by Ruth Ware
It was still very cold, and as I closed the door behind me, the curtains billowed out, and I realized why. The window was open.
I frowned as I walked across to it.
It was open, and not just slightly, as if someone had wanted to air the room, but completely open, the bottom sash pushed up as high as it would go. Almost—the thought came unbidden—as if someone had been leaning out to smoke a cigarette, though that was absurd.
No wonder the room was cold. Well, it was easily solvable at least—easier than battling with the control panel at any rate. The curtains, doors, lights, gates, and even the coffee machine in this place might be automated, but the windows at least were still Victorian originals, blessedly operated by hand. Thank God.
I yanked the sash down, drew the brass catch across, and then scampered back into the still-warm sanctuary of the feather duvet, shivering pleasurably as I snuggled into its folds.
I was drifting back off to sleep when I heard it . . . not the doorbell this time, but a single, solitary creeeeak.
I sat up in bed, my phone clutched to my breast. Shit. Shit shit shit.
But the next sound did not come. Had I misheard? Was it not the footsteps that had woken me the night before, but something else . . . ? Just a branch in the wind, perhaps, or an expanding floorboard?
I could hear nothing apart from the whoosh of my own blood in my own ears, and at last I lay slowly back down, still clutching my phone in my hand, and shut my eyes against the darkness.
But my senses were on high alert, and sleep seemed impossible. For more than forty minutes I lay there, feeling my pulse thumping, feeling my thoughts race with a mixture of paranoia and wild superstitions.
And then, half as I’d feared, half as I’d been waiting for, it came again.
Creeeeak . . .
And then, after the smallest of pauses, creak . . . creak . . . creak . . .
This time there was no doubt—it was pacing.
My heart leapt into my throat with a kind of nauseating lurch, and my pulse sped up so fast that for a moment I thought I would faint, but then anger took over. I jumped out of bed and ran to the locked door in the corner of the room, where I knelt, peering through the keyhole, my heart like a drum in my chest.
I felt absurdly vulnerable, kneeling there in my nightclothes with one eye wide open and pressed to a dark hole, and for a moment I had a sick, jolting fantasy of someone shoving something through the hole, a toothpick perhaps, or a sharpened pencil, roughly piercing my cornea, and I fell back, blinking, my eye watering with the dusty draft.
But there was nothing there. No toothpick maliciously blinding me. Nothing to see either. Just the unending blackness, and the cool, dust-laden breeze of stale attic air. Even if there was a turn in the stair, or a closed door at the top, with a light on in the attic itself, some light would have escaped to pollute the inky dark of the stairs. But there was nothing. Not even the smallest glimmer. If there was someone up there, whatever they were doing, they were doing it in the dark.
Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . it came again, unbearable in its regularity. Then a pause, and then again, creak . . . creak . . . creak . . .
“I can hear you!” I shouted at last, unable to sit there listening in silence and fear any longer. I put my mouth to the keyhole, my voice shaking with a mix of angry terror. “I can hear you! What the fuck are you doing up there, you sicko? How dare you? I’m calling the police so you’d better get the fuck out of there!”
But the steps didn’t even falter. My voice died away as if I had shouted into an empty void. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And then, just as before, a little pause, and they resumed without the slightest loss of rhythm. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And I knew in truth that of course I wouldn’t call the police. What the fuck could I say? “Oh, please, Constable, there’s a creaking sound coming from my attic”? There was no police station closer than Inverness, and they would hardly be taking routine calls in the middle of the night. My only option was 999—and even in my shaking state of fear, I had a pretty good idea what the operator would say if a hysterical woman rang the emergency number in the middle of the night claiming spooky sounds were coming from her attic.
If only Jack were here, if only someone were here, apart from three little girls I was paid to protect, not scare even further.
Oh God. Suddenly I could not bear it any longer, and I understood what dark terrors had driven those four previous nannies out of their post and away. To lie here, night after night, listening, waiting, staring into the darkness at that locked door, that open keyhole gaping into blackness . . .
There was nothing I could do. I could go and sleep in the living room, but if the noises started down there as well, I thought I might lose it completely, and there was something almost worse about the idea of those sounds continuing up in the attic while I, ignorant, slept down below. At least if I was here, watching, listening, whatever was up there could not . . .
I swallowed in the darkness, my throat dry. My palms were sweating, and I could not finish the thought.
I would not sleep again tonight, I knew that now.
Instead, I wrapped myself in the duvet, shivering hard, turned on the light, and sat, with my phone still in my hand, listening to the steady, rhythmic sound of the feet pacing above me. And I thought of Dr. Grant, the old man who had lived here before, the man Sandra and Bill had done their very best to get rid of, painting and scouring and remodeling until there was barely a trace of him left, except for that horrible poison garden, behind its locked gate.
And except, perhaps, whatever paced that attic in the night.
I heard the words again, in Maddie’s cold little matter-of-fact voice, as if she were beside me, whispering in my ear. After a while he stopped sleeping. He just used to pace backwards and forwards all night long. Then he went mad. People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough . . .
Was I going mad? Was that what this was?
Jesus. This was ridiculous. People didn’t go mad from two nights’ lack of sleep. I was being completely melodramatic.
And yet, as the footsteps passed above me again, slow and relentless, I felt a kind of panic rise up inside me, possessing me, and I could not stop my eyes turning towards the locked door, imagining it opening, the slow tread, tread of old feet on the stairs inside, and then that cadaverous, hollow face coming towards me in the darkness, the bony arm outstretched.
Elspeth . . .
It was a sound not coming from above, but in my own mind—a death rattle cry of a grief-stricken father for his lost child. Elspeth . . .
But the door did not open. No one came. And yet still above me, hour after hour, those steps continued. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . the ceaseless pacing of someone unable to rest.
I could not bring myself to turn out the light. Not this time. Not with those ceaseless, restless footsteps above me.
Instead, I lay there, on my side, facing the locked door, my phone in my hand, watching, waiting, until the floor beneath the window opposite my bed began to lighten with the coming of dawn, and at last I got up, stiff-limbed and nauseous with tiredness, and made my way down to the warmth of the kitchen to make myself the strongest cup of coffee I could bear to drink, and try to face the day.
Downstairs was empty and echoing, eerily quiet without the snuffling, huffing presence of the dogs. I was surprised to find that a part of me missed the distraction of their questing noses and constant begging for treats.
As I made my way across the hall to the kitchen, I found I was picking up a treasure trail of the girls’ possessions—a scatter of crayons on the hall rug, a My Little Pony abandoned beneath the breakfast bar, and then—oddly—a single purple flower, wilting, in the middle of the kitchen floor. I bent down, puzzled, wondering where it had come from. It was just a single bloom, and it looked as if it had fallen from a bouquet or dropped from a house plant, but there were no flowers in this room. Had one of the girls
picked it? But if so, when?
It seemed a shame to let it die, so I filled a coffee mug with water and stuck the stem into it, and then put it on the kitchen table. Perhaps it would revive.
I was quietly nursing my second cup of coffee and watching the sun rise above the hills to the east of the house when the voice came, seemingly from nowhere.
“Rowan . . .”
It was a reedy quaver, barely audible, and yet somehow loud enough to echo around the silent kitchen, and it made me jump so that scalding coffee slopped over my wrist and the sleeve of my dressing gown.
“Shit.” I began mopping up, twisting at the same time to see the source of the voice. There was no one there, at least, no one visible.
“Who’s there?” I called, and this time I heard a creak from the direction of the stairs, a single creak, so eerily like those of the night before that my heart skipped a beat. “Who is it?” I called again, more aggressively than I had intended, and strode angrily out into the hallway.
Above me a small figure hesitated at the top of the stairs. Ellie. Her face was worried, her lip trembling.
“Oh, sweetheart . . .” I felt instantly contrite. “I’m sorry, you scared me. I didn’t mean to snap. Come down.”
“I’m not allowed,” she said. She had a blanket in her hands, twisting the silky trim between her fingers, and with her bottom lip stuck out and wobbling dangerously close to tears, she looked suddenly much younger than her five years.
“Of course you are. Who says you’re not allowed?”
“Mummy. We’re not allowed out of our rooms until the bunny clock’s ears go up.”
Oh. Suddenly I remembered the paragraph in the binder about Ellie’s early rising, and the rule about the Happy bunny clock, which clicked over to the wide-awake bunny at six. I looked back through the arch to the kitchen clock—5:47.
Well, I couldn’t exactly contradict Sandra’s rule . . . but here we were, and there was a large part of me that was relieved to see another human being. Somehow with Ellie around, the ghosts of the night before seemed to retreat back into absurdity.
“Well . . . ,” I said slowly, trying to pick my way between backing up my employer, and compassion to a small child hovering on the verge of crying. “Well, you’re up now. Just this once, I think we can pretend the bunny woke up early.”
“But what will Mummy say?”
“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,” I said, and then bit my lip. It’s one of the cardinal rules of childcare—don’t ask a child to keep secrets from a parent. That’s the path to all kinds of risky behavior and misunderstandings. But I’d said it now, and hopefully Ellie had read it as a lighthearted remark rather than an invitation to conspire against her mother. I couldn’t help but glance up at the camera in the corner—but surely Sandra wouldn’t be awake at 6:00 a.m. unless she had to be. “Come on down and we’ll have a hot chocolate together and then when the bunny wakes up you can go up and get dressed.”
Down in the kitchen, Ellie sat on one of the high stools, kicking her heels against the legs of the chair, while I heated up milk on the induction burner and stirred in hot chocolate powder. As Ellie drank, and I sipped my now-cooling coffee, we talked, about school, about her best friend Carry, about missing the dogs, and at last I ventured to ask about whether she missed her parents. Her face crumpled a little at that.
“Can we phone Mummy again tonight?”
“Yes, of course. We can try, anyway. She’s been very busy, you know that.”
Ellie nodded. Then, looking out of the window she said, “He’s gone, hasn’t he?”
“Who?” I was confused. Was she talking about her father, or Jack? Or perhaps . . . perhaps someone else? “Who’s gone?”
She didn’t answer, only kicked her legs against the stool.
“I like it better when he’s gone. He makes them do things they don’t want to do.”
I don’t know why, but the words gave me a sharp flashback to something I had barely thought about since my very first night here—that crumpled, unfinished note from Katya. The words sounded inside my head, as though someone had whispered them urgently into my ear. I wanted to tell you to please be—
Suddenly it felt more like a warning than ever.
“Who?” I said, more urgently this time. “Who are you talking about, Ellie?”
But she misunderstood my question, or perhaps deliberately chose to misinterpret it.
“The girls.” Her voice was matter of fact. And then she put down her hot chocolate and slid from the stool. “Can I go and watch some TV?”
“Ellie, wait,” I said, standing too, feeling my heart suddenly pounding in my chest. “Who are you talking about? Who’s gone? Who makes the girls do things?”
But I was too urgent, and as my hand closed on her wrist, she pulled away, suddenly frightened by my intensity.
“Nothing. I don’t remember. I made it up. Maddie told me to say it. I didn’t say it anyway.” The excuses tumbled out, one after another, each as silly as the one before, and she twisted her small hand out of my grip. I had no idea what to say. I thought about following her as she slipped from the room, and the sound of the Peppa Pig theme tune filtered back into the play room, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I had scared her and missed my chance. I should have asked more casually. Now she had closed down in that way that small children do when they realize they have said something more momentous than they meant to. It was the same panic I had seen in little children when they repeated an inappropriate word without understanding the reaction it would elicit—a startled attempt to pedal back from a response they had not anticipated, followed by total shut down, and a denial that they ever said it. If I pushed Ellie now, I would only be shooting myself in the foot, and preventing any further confidences.
The girls . . . He makes them do things they don’t want to do . . .
My stomach turned over. It was the kind of thing every safeguarding manual warned about—the nightmare scenario you hoped never to encounter. But . . . was it? What girls was Ellie talking about? Herself and Maddie? Or some completely different girls? And who was the “he”? Bill? Jack? Or someone else entirely—a teacher or . . .
But no. I pushed away the image of the wild grief-stricken face staring out of my phone screen at me. That was pure fantasy. If I went to Sandra with something like that, she’d be entitled to laugh in my face.
But . . . could I go to Sandra with something like this? When Ellie would deny what she said, and when it might be nothing at all? There was nothing that I could pinpoint, after all, to say, “This is definitely worrying.”
I was still staring after Ellie, biting at the edge of my nail, when a noise from the hallway made me jump, and I turned to see the door opening, and Jean McKenzie standing on the doorstep, taking off her coat.
“Mrs. McKenzie,” I said. She was neatly dressed in a woolen skirt and a white cotton blouse, and I suddenly felt very conscious of my own state of undress, in a dressing gown, with not a great deal beneath.
“You’re up early,” was all she said, and I felt the prickle of her disapproval. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the leftover anxiety from Ellie’s words, but my temper suddenly boiled up.
“Why don’t you like me?” I demanded.
She turned to look back at me from stashing her coat in the hall cupboard.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. You’ve been completely off with me ever since I arrived. Why?”
“I think you’re imagining things, miss.”
“You know full well I’m not. If it’s about that business on the first day, I didn’t shut the damn door, and I didn’t lock the children out. Why would I?”
“Kindness is as kindness does,” Jean McKenzie said cryptically, and she turned to go into the utility room, but I ran after her, grabbing her arm.
“What the hell does that even mean?”
She pulled herself out of my grip, and suddenly her eyes blazed at me with what I could only
call hatred.
“I’ll thank you not to handle me like that, miss, and not to swear in front of the bairns, either.”
“I was asking you a perfectly reasonable question,” I retorted, but she ignored me, stalking away to the utility room, rubbing her arm with exaggerated care as if I’d given her a friction burn. “And stop calling me miss,” I called after her. “We’re not in bloody Downton Abbey.”
“What would you prefer me to call you then?” she snapped over her shoulder.
I had turned on my heel, preparing to go and wake up Maddie, but her words stopped me in my tracks, and I swung round to stare at her expressionless back, bent over the utility room sink.
“Wh-what did you say?”
But she did not answer, only turned on the taps, drowning out my voice.
* * *
“Goodbye, girls!” I called, watching them through the school gate as they traipsed into their classrooms. Maddie said nothing, she just trudged onwards, head down, ignoring the chatter of the other little girls. But Ellie looked up from her conversation with a little redheaded girl and waved. Her smile was sweet and cheerful, and I felt myself smile back, and then down at Petra, jiggling and gurgling on my hip. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the warmth of a beautiful June day was filtering through the leaves of the trees. The fears and fantasies of last night—the memory of that twisted, grief-racked face peering out from the screen of my phone—all of that seemed suddenly preposterous in the light of day.
