1 / Lights Out
She recognized the symptoms immediately. The stipple of sweat in the small of her back. Ice-heat prickling her forehead. A sense of skittering panic in the pit of her stomach. As she walked faster, she thought: This is absurd, it can’t harm me. But beneath her mind’s voice ran another, dark and urgent. It’s not the night, but what waits in it.
The sun had barely set, but the road ahead was indistinct in the fading light. She refused to consider what might be out there. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, hissed the voice, a phrase recalled from her schooldays. She had no intention of meeting the prince this evening, and quickened her pace, not daring to look back. The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water, threatening to overtake her. Blackbirds skirted the trees, taking measure of the rising wind.
For as long as she could remember, Jerry Gates had been terrified of the dark. The cause of this nyctophobia was beyond the reach of recollection: some early trauma at the top of the stairs, perhaps. Her mother accused her of having an overactive imagination; she made it sound like a harmful thing. Others would have seen misted fields on either side of the road, bare elm trees blurring in the dusk. Jerry could see demons swarming.
She tried to read her watch, but it was too dark. Screw Nicholas and his country weekend, she thought. If he’d shown some warning sign of his intentions, she would never have come in the first place. The man should have been wearing a red toggle, Pull To Inflate Ego, like a life jacket. His personality had changed the moment he’d realized that she wasn’t going to bed with him.
Now it was almost dark, and she was stuck in the deserted Kent countryside on a Sunday night, without a car, in the freezing cold, with an irrational dread nipping at her, goading her into a trot. She was a town girl, used to city lights and cars and sirens and people. It’s so quiet around here you could hear a cow break wind five miles away. Where the hell is everybody?
She thought back over the weekend, and the mistake she had made in accepting his invitation. On Saturday morning they had ‘motored down to the lodge’— Nicholas’s words, as if they were living in the roaring twenties—in the red MG that kept stalling, its roof folded back to admit the freezing country air.
The ‘lodge,’ a damp Victorian monstrosity situated on the far side of Dettling, had been designed in such a way that the watery warmth of the winter sun was excluded from it through every phase of the earth’s rotation. The ground floor was surrounded by tall wet nettles, the brickwork obscured by reeking fungus. The rooms were virtually devoid of furniture. There was no central heating. Nicholas’s family might have breeding, but they obviously had no money. The upkeep of such property, he’d explained, was staggering, and his parents preferred to stay in their Knightsbridge flat.
It didn’t take her long to realize that Nicholas used the empty house for sex. One look at the bedrooms was all she needed to know. Adult magazines, wine bottles, mirrors, and candles, a lad’s pathetic idea of what would please women. The blinds were drawn tight in all the upper rooms, and probably remained so throughout the year.
Her partner’s dinner conversation had consisted of college tales laden with sexual innuendo. Nicholas was a different person on his home ground, all smirk and swagger, and she hated it. It was as if she had ceased to be his friend, and had become his quarry. The second time he brushed her breast while reaching for the wine, Jerry had announced that she was going to bed. No amount of persuasion could keep her downstairs.
She’d spent a sleepless night barricaded into her room, wearily listening to his pleas and insults through the door.
She had never looked forward to dawn so much in her life. Rising at the earliest opportunity, she had listened to the farming forecasts of incoming rain while frying herself bacon. Shortly after ten Nicholas had appeared in his dressing gown. The blackness of his mood barely allowed him to acknowledge her presence. The rest of the morning passed in gelid silence. Denied his conquest, Nicholas had regressed to a sullen schoolboy.
Her uppermost concern had been the problem of getting home. Trouble with the car—beneath which he passed most of the afternoon—prevented Nicholas from driving her to the station. Typically, there was no cab service operating in the area. Jerry found herself left alone to wander the rooms of the old farmhouse. As she examined the shelves of discoloured paperbacks, she grew more bored and upset. Finally she had collected her overnight bag and struck out across the field in the direction of the main road.
She would have been happy never to see him again, but he would be there the next morning, at work. They even shared the same damned counter. Good judgement call, Jerry, she thought. You really know how to pick them.