There was a brooding static energy emanating from everything, natural or man-made. No bird took to the treacherous sky and no sound filtered through the calm silence. Martin hesitated on the pavement and stared at his front door. He wanted to be out of the eerie weather, and any other day he would willingly take shelter within his home, but today his front door was a portal into an uncertain place and the potential for a storm far worse than the outside elements.
He prepared himself. This was the second evening he would have to face her and hide his real anguish and his deeds. Tonight would be more difficult though; she would have been home today, and he was sure that she would now suspect he was deceiving her. He had to be prepared for any reaction she might have. Tonight would be the test for his act.
Maybe she wouldn’t be waiting for him and what had happened at Ebony’s house the day before had brought everything to an end. He might never see Ivory again. As much as that pained him at least he would escape the fall that he had been warned would be his fate. Martin looked up at the house. Despite its size and familiarity his home seemed claustrophobic and menacing in the shade of the boiling grey sky. The rushing clouds hung as a low ceiling that appeared to threaten toppling the chimney pots, and flickered with yellow light. The storm was here.
The clouds sprayed their rain down in a hissing torrent that dissolved surfaces into a haze of surf and sent him running for cover, forcing him into the house. He closed and locked the front door against the deluge that had drenched him in the short distance he had had to cover. He stood in the silence and darkness of the house. He felt a presence mute him from calling for Ivory. He kept still and listened to the house for a tell-tale sound of movement. Nothing. He deposited his keys carefully and quietly on the flat top of the newel post.
The hall was shadowy and cold but all appeared as it should be. He called out to Ivory and his insides nearly disgorged after his voice onto the floor. He calmed himself and called her again. The lounge was empty. He shuddered around the exhalation of a held breath. She was not on the sofa as he had always found her at this time. Yesterday, after Ebony had informed Ivory that Martin knew about her continuing to leave his home and work the street, she had still returned to him and Martin had found her waiting in that spot on the sofa. Maybe she had been giving Martin the choice of continuing to delude himself. Today, however, she was not there. The front door was locked and he was safe from her and her world. The relief was euphoric, but he knew that after the high, the fall into longing would be quick crushing and agonising. He needed to be sure that she wasn’t there and went from room to room checking. He wrestled with hopes for her absence, and also for her presence, playing into a romantic fantasy that what had happened yesterday would cause her to come to him for help and comfort.
The backroom was empty. The kitchen was empty. He stopped. The kitchen window’s long narrow opener was open. His flesh chilled and his muscles tensed. It was the only window that could not be locked with the keys, but it was too narrow to allow anyone but the smallest of children to climb through, he ignored it and decided to check upstairs. He returned to the hall as a soft yellow light flickered through the windows and briefly lit the passage. The lightning and the grumble of thunder that followed shortly afterwards made him conscious of the dark. He flicked the light switch. The hair on his body bristled in a wave of scurrying insects. The light had not come on.
He toggled the switch on and off. He laughed at how foolish it was to be scared, but then he thought of the ‘things’ at Ebony’s house the day before and the influence of reason was lost. He could leave. Yes. He could simply unlock the door and escape the feeling of unease. But where would he go? He would have to return at some point. He couldn’t just abandon his home. He stole himself against the fear that sat at his back and whispered dark imaginings in his ears. Step after step on the stairs he repeated a mantra in his mind that his mother had taught him to recite as a child against his fear of monsters under the bed and in the wardrobe; “This is my home. I am alone but I am safe.”
The landing was devoid of windows and darker still. Martin tossed open the bathroom door in the hope that any light from outside might filter in, but what light there was had been consumed by the storm clouds. He reached in and pulled the light pull but the lights didn’t work in there either. The bathroom was empty. He peered into the shadows of the third bedroom, the office was also empty. He flung open the door on the children’s room, its unfamiliarity was disorientating for him. He hadn’t visited it very often in the last year. He knew the room should be full of rainbow colours from drawings pinned to the wall, and suggestive of childish energy with its clutter of toys, but the shade drained the life from the colours and the playthings languished neglected for days, like grim reminders of a tragedy. Ivory was not there. “This is my home. I am alone but I am safe.”
Martin’s hand rested on the door handle to the master bedroom. If Ivory would be anywhere else she would be here. It was the only other room he equated her with. He turned the handle and opened the door. His ears were assaulted by the colossal sound of the ceiling cracking open and the loft room being torn from the building. He hunched down in terror before understanding the sound was thunder. He laughed at himself but continued to pant the breaths he had lost in fright. None of the lights seemed to be working. Power cut, or cut power?
He snatched hold of an escaping breath and held onto it and stilled himself. On the tail of the rumbling sky there had been a sound. A mouse of a sound compared to the Titan sound of the thunder, but he had heard it nonetheless. “This is my home. I am alone but I am safe.” His studio was the last place he had to look. He soft footed to the stairs, ignoring a sudden urge from his bladder to empty itself. He listened. Nothing. He carefully mounted several steps and listened again. Nothing. The door at the top of the stairs was half-open. He always kept it closed to contain the pungent smell of oils and linseed. “This is my home. I am alone but I am safe.” He climbed cautiously to half-way. The sound had not repeated itself. Two-thirds of the way up the stairs his line of sight was level with the studio floor and he could see into the murky cluttered room. He hesitated and scanned the interior with his head cocked for noises. “This is my home. I am alone but I am safe.” A sound of drumming fingers tumbled against his hearing, the sound of a cat trotting on the bare boards of the loft studio. Except he didn’t have a cat.
From where Martin stood on the stairs he lunged onto the landing grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it shut and twisted the key in the lock. From behind the solid wooden door the closing drumming sound lessened then ceased, as if the thing that had made the noise had given up its sprint. He flopped onto the stairs, the key held firmly in his fist.
“This is my home. I am not alone and I am not safe.”
How did it get here? In his search for Ivory he had left all the internal doors open. The realisation pitched through his mind like a warning sign carried in a gale. He stumbled down the stairs, dashed across the landing and slammed shut every door he passed, ran down to the ground floor and closed the reception room doors on his way to the kitchen. In the kitchen he rooted around in a drawer, snatched the master key that locked all the internal doors and ran back upstairs and began to lock each door. Each one seemed too little too late. How many of those ‘things’ were here and where were they?
Pain gripped his head and he stalled with its abruptness. He massaged his temples against the stress headache and resumed his direction towards the stairs. The image of the landing and the drop of the stairs that his eyes presented to his mind scattered into billions of component pixels that shifted and dissolved. Blots of white daylight bled through the disintegrating image, he thumbed and fingered his clenched eyes, but even behind the shielding of his eyelids the light continued to eat away his vision. The house cooled. The light feel of his clothes became the heaviness he associated with wearing his coat. The silence of the house was replaced by the sound of a car passing close by him on the landing. The sound t
ransported him, seemingly physically, to the day before.
The car passed and Martin crossed the road and carefully unlatched the gate and supported the weight of it as he eased it back on its hinges so it couldn’t squeal his arrival to Ebony. The first stretch of the path was pea shingle until it reached the side of the house. Martin overcame this noisy approach by walking on the line of bricks that bordered the shabby flowerbeds and then walked on the grass until he could reach the side of the house and the start of a path of stepping stones in the gravel. He waited at the door and spent some time pressed against it listening to the insides of the house as a doctor might listen to a patient’s chest for the sounds of life. He had considered just knocking on the door to see if Ebony was home, but he didn’t want to have to talk to him again, and if he played knock-down-ginger on Ebony to see if he was home it might make Ebony jittery and more attentive to any noises that Martin might make in his trespass.
He knew it was a foolhardy plan born of desperation but he reasoned that he did not run the risk of being seen by Ebony, even if Martin did make a subtle noise that might alert him to his presence on the doorstep, all Martin would have to do was be as silent as he could until Ebony was reassured that there was no one there. Or if he was discovered, he would just need to get away without Ebony knowing who it was.
If he could reach Ivory’s key he could let himself in. Although he had never considered anything of this nature before, his conscience was only mildly disturbed. He had retrieved a sketchpad and a coat hanger from the car, he presumed the key was kept hung on the back of the front door and he could use the coat hanger he had untwisted and straightened as much as he could, to knock the key from its home onto a leaf of his pad and drag the key under the door to his side. He doubted his plan would work, but if it didn’t it saved him from the anguish of trespass.
Satisfied that he couldn’t hear anything from within the house Martin put the sketch pad and coat hanger on the step and felt along the bottom of the door. There was the narrowest crack of a gap that became fractionally wider to the middle where the wooden step of the frame had been worn away with years of trampling. The letterbox was a standard size and there was no way Martin would be able to reach his thick arm into its metal maw as Ivory had done so effortlessly. He eased the letterbox open so that its spring wouldn’t scrape or grind and he peered in at the familiar gloomy hallway. The landing and the end of the hall slumbered in shadow. All the internal doors appeared closed against any daylight the rooms might contain, but he reasoned they were also closed against any small noises Martin’s crime might make. Even with the coat hanger to extend his reach his wrist was still going to get a mauling trying to get at Ivory’s key.
Holding the letterbox open with one hand he eased his mobile phone into the gap with the other. It was difficult, as holding something changed the shape of his hand beyond the size the narrow opening would allow, and forced him to hold the phone precariously by its sides between his thumb and forefinger while keeping his hand as flat as possible. With his hand and mobile the other side he took a better grip and felt for the button that would get his phone to take a picture. He pressed it several times, taking pictures of the rear of the door at different angels before repeating the delicate manoeuvres to extract it from the letterbox. He thumbed through his phone memory until he could see the images he had captured. He looked at all the pictures and pieced them together in his mind and found he had successfully managed to get dark rough and grainy images that captured the whole door and its surrounding frame, although he couldn’t see any presence of a key.
He puffed out a sigh that deflated him. He thought he would feel glad at not being able to trespass but his findings stirred the bitter bog of resentment and frustration in the pit of his stomach. He peaked in through the letterbox again and found the key straight away. It was hanging on the front of the newel post from a small nail. The excitement shivered within him in a rush of energy despite being met by a languorous internal inertia of equal force at the realisation that the key was out of arms reach. Ivory’s arm was slender, but even at her full reach it would still be another forearm and hands length away from a teasing touch. The energy dissipated leaving behind a vacuous unease.
Abandoning his original plan Martin rooted around in the clutter of his coat pockets and searched the fistfuls of detritus, his fingers found what he wanted and he produced a battered looking money bag, he fingered it open and found it met his specifications. He set to work on the unravelled coat hanger, bending a four inch length at the end until it was in a right angle to itself and shaped it into a semi circle. He pierced the bag at one side of its opening and fed it along the wire to the beginning of the semi circle and pierced the other side of the bags opening with the end of the wire. He spread the bag open with his fingers and held his net out before him with some satisfaction.
The wire was bendy and unwieldy but after several wrong directions Martin teased the tip of the key, and gently nudged it to the head of the nail where a final jerk sent it dropping into his bag. With even more care Martin withdrew his makeshift tool, desperate to not let the key drop after doing so well. He tipped the prize into his hand and turned the gold key over in his palm with his thumb. He glanced repeatedly between the lock of the door and the key, as if he was mentally spelling out the connection between the two items to his reticent body to will it into action. This was it.
Hesitation anchored his feet to the ground. Self-anger welled beneath his conscience. He needed to see Ebony’s work to understand what it was that cost so much money. He might even find his money and retrieve it so he could afford more of Ivory’s company. If he could find evidence of drug dealing or evidence of Ebony trafficking other girls, then Martin would have something to report to the police. Ebony would be raided and if his crimes were great enough he would be imprisoned and his influence over Ivory would end.
That was all the persuasion he needed. He fed the key to the lock tooth by tooth and eased the lock round in his grip. The door came free from the jamb and he pushed it open, snaking his arm through before him to hold the handle from the other side in case it might suddenly click or sound his actions. Glancing up the path to check if he had been seen he opened the door enough to slip in and crossed the threshold.
Chapter Twenty
The sound of an exploding bomb detonated in the air around Martin, and his view of the door to Ivory’s house disintegrated and was sharply replaced with the darkness of his own landing. The sound of thunder continued to tear through the house. His eyes took a few moments to adjust to the gloom again. The temperature returned to the storm warmth and his clothes felt as they should. It was as though his mind had transported him from his home to Ivory’s house and then back again. Martin steadied himself on the banister in the aftermath of the disorientating shift into vivid memory and back to the present. He had never known memories so clear and overpowering before. Sickening guilt sat as weighted bile in his gut. He didn’t want to remember.
It had been a conscious effort to divert his thoughts and memory of yesterday into a dead end part of his mind, but the stress and trauma of the present created a shortcut to all that he repressed. He did not want to return to that house in reality or in memory. He ran down corridors of memories in his mind, twisting and turning, the rooms of his parents’ home, the galleries and museums he spent so much time in, memories of his father and mother, the registration number of his first car, faces, places and times with his friends at university, college, school, primary school, infants until the repressed was replaced with the present and the ‘things’ that he feared were waiting for him in the dark of his house.
He raced down the stairs. He would unlock the front door and secure his escape route and then lock each internal door. He would then unlock one room at a time and check it for those ‘things’. After he had searched a room he would lock it again so nothing could get past him and escape into other parts of the house. He snatched at the flat topped newel post for his door
keys and was at the front door before he registered that they were not there, the keys were gone. He checked the door in case he had uncharacteristically left them in the lock. He hadn’t. He began to doubt himself. He hadn’t gone into any of the rooms to put the keys on another surface. He tried the light, forgetting it didn’t work, and set about checking the floor in the gloom at the foot of the stairs in case he had swept the keys there in his haste. He searched his pockets, already knowing they were empty. No keys. The doors and windows were all locked.
He was trapped.
His hands quivered to his mouth then down to his sides and then to his forehead. The noise of the rain rattled against the house like a million bony fingers rapping against the glass and plastic of the door, tormenting him with the freedom of the outside world. He still had the keys for the internal doors. He would lock the doors downstairs and then smash the glass from one of the French doors in the back room. It was worth the expense to have an easy and ready escape route. He could then return to his plan of securing the rooms of the house, and get a glazier in within a matter of hours to block the broken French doors. He locked the lounge door. Pain undulated across his brain and the hallway dismantled itself into shifting shapes and colours and the invisible scene-setters in his head rearranged his location to Ivory’s hallway to the time where Martin slipped through the front door.
The point of Ebony’s staff was level with Martin’s face, Ebony stood behind it on the stairs holding it like a spear. He was a tower of strength with his feet on different steps as a firm foundation that would support him in channelling the power of his upper body into a punt of the solid shaft of wood. a blow that would most likely shatter Martin’s nose or lose him an eye. Ebony’s stern face broke around an authoritative roar: “Who dares trespass?”
Ivory Page 17