Читать книгу The Girl in the Water - - Страница 18

It happened in the night, somewhere in the darkness of the drawn curtains and the muffled lampshades, beneath the cotton sheets and in the midst of the heady scent of all that goes on in the dark room of a husband and wife who’ve found their way there by stumbling up their staircase, falling into bed as clothes are thrown at walls and ceilings.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the strangeness closed in.

Our bodies were as tightly wound together as two bodies can be. My chin was pressed into his neck, my lips somewhere near his ear, his whole body slippery with anticipation. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic. Mine was keeping pace.

Then came the flash of light. An image, bursting into my mind. A stranger’s face, loving and peaceful and kind and wicked and cruel, all at once. One of Cinderella’s sinister stepsisters, only far more beautiful.

I suddenly remembered the bookshop. The headline, my hours on the Internet, and something beyond all the details I’d read. Someone else’s games and mysteries and … wrongs. My whole body suddenly felt the immense, overwhelming wrongness of the world. And I remembered the highway, the flashes of my thoughts and fears on the drive instantly back before my eyes. The image. The face.

And I can hear whimpering, and crying; the utterances of a creature, crying out and asking me to know its pain. A judgement, cascading into my present.

And in my embrace with my solidity and my rock, my arms wrapped around David’s fiery chest, I said it. The single word that echoed out to me from that strange, white darkness.

A name. Her name.

‘Emma.’

I don’t know where it came from, why it made my lips move. But her name was suddenly there, and I couldn’t keep it to myself.

‘Emma.’

I could feel David’s body go rigid beneath me. There was ice. The cessation of everything. And then the world stopped, and started to fade away.