In a Dark, Dark Wood

10

VOICES. IN THE corridor outside. They filter into my dream, through the morphine haze, and for a moment I think I’m back at the Glass House, and Clare and Flo are whispering outside my door, their shaking hands holding the gun.

We should have checked the house …

Then I open my eyes, and I remember where I am.

The hospital. The people outside my door are nurses, night orderlies … maybe even the police officer I saw earlier.

I lie there blinking, and trying to make my tired, drug-addled brain work. What time is it? The hospital lights are dimmed for night, but I have no sense of whether it’s 9 p.m. or 4 a.m.

I twist my head to look for my phone. Always when I wake, I check the time on my phone. It’s the first thing I do. But the locker beside my bed is empty. My phone is not there.

There are no clothes hanging on the chair by the window, no pockets in the hospital gown I’m wearing. My phone is gone.

I lie there, looking around the small, dimly-lit room. It’s a private room, which seems odd – but maybe the main ward was full. Or perhaps that’s just how they do things up here. There are no other patients to ask, and no clock on the wall. If the softly blinking green monitor by my head has a time display, I can’t see it.

For a minute I think about calling out, asking the policewoman outside my door what the time is, where I am, what’s happened to me.

But then I realise; she’s talking to someone else, it was their low voices that woke me. I swallow, dry and sticky, and pull my head painfully off the pillow, ready to croak out an appeal. But before I can speak, one sentence filters through the thick glass of the door and glues my dry tongue to the roof of my mouth.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I hear, ‘so now we’re looking at murder?’