by Sam West
Neil righted himself, sighing heavily. “We stay in the hallway, we’re safer here. We need to keep away from windows and near an exit.”
Angie stirred in her arms, making whimpering noises deep in her throat. She sucked even harder on the dummy, her hands twisting in her comfort blanket. Her eyes remained closed, but Jen didn’t think she would stay asleep for much longer. Turning away, she headed for the kitchen.
“Where are you going? We stay in the hallway, and we stick together unless absolutely necessary,’ Neil said.
Jen bristled at his tone. “I’m getting her a bottle of milk, I think she’s going to wake up soon. There’s some made-up formula in the fridge.”
“Fine. Just be quick.”
Sighing, Jen went into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge-door, retrieved a bottle, and headed back. Just as she reached the kitchen door, a scratching sound reached her ears. It was coming from behind her, and she spun round on the spot, her heart in her throat.
“Jeeee-en,” a low, male voice said, extending her name in such a way that it made her skin break out in a rash of goose-bumps.
She couldn’t see anything, or at least, nothing out of the ordinary. The kitchen, brightly lit by the overhead spotlights, revealed nothing more sinister than the shiny expanse of black marble work tops and high-gloss, white cupboards.
Nevertheless, she knew.
It was him. It was the clown-man.
“Did you hear that?” she gasped, hurrying back over to Neil and Danny.
“Hear what?” Neil said, frowning.
“Someone said my name. In the kitchen.”
“There’s no one there, Jen, you know this. There’re no hiding places.”
Danny looked up at her gravely. “I believe you. It’s the clown-man. We’re not safe here.”
“What happened to your mum, Danny?”
“The trick or treaters got her, and now she’s dead.”
As preposterous as it was, she partly believed him.
Those things weren’t human.
“Danny, I don’t know what happened to your mum, and it’s too risky to go back there and look,” Neil said slowly. “We have to get onto the main-road, and as soon as we do, we’ll send an ambulance for your mum.”
“I told you, she’s already dead.”
“Who did you speak to on the phone, Neil? When you called the police?”
Both turned to look at her – two wide-eyed vampires. The strongest vision assaulted her, that she and Neil were married and Danny was their eldest. Angie was their baby and Neil and Danny had got matching costumes for Halloween.
She shook her head slightly to dispel the entirely inappropriate fantasy.
“No one. It doesn’t matter. All calls are somehow being diverted, it’s an elaborate hoax, that’s all.”
“You spoke to that guy, didn’t you?”
“Does it matter? It’s just a stupid scam.”
“I’m not sure that it is.”
“I told you, it’s the clown-man,” Danny added.
Jen tingled in fear. Could the kid be right?
“Oh, come on, it’s just a hoax,” Neil said, noticeably agitated. “We don’t need to freak ourselves out any more than we already are. I don’t know what the hell was up with Lauren and Becky, maybe they took some dodgy LSD, or something, but there’s no such thing as devils and ghosts.”
Yeah, she thought, he’s right about one thing. He’s right about hell. Hell was up with those girls. They’d been infected somehow, by the evil that was out tonight. It was a crazy thought – one she didn’t quite fully believe – but neither was it that farfetched.
“What if they’re not the only ones like that?” she whispered. “What if everyone that was at the party turned into…into things like them.”
Neil’s eyes widened. “That’s just crazy talk, they were on a bad trip, they were off their heads.”
“But what about the others?” she pressed. “Okay, so they’re not like them, but what if they’re dead? What if they killed them? How can you say that this is nothing more than drug-induced insanity?”
Neil had no answer for that. Jen knew she wasn’t being overly fair – Neil was as scared as she was, and talk like this was just plain cruel to Danny, but she couldn’t help herself.
Forewarned was forearmed, or so she told herself.
I don’t think anything can help us right now.
Neil opened his mouth to speak when a loud thump came from the living-room, making them all flinch.
“What the hell was that?” Jen whispered frantically.
But it was a rhetorical question. The noise was undoubtedly made by something heavy connecting with the window. The heavy thump came again.
“Come on,” Neil hissed, rushing over to the door. “As soon as they shatter the glass, we run. We run like hell, do you understand?”
The boy pressed his shivering body against her, whimpering softly. She tried to hug him to her as best she could, but it was very difficult as she was holding Angie.
“Stand back,” Neil said, his hands poised over the safety latch and doorknob.
A horrible thought occurred to her: What if they’re waiting outside the door?
The sound of shattering glass assaulted her ears and she flinched in terror. If those bitches were lying in wait, then they had shit out of luck, for Neil was already pulling open the door.
Oh shit, was her last thought before the four of them spilled out onto the porch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sure enough, as soon as they had set foot outside, Jen’s worst suspicions were confirmed. They were waiting for them outside the door. One of them was, anyway – the one dressed as Catwoman.
Jen screamed in terror as the black-clad woman sprang out of the bushes and threw herself at Neil, who had been the first one out. The girl hopped onto his back as surely as a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco, her arms and legs wrapped around him.
Neil remained upright for all of three seconds, before tumbling to the ground. In her arms, the baby started to scream. The other girl – the one dressed as Little Red Riding Hood – was half-in, half-out of the window. Her head snapped in their direction and her gaze locked onto the writhing couple. She looked utterly crazed, her teeth bared like a wild animal’s, her chin dripping with blood. With a shriek, she came running over.
“Neil,” she gasped, staring down at his bucking, writhing body in a state of paralytic horror.
“Come on,” Danny cried next to her, tugging on her arm.
Neil was doing his best to throw the girl off, and together they rolled around on the ground in a grotesque parody of a lovers’ embrace. Little Red Riding Hood dived onto the squirming couple, and the two women clung to him like limpets to a rock.
Angie was really screaming now, the sound so close to her ears it drowned out Neil’s grunts and low-pitched howls. She glimpsed a flash of metal in Neil’s hand, and realised that he had stabbed Catwoman in the back.
By some obscene miracle, the wound appeared to have no effect on her whatsoever. Again, Neil plunged in the knife, but the girl bared her teeth and latched onto his neck. During this, Little Red Riding Hood was clinging to his legs, her head parallel with his thighs. She too, sank in her teeth, and, judging from Neil’s reaction, the trousers didn’t form much of a barrier.
“Come on,” came Danny’s desperate plea.
Jen stumbled after him when he tugged on her arm. As much as she wanted to kick at the attacking girls, to do something, the baby in her arms had to be her priority. It wasn’t a fully formed thought as such, but she accepted that Neil was as good as dead.
Danny let go of her arm, but their trajectory down the path did not slow. Behind her, the sound of Neil’s screams mingled with Angie’s and the music still pumping out from next-door.
They’re eating him, oh dear God, they’re eating him…
They spilled out onto the promenade, and Danny ground to a halt. Jen almost went careering into the back of him, only jus
t stopping herself in time.
“Hush,” she said between her own ragged breathing, jiggling the child in her arms.
Frantically, her head snapped from side to side, surveying the promenade. The deep base of the industrial metal floated around her head, mingling with the sound of the sea crashing against the cliff face beyond the railing. There was no sign of anyone or anything.
“We have to get onto the main-road,” Danny whispered, even if they did appear to be alone.
Jen looked over at next-door, guilt twisting in her heart.
I should at least go in there and look. What if people are hurt?
Save for the music, there was no other sound of life coming from the house. The front-door was wide open, taunting her.
“No,” Danny gasped, following her gaze. “There’s nothing we can do. We have to get off this street. Please.”
She turned her head to look at him. Yes. He was right. The best thing they could do was to get help. Not quite believing that, and holding the screaming one-year-old tight against her chest, she and Danny stumbled past the student house.
When they reached the next gate along, they went careering into a wild-looking woman with long, loose, dark hair, wearing a ripped white blouse that glowed in the moonlight.
For a horrible second, Jen thought that she was one of them, that she was going to attack. Instinctively, her fingers wrapped around the knife that was tucked under the screaming baby, poised to plunge it into the woman’s heart.
“Please,” the woman sobbed. “You have to help me.”
CHAPTER NINE
A Few Minutes Earlier…
The screaming coming from next-door seemed to have stopped. There was a party going on in the student house, and for a while there, those screams had been blood-curdling. The low, steady thump of the music continued, however. Not that it annoyed her, quite the contrary in fact – it was comforting to know that there were people nearby.
Even if it did sound like there was a whole roomful of people being murdered just now.
Anouchka Heston dismissed the thought; her mind could never stay focussed on any one thing for long, unless that one thing was the state of her marriage.
It was hard for Anouchka to pinpoint the precise point that her marriage had failed. Bill hadn’t always been like this. Her long-dead father had said to her, in the moments before he had walked her down the aisle, that people changed when they got married. At the time, his statement had puzzled her, and when she had questioned him, he had smiled sadly.
You’ll find out, he had said.
Now, twenty-three years later, she understood perfectly his meaning. Oh yes, did she ever. She wasn’t sure that this was quite what her father had meant, but slowly, over the years, Bill had turned into a monster. Gone was the kind, loving man she had said ‘I do’ to, and in his place was a physically and mentally abusive prick.
However did I allow myself to get into this situation, she wondered.
Although she knew the answer to that; her twenty-one-year-old son, Brian. Brian – who was currently away at University – thought that the sun shone out of his father’s arse. Bill was incredibly careful not to hurt Anouchka in front of him, and over the years had sowed the seeds in Brian’s mind that his mother was mentally unstable. That she was prone to nervousness, to an inability to cope and ‘funny turns’ where she had to lie down in a darkened room for sometimes days on end. Bill’s words were a constant threat in her mind:
If you ever say anything to Brian, I will kill him…
Brian, who had spent most of his teenaged years away at boarding school, had not suffered at the hands of his father. Yes, Bill was cold towards him, but he’d never hurt him, not that Anouchka knew of, anyway. But Brian was all grown-up now, busy carving out the start of his adult life, and with every passing year, Bill’s secret threats diminished.
Bill popped his hateful, sneering head round the kitchen door, making her jump when he spoke. “Christ, woman, isn’t it ready yet? It’s gone ten.”
“It won’t be long,” she said, as she drained the potatoes ready for mashing.
“You’re useless, you know that? You can’t even get dinner ready on time.”
This was grotesquely unfair, but she passively took it. It wasn’t her fault that he did so much overtime at the office, regularly working until gone ten at night. And it wasn’t like she didn’t notice that he often came home stinking of perfume – which happened to smell a lot like the sweet perfume that his gorgeous, young secretary wore on the few occasions that she had met her.
Answering back would mean another bout of rough, painful sex tonight, or perhaps a few blows to her midriff where the bruises wouldn’t show. He had only been back for ten minutes and she had timed the dinner for his arrival home as best she could.
Aggressively, she mashed the potatoes, the saucepan before her blurring with her unshed tears.
She blinked. This wouldn’t do. She had almost squirreled away enough money to leave him, and over the past two years she had been buying furniture and putting it into storage for her move up north, hundreds of miles away on the Scottish border.
I only have to do this for a few more weeks, then I’m gone forever.
Bill came into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge door, retrieved a beer, and sat down at the kitchen table.
Tonight, she hadn’t caught a waft of perfume, and he seemed angry. Maybe he and the secretary had had a falling out. She hoped not. She wanted him distracted, his thoughts elsewhere. She hadn’t felt anything close to sexual jealousy for many years, and the last thing she wanted was for him to focus on her. If he ever got wind of what she was doing, she felt sure that he wouldn’t hesitate in killing her.
“So, Anouchka. Tell me about your day.”
She reached up into the cupboard above her head for the plates, willing her hands not to tremble and betray her. She didn’t like his tone, the veiled aggression behind the bland words.
“Oh, just the usual. I went shopping, did the housework.”
She turned round to face him. She had loved him, once upon a time, when she had thought him kind and good. He wore his work uniform – a suit fit for the high-flying lawyer that he was – and his customary sneer. His dark hair, still so thick and shiny, was just like it had been the day she had met him twenty-four years ago on her eighteenth birthday. The passage of time had been kind to him, only serving to make him better looking. His face had filled out in the best possible way, and not an ounce of fat adorned his body thanks to a well-used gym membership. A wave of sadness crashed over her for the young man he had once been, even if she did now know that it had always been an act. How charming he had been then, how persistent in his wooing, how affectionate.
How times had changed. Over the years he had eroded away at her self-esteem like the sea that ate away at the chalk cliff-face beyond the living-room window of her showroom perfect home.
My beautiful prison, she thought sadly.
He had forced her to give up her everything; her education, her prospects, her hopes and dreams, her self-respect.
“And what, pray tell, do you deem normal?” he said, snapping her out of her musings.
That feeling of being on edge sharpened. She recognised the signs; he was up to something, he was goading her.
He knows, she thought in a flutter of panic.
Taking care to keep her tone neutral, she replied: “I deem going to Tescos normal. Keeping house, and everything that entails. That’s what I deem normal.”
“Are you giving me lip?”
She was, she knew she was, and she also knew that she was walking a fine line. Too contrite and he would know something was up, too ballsy and she was as good as asking to be hurt.
“No, of course not.”
She placed his dished-up dinner of mashed potatoes, a home-made, steak and kidney pie which she knew he loved occasionally as an ‘unhealthy’ treat and a generous portion of organic broccoli on the table in front of him. When she let
go of the plate, he grabbed her wrist. An involuntary little gasp escaped her lips.
“I know, Anouchka.”
His voice was dangerously low, and, despite the bland expression, she could see the fire burning behind his dark brown eyes.
Everything seemed to slow down around her and take on a heightened clarity as she tried to figure out how best to handle this frightening turn of events. The clock seemed to be ticking extra loudly, as did the steady thump of the music coming from the student house next-door where that Halloween party was taking place. In a small way, that comforted her. It was good to know that there were so many people nearby, even if they were unaware of her plight.
She twisted out of his grip and went over to the sink, turning her back on him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a second, composing herself, her knuckles turning white with the force in which she gripped the rim of the sink.
“Oh, I think you do. Come over here.”
This was the part where she was supposed to trot obediently over to his side, yet she couldn’t bring herself to move.
For a moment, she allowed herself the fantasy that theirs was a normal relationship. Or even better, she imagined that she was single, just like that woman doctor and her young son who lived on the end of the street next to the park. God, what was her name? Janice, yes, that was it. Janice Breed and her son Danny. She seemed like such a nice woman, not that Anouchka would know because Bill didn’t allow her to have any friends. Part of her hated Janice Breed for her charmed life, and the other part of her – the main part – would’ve sold her soul to her have the slightly younger woman as her friend.
“Anouchka? Do not ignore me. Come here.”
She turned round to face him, swallowing her fear. What was one more beating or him forcing himself upon her? She could take it.
