Darkest Place (27 page)

Nate blocked her path. ‘No.'

Carly held up the photo of Elizabeth that was still in her hand. ‘It's not enough.'

‘It's plenty. The cops see these photos of Elizabeth, they'll have to look.'

‘The last cop I talked to asked if I'd got psychiatric help, the one before that thought I'd scratched my arms for attention. They see these and they'll want to know how I got them, what I was doing in the ceiling, why I was peering into people's wardrobes. They'll want to know where I keep my straitjacket.'

‘I'll go with you, we'll explain together.'

‘The crazy girl and the angry man. Yeah, that'll work. They'll question us both. We're neighbours, they'll probably think we're in it together. Or that I've roped you into my plea for attention. Or it's what got you beaten up. I don't know. But they won't send patrol cars and set up floodlights.'

‘One look up there and they'll know.'

‘Yeah, maybe. And how long will it take to get them here? It won't be this afternoon. It won't be tomorrow,
either. They'll talk among themselves, ask us more questions, think it over, solve other crimes. And in the meantime, Howard or whoever the hell it is will be up there again. Drugging our neighbours and taking photos. It might be Brooke next. Or he might discover I've emptied the treasure box above my loft and do more than drug me.'

Nate scrubbed a hand across his head. Carly could see that he saw her point – and didn't like it.

‘I'll just go to the third floor,' she said. ‘I'll look for boxes, take photos and come back. Then we can go to the police. With all of it. Enough to convince them.'

‘You shouldn't be up there on your own.'

‘Who's going to come with me? Not you. You can't walk.'

That didn't come close to convincing him. It only made anger burn in his eyes. ‘You're not going up there, Carly.' It was loud, an order, like he had the right.

‘I need to do this, Nate.'

 

It was less than a day since Carly had been here and she knew more this time. It made the darkness and dust seem sinister, tainted. It made her angry and committed. She stepped off the ladder into the tunnel above the third floor and shone her torch down its length, wariness tickling at the hairs on her neck.

Unhooking the rope from her waist, she started the long lunge-thrust to the other end. Her sprained ankle was a little less painful but the rest of her body was sore: legs, back and shoulders tight, blisters on her hands, tender spots on her knees. Progress was slow. She saw a double row of timbers around the vent above the shoe collector's apartment and felt success and repulsion – it was evidence for the police and it meant the woman below had been molested.

The latches were slightly different, maybe an earlier model, but the system was the same: hinged lid, divided compartments, cards and photos. Carly withdrew a picture, not happy about being a witness to someone else's humiliation but wanting to confirm it was what she expected.

It was. Ignoring the tangle of sheets, she focused on the face, recognising the woman – blonde hair, freckles, large bust. The first compartment of notecards detailed drugs and dosages, the next physical observations. Carly took photos of the box, the filing system, pictures and notes. Close-ups and wide shots, just like
him
, the flash filling the tunnel with bolts of white light. She pocketed samples, too – one photo, one each of the notecards – put the rest back the way she'd found it. Glanced briefly over her shoulder at the ventilation shaft before continuing on.

Her muscles had warmed up by the time she reached the next clean vent and the treasure box beside it. She checked a sample photo, her eyebrows sliding up with surprise. It was a man: forty-ish, beard, no one she knew. She pulled more, wondering if a woman lived there too. But it was just him, spread-eagled, exposed. Women weren't the only targets.

Carly stayed only long enough to take pictures and kept going, hustling now, urgency in her movements, fear a cold hand on her back.

At the third clean vent, she snapped the latches, lifted a photo and dread sent its oily wave through her. Brooke, eyes closed, exposed. There was no cast on her leg but it was there in others. He'd continued his visits when she was injured? Remembering Brooke's ‘bad day' by the harbour and how much better she'd looked in the weeks that followed, Carly flipped through notecards, looking for dates. There – almost a month ago. Last words:
Injury impeding results. Subject suspended.

‘Subject?' she whispered. ‘Brooke is not your fucking
subject
.'

She collected samples, took pictures, started back. She had plenty of evidence now. Three different people drugged and photographed, three treasure boxes, three vents. Plus Elizabeth's stash. And if Carly added her own, it would be part of a crime, not a black mark against her name.

The way back seemed so much further. Her body was a mass of pressure points: toes, glutes, inner thighs, lower back. Her shoulders and neck felt like they'd been crushed in a vice, and the blisters stung. She kept overbalancing, tearing more skin as her knees and hands slipped off cross-timbers onto the insulation. She'd counted four vents, only two to go, twenty metres give or take. Another slip and she paused, rubbing grazed skin as she looked ahead. In the torch beam, it seemed like a kilometre of shifting shadows. Beyond it was the tortuous upward climb on the ladder. If she didn't stop for a breather, it would take a lot longer.

Cautiously spreading her weight, she straightened her muscles across the rough padding. Closed her eyes and thought about Nate. He had been angry and silent when she left. It was her turn to understand what was inside another person. He was frightened she wouldn't answer when he called her name in the dark; he wanted to save her from drowning but she'd drown in her own self-reproach if she didn't do this. She needed to figure this out, collect the proof, stop what was happening to her friends, to the community she cared about, to
be that
, better, worthy …

Her eyes snapped open.

She'd heard a shush and the whisper of its echo. It seemed to come from all around her. Quiet, distant maybe, but loud when the only other sound was the beating of her heart.

She rolled to a crouch on the nearest cross-timber, head swinging one way then the other, bracing for a figure in the darkness. All she could see was the glow of her torch bouncing across the walls.

‘Time to go,' she whispered and froze as a bright, white beam lit the tunnel. Soundless, weightless. It came from the shaft she'd climbed down, threw the shadow of her body to the insulation in a crisp, elongated silhouette. Eyes tightening in the glare of a high-voltage globe, she felt like an actor on a stage, a thief in a floodlight. And she was blinded to anything behind it.

But someone was there. Someone had flicked the switch and was holding the beam, still and silent. Getting a full, clear image of Carly.

Him
. It couldn't be anyone else.

He didn't move, the beam steady, the brilliance relentless, the silence stretching. She wondered if she should start the conversation.
Hey Howard, is that you?
Or
It's okay, I won't tell anyone
. The voice, when it finally came, turned her veins to ice. So low it was almost a murmur.

‘You're a disappointment, Carly.'

A man's voice. She couldn't tell if it was Howard. Didn't pause to ponder it as she turned, hands, knees, feet scrabbling to get away. Crawling, lunging, wide crabbing steps. The jerking of the torch beam shining from her head made the tunnel sway, made her feel as though she was tumbling – and, she realised, illuminated her progress for him. She flicked it off, the way ahead now lit by the beam at her back.

Was he looking for her or on a regular outing? It could be either or both. He might have discovered her rope at the entrance to the tunnel or her treasure box emptied of its booty. And now he'd found her.

His light turned her shadow to a hunched figure moving ahead of her, like something from the underworld leading her to oblivion. She listened for him beyond the thumps of her lunges and the jolting gasp of her lungs and heard nothing. She remembered Howard carrying the ladder up to her loft yesterday not even breathing hard. Had he wondered what she was up to? Worried that she'd fought back on his last visit?

What did it matter? He was behind her, he'd seen her, he had a lot to protect up here. And there were some ugly ways in this ceiling to stop a person from exposing his secrets.

A vent ahead in the shifting gloom – like the one above Nate's bed, Carly realised as she got closer. She slowed, thinking about pressing her lips to the slats and calling for help, and as she crouched above it and drew breath the shadows disappeared. In the blink of an eye, the space around her turned to dense, solid, suffocating blackness.

The sudden blindness made her rear back from the vent, tumbling into the timber wall of the tunnel at her back. Her ears took over and the sounds in her head became loud and alarming. Heart crashing, blood thumping, air hissing in her lungs. And somewhere underneath it all she heard noises from behind.

He was moving across the timbers, and not with her clunking, faltering progress. It sounded easy, practised. He'd been doing it a long time, maybe he didn't need to see. Maybe he thought unfathomable blackness would slow her. She'd started two apartments ahead of him. If it was Howard, he was tall and strong. He could reach her in a minute, pick her up and throw her headfirst down a vent.

Feeling her way, eyes wide in the darkness, hands scraping and scrabbling along timbers, she found the next
vent. She could push this one open, drop down feet first. It was five metres to the floor, she might break an ankle, smash a knee, but she could drag herself. And if no one was home? If he came down after her? She'd be trapped and he could kill her and leave without a trace. Nate would know how he did it, but what good was that if Carly was dead?

Panic roaring in her ears, she clawed forward, missing and overstepping, groping in the insulation, wondering if falling through the plasterboard might be the best option. Crashing through someone's ceiling, breaking a hip or her neck, maybe just killing herself and saving him the trouble.

She couldn't tell where he was. She'd lost count of the vents, no idea how many ahead or how far to the deep void at the corner. Would she sense it before she lunged straight in? She wanted to flick on her light. She wanted to know where he was. But she fumbled on, body scraping and bruising and burning.

She could hear breathing now. It sounded close, it sounded like it was all around her. She couldn't tell if it was an echo or he was on her heels. Only that it was steady and regular. That he was fit and agile.

Something froze her. She couldn't say what it was. The same internal radar or change in atmosphere or the angel on her shoulder that had stopped her from lurching into the void yesterday. Whatever it was, she didn't question it when it shouted a warning in her head. Stretching a hand past the next timber, she felt the black, cool nothingness of the ventilation shaft. Somewhere out there was the ladder.

As she arranged herself on the lip of the tunnel, she wondered if the darkness made it better or worse. She couldn't see the hole that could suck her down or the rungs that would hold her to the wall. She couldn't see
him, either. He was there, though, lunging, breathing, coming after her.

Impulse made her want to go down – shorten the fall, find the door out, but a voice in her head yelled
Up, Carly, go up
. Safety was there: her own apartment and Nate. You've done this before, she told herself. Reach out and up, find the second rung, haul yourself up like a kid on the monkey bars.

Crouched on the last cross-timber, hip pressed to the wall of the tunnel, fear and darkness held her in place. Brooke's statistics said ninety per cent chance of fatality from here. If she overbalanced, if she missed the rung, if her fingers slipped, she was dead. On the floor in a room no one ever checked.

‘Hey, Carly. Having fun?'

His voice was a whispered growl. It carried in the darkness, wrapping around her like a chill wind. It was close and distant, behind and below. She couldn't wait any longer. Out and up. Her fingertips found cold metal, her palms locked around it. Then she was blinded by dazzling, eye-crunching light.

Shock jerked her left hand from its hold. It was only for a fraction of a second, but her body had been moving across the abyss and her mind leapt into the freefall. Panic exploded in her muscles. Her knuckles slammed brick, a thumb snapped back, skin tore from her elbow. Then her arm was around the rung, her body jammed against the wall, heart slamming her ribs.

She turned her face to the light. It wasn't where she expected it, not right there on the edge beside her, but it was close, three or four quick lunges away. All she could see of him was of a crouched torso and limbs below the glare of the beam. Lean, lithe, silent, like a jaguar ready to pounce.

It scared Carly more than the lethal drop, and before she'd thought about how to climb she was doing it, hoisting
her weight up, reaching up for the next rung. She flicked on her head torch. He knew where she was, she may as well see where she was going. She was juddering with fear and exertion but she moved as though the upward breeze was pushing her. The tunnel she was aiming for was a dark rectangle above when the abyss below was filled with light.

‘Move,' she ordered through gritted teeth. ‘Move.
Move
.'

His feet made ringing sounds on the metal, tapping a faster beat than hers. The span of his light inched further ahead of her, as though it was a net being thrown over her, waiting for the right moment to pull her back down.

‘Are your legs burning, Carly? Can you feel the lactic acid building?'

His voice rebounded around the walls. It didn't tell her how close he was, only that he was barely out of breath. She was gasping, mouth wide open, chest too tight to fill. Slowing, feeling like she was pushing up through water.

‘Nearly there now,' he said.

It wasn't Howard's voice. She didn't know whose it was.

Hands on the top rung, her head above the mouth of the tunnel, she glanced down. The light was blinding. She could see hands on rungs in its glow. A dozen steps down and moving.
Do it, Carly. Do it now.

A thrust sideways, hips crashing on the cross-timber. She threw a leg, got the knee into the tunnel and shoved forward onto the insulation. As she pushed away from the ladder with her other foot, a hand closed around the ankle. Hard, tight. He was wearing a glove. His fingers reached all the way around. It was her good ankle, she kicked it. He held fast, a shackle pulling at her leg so she couldn't thrash.

‘Good girl,' he said. There was a smile in the voice. Patronising, superior.

‘Fuck you.'

The body behind the glare rose higher, the lower half of his torso coming into view, arms and legs gathering to climb into the tunnel. Clothed in black, something tight like a wetsuit. The pull on her ankle shifted as he moved. She wanted to shake her leg free – except he was on the ledge, it might knock him off and take her with him.

He kept hold of her ankle as he climbed in, pushing her backwards to the wall, arranging himself opposite, casual, one knee up, like an impromptu meeting on the floor. He tipped his head back then and she saw the face underneath the light.

‘It's
you
.'

‘And here we are,' Stuart said.

Stuart, university researcher, part-time pharmacist, strange needy guy who tried to impress. He'd undone Carly's pyjamas, touched her body, drugged her, taken photos. She wanted to be sick, wanted to lash at him with her nails. Did neither as she breathed hard and watched him.

‘So you discovered my research,' he said.

He was wearing an all-in-one suit, fitted to a thin and surprisingly well-muscled body, a long zipper down the front. There were matching booties on his feet, excess at his long, craned neck that looked like a hood folded down. The man in black she saw in her loft.

‘It's a pity,' he said. ‘You were excellent.'

She swallowed, breathed, worked at focusing on that.

‘Consistently good responses,' he said. ‘Especially with the plant derivatives. I had high hopes for you as a long-term participant. You disappointed me in our last few sessions, though. I blamed myself initially. I thought I must
have overestimated the effect of the benzo, but you didn't take it, did you?'

Carly's forehead tightened with a frown.

‘Benzodiazepine. Your sleeping pill.' He watched her, a smile spreading his lips. ‘No, you didn't take it. I have to ask, though. Discounting that anomaly, how did you find it?'

She couldn't keep her silence. ‘Find what?'

‘The experience.'

‘You drugged and molested me.'

‘I'm interested in subject response when it's available,' he went on. ‘I don't know about you but I find that particular dream experience fucking mind-blowing.' He raised his eyebrows, a question of their shared experience.

He still held her ankle. She wanted to break his nose with her foot but his amused, casual tone filled her with fear. ‘You hurt people,' she said quietly.

A nod, acceptance. ‘There have been some losses. It's the nature of an experiment of this kind.'

Experiment? Losses? Carly sensed the void at her side, his hand tight on her skin, and wondered if she was his next loss. Pushing down her terror, trying to dredge up something she hoped would pass for a genial expression, she said, ‘I hope you don't consider me a loss, just because I found out. I was frightened before, that's why I was fighting you. But I understand now.'

Blinking, nodding, his lips widening. She thought it was a good sign, until she heard the flat, hard edge to his voice. ‘Nice try, Carly.'

‘No, listen. I could help. I could give you my responses.'

He huffed, scorn and contempt. ‘I've heard your responses when you're fucking your arsehole neighbour. Like a rutting zoo animal. Except you like it on top, don't you, Carly? Buck-naked and riding hard.'

Her face snapped away.

‘Yeah, I've watched. I thought about taking photos but I prefer to arrange those scenes myself. How's your neighbour enjoying the hospital?'

She frowned back at him.

‘He was proving a persistent visitor in your bed so I thought a chat in a quiet laneway might give me some time to correct your dosage.'

‘It was you?' Nate hurt on her account?

‘And a friend. I can't take all the credit, my hands weren't made for that kind of work. A wasted effort, I see now.' The wrench on her ankle came without warning. Stuart dragged her across the insulation, close enough to twist a fist into the front of her top and craned his long neck until his face was in hers. Smiling, amused. ‘Looks like it'll have to be an overdose.'

She shoved at his hands, pushed at his chest, aware of the black drop beyond her elbow. She raised her voice, hoping the sound carried to the apartments. ‘
No!
'

He slapped her face, hard. It knocked her to the insulation. It felt like he'd torn her cheek open. There was no smile when he spoke. ‘Don't fight it, Carly. It won't hurt.' He tightened his hold on her jacket, pulling her upright.

‘No,
no
.' She tugged away from him, saw the void and found herself back in his grasp. ‘No one will believe I've killed myself.' It was a lie but she said it anyway, hoped Stuart hadn't seen her hospital record.

‘People believe what they're told. Drivers have accidents. Old ladies mix up their medications.'

His face was so close she could feel his breath on her skin. It wasn't the first time but there was a light between them now. She could see the pale streaks in his brown
irises and she wasn't drugged. ‘Drivers. You mean Talia.' Had she found him too and he tried to get rid of her?

He dipped his head. ‘It was a new blend. It obviously didn't agree with her.'

The anger she'd felt on other nights, that had been trapped within her, was hot on her skin and tightening her jaw. ‘And Elizabeth?'

‘I told you she wouldn't like the stronger medication.' He dropped away from her as though the dispute was over now and she'd go with him willingly.

She swung an arm out wide and slammed the side of his head with bunched knuckles. ‘You fuck!' It rocked him sideways. She went with him, shoving with both hands, hitting him again, catching his chin hard. ‘You fuck. You
fuck
.' He held a hand over his head like a shield. Carly rose to her knees and pressed forward. She didn't know how to punch, that sport had never reached her. There was no skill in the blows she aimed but they pounded throat and sharp bones. He laughed, like he had in her loft. She found his teeth with her fist and drew blood.

Then the air was heaved from her lungs. The knee he thrust into her gut lifted her, drove her away. A hand out, Carly caught a cross-timber – and felt the nothingness beyond her fingertips. She scuttled backwards, stopped by the beam wall at her back.

Stuart's fingers closed around at her ankle again. Blood coated his lips, his teeth were bared in a grimacing smile. He didn't take his eyes off her as he got to his haunches, moving towards her, head pressed to the timber above. The hand on her leg travelled with him, inching upwards, forcing her knee wide and into the void. Carly hunkered hard against the beam.

‘Have it your way then, Carly. Forget the overdose.' He glanced over the edge. ‘Not as easy to explain, if it comes to that, but my work is safe here.' He fisted a hand in the front of her jacket.

Beneath it, Carly's heart thumped. The edge of an abyss. She'd been here before. With friends, laughing and terrified.
Come on, it's fine.
She'd killed them and she'd wanted to die. She'd craved it for a long time but she'd only been broken – bones, heart, mind. She'd been on another ledge in the bedroom at her mother's house, pills in her hand, broken then too, not strong enough to fall one way or the other.

Here again
, she thought. Grief and shame, like before. Elizabeth was dead and this man had exposed Carly – her damage, her fears, her body. She'd come here to this ledge, she'd made that choice, but what had happened wasn't her fault. And that made other things burn bright inside her.

Rage, loathing, retribution. And as Stuart lifted her from the wall, gathering his strength to lever her over, she felt them sharp like knives. Sharp like the memory that opened behind her eyes. The photo on her fridge was old but Carly was in that moment now, sweaty and exhausted and exhilarated. The person she once was, who'd tried to save her friends, who'd survived a freezing night on a cliff. Three faces smiling with her: young, sunburnt, full of daring. Full of life. They'd taken risks, all of them, and Carly had been left to live with the consequences. She'd spent thirteen years wishing she could make things right.

Maybe that had changed her. Maybe it was enough to change the ending. Maybe all that mattered was that she knew.

She let her hands drop, pushed them into the insulation as though it was the last sensation she would ever feel. Drew up a knee and slammed her foot into Stuart's chest.

It caught him on the right side of his rib cage. Not hard enough to knock him down, only to push him off balance. He thrust out a hand to catch himself, but it was beyond the lip of the tunnel, suspended over the void, and as he leaned, as the weight of his shoulders tipped towards it, he realised his mistake.

Carly saw the flash of alarm in his eyes. He flung himself towards her, grappling at her jacket, her legs. His feet came out from under him, a hip thwacked the ledge as it dropped out and over. There was a grunting from his throat, rasping as his nails scratched at her, at the timber. Fingertips white on its edge.

In the fleeting seconds it took to happen, Carly saw how it could end: her blistered hand extending, the painful grip, the heaving and pulling, a life saved … Then she saw it again: hand and grip, a twist in the other direction and Carly feeling the weightlessness of the fall.

She could save a life and she could lose her own.

She could follow old friends into death or help new ones.

She could take a risk and live or die with the consequences.

Making a decision, shifting closer to the edge, she took a breath, gathered her strength and slammed with her foot. Reaching into the ventilation shaft, snapping Stuart's head back. And, like a ledge breaking away, he was launched into the void. Arms and legs flung wide for the briefest moment before his body crumpled into the brickwork. A guttural, involuntary sound pushed from him, the light on his head falling away and illuminating the shaft before it hit the bottom and went out.

Carly watched the rest in the beam of her paler light, his black shape rebounding downwards like the crumpled cut-out of a person. Leaning out, peering over, she waited – for a noise, a flicker of light. Her eyes eventually finding the contours of a shape on the flat concrete floor below.

Ninety per cent fatality rate. He was dead. She'd killed him. She'd kicked him in the face and shoved him into an abyss. Risk, consequences. Lives lost and saved, and as she watched, she wondered what poisonous concoction would rise up and engulf her this time.

The trembling started in her hands. She pushed away from the edge, her breath spasming in her chest.

‘Fuck.' She'd killed him. ‘Oh fuck.'

The back of her hand stung from his gouging. The nail of her middle finger was torn away. There was skin missing from knuckles, an elbow. Blisters and splinters. A hot welt on her face from his slap. She pressed a palm to it and felt something reach through her.

He was going to kill her. An overdose or thrown to her death.

Stuart. No last name.

He'd killed Elizabeth and destroyed Talia's life and felt nothing. He'd beaten up Nate. He'd made Brooke fall down her stairs. He'd drugged his neighbours and photographed them for his own fucked-up experiment. And he was dead.