by Adam Nevill
Amber bent double, nauseated by the sudden gush of memory and colour, by the very speed of the carousel, the swoop and swill of her mind, backwards and forwards and round and round. Her stomach turned inside out. Emptied itself like an upended plastic bag, pinched at the bottom corners and shaken. She heard the vomit splash against the kitchen floor but saw nothing through the myriad sparks dying in the black, circular void where her vision should have been.
She sat down, then slumped on the cold flagstones of the kitchen floor. The black oval, the blind spot, and its terrible depth, shrank and vanished from her vision.
Unable to tell whether the bombardment of her mind had come from within or without, and too sick to care and just relieved it was over, she lay upon the cold tiles and spat the bitterness from her mouth.
Black Maggie had riffled her like worn pages in an old paperback, then tossed her aside.
Why? You want to know me, bitch? ‘Bitch. You bitch.’ But the scrutiny that had knocked the breath out of her was gone. Had lifted. Was no longer trained upon her.
She was so tired she didn’t think she could stand up; she felt like she’d just completed one hundred sit-ups on a varnished gymnasium floor.
Amber peered down her body and between her feet and saw the rear wing of her black Lexus inside the garage, one edge of the freezer cabinet, the new red bricks of the garage’s inner wall, a copper pipe in fabric cladding. She smelled cement, plaster and oil.
She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand and closed her eyes.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
‘What’s all this then? You going somewhere?’ Josh spoke from just outside the kitchen. He’d seen her bags in the hall stacked neatly beside the front door. When he stepped inside the kitchen Amber avoided looking him in the eye. She prodded the poached eggs with a fork. ‘Just for a few days. Two eggs enough?’
‘Plenty. Smells good.’
She suppressed a tremor in her voice. ‘All local. Bacon and sausage too. Even the bread. There’s coffee in the jug. Just made it.’
‘Cheers.’
In her peripheral vision she watched Josh approach the kitchen bin and drop a grey lump inside. More dust that he didn’t want her to see. He took a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘You’re up early?’
‘I often am.’ She left it at that, but could feel Josh watching her, and she assumed with a familiar expression of mystification at her habits and a concern for her mental health.
‘Thought I’d take off to Cornwall for a few days.’
‘Good. I’m pleased to hear that.’
Amber brought two steaming plates to the table top.
‘Sauces and stuff are all there.’ She nodded at the condiments.
‘Mmm.’ Josh nodded at the plate with approval, his mouth already full. ‘Did you even go to bed?’
‘Too much on my mind.’
‘You’ll drop, kid, if you’re not careful. I’m guessing you never slept the night before either? You OK to drive?’
‘You’d be surprised at what I can endure.’
Josh was taken aback by her retort and tone. He didn’t pursue his curiosity any further as to why she was leaving her house after just one week; a place on which nine months of modifications had just concluded, with a three hundred thousand pound price tag on security and renovations alone.
They ate in silence.
‘Give me a call when you get back here. Just check in,’ he eventually said before draining his coffee cup. ‘I better hit the road. And it’s just as well you’re up to open the gate.’ He dabbed his mouth with a napkin. ‘That was lovely. Thanks for breakfast.’
Just before the front door he paused. ‘I want you to take some more of my infernal advice, Amber. Don’t live here on your own. Take it from someone who made the same mistake. Discussion of full details not possible. But do not live alone with all that up there.’ Josh pointed at the ceiling, towards the study. ‘And with what is up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And I am not talking about getting a cat. Is there a friend who might like a long holiday in Devon?’
A friend: the idea made her laugh unpleasantly. The closest she had to friends were the people she paid to look after her interests: Josh, her barrister, Victoria, her agent, Penelope, her researcher, Peter. Her old friends from Stoke, Bekka, Joanie and Philippa, had all sold stories to papers when the story broke through the news stratosphere and when the world developed a large rubber neck. Her relatively ordinary adolescence, troubled by an insane step-parent and the death of her father, augmented by a few flirtations with soft drugs and a couple of idiotic boyfriends, had been sifted through in as much forensic detail by the tabloids as the black stony soil of 82 Edgehill Road had been analyzed by murder squad detectives on their hands and knees; and all because of her friends.
She’d relegated her ‘friends’ to the part of her personal history she had no inclination to revisit. The fact that not one of her old friends had offered her help when she’d needed a friend most, was something she would never get past. Only Ryan had stepped up.
And look what happened to him.
Amber swallowed the lump in her throat brought on by the memory of her dead ex-boyfriend. The vivid strangeness of his presence in her dreams, and inside her home, produced a quick ripple of panic.
‘Like who?’
Josh shrugged; he could see that he needed to distract her again. ‘Don’t they call them companions, for you ladies of leisure? So get a companion. A maid. No butler because you can’t trust them around the lingerie. A housekeeper. I mean, what with all this bloody dust everywhere, don’t you need someone to keep it clean?’
She started to laugh at the preposterous suggestion. ‘A maid. I’m not sure I even believe in such a thing.’
‘A PA, if it makes you feel better. Find someone who can live in. Light duties. Bit of company. Situation immediately vacant for right candidate. There are agencies for this sort of thing. If you do find someone, I’ll check them out. I’m serious. You do not want to sleep in this house alone. Because you won’t sleep in this house. If you had your way I’d still be here at Christmas in the same clothes.’
‘I’d buy you an entire wardrobe.’
‘You could afford it too. I’ve seen the posters for your film all over the sides of the 38 bus in the West End. But I’m not house trained. Too many bad habits, and I don’t like sitting on my arse all day. Last night is all I will inflict on you.’
* * *
Amber felt like a child again, watching her mum walk away from the school gates. Her smile failed as soon as the front gate shuddered closed and Josh’s car disappeared from view. She went back inside the farmhouse, and distracted herself by attending to the dishes and wiping away the cooking oil spattered on the kitchen surfaces. While she worked in the kitchen she left the door connecting the kitchen to the garage open, so she could keep an eye on the car and the room around it, to make sure that all remained in place and as it should be, until she left the house that morning.
During the night, once she’d gathered her wits and pulled herself off the kitchen floor, just after three a.m., she’d showered, dressed and packed. Standing in the wet room and allowing the force of the water to drown out the sound of her crying in case she woke Josh, she’d realized her experience before the mouth of the garage had been similar to a psychotic reaction, or a hallucination produced by powerful drugs; conditions she had read about while researching her book with Peter St John.
But there were no drugs in her life. She constantly questioned her sanity and knew she was teeming with paranoia, insecurity, phobias, aversions, and a persecution complex that medication and therapy might one day successfully soothe, if she chose that route. And maybe her psychological trauma was still so catastrophic she was generating her own ghosts inside the farmhouse. Two psychiatrists had already told her as much, and that she may never fully recover from those nine days at 82 Edgehill Road, and should maintain a programme of structured therapy until a physician deemed it prudent t
o stop. Advice she had decided against taking once the investigation and the inquest concluded. Maybe that was another unwise decision. For a long time she had longed for a doctor or psychiatrist to categorically tell her that she was mentally ill and had imagined everything.
But she was not going to fool herself that the impossible had not returned to her life. Not now. And her connection to 82 Edgehill Road would no longer be shared with Josh or Peter St John, because neither of them would entertain her ravings.
Maybe the kind of person who claimed a special relationship with the dead – a medium or spiritualist – would engage with her. She’d just spent hours considering the option of inviting such a ‘gifted’ individual to her home, while also worrying that a medium might try and shake her down for a small fortune. Going that route also made her feel she was introducing the inauthentic to an experience she had never embellished with spiritual beliefs or superstition.
But what troubled her most since she had struggled up and off the kitchen tiles in the early hours of the morning were her thoughts of Ryan. If her impressions of the night had been correct, Ryan was not at rest, and nor were any of the victims of number 82. But not even dear Ryan, who had unwittingly sacrificed his life in an attempt to save her, was welcome here.
Ryan had been with her last night, and inside her room, at least in spirit. A presence of Ryan. Or perhaps an illusion of her ex-boyfriend that something had introduced into her home to taunt her and drive her mad. In the middle of the night, as she’d thrown clothes and toiletries into her Samsonite cases, Amber had even considered that Ryan was trying to warn her. And maybe Margaret Tolka had performed this function too, by filling the kitchen with the fragrance of perfume. Revenants that acted as sensory warnings. Beside Bennet, it was possible that was all the dead had ever tried to do at 82 Edgehill Road: warn her.
She had come across such things in her study of hauntings, but she wasn’t convinced; they hadn’t warned her last night, they had guided her downstairs. And now her confounding ignorance of why this had come back into her life had begun to feel terminal.
SEVENTY-NINE
Amber jogged upstairs to fetch her portable hard drive from the study and her laptop from the bedroom; all of her electronic files were saved to both devices.
She unlocked the study and flicked the lights on. Picked up the back-up hard drive from her desk, keeping her eyes averted from the faces and headlines plastered to the wall. The room looked like the secret chamber of an obsessive, a spy, or a stalker. And she acknowledged with discomfort that she may be all three of those things about her own history.
Amber drew the blinds to see the vista outside. Her vision swept the garden and the rolling green mounds of maize beyond the foot of the rear fence, and took in the copses of trees dotted about the land where hedgerows met at the corner of the hilly fields. The giant swelling of the ocean beyond the hills glinted in a thin line of white gold on the horizon. And within the gentle sway of row upon row of long, supple maize leaves, she picked out the presence of what she thought was a leafless tree, withered black by age or even scorched spindly by a lightning strike.
She had gazed out over these fields each morning for a week and recalled that no tree stood in the centre of this field, particularly one that suggested a direct line from itself to the rear gate of her garden.
Amber screwed up her eyes.
The thump of her heart became too noticeable and irregular between her ears. Her scalp prickled.
This was no tree.
The figure was the only black in the green sea of crops, and seemed to draw in the shadow of a passing cloud to stain dark the wide open space that circled the silhouette’s lonely vigil. This was a man. A tall man standing with his head bowed.
Amber hoped hard enough for it to feel like a prayer that this was a farm worker, or an unusual rambler studying a map. Because the indistinct head was lowered or bent over something that it seemed to be studying: an object held close to the chest and cradled like a baby. The thin, uneven silhouette of the head soon revealed itself to be close-cropped and bony by raising itself so that far off eyes could peer back at her.
Amber dropped the hard drive and only held onto her laptop by her fingertips.
She staggered away from the window to evade the piercing scrutiny of a face obscured by distance, the features seemingly blackened by soil or soot, though the figure was too far away to reveal what discoloured the flesh. The idea of the thin and unsightly sentinel being aware of her introduced a stutter to her breathing. She ducked down from the level of the window sill, backed out of the study in a crouch, and fled for her room and for what was locked inside a small aluminium case within her bedside drawer.
Amber stopped short of the bedside cabinet, pulled up hard by a better idea: take a picture.
She wrenched at her iPhone in the top pocket of her denim jacket. Ran back to the study and willed herself through the door and across the room and up to the wide window frame. Focused the camera on the field of maize, shining with sunlight and no longer concealed by passing clouds. A field now empty of anything but the crop.
EIGHTY
‘I’ve some more anecdotal stuff on Bennet senior from the children of former neighbours, and some council records of complaints about number eighty-two. But nothing earth shattering on that front.’ Peter St John turned his laptop round so Amber could see the screen. ‘I have the hard copies at home, but scanned these for you. You can take the memory stick. It’s all on there.’
Amber collected their lunch plates and stacked them on the room service trolley so they would have more space to work. Prompted to do the same, Peter arranged the coffee things. ‘Coffee? Or you staying on the wine?’
Peter’s sandy hair and thin features looked good with the new tan; his green eyes glittered like a warm sea. He’d been in Spain. A white cotton shirt and cream linen jacket further defined the impression of a well-heeled and comfortable man. A marked difference from the pale, chain-smoking journalist, pathologically anxious about money, that she’d met three years before. They may have done each other a world of good financially, but Amber now envied Peter’s effortless self-assurance, his aura of serenity.
‘Wine, thanks.’
For privacy they’d eaten in her room at the Duke. Peter had arrived in Plymouth at noon. On Monday Amber called him and mentioned problems with the farmhouse and Peter assumed the building project was unfinished.
Though their book had included as much detail about the history of 82 Edgehill Road as was available at the time of publication, as well as material uncovered during the first year of the police investigation, Peter had spent the next two years researching the building and its occupants in more detail, discovering and poring over applications for planning permission, censuses, local history, any rental agreements, tracing individuals known to have lived at the address across one hundred years. He’d even undertaken a foray into genealogy.
Peter’s fastidiousness, Amber knew, had not been down to his ingrained investigative thoroughness alone, nor was it taken to satisfy Amber’s desire for alternative theories about the house and its previous occupants. The case had become the making of Peter St John, the uniqueness of the story a vertical accelerant for his career. Four generations of murderers had lived and been active at the same address in North Birmingham, and not one of them had been brought to justice. Peter had written the definitive book about the murders and made the story his life’s work; he was the first person to be summoned by the international media, as a talking head, for any feature about, or similar to, the case. In their entire careers most journalists would never encounter such a sensational story, not to mention his exclusive access to one of two surviving cast members; the second survivor, Svetlana Lanka, spoke poor English and had long ago returned to her home country. Her official testimony about the presence of anything unnatural in the house had never been substantial. She and Margaret had not resided at the house for long either, but had both heard voices and noises in u
noccupied rooms, and even become frightened of the second floor room that Amber had spent her first two nights inside.
‘So what’s that?’ Amber asked, while peering at the official-looking form, loaded onto the laptop screen; the first document Peter wanted her to see.
‘This is one of three official complaints by neighbours in Edgehill Road about flies and a bad smell that they all cite rising from number eighty-two. The complaints match one of Harold Bennet’s frequent periods of renovation.’ Peter didn’t elaborate.
‘And these,’ he said, as he opened a new folder on the screen, ‘are new scans of court records, some Crown, of the Bennets’ respective prosecutions under The Sexual Offences Act of 1956. I’ve found others for kerb crawling, keeping a brothel, disorderly conduct at or very near the address. All new material.’
‘Supplementing what we already know.’
‘Yes, but it focuses the picture. Reveals more of the legacy. The pattern of repeat behaviour that was never perceived as being part of a bigger picture. Of something much worse. Even when some of the victims’ last known addresses were number eighty-two, connections were never made by the authorities.’
It was nothing Amber wanted to read, and a further sign they were moving in different directions. Here Peter was again, collating even more actual and anecdotal evidence of violence and dysfunction, anti-social behaviour, disturbing stories of sexual offences against women; more interminable and unpleasant accounts of what awful human beings Harold and Arthur Bennet had been. Their ghastliness explained little about what dwelled inside the building before they took up residence.
‘I do have something on Knacker too. Stories and so forth, from people who ran with him for a while.’