Darkest Place (12 page)

Carly's arms and legs are spread wide. She is the Vitruvian Man and he is her mirror image, pressing her into the mattress.

His breath is on her cheeks, her lips. Deep and rough, as though it's being forced from his throat, as though he is trying to suck the air from her lungs and take it into his own.

There is a voice coming from inside her.
His face is close
. But she doesn't want to see. The darkness behind her lids is a comfort, a shield, a space he can't invade.

He moves. Something touches her cheek. It's warm, soft, gentle. The voice inside her shrieks.

His whisper is hot and moist against the shell of her ear. Slow and amused. ‘Do you like it when I visit?'

 

Carly's mouth was wide open with the effort to fill her chest with air. Legs kicking at the covers, running before her feet touched the ground.

Her phone was by her bed but it didn't matter. She wasn't calling the police. They wouldn't believe her. They'd come
and charge her. Maybe they wouldn't come at all. She didn't know which would be worse.

Breath heaving, heart pounding, she found the safety chain in the darkness, the brass links a slack curve from the jamb to the door. She stared at it. She couldn't take her eyes from it. Could only feel the burn on her ear from the touch of his lips, the warmth of his breath on her face, the pressure of his hand at her throat.

‘Carly?' Soft male voice, little more than a rumble. On the other side of the door.

She scurried backwards a few steps along the hall. Out of reach, nowhere to run.

A knock. ‘Carly? It's Nate. Are you all right?'

Her silence was filled with the hiss of blood in her ears.

‘I heard noises from your apartment.' A pause. ‘You okay?' Two more seconds. ‘Carly? Is that you behind the door?' His voice this time was firm, demanding, slightly muffled as though he was talking into the hinges.

She thought of the mouth on her ear, the breath on her face. Didn't answer.

‘Carly, if it's you, you need to say something or I'm breaking in the door.'

She swallowed at the sticky dryness coating her mouth, wiped the tears from her face, her voice high and tight. ‘I'm okay.'

There was a shushing along the timber grain. Nate's voice when he spoke again came from lower down. ‘Carly, what happened?'

She imagined him on his haunches, maybe his forehead resting on the door. She clenched her eyes shut. What the fuck could she tell him?
A crazy guy is getting through my locked doors.

‘Are you alone?'

She glanced at the darkness behind her, not sure. Not really. ‘Yes.'

‘Are you hurt?'

Bruises were throbbing. There was a tender bump on the top of her head. ‘No.'

‘Did someone get in?'

Her sob was a long, shuddering gasp.

‘If you're scared, I can help.'

She
was
scared. Terrified. Of the man who'd been here. Of the locked door and what it meant. ‘You should go.'

Nate was silent for so long she wondered if he'd left. Then, ‘I could sleep on your sofa. Or you could sleep on mine.'

Nate would inspect her locks and ask her what happened and she
didn't know
. She shuffled a little further down the hallway as another thought flickered. He
might
know, it might be him. ‘No. Please, you should go.'

‘Carly …'

‘Nate, just
go
.' It came out harsher than she'd planned but it was still the message she'd intended.

It had the right effect. There was another shushing on the other side of the timber, a footstep in the corridor. His voice again. ‘I'm going to write my number down and slide it under your door. I'm ten steps away if you need anything. Just call me.'

Carly listened to his footsteps fade, wondered if his feet were bare. Hers were and they were freezing. Her whole body was frozen. It felt like the marrow in her bones had turned to ice. Maybe she'd shatter if she moved. Maybe something inside her already had. She had to get up, though. She had to check.

Hobbling through the apartment, bruises burning, she stopped in front of the French windows. There was
enough glow from the nightlight on the other side of the room to show her they were locked. Top and bottom, both doors, the way she'd left them when she went to bed. She tested them, sliding each bolt out of its casing and back. She pulled on the handle, yanked and rattled it, tried and failed to loosen the hold of the bolts.

Then she jumped away from them, as though the doorway was a ledge that had started to crumble. Stood and stared. Understanding at last. She hadn't re-locked the balcony doors in her panic. They were never opened.

‘Fuck.' She pushed hands into her hair, agitation beating in her blood.

Okay. All right. So he didn't come in through the balcony doors. She hustled back through the living room, picking up her keys from the counter on her way to the front door, flicking on the hall light, squinting in the glare, a moment of alarm when she saw the slip of paper on the floor. Nate's phone number. She left it where it was, more interested in what the door would tell her, eyes shifting from the chain to its hasp, the deadlock to the jamb. The chain held when she tugged it. The knob didn't move when she tried it. Inserting the key, she opened the door as far as it would go, pulled against the chain. Did it again, harder, and then with a solid yank. She thought of Nate and his warning about breaking in the door. How hard would that be?

Did it matter? The man in her room hadn't got in that way.

Had he unlatched the chain? Was that possible?

She opened the door again, slipped fingers into the gap. There was enough room to get a hand through, but …

Trembling, she typed in a Google search, found YouTube demonstrations on how to unlatch a security chain with a
piece of string. Was that it? Simple and quiet. Followed by a stealthy path up to the loft, amusement at Carly's expense, then … no, no, the deadlock had been set and the chain engaged. How could he manage that?

She closed her eyes, felt the heat of his breath, the brush of lips. It had happened. It
had
.

Hadn't it?

She lifted a hand to her throat, under the hinge of her jaw where his fingers had been. Eyed the wall at her back, the one that ran from the front door to the French windows. Got up and gave it a shove. Pushed some more, all the way along the hallway and back up the other side into the living room. Then the other walls around the lower level of the apartment, knocking and flattening her hands on the paint. High, low. Then in the half bath, and standing on the toilet seat, reaching higher, then heaving at the ceiling and …

She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Hair a mess, face tear-stained. Dark-ringed, pale, wild-eyed. And she spun away, the image burned onto her retinas.

Distraught, panicked, confused. She looked like Charlotte. No, worse than that.

She looked crazy.

 

‘It's Charlotte Townsend. I need to speak to Dr Randolf.'

She'd paced and cleaned for three hours, not letting herself think about it. Not yet. Now the tremble in her hand made the mobile feel like it was vibrating.

‘How are you, Charlotte?' Liam's voice was friendly, casual, as though she'd rung for a chat. ‘I've been wondering how you were getting on.'

‘Hey. Hi. Good and …' She sat on the sofa, elbows
on her knees to hold them still. ‘Not so good.' She rolled her lips together, fighting the rush of words, wanting to take it slowly. For his assessment of her. ‘The apartment is great. Close to everything I need, including kilometres of walkway around the harbour.'

‘Are you using it?'

‘Every morning. Once a day at a moderate pace.'

‘Nice to hear. And the not so good?'

‘You said we could still talk. Professionally.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's not anything we've discussed before.'

‘That's okay.'

‘It's not the anxiety. It's there but it's not that.'

‘Okay.'

She was stalling. They both knew it. He was giving his short answers, designed to make her fill the silence. Well, she'd phoned him.

‘It's something … weird. I'm not sure what it is. Whether it's even … I just …' She pushed two fingers into the crease between her brows.

‘Why don't you try to explain it to me.'

Pulling her knees to her chest, she found a place to start. ‘A couple of days after I moved in, I woke up and saw a man standing over my bed.' She told him about the police, the forensics, the detectives; the replay a week and a half later when the man touched her face. Then the third time and not remembering how she got to the front door, Dean Quentin's
You'll be facing a charge.
The detective finding her mental health record, telling her there were no fingerprints. And last night – the man on top of her, the locks engaged. And the anxiety and memories that were making it worse.

As always, Liam was silent until she was done.

‘So here's the thing,' she said, finally getting to the point. ‘If there's no sign anyone has been here, if there's no way in or out, is it possible that everything that's happened, everything I've carried around with me, has broken something? That there's something screwed up and …' She pulled in a shaky breath. ‘Am I losing my mind now?'

‘Do
you
think you're losing you mind?' Liam asked.

‘I guess if you're asking it's a good thing. If you thought I was crazy, you wouldn't, right?'

‘Maybe.'

Oh. Great. She rubbed at the pain starting in the base of her skull. ‘I don't know what to think.'

‘Can you tell me more about what happens when you see the man?'

‘I wake up and he's there. I'm terrified, so scared I don't move. Or can't. I'm not sure but I don't. I can't see him properly in the dark but I can feel him. On the bed, around me, touching me. On top of me. I just grit my teeth and close my eyes and wait for him to do whatever the hell he's going to do.'

‘So you feel awake but you're not fully functioning?'

‘No, look. I know my dreams are intense, if that's where you're going. This is different. I'm
aware
of him, I know there's someone in the room and he's
on top
of me. My dreams, when I wake up, I remember them, everything about them. I might try to squeeze Adam's hand or check to see if I'm bleeding when I first open my eyes, but once I'm awake, I don't actually think I'm on a cliff or I've lost another baby. I don't ring for an ambulance.'

It took a second for him to respond, his calm voice a contrast to the alarm in Carly's. ‘It's natural to be frightened and worried by something like that, but what you're describing sounds like an experience called
sleep paralysis. And, Charlotte, it's on the spectrum of completely normal.'

‘Normal for crazy people?'

He laughed a little. ‘Normal for normal people. It can be a symptom of narcolepsy, but we know you don't have that. I've read a bit about it, actually. One of the fascinating sidelines in researching your sleep and dream patterns. People who experience it tend to have an active dream life, like yours. They report not being able to move, someone sitting on their chest, feeling a presence in the room. All the things you've described.'

Heat flushed through her limbs. ‘So you think it's a
dream
?'

‘No, not a dream. It's considered a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness.'

‘Uh-huh. Which is what?'

‘Okay, let's see if I can explain it.' There was a rattle as though he was moving about, getting comfortable. ‘When we're in REM or dreaming sleep, we're in a paralysed state, probably to stop us from acting out our dreams. You know, running in front of a car or choking the person beside us. Sleep paralysis is thought to happen when there's an overlap of REM and waking. The imagery from a dream makes it into your waking mind before your body has regained movement.'

Carly thought about the paralysed sensation that kept her still, the frustration that she didn't fight back, the certainty that someone was in the room. ‘Okay. And?'

‘And that's why it feels real. You
are
awake and you
are
paralysed, but the images are from your subconscious.'

Carly got up, stood at the windows and stared into the street below. She had a history of bad dreams and interrupted sleep. His theory matched what she'd seen and felt.
She was relieved – and mortified. She'd called the police over a
dream
. ‘Why now, though? I finally left Burden and I'm here, starting over.'

‘Stress and fatigue are thought to be factors, and we already know they are the triggers for your nightmares. Irregular sleep patterns too. But major life changes, situations that might make you feel unsettled or out of control, can contribute. And you're certainly in the middle of that.'

Carly rested her forehead on the glass, remembering their conversations before she left for Newcastle. ‘You didn't think I was ready to move.' It happened faster than she'd expected: the house sold in two weeks, she found the apartment on her first visit, the course was starting and she wanted to be gone. And now … had she done this to herself?

‘The question of whether you were ready doesn't exist anymore, Charlotte, because you left. It's now a question of how you go forward. How do you feel now you're there?'

‘Worried, obviously, and not sleeping, but only because of the scary bastard I keep seeing in my bedroom. It's good here, though. The course, the apartment, the city. And there are some nice people. I think I'm making friends.'

‘That's a big step for you, Charlotte. Perhaps you could try to think of these incidences like you do your nightmares, as a reminder from your subconscious that you're stressed or anxious and that you need to take care of yourself. Look up sleep paralysis online and do some reading. Knowing more about what you're experiencing usually helps to settle some of your anxiety. Try to go to bed at the same time every night.' He paused. She heard tapping on a keyboard.
‘Just a thought,' he said. ‘Does it happen around the same time?'