by Adam Nevill
Knacker cocked his head at an angle. He rotated his neck. His fists clenched.
Anger and strength drained out of her like cold water and she filled to capacity with indecision and dread once again. She shut the door and locked it. But she didn’t move away because Knacker had not moved away from the other side.
‘I don’t wanna hear nuffin’ about what we’ve discussed getting back to me, yeah? If I hear from the council, or the filth, yeah, anyfing gets back to me about you talking shit about this house, I will be very displeased. You don’t know nuffin’ about my background, or Fergal’s. And we got keys to this door.’
His feet bumped away into the darkness.
When she could no longer hear the footsteps she called Ryan.
He didn’t pick up.
THIRTY-FIVE
By nine p.m. another four ‘clients’ had been entertained by the foreign girls. The volume of anonymous traffic through the house had sustained Stephanie’s anxiety and added a tinge of nausea.
Beneath the window her bags were packed, ready for evacuation, to where she did not know. She’d already made the two most desperate phone calls she’d ever made in her life: one to the YWCA and the second to a women’s refuge. The latter could only take battered women with a police referral; the former had a long waiting list.
And then she’d made her final decision. She would stay until the morning, pack what she could carry and spend the following two nights at a cheap hotel, keep the last forty quid for train fare and food, and return to Stoke on Wednesday to beg Val to take her in. She’d only ever had a desperate and unappealing selection of options since her first night at 82 Edgehill Road. A demoralized inertia, maybe even hope or delusion, had not helped her cause. But she was all out of choices now. She had to leave in the morning.
Stephanie climbed into bed fully clothed. A pair of trainers were in position on the floor beside the bed, ready. One more night. Just one more night.
She lay in bed for hours while cars slowed and pulled away outside 82 Edgehill Road. Sometimes they stopped and their doors slammed. Footsteps occasionally scraped up and down the cement paving of the front path. In the distance the front door of the house opened and closed. Stairs groaned. Girls laughed. Lights clicked on and off. Mobile phones chanted dance music through the ceiling. Knacker bounded up and down the stairs, shepherding, escorting, blagging, forcing a self-satisfied laugh as everything went his way. A preened and prancing cockerel – she imagined the big lips grinning, the heavily lidded, reptilian eyes counting cash, assessing punters. Where was his cousin? Glaring at a ground floor door?
Thoughts of them filled her with a rage so dark, crimson and hot she worried her grinding teeth might snap. When she was clear of the house she’d cancel the new cash card, then call the police and report the prostitution. It was the only thing she looked forward to: revenge.
The last ‘client’ arrived just after ten p.m. At eleven, the thing that visited the girl who didn’t exist in the room next door began to grunt, and the bed in the neighbouring room groaned against the other side of the wall, like a boat loaded with pestilence had just moored and moved on the swell against the thin hull of her privacy.
Earlier, he had been outside her door too.
She’d heard the heavy steps approach from the stairwell. The floor of the corridor directly outside her door had creaked for several minutes as if he were deliberating about which room to enter. When the neighbouring door had clicked open and then slammed shut, Stephanie had felt so grateful she’d breathed hard enough to realize she was panting. But had she opened her door at any point during his visitation, she knew that she would have looked out at an empty, unlit corridor filled with the stench of the unclean, or worse.
But that’s all it is, a smell, and footsteps. They can’t hurt you!
The temperature in her room had since stayed warm, the only blessing she could draw from the disturbance beyond the door of this first floor capsule of light and strained nerves that she occupied and could not escape.
Stephanie slipped the plugs into her ears. Lay on her side facing her lighted room. She thought she’d reached the lowest point in her life a number of times recently, and mostly inside this house. But fathoms of unpleasantness still appeared ready to embrace her. And then there was the renewed contact with Val to come too.
She swore to herself she would not sink any deeper. Dabbed her eyes with a tissue until they closed for sleep.
THIRTY-SIX
In the garden the four women with long skirts sat on the corners of a large patchwork blanket. Their heads were bowed so she couldn’t see their faces. On top of their heads their dirty hair was piled into coils. She wondered if they were reading. A small wooden box, with a purple velvet curtain draped over the front, was placed in the middle of the blanket.
Someone had put a wooden ladder against an oak tree and arranged four identical wooden chairs beneath the lowest limb.
Only when she sat on the blanket did Stephanie realize the women were all crying into their thin white hands. How had she not noticed before?
Placed on the blanket in front of each of the women was an old creased chapbook with something written on the cover she couldn’t make out.
When one of the women became aware of Stephanie, she removed her hands from her face and revealed what looked like a skull in a wig. The sharp features were tightly papered with a mottled parchment of skin, and the woman’s eye sockets were empty. Stephanie tried to scream but had no breath. The woman said, ‘What’s the matter with my face…?’
Stephanie wasn’t in the garden for long before she found herself inside a dark place with wet brick walls, through which the women in the long skirts bustled. When the tunnel became too tight for them to go any further, the women slipped to their hands and knees and rolled sideways into blackened stone cavities near the floor. The holes looked like drains without grates.
‘This one is yours,’ said a voice behind her.
She looked down at the black space, no more than a little stone alcove at the foot of the wall. ‘In there? I can’t. I can’t. I don’t like closed spaces.’
Stephanie looked over her shoulder. There was no one behind her. And even though she was only a little girl, when she tried to squeeze back through the narrow passage, and towards what looked like a door sunken into one side of the shaft, she became wedged.
What she had thought was a doorway was only a cleft in the brick wall. Inside of the cavity something wrapped in polythene was standing upright. ‘What is the time?’ it asked her.
* * *
Stephanie awoke into silence and a cold so fierce it burned her forehead, the only part of her face exposed above the bedcovers. She tugged the plugs out of her ears. There was a delectable moment of cool air filling the ear canals.
A smear of half-remembered images sank into oblivion, until she could not pin down much about the nightmare at all. There had been wet brick walls … long skirts … a face, a horrid face.
She looked about the walls and ceiling of her room, took in the mirrored wardrobe doors, the little glass table, her bags, the window. She saw nothing move. Sniffed at the chilled air. Detected no trace of the male animal odours.
Thank God.
Silence next door too, and in the rooms of those living above her. But she knew she was not alone on account of the plummet in air temperature.
Pulling the duvet with her she sat up in bed and glanced at her travel clock: three a.m. Her mind scrabbled for ideas of what to do, and for clues about what might be happening, or about to occur.
They can’t hurt you was the only reassuring notion that came to her, though she found that very hard to believe.
A girl: it must be one of the female presences inside her room. Can she see me?
Stephanie swallowed hard. ‘Hello.’ Her voice was no more than a whisper. She raised it. ‘Hello. I know you’re there. I … I can feel you.’
Silence.
‘It’s all right. I promise. He’
s not here. And I won’t scream. Are you … are you Russian?’
Silence.
Her sense of being watched was acute. And there was a peculiar tension growing inside her eyes and ears, like anticipation. Something was trying to get her attention; not by movement or sound, but through other means.
Another part of her, like some unused sense, seemed to quiver in response to what felt like a change in the air pressure. She might have been close to the edge of an awful drop, or about to cross a road ploughed by fast traffic in the rain. An unpleasant tightness around her belly grew into her chest and made her breathless. As before, her spirits quickly darkened and she felt as sad and lost as a child separated from its parent in a crowd of indifferent adults.
She was stuck in this house and would never be released or found. No one cared enough to come looking for her. This was her end and also her future, because the house was not a true conclusion to existence, only of life.
She had no role to offer the world and had been shuffled into a forgotten and dreary corner to wait quietly until expiration. She belonged amongst dust and dreary colours, age, stone, the plaster that sealed it, the paper that covered it. She amounted to nothing. She had kidded herself that she could function in the world.
A sob broke from her. Stephanie covered her face.
Fingers pressed her forearm.
Stephanie thrust her body back against the wall.
The touch had been freezing. She could still feel the chill indenting her flesh.
‘Please … don’t. Please,’ she whimpered.
She clutched her hands over her ears because she was sure a mouth had opened, close by, to speak. She didn’t know how she knew this. Maybe she didn’t know and this was nothing but her senses spiking with panic, but she could not bear to hear a voice.
The touch of a cold hand became a gentle squeeze around her wrist. And this time she did not cry out, or even breathe. With the exception of the shivers that erupted over her entire covering of skin, Stephanie remained absolutely still.
The lights are on. There is no one there. Can’t hurt you, hurt you, hurt you …
‘Hold me,’ a voice said. ‘I’m so cold.’
Stephanie closed her eyes tight. Either a young woman had spoken with her mouth a hair’s breadth from her ear, or she’d heard the request inside her mind.
Cold, invisible fingers remained attached to her wrist. And whatever was beside her slowly reclined upon the bed. The mattress gently gave to support a weight that could not be, and perhaps her eyes deceived her, or maybe the exposed bed sheet really did move.
‘Hold me. I’m so cold.’
Staring at her trembling arm, dumbstruck at her own compliance, Stephanie eased herself down to a freezing mattress that she now shared with something she could not see.
* * *
Stephanie struggled to breathe, her facial muscles barely moved. Something covered her face tightly. Opening her eyes fully was impossible. One eyelid was partially stuck shut and the second was completely sealed. The space before her eyes was as black as pitch.
Flurries of panic pricked her stomach. Her immediate and instinctive reaction was to raise her hands and tear off the thing covering her face that smelled of plastic. But her arms were stuck fast against the sides of her body: she was bound from hip to shoulder.
She could wriggle her fingers against her thighs, move her toes, but no other movement was possible. Her legs were also awkwardly and uncomfortably strapped together by bindings she could feel against the sides of her knees and pressing into her ankles and Achilles tendons.
Her skin responded to points of pressure scattered about her body: shoulders stuck against a hard surface; the soles of her bare feet touched what felt like cold bricks without supporting her weight. Whatever had passed under her arms, crossed her chest, and gripped her throat tightly, felt like coarse string. The twine held her in position, held her upright.
Or was she upright? It was so dark and any movement beyond her fingers and toes so restricted, she was no longer sure if she was lying down, lying sideways, or even hanging upside down with her feet pressed against the ceiling.
Hysteria flooded her mind.
Within the secure moorings, the energy of the terror that spread from her core and lit up her muscles only succeeded in producing a frail tremble throughout her body.
The scream she issued through lips clamped around the tube that passed between them, was wholly contained inside her mouth. She tugged at the air with her nose but only drew a short sniff up each nostril. Not much air was coming in through that route.
Powered with all the might of her lungs, her mouth pulled a thin stream of oxygen through the tube. What she managed to draw inside tasted of wood and dust. If she didn’t calm down, catch her breath and regulate her breathing, she was going to suffocate while being unable to move anything but her fingers and toes.
When the lack of air made her chest feel as if it were full of cement, any attempt to calm down was engulfed by a panic so total it was mindless. Amongst the flashes of quickly passing memories that crowded the walls of her skull, came a hope that she would die quickly.
* * *
Stephanie didn’t so much sit up in bed as thrust herself upwards and onto her knees. She kicked off the duvet and dropped to the floor, gasping like her head had been held under water.
For a while she was convinced she had been about to die in her sleep. She must have had her head cocked at an unusual angle to restrict her windpipe, or she had sucked the bed coverings inside her mouth or squashed them against her nose. Restricted breathing had then been transformed into a nightmare. The relief that came with finding herself on the floor of her spacious room and able to move her hands through the air and to blink, to see, to breathe, made her eyes blur with tears of joy that ran down her cheeks.
But the room next door was enduring a break-in, or worse.
Her neighbour whimpered and sobbed as her body, and the feet of her assailant, bumped about the floor of the room. The woman was being moved or positioned against her will in a manner that was painful, that made her neighbour sob and cry at the point before her strength failed.
Stephanie ran to the door of her room. Unlocked it and tugged it open, determined to stop the attack, to end the sounds of violence as she had managed to do before, without having a clue why the activity had stopped that first time.
Who can be sure of anything here?
She banged her hands against the door. ‘I’ve called the police. The police, you bastard! You touch her again and you’ll be sorry. You fucking pig!’
Her delight that the male presence seemed to comply with her demands was short-lived. Because as soon as the room fell silent, the darkness of the first floor began to fill with other sounds. Or other voices.
About her the cold air muttered with what could have been a radio changing channels. Into the hitherto peaceful room on the right-hand side of the corridor she followed one voice, and seemingly with her whole being, until the voice settled behind the locked door into a low, repetitive intonation of …
It sounded like a recitation of scripture.
Stephanie pressed her ear to the door.
The voice on the other side rose and fell, into and out of coherence, to peaks of earnestness before sinking to a muffled, half-sobbed tone of desperation. It was the voice of an older woman she was hearing, a woman speaking quickly.
‘To speak evil … no brawlers … all meekness unto … foolish, disobedient, deceived … diverse lusts and pleasures … malice and envy, hateful … hating one another … kindness … love of God our Saviour…’
From the bathroom came the broken utterances of the girl beneath the floor, spilling across the landing at the end of the hallway, as if she too were now raising her voice to get Stephanie’s attention.
‘Is my name?… before here … that time. Nowhere … to where the other … the cold … is my name?…’
In the room next to her own, the girl who had be
en attacked had resigned herself to weeping from a misery that seemed bottomless.
‘God.’ Stephanie placed the back of a hand against her nose and mouth because of the smell; the terrible miasma in the cold air now swelled up the stairwell and billowed across the first floor landing before hitting her full in the face. Into her memory came the image of the tatty brown remains of a pet rabbit wrapped in a blue blanket, that she and her friend, Lucinda, had exhumed from a rockery at the bottom of Lucinda’s garden when they were little girls, in a well-intentioned hope of returning the pet to life.
Stephanie turned and fled to her room. Shut and locked herself inside, before sinking to her bottom with her back pressed against the door.
DAY SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
Her eyes hadn’t opened again until ten thirty a.m. and she’d since sat slumped on her bed, wearing the clothes she’d slept in, too tired and too reticent to venture to the bathroom for a shower, or to the kitchen to boil the yellowing plastic jug for a mug of instant coffee. After the previous night’s disturbances she’d slept for around three hours that felt like three minutes. The last part of her rest had been as dreamless as a concussion.
Heavy rain struck the window with a violence sufficient to make her shiver in anticipation of entering the cold outside the building’s walls, lit dimly by the rise of the sun behind clouds the colour of smoke from an oil fire.
She needed to pee. But would they be in the bathroom? Did any of the customers stay overnight, or were they only here briefly? Did they use the bathroom? There was one toilet on the second floor but no bathroom. Maybe they came down to the first floor to wash and rinse away the tell-tale smells of perfume and condom rubber. Oh God, it made her feel sick.
Stop it!