Land of the Living by Nicci French

more. At first, I had not let myself think of life beyond this room, of ordinary life as it had been. I had thought that would be a way of taunting myself and going mad. Now that I wanted to remember things, I couldn’t, or not properly. It was as if the sun had gone in and a storm was brewing and night was coming. It was coming.
    I tried to put myself in the flat, but I couldn’t. I tried to see myself at work, but I couldn’t. Memories lay in gathering darkness. I remembered this, though: I remembered swimming in a loch in Scotland, I couldn’t recall when, years ago, and the water was so brackish and murky that you couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t even see my hands clearly when I stretched them out in front of me. But when I did the crawl, I could see silver bubbles of air in the dark water. Cascading bubbles of silver air.
    Why do I remember that when other memories were shutting down? The lights were going out, one by one. Soon there would be nothing left. Then he would have won.
    I knew what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to write any letter. I wasn’t going to wait for him to come into the room with his piece of paper. It was the only power I had left. The power of not waiting for him to kill me. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. No memory, no hope. Just that. And it was perfectly simple, really. If I went on sitting here, sooner or later — and probably sooner, tomorrow or the next day, I could sense the moment was near — he would murder me. Any doubt of that had gone. I was quite sure that he had murdered the other women and he would do the same to me. I wasn’t going to outwit him. I wasn’t going to escape when he lifted me down. I wasn’t going to persuade him that he should set me free after all. The police weren’t going to burst into the room and rescue me. Terry wasn’t going to come. Nobody was. I wasn’t going to wake up one morning and discover it had all been a nightmare. I was going to die.
    I told myself this at last. If I waited, he would kill me, as sure as anything was sure. I felt no hope at all. My pitiful attempts to change that had been like hurling myself against a solid wall. But if I threw myself off this ledge, the noose would hang me. That’s what he had told me, and I could feel the wire round my neck if I leant forward. He must have known that I wouldn’t try. Nobody in their right mind would kill themselves in order not to die.
    Yet that is exactly what I was going to do. Throw myself off. Because it was the only thing left I could do. My last chance to be Abbie.
    And I didn’t have much time. I would have to do it before he came back, while I still could. While I had the will.
    I breathed in and held my breath. Why not now, before I lost courage? I breathed out again. Because it’s impossible to do it, that’s why. You think: Just one more second of life. One more minute. Not now. Any time that isn’t now.
    And if you jump, then you’re saying no more breath and no more thought; no more sleeping and knowing you’ll wake, no more fear, no more hope. So, of course, you hold off, like when you climb up to the high diving board and all the time you think you can do it until you reach the top step and walk along the springy platform and look down at the turquoise water and it all seems so horribly far away and you know you can’t, after all. Can’t. Because it is impossible.
    But then you do. Almost without knowing in advance, while in your mind you are turning round and heading back to safety, you step off and you’re falling. No more waiting. No more terror. No more. And maybe in any case it would be better to die. If I’m going to die, better to kill myself.
    And I do what I know I can’t. I do jump. I do fall.
    Terrible pain around my neck. Flashes of colour behind my eyes. A small interested corner of my brain looked on and said to itself: This is what it is like to die. The last gulps of air, the final pumps of blood before the fading into