Read I Do Not Sleep for Free Online

although it looked as if it could snap and shatter any moment, it began to move. It knew me. It had eyes: small, glittering, intense. Malevolent. They were fixed on my face.
     
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread…

This was not what I had been searching for. It was not Joey. Joey was not a fiend, a demon. Whatever scrambled thoughts had curdled my brain, I knew this was not my son. But it was evil. And I had seen it before. Where? When? My mind couldn’t grasp what was happening. And as my sense of horror deepened, I knew that whatever had happened to my son was dreadful beyond belief. I was being warned. My search for Joey would be dark and terrible, and my lovely summer holiday would be shrouded in fear.

I turned and ran back to the car, fumbling with the keys, my heart racing, desperate to feel Adam’s arms around me.

Chapter Ten

    As soon as I got off the moor the grey fog lifted and I drove back to Coombe in blazing sunshine. I shook my head as the hedgerows flashed by, dotted with banks of wildflowers, and breathed in the Cornish air through the open windows. With each breath I felt calmer. The mist and the scarecrow receded in my mind, and the impossible beauty of the landscape tranquilised my thoughts. By the time I got back to the old farmhouse, my heart had stopped thudding, and I was beginning to convince myself I had had some kind of hallucination brought on by my strange moonlight vision in the garden last night.

I walked in the door, and was confronted by a pathetic little domestic scene.

Edie had a bad cough, and her small head blazed with heat, her cheeks burning red, a feverish glaze in her eyes. Our chatty little girl was silent, gazing reproachfully at us, the grown-ups who were supposed to protect her from harm. Lola was reasonably calm, but Danny seemed distressed.

‘We’re taking her to the doctor’s, Mum. There’s a surgery in Looe.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Many’s the time I’ve been there with you or Joey. Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a summer bug.’

I waved them off from the porch, smiling to myself. New parents. Poor things, consumed with fear because their first-born had a cold. The smile disappeared when I thought of Joey. All those trips we took to see GPs when he was little. All those cough medicines and Calpol, our anxiety when he spat the medicine out. And of course he always got better. Until the day when all the doctors and all the Calpol in the world couldn’t help him. The day he disappeared off the wild Cornish shore.

Adam came home, having got a taxi to bring him back from Talland Bay. I told him about Edie’s trip to the doctor’s and he chuckled.

‘Brings it all back again, eh, Moll? Rushing off to see the doc with a poorly baby? She’ll be fine.’

I smiled back at him.

He looked at me closely. ‘Are you OK, love? You look pale. Did spooky old Jamaica Inn give you a fright?’

He laughed but stopped immediately as he saw the tension in my face. Putting his arms around me, he pulled me close. ‘Molly, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I’ve just got a headache from the drive, and I feel a bit sick. It was very misty up on Bodmin, and before I left it was turning into fog. I couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in front of me,’ I lied.

‘Poor sweetie. You’ve always hated driving in fog. Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down. I’ll bring you some tea and a couple of panadol.’

I closed my eyes. Adam was so sweet. I let him rock me in his arms for a couple of minutes, then pulled away. ‘Thanks, Adam. I think I will.’

I went upstairs for a siesta. But kind and loving as he was, when Adam brought me the tea I found couldn’t talk to him about what I’d seen at Jamaica Inn. He would have thought I’d gone mad, and rightly so, I thought. That stupid old scarecrow was the result of a protracted infirmity of my brain, caused by a delusional nightmare the previous evening. There was no way