The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  “Sarah? What’s going on?”

  It’s Patrick’s voice, muffled by the door but definitely his. Not a mysterious watcher, not a ghost. “Patrick?” I say.

  “Are you okay?” he responds.

  I’m flooded with such relief I can’t speak. I release the chain and open the door, stepping back to let them in, my heart still galloping. Patrick comes toward me.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Joe and Mia are still standing in the doorway, and I realize how it’ll look if I show my panic. They’ve been out to pick up fish and chips and come back to find their mother freaking out over nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought I heard someone outside and I overreacted, but I’m okay now. I promise.” I’m trying to sound calm, but I can hear my voice shaking. I manage a smile. “Ignore me—go and get changed. You’re all soaking wet… I had no idea it was raining so hard. I’ll set the table.”

  Patrick follows me into the kitchen after the children have gone upstairs, stopping when he sees the pool of water on the floor, the kettle lying on its side, the soaked towel in the midst of it. “What is it? You looked scared when we came in.”

  I grab a roll of paper towels to finish wiping up the water. “I thought… There was someone outside—watching the house.”

  He touches my arm. “Did he try to get in?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so. He was across the road, but watching.”

  “Across the road? So he might not have been interested in the house at all?”

  “I heard something outside, right outside. I heard a knock.” My voice is rising and I can hear the edge of hysteria in it. Patrick’s hand tightens on my arm and I wince.

  “Sarah, calm down,” he says. “Look at me and listen.”

  My breath is coming in gasps.

  “It’s fine. Fine. Calm down,” he says. “I’ll go and look.”

  I watch him through the window as he crosses the road and is swallowed by the darkness. I start counting. If he’s not back in a few minutes, I’ll go out there. As the seconds pass, my imagination supplies me with a dozen images of what’s happening in the patch of darkness that swallowed him. He’s fighting with the watcher; the watcher has thrown him into the sea; he’s killed the watcher; the watcher has killed him, is dragging his body down the beach.

  Why is he still not back?

  One more minute. I’ll give him one more minute, then I’ll… I hold my breath as someone crosses the road toward me, releasing it as I recognize Patrick. I rush to open the front door, stepping out onto the path to meet him.

  “What happened? Did you see him? Did you…”

  His hair is soaked, clinging to his head, rain dripping onto his face. “There’s no one there.”

  Then why was he gone so long? Twenty seconds to cross the road, twenty seconds back.

  “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?” he says.

  I shake my head.

  He stares at me. “Have you taken your pills today?”

  I nod. “Of course.” There’s a note of irritation in my voice I can’t hide. It’s become a ritual—Patrick putting the box of pills next to my morning coffee, the whole family on parade to watch me take them.

  “Okay. I… Come on, I’ll make you some tea.”

  My foot kicks something as I turn back to the house and I look down to see a shell on the doorstep, one of the big ones you hold up to your ear to listen to the sea. It’s not the sort of shell you’d find on the local beaches, too shiny and big and exotic. I pick it up and hold it to my ear, but the real sound of the sea drowns out any magic from the shell. I had one of these once: my dad brought it back from some adventure before he stopped coming home. That’s what he told me when I was a kid—that it was magic inside the shell: a miniature ocean hidden inside just for me to hear. All lies—Dad was a salesman, not an explorer. He probably bought the shell in some tacky seaside town like this one. I look toward the sea again, half expecting to see the ghost of a man I once called Dad, who got lost for good on one adventure too many.

  Patrick ropes in Joe and Mia to help him clean up after we’ve eaten and I go back to the living room to tackle another box, distracted every time a car passes and the flash of headlights hits the curtainless window.

  “What’s up, Mum?”

  I glance away from the window to Mia. She’s chewing her hair and frowning. She’s been so angry with me since the hospital, angry and anxious as she trails around after me. “It’s nothing—me being silly, getting spooked in a new house, that’s all.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  She’s looking at the shell and I hand it to her. She puts it to her ear right away.

  “Can you hear it?” I ask.

  Mia leans against me, nearly as tall as me, nearly grown-up but sometimes still my little girl. I stroke her hair and kiss the top of her head. It’s been a long time since she came to me for a hug.

  “I can’t hear anything but the sea. I’ll never be able to sleep,” she says, her voice muffled as she buries her head in my shoulder.

  “Come on,” I say. “Listening to the sea has got to be better than listening to the neighbors’ kids arguing through the walls. I know it’s weird. But it’s our first day. We’ll soon have it looking like home.”

  “But it’s not our home, Mum. I miss my friends. I even miss my old school. Why do we have to do this?”

  “The school here has a great reputation—much better than your old one in Cardiff.”

  She laughs, but it’s more like a sob. “Seriously, Mum? You move me and Joe to the middle of nowhere halfway through the year and you’re trying to make out it’s because it’ll be good for our education?”

  But they were both failing at the school Mia claimed she would miss: Joe hardly turning up for classes at all and Mia struggling with half her subjects. I don’t need to say this to Mia. However I put it, it’ll sound like the move is a punishment rather than something that could help them.

  “Please give it a chance. We just need to make the house our own… and you know how important this is to your dad.”

  She stiffens and straightens, little girl gone, flinging my shell onto the sofa. It bounces onto the floor, clattering across to come to a halt at my feet.

  “So we have to lie? Say we’re all thrilled to be here? Heaven bloody forbid we should actually tell him what we really think.” At the door she turns back to me. “I begged him not to do this to us and I thought he was listening, but because you took those pills, I had no chance, did I? He’s done this, ruined all our lives, for you.”

  She slams her door upstairs and I hear Joe knock and go into her room. He’ll be better than me at soothing her. After a few minutes, I hear Mia laugh.

  I follow the welcome sound and peek into her room. As the elder, Joe should have had this one, as it’s bigger, but as soon as she saw the size of the third, she pleaded until Joe gave in. Mia is sprawled on her bed, which sits like an island in a sea of boxes, laughing at something on Joe’s phone, almost doubled up with it, red-faced. Joe’s leaning over, trying to snatch it from her, and she jumps up, on the bed, bouncing and holding it out of his reach.

  They freeze as I come into the room and I wish I’d stepped back instead, stored the moment in secret for later. Now I’ve broken it. I try anyway, putting on a smile, a light tone in my voice. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Mia says, chucking the phone to Joe and sinking down onto the bed. “Just something stupid on Facebook.”

  “Cat video,” Joe says, which for some reason makes Mia laugh again, so hard she buries her face in the quilt.

  “Sorry, Mum,” Joe says with a sigh. “She’s being a total idiot. What did you want?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just checking if you needed anything else to eat.”

  Joe shakes his head and Mia ignores me. I hover for a few more seconds, but Patrick’s calling. I hear Mia’s door click shut as I walk away.

 
; I go down to the living room, shoulders drooping. I’m overwhelmed by how much there is to do. The walls are damp-spotted. The parquet floor, in the corner where I pulled up part of the old carpet, is in a worse state than I’d thought. Most of it will have to be replaced. At least the mountain of boxes covers the worst of the damage. I’m back at the living room window staring out when Patrick steps up behind me. I jump at his reflection, thinking the watcher has lurched into view, looming and dark, but it’s just Patrick, wiping his hands on a towel he drops onto the coffee table.

  “The dishes are done.”

  I smile at him. “Thank you—you’re a star. We’ll have to make a dishwasher top of the list of things to buy.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “It’s getting to be a long list.”

  I bite my lip and look up at him. “Patrick? Who do you think it was, watching the house?”

  “No one. Just another nosy idiot from the town.” He leans down to kiss me. His lips are cold and his sweater scratchy when he puts his arms around me. I open my eyes when his icy hand slides under my top, and his are open too, but he’s not looking at me: he’s looking out the window.

  I try to stay relaxed, but his hands are still stroking, lifting my top higher, and all I can think of are the children upstairs and the watcher outside. I put my hands over Patrick’s as they slide toward my breasts. “Not here, not in front of the window.”

  “Too much of an adventure for you?”

  His teasing stings and I turn my face away from him.

  He’s still clutching the edges of my top and I think he’ll keep going, strip me bare. Then he stops, lets his face hide in my hair again, wrapping his arms around me, holding me too tight. “You have to give the house a chance, Sarah, not get hysterical over every imagined thing. We’re going to be so happy here,” he says. “You wait and see.”

  “I didn’t imagine it.”

  “Does it matter if someone stopped to gawk at the house? You overreacting so much is upsetting the children. They worry about you. They want you to be happy here as much as I do.”

  The wind rattles the windows and somewhere a door bangs. I shiver as a cold breeze arrives from nowhere.

  Patrick sighs. “It’s not a haunted house, not a monster house, or a murder house, or whatever they damn well call it. It’s just a family home, our family home. You can’t blame the house… It was Ian who lost it, who went mad, not the house.”

  “Ian? You mean the murderer?”

  He blinks and looks away. “Ian Hooper, yes.”

  “Why did you say his name like you know him?”

  He hesitates. “Didn’t I tell you? I did used to know him. He was a few years older, but I knew him.”

  I frown. “When you lived here? When you were still at school?”

  He doesn’t answer immediately. “Yes. That’s right,” he says, after that too-long pause. “I knew him when I was still at school.”

  I look at the shell in my hands. Will you know what it means? Will you remember? I wish I could get into the house. I wish I could find those hidden, secret places again. I’d put the shell there, fill it with my words, and leave it hidden, waiting to be discovered. Leaving it on your doorstep is cruder, a shout rather than a whisper, but then she finds it, not you, and it makes me laugh as I hide in the shadows.

  CHAPTER 6

  In May 2002 a man named Ian Hooper came to this house and stabbed John Evans three times in the front hall. Before that, he went upstairs to the room that’s now Mia’s and stabbed Marie Evans twelve times. Billy Evans, who was nine, came out onto the landing and tried to stop Ian Hooper from killing his mother, but he was stabbed once and pushed down the stairs. He later died in the hospital.

  The younger boy, Tom, lived.

  Hooper was charged with all three murders but only convicted of John Evans’s: there wasn’t enough evidence to get a majority verdict on the others.

  Why did he do it? None of the first stories I find seem to answer that. But I’m looking for a connection to the Evans family, something to explain why. It can’t have been senseless and random, can it? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to relax in this house if I’m thinking that it could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to us.

  No. There has to be a connection. A motive. If Patrick knew Hooper when he was still at school, maybe John Evans did too.

  I click through to another story, skipping the more gruesome details. I’m looking for more about Ian Hooper, whom Patrick apparently knew, but I can’t find anything that makes sense. Hooper would have been so much older—too old to be Patrick’s friend, too young to be his parents’ friend. But it’s a small town. Patrick might have known him to say hello to in the street.

  I zoom in on a photo of the Evans family until it goes all pixelated. The knowledge that a grown-up Tom Evans sold us the house makes me feel as if I know him somehow. When we were signing papers, his name on the contracts brought a lump to my throat. That poor little boy. I know he’s older than Joe now, twenty-one or twenty-two, but it’s the little boy in the newspaper photos I pictured signing away the house, a seven-year-old I imagined banking my mother’s money.

  I close my eyes. Maybe I didn’t get the adventures I wanted from the money my mother left, but I like to think Tom Evans will. That he took the money from the sale of the house and is now traveling the world, freed from the ghosts of his past.

  It’s different for us. The house will be different for us. Patrick has only happy memories, and for me, Joe, and Mia, it’s a house with no memories at all. We can make it better. We can make it new again. My phone buzzes—I glance down and see another text from Caroline. She’s given up calling. I’ll call her back, but not until we’re settled, not until she can hear in my voice a conviction that the move was the right thing to do.

  I step away from the computer and open another box, unwrapping a vase to put on the mantelpiece. There’s a knock on the door and I freeze, remembering the knock I thought I heard last night. I step back from the window, then jump as someone appears in front of me, her hands cupped, peering through the glass.

  It’s a woman in her sixties with a bunch of daffodils tucked under her arm. She steps back and waves when she sees me. I can’t think what else to do, so I open the front door to greet her.

  “Hello—hope I didn’t scare you just now. I wasn’t sure you’d heard me knocking.”

  I glance back toward the living room. “No. Sorry. I was listening to music.”

  “I’m Lyn Barrett from number twenty-eight. I was going to pop in yesterday, but my husband said I should give you longer to settle in.”

  It’s not even noon. We’ve been here less than twenty-four hours. “Yes, I’m very busy, as I’m sure you can imagine. A million boxes still to unpack.”

  She gives a big bright smile. “Well, I’m sure you’re ready for a break.” She steps forward. I have to move aside to let her in or she’d be close enough to kiss.

  “Oh, yes,” she says as I lead her reluctantly through to the living room, the only room vaguely presentable for visitors. “You have got a lot to do.” I see her gaze drift to the computer screen and go over to close the browser window before she can see what I’ve been looking at.

  I offer her a seat, but she follows me into the kitchen when I go to fill the kettle, my face warming as she trips on a box.

  “I’ve brought you these. They should brighten the room nicely.” She’s looking around as she says it, at the falling-apart units, the open pill box with the bold red lettering shouting what it contains, the scrunched-up packing paper littering every surface.

  I put the daffodils in a mug on the windowsill.

  “So, I’m guessing your husband—Patrick, isn’t it? Patrick Walker. He’s gone to work?”

  I nod, thinking if I stick to saying as little as possible, she might leave quicker. I don’t like the way she’s nosing around—I can tell she’s dying to open drawers and cupboards. I half expect her to ask for a tour of the house. She steps
closer to the pills on the table, her head tilting to read the box. I want to snatch them out of view, but that would only make her more curious.

  “And your children, I saw them heading into town earlier. I guess they’ll be going to the local school?”

  “That’s right. They start next week. Look—it’s so nice of you to stop by, but it’s a really bad time and—”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t keep you. Just wanted to pop in to say welcome to the street.”

  I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s what I’m being. I should welcome a friendly face. I don’t want her to go away gossiping about the uppity woman who’s moved into the Murder House. “Perhaps next week you could come over for a proper chat,” I suggest. “When I have things more organized.”

  She takes a sip of tea and pushes it away. I’ve made it too weak and milky. My own tastes of milky water. It’s lukewarm—I must have forgotten to switch on the kettle.

  “I really am sorry.”

  She reaches over to pat my hand. “It’s fine. I’ll be off now. Can I use your loo before I go?”

  I direct her upstairs, because the downstairs loo is full of boxes, and pour away the disgusting tea. I’m moving the daffodils to the table, gathering up the packing paper to clear it away, when I hear a floorboard creak above my head. I frown. It’s Joe’s room above the kitchen, not the bathroom.

  I go upstairs and find the bathroom empty, no sign she’s even been in there. I turn as she walks out of Mia’s room, her face reddening. She has her phone in her hand.

  “Were you taking photos?” I say, my voice rising in disbelief, my stomach turning.

  “Ah, no—my phone rang and the signal wasn’t very good in the bathroom, so…”