Belinda Bauer - Darkside

The sounds of the hospital came back to Lucy muffled and from far away. She became aware of a big hand holding hers – tough, dry and warm.

Jonas , she thought with a twist of guilt.

Stiffly she moved her head and opened her eyes, expecting to read worry, relief – even anger – in his eyes.

Instead, for one crazy moment, she found she had been sucked through a tear in time, and that she was married to a small boy wearing a look of such terror on his face that she flinched and clutched at his hand as if he were the one who was falling.

‘Jonas!’

Her throat burned and the word came out as a harsh caw, but it aged him like a slap in the face and immediately his eyes filled with all those emotions she’d expected to see when she first looked up at him – even the anger.

Lucy didn’t care. She brimmed with tears. Jonas held her in his arms – a man again – and she overflowed into the crook of his elbow while he bent over her and said quiet, tender things into her hair.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ she sobbed, but she couldn’t even understand her own muffled words.

And anyway, she wasn’t certain they were true.

Margaret Priddy awoke to the brilliant beam of light she had been anticipating with fear and longing for years.

Finally, she thought, I’m dying. And tears of loss mingled with those of joy on her lined cheeks.

Ever since her fall she had lain here – or somewhere very like it – slack and immobile and dependent on other people for her most basic needs. Food, water, warmth. Toilet – which the nurses carried out as if her dignity were numbed, not her body. Company…

The nurses tried their best.

‘Morning, Margaret! Beautiful morning!’

‘Morning, Margaret! Sleep well?’

‘Morning, Margaret! Raining again!’

And then they would either run out of paltry inspiration or jabber on about their night out getting drunk, or their children’s seemingly endless achievements at school. A relentless rota of cheerful bustle with big busts and bingo wings. The break in silence was welcome at first but, in the face of inanity, Margaret quickly longed for solitude.

She was grateful. Of course she was. Grateful and polite – the way an English lady should be in the circumstances. They had no way of knowing about her gratitude, of course, but she tried to convey it in her eyes and she thought some of them understood. Peter did, but then Peter had always been a sensitive boy.

Now – as the light made her eyes burn – Margaret Priddy thought of her son and the tears of loss took precedence. Peter was forty-four years old but she still always thought of him first as a five-year-old in blue shorts and a Batman T-shirt, running down the shingle in Minehead on the first beach holiday they’d ever taken.

She was leaving her little boy alone.

She knew it was silly, but that’s how she felt about it.

She was dying and he’d be all alone.

But still she was dying. At last. And it was just as she’d imagined – white and wonderful and pain-free.

It was only when she sensed the press of weight on the bed that was her home that she realized this was not the start of her journey to the Hereafter, but someone in her room with a torch.

Someone uninvited, invading her home, her room, her bed, the very air in front of her face…

Every fibre of Margaret Priddy’s being screamed to respond to the danger.

Unfortunately, every fibre of her being below the neck had been permanently disconnected from her brain three years before when old Buster – the most reliable of horses – had stumbled to his knees on a patch of ice, throwing her head-first into a wooden telegraph pole.

So instead of screaming, punching and fighting for what was left of her life, she could only blink in terror as the killer placed a pillow over her face.

He didn’t want to hurt her. Only wanted her dead.

As he suffocated Margaret Priddy with her own well-plumped pillow, the killer felt a rush of released tension, like an old watch exploding, scattering a thousand intricate parts and sending tightly wound springs bouncing off into nowhere as the bounds of the casing broke open around him.

He sobbed in sudden relief.

The feel of the old lady’s head through the pillow was comfortingly distant and indistinct. The unnatural stillness of her body seemed like permission to continue and so he did. He pressed his weight on to the pillow for far longer than he knew was necessary.

When he finally removed it and shone his torch into her face, the only discernible change in Margaret Priddy was that the light in her eyes had gone out.

‘There,’ thought the killer. ‘That was easy.’

First Lucy – and now this .

PC Jonas Holly leaned against the wall and took off his helmet so that his suddenly clammy head could breathe.

The body on the bed had played the organ at his wedding. He’d known her since he was a boy.

He could remember being small enough not to care that it wasn’t cool to be impressed by anything, waving at Mrs Priddy as she went past on an impossibly big grey horse – and her waving back. Over the next twenty-five years that scene had been repeated dozens of times, with all the characters in it evolving. Margaret growing older, but always vibrant; he stretching and growing, coming and going – university, Portishead, home to visit his parents while they were still alive. Even the horse changed, from a grey through any number of similar animals until Buster came along. Mrs Priddy always liked horses that were too big for her; ‘The bigger they are, the kinder they are,’ she’d told him once as he’d squinted up into the sky at her, trying to avoid looking at Buster’s hot, quivery shoulder.

Now Margaret Priddy was dead. It was a blessing really – the poor woman. But right now Jonas Holly only felt disorientated and sick that somehow, during the night, some strange magic had happened to turn life into death, warmth into cold and this world into the next.

Whatever the next world was. Jonas had only ever had a vague irreligious notion that it was probably nice enough.

This was not his first body; as a village bobby, he’d seen his fair share. But seeing Margaret Priddy lying there had hit him unexpectedly hard. He heard the nurse coming up the stairs and put his helmet back on, hurriedly wiping his face on his sleeve, hoping he didn’t look as nauseous as he felt. He was six-four and people seemed to have an odd idea that the taller you were, the more metaphorical backbone you should have.

The nurse smiled at him and held the door open behind her for Dr Dennis, who wore khaki chinos and a polo shirt at all times – as if he was in an Aussie soap and about to be whisked off in a Cessna to treat distant patients for snakebite in the sweltering outback, instead of certifying the death of a pensioner in her cottage on a damp January Exmoor.

‘Hello, Jonas,’ he said.

‘Right, Mark.’

‘How’s Lucy?’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘Good.’

Jonas had once seen Mark Dennis vomit into a yard of ale after a rugby match, but right now the doctor was all business, his regular, tanned face composed into a professional mask of thoughtful compassion. He went over to the bed and checked Margaret Priddy.

‘Nice lady,’ he said, for something to say.

‘The best,’ said Jonas Holly, with feeling. ‘Probably a blessing that she’s gone. For her, I mean.’

The nurse smiled and nodded professionally at him but Mark Dennis said nothing, seeming to be very interested in Margaret Priddy’s face.