Darkside

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 had 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?