She’d just got herself together when the doorbell rang, and Alex got wearily up to answer it... She heard him open the door, and a gruff voice asked for money. There was a pause.
“But it was just here,” she heard Alex say to the window cleaner (they’d been in the house just a week and already the windows were filthy from the dust of the building site; it made Kat’s eyes itch). Had the money gone missing? She could picture the way Alex would be gesturing at the table near the front door, where he’d left the fiver that morning.
She heard Alex sigh and get out his wallet; she opened her eyes as he came back into the lounge looking baffled rather than angry. Kat relaxed slightly, even though the house was still freezing because the windows were all flung open, because of the smell of fish.
Kat had thought she’d been in a bad mood when she awoke, for it had been her first day back at work. The thought that she should count herself lucky that she had a job wasn’t much consolation. She was late (Alex had already left) and she dragged Sheba double-time around the deserted building site – it was creepy, how the sense of being completely alone could paradoxically make you feel watched too. And then the cramped bus to town, where all sense of being alone was utterly erased by the close coughs of her fellow passengers. Still bleary eyed she’d put her company ID-card around her neck, and swiped into the office. Her fellow temps had greeted her warmly, all asking about the new house. Kat had just been starting to cheer up when their manager had called them all into a meeting room.
She’d left straight after, too furious for tears. True, she was hired by an employment agency, but even though she knew that they could get rid of her with a day’s notice it didn’t mean that they should... After a year working there! The fact that the manager had been given notice himself didn’t dull her anger, but made it more unfocused, more diffused, for there was no human face to be angry at, no words to argue with. Just the sense of the big machinery of the economy faltering and grinding somewhere, making internal adjustments for the benefits of the financiers and shareholders, which had resulting in her being spat out... She thought of cog-wheels turning high above her, their aloof motion turning other wheels, and those wheels still others; and did whatever was turning the big wheels even know what effect they had down at her level?
She called her employment agency, but there was no employment to be had. They’d been many companies ‘downsizing’ recently, and the agency had more temps on their books than there were jobs available. She realised she still had the damn company swipe-card hung around her neck, and tore it off and stuffed it in her jacket pocket.
It wasn’t until she got home that she started to cry – the new, expensive house around her seemed like a trap. And making it worse was the fact that Kat knew her misery was mispriced, over-inflated. For they could still pay the bills, on Alex’s new salary. The loss of her job meant she was crying over the fact that there would be no foreign holidays this year; no wine when they felt like it but only on special occasions – she was crying over losses such as these when if she turned on the TV or picked up a paper people would be losing their homes, their hopes and businesses... Kat had a brief, guilty image of legions of stick-thin white figures creeping into the abandoned housing estate.
“Oh Sheba,” she said, hugging the dog to herself. Alex wouldn’t be home for hours yet; she supposed she could no longer begrudge him working late to make his new job a success, because now they really needed it to be.
When Alex did get back she told him, and his face was very stiff and calm, as if concentrating on not flinching from a blow. He seemed very slow in absorbing the fact and its ramifications; he sat sunk into himself and didn’t look at her. And that was when Kat has started to cry again, alone in the kitchen starting dinner. She’d ran upstairs to the privacy of the bathroom, and it was when she was trying to sort out her makeup in the mirror that the smoke-alarm had started to shriek, and she realised she’d left the salmon under the grill. And she’d come out the bathroom and their house was already starting to stink of fish, and Sheba was howling at the alarm, and Alex was shouting why the hell did she let that happen, and she’d started to cry again, new trails on her fresh mascara.
She’d calmed down now, although her eyes still felt fuzzy and sore. Alex came and sat next to her and gave her the hug she’d needed all day; but she could feel his head turning, his eyes casting around the room for the missing money. But she didn’t say anything, for she suddenly thought how all the windows were all wide open (which was her fault) and of the skinny, fleeing figure of the squatter she had seen the other day. Could he have crawled in, taken the money somehow? You heard about such things but...
“I’ll take the dog for a walk,” she said to Alex. “Calm me down. Come on girl.”
***
There was more mist on the building site, curling like long arms around the incomplete silhouettes of the houses. Wasn’t it unusual, Kat thought, for there to be so much mist at night? But she was a city girl, and didn’t really know. Had there been a bog or marsh on this site before? She’d not properly read the surveys they’d signed, but there had been something... – no buildings before, just some bog-land no one had previously thought profitable to develop. “And they were probably right,” she said to Sheba, looking around at the unfinished buildings. There was something sinister and almost gothic about them tonight, a sense of age they had no right to.
Now she felt guilty about jumping to conclusions about the squatter and the missing money – just because people were poor and homeless didn’t make them criminals. She could almost hear Alex’s counter argument: well, statistically they are more likely to be... And hadn’t she made the same kind of assumptions as Alex would have, and wasn’t she out here in the dark to look for evidence to confirm those assumptions?
“Or refute,” she said to Sheba, “or refute.” She could at least be honest and admit she wasn’t taking the dog for a walk for the animal’s benefit, for the dog was following her reluctantly, and sticking close to her heels rather than pulling ahead.
When they reached the grassy area she let the dog off the lead, and watched Sheba trudge round, mark her territory against one of the newly planted saplings, and come quickly back. Kat was shivering as she fitted the lead back to Sheba’s collar.
It came out of the corner of her vision – a white figure dashing across the grass towards a terrace of unfinished houses. It was undoubtedly the same person, for Kat recognised the odd, loping gait, the painful thinness (when did he last eat? she thought). The figure moved with a surprising speed, and she realised that he wasn’t so hunched as she’d first thought, it was just that his stick-thin arms were so long that they almost hung to his knees. Is that even possible, she thought, is he deformed in some way? And she imagined those long, white arms reaching through the open windows of her house, and she shivered.
“Hey!” she called after the figure. “Hello!” She was distantly aware of Sheba straining at the leash and she tightened her grip. The figure turned its head in response to her cry, but didn’t stop running. It reached the row of houses it had been aiming for, and seemed to vault through the window of one. Kat flinched at the thought of breaking glass, but of course the window-frames were bare. Once in the house the figure quickly moved away from the window and out of sight. The building site seemed as empty and quiet as before, the only movement being the faint drift of the mist.
“Jesus,” Kat said, relaxing. As she did so she loosened her grip on Sheba’s lead, and with a sudden growl the dog was away from her, running across the patchy grass with the lead trailing behind, directly towards the window which the figure had disappeared into.
“Sheba, no! Sheba!” Kat cried, then ran after the unheeding dog. She remembered the dog’s restlessness and barking the other night when something had been at the bins. But that had been foxes, Alex had said so. And after all, people didn’t raid bins did they, not even if they were really hard up? But you’ve never been hard up, she told herself in a dif
ferent voice, how would you even know?
Sheba reached the window-frame before Kat was even halfway to the house, but fortunately she was a small dog and couldn’t jump through; instead she was up on her hind legs, front paws against the bricks, barking furiously at the empty window above her. Out of breath Kat reached the dog, dropped to her knees and hurriedly grabbed for the lead. “Sheba be quiet!” she whispered. The poor squatter was probably cowering inside, a young runaway scared that the residents of this estate siced their dogs on strangers. She just wanting to drag Sheba back home and sit down with a drink. As she straightened she glanced at the window that the dog was still fixated on. A face glanced back at her.
She recoiled with a cry that sounded loud in the silence. The face was a sick, drained colour, hairless except for a few wispy tuffs, even the thin lips white. The bone structure was prominent beneath the thin skin, and even though Kat could see eye sockets, there were no eyes... Nevertheless she could sense the thing’s attention move from the yapping dog to her. Its mouth dropped open and the red of its gums and thick tongue was livid in contrast to the paleness of the rest of it. Kat was reminded, simultaneously, of the staring TV faces of those caught in a famine, and of those white fish trapped in lightless cave lakes eons ago, which lost their sight and colour.
The face seemed to try to speak but its tongue was so thick in its mouth it couldn’t; all that emerged was a choking, coughing sound. Its choking had the rhythm of lost speech, without the sense.
Kat tried to back away, but Sheba was still growling and pulling forward with all her strength. Kat fell on her behind and almost lost hold of the dog lead again; she imagined Sheba rushing to the window and those long, white arms reaching out, grabbing the small dog and pulling her into the empty blackness of the house... But she held onto the lead, and kicked herself backwards a few feet, and then the face in the window-frame was gone.
“What..?” she said out loud, unaware she was speaking.
She got to her feet, distantly surprised at her own calmness, and at the calm and silence all around her. Only Sheba was still frantic. She started back home, dragging the dog behind her. Already what had happened didn't seem quite real.
How could she tell Alex about what had happened? If she told the truth he wouldn’t believe her, and she could imagine him using it against her writing: “You spend too much time in your head, you’re imagining things, you need to get out and get a decent job while you’re young...” He’d only value her writing if it ever paid the bills, she realised, and value it only at that amount. She wished she could make some quick money of her own to show him, to get him off her back for a little while...
She stopped suddenly, and looked back into the mist behind her. And maybe she just didn’t want to think too directly about what had happened (the white face, the choking mouth); maybe it was just a product of shock, but when she spoke to the dog to hurry her along, her voice was no longer calm, but oddly expectant.
***
“I don’t have to get up early, I don’t have a job remember?” Kat said, covering her eyes against the sudden light. Alex was blundering around in the en-suite bathroom – an en-suite had been on their ‘list’ when looking for a new home, although now Kat didn’t know why.
“You won’t get a job unless you get out of bed,” Alex said from the bathroom.
“Don’t shout, there’s no need to shout!” Kat shouted.
“It’s not my fault you stayed up until...” she heard Alex, mutter, but she chose to ignore it. After all, tonight when he came back things might be different. She did love him, obviously, but it would be nice to prove the know-it-all wrong sometimes.
She wasn’t thinking about what she was going to do, just the happy consequences afterwards.
She feigned sleep until she heard the front-door close, then immediately got up and dressed. She would shower afterwards. Her eyes felt numb with tiredness, so after a quick coffee she got her camera (annoying she still couldn’t find the torch), grabbed her keys, and headed to the front-door. Sheba followed hopefully, but Kat remembered the way the dog had reacted to the white figure – Sheba would just be a hindrance. She'd walk her when she got back.
Outside, she shivered in the early morning chill. She could hear the faint sounds of the rush hour, but these faded as she headed into the deserted building site. For once the day was clear of mist, and her head felt clear with purpose.
She put her hands in her jacket pockets to warm them, and found something in one of them. It was the swipe-card from the company which had fired her – she must have put it in her pocket without realising. Stupid bastards hadn’t even asked for it back. She briefly thought of returning, of the revenge she could reap. But all her fantasies were petty; this was the better revenge, for how much would photographs of that...thing... be worth to the tabloids? As much as that place had paid her in a week? A month? A year? Enough to show them, anyway. Enough too, she decided, to give her leeway not to work for six months, to really concentrate on her writing... Alex wouldn’t be able to say anything, it would be her money. New ideas would come, she was sure, if she had time to herself. “No such thing as writer’s block really,” she said aloud.
Kat started her search in the grassy area where she’d first seen the figure appear. She followed the route she guessed it must have taken; but the ground seemed too hard for footprints. She peered into the glassless window from which it had stared at her. She could see the dark outlines of something that might one day be finished and habitable. There was debris scattered all over the floor, but it looked like evidence of untidy builders rather than squatters; rather than something living there. And there was a strange musty smell, but she couldn’t photograph that. She almost gave up and went home, but the thought of Alex flopping himself on the couch that night, and pointedly asking her what she’d done all day stopped her. Kat climbed through the window-frame of the unfinished house, and lowered herself carefully to the floor.
Her eyes hadn’t adjusted and they itched in the dark, but she took a few, cautious, steps. Although it got darker as she moved away from the window-frames, the layout of the house was identical to the one she and Alex had bought, a tumbledown version of their own home. She was standing in what was going to be the living room, but at the moment its wooden innards were exposed; wires hung loose in bunches from holes in the walls; everywhere dust motes turned and drifted. There was an abandoned builder’s helmet in one corner, a pile of wooden beams on the floor, and a single chocolate bar wrapper. Kat tried to move quietly but the uncarpeted floor creaked at every step. She moved through the doorframe, to the hall – the staircase wasn’t finished, there was no way of getting upstairs. There was even less light here (the only source being the space in the front door where the letter box would go) and Kat’s eyes strained against the gloom. Maybe they were adjusting, for she saw something small and bright red on the floor. Recognising it, she stooped to pick it up, feeling oddly troubled by the coincidence.
It was an ID swipe-card, with a clip to attach it to a shirt pocket. Kat recognised the company logo – they had got rid of nearly a quarter of their staff about three months ago. There was a name (Jason Holmes) and an overexposed photograph of the unsmiling employee: male, small eyed, thinning hair, wan skin...
“Now don’t be silly,” Kat said out loud. But it was true; the photograph did look somewhat like the face that had peered at her from this very house the previous night. True, but surely ridiculous, for there was a whole world of difference between this guy’s admittedly poorly looking face, and the sick, pallid thing that had gabbled its nonsense at her the other night. Why, that face hadn’t even had eyes!
There were marks in the dust where the ID card had been, like Jason Holmes had torn it from his shirt and thrown it in the corner. When he got fired, she thought to herself. Yet why would he have been here in the first place, in this as yet to be occupied house? She had always been too imaginative, and she imagined the scene again: Jason Holmes, red eyed, t
earing the swipe-card from his breast, and throwing it in the corner of the unfinished house which he had been going to buy, but now couldn’t afford... And then sitting in a dusty corner, rubbing the palms of his hands against his itchy eyes. Kat threw the swipe-card down in the dust herself; she was tempted to do the same with her own but kept it in her pocket.
The house creaked around her, no doubt not used to being occupied; there were even creaking sounds from the inaccessible top floor.
Kat stifled a sneeze; the dust was getting to her nose, and throat. Her thoughts of just a few seconds earlier already seemed ridiculous – there was no connection between Jason Holmes and the face she had seen. People didn’t just become other things. Whatever the creature she was looking for was, it was some creature created like that, some throwback or undiscovered... thing. In truth, she hadn’t really speculated beyond the financial possibilities.
“He’s just some poor unemployed sod,” she said, still thinking of Jason Holmes. She passed beneath the space where the staircase should be, the creaking floorboards hiding any other sounds. Was she talking to herself because she was scared? She laughed nervously to herself (more nervously than she’d intended) unaware of the long, white arms reaching down from the first floor towards her.
***
Alex arrived home bone tired. He worked late every day but hadn’t told Kat why; he’d lost his ‘new job’ almost as soon as gaining it (“last in, first out,” the management has said). As a consequence his redundancy payment had been meagre, but Alex had assumed he’d find another job easily enough. It had been a month before the move. So why, he had reasoned, pull out of buying their new house and lose their deposit?
And he hadn’t told Kat – he had tried, that first evening, but the words hadn’t come. And to tell her after that first opportunity would also mean telling her why he hadn’t told her before, and that he didn’t know.
The Other Room Page 5