Murder in Manuscript (Robert Budd Book 15) by Gerald Verner

Author:Gerald Verner [Verner, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2019-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It was quite a long time before Janice recovered consciousness for the second time. A racking pain was crawling to life in her tortured nerves and her head throbbed monotonously. She could feel every hammer-beat of her heart magnified a hundredfold, and her skin was hot and clammy and there was a feverish heat in her flesh that seemed to be burning her up. Subconsciously she knew that she was lying on something hard and lumpy, but she couldn’t get up. Her numbed muscles refused to obey the signal from her brain. There seemed to be a kind of insulation between her and her senses.

Somewhere above her a blaze of light was stabbing at her eyes and hurting them. It cut into her head like hot knives and made her feel sick. Every now and again there was a queer feeling as though she were being rapidly revolved in a large drum with no chance of getting out or stopping the dizzy spinning. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to relax.

For a long time she lay, slipping back again into a state of dreamy lethargy. She was experiencing all the misery of the slow return to normality from the effects of the drug which had been injected into her system.

Presently she opened her eyes again. The light still blazed, white hot, above her, but now it did not seem so strong. It did not burn her eyes as it had done before. Vaguely she began to remember fragments of what had happened, and tried to disentangle them from the patches of vacancy that surrounded them. She got angry that she could not connect any of this jumbled mass of isolated glimpses into a coherent whole, and in the midst of her anger, drifted away again on a river of darkness. . . .

When she woke again it was to full consciousness. She remembered every little detail that had happened to her, clearly and sharply. She was no longer in the room with the drawn curtains and the green shaded reading lamp. This room was smaller and more barely furnished. The walls were covered with a garish paper; the floor was bare without even a rug on the unstained boards. The thing she was lying on was an old horsehair sofa. This, with a plain table and a kitchen chair, was the only furniture.

From the centre of the dirty ceiling hung a single unshaded bulb. This gave all the light there was, for the only window had been heavily boarded up.

Janice, after one or two abortive attempts, got unsteadily off the sofa and looked about her.

Was this another room in the same house or had she been moved to some other place altogether? She looked for her wrist-watch and remembered that she had forgotten to put it on. She wondered if it was still day, but she had no means of telling. The air of the room was stuffy and smelt musty with that unpleasant smell that is associated with houses that have been long shut up and neglected.

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