The White House - Book 6, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Thirteen

James booked into a hotel near Land’s End on Saturday night. He thought about ringing Elise and letting her know he was okay, but there were no texts or voice mails on his phone from her and he suspected she didn’t give a damn how he was. He sat alone in his hotel room and watched inane television in the hope it would keep his mind from the sound of his hand striking her face. It didn’t work. The resounding crack of the hard slap played on repeat in his head.

If he could turn back time where would he take them to, he wondered. Would he go back to before he rented the house in Porth Kerensa? But why stop there if he had the power to rewind the wheels of time? Why not go back to the days they had put off having babies because life was good and they were young and carefree? Would things be different if they’d tried for a child in their twenties or early thirties? What if, even then, they’d still suffered the same losses? Why not go back to the day he met her, and instead of asking her out for a drink, he simply smiled and walked away from her?

Would that have been better for both of them?

      ******

Sunday morning dawned and Elise woke up on the attic floor. Every part of her body was stiff and sore when she pulled herself up and she wondered how long she’d been there. She had no recollection of how or why she’d ended up in the attic and the blank in her memory frightened her. The last thing she could remember was crying at the table, listening to the sound of the rocking horse creaking, frenetically above her. She glanced at it, nervously, but it was still and silent now; its glassy glance, chilling the blood in her veins.

She went down to the silent second floor and knocked on James’ bedroom door, although she knew it would be empty before she stepped inside. She gathered up the few of her belongings that she’d left in there and went across the hall to her own room. She switched her radio on, turned it up loud and took a long hot shower. When she finished she wiped the condensation from the mirror and studied her face.

The swelling had gone down, but a bruise had come up overnight and it was still sore at the slightest movement. She lifted her hand to touch it, but the noise of glass breaking somewhere downstairs froze her in place. For a few seconds she wondered if James had come back to restart their fight, but when no further noises followed she relaxed a little.

She hurried into her bedroom, threw some clothes on and crept, quietly, downstairs; tension making her movements stiff and wary. There was no one in the lounge and she wondered if she’d imagined the noise, but as she moved around the sofa she saw the wedding picture of her and James on the floor. 

The glass was smashed and the frame was broken; worse than that though, her face had been completely obliterated from the photo. Someone or something had irreparably slashed it to pieces. Elise knelt on the floor, tears running down her face, and picked the picture out from the broken glass.

She glanced around the room and shouted, “Oliver, did you do this?”

She knew there would be no answer, but she didn’t expect the sudden odious feeling that wrapped itself around her. She gasped for breath, struggling against the icy malevolent cloud that seemed to be squeezing the oxygen out of her. Her veins felt frozen solid in her body and her heart raced. Images of bloodied crumpled bodies flooded her mind and she cried out, desperately.

The horror stopped as suddenly as it started and Elise crumpled, helplessly, on the floor, clutching the ruined photo close to her chest. She didn’t know what had just happened to her, but she knew it wasn’t her own hallucinations and it certainly hadn’t been Oliver.

Eventually, she stood, wiped her face and cleaned up the broken glass and frame. She threw them in the bin and she hid the picture at the back of a cupboard. She went down to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on before switching her phone on. There were no messages from James and she dialled his number, even as she wondered what the hell they would say to each other now.