Darkest Place

by Jaye Ford

  ‘The windows make me feel a little exposed at night,’ she said.

  ‘I like being able to see out.’ He crossed the room to them, stood dead centre.

  Carly imagined what he looked like from the outside: solid, strong, undaunted. She did her circuit of the view – black bulk of the warehouses, soft lighting of quiet homes, the street below. ‘I worry about who can see in.’ Even now, bad dreams or not.

  ‘Carly.’ There was something decided in his tone.

  She turned, resigned to his questions now.

  ‘Whatever it’s about,’ he said, ‘if you need help, you can ask me.’ He took his hand from his pocket, patted the air. A dual message: I’m not asking and It’s okay. ‘I don’t care about the cops,’ he said. ‘If they’re part of it, it makes no difference to me.’

  She took a breath, said nothing, no idea what conclusion he’d come to on his own.

  ‘If it’s something you’ve done, if you’re in trouble, I don’t care when or what. I want you to know that.’

  Something she’d done? Did he think the police had come uninvited? That she was the problem?

  ‘I just want you to know I’m here, next door. No questions, if that’s the way you want it.’ He raised his eyebrows, asking her to believe him.

  ‘Nate, I …’ It was so far from the conversation she’d expected that she didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I don’t want you to think you’re on your own, Carly.’ He cocked a thumb at the wall between their apartments. ‘And I don’t want to sit in there doing nothing if there’s something I can do to help. To stop it, if that’s possible.’

  He thought she was in danger, and the biggest danger was from herself. He finished his wine with a toss of his head and turned away as though she’d asked him to leave.

  ‘Nate.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to say anything. Now or any other time. Just don’t forget I’m here.’

  ‘Nate,’ she called again as he started for the hall. She didn’t want him to leave and not just because she was scared to be alone. She wanted to tell him it was simpler than he thought, that she hadn’t done anything, that she was grateful for his words. She spoke quickly as she hurried across the room. ‘It’s not … I’m not …’ She took hold of his sleeve, wanting him to know, at least some of it. But his eyes made her hesitate, wondering if he’d feel the same way if he knew it was all in her imagination.

  So she told him something else. ‘Don’t go. Not yet.’

  22

  There was relief in Nate’s expression as Carly drew him back into the room. ‘Thank you,’ she said, wondering why it was important to him. ‘For staying. For what you said.’

  He nodded. Brevity. There was a lot to like about him. Her eyes lingered on him as she took a sip of wine, reminded herself sex hadn’t been part of the equation when she’d asked him to stay. It didn’t stop the concept slipping through her mind, though.

  ‘What do you look at when you stand at your windows?’ she asked.

  ‘The harbour.’

  Carly angled her eyes towards the wedge of sparkling lights. ‘It’s pretty.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Down there,’ she said. ‘The warehouses, the neighbours, the street. I wonder if someone watches back.’

  ‘Do you think anyone does?’

  ‘I think I worry too much. What do you see in the harbour?’

  He stared straight ahead for a long time, lost in whatever was out there. His answer when it came was soft, low. ‘The marina.’

  ‘Can I see it from here?’

  He came to her side, leaned close as he pointed. ‘You can make out the straight line of lights along the jetty.’

  Carly smelled curry and soap on him. And something unmistakably, appealingly masculine. A pulse of awareness joined the buzz of anxiety and alcohol inside her. ‘On the right?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘In daylight, you can see masts and rigs, sometimes a mainsail as someone heads out.’

  Boating terminology. ‘You’re a sailor?’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  She remembered the picture in his apartment, the big black-and-white of a yacht under spinnaker. ‘The photo on your wall. Are you on that boat?’

  ‘Yeah.’ No hint of pride or pleasure in his tone. Maybe he regretted giving it away.

  ‘No time anymore?’

  He folded his arms across his chest, a muscle tightening at the hinge of his jaw. ‘I was involved in an incident at sea. Someone died. I never went back to it.’

  Without thinking, she reached for him, her fingers curling around his bare forearm. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He gave a single sideways dip of his head. Regret and sorrow and realism rolled into one small gesture. As if it was that simple. She knew it wasn’t. She knew the shrug, too. It was shorthand for pain.

  Turning to the lights, she imagined the kind of dark memories he might carry, of a drowning or a rescue gone bad or being adrift on wild seas. Visceral, terrifying memories like her own. She thought it explained his grim tenseness, that he gave up sailing, that he preferred a cramped oil rig to a nice apartment. But he worked in the middle of the ocean and on another man’s boat – Carly had never climbed again, and it had nothing to do with the injuries she’d suffered.

  ‘I had friends,’ she said, not sure why. ‘Three friends. Best friends.’ Maybe she just wanted to tell him something. ‘I watched them die on a ledge in a canyon.’ She closed her eyes. The warmth of his hand as it covered hers made her open them again. His thumb moved across her skin as though she’d said all that needed to be said. It was a still, silent moment that was breathtakingly intimate.

  She wanted to feel what he knew, lifted her eyes to him. He raised his to the window, the muscle at the side of his jaw flexing. It made her hesitate, but her hand turned of its own accord, fingers slipping between his.

  He didn’t move. It wasn’t rejection. It wasn’t acceptance, either. Just a tight set to his mouth and the soft tangle of his fingers with hers. Carly closed the space between them, moved into the line of his gaze, seeing things in his face that she understood, that she felt herself – longing and lust, hesitance and restraint. And something harder and sharper in his eyes – resentment, anger, reproach.

  As though he’d sensed what she saw, he straightened his fingers and pulled them from hers. Held up both hands and took a pace back. She didn’t know if it meant Get away from me or I’m trying to resist.

  ‘Carly, you’ve had a bit to drink.’

  ‘You’re being a gentleman?’ she scoffed. ‘You think I’m so drunk I can’t make a responsible decision for myself?’

  ‘No, look, it’s not what I meant when I said I could help. I’m sorry if that’s what you wanted.’

  There’d been want in his eyes twenty seconds ago. ‘You think I asked you to stay for calm-down sex?’ She’d asked it of other men.

  ‘Christ.’ He spun away, shoulders taut as he stalked from her. Halfway across the room he turned around. ‘This isn’t what you need.’

  ‘You think you know what I need?’

  ‘Carly, listen.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was loud, her legs stiff as she paced to him, incensed and disappointed now. ‘You should leave.’

  She marched past him to the hallway, paused to make sure he got the message.

  Neither of them spoke until he got to the threshold. ‘I can help with whatever is going on with you,’ he said. ‘But you don’t want me like that.’

  Anger and anxiety and alcohol. It was a shitty mix. Carly paced and berated herself. What had she been thinking?

  She hadn’t thought. She’d been alone and afraid and exhausted so she’d opted for sex with the first man to offer her sympathy. It was Charlotte’s failing, her Achilles heel. But she wasn’t Charlotte here.

  And she should be grateful Nate had walked away. They lived either side of the same wall, they passed in the corridor – being rejected was embarrassing enough, it w
ould be worse if she’d slept with him and wished she hadn’t.

  Except now she was alone in her apartment, left with her subconscious and the prospect of sleep. She opened her computer, tried to google sleep paralysis, but couldn’t see for the alcohol or sit for the agitation. And all the time, Nate’s last words kept replaying through her mind – You don’t want me like that.

  He wasn’t being a self-righteous arsehole when he left. It was about him. A warning or an admission or … she had no idea.

  ‘I’ve made a list.’ Dakota unfolded a page as they walked to class the next morning. ‘I’ve called it “Carly’s Big Long List of Things She Could Do”.’ She held the single sheet up.

  Carly squinted from behind sunglasses, the glare off the white page reawakening her hangover. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought we could brainstorm business ideas for you.’

  Carly caught a corner of the paper, glanced at the column of words. ‘You think I should be a walking companion?’

  ‘Well, no, not really. It was just, you know, off the top of my head. But that’s what you’re meant to do with brainstorming. Just chuck in ideas and see where they go.’ She glanced at Carly, a little uncertainty creeping into her kohl-lined eyes. ‘I was reading about the whole brainstorming thing last night and got thinking about you and, well, thought I’d give it a go. It was kind of fun, actually.’

  ‘You were thinking up business opportunities for me last night?’ When Carly was making a fool of herself.

  ‘This morning actually. Over breakfast.’

  When Carly was swallowing painkillers. ‘Oh.’

  Dakota grimaced. ‘I hope you don’t mind. You can, like, toss it if you want.’ She took the page back, folded it over.

  ‘No. It’s a good idea. Come on, let me see.’ There were a dozen or so items on the list. ‘Walking companion. How would that work?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s just you said you walk a lot and … you could have clients who’d pay you to walk with them. Keep them company, make sure they go, that kind of thing.’ She grinned. ‘Include a coffee and cake break and make them pay.’

  Carly nudged her with a shoulder. ‘That’s so sweet you were thinking of me.’ It didn’t make up for last night but made her feel a few steps further away from Charlotte this morning.

  Okay, so sleep paralysis wasn’t a term that people with stressed-out, over-analysed first-world lives had come up with to explain weird dreams. Which was a relief.

  Lunch with Dakota and a few more laughs on the way back to the car park had left Carly ready to face whatever Google could tell her about Liam’s diagnosis. Legs crossed under the coffee table, the laptop open on top and an hour into her research, and she was feeling an uncomfortable connection to other abnormal sleepers.

  Sleep paralysis was a phenomenon that had been experienced frequently enough over hundreds of years for cultures around the world to develop mythologies to explain it. Mostly the folklore involved supernatural visits: demons, ghosts and devils who sat or lay on a sleeping person, pressing down on them, preventing movement and making it hard to breathe. It was called Riding the Hag and Shadow People and the Incubus Effect. The names gave Carly the chills.

  She was grateful Liam hadn’t insisted she was possessed by the spirit of someone in the building, which, according to Scandinavian folktales, was what had sat on her chest. Northern Spaniards would tell her it was a large dog. Fijians believed they were being eaten by the spirit of a dead relative. Japanese culture called the paralysis kanashibari, while the Mongolian term for it translated to ‘pressed by the black’.

  Carly checked off the similarities between the demon stories and her own. The weight on her body, the hand at her throat, the gasping, the paralysis and not being able to fight back. There was no mention of faces being touched, feeling the demon’s breath or hearing it talk and laugh, but they were ancient stories, not a list of symptoms.

  Modern science had, of course, debunked the mythology. Research showed sleep paralysis sufferers were often predisposed to panic attacks, like Carly. There were suggestions it explained alien abduction stories. At least she hadn’t gone to the police with that one.

  Studies had narrowed down three types of ‘intruders’: a man in a hat, an old hag, or someone with a hood. Dreamers couldn’t see the faces and felt a deep sense of terror – all of which Carly had experienced and seemed to confirm Liam’s diagnosis.

  The good news was that it wouldn’t kill her, the bad news that she might be one of the few that suffered repeated, regular incidences, and that it could happen several times in one night. Something to make her want to stay awake.

  Except staying awake would make it worse – and not just the sleep paralysis. She’d been there before, strung out with insomnia and memories, walking herself into exhaustion in an effort to keep them at bay, jittery and fearful when she was still. The online advice matched Liam’s: avoid stress and establish regular sleep habits. Sleeping pills might do that but having the prescription filled felt like a backward step – it was written for Charlotte, the version of herself she’d wanted to leave behind. And if …

  She got up, stood at the edge of the window, telling herself the evidence for sleep paralysis outweighed anything else, but her eyes roamed the view anyway. No fingerprints, locks undisturbed … she wanted to believe it but her skin kept remembering. She touched her throat, her ear. She didn’t want to be drugged and sluggish the next time it happened. Because next time the demon on her chest might do more than clasp his hand around her throat.

  23

  Elizabeth was sitting on her bench in the atrium when Carly returned from a walk the next day. Something about her stillness made Carly walk a little faster through the foyer.

  ‘Elizabeth?’

  The older woman’s eyes were closed, her walking stick lying on the floor.

  Carly dropped to her haunches, kept her voice low, worried about startling her. Worried she wouldn’t respond at all. ‘Elizabeth?’ One of her hands clenched and unclenched. Carly touched the sleeve of the older woman’s red jacket. ‘Elizabeth?’

  She raised her head, her gaze unfocused.

  ‘It’s me. Carly.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ she retorted.

  Stroppy. Carly thought it was a good sign. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ There was a moment of rearranging, shoulders, arms, legs. ‘I was just enjoying the sunshine. You know I insisted they put this bench here for that very reason.’

  Except there was more grey than sun today. ‘Yes, it’s a lovely spot.’ Carly sat beside her, looking her over. Was there a problem or had she dozed off? ‘Have you been out?’

  ‘I have several items I must pick up in Baxter Street,’ she said, fumbling suddenly around the seat.

  Carly noticed an empty shopping bag, retrieved it and the walking stick. ‘Are these what you’re looking for?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Thank you.’ Elizabeth propped the rubber end of the stick on the floor, ready to hoist herself up – and just sat.

  Carly took a guess. ‘How’s your hip feeling in this bad weather?’

  ‘It’s a damn nuisance.’

  ‘I can go to the shops for you.’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’

  Obviously the wrong way to tackle it. ‘It’s just that I need to go myself and it looks like the rain might start any minute. I can take my car and pick up what you need while I’m there. Save us both getting cold and wet.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out.’

  ‘A wise person told me recently that a woman should make her preferences clear.’

  Elizabeth lifted her chin. ‘Thank you, Carly. I would be grateful if you could make a few purchases for me when you are making your own.’

  ‘It would be a pleasure. I need to grab my purse from upstairs,’ she lied, trying to be discreet about helping Elizabeth to the lift. ‘With weather like this it might be a good time to start that stronger
medication for your hip, Elizabeth.’

  ‘I’ve considered that myself. Perhaps I will.’

  ‘I could pick it up for you now, if you like.’

  Carly walked to the shops in a light drizzle, happy for an excuse to avoid going back to the apartment for a while longer. She hadn’t been into the pharmacy in Baxter Street before and took a moment to find Prescriptions In at the rear of the store. A man had his back to the counter, head down, reading. She cleared her throat, and was surprised when he turned.

  ‘Oh, hi. I didn’t know you worked here.’

  Stuart, looking even more like a nerd in a conservative white shirt and blue tie, smiled uncertainly.

  Oh for god’s sake. ‘Carly. From the warehouse. We’ve passed in the lift.’ About twenty times.

  He made a show of remembering. ‘Right, yes. Only when they need me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I only work here when they need me. Usually a couple of days a week. They’d like me to do more but, you know, the research.’

  She nodded, undecided about him. Either he was brilliant or he wanted people to think he was. Maybe his memory was a clue to his brain capacity. ‘At least it’s handy to home,’ she said.

  ‘True. Actually, I’ve been working on a new project. I might have to cut back my time even more. Very interesting, this one.’

  It seemed to be her cue to ask for details but she was damp and cold and she really didn’t care. ‘Well, that’s nice. Can I give you my prescription?’

  There was a second of hesitation before he took it, another as he looked it over. ‘This script is for someone else. Did you have one for yourself?’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘You’re having this made up for Mrs Jennings?’

  That’s what it said. ‘I’m helping her out with some shopping.’

  ‘Mrs Jennings is on our computer, let me check her records.’ He said it as though it was all a bit unlikely. He stooped to tap on a keyboard – maybe too much of that was the problem with his posture. ‘I thought so.’ Poking a finger at the screen, he looked up at Carly. ‘This is a higher dose than usual.’ He held the script out to her like he’d trumped her.