by Adam Nevill
But an assurance that she could leave once he’d stolen even more of the prostitutes’ money to clear the house’s debts was another lie, because then something else would be required of her. Knacker thought he owned her now. The realization took the strength from her legs. She wanted to be sick.
She tried to yank her wrist out of Knacker’s hand, but his fingers hardened into a bone cuff that became so painful she cried out. His arm merely rose and fell with hers. Then he turned so quickly she squealed.
Knacker crowded Stephanie against the front door. His face moved an inch from hers; his breath stank of the burger he’d stopped to buy in the street and gobbled down like a dog. ‘Let’s get one fing straight, yeah? About that room you been living in at the cheap rate, yeah? Well your terms have changed. You now owe on the room. Forty quid a week for them fittings and fixtures? You must be having a laugh, girl, if you fink you can rip us off like that. You already owe us on the room. Yeah? Price is hundred a week.’
‘What?’
He raised his voice. ‘So you already owes me sixty quid for the week you been here. And another … let me see, one mumf in advance … that’s three times another sixty quid…’
‘You can’t!’
‘That’s one eighty in total on the next three weeks on your first mumf. So you now owe me two forty. Just be fankful I ain’t charging you for damages. Fucking dust everywhere in there, like. And here’s you taking back that deposit like we owe you. You got a nerve. Fuck’s sake, I ought to march you to the cashpoint right this minute and take every penny you owe us. Which is more consideration than these council wankers are giving me, like. So I’ll have that one sixty back now, and on the rest, don’t make me collect in another way, yeah?’ He pulled her to the foot of the stairs. ‘Get up in your room. Fucking stay there.’
Without all of her balance, Stephanie stumbled up the stairs with Knacker pressed against her back; one of his arms was around her waist, his other bony hand slapping its way up the railing.
On the first floor he stopped at the sound of a crying woman. A terrible chest-deep sobbing came from the second floor; you couldn’t fake anguish like that. It was one of the Eastern European girls.
‘Shit,’ Knacker said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ His words panicked Stephanie.
‘Fergal!’ he shouted up the stairwell, his voice so loud it made her jump. ‘Fergal!’
There was no answer.
Stephanie made for her room. She took her phone out of her pocket as surreptitiously as she could.
From the landing Knacker shouted at Stephanie, ‘Eh, hang on!’
She entered her room regardless, planning to close and lock her door, then call the police. She was now being held here against her will, and something terrible had happened while she had been out; she could just feel it. A woman didn’t cry like that for no reason.
Knacker bounced down the corridor after her. He had a key. Shutting the door would undoubtedly provoke an escalation of whatever mass she’d sensed solidifying inside the house since they’d come through the front door, a growing tension she wanted to creep quietly away from.
Too late for that now, girl.
No!
She had to find a moment, soon. She shuffled her phone back inside the pocket of her jacket.
Knacker’s footsteps paused in the corridor outside her open door. ‘Fergal!’ he roared into the house.
In response, a fresh surge of woe erupted from the girl upstairs. Stephanie guessed it was Svetlana, because she could now hear the girl’s muffled cries through the ceiling of her own room. So where was Margaret?
Ryan. He cannot come here. Police!
She’d risk a quick phone call, keep her voice down. Hurriedly, Stephanie retrieved her phone from her pocket. Her scalp cooled when she realized no one, beside her bank branch, knew she was living here. Not even the temping agencies. She’d planned to move out quickly and so hadn’t supplied the address; they all still had the cell in Handsworth on record as her home address. She thought of Svetlana’s and Margaret’s phones in Knacker’s pocket and suddenly felt dizzy from the gravity of personal danger she found herself in.
She punched out 999 as Knacker came through her door, muttering to himself after failing to raise a response from Fergal. ‘Fuck is he, like?’
Maybe she should make the call to the police and leave it open with the phone in her hand. They recorded all calls.
Knacker spotted the phone. ‘Aye, aye!’ He ran at her. Whacked her hand hard. The phone thumped against the floor.
‘What the fuck!’ she shouted into his face.
Upstairs, a window smashed. Glass tinkled down one side of the house.
‘Shit!’ Knacker shouted. He scooped Stephanie’s phone up at the same time she reached for it. With one hand he shoved her backwards so hard she sat down.
‘You fucking prick!’ she screamed at him. ‘Don’t you touch me!’
Knacker was already on his way out of the room.
Svetlana screamed from her broken window upstairs. ‘Help! Help me! They kill her!’
Stephanie felt like she’d been electrocuted. Her vision shook. Through the juddering room she saw Knacker bound back at her. His bloodless face thrust against her own. ‘Give me your keys!’ Spittle flecked her face.
She didn’t react or move, beside flinching and instinctively covering her breasts with both arms.
Her head jerked to one side at the same time as she heard the slap of raw meat upon a chopping board. A sensation of having one side of her head underwater engulfed her. One ear became hot. Her hearing sang with tinnitus. A fire alarm had just been activated deep inside her skull. She wasn’t sure which direction she now faced.
When her vision settled she was lying on her back and looking at the ceiling. Knacker had thumped her.
A bony, clenched fist was pressed against her face. She thought her nose might snap. Knacker’s fingers stank of burned tobacco and tomato sauce. Above the knuckles she could see his big, wild eyes. ‘Keys, bitch! Where’s your fucking keys?’
Big feet at the end of long strides bounded across the ceiling. Stephanie heard the door above her room being hastily unlocked: Svetlana’s room.
Svetlana shouted, ‘Bastard!’
Heavy feet boomed deeper inside the room above.
Svetlana screamed. A heavy thump followed her cry.
A horrible silence ensued until the girl became hysterical again. She shouted words in her own language. What could have been a large, fierce animal bellowed in response. The very sound of the roar – inhuman, bestial – made Stephanie whimper. A solid weight crashed through splintering wood. Feet boomed across the floor of the room upstairs as if rushing at the sound of the breakage.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
‘Keys!’ Knacker bellowed into Stephanie’s face.
‘Pocket.’ Stephanie’s voice was a whisper. Her ear still sang like an old wireless; whale songs of trauma whistled from the deeps. The flesh on one side of her face smarted like she’d put her head on an oven hotplate. Inside her skull, blood thumped like a bass drum.
Knacker’s fingers went through the pockets of her jacket and fished out her room keys, her purse and the one sixty in cash. He bolted for the door, slammed it, locked her inside.
Stephanie moved from where she had been lying on her back. On her hands and knees she made for the window. Looked at the bars behind the dirty glass. The window was difficult to open, the frame old and swollen. She needed to break the pane with something so she could start screaming like Svetlana. But stopped looking for a heavy object when she thought of what she’d just heard upstairs. The thump. Fergal’s shriek of animal rage. A body crashing through wood. The slapping. Fergal must have gotten hold of Svetlana because she had broken her window and screamed into the street to attract attention.
They kill her. That’s what Svetlana had said.
Margaret.
Stephanie’s stomach turned over and she clenched her teeth and steeled herself to prevent
what remained of two cups of coffee coming up.
With a paralyzing clarity, she imagined the girls drumming on their doors, hurling insults the whole time she had been away, threatening Fergal with this ‘Andrei’ because Knacker had stolen their phones and their money. She remembered Fergal’s face: the malice, the savagery, the instability therein. And she believed he could easily have lost his temper while she and Knacker had been at the bank.
Stephanie struggled to her feet, but didn’t know what to do.
She looked at the ceiling when she heard another pair of feet upstairs: lighter, swifter, with shorter strides. They bounded down the second floor corridor and moved into the room above her head: Knacker. He began to bellow at Fergal. ‘What you done? What you done, you fucking idiot? Where is she? Where the fuck is she?’
Fergal grumbled something she could not make out. But Svetlana heard Fergal’s reply because she issued a fresh upwelling of despair, before sobbing through the floor of her room and right into Stephanie’s heart.
FORTY
As Stephanie attempted to open the window, as much to air the room of the smell of vomit as to attract attention without making any noise, she inadvertently summoned Knacker. He came through the house and to her quickly.
She’d even switched the television on to run interference over the sound of the old sash window grinding upwards through the wooden runners. But Knacker had heard, perhaps from inside Svetlana’s room because the window upstairs was now without glass.
She wasn’t going to scream, not after what she’d heard upstairs. Svetlana had briefly stopped sobbing and moaning when the McGuires had dragged her from her room. ‘Not in there!’ she’d screamed. The desperate fear in the Lithuanian girl’s voice had transfixed Stephanie with terror all over again. Unable to swallow or blink, she’d stood immobile and helpless in the middle of her room, her hands clasped to her cheeks while disbelief clashed with the horror that swept round and round her mind in a whirlpool of panic.
In where? Where were they taking Svetlana? To another room? But not the room occupied by Margaret, because Stephanie would have heard their feet through the ceiling on the far side of her bed. There was only one other room on the second floor: the room she had spent her first two nights inside; the room with the fireplace and the hands under the bed and the footsteps. A room facing the back of the building and the junkyard that served as a garden. So she could only assume they had installed Svetlana inside that awful room, or even inside their flat.
Interspersed with the bangs of a hammer in the room above her own, as wood was applied to the upstairs window that Svetlana had smashed, Stephanie had heard faint bursts of a woman crying, somewhere in the distance. She’d assumed it was the Lithuanian girl’s grief continuing undiminished, though in this house she could never tell who, or what, was crying.
Not in there. Did the girl know something about that room then? After their brief exchange in the kitchen there had been no further opportunity to converse with Svetlana. The idea of prostitution, the prospect of engaging with broken English, and Knacker’s clear displeasure about them speaking had deterred Stephanie. She wished she had been bolder. Things might have been different had she and the other two girls discussed the house and the cousins. Regret: the most corrosive horror.
And within the house there was still no sign of Margaret.
They kill her.
Knacker couldn’t get inside Stephanie’s room fast enough. At the sound of the frantic rattle of a key inside the lock, she slipped one hand inside the front pocket of her hooded top and fingered the paring knife.
The moment she saw the landlord’s face come out of the shadows of the corridor and into the doorway of her room, her courage deserted her the same time the strength seemed to evaporate from her arms. She could not stab someone. Could not put a knife into the warm density of a human body. She doubted she could even threaten someone with a knife. That was not her. And people like her died because they were incapable of doing such things. They waited until it was too late. They screamed and scratched and slapped about. She could picture herself doing exactly that inside this very room. People like her did not fight back, not properly.
Too late.
Knacker closed the door slowly and locked it behind him, turned to Stephanie. His face was pale and his thick lips quivered from the emotion that had taken him over. Maybe it was rage, but she didn’t think so. In his expression she intuited what might have been a powerful remorse, or even fear. Yes, he was anxious, so extremely anxious he’d become afraid.
‘What is happening? Where’s Margaret?’
‘He’s done one. He’s fuckin’ done one. I never fought he’d…’ Knacker spoke quietly, more to himself than to her.
Stephanie’s breath caught in her throat. She’d not seen Knacker this shaken or distracted before, and she sensed he needed to tell her something. She suspected he was like that; at the best of times he didn’t like silence, liked to obliterate it with the sound of his own voice, to announce and brag and show off. Now trauma was pushing words into his mouth.
He ran his fingers through his curls and momentarily closed his eyes. ‘I tell you somefing. Bennet was right. These fings shouldn’t happen. But they do, like.’ It was as if he was now speaking to someone else in the room, someone that wasn’t her. She wondered if he was mad too, like his cousin.
Knacker looked at the window and became concerned. His usual demeanour returned to the surface of his consciousness; his big eyes glared and swept the room for evidence that he might disapprove of. When he finally looked at Stephanie it was as if he had found her guilty of a great betrayal. Bobbing on his heels, he came further inside the room with his hands out wide from his body, to emphasize his disappointment that she could be so unreasonable. Because she knew that anything she did that was not in his absolute favour was just that to Knacker: unreasonable.
‘I … I’ve been sick.’ She nodded at the towel on the floor that was covering the wet patch. ‘The window,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘Air. I needed air.’
Knacker peered at the towel. Sniffed. Narrowed his eyes, studied her face, searching for other motives before this potential red herring.
‘I want to go.’
Knacker stifled a smile that lived on in his cruel eyes.
‘I won’t say anything.’
‘That right?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘Give me your word, like?’
‘Yes, yes. Please.’
‘First fings first. We need to clear the rest of these bills, yeah? Don’t want bailiffs coming froo the front door at an inconvenient time.’
Her confusion was so great she sensed that her mouth was hanging open in stupefaction. Bills? Why was he talking about bills?
‘I was finking, cus of the cash flow problem we is having, that you might pay off some more of that council tax, like. We’s sorted the gas and electric, but as arranged wiv the council this morning, the council tax still needs sorting. First payment, like. Why wait till Monday? You can do it on the phone, like. I swear on me muvver’s life you’ll get it back.’
‘I don’t … don’t know what…’
‘You must have a bit tucked away, like. All this perfume and biscuit stuff you been doing, eh? Well the dosh ain’t no good to us is it, tucked away in some savings? Time to put it to work and all, considering as you still owe on this room.’
‘Room?’ She couldn’t align her thoughts. A sense of the impossible, of such a great injustice, of this baffling nightmare continuing while also remaining unpredictable, rendered her mute.
‘Yeah, this room you puked in. It ain’t a forty quid room. I told you earlier. You must have forgotten. Convenient, like.’
She almost had to hold her head still to work out what he was getting at. It was surreal, absurd. ‘I did what you asked. I paid—’
‘Our agreement was for you to sort fings out and fings ain’t sorted, is they? Water’s done. Gas, electric. Fanks for that, your help
and all that. But council tax is still outstandin’ and we need to get them off our backs wiv the first payment. Everyone’s got to pitch in, like, in this minor setback. Just as well I been looking after your cash card, cus I fought a time would come when we’d need to put it to work for us, like. All of us. That includes you.’
Her mind cleared sufficiently, or was cleared by a loathing for what stood before her. Even now, at this stage, when a girl had been assaulted in the room above her head, while the other girl had vanished, or been killed, this idiotic man in his designer casual wear, who had tried to run prostitutes from the building, and stolen her cash card, was asking her to pay off his debts with the pittance in her bank account. ‘You … you came down here to ask me—’
‘I ain’t askin’, I’m tellin’, girl. Though you will get it back.’
‘You are now trying to steal my money to pay off unpaid council tax. After that … that’ – she couldn’t say his name – ‘just assaulted a girl in her room. And Margaret…’ She paused because Knacker’s eyes flitted away from her to evade the horror that showed on her face. ‘Where is Margaret?’
‘That ain’t none of your concern. Little domestic. Fings got out of hand when I weren’t here.’
‘Out of hand? Are you insane?’
‘No he ain’t, but I am. Open this fucking door, Knacker, you soft-hearted tosser.’ It was Fergal. And he had been listening to the exchange.
Stephanie tried and failed to swallow the icy bolus of terror in her throat.
Knacker’s face went taut with fear, his big eyes swivelled to the door. ‘All in hand, like. No problem here.’
A hand or a shoe slammed into the door and seemed to shake the entire building. ‘Open. The. Fucking. Door. Knacker.’
Knacker scampered across the room to do Fergal’s bidding.
‘No,’ Stephanie said, or thought she said. In her terror she wasn’t sure. But now she felt sick again and her vision wasn’t right; the room seemed to be moving around her. Svetlana’s cries, ‘They kill her’, ‘Not in there’, as well as the sound of the girl’s screams reactivated and returned to Stephanie’s mind on a spin cycle. Tears welled and blurred the unstable room. ‘Don’t.’ She swallowed. ‘No.’