He, like the others, has no idea where they are or how they’ve ended up here. No one seems too bothered tonight but he’s certain that will change come daylight. If daylight comes, of course. He thinks he should be concerned about their inexplicable situation but he just can’t find it in himself. It’s not that he doesn’t care because he does. More than anything he would love to return to his old life but he’s not naive enough to believe that’s going to happen. He is sure of one thing; his life can’t possibly get any stranger. And if he’s sure of that, there’s nothing for him to worry about. They’re quite possibly dead but he doubts it because he isn’t religious, he’s never believed in anything other than good living, and he’s never imagined there would be anything after death. He’s never felt the need to. So if he’s going to stick to those beliefs then this place has to be something else. Maybe a ‘thank you’, a reward for a job well done. Although if he isn’t going to believe in a higher power there’s nothing for the reward to come from. And if that’s true, it can’t possibly have been the devil he saw the morning he left Los Angeles. But he’s certain it was and it’s this sort of circular thinking that’s behind why he’s determined not to worry. Because if he’s going to worry he’ll need to rethink his whole life philosophy and quite frankly he’s too tired to do that. It’s been difficult enough being an atheist during what he has to admit has really looked and felt like the apocalypse.
Another lightning flash strobes white across the room. There was a storm last night too, their final night in the diner, but that was different. The thunderclaps were loud and hard enough to rattle the glass and the polka-dot blinds in the windows, bright violet bolts threw foreboding shadows across the parking lot and hail stones the size of golf balls cracked the windshield of the jeep the four of them used, following daily in the Mustang's slipstream. This storm feels more controlled, less like a natural event and more like a show. The others might have been right earlier. It could be a celebration because if that was the battle to end it all, they must have won and they were fighting on the side of Good. When he closes his eyes he can still see the explosion of light when Matt and Luke joined hands. There was nothing destructive or evil in that. It was beautiful. This whole thing has been one long mind-fuck.
Dropping his head back he looks up at the high vaulted ceiling, at the impressive chandelier hanging directly overhead. He taps the poker against his palm. He’s used to being in possession of something more than hearthside equipment, but their arsenal doesn’t appear to have arrived with them and ironware seems to be all they have to defend themselves if the need arises. So far the house has provided everything else they need, so for now he’s happy to go along with Joe's assumption that they won’t need anything sharper or more effective at killing things quickly. At least until he’s proven wrong.
The general aches and pains of the house finally die down and that throws into sharp relief other sounds, quieter sounds. Scratching. He lifts his head, listening, trying to pinpoint where it’s coming from. Somewhere off to his right, possibly in the walls. He sits up, tightening his grip on the poker. It could be mice or it could be rats. They've come across some evil bastard rats recently; huge ones with diamond-sharp teeth, blood-red eyes and seemingly insatiable appetites. In a trashed 7-Eleven in the small town of Racoon one bit him on the ankle, leaving a wound that bled through his sock and into his shoe. They had to get him a tetanus shot in the next town over. So he doesn't like rats, so sue him. He isn’t inclined to give any of them, even the most distant relatives of the rabid things in Racoon, the benefit of the doubt.
As he listens another noise starts to creep into his consciousness, different from the scratching. A slow creaking, as rhythmic and steady as a heartbeat. It’s familiar, something he remembers from way back. He can’t quite place it but he can tell where it’s coming from this time. It’s behind the locked door that Rick failed to open. A slightly sickening dread starts to uncurl in his gut, a feeling that they’re not as safe as they’ve been hoping they are. Slowly getting to his feet, poker in hand, he moves cautiously over to the door. Looking closely he thinks he can make out light spilling out from the crack so aware of squeaky floorboards he crosses to the switch and pushes it down with a soft click. The bulbs in the chandelier all go out and he’s plunged into darkness for a moment until his eyes adjust. Then he can see fingers of amber light extending out from under the door, reaching a little way into the hall before pulling back, as if feeling for something on the floor.
It’s the light from a fire and he knows where he’s heard that slow squeaking sound before; his old Ma and her rocking chair, an ancient wooden thing that she had out on the veranda. She would sit on warm evenings, rocking back and forth, back and forth while she watched the neighbours go about their business. It was her favourite hobby, possibly her only hobby, the only thing she had the time to do for herself. That’s what the noise is, and whoever is in there must only just have woken up because even with their talking and the oven and the pipes coming to life, the rocking on squeaking floorboards is loud enough to be heard. Of course, with their talking and the oven and the pipes, whoever it is should have been disturbed hours ago and surely should have come out to see who’s in the house. They’ve made enough noise since their arrival to wake the dead and he really, really hopes that isn’t the case.
Turning the light back on, Gabe stands in front of the door and takes a deep breath, brandishing the poker in one hand, turning the brass doorknob with the other. It was locked when Rick tried to get in earlier, but he’s acting on a hunch and it certainly isn't locked now. The knob moves in his fingers and his heart starts its all too familiar pounding, body shifting gears into fight-or-flight with well-oiled ease. The door opens inwards with the gentle scratch of rusted hinges and Gabe peers inside, eyes adjusting to the warm glow of the fire burning in the grate as he stares at what's in front of it. He’s right about the rocking chair; it is just like the one his Ma once had. There’s an old woman sitting in it, rocking gently, the clackety-clack of metal knitting needles restless in her hands.
‘Hello?’ He keeps his voice low because he really doesn’t want to scare her if she's just an old woman, and he absolutely doesn’t want to startle her if she isn't. ‘Ma’am?’ He lets go of the doorknob and puts both hands on the narrow trunk of the poker, one above the other, taking a couple of cautious steps inside. There's a ball of light-blue wool in her lap, a single strand winding its way up to two knitting needles off which hangs something square, perhaps the start of a scarf. He can’t quite make it out. He takes another two steps forward, ‘Ma’am?’
Her head turns.
He’s ready for anything, from the macabre to the plain freaky. He’s ready for a skeletal face or no face at all. But she’s just an old woman with silver hair and wrinkled skin, big blue eyes staring at him from behind thin-framed specs and a friendly smile with the right number of teeth, give or take.
‘Hello, dear,’ she greets him, her voice friendly and her expression welcoming.
Gabe stares. The last old lady they met had two obviously broken legs and she still chased them half a mile with the speed and determination of a marathon runner.
‘It’s all right, dear. I’m just knitting this toy for the orphans. Are you all right? You look a little peaky. Do you and your friends have everything you need?’
Slightly belatedly, Gabe lowers the poker. He keeps staring at her but she doesn’t change into anything else, doesn’t shift her shape to become something bizarre with bulging eyes, doesn’t try to stab him with a knitting needle. She just smiles her crinkled smile and starts knitting again, the sound of needle against needle one of those things that’s just familiar and comfortable enough even if he can’t recall ever knowing anyone who knitted. Perhaps an aunt, although he doesn't remember ever owning a bright red sweater with Rudolph on the front, even as a child.
‘Excuse me, ma’am, but… who are you?’
‘I’m Nancy, dear.’
Hones
tly not knowing what else to do short of yelling for the others, which seems extreme for what doesn't feel like a life threatening situation, he holds out his hand. She makes a show of placing her needles into her left hand and shaking his with her right. It’s a strong handshake but nothing out of the ordinary.
‘Is this your house?’
‘Mine, dear? No. I’m just a guest here, like you. Oh, but don’t mind me. I’m happy sitting here with my fire and my knitting. All I ask is that whenever you have the kettle on, you think about making me a cup of tea. Sencha Green if you have it.’
Gabe’s the first to admit that bizarre has been the order of the day for quite some time but he can’t stop staring at her. Close up he can see the little toy she’s making, small and square and blue with stumpy legs and little arms sticking straight out from its sides.
‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘Yes.’ He tries to find a few more words and finally settles on, ‘Have you just arrived?’
‘I'm not sure. I think so. But my memory is so bad these days.’ She doesn’t seem remotely disturbed by any of this. ‘Come to think of it, I might have been here a while because I usually have a cup of tea when I arrive somewhere, and I don’t seem to have had one recently. Or a sherry.’ She pauses in her knitting and looks up at him, intelligent, clear eyes sparkling in the light from the fire. ‘Oh, do you think you could find me a sherry, dear? I'm quite parched.’
Gabe looks around. There’s no sign of a drinks cabinet, but so far the kitchen seems to be well stocked. ‘Let me go and see what we have.’
He backs out of the room, still nervous about turning his back on her, and closes the door as he leaves. For a moment he stands outside it, contemplating the doorknob and considering that he might finally have gone insane. He should wake the others but she hasn't tried anything nasty and they deserve to sleep while they can so he keeps hold of the poker and goes into the kitchen, switching on the light and checking the cupboards before the pantry. Sure enough there’s an unopened bottle of La Gitana Manzanilla Sherry on a shelf just inside the door, and a set of four small glasses in the cupboard beside the window, next to the stemmed wine glasses, champagne flutes, shot glasses, tumblers and beer tankards. Someone or something has planned for all eventualities. He pours a healthy measure and takes it back through, hesitating for a second before opening the door again, half-convinced she won’t be there. But she is, rocking and knitting and humming a tune so softly to herself he can barely hear it. It isn’t one he recognises.
‘Here you go.’ He holds out the glass and she lets her knitting fall carefully into her lap as she takes it with both hands.
‘Oh thank you, dear, you’re a gem. Now you go off and get some sleep! It’s late and you look exhausted.’
‘I’m keeping watch,’ he explains, feeling foolish. She doesn’t look like she could knock down a cobweb with a feather duster, as his Ma used to say. She reminds him of her a bit. And when she frowns she strengthens his feeling of trust.
‘What for? Nothing’s going to hurt you here, dear. You’re all perfectly safe now, I assure you. We won, you know. So you just get yourself up to bed and when you wake up all this storm nonsense will be over and it’ll be a bright and beautiful day.’
There’s no reason to believe her, then again there’s no reason not to except for well-tuned paranoia telling him she could easily be something put in the house to set them up, take them off guard to make way for an attack. But that in itself is ludicrous. Anything could have attacked them at any time, they don’t have any defences. They don’t have Matt and Luke's frankly astounding collection of weapons, or their hand-to-hand fighting skills. If there’s an armoury hidden in the house they haven’t found it and a small collection of hearthside equipment – two iron pokers and a pair of sturdy tongs – will only get them so far. Besides, it would probably be better to die in his sleep, unknowing and blissfully ignorant of whatever horror befalls him, although he’s not sure that the others would feel the same way.
‘Will you be all right alone?’
She pulls a face just like his Ma used to pull. ‘I’m an old woman, dear, not a toddler. I can look after myself if the need should arise but I assure you that it won’t. Now off to bed with you. In the morning you can make me a nice cup of tea. No milk, no sugar. Thank you.’
Gabe nods. ‘Okay. Good night.’ He pulls the door closed behind him and stands in front of it, not knowing what to do next. It’s one thing for all of them to arrive in this place together. It’s another for an old woman to just appear out of nowhere, to know them, to know what’s happened. Yes, she's made him feel better for some inexplicable reason, but after months of being rudely awoken by things trying to eat him for breakfast, he’s uncertain about leaving them without a first line of defence even if it is just him and a fire poker. Still, he switches the lights off before returning to the couch, hugging the poker to him as he lies down and stretches out, feet over the arm, head on a cushion. He closes his eyes and within minutes he's fallen asleep to the comforting sound of the rocking chair and the crackle and pop of the fire in the grate.
~..~
Emilie wakes slowly, warmth on her face and heat in her body, feeling rested after her first real good night’s sleep in ages. Stretching her limbs out under the sheets she opens her eyes and in the daylight surveys the room she’s stayed in all night. It’s beautiful. The decor is in keeping with the rest of the house, done out in purples, from the violet throw to the amethyst and byzantium in the wallpaper. The large rug covering the bare floorboards is eggplant. The curtains, hanging in the small windows that are at right angles to one another in the corner of the room, are lavender. (Yes, she was a bridesmaid when her best friend from school got married, and their dresses, the bride’s dress and the flowers were all in purple hues.) There’s a heavy wooden door in the opposite corner of the room, maybe an en-suite, probably just a closet. The bed is the best thing she’s known in so long that it’s going to be a while before she’s getting up to find out. She spreads out, reaching for all four corners with her hands and feet.
After snoozing for what might have been a minute or might have been an hour she eventually admits to herself that she really needs to discover if there’s a bathroom behind that door. She wonders if anyone else is awake. She left the bedroom door ajar last night, so that the slightest noise outside the room would wake her, and it’s still open. There’s no one around on the landing but she can definitely hear movement downstairs so she eventually and regretfully drags herself out of bed and tries the other door, which turns out to be a closet with clothes hanging in it. She crosses the landing to the bathroom.
She showered before she went to bed. It was truly heavenly. And feeling indulgent she takes another just to feel piping hot water raining down hard on her from the huge showerhead. She returns to her room half an hour later the colour of a lobster and wrapped in one of the big, fluffy white towels she found in the cupboard in the bathroom.
Opening the closet again she brushes her fingertips over the line of hanging blouses and sweaters, opens the drawers and lifts out the folded jeans and T-shirts. It all looks slightly too big for her but she finds a pair of jeans which don’t fall off every time she stands up and a mohair jumper with a V-neck high enough to cover her breasts. The clean underwear she finds in the chest opposite the bed is a relief. It’s not something she would ever have considered a luxury before leaving Malibu but it’s been the one thing she’s really missed.
There’s makeup on a small dresser next to the bed but she doesn't bother with that. She hasn't done since leaving home, except for the day after meeting Luke when she found a woman's makeup bag in a motel room and made an attempt at covering up the worst of the junk food spots to make a half-decent impression. Not that it made the slightest difference. She could have been Paris Hilton; he wouldn't have looked at her twice. She hopes he and Matt are okay.
Dressed and towel-drying her hair she crosses to the windows and opens the curt
ains. She’s in the left-hand corner of the house, looking out over the front yard where they materialised last night. It’s a bright morning, if it is still morning and she hasn’t slept all day, but it’s too hazy for her to pinpoint the sun. It looks as if the sky is wall-to-wall high level cloud so she can't work out north from south, east or west. The grounds appear to run out to a ragged hedgerow some twenty or thirty feet away from the house. Beyond that, through the bare branches of dead trees, she can see a road, if ‘road’ isn’t too grand a description for the strip of broken asphalt that runs straight in both directions as far as she can see. Across the road the light is reflecting off what might be sand, stone or even water. It’s impossible to tell without going out there because the horizon itself is blindingly bright and it’s an unsettling thought that there might not be anything out there at all. To the side of the house, there’s a path running the length of the place, another hedgerow then scrub following the road all the way out to the horizon. There aren’t any other houses. There’s nothing else.
She has no idea how they got here or where ‘here’ even is, but nothing’s tried to kill her yet and that’s a definite, one hundred percent improvement on the last few weeks.
She hears someone out on the landing but by the time she opens the door there’s no one there. She does however become aware of sounds and smells from downstairs, a kettle being brewed and frying bacon if she isn’t mistaken. She can only hope there are pancakes too. During the week at the diner Matt made pancakes with maple syrup every morning for breakfast. She loves maple syrup. She wishes she wasn’t as jealous of Matt as she is.
She pulls the sheets straight on the bed and folds her towel, hanging it up in the bathroom before she heads downstairs. Someone’s showering in one of the two en-suite rooms on the other side of the landing. The domesticity of the sound as well as the smell of breakfast is starting to make her feel at home.
The House at the End of the World Page 6