Breaking the Dark by Lisa Jewell

Author:Lisa Jewell [Jewell, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hyperion Avenue
Published: 2022-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

NIGHT HAS FALLEN as dark as night can get as Jessica arrives outside Belle’s house. The perimeter wall looms above her, ten feet high. She looks from left to right and back again, and then hurls herself upward. She perches on the wall for a second and she waits for the noise of the dogs. Sure enough, it comes. Like a tornado in the night, the pack appears below, and with a lurch in the pit of her stomach that almost makes her puke, Jessica throws out a handful of cubed ham, then jumps, legs ablur, arms pumping the cold night air like engine parts, heart swelling in her chest. As she lands, one dog manages to get close enough to take her heel in its mouth. It’s the same dog that Belle was feeding morsels of lamb to earlier, who’d taken them from Belle’s fingers as daintily as a highborn lady. Now that same soft mouth is embedded in her flesh and Jessica kicks her leg hard enough to boot the dog a few feet across the grass, where it lands with a whimper. Jessica knows she has a very short opportunity to make it across the grounds to the house before Debra and Belle are alerted, so she overrides the pain and runs.

The house is in darkness when she reaches it. Jessica has a few seconds to get into the house before the dogs arrive and wake everyone up. She shimmies up a water pipe toward the middle floor, where Belle will be sleeping, but is halfway up when she hears the dogs. She pulls in her breath and peers around the corner, where she sees Debra in a towel robe and sheepskin slippers, standing just outside the front door with a huge flashlight in her hand. She looks like someone’s mother, waiting to greet their late-returning child. She does not look like a child abductor or a killer, with the soft slippers, the glasses on top of her head, the moonlight shining off the night cream on her cheeks.

“Hello?” she hears Debra call out. “Someone there?”

Jessica hears the skitter of dogs’ claws across the graveled parking area, the clamor of barking nearby. They can smell her. They know she’s here.

“What?” she hears Debra say to the dogs. “Is there someone up there? What is it?”

Jessica sees the beam from the flashlight arc across the top of the house and she tucks herself tight in away from it. The dogs are coming for her, and she knows that she needs to either get out of here, or get into the house, so she breathes in hard and pulls herself up the drainpipe to the second floor, where she pushes open an unlocked window and climbs onto the landing. She opens and closes three doors before she finds Belle’s bedroom. And there is Belle, asleep, curled into herself on a narrow single bed under a thin quilt. Her room is cold and damp.

“Belle!”

The girl stirs.

“Belle! Wake up!” She touches Belle’s shoulder gently, and the small figure wakes slowly from a very deep sleep.

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