Darkside

Jonas bit his lip. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him – maybe a clue as to who had written the note in this odd, spiky hand. His eyes scanned the empty street and darted from parked car to parked car, seeking a watchful silhouette or the sudden ducking motion that could denote culpability. Then his gaze flickered over the windows of the brightly painted cottages that crowded the narrow main street, waiting for a twitching net to give the guilty party away.

Nothing moved apart from Bill Beer’s fat border collie, Bongo, snuffling his way up towards the shop where he spent every day door-hanging for treats and gently removing sweets from the unwary hands of passing toddlers.

Jonas felt like a stranger in his own home. Somebody knew he’d failed in his duty. Worse than that … that somebody wasn’t on his side. Jonas had always felt that the local people held him in warm regard. Now a small dagger of ice had pierced that warmth and everything had changed in an instant.

Call yourself a policeman?

Jonas tore the note into small pieces and squeezed those pieces together into a shapeless lump in his hand, before dropping them in the litter bag behind the passenger seat. Then he looked around at the village once more and – with a hollow sense of foreboding – drove slowly away down its curiously silent street.

* * *

Lucy watched The Exorcist in slices between her intertwined fingers. So silly! She’d watched it a dozen times; it was dated; the story was so copied it was a retroactive cliche; the effects were all pea soup and puppetry – and it scared the crap out of her every time.

Lucy had a degree in psychology. She knew that demonic possession was rubbish – that it was the way religions had for centuries explained conditions like schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorders. She knew that. She reminded herself of that. She believed it to be so. But the idea of a little girl possessed by the devil, of a mother’s reluctance to accept the fact as her golden-haired child descends into apparent madness – and the final showdown in all its hellish hamminess. It ticked all the right boxes for Lucy.

She had always liked horror films. As a teenager they had just been a way to allow a boy to put his arm around her at the movies without feeling as though she was being a slut. Then she got addicted to the thrill – the jumps and the gore. How many ways could a head come off a human being? How far could blood squirt from a severed artery? And over what? Or whom? Lucy applauded every new method of murder, exalted any clever new way to make her jump out of her skin, bowed down in awe to any film that could leave her wishing that turning on the lights on a winter’s afternoon was a quicker affair than hauling herself across the room on sticks and pressing the switch with her chin.

But she always came back to The Exorcist.

Often, when she thought about her life and death, Lucy wondered about her passion for horror. She had finally come to the conclusion that it was born out of a deep-seated sense of security. Until the MS was diagnosed, Lucy had led a charmed life. She had meandered through school and university in the manner of many very bright students – neglecting her studies with a vengeance and yet still managing to pick up her First and lifelong friends along the way. She had dabbled with cannabis and yet never had a trip worse than the one where she suspected her best friend, Sharma, had stolen her new Max Factor mascara. She had been on three protest marches – Animal Rights, Tibet, and Tibet again – without ever having her name taken by police. She’d got drunk only in the company of friends who made sure she got home safely, she’d never lost a close relative and she’d never had her heart broken. Probably, she reasoned, she enjoyed horror because nothing even vaguely similar had ever happened to her or ever would.

At least, that’s what she told Jonas.

But it was not as strictly true as it had been before she was diagnosed. Since the MS had started to take over her life, she grudgingly recognized some need to test herself through horror, to push the boundaries of her own strength and resourcefulness to reassure herself that she was not yet helpless – even if the test was just in her mind.

She watched the films for fun; she studied them like manuals.

No longer could she simply see a pretty young girl walk through creepy woods or a dark house without some part of her wishing she was there – and handling it better.

Lucy Holly would never turn round and call out, ‘Who’s there?’ in that tremulous voice. She’d duck suddenly into the trees, circle silently back through the undergrowth and get behind the lurching zombies. See how they liked it!

She’d never creep downstairs in the dark with a knife shaking pathetically in her hand to confront an intruder; she’d stay at the top of the stairs and tip the landing bookcase on to the bastard as he crept ignorantly up towards her.

If she could stalk a zombie; if she could squash an intruder … how hard could it be to repel the killer in her own body?

Sometimes, when she felt mentally strong enough, Lucy would stand naked and watch herself in the mirror. That was what it felt like – watching herself, not looking.

She had been beautiful. She knew that – although it was behind her now.

The year of steroids was over and she had lost all the weight and more. She had hated being fat and puffed up almost more than she hated the disease – had not wanted Jonas to touch her, even when she wanted to touch him. But now even she could see that things had gone too far the other way. She was so thin and wobbly that when she stood before the mirror she almost fancied that, if she only looked hard enough, she could see the very beast that was consuming her from the inside out. Sometimes she even thought she caught a glimpse of it – a tic in the skin stretched over her hip, an odd bulge under her ribs that disappeared with the light. She would feel sick at the thought that one day she might be looking into this mirror and see a sharp claw split her belly, a scaled hand emerge, and the cold-eyed reptilian disease open her skin like curtains on the final act in the play of her life.

Lucy shivered, even though their heating bills were ridiculously high and she had the rug snuggled up to her chin. She thought of the real-life horror that had played out less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay now on the couch. Had Margaret woken before dying? She must have. Even if it was only when the pillow was already over her face. The terror. The helpless terror. Lucy felt compassion overwhelm her. Poor Margaret.

Shamefully hot on the heels of compassion came the usual question: what would she do?

She thought that she would bite an assailant to make him let go of her. Biting was weird, and taboo enough to be unexpected. So, bite him in the face like a pit bull. She imagined the taste of his unshaven cheek and the howl of pain and outrage as his grip loosened … Then she would jerk upwards and sideways to throw him off the bed and on to the floor – like this! – then she would twist, fling the bed covers over his head, stamp on the place where she’d last seen his face and run next door to Mrs Paddon to use the phone.

There!

She was mentally breathless, but drew real strength from her imagined actions, reassured that if anyone ever tried anything like that with her when Jonas wasn’t around, she’d done as much as she could – and more than most people – to prepare herself.

There was a faint rumbling noise, then the sound of the garden gate squeaking and a tentative knock on the door. Lucy changed channels to The Antiques Roadshow and called, ‘Come in, Steven!’

A gangly sixteen-year-old sloped into the room with white earphones in, making only shy eye-contact.

‘I brought your paper, Mrs Holly.’

As if he’d be doing anything else. The DayGlo sack resting on his hip with Exmoor Bugle emblazoned across it was the giveaway, just as the rumble of his skateboard wheels on the road outside the front gate was his weekly herald.

‘Thanks, Steven. How are you?’

Steven Lamb had been delivering their paper since they moved in, and Lucy had watched him change from a boy into a teenager in weekly increments. First he’d been a scrawny thirteen-year-old, small for his age, and so shy that he had reddened and stammered at the mere idea that he might actually come in to deliver the paper instead of push it through the letterbox. Only the five-pound tip Jonas Holly pressed into his hand every month seemed to convince him that the policeman was serious – that he should indeed enter their home and