Maybe you dreamed him…
She groaned aloud at the horrible, mocking little voice. With a grunt of pure irritation, she grabbed the laptop and slammed it down on top of the letter, just at the same time as the doorbell rang out.
Her stomach violently lurched and her heart instantly started hammering. She never had visitors and it was way too late for the postman.
Maybe it’s someone here to read the gas or electric…
The doorbell sounded a second time and she cried out, clamping her hand over her mouth like she was in hiding, or something.
Stop. Just stop. You’re being ridiculous.
On shaking legs, she made her way over to the large bay window that was parallel to the front door, prised open the slatted blinds between thumb and forefinger and peered around at her own front door.
On her doorstep was Mrs Bennet, the old lady who lived next door. Her relief was short lived, because the woman’s head snapped round in her direction as if some sixth sense had told her that she was being watched.
“Shit,” Cassie muttered, letting the blind fall back into place, but it was too late, she had been well and truly spotted, now she had no choice but to open the door.
What the hell did that old bat want, anyway?
“Hello Mrs Bennet,” Cassie said, her smile feeling tight and unnatural on her lips.
Mrs Bennet, a well-spoken, some might argue, snotty woman, who, possibly because of her advanced years, apparently deemed it inappropriate for a woman in her twenties to address her by her Christian name.
“Hello, Cassie dear, how are you?”
Cassie gritted her teeth at the fact this mark of respect didn’t cut both ways. Who did she think she was, exactly? She was a slight woman in her seventies, well-preserved, very neat, very proper. Cassie hated her and her busy-body attitude enormously. Hugh had told her that she had been a headmistress, before she had retired a few years back. Cassie could well believe it.
Cassie leant against the doorframe, arms folded, making it quite clear that she had no intention of inviting her inside.
“I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs Bennet. And how are you?”
“Oh, you know, keeping busy. Now that Roger is retired too we seem to be busier than ever. The thing is dear, I was wondering if you would mind getting someone in to mow your lawn. Mr and Mrs Thompson next door have the house on the market and Margaret told me that they’re having a terrible job trying to sell. She seems to think that it might be because the street doesn’t look neat enough. This is a very good postcode, one of the best in Whitstable. There are appearances that one must keep up.”
For a moment, Cassie was at a loss for words, unable to believe that this cow was on her doorstep, telling her that her neatly-kept front garden wasn’t good enough.
“I take good care of my home and garden,” she said in clipped tones, alarmed at the way she could feel her temper simmering just beneath the thin veneer of civility that she was clinging to by the thinnest of threads.
“I don’t wish to offend you, dear. Roger is quite happy to pop ‘round and give your lawn the once over. It’s really no problem.”
“I already have a gardener,” she said through gritted teeth.
“I’m only trying to help, dear. And that offer doesn’t just extend to your garden. If there’s every anything we can do to help, all you have to do is knock on the door. It’s not healthy for a girl as young as you to spend so much time alone…”
“Is that all?” Cassie said, positively bristling in indignation.
“I don’t mean to offend, dear. So shall Roger come round and mow your lawn tomorrow?”
“No, Mrs Bennet, I don’t think so. In fact, I think you should fuck off and keep your fucking nose out of other people’s business.”
With that, she slammed the door on her, the final sight of her near comical with her bug eyes and slack jaw.
The brief stab of satisfaction was immediately replaced by a flood of remorse. She leaned against the door for support, alarmed to discover that she was shaking violently.
Oh God, what just happened?
She just didn’t know what had come over her. That little altercation simply wasn’t like her at all. But that witch was way out of line, spouting all that shit about her near immaculate front lawn. How dare she? Cassie was immensely house-proud – it stung like a bastard to be criticised for exactly less than nothing.
“Fuck you, Mrs Bennet,” she said under her breath, but there was very little conviction behind it, because truth be told, she was disgusted at herself.
No, she didn’t care for the way she had acted one little bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
An hour later Cassie had nearly polished off the bottle of wine, and, true to form, she didn’t feel remotely drunk. She couldn’t settle on anything – the TV grated on her nerves, music felt like a fog in her brain and lifting the laptop lid was just a reminder that He had disappeared on her arse. Wasn’t the term for that ghosting, in the online dating world?
You were never dating him, she reminded herself.
Abruptly jumping to her feet from the sofa, she strolled purposely over to the crammed bookshelf that took up almost the entirety of the wall adjacent to the bay window.
She stood before it, surveying the vast array of books, cursing the fact that she hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing her busted kindle. Most of the books were Hugh’s – fat, leather-bound law tomes that either of them rarely touched. They were for show, more than anything, but there were a few ‘readables’, as she liked to call them, on one of the top shelves. Just as she reached up for a Gillian Flynn that had caught her eye, the living room tipped around her and she snatched back her hand.
Nausea washed over her, accompanied by a searing pain in her head and she doubled over at the suddenness of it. It was accompanied by a ringing in her ears that reached near-deafening proportions, making her clamp her hands to her head and cry out in pain.
Neither could she catch her breath – she was hyperventilating, her heart working overtime. Dimly, she realised that she was having a full-blown panic attack. The room around her darkened and it took her a moment to realise that it was because her vision was dimming rather than the lights. She was on her knees on the hard, wooden floor, and she didn’t remember falling.
“What’s happening to me?” she sobbed to the empty room.
Except it wasn’t empty anymore.
Through her blurred vision, she saw Chloe sitting on the sofa, on the spot that she had just vacated. Tight panic squeezed her heart, forcing it to pump harder, faster. She understood that she was hallucinating. Yes, she understood it, but it didn’t make it feel any less real.
“Hello, Cassie. Did you miss me?”
She was wearing the same jeans and t-shirt that she been wearing when Cassie had spotted her this morning.
“You’re not real.”
She cupped her head in her hands, horrified at the pain that jabbed at her brain just behind her forehead.
“Yes, I am. I never died that night. You know this, it’s time you stopped lying to yourself.”
No,” she said, refusing to open her eyes and clutching her throbbing head.
“I’m not dead, Cassie.”
“You are dead. You were pronounced dead at the scene when the police arrived.”
Cassie braved a look at her, catching the way that Chloe threw back her mane of lustrous blonde hair and laughed.
“Sure. Believe that, if it makes you feel better.”
The hallucination of her twin undulated slightly before her eyes, taking on a near-transparent quality for a second before reverting to full solidity once more.
“You’re not real.”
“You’re not real,” her twin mimicked in a high, falsetto voice, mocking her.
“No,” Cassie screamed, pushing violently against her eyes with the balls of her palms. “You’re not real.”
Bright light danced behind her eyelids from her pushing too
hard, and her eyes snapped open.
The vision of her twin had gone.
Cassie remained on the floor, sobbing.
I’m going crazy, she thought in absolute misery. I have officially lost the plot.
Dr Thornton’s warning danced in her mind, that her nightmares could creep into her wakefulness. That her conscious mind could conjure up hallucinations.
“Shit,” she said, tugging aggressively at her hair.
The pain felt good. It centred her.
She didn’t know how long she remained kneeling on the floor, feeling utterly wrecked. It felt like hours, when in reality it couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes.
Shakily, she got to her feet, desperate for a drink. Dazedly, she drained the mouthful of wine left in her glass and made her way back into the kitchen. Once there, she immediately located a second bottle and got to work attacking it with the corkscrew. She was on automatic pilot now. All she wanted to do was to become numb, to stop the thoughts that tumbled through her mind in all their horrific glory.
Her glass refilled, she gulped down over half of it in one go. It burned a trail down to her stomach, suffusing her mind and body with a warm glow that took the rough edges off her jagged, painful thoughts.
She made her way back into the living room, glass of wine in one hand, bottle in the other. Purposely, she sat down on the exact spot on the sofa where she had hallucinated her dead twin.
I am not losing my mind, she told herself, pouring herself another glass of wine.
She sat there in silence, the day darkening outside. She didn’t bother to get up and switch on the light. For tonight, all she sought was oblivion – the kind of sleep that was utterly dreamless. A sleep that was nearer a coma.
Yes, she had every intention of drinking until she felt nothing. Until she passed out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Cassie got her wish. Groggily, she opened her eyes and promptly shut them again on discovering that the room was uncomfortably suffused with light.
She groaned, for a moment not remembering a single thing about anything. Slowly, her tragic life and state of mind came back to her in little broken pieces. Drinking two bottles of wine last night. Hallucinating Chloe. Falling asleep on the sofa, fully dressed. Her sleep had been dreamless, a black void that had swallowed her whole, and now she was paying the price. She had slept the sleep of the dead and woken a zombie.
“Jesus,” she groaned, heaving herself upright into a sitting position.
Why, oh why did she do this to herself?
Because the hangover is better than the nightmares.
Right that second, she wasn’t entirely down with that theory.
Coffee. Need coffee.
Stumbling out into the hallway on the way to the kitchen, her reflection in the hallway mirror caught her eye.
She paused. She looked like shit. Her eye makeup resembled that of a panda, or perhaps a heroin addict. Either way, it wasn’t a good look.
I look like a ghost.
As she stared at the wreckage of her reflection, movement in the mirror behind her head caught her eye.
The hallway behind her, and the living room which she glimpsed through the open door, was morphing. The white paintjob was dissolving and peeling, revealing cracked, yellowing walls. The gleaming floorboards that she had spent a small fortune restoring turned dull and split, revealing gaping holes between the joins.
She blinked and spun around on the spot, her brain screaming at the sudden movement and the sheer improbability of what she was seeing.
The hallucination ceased. She blinked.
Oh dear God, what is happening to me?
Staggering down her perfectly normal hallway, she made her way to her kitchen with the intention of drinking a gallon of coffee.
* * * *
Ethan hadn’t been home. Cassie had elected to walk the two miles to his house, telling herself that the exercise would do her good. It had been the logical thing to do, after her coffee and shower. But when she had arrived, there had been no sign of him.
In fact, there had been no sign of life in that house at all. She had peered through the window, cupping her hand against the glass, but the living room appeared devoid of life. It had the distinct look of a showroom. Soulless. Empty. Immaculate.
And now, safely back at home after her little excursion, a hundred confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. She didn’t feel at all right. She felt distinctly out of sorts, almost dreamlike and disassociated from her own existence. Like she was an imposter, living someone else’s life. For the past week, she felt as if she had been lurching blindly and disastrously from one day to the next. Like her life was a car crash, waiting to happen.
She sat there at her kitchen table, her head throbbing with the mother of all headaches. Her bones ached, like she was coming down with flu.
Hugh was coming home today. She had to get it together. She had to put all thoughts of Ethan out of her mind. She had to pretend that she had never met him.
That he didn’t exist.
Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe you did imagine him.
The thought was pure poison in her brain, turning her lightheaded and making her feel sick. Assertively scraping back the kitchen chair over her expensive slate flooring, she jumped to her feet, scurrying down the hallway in the direction of the living room.
It wasn’t quite a fully-formed thought, but she knew exactly what she had to do. It was something she should’ve done yesterday, but it hadn’t occurred to her then. And she had to go and look, didn’t she? She had to go and look for Ethan…
A quick google search threw up exactly what she didn’t want to see. She sat there on the sofa, stunned, staring in horror at the screen of the laptop balanced on her knee.
She stared hard at the details on the screen, but no amount of staring changed the cold, hard facts. It couldn’t be. It had to be a mistake. But there it was, right in front of her.
Ethan’s home was a holiday let.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Morning baby, did you sleep well?”
The sound of Hugh’s voice snapped her fully awake in a matter of seconds. She sat bolt upright in the bed, heart pounding, twisting her torso to look down at him. She was naked. She gripped the soft duvet to her chest, the bedroom spinning around her. Sunlight flooded the room, and she blinked, drowning in her own confusion.
“Hugh. What time is it?” she asked because it seemed as good a thing as any to say, given the circumstances.
He lifted his right arm, squinting at the silver Rolex he always wore.
“Mmm, almost ten. We’ve overslept. Come here, gorgeous, I missed you so much.”
He bundled her into his arms, pulling her head against his chest. She allowed herself to be held, his chest hairs crunchy against the side of her cheek. His unmistakable, ‘Hugh’ smell – his very essence – a musky, masculine odour assaulted her nostrils. She inhaled deeply; God, she had missed that smell.
Her leg curled around his solid thigh, and for a moment she allowed herself to think of nothing apart from how good he felt, how perfectly his body slotted against hers, like they were made for each other.
Then it was all ruined when thoughts of Ethan crept unbidden into her mind. She wondered what it would be like to lie on him, given that he was so slight, compared to Hugh.
And what the hell happened yesterday, anyway?
“You were so out of it last night, baby,” he mumbled into the top of her head. “Did you hit the wine heavy?”
And there she had her answer of sorts, because the moment he said those words, the missing pieces of yesterday came back to her in small increments. After the devastating discovery that Ethan’s home, was, in fact, a holiday let, she had opened a bottle of wine, despite it being only three o’clock in the afternoon. That bottle had been swiftly succeeded by another, and then a third. She had sat there, unmoving and in deathly silence in the living room as the day to turned to evening, and the evening turned to
night.
She was pretty sure that she hadn’t consumed the entirety of the third, but that in no way diminished the distinct feeling that her brain was bleeding. She hated it when things got hazy like this. Lately, it seemed to be happening more and more often, but it had never this bad before. This was above and beyond and it frightened her half to death.
“I guess I had a few glasses,” she said into his chest.
“You drink too much, baby.”
She stiffened in his arms.
“You’re not going to lecture me, are you?”
As she spoke, the final pieces of the puzzle that was yesterday slotted into place. Hugh definitely hadn’t come home when she had been up. Vaguely, she remembered him coming into the bedroom and briefly waking her up. After that, she drew a blank, probably because she had passed out again.
She shivered. The faintest memory of him entering the bedroom in the dead of night had felt like a dream.
Yeah. At least he didn’t strangle you this time.
“I’m not lecturing you. It was just you were kind of slurry last night.”
“I was asleep. You woke me up. What do you expect?”
“And the bedroom stunk like a brewery. How’s your hangover?”
“I don’t have a hangover,” she lied.
Hugh laughed, but there was very little warmth in the sound.
“Sure you don’t.”
“I might take a shower,” she said, trying to wriggle out of his grip but instead he clung to her tighter.
The hand that had been resting casually on her hip began to knead her hipbone, and she stiffened in his arms.
“Why don’t I get you real dirty so it makes it worth your while having a shower?”
Unseen by her husband, Cassie grimaced. The last thing she wanted was sex. She was painfully conscious that her breath stunk like an old dog’s anus – she was dehydrated, nauseas, she needed to urinate. Sex was just about the last thing on her ‘to do’ list right now.
After She Died Page 12
