Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  No answering sound.

  The light was on under the bathroom door. Jonas went in.

  The air was still slightly warm and heavy with moisture from his earlier shower.

  Jonas’s gut lurched. There was blood on the tap.

  There was blood.

  On the tap.

  He went closer to the basin. The smear of blood was unmistakable – as if someone had turned the tap on or off with a bloodstained hand. A little drip ran down the porcelain.

  He frantically looked around with eyes attuned to this one thing, and found more. Two drops on the floor, a smear near the laundry basket, what looked like half a handprint on the outer edge of the basin – four slightly splayed strips where someone had rested their printless fingers.

  Jonas turned sharply to go and caught a movement close to his head that made him flinch and put up a hand in self-defence.

  He almost laughed. He’d jumped at his own fuzzy reflection in the cabinet mirror!

  He stopped dead.

  In the lingering condensation on the cold glass mirror was a message he had no doubt was meant for him.

  ‘Lucy!’ he cried in strangled horror, and ran to the bedroom, slapping on lights. She was not there. He ran into the box room. Empty. Jonas was no longer looking for, or afraid of, the killer. He only wanted to see his wife.

  The back bedroom. His childhood room. She wasn’t there but, behind the door, the loft ladder had been dropped from the attic.

  ‘Lucy?’ he hissed. He was wary again now. He couldn’t see how Lu could have extended the ladder, let alone gone up it, without help.

  Or without being forced.

  Halfway up the ladder was a long smear of blood.

  He bit his lip to keep himself quiet. He peered up into the black hole. There was no light in the attic; they used a camping lantern. A lantern that was no longer in its usual place on the bedside table.

  Jonas gripped the ladder and slowly climbed into the dark.

  *

  From his secret place the killer watched with a dispassionate eye as Jonas Holly warily ascended the ladder. He knew what he would find up there, and knew that this would soon be over.

  It was sad, but it was the way things had to be.

  *

  Reynolds and his team were lost.

  They had run across the fields more slowly than Jonas because they did not have a wife in danger on the other side and because they were not as fit, as fast or as tall as him. The snow was a problem – both that which was deep underfoot and the fresh flakes that were whipped stingingly into their faces.

  They followed Jonas’s tracks to where they appeared to run straight into a hedge.

  ‘Shit,’ said Reynolds.

  They could see the lighted window in the cottage on the other side of the hedge, but there seemed to be no way to get to it.

  ‘There must be a gate,’ Reynolds said, and so they started to look for it, splitting into two groups, each going in opposite directions down the hedge-line.

  Singh tried to find a place to burrow through, but learned a quick lesson in blackthorn and sheep wire.

  They reconvened at the place where Jonas’s tracks were now filling with new snow, and Reynolds turned towards the lane and started a methodical circumnavigation of the field in an attempt to find a way out.

  *

  Lucy jumped at the rattle of the ladder. The yellow patch of light in the attic floor was darkened by a shadow and she got out of the armchair, groping for the knife.

  She saw the silhouette of a man’s head rise into the attic space and held the blade out towards him in hands that shook uncontrollably.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she said in a tremulous voice.

  ‘It’s me!’ Jonas sounded hugely relieved. ‘Are you OK, Lu?’

  ‘Don’t come up here!’

  His head and shoulders were already in the attic and she could see him cocking his head, trying to squint into the darkness to make her out.

  ‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

  He stepped up another rung so he was up to his waist in the attic.

  ‘Stay there!’

  Jonas stopped dead. Lucy’s head spun. This was ridiculous. This was Jonas. He had come to help her, not to harm her. But she needed some … explanations.

  ‘I found the missing button!’ she cried.

  Of all the things he’d expected Lucy to say next, that was the stone-cold last. Jonas almost laughed. Would have, if he hadn’t been able to hear the shake and the fear in Lucy’s voice.

  ‘What button?’

  ‘The button you found on Margaret Priddy’s roof. It came off your trousers.’

  ‘No it didn’t. I checked when I found it. What’s this all about, Lu? How did you get up here?’

  ‘It did, Jonas! I found a pair of your uniform trousers tonight with a button missing.’

  Jonas still failed to see how that would scare his wife so badly she would hide in the attic. She’d always been so objective and sensible. He couldn’t understand—

  Panic suddenly made him tingle all over.

  ‘Lu? Did you take anything? Did you take any … thing?’

  ‘No! Jonas! Something’s going on here, but it’s with you, not me! I think … I think something’s not right with you, Jonas.’

  He was not convinced. The note of hysteria in her voice worried him. He started to move up as if to make the final climb into the attic, but her scream cut him short.

  ‘Stay there!’

  ‘OK. OK, Lu. I’m not moving. I’m staying right here.’

  A sob of relief came from the darkness.

  ‘Lu, do you have the lantern?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you turn it on, baby? So I can see you? So we can talk?’

  She hesitated, then he heard her fumble around in the darkness, sniffing back tears. He was careful not to make a move while she was distracted; she sounded brittle enough to snap at any moment.

  The lantern glowed an unnatural white beside her, and made her haggard face look ghostly, while the knife in her hand glittered.

  He saw the cut on her swollen lip.

  ‘Lucy! What happened? Did you fall? There’s blood in the bathroom.’

  She touched her lip with one shaking finger. ‘You did this, Jonas. When you hit me.’

  ‘What?’

  Lucy’s voice was small and childlike. ‘Earlier tonight.’

  ‘I never hit you, Lu! I never would! What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘You don’t remember,’ she whispered.

  ‘Lucy, please, you’re scaring me. Please tell me what’s happened. Why are you up here? Did he come back? Did he hurt you, Lu?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The killer! The man I chased out of the back door! Did he come back? Lucy, tell me!’

  ‘You don’t remember,’ she said. ‘You don’t remember what happened. You were somebody else.’

  ‘Lucy, I’m me. I’m just me.’

  He didn’t know what else to say. Lucy must have taken something. He didn’t want to engage in some weird drug-induced conversation with her. He was the protector. He needed to get her to come out of the attic with him and downstairs so he could check her over and get her to vomit. Maybe he’d have to take her to hospital. The Land Rover might make it.

  ‘Lu, I’m coming up, OK?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sweetheart, I have to, I—’

  ‘NO! Stay there!’

  He stopped again, still on the ladder but now more in the attic than out of it.

  She tried to control the wobble in her voice. ‘Jonas, you have to listen to me. Please.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said, although really he was wondering if he could rush her, or whether it might be dangerous with her waving that knife around in front of her.

  ‘Jonas,’ she began – then started to cry. ‘Jonas, I think you lost your button the night you killed Margaret Priddy.’

  ‘Lucy!—’

  ‘Listen! Y
ou said you’d listen to me!’

  ‘I am,’ he said, and this time he really was.

  ‘It wasn’t really you, Jonas. I know you’d never, ever hurt anyone. I don’t just believe it, I know it. But I think some … part of you killed Margaret and Yvonne and the others. I don’t know why, but you’ve been under such pressure, Jonas! Your parents and the job and then me, being such a burden to you … And then … and then when I couldn’t even kill myself …’ Lucy trailed off, but gathered herself up again and went on. ‘I know how scared you were, Jonas. I saw it on your face! You were like a frightened little boy, like a—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Lucy stopped, shocked, at Jonas’s words, which came out with a thick, low vehemence she’d never heard from him before.

  ‘Jonas?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Shut up! You’ll wake him!’

  Lucy swayed in disbelief. The voice was not Jonas’s. It was rougher and older, and his face had changed. Lucy sought the softness in Jonas’s eyes and found only black nothingness.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she whispered.

  ‘None of your business,’ he snapped.

  ‘Who will I wake up?’

  ‘The boy. We let him sleep.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Me and Jonas. Although he’s been no fucking use. Won’t do his job.’

  Lucy caught her breath.

  Do your job, crybaby.

  ‘What’s Jonas’s job?’

  ‘Protecting the boy, of course. That’s always been his job. He’s the protector.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I am the killer.’

  Something in Lucy hoped she might be dreaming, but the cold and the smell of mouse droppings and the knife in her hands all felt very real to her. She made a huge effort to speak simply and gently so as not to provoke the person who was no longer her husband.

  ‘Who is the boy?’

  ‘The boy is us. He’s who we used to be.’

  ‘What do you need to protect him from?’

  Silence.

  ‘How can Jonas protect the boy?’

  The man who wasn’t Jonas shrugged, but looked sly. He knew.

  ‘Why does the boy need protection? What happened to him?’

  ‘Shut up!’ The man who was not her husband put an angry foot up on to the floor of the attic. ‘You’ll wake him!’

  Lucy spoke quickly and gently, trying to talk her way past the killer to reach Jonas. ‘Was it something to do with the fire, Jonas? What happened to you and Danny up at the farm? Did somebody hurt you, sweetheart? Did somebody—’

  ‘Don’t! Please don’t!’

  Huge tears welled in Jonas’s eyes and his face instantly relaxed into something so young and vulnerable that Lucy gasped. That little boy who’d been at her hospital bedside was suddenly standing here in her attic as if by magic.

  ‘Jonas?’ she whispered.

  The boy/man shook his head and pushed his tears away with the heel of a rough hand. ‘Please don’t talk about it. Please don’t make me say.’ Then he covered his face with his hands and his young voice was muffled. ‘Where is this? I don’t want to be here. Don’t make me be here.’

  It broke her heart. She actually felt a pain, as if that tender organ was being torn in two, and she put a hand to her breast, knotting the blue sweater in her fist.

  ‘Jonas,’ she whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion.

  Jonas slowly took his hands from his face and looked at her, and Lucy gave a huge sob of relief to see her husband standing there once more.

  ‘I wouldn’t hurt anyone, Lu. You know that!’

  It was as if the last two minutes had never happened. No killer with his cold, dead eyes, no boy-Jonas tortured by the memory of something so terrible that it had split him apart. Those fragments of the whole lived separate lives – the boy sleeping, Jonas protecting him, the killer dormant until the stress that she had caused threatened to reawaken the horror he’d already lived once. If something had gone wrong with that delicate balance, the only person to blame was herself. She had been the tipping point.

  Lucy burned with shame and selfishness.

  With one self-obsessed handful of pills, she had made Jonas start to fall apart.

  Despite the shock of the truth, Lucy felt a sudden surge of pride in Jonas. There was one thing he had done supremely well: he had protected the boy within him like a tigress does a cub. He had become a protector both personally and professionally; his whole life – conscious and subconscious – had been devoted to keeping that small child from having to face whatever it was that had been done to him.

  She realized with a sharp pang that Jonas had been more of a parent than she would ever be. He had worked so hard and done so well. The boy had grown up into a good man, had got a good job and had loved her like no other. He had suffered setbacks and sadness and nothing had broken him.

  Until she had tried to kill herself.

  And now she understood everything.

  Tears started to blur her vision.

  ‘I know you love me, Jonas.’

  ‘Of course I love you!’

  ‘But protecting me is making you hurt other people instead, sweetheart. The notes you wrote: Call yourself a policeman? … Do your job … You knew you were hurting the wrong people …’

  Jonas looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  Her tears were coming thick and fast now – as she knew in her heart the truth of what she was about to say.

  ‘Jonas … There’s somebody inside you who wants me dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s OK. I understand. You have to protect the boy. He needs you to be strong, Jonas. Now more than ever.’

  ‘Lucy, honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please come downstairs …’

  He held out his hand to her – the way he had at the altar. She had given him her hand then and he had slid the ring on to her finger and vowed to love her for ever.

  ‘You killed the wrong people, Jonas.’

  She had lost it.

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone, Lu. I swear to you. Sweetheart, please just come downstairs with me, so we can talk properly. It’s freezing up here. Please, Lu? Please?’

  Lucy stared at his outstretched hand and then looked up into his eyes with an expression of such helpless agony on her face that he flinched.

  ‘Jonas,’ she choked, ‘you’re still wearing the gloves.’

  Jonas looked down at his hand. It shone, stretched and strange in the white light of the lantern, and he held it up so he could see it better.

  He was wearing a near-translucent surgical glove.

  Why?

  Why?

  He frowned stupidly at his own fingers, all smooth and pale and plastic. He raised his other hand and saw it was the same. He felt disorientated. Why would he be wearing these gloves? It made no sense.

  ‘I love you with all my heart, but you can’t protect me any more. It has to stop.’ Lucy’s voice was a dull whisper. It had lost all hope.

  Jonas said nothing – still consumed by the sight of his own shining fingers.

  ‘This is the job you were meant to do, Jonas,’ Lucy said, and – with hands that did not shake – slid the knife into her own throat.

  ‘NO! NO! NO!’

  Jonas reached her in two seconds and caught her before she fell. The knife was lodged in her jugular, blood beat from her neck in time to her heart, while she made a very small mewling sound, like a kitten in a box.

  Jonas made all the noise. He screamed her name and screamed for help and tried to stop the blood with his hands, then dragged her towards the hatch. He had to get her to hospital. He barely touched the ladder, dropping on to the landing in a heap with his wife in his arms, then down the stairs, slipping halfway, banging his head, and falling to the hallway, holding on to Lucy in a tangled mess of blood and arms and legs.

  He raised his face from the cold flagstones, sat
up and pulled her on to his lap, repeating her name like a talisman against bad things. If only he kept saying Lucy then she would not die. Would not.

  Her copper hair was darkened by thick blood, and her face was spattered and smeared. Her eyes were still open and found his.

  ‘LucyLucyLucyLucy …’

  She looked away from him then and into a future where he could not follow.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he begged her. ‘Please don’t go.’

  But he could do nothing but hold her and watch the light in her eyes go out.

  Here on the cold floor behind the front door – where Lucy Holly had already tried to end her life once – she finally succeeded.

  Jonas laid her head gently on his knees and pulled the knife from her neck. Then he plunged it into his belly.

  ‘GET OUT!’ he screamed. ‘GET OUT!’

  Jonas repeatedly sought the killer inside him, but his job was done and he was nowhere to be found.

  *

  The walls were thick and stone, but Mrs Paddon was woken by Jonas’s shout of ‘NO! NO! NO!’

  She was eighty-nine, but she had been through the war, so she got out of bed and pulled on her coat and boots.

  She heard Jonas screaming ‘GET OUT!’ as she approached the front door, but nobody burst past her, so she went inside.

  She found Lucy dead and Jonas still alive, so she fetched towels to staunch the blood.

  She saw the knife lying nearby, so she didn’t touch it in case it was evidence.

  She called the police and the ambulance and told them two people had been attacked in their home and stabbed.

  She went back to help Jonas and noticed with a puzzled frown the surgical gloves on his hands.

  She had known Jonas Holly since he came home from the hospital in his proud father’s arms, and she knew he was a good boy.

  There could be no doubt about that.

  So she pulled them off and threw them in the embers of the fire, where they stank and smoked and then melted into flames just as Reynolds and his team finally burst through the front door.

  Another Day

  Jonas didn’t want to survive and had tried his best not to, but the doctors were skilful and the nurses relentlessly vigilant.