Light Up the Dark

by Suki Fleet

  Driving back, Cai thought he glimpsed a shiny car following him. A car that reminded him of Cyril’s, but it turned off before Cai reached the estate and he promptly forgot about it.

  When Cai woke the next morning, muscles aching worse than the day before, all he wanted to do was bury his head under the duvet and sleep some more. His conscience didn’t agree. If he slept the job wouldn’t get finished and he wouldn’t get paid, and if he had no money he couldn’t pay the van loan or the rent and they’d have nothing to eat and nowhere to live and Soph would…. Cai rolled out of bed and rubbed his face with his hands. There were far harder things in life than having to get up when you felt like crap.

  It was still dark as Cai drove out of the estate. But as he made his way down the winding country lanes leading to Thorn Hall, the sky dawned spectacularly. Fiery oranges and pinks on a sea of electrifying turquoise. It looked unreal and Cai drove slowly, creeping along the drive, transfixed.

  If he’d been driving normally, watching where he should have been watching, he would have known he was a little too close to the shallow draining ditch that ran down both sides of the driveway.

  The van tilted and slid, before pitching sideways into the ditch and thumping to a halt.

  “Crap!” Cai swung the door open and stepped out to see what the hell he’d done and how he was going to undo it. But before he turned to check the van over, something caught his eye—movement a hundred or so metres away by the side of the house. As he watched, a slender hooded figure emerged from between the large trees, walking fast. Another figure darted between the shadows of the trees and followed a little distance behind.

  Since he’d taken the job, Cai had only seen a delivery driver and Cyril5 here, and they’d both arrived in vehicles. There were no vehicles currently parked in front of the house.

  Cai waited, but neither figure turned and noticed him.

  They were headed towards that dark patch of monstrous trees Cai had, as yet, not gotten around to taking a look at. If he was being honest, he’d avoided those trees.

  What was bothering him was that the first figure seemed completely unaware they were being followed.

  And in Cai’s experience if someone was being stealthily followed it wasn’t usually for a good reason.

  With a sigh, he looked back at the van. He could probably push it back onto the drive. It would be easier with help but he knew he’d probably end up doing it on his own. Crouching down, he ran his hand down the car and glanced under the chassis. Everything looked okay; it wasn’t damaged or leaking oil, and it wasn’t blocking the drive. It could wait.

  Reaching inside, Cai grabbed the wax jacket from the passenger seat, before quietly shutting the van’s door and wading into the overgrowth.

  The cluster of dark trees loomed across the overgrown lawn. Close up they were more imposing than the house. By the time he reached the edge of them, both figures were nowhere in sight.

  Cai took one last glance over his shoulder at his van before taking a step inside. Immediately, the stunning warm colours of the sky vanished. If he looked up, all he could see were the dark crosshatch of branches, as if the spectacular sky ceased to exist at all. Now the world was indistinct, grey and shadowed, and quite a lot colder.

  He should have picked up the scythe, he thought, pushing his way through the narrowing space. Whip-like spindly branches stung his hands as he protected his face as best he could. The wax jacket was like protective armour covering his chest and back and he was intensely grateful to his note leaver.

  After a minute or two, Cai stopped plunging forwards and listened. No twigs snapped, no wind rustled through the branches, no whispered voices echoed. His shallow breathing was the only sound in the heavy silence. The air smelled rotted and wrong and with every movement Cai tried not to exert himself, not wanting to breathe any deeper than was necessary.

  Turning his head, he scanned the area around him again. He couldn’t see more than a few metres in any direction. The trees were evergreens, tightly packed and straight as an army of telephone poles. The ground beneath his feet was covered in a carpet of grey-brown needles that silenced any footsteps.

  Feeling caught in a strange muted bubble, Cai struggled on. Thick roots lined his path and, unable to see the ground clearly, he tripped over them again and again, every stumble hushed by the pine needles.

  Thoughts about yelling out, just to check his voice could still be heard, nagged at him, but he supposed he should try to go unnoticed—he was trying to surreptitiously follow the two people who’d snuck in here, after all.

  But as he’d lost sight of them both almost as soon as he’d put on his jacket and trampled across the garden after them, he wasn’t sure they’d even come in this direction. All he could think about was getting out of there.

  A muffled splash echoed around him.

  Cai closed his eyes, trying to focus on where the sound had come from. But it was hard to tell. He kept walking. Another splash. Closer now. The sound more like something heavy being thrown into a pool. The bad feeling in his chest began to grow. Drawing his arms around himself, Cai burrowed deeper into the warmth of the jacket and headed towards the splashes.

  Up ahead the dense wood finally appeared to thin. As he got closer he could see it opened out into a clearing. It wasn’t the edge of the wood as Cai had hoped, but stepping through the last of the trees he wanted to shout his relief. No longer thinking about the figures he was following, Cai was just thankful to be out of the claustrophobic dark. Dark that now felt solid as a wall behind him.

  The stunning pink brightness of the dawn filled the sky once again. Cai tipped his head back, only half aware of the large rectangular pool taking up much of the clearing.

  A flurry of movement caught his eye. Cai swung around to see a slim bare-chested young man with a rope of red hair race out of the treeline on the far edge of the pool, his goggled gaze fixed on the water. Lifting his arms, the man leapt and dived, his body taut as an arrow, and shot straight into the pool’s black depths.

  “Hey!” Cai shouted, filled with a sudden and intense feeling that no one should be diving into this dark pool. It wasn’t safe, wasn’t right somehow. The whole place had an air of wrongness. But he was too late.

  Cai rushed to the edge of the water, searching for any sign of luminous pale skin or bright red hair. Concentric ripples spread across the water’s surface, but the young man had vanished into its blackness.

  For a moment Cai stood at the side of the pool and waited apprehensively, expecting the diver to quickly resurface, gasping with cold.

  But he didn’t.

  It began to feel like too long.

  Unsure what he should do, Cai held his breath and started counting.

  He didn’t know who this person was, and quite frankly he didn’t care right now, but he didn’t want them to drown, definitely not while he was there watching.

  Seven, eight. Cautiously, Cai crouched and dipped his hand into the water. It was even colder than he expected, the surface littered with bracken and slimy leaves. Though, surprisingly, the water didn’t seem to be the main source of the rotten smell that had filled the air when Cai had been struggling through the trees, rather the brackish water smelled no worse than a mouldy puddle.

  Twelve, thirteen. Cai gripped the stone at the edge of the pool. It was the same cold austere stone Thorn Hall had been built with. The green of the moss was striking and bright against the grey.

  On the opposite side of the pool a small pile of dark clothes lay on the ground near where the young man had dived from. The tightly packed trees behind the clothes shifted slightly as Cai watched. He stared. It could have just been the wind.

  Birds flew across the roof of the clearing. A crow cawed. The sound was startling and loud in the silence.

  Twenty, twenty-one. No longer holding his breath, Cai kept counting. The surface of the pool had become so still it was as though it had never been disturbed. It had swallowed the diver completely.


  Where was he? Why wasn’t he coming back up? How long was it possible to hold your breath for underwater? He’d dived in with nothing to help him breathe under the water, Cai was sure of it.

  He didn’t want some dead guy on his conscience. He thought of Soph. He thought of telling her he’d stood at the edge of a pool and did nothing while someone drowned.

  With a sick feeling in his stomach, Cai stood up and stripped off the wax jacket, then bent down and unlaced his boots. Quickly, he toed them off. The chilly morning air bit into him through his thin T-shirt, making him shiver. Should he undress completely? Cai wasn’t sure, but dithering was not going to help anyone. The diving figure had been wearing only a pair of tight black trousers.

  Forty-two, forty-three. Come up. Please come back up. Don’t make me do this….

  Cai scanned the water again and again. Nothing. The pool suddenly seemed huge. It looked to be as large as an Olympic swimming pool and Cai had a feeling it was deep. Deeper than a swimming pool should be.

  Fifty, fifty-one….

  Fuck it! Cai took a deep breath and jumped.

  The cold of the water crushed all the air out of him. He kicked his legs and fought to stay afloat until he could catch his breath. Something touched his foot. Panicked, Cai jerked back, splashing madly.

  Someone was in trouble, he reminded himself. Someone had dived in here in the freezing cold and not come back up, and they’d been followed—though as to whether the redhead was the followee or the follower, Cai didn’t know.

  What he did know, though he was reluctant to admit it, was that it was exactly this sort of impulsive behaviour that had gotten him into trouble last time.

  Letting the weight of the water on his clothes help pull him down, Cai took a deep breath and dived.

  Nicky the water nymph

  “I didn’t need rescuing! I was fine,” Nicky snapped, as he dragged himself over the rough stone, out of the pool and away from the gardener’s too helpful grasp.

  In truth, Nicky was about as far from fine as it was possible to get.

  His arms collapsed, leaving him lying half on the stones, half on the muddy wet grass, shivering violently as he coughed up a lung and tried to catch his breath. Reaching up, he yanked his goggles off and tossed them on the grass—he would have flung them into the pool if he had the strength.

  For half a minute down there, with his ankle trapped in some tangle of wire that seemed to cover the bottom of the pool, he’d thought that was it for him. He’d gone right through panic and come out the other side. Felt his own death like a physical tangible thing darkening through him, starting to put out all the lights. And then the looming figure of the gardener had appeared paddling through the gloom, lit up by Nicky’s flickering torch like the ghost of Christmas past, and Nicky had nearly swallowed a fatal lungful of filthy water in shock.

  After that everything had become a bit blurry and faint—somehow Nicky’s ankle had been freed and Cai had put his big gardener’s hands on Nicky’s ribs and jetted them both to the surface in what seemed like nanoseconds.

  Cai had probably (definitely) saved his life, but there was no way Nicky was telling him that. He’d likely wanted nothing more than to sling Nicky over his shoulder and carry him off grunting.

  Closing his eyes to the too pink sky, he heard Cai haul himself out of the water, splashing and huffing and gasping for breath, teeth chattering like firecrackers.

  From the proximity of the sound, he surmised that Cai had collapsed somewhere far too close, though he wasn’t going to open his eyes to check. Any voluntary movement was too much effort right now.

  They lay unmoving in the cold, the both of them breathing too heavily and shivering too hard, but neither making any attempt to get up, though Nicky knew they probably should—but it was just a small suggestion at the back of his mind that he was currently, quite wilfully, ignoring. Everything was beginning to feel like a bizarre dream.

  At one point Cai might have muttered something like “Who are you?” and Nicky might have replied “Nicky the water nymph” because it was the first thing that came into his head and he hadn’t slept all night working himself up to doing this, and he’d faced a terrifying watery death and didn’t feel like making sense any longer. But he probably hadn’t really said that—probably no one had spoken at all. He was just so tired his mind was playing tricks, and it felt a little bit like he was floating.

  “Please tell me no one else dived into the water before you. I heard splashing.” Cai’s voice brought him back to himself and Nicky winced. Crashing back to reality made him suddenly fully aware of how utterly fucking freezing cold he was.

  He sat up. And swayed. Cai was watching him—far too closely.

  Shivering uncontrollably, he made an attempt at standing and discovered his whole body ached as though he’d been beaten with sticks. His trousers were stuck to his skin, making it hard to walk, or maybe that was just his legs refusing to work properly. Where the fuck had he left his shoes and his jumper? He stumbled along the side of the pool, searching.

  A hand touched his arm, steadied him from dropping to his knees. He shook it off.

  “Hey, take it easy. You nearly drowned.” Cai stood in front of him with Nicky’s jumper in his hands. Dirty water still dripped down Cai’s face from his messy hair. The long brown streaks looked like war paint. The way his T-shirt was stuck to his chest, Nicky could see every curve of his muscles. Who needed a gym if that’s what hard labour in the garden did for you? Snatching the jumper, Nicky shoved it over his head, then struggled to find where he was supposed to put his arms.

  “I was following you,” Cai said.

  Great, he’d employed a fucking stalker. This was getting better and better.

  “Were you following someone? Because if you weren’t, there was someone else following you too,” Cai carried on.

  Nicky’s stomach dropped as though he’d been flipped upside down on a roller coaster. He yanked the jumper quickly over his head and stared at Cai’s large brown eyes, feeling the darkness in the woods around them creep closer. “What?”

  “I’m Cai. I’m a gardener at the house.” Cai gestured over his shoulder—in completely the wrong direction. “I was on my way up the drive when I saw two figures in the garden. One following the other. The first didn’t look like they knew they were being followed so I….” Cai shrugged. “Do you live here… I mean there… at the house?”

  Nicky looked around at the copse, everything dark and quiet. So there really was someone watching him, following his every move… scaring the fuck out of him. Question was, who? Were they anything to do with what had happened two years ago? He hugged his chest. His throat felt tight. He needed to get back to the house, to the study, to some semblance of safety, however precarious that now seemed.

  “What were you doing diving in there?”

  Nicky blinked. He’d forgotten Cai was there.

  “I have to get back.” He tried to swallow but his throat still felt tight. The shaking in his limbs was no longer just from the cold. He really, really wanted to be back in his study with the door locked. He wanted to stay there, curled up in a chair, covered with blankets and hidden away. He didn’t want to think about being watched. If he did it would break him.

  Shoes, he needed to find his shoes. Nicky looked around, spotting them behind Cai. Hurriedly, he shoved his wet feet into them, hating how the rough canvas rubbed against his skin.

  “Hey, wait!” Cai called, running to the other side of the pool where it seemed he’d discarded his own jacket—Lance’s jacket—and boots.

  Of course, Nicky didn’t wait, and though he hated to admit it, he was glad Cai stumbled clumsily through the trees after him.

  Cai kept calling out as Nicky headed deeper into the copse. Nicky pulled his hood up so the branches didn’t snag in his hair. He’d lost his torch in the water. Now he was down to candles (and too few matches) even in an emergency, which was funny—in the unfunniest way possible—because his whole
life was beginning to feel like one big fucking emergency.

  Sky on fire

  Nicky, Nicky, Nicky. Mysterious, preoccupied Nicky, with the stunning fiery hair Cai couldn’t stop looking at, was heading straight across the lawn to the back of Thorn Hall.

  Watching Nicky walking purposefully through the thigh-high grasses, arms wrapped around his waist, narrow shoulders hunched and tense, Cai wondered again if he worked at the house in some capacity and what that might be. Though precisely nothing explained why he’d been diving into that deathtrap of a pool in the middle of the creepy wood, other than he had a death wish. Cai was so glad to get out of that place.

  The sky had grown lighter, though the glorious pink had faded to a less attractive sulphuric yellow, and clouds as formidable and grey as the house were shifting in from… the east? Well, whatever direction they were coming from they were shifting fast.

  If it rained again today, Cai wasn’t sure he could take it, not without a hot shower, some dry clothes and maybe something warm to eat first. He wasn’t holding out much hope of finding any of that at Thorn Hall. Still, as Nicky swung open one of the French doors at the back of the house and disappeared inside, leaving the door open and banging against the door frame, Cai decided to follow him in to see if he could at least dry off or get warm by a radiator or fire for a minute.

  Not wanting to leave a trail of pine needles and mud inside the house, Cai carefully toed off his work boots on the patio. After a quick glance up at the roiling sky, he placed them inside the door.

  The room he stepped into was even more wrecked than it looked from the outside. No chance of finding a radiator in here, then. He eyed the lake of water covering much of the tiled floor and, forgetting his feet were already soaked, stepped carefully around it. His wet socks left large, perfectly formed footprints on the dry tiles.

  The room had obviously once been the kitchen, and the pile of units he’d noticed outside on his first day were the torn-out kitchen cabinets. But it didn’t look as though anyone was in the process of fixing the kitchen up. The pipe below where a sink had probably been leaking, causing the lake. With the right tools it looked to be just a matter of tightening the bolt. Judging by the slowness of the leak and the depth of the water, it had been leaking for a while.