Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [98]
He looked up into the sleet to see that he was almost at his gate.
He needed to speak to Lucy. Lucy's brain worked faster than his at the best of times, and right now his brain was stuffed so full, and was nonetheless so empty of solutions, that it was as if a super-massive black hole was expanding slowly within his head, ready to burst out and swallow up the whole world in compressed nothingness.
Lucy was on the living-room floor, weeping and gnarled up with pain and with an unopened bottle of pills beside her.
In an instant the black hole in Jonas's head shrank to a pinprick and his heart exploded into his throat with fear.
He dropped to the carpet beside her and tried to gather her into his arms, but she tucked up and resisted.
Her head was hot with tears, but the rest of her was icy from being on the floor. The fire was long burned out and had turned to white ashes. Jonas got her tartan rug and wrapped it around her, then lay down behind her and wrapped his arms around that. He could keep her warm, even if he couldn't keep her well.
'Did you take anything, Lu?'
'No!' she shouted. 'No, I didn't!'
He squeezed her into his chest. 'I meant for the pain.'
'If I had then it wouldn't be hurting so much!' she yelled at him - and started a new bout of hopeless crying.
An hour later they were in the same position but on the bed, where Lucy had allowed herself to be carried.
The silence was complete - what isolation and winter had not dampered, the snow had shushed as it fell.
Jonas had given her three painkillers and the worst of it was over.
'How do you feel?' he whispered.
'Better,' she said. Better than what she did not say, but Jonas understood that, and hoped she knew that he did.
Jonas stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall of what he would always think of as his parents' room.
'Tell me about your night,' she said, still with the weary trace of a sob in her voice.
She needed to forget her own. He knew that.
'I can't.'
'Why not?'
How could he tell her? He felt numb. He felt detached. He didn't know any more where lines could be drawn between past and present, good and evil, right and wrong.
'Jonas?'
Jonas felt it all starting to rise in him. Everything underneath was coming to the surface - however much he tried to keep it down.
Tigger for Danny, Taffy for him. The slide of polished leather against his knees and the grip-and-release wonder of a whole beast held in his little-boy hands; the bunching and bumping of muscles under his backside; watching Danny fly along beside him and hoping he looked as free as his best friend did; the eager little ears, between which he'd viewed his whole world. For a happy while.
Jonas remembered.
Although he'd spent a lifetime forgetting.
He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy's muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him.
Unspeakable.
He shuddered against Lucy's back.
'Jonas?'
But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him. He knew that must have been true, because even though they'd never spoken of it - because it was unspeakable - Danny had done something about it.
He'd burned the place down.
Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas's head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.
Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke.
Tigger was half gone but