It’s Joanie, peeping in the doorway, who comes to my rescue with a jaunty, ‘I’m exactly the same. Problems with the old internal thermometer.’
I haven’t got a clue what she’s going on about.
Her tone lowers meaningfully. ‘This menopause – menohell more like – is driving me up one tree and down another. One minute I’m as cold as Santa’s grotto, the next I’m boiling like a fish sunbathing in the sun. I’ll go and get you that key.’
‘You’ll have to forgive Joanie, her mouth sometimes runs away with her,’ my new boss tells me when she’s gone.
‘She’s lovely…’ I’m talking but my mind’s on that window.
Michael gives me one of those one hundred watt smiles again that he seems to be more than happy to keep dishing out. ‘Welcome on board, Rachel. It’s great to have you as a member of the family.’
I can’t believe how I’ve landed on my feet getting this job. How did I get so lucky?
Four
‘Bumped In The Night! London’s Top 10 Most Haunted Houses For You!!!’
#No. 8
‘A Stray Dog Tried To Save Them! But Too Late! Too Late!’
That’s what stares back at me from my computer screen inside my office. A website I hope is going to provide me with more details about the sweatshop fire here over a century ago. The memorial plaque outside has been gnawing away at me. Demanding I dig up the full story of what happened here. So, I’m taking a breather from summarising the restructuring report Michael has got me doing for a client.
Being a management consultant is surprisingly easy. I had an image of hard-sell phone calls, an in tray of mounting paperwork that had to be rubber stamped by the end of the day. Definitely not taking my sweet time rejigging a report. Is this really what Michael’s willing to pay me a mouth-watering salary, plus bonus, for? Hey, who am I to question good fortune come a-calling?
I turn my attention back to the eighth most haunted building in London. Surprisingly this website is the only online information I can find about the fire. I suppose the death of poor folk fades from society’s memory. The website is full of the usual gruesome tales of beheaded monarchs and grey ladies walking through walls. But at number eight on the list is an account of the fire in this building in 1908 and its aftermath. I read:
Locked into a sweatshop in a dungeon below an East End tenement block, earning a pittance a day for sewing clothes, some urchin girls rescued a stray mongrel dog from starvation on the streets! Unknown to the landlord, they kept him in the basement where they worked and hid him among the benches and sewing machines. Though hungry themselves, they kept their dog alive by feeding him scraps – so he became known as Scrap the dog! Scrap repaid the girls’ kindness by performing tricks and barking a warning whenever the foreman came to check up on them.
Next to the text is an ink drawing of thin girls slaving away at their benches. There’s another drawing of the owner of the sweatshop but it doesn’t look like a very faithful one to me. It’s a caricature of a classic Victorian villain with top hat, bulging belly, monocle and spats. The only thing this Lord Jasper Coldheart-type isn’t doing is twirling his moustache.
Scrap barked a warning! One cold and stormy night in 1908, the girls noticed that Scrap was running around the basement, barking and frantically tugging at their dresses. What could this mean? Did his sixth sense mean that danger lurked below? But the girls knew if they left their benches their pay would be docked and their families would starve! Blind as to what was to happen, they worked on!!
The author certainly loves his exclamation marks.
Consumed in a fiery inferno!
Smoke was smelt! The basement was on fire! The girls were trapped! Scrap’s frantic warnings had come to pass! As the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness, the girls screamed and howled for help!
Scrap to the rescue!
As they ran in circles and panicked, only Scrap kept his head! Barking at his girls to follow, he led them to hidden passageways in the building in an effort to get them out! But in vain! The passageways were blocked and the doors locked by the landlord. As the flames drew closer, their faces wreathed in choking smoke, prayers for divine intervention were feverishly howled by the doomed girls. The heroic dog that had led the way, keened in helpless anguish. All twenty-two perished. Only Scrap managed to escape!
It seems a bit mean to wonder how, if all these urchins died in the fire, the author of this website knows what happened in 1908. Perhaps Scrap told him.
For years after the fire, Scrap sat outside the tenement, keening and howling for his lost friends. Residents and neighbours claim that on stormy nights, he can still be heard keeping a lonely vigil in the darkness while echoes of the girls’ sewing machines, feverish prayers and cries still carry within the building itself.
Of course, there’s also a moral to this story.
And the landlord? Years later, in 1940, he was living in his luxurious mansion in Kensington when the German air force dropped an incendiary bomb on his house and he too was consumed by flames! No trace of his body was ever found! Justice at last for Scrap and his sweatshop girls!
It all sounds a bit like playing to the audience to me, especially considering the website’s frequent irritating reminders for visitors to ‘Like this page’. Still, it leaves me unsettled with a chill skating along my arms and spine. The window calls to me. I’m out of my chair and looking through it seconds later. Checking the drop to the ground beneath as usual. There would’ve been no windows for the sweatshop girls to escape from in the basement.
Suddenly my office is airless, suffocating, so I leave and head out to the kitchen, opposite Joanie’s office. She senses my presence. Lifts her head and smiles encouragingly over her reading glasses. I smile back and step into the room that would go down a treat on a TV cookery show. Cosy and compact, every item in its place, immaculately turned out. The shiny red of the kettle, fridge and microwave match. Shelves containing see-through airtight jars of all kinds of health conscious goodies – nuts, seeds, dried berries, brekkie cereals including organic oats. Different types of tea, free trade brands of coffee. I feel like a kid in a sweetie shop. I know, a big-time cliché, but this room leaves me in a state of a wide-eyed giddy pleasure. Maybe I can have breakfast here in the morning if I get in early enough. No more roughing it on the hunt for a crust back at the shared house. More importantly, I’ll be saving myself a wagonload of money.
The mugs hanging off red hooks gleam with the sheen of the brand new. I select a bright lemon-coloured one. Pop on the kettle, stick in a teabag. Milk’s always last of course. Plenty will disagree with me, but that’s how you make a decent cuppa. Anyone who says different should stick to coffee. I swing open the fridge. The cool air melts over my skin as I pull an opened carton of semi-skimmed milk from the door. It’s back in its chilled home once I’ve poured.
I lean against the counter, near the microwave, cup warming my palms, and inhale the rising steam. Pure bliss. Take a mouthful.
A terrible shudder of disgust ripples through me. My tummy spasms as I desperately try to close my throat. Tart. Nasty. Horrendous. A mixed taste of revulsion invading my mouth. My cheeks balloon as I gag. Eyes widen. Heart zooms into overdrive. Heavy air whooshes through my nostrils like a bucking wild horse.
I’m gonna be sick. Gonna be sick. Gonna…
The cup slips from my hand, crashing to the floor. I just make it to the sink in time before I’m throwing up. Can’t stop. Heat and chills pull the temperature of my body in different directions, intensifying my stunned state.
Nothing left to give, I dry heave, my tummy painfully cramping. Blindly, I turn on the tap and stick my open mouth under the running water. Spit. More water. Spit. Continue until the taste is only a remembered smell in my nose, my breathing back to my own.
Shocked, I raise my head, water dripping off my chin, my hands clutching on to the twin sides of the freezing sink. What the hell was that? The boiling water? Tea? It comes to m
e what the suspect must be. Still shaking, I open the fridge and pull out the milk. Sniff. Recoil in disgust. Sour, but not spoiled enough to leave yucky lumps in my drink.
‘Goodness me, Rachel, what the hell’s happened here?’
A horrified Joanie is in the doorway, her anxious eyes shooting between me and the beautiful shattered cup.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Joanie chokes for the umpteenth time, close to tears as we sit facing my new boss in his office. ‘I should’ve checked the sell-by date, I must’ve forgotten to ask Keats to buy me a new carton on the way in.’
Keats? Who’s that? I don’t ask; this is certainly not the time for me to be lobbing out questions. I feel like an absolute damp dimwit. What a fuss. And over what? Soured milk. All I had to do was spit it out, wash my mouth, leave Joanie a note on her desk and return to work. Simple. But what do I do? Perform a scene that belongs in a third-rate daytime soap. And on my first day on the new job no less.
I can’t let Michael think he’s taken under his wing an attention seeker. ‘No problem, Joanie. It was just one of those things.’
Her face is tense and drawn. ‘I only went downstairs to collect the post or I would’ve heard you in the kitchen.’
‘Stop worrying about it.’ Michael’s tone is gentle, rounded with an edge of insistence. ‘As Rachel says, it’s just one of those things. Would you do me a favour, Joanie – tidy up the kitchen.’
After she’s gone, I try to recover the situation. ‘I didn’t mean to kick up a commotion—’
He cuts over me. ‘Don’t sweat it. These things happen—’
‘Not on your first day in a new job.’
He leans back, a tiny smile licking at his lips. ‘You’ve got nothing on me. I pranged the boss’s Ferrari once on my first day in my first job.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘For the next three months I lived on lentil soup and bread so I had enough cash to pay him back to fix it.’
We chuckle together. Any other boss would be railing at me for being a proper nuisance, not Michael. He has a way about him that puts me at ease. I’m going to enjoy working here.
Suddenly his face changes as something over my head grabs his attention. I turn to find his PA standing awkwardly just beyond the door. In her hand is the carton of milk. Something passes between them, a sixth sense people who have worked together for a long time develop.
Not taking his eyes off the other woman, he says, ‘Excuse me,’ and leaves me alone.
Something’s wrong, I know it is. I hear their voices. Rapid, whispered, his deep, hers high. Can’t catch what they’re saying. I want to get up to find out, but it’s as if I’ve been stitched into the fabric of the seat, trapped, no way to break free and move. Then I catch a word coming from Michael.
‘Rachel.’
Why’s he mentioning my name? The chair tightens. Squeezes. My ears prick up, but all I hear is the rustling of their voices mingling together.
‘Rachel.’
It’s Joanie’s voice this time. What’s going on? My heart’s thumping against my chest, sweat breaking above my top lip.
Words continue running. Running. Then:
‘Rachel.’
Like a song going up and down, my name’s the only lyric that reaches my ears.
Rachel. Rachel. Rachel.
I’m a screaming mess by the time Michael comes back. He’s not on his own. The carton of milk is in his hand.
‘Michael, what’s wrong?’ bursts from me. I watch the milk he holds every step of the way as he retakes the chair behind his desk. He places it on the table. Doesn’t let go.
His lips spread into a smile that doesn’t change his watchful stare. ‘Nothing. Go back to work and I’ll touch base with you just before five.’
I’m about to get up. Go on run, Rachel, like you did that summer, the other me taunts inside. No, I won’t do it. I look at my new boss. ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help hearing you and Joanie saying my name. Have I done something wrong?’
His smile stretches to his eyes as his palms tighten on the carton of milk. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll touch base later on.’
I don’t have a choice. The chair releases me and I leave.
I hover inside the door of my new office, listening. I hear him. Michael’s firm footsteps in the corridor. I don’t know for sure but I think he’s gone into the kitchen. The slam of the fridge confirms my suspicions.
I give it half an hour before I cautiously head back to the kitchen. Thankfully Joanie’s door is shut. With steps quick and sure, I open the fridge. The milk’s back in its place. I take it out. Sniff. I reel back in shock. No sour smell. I pick off a cup from a hook. Pour. Hesitate with the cup’s rim hovering on the outskirts of my mouth. Close my eyes and drink. Swallow. The flavour is rich, wholesome unspoilt milk.
I’m mortified. No wonder he and Joanie were talking about me. Sending me back to work with no fuss was Michael’s way of trying to help me save face. Good grief, I hope they don’t think I am what Jed’s housemate called me – a nutjob.
For the rest of the day the memory of the taste of sour milk sits with the power of a deadly infection on my tongue.
Five
After work I arrive at the place that should be my real home. My house. It leaves me feeling so ashamed. My greatest gift, yet my biggest mistake. So lovely on the outside, so rotten within. It feels like a zillion years ago when I was twenty-three, deciding with youthful exuberance that it was time to stake out my own place in the world. Dad wasn’t happy, I suppose not wanting his only child to flutter away from the family nest, especially with Mum gone for the last five years.
Not only did he cave, he’d also agreed to join me on my property hunt. We’d argued good heartedly, back and forth, me wanting a flat, his professional knowhow firmly in the court of a house near a tube station. In the end it was Dad who’d sorted it all out when he’d told me that a friend of his was downgrading his property portfolio, which included a small house.
As soon as I’d seen it I knew it was The One. Nothing grand, a two-up two-down perfect for a couple starting out. Dad – wonderful Dad – had so generously put down the deposit and the cash for the first year’s mortgage. It should’ve been so easy after that. God, how had it all gone so hideously wrong?
I open the door and refuse to look down at the mini-mountain of letters I step over. Then stand so still in the hallway, arms criss-crossed tightly over my middle. It should be inviting, warm, but it isn’t. Cold is ingrained so deeply into the fabric of the walls, floor, the ceiling, that it leaves an icy skin over my already goose-pimpled flesh. The electricity, gas and water were cut off months ago. A frightening urge to bolt out of the front door suddenly overwhelms me. That’s your MO, isn’t it? My inner voice snipes. Always running. And running. Letting people down. Your dad down.
I shake off the sensation of escape and move towards the lounge. Hover on the threshold. Hell, this is so hard. So crippling hard. The acid flavour of bile laces the back of my throat. It remains lodged there as I force myself to confront the physical devastation that was once my favourite room.
Radiator ripped from the wall. Ornate ceiling border hacked off. Some floorboards forced up and out. Light fixture gone. Furniture gone. TV system gone. Every room in the house the same – gutted of what a young woman of twenty-three had found so very special. Even the taps in the kitchen and bathroom and pipes in the walls are gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
Defeated, I slump down to the naked floor. Pull my knees to my chest, arms wrap around my legs as if to protect me from further damage. I look at the place where the cast iron fireplace had lived. Now a misshapen, grotesque, gaping hole, the wall’s screaming protest that its life companion has been forcefully taken away. I feel like screaming too. Banging my head against a wall that also offers support. How could I have been so stupid?
Then again, debt makes people do the dumbest things. If only I hadn’t followed the dazzling seductive neon-lit ‘E
asy Way Out’ sign. Rent out my house to a couple of mates to pull in money to dig my way out of my financial hole while I sofa-surfed about town. Easy. What could go wrong? My so-called friends deciding to use my house as their own moneymaking scheme, that’s what. If I hadn’t turned up here unexpectedly one Thursday night I’d have never discovered they were sub-renting it out for triple the amount they were giving me.
That Thursday, the door – my bloody door – had been opened by a guy who should’ve been sporting a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Thug Number 1’ in huge print across it. The hard faces that had hovered in the background behind him had looked like they’d written the rulebook on how to throw a punch. That had been one scary, scary night. Jed had rounded up a few bouncers from the club he gigged at and got rid of the lot of them. But not before they took every last thing of value from my home and trashed the place.
I did move back in, but one after another the utilities had been disconnected. I tried, I really did, to bed down on the floor of my one-time dream house that had turned into a freezing shell of concrete. Most mornings I’d wake, teeth chattering, no water to wash in, no fuel to cook. For two weeks I kept going, refused to give up. Until the day I awoke with a hacking cough and a chest so heavy with cold I knew it was time to quit. I’d grabbed the few belongings I had, fled, and thrown myself on the mercy of Annabelle, a friend from the bar scene, and then Jed.
I know, I know, I hear Jed’s question – what about going to my dad? He’d have given me the money to reconnect myself to life, paid the mortgage arrears, put me straight. But Dad’s a smart man: if I tell him about this, somehow he’d dig deep and make me confess the rest. The past. Plus, I don’t want Dad losing his cool. Not a pretty sight.
I can’t do that. Just like I still can’t stay here. I’ve only come to get one thing. I ease up my aching body, go back into the hallway and stare down at the pile of post. I don’t want to do this but what alternative do I have. I open my bag and pull out the bulging thing that’s always with me. The self-inflicted sore that pusses with more poison every time I come here.
Trap Door: the creepiest psychological suspense you will read this year Page 3