Black Widow. Jessie Keane

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       3

      Annie woke up by slow degrees. She opened her eyes and saw the blue bowl of the sky above her. A buzzard was circling over the cliffs. There was a smell. Smoke and dust. She lapsed into unconsciousness again. Or was it sleep? Was this a dream?

      Again she awoke, and this time it was with a powerful sensation of nausea. Of something wrong. The sun was warm but something was burning. Her eyes hurt, her throat felt as dry as dust. A dream. A nightmare.

      The third time she came back to herself with a violent urge to vomit. She shot up on the sunbed, leaned over, and was sick. Her head spun. Clutching at the sunbed she lay back again and closed her eyes. There was crackling nearby, like a fire in a grate.

      What the fuck’s going on? she thought.

      She opened her sore eyes and alarm started to take hold. She wasn’t in bed. This was daylight, she was lying beside the pool and…she fought to clear her jumbled thoughts…there was something happening. There had been a bang, then something on her face, and now there was an unpleasant chemical smell in her nostrils and—Jesus—she was going to throw up again.

      She vomited again on to the stones of the terrace, then thought: Layla?

      She had heard Layla indoors singing just before the bang. Sometimes you got hunters up in the wood after rabbits, but this had been different, so much louder. A roll of smoke and dust, a bang louder than any firework, it had hurt her ears and they were ringing with the aftermath of some sort of shockwave. She could hear a dog whimpering nearby.

      No. Not a dog, a person.

       Layla?

      Annie fought her way up into a sitting position, swaying, impelled by the need to get to her daughter right now. She felt drunk. Which was almost funny because she had never been drunk in her life. Her mother Connie had been an alcoholic and it had killed her. Annie was happy never to touch the stuff, ever.

      She opened her eyes to a scene of horror. Jonjo’s sunbed was empty. Jeanette was still there, though. Jeanette was sitting up and with her head in her hands. The whimpering was coming from Jeanette.

      Alarm shot through Annie.

      ‘What’s happening?’ asked Annie. Her voice came out a croak.

      Jeanette dropped her hands. She looked at Annie with eyes wild with terror. She opened her mouth and started to shriek. Annie lurched to her feet, staggered, then righted herself. She plummeted to her knees in front of Jeanette.

      ‘What happened?’ she asked again, and her voice was stronger now.

      Jeanette’s hysterical screams seemed to be echoing around Annie’s aching head. She hauled back an arm and slapped the other woman, hard. Then she grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

      ‘What happened?’ she shouted. ‘Is Layla indoors? Is Layla all right?’

      Now Jeanette was crying and shuddering.

      Christ, thought Annie. She stumbled to her feet and half fell off the terrace and through the door into the sudden cool and semi-darkness of the finca’s hallway. The telephone on the hall table tinkled as she passed by. She stopped, looked at it. What the fuck? It had never made that sound before. Maybe the blast had damaged the wiring in some way. She picked it up, heard only a normal dial tone. She quickly put it back down again and hurried on. Supporting herself against the walls, she dragged herself to Layla’s bedroom, blinking to try to see with eyes that were incredibly sore.

      Layla’s swimsuit was laid out on her bed beside her teddies and dolls. But the room was in chaos. The stool at the dressing table was thrown on the floor, and a chair had been knocked over, and the dressing table itself was askew, as if it had been pushed.

      But the thing was way too heavy for Layla to have moved it.

       Where was Layla?

      Swallowing bile and a growing panic, Annie lurched into the bathroom, into the master bedroom, into the spare bedroom, the kitchen, then the sitting room.

      ‘Layla!’ she yelled, but there was no answer. She ran outside to the back of the finca where Layla loved to play; she had a swing there, suspended from one of the palms.

      ‘Layla!’ she yelled again, but there was only silence.

      Maybe this was a nightmare. Please God let it be a nightmare. At any moment Layla would come and jump on the bed and she would wake up and Max would groan beside her and roll over and go back to sleep.

      ‘Layla!’

      Nothing. No answer. No sound.

      Annie stumbled back outside to the terrace and stepped on something soft. There was a tiny crunch of bones. She looked down. A dead sparrow. Not a mark on it, but it was dead. The blast, she thought. The Shockwaves had killed it. There had been an explosion. Or had it been merely stunned? Had she just killed the poor damned thing with her weight? Nausea rose again. Her eyes went to the pool house and found nothing there but smouldering wreckage.

      Her eyes drifted on.

      ‘Max?’

      Her eyes locked on to the body in the pool. A man’s body, the skin brown from hours spent in the sun, face-down, floating on the surface. Dark hair on the arms, dark hair on the head—and blood billowing all around it like a crimson halo.

      Annie felt the breath leave her body in one horrified, disbelieving rush.

      ‘Max!’ she screamed, and dived straight into the pool.

      Afterwards, Annie couldn’t even remember swimming across the pool. One moment she was on the side looking at Max’s lifeless body, then she was there beside him.

       ‘Max!’

      The nightmare was relentless. She rolled him over and he was weightless, lifeless in the water. Max, oh God Max no please don’t be dead, please Max…

      It was Jonjo.

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