In the Spider's House

by Sarah Diamond

  She broke off for a second, inhaling deeply. I could see the glint of tears in her eyes. ‘But I never meant to hurt you, Anna. Never in a million years. When I threw that stone tonight, I could see that the lights were off, I knew you were in bed. All I wanted was to scare you, stop you finding out about me before you found out too much. It was just a matter of time, I knew that. If you carried on with your research, you’d end up putting two and two together, and…’

  Her gaze moved to the faux Tiffany lamp on the table. The silence between us stretched out interminably. ‘We’ve talked about so much together,’ she said quietly, ‘you remind me so much of myself, sometimes. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you, Anna—we’ll still be friends? You’re the only person in this village who really understands me. Does finding out who I really am change so much?’

  I stood and looked at her, a sense of numbness fading fast. All the horror I should have felt at first came crashing in out of nowhere. The idea that I’d trusted this woman implicitly, almost loved her; it was as though I’d disturbed a stone in a beautiful, familiar garden, discovered pallid, freakish, alien things trundling blindly here and there. A sudden wave of instinctive revulsion came over me as I remembered the morning I’d helped bury Socks. I couldn’t hide that revulsion; I could feel it in every line of my face, hear it in my voice as I spoke.

  ‘It does,’ I said quietly. ‘It changes everything. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.’

  Her face was at once expressionless and utterly tragic. Slowly, she rose from the table and went over to the counter, where she stood with her back to me. I could see her rounded shoulders shaking slightly, understood she was crying without making a sound.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I really am sorry.’

  The broad pink dressing-gowned back betrayed nothing, now. It was then that Donald Hargreaves’ voice came back to me, from a quiet and civilized office a thousand miles away. The threat of personal revelation, he’d said, betrayal by a loved one. Those are her triggers. And it was in that moment of vertiginous knowledge that she turned, and I saw the madness in Rebecca’s eyes as she grabbed a six-inch butcher’s knife from the wooden block by the spice racks.

  I moved before I’d made any conscious decision to do so—pure survival instinct hot-wired my nervous system and I was out of the kitchen, in the hallway, hammering barefoot up the stairs. I could hear her behind me, and my terror made the split-second decision between all the doors on the landing. I darted into the bathroom maybe three feet ahead of her and slammed the door behind me just in time, sliding the bolt to.

  The bathroom was in virtually absolute darkness, and the thin moonlight that slanted in through the window showed me nothing but dark, indistinct shapes. I could feel my heartbeat pounding all the way through me; it seemed to be in my mind, my mouth, my ears, even my bloodstream. Behind it, there was nothing but the sound of beating at the door. It wasn’t the kind of beating that implied an urgent let me in. It was the kind that attempted to force an entrance.

  I stood stock-still, feeling exactly what adrenaline hadn’t let me feel on the way upstairs—the blank helplessness of something frozen in headlights. The bolt on the door wasn’t strong, the small brass type that a housewife with no specific DIY knowledge could easily fit herself; fitted simply so you could call out a sheepish sorry when you turned the handle and the door didn’t open. A bolt that was about politeness far more than security, that had never been designed to keep out a killer.

  The insanity in those eyes—that memory destroyed my caught-in-headlights feeling in a second. Snapping the light on, I looked wildly round the room for anything that could help me. Brass towel rails, clean, fluffy, pastel-coloured towels, wicker laundry basket. Shiny, pale tiles underfoot. Above the gleaming washbasin, the window faced out onto the back garden, but it was far too small for me to climb through, would have been too small for an exceptionally skinny child of ten. Even if I’d been able to, it was a first-floor window in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to climb down on the other side. The latticed glass showed me two pictures at once; a sharp image of this tidy, crowded bathroom, and the black misty nothing outside that acted as its screen.

  Call for help? There was no point, I realized, there was nobody for miles around. We were on our own here, just as we’d always been. Then, a deafening crash from the door brought two things home to me at once. She was trying to break the door down with something large and heavy. And the door had given slightly. The dainty, discreet little bolt was now bulging inwards, a tiny change in its angles that made all the difference in the world.

  That butcher’s knife. The eyes and the expression that Eleanor Corbett must have seen in her final moments.

  My eyes scanned for something heavy, any makeshift potential weapon. They fixed on the ornate rack that formed a wrought-iron bridge across the bath. It was an unusual and beautiful item, perhaps antique—I prayed that it was, that it wouldn’t have the false weight of the birdbaths you could buy from garden shops which looked like stone from a distance but were light enough for a child to lift. I picked it up, bottles of shampoo and bath foam and deodorant spray scattering in every direction, some smashing open on the underfoot tiles. I’d been right: the rack was as heavy to the hand as to the eye.

  I stood pressed up against the wall next to the door. It would give way at any second, I thought, and was right—at last the bolt gave with a groaning pop, unbroken but no longer anchored to the wall. Rebecca came in. I saw she’d been using a side table from the landing to assist her entrance, and she pushed it to one side in the fraction of a second that her gaze flickered round the room.

  She caught a glimpse of me by the wall just in time to lash out as I was raising the wrought-iron rack over my head and preparing to bring it down. The knife in her hand flashed upwards in the light—I screamed, and my free arm went up to block it. The knife slid in above my elbow, slicing up my forearm. In that same instant, I brought the rack down with all the strength I could muster, every element of my mind contracted in self-preservation before I even had time to register that I’d been wounded.

  It was a lucky blow. Rebecca collapsed on the ground like a sack filled with something loose, heavy and inanimate. There was a sharp click as her head hit the tiles.

  I stood staring down at her limp, unmoving body in horror. And as the seconds passed, I became gradually aware of the blood pumping from my arm, from the cut that was far deeper than I’d thought at first, fat scarlet drops plinking on the tiles an inch from Rebecca’s face.

  I realized I was crying.

  EPILOGUE

  I’M STILL INFINITELY confused by my memories of events immediately following Rebecca Fisher’s death, as though I’d experienced them while drugged or cataclysmically drunk. Not blurred memories, but huge black areas empty as outer space—the kind of memories you knew would never be recalled by a random mental trigger, the kind that are lost for good as surely as unsaved data on a computer.

  But I can recall some things. Images I can see illuminated in separate flashes, so a picture seems to explode into being before vanishing almost instantly; like a flashbulb going off in a dark room, showing you floodlit details for an eye-watering nanosecond. That’s how I remember them, anyway. I don’t know quite how I saw them at the time.

  An image of a telephone on a table, in a bedroom I’d never been into before. On the outskirts of my vision, a half-recognized impression of ornaments and pictures, the dull gleam of a brass bedstead under the center light; rumpled bedclothes, tangled sheets. My blood-streaked hand lifting the receiver. The pale apricot-coloured towel wrapped round my arm, slowly darkening to red. Wondering whether to call the ambulance or the police first. Deciding on the ambulance.

  The flash illuminates a moment of my disjointed, hysterical account spilling out into the receiver, words becoming intricate, difficult, foreign. The patient, dubious voice down the line turning alert at my mention of the word dead. The towel round my arm far more red than apricot,
now. A dizzy feeling, the world swimming past me, away from me.

  The flash illuminates the scene through the open bathroom door as I walk unsteadily past it. Tiles streaked and spotted with my blood, toiletries everywhere. Conflicting smells of spilt shampoo and bubble bath and conditioner—a provincial chemist-shop smell, grotesquely incongruous with the sight of Liz unmoving on the tiles. A conscious thought caught in the flash with that image, as I look in. Not Liz. Rebecca. Rebecca.

  Blue flashing lights through the frosted-glass door panel. The urgency of the voices around me as the colors begin to drain out of everything. A paramedic with sandy-blond hair and a dark red birthmark dripping down one cheek. The unearthly dawn of a summer morning as the ambulance arrives at Bournemouth Hospital.

  The wound wasn’t as serious as it looked, but I still needed ten stitches in my arm. There would always be a scar. I was lucky it was in a place where my clothes would cover it ninety percent of the time. That was what the nurses told me, when the frenetic Casualty busyness was over and the world was quiet again, the nurses who came and went in a misty, dreamlike, seemingly unending gavotte.

  I’d been put in a private room. I sensed that was more for the police’s convenience than my own. Two of them came to sit by my bed and ask me questions, and I answered with some distant part of my mind still drifting in and out of reality. They were polite, pleasant, concerned; it was a terrible thing that had happened, they hated to ask me questions at this time. But they needed to know…I told them the full story, because I wasn’t sure what else I could do.

  When they’d gone, one of the nurses showed Carl in. He was pale and disheveled, his eyes appalled—he’d come home to find the police crawling all over Liz’s house, and his horror had only intensified when he’d asked them what had happened. Thank Christ you’re all right, he kept saying, thank Christ you’re alive. He seemed as dazed as I was, at that moment; his shell-shocked look said he couldn’t believe the abrupt turn our lives had taken into a strange and violent world. If anything had happened to you… And then he’d fallen silent, realizing, as I did, how easily it could have done.

  I’d anticipated a long stay in hospital, but they told me I was free to go home on Monday afternoon, instructed me on how I should care for the wound, gave me the solutions and dressings I’d need for the next couple of weeks. Carl drove me back home. At first, we talked nonstop of what had happened, then our conversation gradually tapered off—there was more talk than silence, and then more silence than talk, and then there was nothing but silence. I drifted into sleep, vaguely aware of my surroundings so that they edged into my dream—honey-coloured houses and dappled ponies grazing in fields, patches of heavy shadow cast by overhanging trees. Sunshine. Emptiness. Peace.

  Of course, you’ll have read in the papers what happened after that. The way they were legally allowed to release Rebecca Fisher’s secret identity, where she’d ended up and who she’d become. She was in the public domain again, inspiring headlines and editorials—some thundering with Old Testament anger, some ostentatiously poignant. Geraldine wasn’t mentioned by name. I wasn’t so lucky. I was, after all, key to the tale of her unveiling—the innocent writer next door who’d almost fallen victim to her well-concealed madness.

  Everyone now knows that Rebecca Fisher died at the age of forty-three, in a skirmish with a neighbour she was trying to stab to death. I suppose that’s my fault, really. They’d never have known the full story if I hadn’t given those interviews to the Mail and the Sun and the Express and the Mirror. The Mail one was advertised on the front page. I gave them because I wasn’t sure that I had any choice, that I could decide not to. Even if I had no legal obligation, I couldn’t help feeling that I had a moral one; a kind of guilt made me want to explain. What had happened was as clear to the papers as it had been to the police, a clear-cut case of self-defence. The knife on those blood-streaked bathroom tiles told its own story, as did the broken bolt and the table Rebecca had used to force entry. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, they cared far more about how it had happened, and what had come before, and if I’d ever sensed something strange about her.

  I told them the truth, but it was like giving a priceless present that went entirely unappreciated. It took me some time to realize they didn’t want the truth, and never would. What they wanted was some crass variation on A Mind to Murder; the sweet-faced, middle-aged housewife and librarian, whose reassuring smile concealed pure evil. When I look back to those interviews, the sensationalist headlines and the breathless prurience of the copy, I sometimes find myself wishing I could go back in time to reclaim the truth—not hand these indifferent passersby the details and emotions that meant so much. And I feel an obscure species of guilt, as if I’ve betrayed Liz’s confidence.

  I know there was no such person as Liz Grey really, that she’d been a name invented in a prison side office, a persona that would draw no suspicion in a village far from home. But I can’t help feeling she did exist, in a way. As a character in a play can exist when some projection of the actor’s own personality shines out through the costume and the makeup, creating something so real you can’t quite believe it stops existing when the curtain falls.

  I felt she’d been a part of Rebecca. The woman Rebecca had always wanted to be.

  We’d had a lot in common.

  We still live there, Carl and I, in Ploughman’s Lane, Abbots Newton. We got some suspicious sideways glances at first, after I came back from hospital. But, as I’ve said, the story’s been all over the papers since then. These days, everyone knows the facts, and the part we played in events, and our innocence.

  Anyway, life’s moved on in the fifteen months between then and now. A new couple have moved in next door, a couple in their thirties. He’s something in television and she’s something in PR—they live in London all week and come down at weekends. On the rare occasions they’re here, they keep themselves to themselves, and it’s easy to feel the house is still standing empty.

  Sometimes I see Helen round the village. It’s hard to know what to say to each other, on the rare occasions our paths cross. Our only possible topic of conversation revolves around the friend we had in common, and I can tell she’s every bit as uncomfortable with the subject as I am. We’ll never be at all close, but I can see her as clearly as Rebecca did, now: an awkward, guarded woman, raised to be moral and dutiful and disapproving all at once. There’s no real darkness in her after all, and there never was.

  Petra comes to visit, from time to time. Everything between us is just as it used to be in Reading, as everything is between myself and Carl. We’re happy together. We’ve started to talk about beginning a family in the not-too-distant future, and it surprises me to realize I’m as keen on the prospect as he is. There’s nothing that has to come before that, not anymore. You could say that my priorities have changed a bit.

  Carl and I socialize more, as well—I’ve become friendly with several women I’ve met at his colleagues’ houses, although Jim and Tina still feel like strangers to me. When I’m introduced to someone for the first time, the conversation inevitably moves towards Rebecca, sometimes tactfully, sometimes with blinding insensitivity. Like the newspapers, they don’t want to hear the truth. I’ve come to accept that, and be patient with it, and move on.

  I’m still working on the novel. It’s going well, and should be finished in a few months’ time. I’ve come to enjoy the time I spend in the writing room that looks exactly as it did before the break-in—the radio beside me and Carl at work, window facing out onto uninterrupted woods that never concealed Mr Wheeler after all.

  My agent tells me that the lingering aftermath of publicity from my interviews should do this novel’s sales a lot of good. I want to be delighted, but can’t quite bring myself to feel that way. Bright hope for its success trails a dark and elongated shadow in its wake; it seems wrong somehow, uncomfortably wrong, a kind of grave robbing.

  I’ve tried to keep the plot as far away from the realities of the case
as I possibly can, far further than I’d initially anticipated. When I started writing it, a kind of self-defence mechanism created my central character unbidden, and made sure she was next to nothing like the Rebecca I’d known.

  There are some things I don’t want to remember, you see. Even now it’s all over.

  I had the dream for the first time nearly six months ago. Last night, I had it again. I don’t know exactly what prompted it. Perhaps the memory just drifted back on its own, the way memories do sometimes.

  For no specific reason, I was back at Teasford station. I saw Rebecca standing on the platform further down, a ten-year-old girl in neat school uniform, little gold earrings, an elaborate velvet bow in her long, pale hair. Beside her, silent and blank faced, stood Eleanor Corbett. They seemed to be the only two people in the world. Around them, the station and the roads and pavements beyond it were entirely deserted. It was a hot summer evening. The sunset was coming down rosily on the horizon.

  I hurried towards them, suddenly jolted. My footsteps rang out sharply. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘We have to leave.’ Rebecca’s face was expressionless, her voice flat and uninflected. ‘They know who we are now. It isn’t safe.’

  I stared, bewildered. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘We’re not coming back.’ As she spoke, a train appeared in the distance, approaching impossibly fast. Then it was there at the platform, and I saw that it too was empty. ‘We’re not ever coming back.’