People Who Eat Darkness Read Online Free PDF

with a malaise that caused her legs to ache so much that she could barely walk, and put paid to two years of schoolwork. For weeks at a time she had no energy at all; the effort of descending a flight of stairs left her spent with exhaustion, and a series of doctors could give no assurances about when, or even if, her good health would return.
    Jane Blackman had a strong belief in the hidden powers of the mind, and in her own gifts of prediction and intuition. She worked as a reflexologist—a masseuse and a therapist of the feet—and frequently, she said, she had found herself accurately foreseeing imminent events—the death of an elderly relative, the pregnancy of a patient before the woman was aware of it herself. “I just have feelings about things when I’m working,” she said. “A voice will come into my head to tell me something and afterwards I’m right. It goes back to my sense of justice: I feel people’s pain. People say I’m very empathetic, but I think if you’ve been through a lot yourself it gives you that ability.”
    It was during Lucie’s long illness, her mother believed, that her daughter’s own gift for supernatural perception first displayed itself.
    Separately, both her parents began to notice a faint but distinctive smell in the master bedroom where Lucie was being nursed—the smell of cigars. No one in the family smoked them; Tim even called on the neighbors to confirm that the smoke was not coming through their shared wall. A few days later, Jane mentioned the strange smell to Lucie. It was a time when she was extremely weak, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, but it was still a surprise when she replied, “It’s the man who sits on the end of my bed.”
    “What man?” asked Jane.
    “In the night, there’s this old man who comes and sits on the end of my bed sometimes, and he smokes cigars.”
    “Poof!” said Tim, telling the story later. “We all thought, ‘Lucie’s gone completely off her rocker.’”
    Much later, after her strength had returned, Lucie visited the home of Jane’s father and stepmother. She came across a photograph on a sideboard of an old man and asked who it was. Jane’s own grandmother, Lucie’s great-grandmother, was there that day, and the man was her husband, Hollis Etheridge, who had died years before.
    “That’s the man,” said Lucie, “the one who came and sat at the end of my bed.”
    Throughout his life, he had been a smoker of cigars.
    *   *   *
    The disappearance of Lucie Blackman, the long months of uncertainty, and the discovery of her terrible fate added to the ill feeling between her parents. But it existed long before her death. The shrill, contending versions of the truth were the sound track to the last five years of Lucie’s life.
    In Jane’s version, the breakdown of their marriage occurred at a precise moment in November 1995 in their latest home—a big six-bedroom Edwardian house in Sevenoaks, the place where Jane’s dreams of domesticity had finally been fulfilled. “It was the house where I was going to have my Aga,” she said, with a trace of self-mockery at the snugness of the image. “This was the place where it would all be. I would be round the kitchen, Aga cooking, and my children would be in there, and then grandchildren. It didn’t quite work out like that.”
    It was Sunday afternoon, and the five members of the family were sitting together in the front room. A fire was burning in the grate. Jane had prepared what the children called “colored toast,” striped with a tricolor of Marmite and apricot and strawberry jam. “We were watching The Wonder Years , which I used to love,” Jane remembered. “We all used to love it. Tim had Rupert on his lap, and I’ll never forget what he said. He said, ‘I love being family,’ as we all sat there together. I’ll never forget it. ‘I love being family.’ That’s what he said. And then the next day it was all over.”
    On Monday morning, Jane