Читать книгу When Your Eyes Close: A psychological thriller unlike anything you’ve read before! - Tanya Farrelly - Страница 9

Nick woke in the night to the sound of a woman’s voice in his ear. He flailed blindly for the lamp and knocked over a glass of water on the bedside locker. When he finally found the switch, the light dispelled the auditory apparition, but failed to slow his racing heart. The voice had been distinct, angry, but what bothered him most was he hadn’t caught the words that the woman had said – and yet somehow, he knew her voice: it was Rachel’s.

Sweating, he sat up and threw back the covers. Rachel, the woman from his dream; why was it that she seemed so real to him now? He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. His hands were shaking badly, and a pulse throbbed in his left temple. Had he been dreaming before the voice had woken him? He didn’t remember. He just remembered the voice so close to his ear that he’d jumped.

Downstairs, Nick switched the kettle on. He gripped the counter wishing that he’d not poured out the half bottle of whiskey that he’d had in the press two days before. The prescription that the doctor had given him lay on the living room table. He’d been prescribed Valium and Librium, drugs whose names he was familiar with but had never anticipated having to use. The doctor had said there would be withdrawal symptoms, but he hadn’t expected to feel this bad. The drugs would have helped to ease the tremors, and now with trembling hands he made a mug of coffee, heaped in four spoons of sugar, and wished that he’d heeded the doctor’s advice to have the script filled right away.

Nick took his coffee into the living room, and rummaged in his coat pocket for his cigarettes, but then remembered he’d smoked his last in the car after his appointment – his only immediate means of self-medication gone. He sat back in his armchair, sipped the too-sweet coffee. Bars of light filtered through the venetian blind and bathed the room in the orange hue of the streetlight. It fell on the painting that Michelle had bought him for his birthday the previous month, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Michelle. He was glad she couldn’t see him like this. She didn’t even know he had a drink problem, or if she suspected it, she’d never said. He was rarely drunk. Over the years his body had developed such a tolerance that he’d had to drink more and more to feel the effects. Michelle drank, too, but one glass of wine and she was more than a little tipsy. She hated the taste of beer and he suspected that she only drank wine to be sociable.

Nick picked up his phone and scrolled through her last few messages. She’d said that she hoped everything was all right. If only she knew how not all right things were. He knew she’d stick by him, he wasn’t afraid of that, but why should she have to? They’d only been seeing each other for eight months and he didn’t expect her to take on the burden of his illness. He knew it was going to be awful, the abstinence and the unbearable wait for a donor to be found – for someone else’s ill fate to determine his continued existence.

He thought about the length of time it might take to find a suitable donor, if they found a suitable donor. The doctor had been frank about that. Type O negative was the rarest blood group. He had to face the facts. Apart from that there were the horror stories portrayed in the media: patients who died while on the transplant list, all because there weren’t enough people carrying donor cards. He hadn’t had one himself, had never even thought about it before he’d found himself in this bind. He hated to admit it, but Susan had been right. He’d screwed up his life.

When he’d met Michelle, he thought that things were turning around, that maybe he had a chance at real happiness, but now he couldn’t bear to break the news to her, to drag her into his self-made mess. The thought of letting her go was agonizing, but how could they plan a future when he couldn’t be sure that, for him, such a thing even existed? She deserved so much more than that.

Nick gulped the last of his coffee, winced at the accumulation of sugar at the bottom of the mug and thought he might be sick. The caffeine had momentarily eased the thudding in his temple, but his hands were shaking worse than ever and he wondered how he was going to get back to sleep. He remembered an all-night pharmacy that he’d seen a couple of kilometres away and wondered if he was fit to drive. Then he picked up the prescription, stuck it in his jeans pocket and pulled his leather jacket on. He needed those tablets badly.

Outside, the rain was still coming down. Nick ran to the car; he started the engine, set the wipers on full speed and drove out of the housing estate. He was shivering, but his skin felt hot. It was almost 2 a.m. when he pulled into the shopping centre car park, which was empty save for two cars he imagined belonged to the pharmacy staff. Shivering, he cut the engine and stepped into the wet night.

The pharmacist looked at the prescription, asked him to confirm his address and disappeared out the back. One look at him and he was pretty sure the pharmacist could identify a victim of detox. Not only were his hands shaking, he was perspiring too. His hands and face were clammy to the touch. A few minutes later, the pharmacist reappeared. He went through the directions with Nick but didn’t refer to his condition. He didn’t know what Librium was used for apart from withdrawal, but he knew that his mother had taken Valium after the shock of his father’s death, so he supposed these drugs were used to treat a number of conditions. He thanked the man, put the small pharmacy bag in the inside pocket of his jacket and went back out in the rain.

In the car, he fumbled on the floor until he came across a half bottle of water that had rolled under the passenger seat. He swallowed two tablets and hoped that it wouldn’t be long before they began to take effect. The rain was still teeming down as he exited the car park; the wipers, set on automatic, raced to clear the windscreen. The coffee hadn’t helped; if anything, it had made him feel even more jittery. He thought of the session with the hypnotist – about what she’d said about confabulation. He’d looked it up on the Internet and the definition was just as Tessa had said: a false memory, or pseudo memory, a term that was used in cognitive psychology defined as a recollection of something that had never happened.

He’d considered what she’d said about some people believing that confabulations under hypnosis were memories from their past lives, and he’d changed his search to ‘hypnosis and past life regression’, laughing at himself even as he did so. If only Michelle could see him now; she loved that kind of thing. He thought of all the times he’d teased her about her interest in the occult. He’d scoffed when she’d told him about her visits to an elderly gypsy lady – even when she’d insisted that the woman had known things, specific things about her family that couldn’t simply have been speculation. ‘And what does this lady do?’ he’d asked. ‘Read your palm, your cards?’ Michelle had told him that, no, the woman simply held your hand and gently rubbed it, that it was as if by touching you that she could access those private recesses of your mind. ‘Of course she can,’ he’d argued, ‘your hand probably jerks every time she hits on something and she just goes with it.’ Michelle had laughed and called him a sceptic. What would she think of him now, making appointments with a hypnotist and reading about regression and past lives?

Nick was preoccupied with such thoughts when a dark shape suddenly stepped in the road in front of him. He jerked the wheel, thankful there were no cars on the other side of the road. Heart hammering, he pulled into the kerb and checked the rear-view mirror. The man had reached the opposite side of the road and was fumbling with something that Nick imagined to be a sleeping bag. Nick got out of the car, his legs weak, and walked back to the man who seemed ready to bed down in a doorway for the night.

‘Jesus, man, are you all right? I could have killed you,’ he said.

The man looked at him unfazed and continued setting up his bed for the night, a dirty green sleeping bag that looked as though, like the man, it had been soaked through.

Nick put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fifty-euro note. ‘Look, get yourself into a hostel for the night, man. It’s no night to be in the street.’

The stranger looked at him, and at the money in his hand. ‘Are you sure? I wasn’t asking …’ There were tears in the man’s eyes.

Nick was surprised at his timbre. He didn’t sound like someone who should’ve been in the street. Embarrassed, he thrust the money into the man’s hand.

‘God bless you for this,’ the man said. ‘God bless you.’

Nick dashed back to the car. When he looked in the mirror again, he saw that the man had bundled up his sleeping bag and was walking in a brisk manner in the direction of the city. Only if he were lucky, Nick knew, would he find a shelter for the night.

Shaken by the experience, along with his symptoms, Nick drove home slowly, absorbed still by thoughts of reincarnation. In his search that afternoon, he’d come across an excerpt from a book called Many Lives, Many Masters, by a Dr Brian L. Weiss, MD, an American psychotherapist. It told the story of how Weiss, a sceptic, had learned to believe in past lives when a patient of his had been accidentally transported to a past life during standard hypnotherapy. Nick had read the two-page extract and then re-read it. It seemed that Weiss’s patient had found herself in a different time and place, just as he had. He’d refreshed his search. The Internet was full of stories of people who claimed to have lived before. Finally, annoyed with himself for even entertaining such a ridiculous idea, he’d closed down his computer. Hocus pocus, that’s all it was. What he’d experienced was a confabulation. It had to be.

Chiding himself still for his foolishness, Nick reached the house without further incident. He knew that his jumbled thoughts were most likely a further consequence of the withdrawal from alcohol – something that he hoped the medication would help with when it had had a chance to get into his system. In darkness, he climbed the stairs, longing for the oblivion that sleep might bring and trying to put from his mind what might happen at his next session with Tessa. He would phone her to make another appointment in the morning. Regardless of what might happen, he’d need the woman’s help to quit drinking.