Jessie – 12.56 a.m.
I come back to myself, sitting in the pitch black at the bottom of the well, my lower body submerged in a foot of stinking water. My chest hurts, my throat burns. It feels like I’ve swallowed glass. There’s pressure, behind my ribs and behind my eyes. A terrible feeling of fullness that shouldn’t be there. My heart races, beats in triple time.
I’m dying, I’m dying.
Then I pull in a ragged half-breath and vomit up a mouthful of bile.
It’s fifteen years since Amy’s body was found floating in this well. At least a part of me knows it isn’t the same water down here now as it was then. Still, I can’t stand the thought of having so much as a drop of it inside me. I retch and spit to get the horrid taste out of my mouth, then vomit again, and collapse against the curved stone wall.
Was it this dark down here before the climb? It must have been, but it seems darker now. The light from above doesn’t reach the bottom of the well, and while not being able to see around me is bad enough, not be able to see how badly I’m injured is ten times worse. My entire body hurts in new and frightening ways. My chest, my shoulders, my neck. Most of all my right leg, where the pain throbs in steady waves from the back of my thigh. And my hands and fingers feel odd, bigger than they should. Still, I can’t help peering at the opening high above me, a fine drizzle wetting my face as I look up. I was so bloody close. I wonder if I could climb out again, even with whoever did this to me still up there, waiting to push me back down. I could, I’m sure of it. Once I’ve got my breath and my hands have stopped hurting. And the second time would be easier than the first, seeing as I’ve already dug out all those footholds and handholds. Maybe I can get the jump on them, if I’m quick enough. Climb out before they realise I’m there and take off through the woods? Or I could grab hold of them and refuse to let go. Hold on for dear life …
What else can I do? I can’t just sit here.
I’m over two miles from the edge of town and half a mile from the nearest building – though the Old Mill Tearooms won’t be open again until the morning – so I know there’s no use screaming for help. Nobody will hear me. The well is thirty yards off the trail, down an overgrown, hard-to-find path, and while it’s possible the occasional hiker might wander in this direction, they don’t tend to walk the woods in the dead of the night.
And that’s the least of my problems.
When I try to remember the last few days, it’s like trying to recall a dream. Images come to me, fuzzy and incomplete, as if viewed through frosted glass. It must be the shock: my brain has switched into emergency mode, putting all its effort into the here and now, surfacing only what it deems relevant to my survival. Which must be why, even though I haven’t a clue how I ended up here, I know that the oppressive heat of the last few days is forecast to come to a thunderous end in the next few hours. A storm is coming.
Right now, the water in the well is neither deep, nor very cold. It barely covers my legs and is bordering on tepid, perhaps still holding some of the heat of the last few days. But that will quickly change when the rain comes. I need to get out of here, and soon. If I don’t, there’s a possibility I won’t make it through the night.
My legs feel like they have gone to sleep. I need to stand, get the blood flowing, work out what to do next.
I shift position, brace a hand against the wall of the well to help myself up. But the moment I try to move, pain spikes through my right leg and steals all the breath from my body. I see stars, and slump back against the wall with tears in my eyes. I keep still for what feels like a long time, the darkness closing in around me. If I could only see what’s wrong, I might not feel so afraid.
Once the pain isn’t singing quite so loudly, I unclench my jaw, reach blindly down into the water and carefully run my hand down the back of my thigh until my fingers catch on something hard that shouldn’t be there. The pain flares again. Explosive, dizzying.
Something is very wrong under the water.
What feels like a branch is growing out of my leg. No, worse than that, it’s growing through my leg. I can feel the swollen places where it enters at the back and emerges through my inner thigh. It is gnarled and knotted. Sturdy. As thick as my finger.
I feel the blood drain from my face. I want to throw up again.
Oh God, this is bad. This is so, so bad.
I pull my hand away, don’t want to touch the branch anymore. Don’t want to think about what has happened, what it means.
You’re fucked. That’s what it means.
I got lucky, I realise. The first time I came to, down here, I was banged up, bruised and terrified, but by some miracle, not seriously hurt. Once the shock had subsided, I was able to pull myself together, get to my feet and make a plan to climb my way out of this mess.
But this time is different. This time there will be no climbing.