My vision wobbled.
There was blood and mess where Donovan had been, but he wasn’t there now. He wasn’t anywhere.
Pressure built around me, squeezing in.
I was scared to turn. Scared to move and break the stillness.
Where was he? Had he gone upstairs to Bethany?
‘Will you show me your hands again?’ Sam asked. ‘Now that we’re in the light?’
‘We have to go,’ I told him.
He didn’t respond. He just nodded wordlessly, staring with uncertainty at the shattered remains of the broken vase.
‘We have to go right now, Sam.’
It was so cold in the room. Much colder than before. Gooseflesh spread across my skin as I looked at the open door to outside.
Sam moved closer to me, gently taking my hands and inspecting them silently, then nudging my chin to one side and sucking in a draught of air as he saw the cut at the back of my head.
‘Tell me again how you did this.’
And that’s when I realized. That’s when it hit me.
He thought I’d fallen.
He thought I’d whacked my head on the corner of the coffee table, smashed the vase, given myself a concussion, maybe.
He thought everything I was telling him was imagined. A delusion. A catalyst that had transformed my anxieties and phobias into a tale about a rogue intruder.
Something puckered at the base of my spine. A sensation of being watched.
I didn’t want to move but I whirled around anyway, staring into the kitchen.
Nobody there.
But the door to the basement remained wide open.
I dropped my gaze to the floor.
There were spots of blood on the steps leading down into the kitchen.
A smear on the edge of the granite countertop beyond the sink.
Another drop close to the basement steps.
Could Donovan have gone down there?
Sam released my hands and crossed in front of me to return to the vestibule, where he stuck his head outside to look for the police and the ambulance he’d called.
Turning back to me, he shrugged awkwardly, then stepped into the living area again, this time moving around the other end of the sofa closer to the bay window, as if to analyse the scene of devastation on the ground from a new angle.
The air tightened between us.
Everything throbbed with an oddly charged intensity.
The atmosphere in the room. The blood in my veins.
Then the darkness shifted and Donovan rose up with a roar of pain from behind the armchair, slipping his arm around Sam’s neck.