Craven Manor(32)

He could hear sounds of a struggle inside in the bedroom, with Kyle spitting curses and sharp yelps of pain. Daniel grabbed the door handle and tried to turn it, but it was locked. Kyle screamed again. Glass smashed. And then silence.

The door drifted open as though its latch had never caught. Daniel stared into the bedroom, shock and fear thundering through him and drenching him in cold sweat. Rich browns and reds shone under their coating of dust, as the lamps illuminated the room’s furniture. Cupboard doors and drawers hung open from Kyle’s earlier scavenging.

Daniel’s own pale face stared back at him from a cracked mirror opposite the bed. A trickle of blood ran from his temple. He touched his finger to it as he stepped into the room.

Kyle was gone. As was Bran. The window had been broken. Jagged shards of glass ringed the hole. Daniel moved closer and saw a smear of red on one of the glass fragments.

Breathing was impossible. His vision was still blurry, but it had become further distorted by fear-induced tears. Daniel passed his head through the hole in the glass and looked downwards. Kyle’s body lay three floors below, cradled in a mess of dead bushes.





Chapter Fourteen





“No, no, no, no, no.” Daniel’s heart thumped, skipped a beat, then thumped again. He pressed a hand to his chest. He felt dizzy and sick, but he couldn’t stop staring at his cousin’s still form in the garden below.

Dull pain radiated through his fingers. He realised too late that he’d rested his hand on the windowsill, over shards of broken glass, and blood trickled down to drip off his wrist. He pulled his hand back and clenched it.

Bran was nowhere to be seen. The curtains rolled inwards as a cold wind slipped through the window. Shadows gathered in the room’s corners, impervious to both the lamplight and the moonlight. There was no motion or sound, not even breathing.

This can’t be real. Daniel’s legs were unsteady as he stumbled into the hallway and towards the stairs. He was dripping blood onto the carpet but was barely aware of the pain in his hand. He felt as though he’d been sucked into a horrible, otherworldly nightmare, the kind that would leave him with phobias even decades later. It was almost inconceivable to think that he was awake.

Leaves skittered across the tile foyer floor as he ran through them. He was breathless, but not from exertion. His chest felt as though someone had wrapped an enormous rubber band around it, and every inhale was fighting against that resistance.

Daniel leapt down the porch’s steps. He’d misjudged the distance, and his feet skidded out from under him. He hit the ground, pushed away from it, regained his footing, and raced around the house’s exterior.

As a child, Daniel had gone to school with a boy called Adrian. The boy’s father worked with the police and apparently shared a lot of stories with his son. Adrian liked to shock the other children with them during lunch.

According to Adrian, his father had attended a lot of suicides, especially for people who had leapt from the tops of buildings. He’d called them “jumpers.” The name had seemed painfully flippant to Daniel, almost as if it were intended as a joke.

He remembered Adrian beckoning everyone at his canteen table closer, a gap-toothed grin promising dark secrets beyond what their imaginations could handle. He’d said the jumpers didn’t stay whole when they hit the sidewalk. They burst like water balloons. Blood and brain matter would spray all over the sidewalk. The council had to use industrial hoses to clean the matter off.

The image of a human popping had always hung with Daniel. Maybe it had stayed with Adrian, too; he himself had leapt from a building a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday. Logically, Daniel knew depression or anxiety could target anyone, but he couldn’t stop from thinking that the policeman’s nightmare-fuel stories had never left Adrian’s head. They would have crammed themselves in there, growing bigger and blacker with every passing year, until death looked like the only escape.

Popped like a water balloon. Daniel tasted bile. He wanted to scream. He never should have shown Kyle the coin, never even given him money. He’d wanted to share his luck with the man who had helped him. But Kyle had paid a horrific price.

Daniel slowed as he neared the scene, gasping against the rubber-band sensation. He felt numb all over; not even the cuts on his hand hurt anymore. The broken window was visible three floors above. Glass fragments had been thrown across the weed-choked ground, and one crunched under Daniel’s shoe. It took him a moment to find Kyle’s body.

He wasn’t lying on the ground like Daniel had expected. There was no halo of blood, no popped human balloon. He’d crashed into a tangle of half-dead shrubs, and even after he’d crushed them, they still held him nearly three feet off the ground.

The bushes were thorny, though. Daniel struggled through them to reach his friend. He was faintly aware of scratches, but it was easy to ignore them as he reached between the tangles to touch Kyle’s cheek.

He was warm. Daniel had to remind himself that Kyle had fallen only a few minutes before, so warmth was no guarantee of life. And the lack of response wasn’t a good sign.

Kyle lay on his back, his head thrown to one side. Blood dripped from cuts across his arm, face, and torso where the glass had sliced him. The bushes cradled him awkwardly.

Daniel moved his hand lower to feel for a pulse in Kyle’s neck. His fingers were numb with shock, and his mind was so frantic that he couldn’t differentiate reality from what he wanted to feel. Desperate, he rose onto his toes and held his hand an inch above Kyle’s open mouth. Warm, moist breath ghosted over his fingers.