  Breathe. He had to breathe …

  But he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t—

  And the door at the far end of the kitchen suddenly blew off its hinges and let in a fireball that incinerated Joy Springer and the hairy sofa as if they were one big ball of tinder, and then rolled across the room towards Marvel.

  *

  The Land Rover only took Jonas so far.

  The blizzard was blinding and he did his best but he needed to get there fast and he tried too hard. Halfway up the driveway to Springer Farm it came to a sudden lurching halt in a ditch that Jonas couldn’t even see until after he’d climbed out and gone round to the front of the car.