by Adam Nevill
Too late.
Fergal came into the room quickly. Pushed past Knacker. Using one long arm like a yacht’s boom, he swept the smaller man off the deck and came for Stephanie in a rustle of dirty Gore-Tex and a flap of soiled denim. Big feet banged the floor until the white, freckled face and bloodshot eyes, the unclean mouth and yellow teeth were suddenly very close, almost touching her face. She coughed in the stench – hormonal, animal harsh, old sweat mingling with new, base scented with something kidneyish and pissy. Her eyelids cramped into an instinctive squint.
A large, bony claw buried itself in the hair at the back of her head. She was broken in half. Snapped double so that when her eyes fluttered open they were staring at the old carpet. Through her shock and the volume of her own breath that panted around a squeal, was an awareness that the fingers gripping her hair would never let go; the grubby digits seemed to have passed inside her skull to hold her thoughts in a permanent freeze of terror.
Outside of her limited understanding of what was happening, this cold recognition of events that clung around her head like a wet rag, she could hear Knacker shouting, ‘Leave it! Fergal! Leave it! Fergal! Fink! Fink about it! Leave it!’
And she could also hear Fergal, though she wasn’t sure who he was talking to. ‘You fink you’re so high and mighty. But I been watching you. You fink I don’t know what you are? You is wrong. You is very mistaken.’ At that point she realized he was talking to her. ‘What you still doing here if you ain’t gonna earn? You had your chance to fuck off, but you didn’t. Cus you is finking about it, eh? I’m right, ain’t I? I know these fings. Someone, a little birdy, is telling me all these fings. I fink you know who I am talking about, don’t you? An old friend of mine who’s got an eye for the ladies. And he’s had a good look at you. Very nice it was too, he tells me.’
‘Fergal! Fergal! Cut it out!’
Fergal turned to Knacker. ‘Cut it out? I’ll cut somefing out if you don’t watch your mouf. And you is too soft, Knacker. You is a big pussy. This ain’t how you get results. Didn’t you listen to nuffin’ Bennet told us, eh? The only useful fings he ever told us was how to get results. But he could be a real old woman at the best of times, and you’re starting to remind me of him. Know what I mean?’
And it was then, when she blinked the tears out of her eyes, that Stephanie saw Knacker’s feet, pacing about the carpet, circling Fergal like a nervous boy. And she saw the dried blood on Knacker’s green training shoes, dark as creosote and splashed across the toes of both shoes.
‘Eh? Eh? I ain’t having none of that from you,’ he barked at Fergal. ‘Not after what you just gone and fuckin’ done. You’re the fuckin’ problem here.’
‘The problem right here, you tosser, is what I am holding in my hand. Your mistake. Who you can’t even get in line. You is all mouf, Knacker. What you contributed, eh? Nuffin’. Fuck all is what. All we got I brought here.’
Fergal shook Stephanie’s head and she felt some of the roots of her hair tear out of her scalp. Tears dropped from her cheeks and saliva looped from between her lips.
Fergal spat on the carpet. ‘This is your contribution and I am afraid it ain’t nuffin’ but a nuisance. I give you till the weekend to get her up and running and you still ain’t produced. Fuckin’ around trying to break into her piggy bank, when she should be turning four tricks a day. Cus you don’t know your arse from your elbow, Knacker. Cus you is too fucking soft. So I will tell you what I am going to do. I am going to make my point very clear. And if you can do me a favour and watch this, you might end up learning somefing too. Awright?’
And then his stagnant breath was all over Stephanie’s face, clouding down from above like a foul mist. ‘You listening to me? Oi, you down there. You listening to me?’
Her head was whipped upwards so quickly her feet left the ground for a second, before her entire body crashed back down to the floor. She found her feet but couldn’t see the floor because he was making her stare at the ceiling while holding her by the hair like a doll.
A big, dirty foot thumped across the back of her knees as Fergal kicked her legs out from under her. Stephanie sat down hard and gasped from the scatter of pain that shot up from her tailbone when it connected with the floor. Now she could see herself in the mirror, open-mouthed and glassy-eyed with shock. She had no idea she could even look like that.
She was going to die.
This is it.
In the reflection she watched Fergal dip a long, grubby-fingered hand inside the pocket of his parka. He removed a glass bottle. A small one, the kind that contained medicine. The bottle was unlabelled, the screw-top yellow. ‘Hold her,’ he ordered Knacker. ‘Can you get that right?’
‘No! No fucking way. No! I ain’t having no part of this. Fergal, no!’
‘Pussy. Then watch.’ Fergal released Stephanie’s hair.
She tried to stand up, but he pushed her onto her painful backside by cupping the entire top of her skull and pressing down. His strength was hideous. She thought her neck might snap and she yelped.
The hand vanished. ‘Oi, oi, cry baby. You listen to me, yeah?’ He dropped his voice. ‘When you is in our house you obey our rules. Simple, yeah? Yeah? Any of this bullshit, this calling from windows and causing a ruckus and all that and I’ll put this on you. I’ll fucking burn you without a second’s fought, sister. You don’t fink I will, then watch this.’
And then she knew what was inside the bottle and she screamed and rolled away from Fergal’s feet. Even Knacker cantered back to the mirrored doors of the wardrobe.
‘Any little notes, or whispers, or looking out them windows when our backs is turned, anyfing like that at all, and I’ll pour this over your fuckin’ head. Even fink you can treat me like a cunt and I will know. I will burn you, sister. You get me? This will go right froo your face. I’ll fucking blind you wiv this. You hear? We ain’t the only ones wiv debts to pay off, yeah?’
A dribble of liquid splashed the carpet and instantly produced white steam. The air of the room swelled with the stink of iron, sulphur, burning toffee and old curtains on fire.
As the room swooped and as little sparking motes of light dropped through her vision, Stephanie closed her eyes on the sight of gangly Fergal carefully recapping the glass bottle. Her stomach walloped over, her throat contracted and she was sick again, right where she sat. Sick onto the floor and onto her hands.
‘And I don’t want no blubbering. Not a peep out of you, else I’m taking the cap off.’
‘Yeah,’ Knacker said. ‘Yeah, you heard him, like.’
FORTY-ONE
Outside the window of the room she had been locked inside, night fell over the brick entry. Through the solitary window she could see little to either side of the space between 82 Edgehill Road and the wall of the neighbouring property.
The cousins had installed her inside the only room on the right hand side of the first floor corridor. Despite what had happened in her bedroom, and the fact they had crossed the final line by putting their hands upon her, she’d felt relief as she was escorted out of the room where the reek of Fergal’s unclean flesh and fouled clothes was replaced by the stink of the acid-burned carpet.
Jesus, God, it could have been your face.
The new room had thus far remained locked and mostly undisturbed during her tenancy, save one evening when she’d heard an old woman’s voice reciting scripture. And since she’d been sealed inside the room, Stephanie had successfully suppressed that memory because she could not tolerate another reminder of being swallowed whole and alive by the horror that refused to be sated inside this house.
The window of the room was barred. Before the bars the sash window frame was secured with an old metal fixture that required a key with a square end. It was the kind of lock that suggested the key was long missing.
The grubby glass of the window pane could be broken. But to what end? The McGuires would hear it smash. She’d already imagined her cries for help echoing back at her from inside the
narrow stone gap between two detached houses built close together.
The seedy man with a messy front garden lived in the house that neighboured this side, but Stephanie couldn’t imagine him running to her aid. And escape from here wasn’t possible because the room was a cell. In her misery she wondered if it had been used as one in the past.
Fergal’s acid trick had achieved the desired effect; Stephanie shrivelled inside whenever her thoughts returned to the white steam rising from the carpet, the crackle and hiss. Imagining the acid’s tearing heat over her face and the pooling of it inside her eye sockets thwarted any urge to shout from the window. To serve as another reminder, the left side of her head was swollen, the ear too painful to touch.
Stephanie knew why she was here and still alive. Why Fergal hadn’t killed her like she suspected he had murdered Margaret. Because they were cutting her off and ending her final resistance to their will. Knacker had tried to do this incrementally by selling the idea of prostitution to her, while emphasizing her lack of alternatives, a sales pitch underwritten with suggestions of violence, preceding actual violence, and then extortion. But Fergal had strong-armed and fast-tracked her towards their original goal of selling her body to strangers for profit. It’s why Knacker had rented the room to her in the first place. Girls only. Knacker had hoped she was young and desperate enough to be blindsided by his spiel and seduced by the promise of riches, eventually. He must have sensed how compromised she had been that first day, smelled her need like a weasel sniffed out a timorous, hungry vole on a canal bank. But he had missed his recruitment target and Fergal had stepped in with a bottle of acid.
They were a girl down now and she was the replacement.
The sounds of her impending fate were audible through the ceiling. Svetlana had been put back to work. Svetlana was her future.
Above her head, the girl whimpered around the muffled rhythm of a bed thumping a wall as another man threw himself into her body. She had entertained her first ‘client’ hours before. Had anything remained inside Stephanie’s stomach she would have spat it onto the dusty carpet. This was Svetlana’s third visitor since Stephanie had been locked inside the new room.
Tonight Svetlana’s cries lacked their former enthusiasm, from a time when the tough Lithuanian must have considered herself to be freelance, perhaps one of this ‘Andrei’s’ girls, leasing premises in a building owned by his peers up north. But she was now being forced to have sex after she had been beaten, and had maybe borne witness to, or at least heard, the murder of her friend, a consideration that made Stephanie physically tremble.
This was new territory and within its borders she felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt before in her life; it was a landscape in which all boundaries of restraint, that she had previously taken for granted, had not so much been moved as obliterated and replaced with an arbitrary state of being.
Murder. The very word so close to her actual existence made her feel as if the floor of a lift had just vanished from beneath her feet.
She knew almost nothing about the girls. And the same could be said for everything else at the address: who Bennet was, who the McGuires were, what had happened to those unseen women whose voices and footsteps still lingered inside the dusty, poorly lit rooms. It was ironic that she’d now do anything to go home to her stepmother, to withstand whatever she chose to, literally, throw at her.
How had this happened?
You don’t know what happened to Margaret. You don’t. You don’t. You don’t.
She repeated this mantra to the regions of her mind that had already acknowledged the worst, which only responded with some recalcitance by not being convinced.
So fatigued by the day’s relentless cycles of fear and anxiety, loathing and hatred, crowned by the devitalizing episodes of outright terror in Fergal’s dirty hands, she needed to sit down before she fell over. She was hungry and thirsty and faint, her thoughts becoming vague. She had not stopped feeling nauseous and if she cried any more she feared her eyes would close from the swelling.
Coughing, she batted the fur of grey dust from the pink candlewick bedspread skimming a single bed that looked too small for an adult. She sat down. Turned over the bedspread and cotton sheet and discovered the grey dust had seeped inside the bed’s coverings. A once white sheet was stained by vague brown marks which she immediately covered. The ancient pillow was also watermarked by a former occupant’s sleeping head.
A headboard of cushioned white vinyl completed an item of furniture she’d do almost anything to avoid sleeping on. The last bed she had seen of this age and style had been in her gran’s spare bedroom when Stephanie had been a child. And this was the smallest room she had yet seen inside the house. It hadn’t been cleaned in years, or even aired. The odours of mildew, dust and sour paint refused to normalize into something her nose no longer detected.
Beside the small bed was an empty bedside cabinet made of chipboard and laminated with white plastic. The top surface was fluffy with dust. A grimy mirror was screwed to the back of the door. A solitary light bulb hung inside a plastic shade and made the dim electric light look like it was being shone through a bowl of fruit cocktail, poured from a cheap tin.
It was a room in which an occupant could only feel trapped, hopeless and miserable, which is exactly how Stephanie felt. She zipped her jacket up to her neck until the heating came on, surprised they hadn’t shut it off to save money. Perhaps they didn’t know how to. And if she was to be left in here all night, she realized she would need to sleep on the floor. The bed was too dirty.
All she had going for her was the knife.
She took it out of the pocket at the front of her hooded top and rolled it between her fingertips. Clenched her teeth until her face pulsed with the heat of her blood. If one of them came in now …
She didn’t know what she would do. The knife was blunt, the blade short. It couldn’t kill, but it might slash, might wound.
And if it went through an—
‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she whispered to herself.
FORTY-TWO
When the world outside darkened, and as Svetlana’s unwilling hospitality extended to her fifth customer, the squeak of a floorboard preceded the rattle of a key inside the lock of her door.
Before the door opened, Stephanie leapt off the bed and then backed against the window. Struggling to swallow the lump in her throat, she slipped a hand inside the pocket of her hooded top. Her fingers squeezed the plastic handle of the knife, but it felt smaller and lighter than it had done before.
Knacker’s bony face thrust inside the room, grinning. ‘Fought you might like somefing to eat.’ He held a yellow polystyrene container, the kind takeaway restaurants used to package kebabs.
Shuffling into the room, he peered about the walls and bed warily, maintaining the grin as if trying to find something positive about the situation he could comment upon.
He placed the carton on the foot of the bed and pulled a can of Carling Black Label out of the pocket of his ski jacket – the coat her deposit must have paid for.
He dropped the can onto the dirty bedclothes. ‘This stuff don’t come cheap neither. Yous’ll have to pay me back tomorrow. Till I can get to a cash machine that is, so you better be quick wiv that pin number, yeah, when I ask for it. Nuffin’s free in this world, girl. Don’t I know it, like.’
Unable to speak through a blockage of rage, disgust and fear, Stephanie glared at his face. Behind his curly head the light clicked out and plunged the corridor into darkness.
She needed to lose it, needed to get angry and provoke him, and then ignite herself. It was the only way she would be able to use the knife, by losing control in a hot flurry of hate and hysteria. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is kidnap.’
He tried to laugh it off. ‘Nah, nah, it’s nuffin’ like that. You’s a bit of a drama queen, ain’t ya? Just a little setback, like, that we is fixing. No harm done, yeah.’
‘Your cousin threatened to burn
my face with acid. He beat Svetlana. Margaret’s … You punched me. Assaulted me. And now you’ve locked me in this room. You’re in serious trouble. You know that?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Or, at least, your cousin is.’
Knacker’s eyes narrowed. He glanced over his shoulder into the dark corridor, pushed the door to then turned to her. ‘Let’s get one fing straight, yeah. So pin your ears back, girl, while I is explainin’ somefing to you. First fing, you don’t know nuffin’. Nuffin’ about me or Fergal, our backgrounds. Nuffin’. Second fing is, you better start cooperating, like. I’m doing my best to fight your corner here. But if the truth be told, you ain’t helpin’ much. Only fing in your favour with Fergal is you helping us out wiv a few small fings. But that ain’t enough no more. And I been trying to offer you a way out. I gave you a choice, on a plate, like, but you turned your nose up. Bent over backwards, I have, since you been here, but we ain’t got no time for passengers no more. Patience is all used up wiv them that don’t do what they are here for.’
‘I’m not here for anything. I rented a room. And if you thought I’d be a … a whore because I rented a room off you, then you were mistaken. Very much so.’
‘None a that, eh? And keep your voice down, yeah? I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Decision’s been made. Time for discussion is over. You saw what he done to that floor. Be fankful it weren’t somefing else, like.’
‘You can’t make me. I won’t. I won’t do it.’
‘Make you? No one is trying to make you do nuffin’. You knew what the score was, so why didn’t you fuck off, like? Like Fergal said, you was tempted. You was finkin’ about it. So we is just helping you wiv your choice, like. Bennet…’ Knacker held back, as though he’d just let slip the first word of a secret while justifying his odious coercion.