Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [119]
The Exorcist flashed to her mind. The child trapped inside the ranting demon desperately pushing the words Help Me up through the tender skin of her midriff. It made her think of Jonas's face at her hospital bedside. The face of a frightened child staring into the void.
Or out of it.
Help me.
She shivered.
She had briefly covered cases of multiple personalities in her Abnormal Psychology lectures. Patients who lived their lives as two, three - even more - distinct and different people. Alters, they were called, she remembered now. One man had even beaten prison on a rape charge after the court accepted that he was unaware that one of his alters had committed the crime.
Was Jonas such a case? Had something terrible happened to him as a boy that had caused his personality to fracture into several brittle parts?
She thought of the photo of the carefree child. Something had changed Jonas; some trauma. Was it something to do with Danny Marsh? With the fire at the farm? With horses? Had Marvel actually been right? Lucy shuddered at the thought.
Jonas had been under pressure for years. His parents' death, her diagnosis, starting a new job all alone. And then she'd failed to kill herself, so that he'd had to come home from work every day not knowing whether he would find her alive or dead. Then Margaret Priddy had been murdered and Marvel had treated him like shit, and someone had started to leave him notes telling him to do his job ...
Any one of those things could have pulled the trigger on the loaded gun of a damaged psyche.
Did Jonas clear up the vomit? Or did an alter do it without his knowledge?
Did an alter lose the button and Jonas merely find it?
She believed Jonas was telling the truth. Then again, maybe his truth was not the truth.
She still didn't fear Jonas. She trusted him with her life.
But she did fear the stranger inside him.
She stood up suddenly and nearly fell. The jelly in her legs was not all the disease. She tried not to be sure. In her head, in her intellect, she tried to rationalize, to hypothesize, to justify Jonas's contradictions so that she could disprove her own conclusions. But her body overrode her and made her shake with adrenaline.
Hollywood had been preparing Lucy for this for years. She had learned from the mistakes of air-headed heroines, and determined to be different. But now that the fantasy was made real, it made her feel sick, and numb with confusion.
She heard the front door open.
Jonas.
Her panic was only outweighed by her indecision. She had to hide from him! And yet that seemed ridiculous. Hide from Jonas? She would just feel like a fool.
He didn't call from the door. He always called from the door, to let her know it was him.
Maybe it wasn't him.
The thought spurred her to action.
She slid to the floor with the trousers still in her hands, and rolled under the bed.
She heard the middle stair creak and felt fear trickle down her spine. Jonas always took care to miss that tread.
Who was it that was coming up the stairs towards her?
Suddenly, rolling under the bed seemed the smartest thing she'd ever done, even though she felt horribly vulnerable. If he saw her, she had no defence. He would lean down and grip her ankles and drag her out like a pig in a slaughterhouse.
The man walked down the landing and into the bedroom.
Lucy held her breath.
She saw only his black trousers and boots, still with snow clinging to them. Jonas never wore his boots upstairs. Taking them off at the foot of the stairs was second nature to him.
The man crossed the room as if he owned it. There was no hesitation, no caution, no fear that he might be detected.
Lucy heard a drawer open and shut, and watched the boots leave.
After a few moments, she heard the shower go on.
She frowned.
It must be Jonas!
Relief made her shake.
And yet something stopped her from coming out from underneath the bed. It wasn't the fact that he had hit her. Somehow that seemed almost incidental now. It was something else. The