Out of Such Darkness Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t answer the question, how long?
    He plays back the woman’s jump in his mind and counts to ten before the camera pans away as the ground looms up to meet her. Ten seconds.
    Enough for her to anticipate the instant she hits the ground and becomes no more than a mess of butcher’s slops on the sidewalk. When did she lose consciousness? What did it feel like in the moment of impact when Nancy’s thighbones speared into her brain?
    Jay shudders. What’s got into him? Is he torturing himself because he should have been there? Is this how his life is going to be?
    He groans and presses his hands to his face. Rachel reaches across and squeezes his knee.
    Route 22 takes them past chic estates with high walls and robust electric gates. Trees lean out from either side and join arms overhead. The effect is of the 4×4 shooting along a tunnel like a hover car in
Blade Runner
. Jay wants it to stop. He doesn’t know how to act when they get to the house. The neighbours are going to congratulate him on his good fortune but how can he smile when all his work colleagues have disintegrated into dust particles that drift across the East River?
    There’s a lurch in his chest. ‘Ben! What about Ben? Does he know?’
    Rachel is upright in the driver’s seat with her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Her lips are pressed thin. There’s a blue-veined tic in her pale temple. Her voice checks as if she is trying to swallow down bad words. ‘He knows you’re safe. Katy went to collect him and Tyler. He’s home now. The school has closed.’
    ‘What about others … neighbours?’
    ‘It’s too early – who knows?’
    Jay takes a deep breath and his body tenses. ‘You said it hit our floor – SDC. Have you heard anything from anybody?’
    There are spasms in Rachel’s neck. She puts a knuckle to her mouth as if she’s holding back sickness. ‘You’ve only been there – how long is it?’
    ‘Six weeks.’
    ‘Six weeks.’ Her voice is cold and flat. ‘They don’t know you. Nobody will think to call us. They have their own problems. Were any not in today?’
    He shakes his head. ‘I’d forgotten when I missed the train. It was a senior team meeting today. Everybody was due in early – by 8.30. Perhaps someone else was late like me.’
    She turns to him. ‘Why did you miss the train? You left in good time.’
    His eyes look out of the windscreen but he sees only the morning’s horrors. ‘I saw it go in. I knew it was our floor, Rachel. I ran. I ran away.’ He presses his fingers into his eye sockets to force the tears away and the accusations rain inside his head.
You survived. You left them to their fate. They were your colleagues but you didn’t lift a finger.
    The car swings into Ponds Lane. Jay registers Ben sitting with the screen door wedged open by his body. He’s bent over as if examining the ants’ nest that Jay knows is there in the crack between the steps. Of all the things to say that scroll through Jay’s mind, the one he elects to use as he approaches is, ‘Don’t leave the screen door open like that, Ben. The house will be full of flies.’

Chapter 4
    Wolf was shivering as I undressed him in the bathroom. Naked, his ribcage showed blue through his vellum-like skin. His shrimp-like penis cowered in the seaweed twist of his pubic hair. His buttocks were hollowed out and pale. The steam from the bath rose around us and I sensed Wolf’s fear passing from him to me like an infection.
    I sat on the edge of the bath dribbling hot water on to his chest from a sponge with my right hand as I massaged his neck with my left. Despite myself, I could feel the stirrings of my arousal and I was disappointed to see that he was unmoved by my ministrations. “What happened?” I said. “You’re safe now. You can tell me.”
    He closed his eyes; the fair lashes fluttered. “I’m sorry, Cammie. I lied to you. You are not my only friend.”
    It was a dagger in my heart but it was something I knew had to