The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  “He’s in my room,” Joe mutters, heading for the stairs.

  I follow him. I want to find Patrick fixing the wardrobe door that keeps sticking or, even better, putting together some new furniture so Joe’s room looks like less of an afterthought next to Mia’s, whose room he put aside a whole weekend to decorate straight after we moved in. But he’s not doing any of those things. He’s fitting another lock, this one to the window, a big, ugly lock-and-bolt thing that’s hugely obtrusive.

  “Jesus, Dad, you’ve already cut the fucking tree down,” Joe says, and Patrick scowls at him. He’s still holding the drill and I put a hand on Joe’s arm. The shadows of his beating have only just faded. He shakes it off and takes another step toward Patrick. “Will it be a lock on my door next?”

  I think of the shiny new padlock Patrick’s put on the cellar door. What else has he got in that bag?

  “I have to stop the sneaking out,” Patrick says, and Joe laughs.

  “It wasn’t me sneaking out, though, was it, Dad? In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m the one who’s actually fucking here.”

  Back on the landing, Joe turns to me. “How long do you think it’s going to be before he really does put locks on our doors?” The drill starts up in his room again and we back away.

  “I’ve got a job,” Joe says. “It’s only in a coffee shop, and only part-time, but I’m earning money and I’m saving. I’m going to get out of here, Mum. I wish you would, too.”

  “Joe…”

  “He won’t be able to lock me away then. I’ll be gone and I won’t ever come back.”

  Something wakes me. I open my eyes and Patrick is sitting up in bed, his head in his hands. I hadn’t noticed how thin he’s getting, collar bones jutting behind his hunched shoulders, his scars standing out even in the dark.

  The first time I saw him naked, I remarked on his scars. He had too many scars for a twenty-two-year-old middle-class man with an office job. Where did you get them? I asked. He told me stories for all of them—a fall from a tree, off a bike, a minor car accident, all perfectly feasible explanations for the scars patterning his body.

  But now I wonder how many of those stories were true.

  “What’s wrong?” I whisper.

  “Bad dream,” he says, lifting his hands from his face but not moving from that hunched-over position.

  I reach up to touch his shoulder and find it damp with sweat. He jumps as if I’ve slapped him.

  “Do you want me to get you a drink or something?” The bed creaks as I sit up, tugging the quilt with me. Patrick is sweating, but I’m cold. I always seem to be cold in this house.

  Patrick shakes his head. “No, I’ll just… sit for a while.”

  Is he scared to go back to sleep in case he falls straight back into his nightmare?

  “Was it like the dreams you had before?”

  He wipes sweat off his face. “It was different this time. I was a boy again. The house was like it was back then, but the landing was longer and there were too many rooms. I was running and there was screaming… That was always when I woke up before. But this time, I found myself in the cellar and I knew whatever caused the screaming was in there with me.”

  I can hear our mingled breath, his fast and harsh. When he’d had these dreams before, I’d never thought they meant anything. But now we’re here, in the house with the same landing, which does seem to get longer in the middle of the night. His dreams never took him into the cellar before—is it because I found the writing, or is it something more? “Is it… Do you think it is just a dream?”

  “As opposed to what? You think it’s real? What—a memory?”

  I pull the quilt higher. “Is it?”

  He looks down at his hands and I see they’re shaking. I hold my breath as I wait for him to answer. “Don’t be stupid,” he says. “Of course it’s a dream.”

  But I’m thinking of the cellar. I’m thinking of the writing on the walls. I’m remembering when he woke up from those nightmares before, the half-screamed words I thought meant nothing, that were just fragments left over from a nightmare. I’m sorry, I’ve been bad. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve been bad.

  “Sarah?” he says. “You won’t… you won’t ever leave me, will you?” The pleading note in his voice, the fear, sets my stomach churning. “I see you drifting away and I can’t… I don’t think I could stand it if you weren’t here.”

  I see the ghost of my mother in his face, a naked vulnerability verging on desperation.

  The light on the landing flickers and goes out. I glance at the digital clock and that’s gone off too.

  “Power cut,” Patrick says, but when I get up to check, the streetlight outside is still on. I hear a moan from one of the children’s rooms.

  “I’ll go,” I say as I see Patrick getting up.

  “I can’t sleep anyway, I’ll check on them.”

  “Patrick.” I reach for his arm. “Don’t…”

  He stares back at me, his face barely visible in the darkness. “Don’t what?”

  My heart’s pounding, but I don’t know how to say the rest of the sentence without making him… upset again. He shakes my hand off his arm.

  I get back into bed and lie down, staring up at the ceiling. I can hear a tapping on the window. I know it’s not tapping. I know it’s the wind rattling the frame. Or the branches of the tree at the front hitting the glass. But it sounds like knocking, someone outside saying, Let me in.

  I don’t think I could stand it if you weren’t here, Patrick said. What would he do to make me stay?

  Patrick still isn’t back. Maybe one of the children is ill. I think of Joe and his arms and I get up, tiptoe to the door. When I look out, Patrick is on the landing, facing away from me. He’s leaning his head on Mia’s closed door. He’s holding the handle, but he doesn’t open the door, just leans his head against it. His other hand is clenched in a fist at his side and his eyes are closed. I don’t move, I stay where I am, heart pounding even harder, hidden behind our door, watching Patrick and waiting. Waiting for what? I stand and wait and watch, and behind me, the tapping on the window gets louder and the wind outside seems to whisper, I’m sorry. I’ve been bad. I’m sorry.

  CHAPTER 26

  I pick up my phone and hesitate. I waver, then make myself answer. “Hello?”

  “Sarah? It’s Tom.”

  Stupid. This is my own stupid fault for leaving my details with the estate agent, for trying to contact him in the first place.

  “I had a message on my phone from Mr. Walker.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “He basically accused me of stalking you. Told me to stay away from you. What did you tell him?”

  “You came to the house, Tom—you followed me onto the cliff path. That’s not normal behavior.”

  “All I ever did was warn you. All I wanted was to help you.” He pauses, and I can hear him breathing, harsh and fast. “Do you know—I called your husband once, when I knew he was buying the house. I called because he knows Hooper should still be in prison for what he did to my family. He knows. But he wouldn’t take my calls. He never called me back. And so I left it. But then you contacted me and I knew it was a sign. And now you’re doing the same, ignoring my calls.”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Is it because of the other man? The one in your sketchbook? Do you think he’s going to rescue you, take you away from it all?” He stops and I hear his breath catch. “That’s what my mother said to us about Hooper.”

  I feel a growing sense of panic, of things escalating. “Look, I’m sorry I got in touch. It was a mistake. Patrick can’t help you. Ian Hooper is out, but there’s nothing Patrick can do to change that. And you don’t know me, we’re not family—we’re strangers.”

  There’s silence. I’m ready to end the call when he speaks again. “We were never strangers. You’re as caught up in this as I am, because of the man you married.”

  “What do you mean? What—” But
I’m talking to dead air. He’s hung up, and when I try to call back, it goes to voicemail.

  I take my sketchbook out onto the coast path and sit on the bench that I believe was the star of the painting in the gallery window on the day I met Anna. I’ve got an idea for another painting using all the colors from Anna’s secret beach, but working in the studio was stifling me, giving everything I paint an edge I don’t intend to be there. Instead of it being a sanctuary, I’m too aware of Ben working downstairs, Ben, who I’d thought might turn into a friend but instead has become more of a stranger, because of his secret friendship with Patrick and his bowls of shells. I tried painting in the kitchen of the Murder House, but the draft from the broken window catch is like a cold breath on my neck, and the way the wind blows sometimes sounds like moaning.

  “I wondered where you were.”

  My pencil slips on the page as Patrick sits down next to me. He’s still suspended from work, but he got up at six as usual this morning and put on his suit. I came downstairs and he was sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space.

  He puts a flask on the bench between us. “I brought you some tea.” He pours some into a cup and offers it to me, but I shake my head. He shrugs and takes a sip, smiling. “What are you drawing?”

  “Just some scribbled ideas. For a seascape, but something quite abstract.”

  “Not a portrait, then?”

  There’s something odd in his voice, an off-note that makes my shoulders stiffen and my heart beat faster.

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “I found this in the hall—it must have fallen out of your sketchbook.”

  He unfolds the paper and lays it on the bench between us. “Who are you drawing?”

  Oh, God. I think of that painting of the couple on the bench and wonder if Anna’s ever come up with this scenario for what’s going on between the two figures. “It’s just a drawing from my imagination.”

  It’s not even a good drawing, not like Joe’s sketches. It’s a scribbled portrait done in an idle moment: an artist at work on a canvas in a cottage by the sea, shown from behind so you can see the view he’s painting. It doesn’t look much like Ben, not really. Any of the other pages in my sketchbook have better drawings, but they’re of the beach, of Mia and Joe. Nothing in any of those to make Patrick wonder. Which is why I’d torn out the page. I thought I’d put it in the bin. I think again of Patrick sitting staring at nothing. Maybe I did. Maybe that’s where he found it. Or… I think of Tom Evans looking at the sketch, Tom Evans, who might still have a key to the house, who’s angry because I told Patrick about him.

  Joe’s sketchbooks reveal the truth, more than a photo ever could. Does mine do the same? Tom read something in this sketch that I never intended to put there. Clearly, so has Patrick. I notice his hand is shaking.

  “I thought… at first I thought you were drawing the house. Us. I thought it was me in the sketch, looking at your paintings. Then I looked closer. Who is he?” he asks again.

  “Really—he’s nobody. An idea, a dream, I don’t know.”

  “A dream? Is this what you want?” he says.

  Everything I find out about the boy Patrick used to be, the more of a stranger my husband becomes. The house, the Murder House, is rotting, oozing poison and falling apart. Joe is at home, a boy made of scars. Mia is out, still searching for someone to save her. And at the back of the wardrobe, there’s a gaping hole in the box of treasures that holds all that’s left of my parents. “Yes,” I snap. “This is my fantasy—everything I don’t have.”

  Patrick’s turn to go pale, to look scared. The fear in him is bleeding out, eating at his control. I didn’t start it: that was someone else, something else. It was this house, whatever he’s trying to undo and paint over by bringing us here.

  He crumples up the sketch and I think he’s going to hit me. I duck down, but nothing happens. When I look up, he’s opened out the paper again and he lets it go. The wind picks it up and carries it away, over the edge of the cliff.

  “You’re killing me, Sarah,” he says softly. “You’re breaking my fucking heart.”

  I see Anna coming up the path and, for a moment, I’m tempted to hide. I’ve been avoiding her—at first because I was angry over her words last time we met, then, after Patrick nearly hit Mia, because I didn’t want to have to confront my growing fear that she was right.

  I take a deep breath and pull the front door open when she knocks.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, holding out a pot of daisies gift-wrapped in tissue paper and a bow. “I was ridiculous the last time we met. I’m oversensitive because of my history with my ex, but I had no right to question your relationship with Patrick. You told me he’d never touch any of you and I should have accepted that immediately.”

  The way she’s holding out the pot of flowers, I can see the scars running up her arms. I reach to take the daisies. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you sure? I’d hate to think I’ve upset you in any way… You haven’t taken my last couple of calls, so I thought I must have said something.” She glances at me and away again.

  I take the flowers and put them on the hall table.

  “Are you okay? You look terrible.” She reaches past me, picks up a fallen petal. “Do you think that was a loves-me or a loves-me-not?”

  I want to smile and tell her again it’s all fine, but Mia jumps every time Patrick enters a room and Joe is still healing after the attack. The attack he’s too scared to tell anyone but me about. The attack someone watched and let happen.

  Instead of replying, I rub my palm across my burning eyes. I didn’t sleep again last night. Every time I closed my eyes, all those faces were there—Ian Hooper, John and Marie Evans, the little gap-toothed boys. God, Tom Evans, that sweet boy from the photos who looked like Joe once did, the man he’s turned into… Is that what’s going to happen to my children? Next to me, Patrick was sleeping heavily and I watched him in the dark, thinking about his obsession with this house, all those times he came here when he’d said he was working… Did he visit way back when the Evans family lived there? Did he just park and sit outside? Or did he sometimes knock on the door?

  Tom is so insistent John and Patrick were friends. What is it he thinks Patrick knows that could have kept Hooper in prison? All those detours Patrick said he used to take past this house, all those calls he put in to the local estate agent… More than fifteen years ago. Can I remember where he was every night fifteen years ago? Could I even remember where he was on the night of the murders?

  Ben might know. He might remember. He said he was away at college when the murders happened, but what about before? What about holidays? Would he have recognized his former school friend hovering around his old house?

  “What’s wrong, Sarah?” Anna says, and I look at her, blank-faced. How long did I zone out for then? What was she saying?

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.” But even I can hear the lie in my voice. Does she see me jump when I hear a car door slam? Does she wonder why I rush to the living room window to check it’s not Patrick?

  “Nothing wrong? Really?” Anna says.

  “You’d better go. Patrick could be home any minute and he’s… It’s not a good time.”

  “I’m worried about you,” she says softly. “I see myself when I look at you… I sometimes feel I spent my life learning to swim against the tide. Years and years, building my strength up.” She leans in close and her perfume is overpowering. She smells of the sweetpeas she brought around once, strong enough to make my head spin.

  “I can see you’ve done the same. Struggling against the tide all this time. I swam away, but after a while I got tired and stopped swimming,” she says. “I stopped swimming and the tide dragged me here.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them, she stares at me with burning eyes. “Things are escalating, aren’t they? What are you worried about, Sarah? I can see it in your face. What’s
he done?”

  I’m awake but not really awake. I lie staring up at the ceiling, listening to Joe get ready for work, Mia for school. My door opens and I close my eyes again, feign sleep.

  “Sarah?” Patrick whispers, sighing when I don’t answer. The bed creaks as he sits next to me. I feel his hand on the back of my head. “I have to go into the office to speak to David, but I’ll come home early.”

  He puts a glass of water next to the bed. It’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes after he’s gone. It’s to take my pill with. He’s done it every morning, put a glass of water in front of me, waiting until I respond to the trigger, like Pavlov’s dog, and get up to find my pills. Are the ones I buried in the garden still there? I picture myself digging them up, swallowing mud-caked drops of numbness, and that’s the thought that gets me out of bed. I make myself shower and dress and go downstairs. I will not fall into that bloody dark pit again. I won’t let myself.

  I jump when I go into the kitchen and find Joe there, eating toast. I put a hand on my chest. “God, Joe, I jumped a mile then—I thought you’d gone to work.”

  He looks at me from under his hair. “I don’t start until four today,” he says. “It’s an evening shift.”

  I frown and switch the kettle on. “Will you be okay to get a bus or a train home?”

  He puts his mug next to mine, spooning coffee into both. “I might stay with a friend.”

  “One of your old friends from school?”

  “What old friends from school? Have you noticed my phone constantly ringing?” He half smiles, but I can see the bitterness. “It’s fine, Mum. Don’t worry about it. I’ve never been Mr. Popular, never like Mia.”

  “So who are you staying with?”

  He picks up his mug when I fill it with hot water. “Just… a friend. Someone I met. The one who came out to meet me last week.” I think that’s all I’m going to get, that he’ll take his toast and coffee and retreat to his room, but he puts his mug on the table and turns to me. “Simon. His name’s Simon.”