Darkside

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 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.