Now You See Me

Fifty-One: Debts Owed

When I next woke up, it was still night time. It was dark, but under the blinds there was a thin sliver of pale dawn light creeping inside the room. I put a guess at around six in the morning. I could at least say I'd claimed myself an hour of peaceful sleep.

When I sat up and looked around, I experienced a brief moment of strange disorientation, before I remembered I'd never left Chris's room. I had a fuzzy recollection of rehydrating for some time in his bath, and then simply climbing into bed next to him. A wall of crumpled-up duvet ran the length of the bed down the middle, standing testimony to my invasion. I couldn't remember which one of us constructed the divider, but I had a feeling it had been him.

I faintly heard footsteps on the stairs, probably Thea on her way down to work for the day, which proved my time estimate correct. I lay back down. My eyes were heavy with tiredness, and I was sure that if I stayed still enough and kept my mind blank enough, I could easily have drifted back to sleep. The room was muggy from the heat of the bath getting trapped inside, and it smelled faintly of sweat. A couple of stained pillows had been tossed over the foot of the bed from Chris's nightmare cold sweats, but it no longer smelled bad in here. If I was honest, it was mildly relaxing.

Apparently, though, I was not fated to fall asleep a second time; as soon as I closed my eyes, something smashed on the hall tiles downstairs, the sound accompanied by a shrill cry and running footsteps.

I flipped the duvet off and lurched for the door, wincing as the dry skin on my limbs stung; I wasn't supposed to really try and spend an hour in a dry bed anymore, and last night I hadn't even thought it through properly – but at this point, jumping into the bath was the last thing on my mind.

I opened the door just as Thea reached my floor. She was white in the face and visibly trembling, and started violently when I called out to her.

"Are you okay, Thea? I heard something."

"Oh, Damien," she breathed. "I'm sorry I woke you up, I dropped my tea. I saw...in the dining room...." She squeezed her eyes shut, looking for a moment like she wanted to vomit. "Oh God, it was really horrible. It was...." She shook her head violently. "I'm sorry, I can't. I need to tell Leia."

She disappeared. I stood there for a minute, staring at the space in which she'd been standing, and then looked around when Chris stirred and sat up.

"Wuzz goin' on?" he mumbled, rubbing his eyes and squinting at me.

"Don't know," I replied, going back into the room and heading for the bathroom. I badly wanted to investigate straightaway, but I wasn't going to get far without a bath. "But it isn't good. It's shaken Thea up really badly."

"What has? Is she hurt?"

"She wasn't hurt." I stripped off my shirt and boxers and lowered myself into the water. "Just shocked."

He came in, still trying to remove sleep from his eyes, and turned to the mirror to try and give some order to his hair.

"I'll be done in a sec," I said, "Just in for a minute before I go and see what's happening."

"Okay." He smiled blandly at me, and then became concerned. "What if it's dangerous?"

"If it was the kind of dangerous you're probably thinking, Thea would be hurt, wouldn't she?" I clambered out again, stretching myself out on the mat to dry off. "No, I think she saw something disturbing, not dangerous."

He clambered past me and got up onto the bath ledge. "I don't think you should go down there."

His expression as he turned to me was filled with worry, but also a quiet kind of fear that I was sure he was trying to hide. I had a few ideas as to what it was, and to what he thought it was. None of them were ideas I wanted to find as truth.