Page 60 of Watching You
Something dripped into her right eye and she wondered how it was raining without a cloud in the sky, until the world turned crimson and the pain in her head became a monster intent on splitting her skull in two. She vomited.
Get up, she told herself. Get up and deal with him, because if he’s still alive, he’s coming back for you.
She pushed herself off the tree trunk, mentally checking each limb as she went. The pain in her left side was undoubtedly a cracked rib. Breathing was agony. Best-case scenario was no internal bleeding. She’d broken one tooth, possibly more. Her pulse was racing and her head was throbbing. Concussion, almost certainly. Arms and legs though, while scratched to pieces, were not fractured.
Taking the slope in a seated position, she made her way down, with no clear plan what she’d do when she got there.
She paid for the journey in agony and it seemed to take forever. What she found was nothing except a few scraps of black material fluttering from the ends of branches and a scuffed path in the dirt that went in the direction of her cabin.
‘Still alive,’ she muttered. ‘Fuck him.’
Beth looked more closely at his tracks. She was no wildlife expert, but she knew the difference between footsteps and drag marks. The tracks were two long, deep lines, blunt and wide. Her assailant wasn’t walking, he was on his hands and knees.
‘Badly hurt then,’ she told herself. ‘Worse than me.’
She had two choices. Head in the opposite direction, get far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to find her, then seek help.
But he might find her again. He just might. And she might be more badly hurt than she felt as yet. The body had a wonderful inbuilt pain relief system that kept you going for a while before letting you know just how bad things really were. Worse than that, he might get away. He had to have a car or motorbike in the area, there being no easy way of getting where they were without a vehicle. And it was possible that she’d just get lost. More than possible. Probable. Her head was already spinning.
That left only the prospect of going after him in the direction of her cabin and car. She needed her keys, her wallet and her mobile. That was all. If he really was as badly hurt as she suspected, it was possible that he wouldn’t bother her at all.
She moved several metres to the left of his tracks and followed as quietly as she could, clutching the cracked rib and stopping to check there was no blood in her saliva. It was clear. That was good. No wet sounds in her breath, either.
The man she was walking towards had lost someone underher knife. A woman. Beth hadn’t got much of a look at his face, but the glimpse she’d had was all she needed. That, and his scream. He’d yelled that at her once before.
His mother had been brought in by ambulance having suffered a suspected heart attack. She’d been kept alive en route with shocks and drugs, but as soon as Beth had cut her open, the damage was obvious. Such were the perils of decades of smoking topped up with years of alcohol abuse. The woman had been thin, almost emaciated, and it had been clear that all her calories had come from an off-licence and that even when she wasn’t actively smoking, the air she was breathing in at home was still tainted with toxins.
A postmortem had confirmed extensive cardiovascular damage, a massive blood clot in her heart and several small tumours forming in her lungs. The cancer would have claimed her, had her end not been quickened by the heart attack. Her body had been a corpse-in-waiting. There had been no kind way to break the news to her family, but as ever, it was hard to tell people that someone they loved had caused their own death, and that there had been nothing medically the team could do to save them.
There had been an older man there, Beth now remembered. Unemotional, almost closed off. The adult son hadn’t been in the room as she’d broken the news to his father. It was only as Beth had exited with the two other doctors who’d volunteered to be present to answer questions, that the son had appeared.
‘You killed her!’ he’d screamed at them.
‘Keep walking,’ one of the other doctors had warned Beth as she’d turned round to look at him, preparing to go back and talk it through. ‘I’ll call security.’
‘But—’ she’d begun.
‘You know the protocols. It’s dangerous to talk with familywhen they’re that upset. Best advice is to walk away and let them calm down.’
They’d rounded the corner as he was still yelling, but he hadn’t run after them. The image in her mind was of a man somewhere between twenty and forty, with mid-brown hair, a sprinkling of moles on his face, with deep-set brown eyes and square shoulders that seemed to jut out from his neck at ninety degrees. But it was the desperate screech of his voice that had stuck in her memory. The sense that he needed to vent at them, that he needed it to be someone else’s fault. Grief was a parasite, and its favourite meal was blame.
Still she couldn’t summon the woman’s name. Working in trauma, there were so many losses that it was a necessary protection of her own sanity to let some of it go. The oncologists she knew all said the same. If you carried every death with you every day, if you could see all their faces and name all their names, you were on a slippery slope into depression that would land you in a breakdown. Beth thought she knew a little more about slippery slopes given what she’d just been through.
As she drew closer to the cabin, her footsteps slowed and her pulse quickened. She could see her car through the trees. The front door of the cabin remained closed, but of course, unlocked, because she was an idiot who’d allowed her need to escape to override common sense. Beth stood still and listened. Distant birdsong, some insect noises. Was that a chainsaw a long way away? The sound could even be echoing from across the loch. But near her position? Nothing. The air was dead. Had that silence been caused by her approach or his?
Part of her wanted to scream that she was there, to get it over with, to make him rush out of the trees or out of her cabin, or from behind her car, or wherever the bastard was. His trailwent out into the clearing but she couldn’t see further than that without giving herself away.
Do or die, Beth thought. The world was spinning faster with every passing minute.
She took several deep breaths, removed her hand from her side so as not to indicate weakness just in case he was watching her, and stepped out into the clearing.
Time stopped.
Even her thudding heart was quiet.
She wanted to cry with the tension, with the need for it to be over – the waiting, the fear, the danger.
Still nothing.
