Stranger in the Woods: A tense psychological thriller Read online

  Then I knew exactly what was wrong with me.

  A seizure was starting.

  I hadn’t had a seizure in years. And I hadn’t wet myself during a seizure since I was twelve.

  Before I could figure anything out, I plunged backwards.

  The water engulfed me headfirst.

  My body sank through layers of dark green ocean.

  Can’t breathe.

  Panic gripped me.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t swim, couldn’t save myself.

  I needed to swim up. But my limbs were rigid.

  I sank deeper.

  Can’t breathe.

  Darkness so thick.

  Lungs exploding.

  Can’t breathe.

  2

  ISLA

  I blinked rapidly in the searing light.

  Mr Barrington and a crew member looked down on me, both of them dripping wet. Mrs Barrington was kneeling beside me, her face bright with blue eyes and red lipstick.

  I’m alive.

  My mind was numbed from the seizure, but underneath that was a sense of shock and relief. I was here on the deck, in the sunshine. I’d just witnessed the whisper-fine line between life and death.

  Mrs Barrington grasped my shoulder. “Are you all right, Isla?” The warm, Southern accent of the client’s wife filtered through the haze. She wrapped a fluffy, striped towel around me and helped me sit.

  Gasping and coughing, I nodded.

  I was about to make up an excuse and then stopped myself. I didn’t have to make up excuses. I should just tell the truth.

  “It was a seizure,” I croaked. “I have epilepsy.”

  “Goodness gracious,” Mrs Barrington drawled softly. “A seizure? That explains all the jerking about. You gave us a good old fright. Don and Marco fished you straight out, but you looked pretty peaky before you fell in. I’ve called you an ambulance.”

  “Sorry about your camera,” Don said, observing me with crinkly blue eyes. “It was around your neck. We hauled it up out of the water with you, but I have a pretty good hunch it’s not going to be any good.”

  I sat up fully, shivering and coughing again. “It’s okay about the camera. I’m just so grateful you were able to find me in the water.”

  “We saw you fall in,” he said. “We jumped straight in after you, but you went down pretty deep. Well, you’re all safe and sound and that’s all that counts. No problem about the pictures.”

  I detected a note of frustration in his voice as he mentioned the photographs.

  “The photos are all saved,” I told him, hoping to redeem myself. “I sent them all to the cloud.”

  His steel-grey eyebrows shot up. “You did?”

  “Yes, I’ve got all of them.”

  A smile seemed to come out of nowhere and plant itself on his face—large and toothy. “Well, now, that’s good news.” He turned to his wife. “Isn’t that great, Maggie? Isla managed to save all the pictures from today.”

  “Oh,” she scoffed, making a shooing gesture at her husband. “We’re not worried about that. We’re just glad you’re okay.”

  The arrival of the ambulance at the docks created a stir among the crowds there.

  I was raced away to the nearest hospital, the lights flashing and siren loud in my ears.

  At the hospital, immediate checks on my lungs and temperature were conducted. The doctor—an older lady of Indian background with hair in a thick plait—asked how long my seizure had lasted for. I didn’t know the exact answer to that, but I told her it hadn’t been longer than three minutes. Don Barrington and his crew member must have fished me from the water within seconds, because they hadn’t needed to try and revive me.

  I knew that the length of seizures mattered. A long seizure was trouble.

  “Am I able to go home if my results look okay?” I asked her weakly.

  She shook her head, pursing her lips so hard she gave herself chipmunk cheeks. “No, I’m afraid not. We’ll be keeping you in overnight and keeping you monitored. Have you been taking your medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every day?”

  “Yes—I only skipped two days in the past three months.” I’d actually forgotten to take it on at least two days this month alone, but I wasn’t going to admit to that.

  “Hmmm, no life jacket? You were on a boat, right, with no life jacket?”

  “No one was wearing one.”

  She tut-tutted. “But it’s especially dangerous for you. And your attention was on taking photographs, correct?” She didn’t wait for a reply before continuing. “Even just falling into cold water unexpectedly could trigger a seizure. But in this case, your seizure had already begun before you hit the water, is that right? It was the seizure that made you fall?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me give you an illustration of what was happening to you under the water, okay? You had a tonic seizure and your chest wall was contracting. This contraction resulted in air being expelled from your lungs. When this happens, your body density can become higher than the density of the water—which can cause rapid submersion. Which means you go down deep. And later, when your chest wall muscles ease and relax again, water will enter through your mouth and nose. You’ll remain underwater and you won’t float to the surface. You’ll be hard to see in any body of water and perhaps impossible to find if you’re in the ocean. Do you understand?”

  I nodded again, this time almost squirming at the picture she’d painted. I knew exactly what happened during a tonic seizure and I knew about the risks when swimming for people with epilepsy, but I hadn’t known the specifics before. And today, I’d had a heavy camera with a long-range lens hanging around my neck and dragging me down.

  She patted my hand, giving me a kind smile. “But you were fortunate. You’re here to tell the tale. Now, who can we contact to let them know what has happened—someone who can keep watch over you for the next few days?”

  “Oh, that isn’t necessary. I’m fine.”

  Her expression became stern again. “I’m afraid I’ll be keeping you in hospital much longer if you don’t name someone. Do you live alone or with others?”

  “I live with my mother and younger brother, but…I don’t need anyone rushing down to the hospital right now. Especially my mother—she’ll freak when she hears what happened.”

  Her expression didn’t change, and I could tell that she wasn’t going to budge. I had no choice but to relent.

  My mother arrived at the hospital within thirty minutes. She had my nineteen-year-old brother in tow.

  “You could have drowned, Isla,” were my mother’s first words.

  A worried look entered Jake’s eyes but he hid it quickly, replacing it with a wide grin. “Trust you to fall from the boat.”

  Jake had the same crop of dark hair as Mum and me, and he wore it almost as long as mine.

  “People fall in the water all the time. No big deal.” I yawned and stretched to demonstrate that fact, trying not to think of the doctor’s description of someone in the middle of a seizure going underwater.

  “Have you been forgetting to take your medications?” Mum asked.

  “No,” I lied again.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Well, you must be pushing yourself too hard. You don’t have anything to prove. You’ve already done it all.”

  “I think it was a combo of tiredness and the heat,” I told her, then turned to my brother. “What did you get up to today, Jakey?” He hated it when I called him that.

  “A girl called me.”

  “Really? A bonafide, live girl?” I said playfully.

  He nodded nervously. “She’s twenty. She watched my band play and asked me for my number. I gave it to her.”

  I eyed him with interest. My handsome younger brother had strictly avoided girls before—due to his crippling social anxiety.

  “What’s the girl’s name?” I asked Jake.

  “Charlotte.”

  “When are you going on a date?”
<
br />   “Was I supposed to ask her out on one?”

  “Do you like her?”

  He shrugged awkwardly. “She’s all right. She has nice eyes and was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt.”

  “Then, yes. Always date the girl wearing a Star Wars T-shirt.”

  Mum and Jake stayed for another hour. Just before they left, Jake took my laptop computer out of his duffle bag and planted it in my lap. “Here. Thought you could use this as an excuse in case any weird patients try talking to you. It got left behind on the yacht, apparently. Your clients dropped it off at the hospital.”

  I grinned. I knew why Jake had made a comment about weird patients. Jake hated strangers talking to him unexpectedly—his social anxiety would often make him freeze up.

  The only other patient in the ward—a middle-aged woman hooked up to a drip—had been sleeping soundly the whole time.

  With my family gone, the room fell quiet and still.

  A tremor passed through my body and I rubbed my arms.

  I realised that my face was suddenly wet with tears. Shock and exhaustion crawled through my veins. I hadn’t admitted it to my mother, but she was right. I could have died. Another few seconds, and I might have sunk so deep that I couldn’t be found. The doctor couldn’t have stated it in more black and white terms. I was glad Mum hadn’t heard her.

  More than anything, the sense of a complete lack of control made me feel helpless and hopeless. I’d first been diagnosed with epilepsy at puberty. A doctor had once explained to me that all brains operate by generating electrical impulses—thoughts, emotions and physical movements. During a seizure, the brain got caught up in an electrical storm.

  Other people took it for granted that they’d have the control I lacked. The closest thing to losing control of their body that most young people had was a sneeze.

  I’d had a severe seizure years ago, one that left me unable to do anything for months. And I’d become afraid to venture out on my own too far in case something like that ever happened again. I hadn’t even left Australia, apart from the usual end-of-school odyssey that Australian eighteen-year-olds took to Bali.

  And then…today had happened. Today in which I could have died—not really having lived.

  The truth was that my life was pretty damned small. No one would guess that from my social media pages. Those were littered with glamour—photographs of exciting people and parties and art galleries and concerts. All of it was from my photography jobs. None of it was from my own personal life.

  I documented it all, like a Peeping Tom watching through a keyhole. I had a mental picture of myself as a giant Alice peering through a tiny door she could never enter.

  After each job, I’d return home to my quiet room and watch TV and sleep. I barely saw friends anymore.

  A depression settled in heavily on my shoulders—an aftereffect of the seizure. I just had to ride it out. I was grateful when a deeper wave of exhaustion pulled me towards sleep.

  3

  ISLA

  True to her word, the doctor let me out of the hospital the next day.

  My test results and scans were good. But tests and scans couldn’t see everything, and I needed to rest and watch for signs of anything abnormal. I sat at our kitchen table, composing an email to Mr Barrington, thanking him again for pulling me from the water, and letting him know I’d have his portfolio to him within the week.

  My mother had told her boss that she was taking the next three days off, to look after me. She was busying herself sanding some kitchen chairs out in the yard. She always had some project or other going. A week ago, she’d found the chairs on a roadside rubbish pile and she’d brought them all home like they were treasures. She planned to paint them in different colours. My mother had decorated our entire townhouse in 1950s decor and her own eclectic style. She loved old things with history behind them with a passion.

  She shooed me when I stepped outside and offered help, saying that I should get out of the heat and go watch TV or something.

  But I felt restless. I didn’t want to stay indoors.

  I continued onto the only private spot in our tiny patch of yard—a place where even the neighbours couldn’t see me. Behind the garden shed was a little corner surrounded by bamboo palms and outrageously coloured canna lilies. A swing hung from a low branch on our only tree—an oak. Orange and white floral vines crept up along the trunk of the tree and spilled down from the branches.

  The colours of the garden were bright and gaudy, just like the interior of the house. I was used to it. I liked it. Home wouldn’t seem like home without the colour palette I’d grown up with.

  The door of the shed had been open—Mum had been in there earlier to get sandpaper and tools to fix up the chairs.

  Sometimes I tipped-toed past the shed, not wanting to look inside and risk a flash of memory.

  The shed was where Jake and I had discovered our dad. Dead.

  We’d just been children. Me eleven and Jake four. That day, Jake and I had returned home a week early from a holiday at our aunt’s house at the ocean. She’d been meant to have us for two weeks. But she’d gone into hospital with a burst appendix and we’d been ferried back home.

  Dad had hanged himself.

  I’d plunged into a deep depression that day. I’d gone on like that for months. People describe that kind of depression as being dark and black. It wasn’t like that for me. My depression had felt bleached, like coral without colour. Everything a dull white. Nowhere to hide. My mind pried open by child psychologists. Kids at school treating me differently. And police investigating into my father’s death, as they did with all cases of suicide. Night had been the only thing that brought refuge, a place to hide away. I guessed that the psychologists had done their best—maybe they’d helped—but it hadn’t felt that way at the time. I’d been a private, quiet kind of a child and it’d been painful for me to be in the spotlight. I’d come home from school or from a psych appointment, and just find Jake and hug him, holding him silently for minutes. Jake—then not even old enough to go to school—hadn’t understood at all where his daddy had gone.

  Today the shed was flooded with sunshine and that seemed to sanitise the lingering memories. Mum had never given a moment’s thought to tearing the shed down—she’d said that Dad had loved tinkering away in there and making things for all of us, and that made it rich in love and memory.

  Shuffling through the thick floor of disintegrated oak tree leaves, I made my way to a bench seat. Mum never cared about the fallen leaves from autumn building up on the ground.

  The world instantly became a little oasis as I settled in under the arch of ivy. I’d long suspected that my mother had created this corner in order to find her sanity after long days of looking after Jake and me when we were younger.

  I couldn’t stop yawning. I was tired, irritable and feeling flat. Everything was still fringed with a shifting sense of unreality. It always took me days to recover from a seizure and I was still mentally processing this one. There was no getting away from it—l’d almost drowned.

  Folding my arms and legs up on the bench, I wriggled down to rest my head. It was hot but shady here, and I could easily let myself drift off to sleep.

  I woke with ants biting my bare feet. I’d been dreaming. It was the same dream I’d had multiple times.

  In the dream, I stood at the entry of a strange house.

  A long hallway stretched before me. Four rooms with three doors hanging open like hungry mouths were situated on either side of the hallway. One door locked. The air dark and a wind blowing dry leaves through the hallway. A picture of a religious cross with a rose in the middle. Legs dangling mid-air in one of the rooms. From the extreme end of the house came the sound of a piano being played, only without any tune. Just chaotic, crashing chords.

  And there was me, busybody giant Alice, peering in where I shouldn’t be looking.

  My psych said the dreams were unresolved issues from my father’s death. My neuro said it could
be just my overactive epileptic brain or the meds I’d been on, or maybe both. I’d been on so many drugs over the years: Keppra, Clobazam, Epilim, Trileptol, Zonegran, Tegritol.

  The colour seemed drained from the world as I opened my eyes. The dream always left me feeling wiped out.

  My mother carried two tall glasses of drink around the corner. “You had a good sleep out here. A whole hour.”

  I blinked, rubbing my face. “Seriously? An hour? No wonder the ants were having a field day on my toes. Probably thought I was dead.” Taking the drink, I sipped the cool liquid. It was freshly squeezed orange juice.

  She frowned. “You don’t look so good, Isla. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just that I woke up having that dream…you know the one.”

  “Oh, honey. I wish I could make that awful dream go away.”

  “Why does there have to be so much that’s wrong with me?”

  She sat on the swing opposite me. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Not a thing.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “It is true. Seizures. Nightmares. And I’m not doing anything with my life.”

  “You put yourself under so much pressure. You know, it’s okay to just be.”

  “Mum, that’s what I have been doing. I feel like I’ve just been treading water forever. I lost so much time when I got sick. I don’t even remember—”

  “Why do you keep going back to think about that? It was two years ago. Honey, you have to let it go. It’s not helping you.”

  “I know. But it just feels…it feels so bad. Like I’m not a whole person anymore or something.”

  She moved from the swing to the bench, putting an arm around me. “You’re perfect and I’ve known that from the time you were born.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Your dad and I had the nursery all decked out when I was pregnant, but you preferred our room. Your room faced the brick wall of the neighbour’s house. But our room faced the garden and was full of yellow sunlight and patterns from swaying palms. And you were right to prefer it, because you were made of sunlight, too. And so that’s where you slept for your first year. With us.”