Darkside

Then Lucy put the knife that Jonas had insisted she carry into her back pocket, picked up the camping lantern from the bedside table and put an unsteady foot on the first rung.

It took her almost fifteen minutes to climb the ladder. She slipped a dozen times – banging her elbows, grazing her fingers, once tearing a gash in her forearm – and had to take several gasping rests, clinging on to the upper rungs and kneeling on the lower ones to try to give her legs some respite. The longer she struggled and the higher she climbed, the more frantic she got to ascend into the square of darkness.

The irony did not escape her. She had tried to kill herself. Still might. And yet here she was, trying to hide from a killer who would do the job for her.

The instinct for self-preservation came as a shock to Lucy.

When she finally made it and hauled herself into the dry, cold space that smelled of wood and feathers and mouse droppings, Lucy could not move again for ten minutes. She retched from effort and sobbed in pain.

And then the kick in the teeth came when she found that she could not pull the ladder up behind her. She strained and wept, but her grip was limp and her arms feeble and the ladder didn’t seem to be designed for such a thing anyway. There was nothing she could do about it. She tried to move a heavy wooden packing case over the entrance but it stuck on a joist and she had expended the last of her energy. She cried again with frustration. She knew what she should be doing! In her head she had it all worked out! The Lucy Holly that she used to be would have run, jumped, set booby traps, armed herself, been prepared. That Lucy Holly would have kicked zombie butt and outwitted the very devil. But that Lucy was long gone. And with the new Lucy’s body the only one available to her now, it was all she could do to crawl into a corner with her unlit lantern and her knife, huddle in a musty old armchair, and wait for the killer to come home.

* * *

The killer did come home, although nobody would ever have guessed it.

* * *

Jonas was a fit man, but running through the foot-deep snow was exhausting. His lungs tore at his chest and his heart pounded his ribs like a madman in a cage. His boots and trousers were wet well past his knees and seemed to be made of something that stuck to snow and dragged at his legs every time he tried to lift them to place one foot in front of the other.

Still, he made it across the first field lit only by the stars and a slim moon, his eyes adjusting so well that he even spotted the gap in the hedge that denoted a gate, which he clambered over so fast that his legs got left behind and he dropped face-first into the snow on the other side before getting up and running again.

Despite the snow over uneven ground and the wind that drove the flakes into him, fear made him faster than he’d ever have thought possible and blurred the blizzard so that he was running through a snow globe as it was shaken up. He couldn’t tell which way was up, as flakes came at him from everywhere – now in his eyes, now in his ears, now slapping the back of his head like a teacher. The only guide was that bathroom light which – mercifully – he had left on in another time and place he barely even remembered now. It disappeared and jiggled and jerked on the inconstant horizon. If it weren’t for that he might have run to Withypool for all the sense of direction he had left in him.

Now and then he saw the tracks he was following, but he didn’t really care about them any more. His target was that bathroom window. He didn’t care where the killer was going – as long as it wasn’t Rose Cottage. As long as it wasn’t to Lucy.

Not Lucy! Not Lucy! Not Lucy! The words beat the rhythm of his headlong race across the snow.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the display but there was no signal. Big shock. He tossed it aside like ballast.

The prints in the snow curved slowly to the right. The gate in the second field was off somewhere to his right and opened on to the lane. He couldn’t afford the detour and kept running straight down the hill. He would have to go over the hedge beside Rose Cottage. Or through it.

Either way, it wasn’t stopping him.

The hedge loomed, huge and black with its happy icing of snow. Because of his height, Jonas had done high jump at school. He wasn’t much good at it but he remembered the basics. He speeded up, turned in at the last moment, and threw himself at the hedge in a not-ungraceful arc. He landed high enough to be suspended there in uncomfortable limbo. He rolled on to his stomach, reaching for anything that would give him purchase, gripping handfuls of branches and thorns, dragging himself across the five-foot expanse, which sagged and dug and snapped under him like cruel water, before dropping to the ground in a heap on the other side, right next to Lucy’s Beetle. There was a crunch and he winced as he landed on his torch.