by Steve Harris
All she had to do was go downstairs to the lounge and align as many movable objects as she could find so they faced in the right direction. If they all pointed towards the south wall of the house - the front wall, the front door would cease to be locked against her.
Snowy read no further. There was a large part of her that didn’t just disbelieve what she had read, it poured red-hot scorn on it. But there was also a part - the little-girl part -that took the matter very seriously indeed.
And she was in trouble, there was no doubt about that.
The exact amount of trouble she was in didn’t reveal itself to her until after she had scrolled the story back to the page she’d found it on, replaced all the leads and the mouse approximately as they’d been before, and left the room on legs which seemed to be made of rubber.
She gathered her strewn wits and decided that before she could think about anything else, she needed a good hot cup of coffee.
It was when she got to the kitchen that she discovered the exact amount of trouble she was in. It took a while for it to sink in and it dawned on her only gradually. Starting when she opened the door of the refrigerator to get the milk.
There was no milk in the refrigerator. In fact, Snowy was forced to admit that not only was the refrigerator out of milk, it was out of a great many other things too.
With the exception of one item, the refrigerator was empty.
And Snowy thought she knew why.
It had nothing to do with the fact that all the food had been eaten and everything to do with the story which waited upstairs, still live on a computer screen which should have been dead. This had not been in the story, but Snowy expected it would be when Philip did the redraft. He’d known all about it, but he hadn’t written it down because he hadn’t wanted to give away too much too early on.
Snowy stared at the single item that lay on the fridge’s bottom shelf.
It was not edible.
It was a white envelope and it bore her name on the front in Philip’s handwriting.
She picked it up, already knowing what the message inside would say. She opened it on remote control while she asked herself how Philip could terrorize her like this, and why he should want to. He loved her deeply - as deeply as she loved him - and these were not the kind of games ordinary people played with their loved ones.
But Philip isn’t an ordinary person, she told herself. If he was, you wouldn’t be here in his kitchen holding this chilly letter. Philip is extraordinary. And you broke one of his prime rules. So you should expect the consequences to be extraordinary too.
She tore the envelope open. There was a single sheet of white paper inside. Snowy withdrew it and unfolded it. The message was exactly the one she had expected. It said:
You’ve been a very naughty girl
And naughty girls must be severely punished
So now you have to stay inside the house
For ever
To Snowy, this piece of poetry looked very much like it constituted a death threat.
It’s a joke, that’s all, she assured herself, but the evidence seemed to disagree. She’d already read that she couldn’t get out of the house, and as Philip had removed all the food from the fridge, she couldn’t stay here either. Not for long.
Where did he put the food? she asked herself. When she’d gone to bed the previous evening, the fridge had been chock-full of the goodies the travelling superstore had delivered. It had looked as if Philip had been laying in siege supplies.
It was a lot of food to throw away.
Snowy went to the utility room where the freezer was. There was nothing in it at all; the frozen stuff was gone too.
Apparently Philip meant to starve her to death.
Bullshit, Snowdrop Dresden, she told herself. You are not trapped in this house. You can leave at any time.
She went back into the kitchen. She would just have to have her coffee black. She wasn’t terribly surprised to find that the coffee (and everything else) was absent from the cupboard.
But you forgot to remove the cups and glasses, Philip, didn’t you? she thought, smiling grimly. She took a tall glass from the shelf, held it under the tap and turned on the water.
Then she did curse.
Philip hadn’t removed the drinking vessels because there was no need to. He’d turned off the water.
She slammed the glass down, got on her hands and knees and yanked open the door under the sink unit, intending to find the cold water cock and turn it on again. This was where it would be.
And at this point, Snowy learned another mystifying fact about Black Rock which she could add to her collection.
There was no stop-cock there.
Or any pipes.
And yet water had come out of the taps. Until today. Scalding hot water out of the hot tap and freezing cold from the cold. Just like a normal house.
Snowy reached to the back of the cupboard and felt up the wall to where the taps were mounted in the stainless steel unit. There should have been unions there, where the taps met the pipes, or at least a big nut where they were mounted to the unit. Snowy felt nothing but smooth steel. It seemed that the taps had simply been glued to the top of the unit.
I don’t like any of this, she thought, feeling dizzy and frightened.
Plan A, she told herself. Get on your bike and get outta here!.
Snowy left the kitchen and went upstairs to the bedroom to get dressed.
On the way, she entertained herself with a brief fantasy in which she arrived at the bedroom to discover that all her clothes had vanished. She pictured herself being astonished that they were no longer draped over the chair where she’d left them. She imagined herself frantically opening cupboards and wardrobes and discovering that they were all empty, not only of her own clothes, but of Philip’s too. She visualized herself sitting down heavily on the bed and starting to cry.
This was exactly what happened.
But you still have his car keys, she remembered. Even if you have to leave dressed only in his shirt, you can just jump in the Porsche and drive away. If you can open that bastard front door, of course. …
She wiped away her tears, told herself she would not be beaten, got up and went back downstairs again.
She stood before the door looking at the parquet blocks of the polished wooden floor. None of them looked as if they would move; certainly not under the pressure of your foot, and probably not under the force of an atom bomb. The floor was as solid as the rest of the house.
Snowy ran her bare toes back and forth across the floor, but it felt as smooth and flat as a recently dressed ice-rink. She took hold of the door knob - knowing that she wouldn’t leave her fingerprints upon this side of it, just as she couldn’t leave them on the outside half of it - and pulled gently.
Nothing happened.
Snowy peeled her hand away and looked for her fingerprints. They’d left no trace.
The only difference between t
he outside half of the door knob and the inside half was that this side didn’t have the ugly lion embossed upon it. If it had, Snowy thought the damned thing would be grinning at her smugly.
‘Come on, you shit-house door, open up!’ she commanded, and tugged on it again while sliding her foot back and forth across the floor in case there were any hidden pressure points.
This short, one-sided parody of a ballroom dance, achieved exactly the same result as her earlier attempt.
‘I can easily get out of the window,’ she told the door. ‘All I have to do is open the one in the lounge and climb through it and I’ll be out, so you may as well open for me.’
The door, apparently, was unimpressed.
She went back into the lounge, intending to climb out through one of the windows; she’d opened them more than once, and they had not offered even a token resistance. She reached the nearest window, took hold of the catch and twisted.
Or tried to twist: the closure was jammed solid.
Five minutes later she had discovered that every window catch on every window in the house was just as jammed as those in the lounge.
But Snowy wasn’t beaten. She fetched a wooden-handled claw-hammer from Philip’s tool box, bared her teeth at the first window and said, ‘Now you’ll open, you fucker!’
She placed the head of the hammer against the centre bar of the window frame, hooked the clawed end under the handle of the catch and levered to her right, intending not to force the catch open, but to break it clean off its centre pivot.
When nothing happened she pulled harder.
The wood on which the hammer was resting did not dent. The slender aluminium catch did not bend or snap. When she took the hammer away to inspect it, the catch wasn’t even scratched.
‘It’s only aluminium, for God’s sake!’ Snowy complained, deciding it would be easier all round if she just broke the glass.
She removed the hammer from the catch, stood back and took an almighty swing at the window pane.
When the hammer hit the window it made a sound similar to the one she would have expected to hear had she struck the hull of an aircraft carrier: a solid metallic clunk!
Another three strikes proved to her that the windows were made of something very much stronger than standard glass and that she didn’t have a hope of even cracking one, let alone shattering it.
The effort of trying to escape was making her sweat away quite a bit of the water she had left inside her, and she’d woken up thirsty. Soon she was going to stop being thirsty and start being very thirsty indeed.
Telephone! she suddenly thought and was again galvanized into action and running to where the telephone sat on a table at the back of the hall - where, in her opinion, the back door should have been. She had never used it, and now she thought about it she’d never actually seen Philip use it either.
The telephone looked as if it had been made shortly after they’d stopped using the ones on which you had to wind a little handle. It was large and heavy and made of a substance which might have been Bakelite. It had a proper handset, but that was about as modern as it got. Its cables were covered with that old-fashioned brown braided material she had last seen when she was very young and the large chromium dial had groups of three letters printed beneath each finger hole as well as the numbers. It was probably one of those restored antiques you could buy.
She lifted the handset, held it to her ear, and punched the air in triumph when she heard the dialling tone.
Have you out of here in just a jiffy, Smiffy! she promised herself, and dialled Nine Nine Nine. If this wasn’t an emergency, she didn’t know what was.
The operator took an age to answer. While she was waiting, Snowy had time to wonder about the odd ringing tone she could hear. Presumably it was some super-duper new technology that the emergency services had installed.
The line clicked.
‘Hello?’ a faint female voice said.
It wasn’t the sort of voice Snowy would have expected an emergency services operator to possess. This woman was old. Her voice almost creaked.
‘Give me the police!’ Snowy said.
Silence.
The police. I want the police!’ Snowy repeated, croaking herself now. Her throat felt as if it was full of dust.
‘I don’t know what you mean, dear,’ the old woman said. ‘And I’m having trouble hearing you. Could you say that again? You’re very faint, you know.’
‘I need the police,’ Snowy said, raising the volume of her voice.
‘No dear, this isn’t the police,’ the woman replied. ‘This is Maida Vale Two Seven Five. Oh dear, I don’t know what’s happened. This infernal thing is playing me up again,’ she added, presumably to herself.
‘Who is this?’ Snowy demanded. People hadn’t had numbers like Maida Vale 275 since the fifties, as far as she knew.
‘Mrs King,’ the woman rasped. ‘I’m not a policeman, dear.’
And then Mrs King rang off.
Snowy stared at the phone in disbelief.
It’s not a reproduction phone, the little girl inside her quipped. This is an original. And it’s still connected to the time when it was new.
Snowy slammed her hand down on the cut-off buttons, got a fresh dialling tone and dialled again.
‘Mayfair One Nine Zero,’ a younger female voice announced. ‘Zara Winter speaking. Can I help you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Snowy said and cut the connection, the name Zara Winter ringing in her ears. She dialled again.
‘Fred King!’ a man’s voice shouted above the background roar of what had to be a factory.
Snowy’s head was spinning. ‘Are you related to Mrs King?’ she asked.
‘Well I’d have to be really, wouldn’t I?’ the man asked. ‘I’m only called King because my parents are called King. Yes, Mrs King is my mum. Who is this anyway?’
‘My name’s Snowdrop Dresden,’ Snowy said. ‘And I’m thinking of the Mrs King whose telephone number is Maida Vale Two Seven Five.’
‘Yeah, that’s my mum. What about her? She been taken bad again? This the hospital?’
‘No, she’s fine,’ Snowy said. ‘I just wanted to ask if you knew a Zara Winter.’
‘Don’t think so,’ Fred said. ‘Why?’
‘Could you tell me what the date is?’ Snowy asked.
‘October the twenty-eighth, of course. Friday. Same as it is where you are. What is this, Twenty Questions?’
‘The full date,’ Snowy heard herself ask. She did not want to know this, but she couldn’t stop herself asking.
‘That is the full date,’ Fred Winter yelled.
‘The year,’ Snowy croaked. She felt as if she was burning up inside. There were such things as ghosts. She was talking to one now. She was certain.
‘Nineteen forty-eight, of course. What year is it where you’re calling from?’
Snowy cut the connection again, put the phone back in its cra
dle and wiped her hands on the shirt she was wearing as though the handset had been tainted with something which might have stuck to her. Earlier, she had hoped she hadn’t gone mad. Now she hoped she had. She felt as if she was running a high temperature and her mouth and throat were screaming for water. She attempted to switch off what her mind was trying to tell her and to return to the immediate necessity, which was no longer escape, but an overpowering urge to drink.
Snowy stared at the phone for a few moments and her mind hit pay-dirt again. She suddenly knew where there would be some water she could drink.
She might never have managed to find any water supply pipes or any for waste-disposal, but in that bathroom was a wonderful invention which was going to save her life. That thing was the toilet cistern. You pulled the handle and two gallons of water gushed down the pan. Two gallons would keep her alive for a week, easily. If Philip hadn’t flushed the pan after turning off the water, she was going to be fine. If he had, she wasn’t going to be quite as fine, but she would survive longer than he had anticipated because there would be clean water in the U-bend of the pan. If he’d flushed the toilet, then pissed in it afterwards, she was going to have to think again - about boiling it before she drank it, probably -but she was certain that problem wasn’t going to arise. He couldn’t have thought of everything.
Except Philip had thought of everything.
He had emptied the flush.
He had not pissed in the U-bend water, but he hadn’t needed to. Somehow, he’d removed the water from there. When Snowy put her hand down to touch - and perhaps claim the last few droplets for herself - she found that the trap was bone dry.
Snowy dearly wanted to collapse and weep, but refused to let herself. If what she’d read in Philip’s book was true, there was one last chance. But it was the only chance she had left.