The Death of Mrs. Westaway(107)

“I’m sorry,” she heard through the roar in her ears. “I’m so sorry, I never wanted to do this—”

Her legs were barely moving now. She wanted to cry out, beg him, but she could not whisper, let alone speak. The pressure on her windpipe was too great, and she had no breath left in her.

Hold on.

She was not sure whose voice it was. Maggie’s. Maud’s. Or maybe it had always been her own—only her own.

Hold on.

But she could not. His fingers were crushing her, and everything was slipping further and further away.

There was no point fighting. He was too strong.

She let her fingers fall from his, stopped trying to pry his grip from her throat.

And as she did, her knuckles brushed something on the bed, something that had fallen from the nightstand in the struggle.

She closed her hand around it, and with almost the last of her strength, she picked it up, and smashed it into his face.

Hal heard the crack of the glass before she realized what it was—the broken photograph frame—and then she saw the spray of blood as a shard of glass dug deep into the bony ridge above his eye socket. He gave a scream of pain and took one hand away from her throat, feeling for the piece of glass sticking out of his brow, the pouring blood blinding him. For a moment Hal stared in horror. She had no idea what she had done—whether the glass had gone deep enough to penetrate something vital. But she could not stop to find out.

She let the picture frame drop, dug her fingers beneath his remaining hand, and then she swung her knee up and into his crotch with all the force she could muster.

And he let go.

Stumbling, gasping, her breath tearing in her raw throat, Hal made for the door at the far side of the room.

“Oh no you don’t!” She heard his voice like a hoarse roar of pure fury, but it was too late to turn back even if she had wanted to.

As she flung herself against the door it gave way beneath her weight and she found herself falling, tumbling, down cold steps, until she stopped with a crunch at the bottom.

? ? ?

IT WAS EXTREMELY DARK. HAL’S head throbbed with the old bruise, where she had hit it before, and her throat screamed with pain from Ezra’s near throttling.

The fall might have killed her, she thought, were it not for the fact that she had fallen against something soft and yielding.

It was only when she put her hand down to try to stand, and felt soft hair beneath her palm, that she realized what it was, and when she did she had to stifle the whimper that tried to escape her bruised throat.

It was Mrs. Warren. And, as Hal’s fingers traced across her face, her glasses, her open mouth, Hal could tell—she was dead and completely cold.

But she had no time to find out more. Above her, she could hear Ezra moving with lumbering ferocity like a wounded animal, crashing into furniture as he staggered towards the open door. He would be down here in a moment, and then she would be dead—wounded or not, he was far, far stronger than her, and his blinded eye was not much disadvantage in this inky black.

She must be in some kind of cellar beneath the house. The only question was, was there another exit?

Hal put her hands out in front of her, and began to stumble cautiously through the penetrating darkness, feeling the shift and slither of things beneath her feet—the clank of bottles, the sharp pain where she hit her shin against some kind of box.

Back there in the darkness was Mrs. Warren’s body, and as a shaft of gray moonlight pierced the blackness, and she heard a hoarse panting, she knew that Ezra too had found his way to the door, and was stumbling down the stone steps.

“Hal,” he called, his voice echoing in a way that made her think this cellar must be large, much larger than she had at first thought. “Hal, don’t run from me. I can explain.”

Her throat was too hoarse and bruised to have answered, even if she wanted to—but there was no way she was going to give away her location down here. She stopped, pressing herself back against the wall, listening for his harsh breathing. It sounded as if he was facing the wrong way, and she edged quietly along the wall, holding her breath.

In the disorienting darkness she had completely lost all sense of direction, but the cellar seemed to stretch out in two directions, in front of Hal, and to her left. Mrs. Warren’s body, and the steps upwards, lay to the right. Ezra seemed to be in front of her, venturing deeper beneath the house, so Hal continued her slow, painful edging along the wall, feeling the wetness of damp bricks at her back. There was hot blood on her hands, and she thought she must have cut herself when she hit Ezra with the photograph frame, though she had no memory of having done so.

“Hal!” His voice boomed, echoing back and forth beneath the vaults. Then there was a scratching rasp, and far away to her right Hal saw a flame ignite in the darkness, and the yellow glow of a lighter as Ezra held it above his head, surveying the darkness.

Two things happened in the instant before he extinguished the flame.

The first was that he saw her, she knew it from the way his face turned towards her, a hideous Pierrot mask that slashed his face into one half of white skin and another half painted in dark blood, black in the shadowy darkness.

But the other thing was that Hal saw the layout of the cellar—the clear path between the rows of dusty bottles and vaulted columns leading to the garden door at the far end.

For a moment she froze, each of them looking at the other, caught in the lighter’s glow.