Faith - Lesley Pearse [198]
It was like a weird, slow-motion dream. He felt no real pain but the knife was sticking out of his chest and his cream shirt was turning crimson with blood. Belle had moved back from him now, and she was panting as if she’d run a mile, but her expression was not one of horror at what she’d done, only a crazed gloat.
‘You’re a mad fucking cow. You won’t get away with this one,’ he heard Charles yell at her.
Stuart felt himself growing dizzy. He thought it odd that he could feel a pain in his neck, but not his chest. He was aware of Charles pulling the knife out of his chest, and how frightened he looked, but Stuart’s legs were folding under him.
He was aware he was now on the floor. He could feel the softness of the carpet and smell the wool. He could hear Belle and Charles arguing, but they seemed a long way off.
‘It’s through his heart. He’ll die unless we call an ambulance,’ Charles screamed at her, but Stuart couldn’t make out what Belle’s reply was, even though she was shouting. He didn’t care anyway, for he was drifting off.
The next thing Stuart was aware of was being very cold. It was dark and he automatically reached out for blankets, but when his fingers met cold, dank concrete, he suddenly realized he wasn’t in bed, but on the floor.
It came back to him then. Belle’s face contorted with hatred as she lunged at him with a knife.
His neck was throbbing and so was his chest. He touched it lightly and felt the blood stiff on his shirt. Clearly he had passed out, and Belle and Charles had put him in their cellar.
A wave of sheer terror washed over him, but he forced himself to banish it and check how badly he was hurt. He lifted his head, which hurt, but not much worse than it did with a bad hangover. He could also move his arms and legs. Now all he had to concern himself with was the chest wound, and he’d test that by sitting up because he couldn’t see it in the dark.
It hurt when he moved, and he thought he felt an increase in blood flow from it, but he was alive, so that proved the knife had missed his heart. He could still die from loss of blood of course, and he wondered how long that would take.
But after a few moments of sitting up, it didn’t appear to be flowing any faster, and although he knew his lungs were somewhere around there, he had to assume nothing vital had been punctured, so there was no need to be too alarmed.
Standing up came next, and that made him feel dizzy. He stretched out his arms and felt nothing, so he gingerly took a couple of steps sideways. His fingers encountered a rough brick wall. He shuffled up to it, put his back against it for support, and began moving along it until he felt something hard and loose beneath his feet.
It was coal. By groping with his hands in the darkness he ascertained there wasn’t a great deal of it, probably the remnants from the previous winter. Slowly he made his way past the coal to the opposite wall, and back along it. He came to a wooden staircase. About six feet behind that was another wall.
Groping his way back to the staircase, he sat down on the bottom step and tried to gather himself sufficiently to decide what to do. Obviously they wanted him to die or they would have called an ambulance. Maybe they even thought he was already close to death when he passed out?
If that was the case it wouldn’t do to climb the stairs and start thumping on the door, for that would alert them and he wasn’t quite ready to be transported to a grave.
He couldn’t see his watch face, but it felt as though it was the middle of the night. Yet he doubted it was, for it had only been six or so when Charles came in, and he couldn’t have been unconscious for hours. He guessed it was no more than seven at the latest, and he wondered what Belle and Charles were doing.
He crawled up the stairs to see if he could hear anything. The exertion made him feel dizzy again, it