Darkside

He thanked Jonas anyway. Let the man think he was being taken seriously. Couldn’t hurt.

Reynolds almost asked Jonas if he wanted anything from the chip shop, but then thought that might be taking fraternizing with the natives too far. And there’d be the issue of whether he meant Jonas to pay or not. It would all be a bit awkward. So he just said goodbye and got back in his car, happy that he had bypassed – and therefore undermined – Marvel in even the smallest way.

* * *

Danny Marsh was calling his name. From somewhere.

Not grown-up Danny – boy-Danny.

Jonas hid from him. He didn’t know why. He just knew that hiding was best, here in the bales of fragrant, itchy hay. He hid and listened to his heart between his ears. Every time it pumped, his head got hotter. His heart was pumping molten rock and he felt the pressure build and build until he thought the top of his head would blow off and the river of rock inside would shoot into the night sky like a fiery geyser. His head was burning up but his feet were freezing cold, and he looked down to see that the reason was that Danny’s dead mother was draped across them, her slack grey bra pulled up to reveal her flaccid breasts pooled like pancake mix across her chest.

Jonas jolted awake with a shiver and a kick and found that Lucy was hogging the covers; his feet were exposed. He breathed heavily, his hair and neck damp with sweat.

‘Jonas!’ the voice hissed in his ear. He jerked his head to the side. No one was there. It was a wisp of a dream that had escaped into the real world.

The room was dark and Lucy was breathing so low that he strained to hear her at all. He glanced at the alarm clock. Just gone 3am.

Moving carefully, he rearranged the covers with his feet, and his breathing started to calm a little as his nightmare fragmented behind him.

‘Jonas!’

He froze.

He took Lucy’s arm from across his chest and slid out from beneath it, laying it gently on the warm sheet and covering it with the duvet.

In the flannel pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed in the winter, Jonas crossed to the window and looked down at the front garden, glimmering pale under the stars.

Nothing.

His eye caught a movement in the lane beyond the gate.

Somebody?

Or something?

Something watching the house. Something watching him.

Something underneath.

His mind lolled between sleep and wakefulness, blurring the edges of both, as his overworked eyes sought the caller of his name.

In his gut he knew it was Danny Marsh. Come to talk in the dead of a snowy night. He felt once again the threat that had come off Danny in waves. Part of him wanted to go down there now – right now. To run out into the snow and finish what he’d started in the street. Beat him to a pulp. End it.

He must have stood half-dozing at the window a long, long time, because when he finally went back to bed and spooned up behind the wife he loved so fiercely, the first light of the late dawn was turning the world grey.

* * *

Jonas Holly liked to think of himself as the protector, but the killer was a protector too, in his own way.

They were trying to protect different people, that was all.

Not for the first time, he wondered whether he should speak to Jonas. Maybe a face-to-face would be useful. Let Jonas see who he was dealing with; see if they could come to some kind of agreement. He was not an unreasonable man.

Even though the killer despised Jonas for his weakness, somehow the policeman still kept getting in the way. He had been diverted twice now because of Jonas, and gave him grudging credit for that.

Still, the policeman might not be doing his job, but he couldn’t keep the killer from doing his for ever.

He glanced at his watch and saw it was 4am. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and slid a souvenir letter-opener out of his pocket. By the moonlight he could see the glint of fake gold-enamel lettering on the handle: A Gift from Weston-Super-Mare.

He had noticed this first-floor window in the big old building. The only one that had not been replaced with plastic double glazing. He’d noticed it years ago. He’d noticed a lot of things over the years but had never really felt the need to use them before.

Now he felt the need.

He climbed on to the water butt and from there he swung easily on to the toughened glass roof. He braced his feet against the struts for purchase and slipped the letter-opener between the old wooden frames.

Then the killer pushed aside the catch, slid the sash up – and quietly climbed through the window into the Sunset Lodge Retirement Home.

* * *

Gary Liss liked the nights at Sunset Lodge. The days were all bustle but the nights made him think of old war movies where nurses moved quietly between softly coughing patients, carrying candles.