While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  Zoe jammed her finger on the button, cutting him off. Fuck him. Not a word about Caleb; only that imperious, schoolteacher tone he had taken to using with her lately, that implied he knew best in all things, and it was all for her own good. He had no idea – how could he, when he wouldn’t listen – what that medication had been doing to her head, how muddled and disturbing it had made her thoughts, how it had affected her sleep. He could not know how liberating it had felt to leave the pills behind, and with them the blunt-edged, stifled person she had become. Here, on the other side of the ocean, she had determined that she would be free of them, she would face the world without that layer of cladding, like sodden wool, that muffled all her feelings, so that she no longer trusted her own responses. She had known she would likely feel a little strange for the first few days; that was to be expected, but it was a small price to pay, and she was coping, wasn’t she? She was coping fine. It was only the broken nights affecting her. And to give her mother the number here, to give her an entry to her sanctum – that was an unforgivable betrayal. He must have known how she would feel about that; but as always it was couched in the language of concern. She pressed her fists to her temples. Why was it so hard to make them all understand that she wanted time away, on her own, without their needs and their fussing? Why was her desire for solitude such a threat to them? She could understand how Ailsa must have felt out here, a century and a half earlier, fending off interference from her brother, the minister, the solicitor, the villagers, all the men telling her to doubt her own sanity, wanting to bring her autonomy under their control.

  Anger had displaced Zoe’s earlier fear; she turned away from the answerphone on its polished table and strode out towards the kitchen, holding her phone up so that its wavering beam could illuminate the end of the corridor. She could not call and speak to Caleb now without first confronting Dan, and she couldn’t face that yet, but there was always the capricious McBride network; if it appeared again, she could try Skyping Caleb. He might be able to talk to her without Dan’s knowledge.

  A message flashed up on her phone screen to indicate low battery. Her pulse kicked, but she was sure she had enough left to keep the flashlight app working while she found the storm lantern. Directing the light straight ahead meant leaving the floor immediately before her in darkness; she had not taken more than two steps when her boot struck a soft, fleshy object underfoot. She felt it give with an unpleasant crunch and jerked the beam down; at the sight, she let out a yelp and stumbled back in horror. It was the body of the juvenile seagull Edward had killed – at least, she assumed it was the same one, its wings spread out in a stiff parody of flight. Its head was missing. The flesh around the neck had turned stringy and blackened where it had been severed.

  Zoe froze, staring, a pulse thudding in her throat. She put a hand out to the wall, fearing that her legs might not hold. After the initial revulsion, a colder, infinitely more frightening realisation dawned: someone had placed the bird there deliberately. Meaning someone had been inside the house while she was out. Meaning, perhaps, they could still be here. She held her breath, straining for a sound, but there was only the fierce gusting of the wind and the incessant cries of the gull outside. She stood for what felt like minutes, unable to move in any direction, rigid with fear, and perhaps would have remained there if her phone had not smoothly shut itself down, plunging the house into complete darkness. The shift brought her back to herself. She could make a dash for the front door, jump in the car, drive back to the village, wake Mick or Charles or Edward, let them know there had been a break-in, ask one of them to return with her or notify the police. She glanced back at the entrance hall, now coldly lit by the moon through the narrow windows either side of the front door. But that would involve a drive back across the moor, and she could not shake the image of that figure in its cloak wandering out there. Suppose she stalled the car again in her panic, and couldn’t restart it, out there, with no phone? No: better to call Mick from here; she could reasonably justify it now, with the gull. But Mick and Kaye’s number was in the folder with all the information about the house, and she had left that in the kitchen. She had no note of Edward’s number except in the memory of her phone, which she could not now charge with the power down. Even if she managed to call Mick, it would take him at least twenty minutes to reach her, and before she could do anything, she was going to have to venture through the house in search of a light – and some kind of makeshift weapon.

  Skirting the bedraggled corpse, she began to feel her way with tentative steps along the passage that led to the kitchen, half-fearing the further discovery of the bird’s head, pausing at every step to listen for sounds of movement elsewhere. There was no sound but the wind and the now-familiar creak and shift of old timbers. Her eyes began to grow accustomed to the dark; as she progressed, she tried to muster her thoughts into a logical sequence, only to find the voice of her fear countering every rational argument. It could have been a cat, she told herself. But where would a cat have come from, out here? And how could it have got inside? She tried to recall whether she could have left the back door unlocked, or the French doors in the drawing room, but she was so tired, it was growing harder to pinpoint memories with any clarity; she dredged up an image of turning the key in the lock, but could not be sure it belonged to that day. Every attempt to calm her own fears led back to the same, dreadful probability: that someone had been in the house, that they wanted to frighten her, that they quite possibly wished her harm. It struck her that there might not be a power cut at all, that whoever had been in the house – might still be in the house – had cut the electricity deliberately. At this thought her strength failed and she fell against the wall, snatching for breath that would not come, her legs turned to dough beneath her, telling herself over and over that she had watched too many movies. Everything else that had happened in the house since she had arrived could be explained away as tricks of a fraught mind: sleeplessness, stress, her period, even – though she hated to admit it – withdrawal from the meds she had recklessly abandoned. But the beheaded gull in the hall was indisputably real, and the concrete threat it implied pushed all stories of ghosts and night-demons from her mind.

  She edged open the kitchen door; it let out a long, ratcheting creak. Breathing hard, she faltered in the doorway, unwilling to take a step inside in case someone was waiting there to ambush her. When nothing happened, she shook herself briskly and threw the door back so that it banged against the wall and revealed the room empty, patterned with milky light through the diamond-paned windows at either end. She found, to her great relief, a small but powerful flashlight in the dresser drawer, which she propped up while she busied herself lighting the hurricane lamp, her hands trembling so badly that she spilled paraffin over the work top. The homely glow of the lantern, when the flame took, restored a calm of sorts, though even in here she could discern that faint smell of decay. She checked the back door to the veranda and confirmed that it was still firmly locked, the key secure on its hook. Then she took down the folder from the dresser and turned its laminated sheets, with all Kaye’s carefully printed local maps, marked with walks and sites of interest, until she found the page with their emergency numbers. It was only as she picked up the storm lantern to make her way back to the telephone that she noticed her sketchbook open on the table. She was sure she had put it away safely after Edward had picked it up the other night, to stop him leafing through it. But the picture on the open page looked unfamiliar; she reached across and pulled the book into the light.

  The drawing facing her was not one of her own. It was a crude pencil sketch, the figures no more than stick-people, such as a child might draw, but what it showed was unmistakable. At the top of the page, wavy horizontal lines suggested the sea. Below them, the figure of a woman, naked, her breasts and pubic hair crudely outlined, her arms reaching toward the surface with vertical lines rising upward from her head to show her hair rippling above her like weed under the water. Her eyes were round circl
es, her mouth stretched wide in a dark scream. Below her, at the bottom right-hand corner of the page, another figure, its hand reaching up from the depths and grasping her ankle. The face was barely visible, but suggested a death’s head grimace with a malicious smile.

  Zoe pushed the book away, almost dropping the lantern, the same cold cramps wringing her gut. This was meant to be her, there could be no doubt about it. Whoever drew this had seen what happened on the beach, with Edward; her foolish swim, her near-drowning. Someone had been watching her that day. It was an attempt to frighten her, as Edward had said; they had broken into the house and left the drawing and the dead gull to scare her off. She thought again about Dougie and Annag driving back across the moors, away from the coast – what else was there along this road except the house? Could they have been here? The naked spite on the girl’s face whenever she saw Zoe suggested she would be entirely capable of such tricks, but Dougie’s motive was harder to imagine; perhaps a wish to make her feel vulnerable, so that she would be more receptive to his attentions, grateful for his presence? Even so – even so, she thought, her mind racing – how could they have known about the hand? How could anyone have seen what she had felt, underwater?

  She grabbed up the lantern and the folder and dashed back along the passage to the entrance hall, where she dialled Mick and Kaye’s number with shaking fingers. It rang for a long time before she heard Kaye’s sleepy voice murmur, ‘Stag, hello?’ in her ear. She was about to speak when a sound interrupted her from the kitchen; she froze to listen and recognised the familiar space-age bing-bong of an incoming Skype call. Dropping the receiver in its cradle, she ran back to the kitchen, all fear driven from her mind by the thought of Caleb.

  Her laptop stood open on the table, though she was sure she had closed it before she left; she rushed to accept the call and in an instant the sight of her boy’s dear face eclipsed everything. He looked pale and anxious; her heart swelled to see him.

  ‘Mommy?’ His voice sounded distant, muffled. ‘When are you coming?’

  ‘Soon, sweetie. I’ll be back before you know it.’ Then, because she felt she owed him more than that: ‘You know Mommy’s just having a little vacation. To help me get better. Because I was sick, you remember?’ He did not reply; only continued to blink at her with his serious dark eyes. She willed the connection not to fail now. ‘Mommy and Daddy have to think about a few things, honey, and sometimes it’s easier to do that if one of you goes to a different place, so you don’t end up fighting.’ No, that was too much. She forced a smile. ‘But everything’s going to be OK, I promise. Where are you? Are you hiding under the covers?’ She could not identify the background; it was dark, the white of his skin stark against it. His eyes seemed to have moved away from her face, though it was hard to tell with the delay on the picture. ‘Don’t let Daddy catch you, he’ll be mad,’ she whispered, trying for a conspiratorial tone, wanting to make him laugh, but Caleb was looking past her. His eyes had grown wider, his face rigid, jaw clenched. ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ she asked gently. ‘Caleb?’

  ‘Mommy?’ His voice emerged from the speaker, small and fearful.

  ‘What is it, baby?’ She leaned closer to the screen.

  He paused, as if unwilling to speak.

  ‘I don’t like that person behind you.’

  She whipped around to find the kitchen empty, sunk in flickering shadows cast by the flame of the hurricane lamp. ‘Caleb? Who did you see?’ She heard the rising panic in her own voice. ‘There’s no one here.’ But the screen froze; his face fractured and vanished and only her own hollow-eyed reflection stared back at her. She clicked frantically on the Wi-Fi icon but it showed no available networks; she snapped the cover shut and laid her hands flat on it, as if to keep his last words trapped inside.

  She lost track of how long she sat at the table in a state of paralysis, rocking slightly and staring at her hands, unable to raise her head for fear of what she might see in the room or reflected in the dark windows. Fear had rendered her mute, incapable of movement; all her whirling thoughts reduced to one: who – or what – had Caleb glimpsed in the room with her? The stirring of a shadow cast by the wavering lamplight, or a real figure? All around her the house guarded its silence, while outside the wind chased around the eaves with increasing menace. She wanted Edward there, or even Dan, but most of all she wanted Caleb: his lithe, warm body in her lap, anchoring her; his head tucked under her chin, the familiar smell of his hair. She ached for him so urgently that she felt her face contort from the sheer pain of it, though the tears would not fall.

  She should never have come here. The brief contact with her son had unmoored her, tugged memories loose; the whole purpose of her flight to the island now appeared foolish, self-indulgent. Charles was right: there were things you could not outrun. She should go back. Tomorrow, she would call Dan, admit she was wrong, change her flight.

  A sound from the hallway roused her; in her stupefied state, it took her a moment to realise that the phone was ringing. She hesitated briefly before grabbing up the poker from the kitchen range in one hand and the lantern in the other. There was no sign of anyone in the corridor; she averted her eyes from the dead gull and reached for the phone, hoping it might be Kaye returning her earlier, aborted call, understanding that something was wrong. There was always a chance, she thought, as she set down the lantern and picked up the receiver, that it could be her mother, but even her voice might seem oddly comforting right now.

  ‘Hello?’

  She thought she heard a woman greet her by name, but the words were buried under a rush of interference on the line, as if the person on the other end were speaking on a cell phone outside in the gale. This segued into a slow, rhythmic static, like the turning of an old gramophone record after the music has ended.

  ‘Hello?’ Zoe repeated. She was about to hang up when the singing began.

  It was the same voice as the first night: thin and sick with sorrow and longing, cracking on the high notes, almost whispering on the low, the ancient guttural language hissing in her ear. She listened in disbelief, half-wondering if it could be a crossed line, until the song grew fainter and, as it faded, a woman said, low and clear:

  You won’t take what’s mine.

  In the instant before she dropped the receiver, Zoe registered, with a detached curiosity, that the voice had spoken in the local language, but that she had understood the words perfectly.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ She snatched the lantern and ran up the stairs, holding the poker out in front, her only thought to lock herself into her bedroom and hide there. From what, she could hardly articulate; she no longer knew if the blind fear that constricted her throat and hammered in her chest was of a real intruder or the voices in the house, in her head. It’s not real, she told herself, followed by another thought, almost calm: I’m going crazy. She was about to open the door to her room when another sound cut through the wind’s roar.

  It began as a woman’s scream: sudden and sharp, followed by another. As Zoe listened, pinned to the spot, she realised, with a flush of blood to her face, what she was hearing. These were unmistakably the abandoned cries of a woman in the throes of her climax, the noises of extreme pleasure at the very edge of pain tearing from her throat, the very sounds Zoe had made during those wild dreams when she had sleepwalked to the gallery. The screaming came from beyond the upper landing, from the direction of the turret room; she craned her neck up but could see nothing in the blackness. The hairs prickled along her arms; she found herself unwillingly mesmerised by the sounds, caught in an uneasy mixture of guilt and arousal. As the woman appeared to approach her fever pitch, a subtle change in the tone of her cries caused Zoe to realise, with dawning horror, that she was no longer moaning in pleasure but in real pain, or terror. It was not her imagination this time; a woman was up there, and she was being hurt. Zoe took the next set of stairs two at a time, poker in hand, and rattled the handle of the turret room. It appeared locked, as it had on the night when she
first heard the song, and she might have given up then if she had not heard, beneath the woman’s wild screaming, another sound, the desperate voice of a child:

  Mother! Mother, stop!

  Zoe rammed her shoulder against the door, wrenching at the handle until it gave suddenly, flinging her forward into the dark of the spiral staircase. She hesitated, one foot on the bottom step, her nerve failing; the cries continued, though strangely they seemed quieter and further away now that the door was open. Moonlight filtered down from the windows above. She climbed the stairs, shaking with adrenaline, to find the room empty. Turning slowly full circle, she peered with the lantern held out to see under the wooden shelf that ran around the observatory, but she knew there was nowhere for anyone to hide here. Wind shook the glass in its frames; she crossed to the window and looked out across the beach to see the marram grass pinned flat to the sand like a crouching animal, while towering waves smashed in plumes of white spray against the rocks at the foot of the cliff. On a pinnacle of roof immediately below her stood a black-backed gull uttering relentless, urgent screams.