Is Philip holding out on me? But I don’t feel I can press him because what kind of person would I be to badger and bash someone facing a death sentence?
Suddenly I remember, ‘If your mum and Michael are going back tomorrow, I’m worried about Ray. When I left, there was no-one around. Say no-one comes for him?’
Philip’s expression becomes grim. ‘You’re not going there. I mean it. You’re in danger. For my sake, please say you’re not going. Please!’ The marks of his martyrdom are all over his body from that day ten years ago when he stepped in to save me from Danny.
He’s probably right. And his mother no doubt has Ray. Still, I need to check for myself.
I gently take Philip’s hand from my shoulder and get up off the bed. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Philip’s torment is etched on his already-tormented face. ‘Rachel? Rachel? Are you listening to me? You’re not going to that tenement. I forbid it!’
He wheels his chair backwards to block the door. I grab its handles and pull him out of the way. Climbing unsteadily out of his chair and taking a few steps, Philip lunges for me with his gloved hands but they can’t grip and he tumbles down onto the floor. I should help but I’m afraid if I stay, he’ll talk me out of going to the old sweatshop.
‘Rachel! Rachel! Listen to me!’
Striding down the corridor outside, stealing a backwards glance, I can see Philip as he crawls out of his room. ‘Rachel! Rachel!’
Nurses and other patients appear, drawn to the scene by the shouting. Medical staff rush past me to see what’s happening. I keep walking, through the unit’s reception, not looking back to where Philip’s yells echo up and down the corridor as if they come from beyond the grave.
Forty-Six
As I sit in the back of the cab, I think of me. Of the last ten years, of my slow descent into debt, my rope and buckets of water and cold-cold filled baths. My fear of fire and underground spaces because of what happened in that wine cellar and garage. Of my guilt and my mental anguish.
Then I see Philip’s scarred and pinched face and what he told me. My dad is his dad. Half-brother and half-sister. Philip and Rachel. Was it that unknowing connection of blood that instantly drew me to him? Did we see mirrors of ourselves reflected in each other? A reflection that has another face in it – Frank Jordan. I have this horrible weird feeling digging from my head right down to the soles of my feet that’s telling me that there’s more to the story of my dad covering up the fact he’s had a second family. A hidden lie that’s a truth that will shatter me apart.
Before I can try to unstitch it, my phone buzzes. I hesitate before I take it out because if it’s Dad, I’m going to have to spew my own lies; I want to confront him with his duplicity when his face is in front of mine. But it’s not Dad, it’s Jed on Skype. I inwardly groan. I love my dear friend to bits, but I’m not in the mood to talk to him now. Nevertheless I connect to the video call.
Jed pops up on screen, the camera distorting his face, turning his hair into a gravity-defying mane.
Jed: ‘Hey sweets, how you doing? You look like you’ve had the roughest day of your life.’
Me: ‘Something like that.’
His face becomes stark and alert as he shifts his face nearer to his camera.
Jed: ‘It’s something to do with that place you’re working in, isn’t it?’
I scowl, pulling the skin on my face taut. What would he know about the conditions in which I’ve been working?
Me: ‘Why would you think that?’
Jed: ‘After you asked me about this Michael character, I got to thinking I don’t like my Rachel working for this bloke. I mean, if he’s lied to you about knowing me I got to thinking what else is he lying to you about?’
Jed is more perceptive than I give him credit for. I get to thinking maybe I should have asked for his help much sooner. Brought him along for the ride too like Keats. Yeah, and look what happened to her. If anything had happened to Jed I’d never have forgiven myself.
Me: ‘That’s kind of you—’
He butts in, voice overly urgent.
Jed: ‘Do you remember telling me about the sweatshop fire that happened there back in the day?’
I don’t actually. I blink rapidly, trying to find the memory.
Me: ‘What of it?’
Suddenly Sonia appears beside him, her head intimately cushioned next to his. So they’re still an item. I’m surprised; I didn’t give their hook-up more than a couple of days. Strangely it’s not her wearing the soppy ‘I’m in love’ dreamy expression, it’s Jed.
Jed: ‘Me and computers aren’t really friends so I got Sonia to look into it for me.’
Sonia gives me her full attention. I can tell by the pursed fix of her lips, the narrowing of her eyes, that she still thinks I’m a bad influence on the man she’d fancied the pants from afar for such a long time.
Sonia: ‘When I tried to find records or accounts of the fire online, I could only find one website that mentioned it. It’s a roll call of haunted buildings in London.’
She isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. But I remain patient, allowing her to continue.
Sonia: ‘It all sounded strange. A fire where a lot of people had died even back then would be a matter of historical record. So, I checked this haunted website more carefully and found that it had been put up about three weeks ago.’
Me: ‘So, it’s new. There are websites going up every day.’
Jed and Sonia look so serious I realise that my day from hell is about to shove me deeper into Hell’s fire.
Me: ‘Tell me.’
It’s Jed who does.
Jed: ‘The commemorative plaque on the building wasn’t put there by the local council.’
I hold my breath. Wait for him to drop his fireball.
Jed: ‘No-one died in that building. No young girls. No-one. Someone made all that crap up on the website. The sweatshop fire never happened.’
Forty-Seven
I stare intently at the plaque on the wall of the old sweatshop. Another trick to mess with my mind. I’m tempted to use my bare hands to rip it down. Instead, I look up at the building. It displays every last scar from its long history.
I’m surprised that the door’s slightly open. I hesitate a second before I go inside, searching for Ray. His mad continuous barking erupts in the air but I can’t see him. I walk further into the foyer, becoming an island in the middle. Remain totally still. Attuning my ear to the location of the distressed dog. It doesn’t sound as if it’s coming from upstairs. He’s barking and whining in bursts. I don’t want to… I move towards the trap door. The small cupboard weighing it down is nowhere to be seen. No way in hell do I want to go down and under ever again. But I can’t leave poor Ray there.
I hunch down. Pull back the trap door with a flourish. Leave it open because I want additional light to guide me, but I also need a touchstone of the bright world above with me. I hold back at the top of the narrow staircase because it looms dizzyingly below me. I ignore it and the solid pounding of my heart as I carefully take each step one at a time, my palm pressed to the bumpy uneven wall. The tunnel is all contorted shadow clinging to walls and floor and jagged cracks in the ceiling.
I’ve never felt safe in this long stretch of subterranean London and my insecurities increase with each move towards the basement. Ray is in there. I rush on until I have the handle of the steel door in my palm. I open up. Remain in the doorway. My brows shoot together in confusion. I can’t see Ray. I go further in.
The door behind me slams, startling me. I urgently spin round. A blur. Pain. White light. Then I’m falling into the deepest darkness.
It’s the choking stench of petrol that wakes me. I wince and cringe with the thudding searing pain in my skull. I’m confused. Why is my head hurting? And where the hell am I? Slowly I blink-blink-blink my eyes alive. My vision is blurry, watery, made up of shadows mixed with a blue-tinged light.
Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. The ee
rie voice calling me by name floats above and around me. Then settles on my soaked skin.
Rachel. Rachel. Rachel.
It’s the humming I hear that makes my body stiffen. It’s the beat of the stone heart in the basement walls. My vision flicks furiously into focus.
I’m lying on the ground, petrol soaked all over my clothes and hair. It’s splashed in a circle on the ground around me, turning me into the virgin sacrifice at a satanic ritual. Standing, back against the wall, is Joanie, staring down at me. She looks like a ghoul. Her eyes are sunken deep in a face that doesn’t appear of this world. The Stare’s back, dead flat doll’s eyes blazing and blistering with hatred. At her feet lies a can of petrol. In her hand a lighter she flicks on and off, on and off, the flame, yellow hypnotic-blue, fluttering wildly. Thank God there’s no sign of Ray in this macabre scene.
Her mouth opens and she sneers, ‘Rachel. Rachel. Rachel.’ So it hadn’t all been in my head, the BBs and cannabis oil playing tricks on me.
I struggle to rise, but Joanie’s strangely even-measure robotic voice stops me. ‘Stay down. I wouldn’t move if I was you.’ She raises the lighter with a threat my prone body can’t ignore. ‘No need to look for Ray, he’s safely tucked up in my home. This is all I need to draw you back here.’ She touches the old-fashioned cassette recorder near her, where I assume the taped noises of a dog barking were coming from.
‘Joanie, whatever’s going through your head is all wrong.’
She calmly punches off the wall. That’s what scares me the most, her calm. It’s unnatural, as if she’s had one too many shots of my weed oil.
She speaks. ‘He was born at five minutes to six in the morning.’ One of the most gorgeous smiles I have ever seen lights up her features. ‘The sun’s ray, such a beautiful light, were coming through the windows anointing my perfect baby boy. He fitted so right in my arms. I already had a name picked out for him. Jacob. But when I gazed down at him I knew that wasn’t right. I gave him another name. Philip.’ The tempo of her voice switches to menacingly hard. ‘And you killed him.’
‘But he’s not dead. I’ve just seen him—’
‘You. Killed. Him.’ The demeanour of her body shakes off calm, replacing it with an alertness that tells me Joanie’s a hair’s breath away from springing on me. ‘You think he’s been living for the last ten gut-wrenching years? After what you and Frank did to him, he’s been a shell. His love of life drained out of him.’
I hear it in her voice. Sorrow. This woman is possessed by a grief so strong it’s turned her crazy. God forgive me, but I feel for her. I know what that emotion feels like, how it can tear your insides and heart apart.
Tread carefully, Rachel. Very carefully. ‘I know you’re my dad’s lover and he’s your sons’ father.’
‘Lover?’ Joanie scoffs nastily at that. I hear her footsteps until she appears huge, looming over me. ‘Me and Frank haven’t been lovers,’ the word is spat down at me, ‘since the day he set his own son on fire. You both tried to murder him.’
I touch her eyes with mine, but hers are unsteady, twitching in their bloodshot frame.
‘I never tried to kill Philip—’
‘Liar—’
‘The fire wasn’t my fault—’
‘Liar—’
‘It was an accident. Something that just happened.’ This should be my moment of absolute truth but I can’t get it out of my head how Philip told me his mother would be crushed if she found out the whole of it. What her brother Danny really was. More importantly, Philip’s role in her brother’s death.
She screams, ‘Liar. Liar. Liar.’ And lashes me with petrol from the can over my belly. ‘I’ll empty this fuel down your lying throat if you don’t shut that filthy mouth of yours.’ She pauses. Takes a step back. ‘You were so easy to manipulate. It wasn’t hard to find out that you were down on your luck crippled by debts. Let’s do the girl a good turn and offer her a job. And once we had you in our net, time to play with Rachel.’
‘Were you trying to kill me?’
‘Kill you?’ She shakes her head as the can swings in her hand. ‘Killing’s too good for you. No, you had to suffer just as my Danny and Philip suffered. Put you under the ground like you were back in Danny’s cellar. From the start we had to make you think that it was your own mind tormenting you, so we began ever so gently with the sour milk. Let you experience the nasty and bitter taste we’ve carried in our mouths all these years. I wanted you to feel trapped like Philip had in the fire in Danny’s garage.’
‘It was you who locked me in the basement when everyone else, including Michael, went to lunch. But it was you both who made up the story about the sweatshop fire. There never was a fire here.’
Joanie bares her teeth. ‘And you fell for it hook, line and time to sink Rachel. Every day you came here after being put in the basement, I wanted you to experience the threat of fire, being helpless underground. Blocked in. That’s what Philip must’ve felt in Danny’s garage—’
I throw back before she can torment me more, ‘But you weren’t able to take me down, were you? You took me on and I fought back.’
She considers me with a tilt of her head as if in preparation for the deadly chop of an executioner’s axe. ‘Tough nut, just like Frank. Did you know that I met him through my brother Danny? He introduced us at a party. I’d just come through a very messy divorce – the said mister Barrington, although I’ve been using Connor to cover my tracks – and Frank provided a pick-me-up. He was fun. Of course he promised me the earth… Then your mother came along. I should’ve given him up then but couldn’t. We were never his second family, we were Frank’s first. Then you came along. My boys overnight became second-class citizens—’
‘Think of your sons now—’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ she snaps. ‘Michael was always going to be okay. He set up his business straight out of university. But Philip…’ Her body bows inward, deflated. ‘Philip is the artist. More sensitive. Doesn’t care about money. All he ever wanted to do was play his guitar. Bring some cheer and love into the world.’ She’s back large over me. ‘Then you had to spoil it all.’
I go on the counter-attack, vicious in my delivery. I don’t care anymore. ‘It’s you who has been trying to murder someone. Me. You blocked the exits and left me down here to die—’
Her upper body elongates with a full-blown breath that she lets out with a roar. ‘Why are you lying again? After you tried to kill my boy and put my brother six feet under, you think I could kill anyone?’
‘Then how do you explain the smoke? The car over the back grill and the cupboard over the trap door to stop me getting out?’
Joanie staggers back, her face a patchwork of bewildered confusion. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Her head shakes with horrified denial. ‘What smoke?’
‘If you didn’t do it, then who did?’
Our attention diverts to the door as it opens. Michael walks into the basement.
Forty-Eight
Joanie’s the one who rounds on him. ‘What have you been doing behind my back?’
Michael’s gaze flicks guiltily away from her. ‘I don’t know what you mean. You’re the one who nearly gave the game away by deviating from the plan and staring at her like a mad woman.’
‘She,’ Joanie’s accusing finger stabs in my direction, ignoring his last words, ‘says she was locked down here with no way of getting out.’
Michael turns his gaze back at Joanie and becomes horrifyingly still. ‘Mother, what are you doing? This wasn’t part of the plan.’
She visibly shrinks. ‘Don’t you get it? I can’t figure out how I can remain living on this earth without my son. So, I thought it’s time for me and his killer to go. Frank’s too clever for me to get so I’m going to have to make do with his accomplice.’
For the first time since entering, her eldest son takes in the scene. The lighter. The fuel can. Me soaked in petrol. Then I notice with horror what I should have before.
Joanie is soaked in petrol too.
Michael rears back in panicked shock. ‘Mother, what are you doing?’
Instead she throws him a question of her own. ‘What did you do, Michael? Tell me about the smoke and blocking the exits because I never agreed to any of that.’
He straightens his neck. ‘It was time for her to properly pay for what she’d done. A life for a life.’
The can drops from Joanie’s suddenly slack fingers. She’s staring at her son as if she’s never seen him before. ‘He got to you, didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But I do. It was Michael that my father was talking to in his office when I listened at the window to him threatening someone on the phone if they didn’t… how did he put it… ‘If you don’t get back on my side, I will kill you.’
‘Frank,’ Joanie screams. ‘Your father. How can you forget how he threw us out of our home and gave it to his precious daughter?’
I would’ve staggered back if I’d been standing up. The previous owner of my house was never Danny, it had been Dad. How could he have done that to his own children? No wonder Joanie despises me. In that instant I understand her hatred runs much deeper than what happened to Philip in the fire. What she’s convinced herself Dad and I did to him.
She continues to lash out at her eldest son. ‘Have you forgotten how he barely spent money on us because he wanted to keep it all for his fucking daughter? Remember that winter there were holes in your shoes and I pleaded with him to help me buy you a new pair. I only wanted half of the money and what does almighty Frank Jordan say – “Get a part-time job, Joanie.”’
Trap Door: the creepiest psychological suspense you will read this year Page 25