It’s a shock. She feels winded and lies still before moving different parts of her body cautiously, testing them to see what’s hurt.
She knows she’ll be bruised tomorrow, but otherwise everything seems to be okay apart from her knee. She winces when she examines it. It’s cut. Her breathing quickens. She can’t just bandage it up and hide the blood because there’s a shard of glass stuck in the wound. She won’t be able to walk if she leaves it there; it has to be extracted.
She grasps the edge of the glass and turns her head away before giving it a decisive tug. She gasps as it comes out and throws the shard toward the corner of the room, out of sight. Beads of blood cluster along the incision and she pulls her torn trouser leg down over it and presses as hard as she can.
Out of the corner of her eye, the oven clock turns to midnight.
Why hasn’t Ruth appeared? The noise should have woken her. Jayne calls for her, hears nothing in reply. The house feels empty, too empty.
She relieves the pressure on her wound and glances at it. More blood wells up, bright and persistent. She applies pressure again, but the blood has soaked into her trousers and she can’t look away from it. It horrifies her. She feels faint. All her senses start to tingle. It’s happening. She knows it, even before she blinks once, twice, then rapidly. This is the start of full-on disassociation.
As if through a muffle, she hears something. A scraping noise. From upstairs? Or from the front of the house? She’s not sure. She pulls off a boot and sock and ties the sock around her knee as tightly as possible, then makes her way, hobbling, into the hall. There’s no sound. Perhaps the noise was from outside.
She checks the door. It’s locked as she expected, but the bolt has been drawn, too. Somebody’s in the house with her.
As silently as possible, she slides the bolt open. Better to beable to make a quick exit, if needed. She leaves the lock engaged. Opening it from this side of the door doesn’t require a key.
“Ruth?” she calls again. She hears another creak, and stops still. After a few moments she tells herself it’s just something in the barn responding to the draft whistling through from the broken window.
“Emily?”
Was the door bolted because Emily returned to the barn unnoticed by Jayne, and wanted to lock her out, even if Jayne had a key? As punishment for Jayne not going with her as promised? Or is that paranoid? It’s hard to know.
Her thoughts bundle and swirl. Her heart races. Her ears buzz.
Could young, pretty Emily be behind the letter? she wonders. Is Emily the “E” on the signature? Is there threat, here? From within this building and their little group? Has she badly misread the situation?
Or is Emily still outside, at risk of harm, because she and Ruth let her go?
She tries to fight the disassociation, to stay in touch with what’s happening, but that never works. She feels as if she’s stepped into an alternate version of her life, as if she has only the slightest of connections with reality. Reason deserts her. A sense of danger pulses.
Emily. Ruth. Who are they, really? Anyone can be a danger to others. Who left the remains outside? Who fashioned the hideous scarecrow? It was designed to frighten.
She needs to check this whole place. She needs her gun.
Her brain short-circuits. Blanks. It restarts. Her thoughts are in shreds.
She finds herself standing in the doorway of the sitting room. It’s empty. She’s unsure if this is good or bad. No threat is good, she has to remind herself. It’s as if her logical brain has been wiped.
She moves to look into the other downstairs rooms—a tiny bathroom, a cramped utility area—with robotic slowness as herthoughts swirl faster and her heart continues to thump, thump, thump. The buzzing is ceaseless and increasing in volume.
She doesn’t know how long it takes her to check downstairs. The air in the barn feels as thick as treacle. So do her thoughts. The rooms, though small, and the way they interconnect, which she knows rationally to be simple, feel somehow confusing. At one point she sits and only snaps to when the throbbing in her knee becomes insistent. She’s back in the sitting room but has no idea how long she’s been there. Her wet coat is on the sofa beside her. Sometime later she finds herself staring out of the kitchen window and can’t remember how she got from one place to the other. It’s all a blank.
The oven clock tells her it’s 1:30. But wasn’t it just midnight? Time has become a trickster.
She has to concentrate on climbing the stairs. She daren’t look at her knee, though it hurts. She should call for the others again but can’t make herself open her mouth. It feels sealed shut.
She first disassociated while she was in the army. You can have a fight, flight, or freeze response the therapist said, when you experience trauma in the moment, or when you are triggered, afterward.
You learned to freeze, because in the moment you couldn’t fight. You weren’t in a trench with a gun in your hand, and you couldn’t flee because you were working. Doing your job. You were in a room, at a desk, or watching a monitor. You had no choice but to freeze. It happened because your brain couldn’t cope with what was happening. You contributed intelligence that led to air strikes where there was collateral damage. Murder of innocents. You watched it happen and it was too much for you. Which is why it crept into your dreams and has stayed with you.
As Jayne climbs, she’s aware of a stickiness between her injured knee and her trouser leg. The back of her neck prickles, as if there’sa target on it. The buzzing gets louder. Her clothes are damp. She peels off her blouse and lets it fall.
The light on the landing is on. The bathroom light, too. Rain batters the skylights. It’s relentless. Jayne looks up at the glass. She has a sense of clear and present danger.
It feels as if she’s gone too far to be able to bring herself back to reality. She’s been taught techniques, but right now can’t remember, let alone enact them.
Someone has ransacked her bedroom. Her clothes are everywhere, her bag empty.
