Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Of course you have nothing to do with it, miss. We know that. Take no notice of him and his theories.’ He tapped his colleague on the arm. ‘Come on, Pilbeam. It’s time we were off. And listen to me, for a change: I’ve already cracked this case. Have a look at the guest list for that reception, and your suspect will be there. Number 11 is the key, I tell you. It’s as simple as that!’

  *

  The men were gone. The house was silent again.

  Rachel went back to the sitting room, opened the Gunns’ drinks cupboard and took out the bottle of twenty-year-old Lagavulin. It seemed wasteful to use such a rare and valuable whisky simply to steady her nerves, but such considerations did not weigh with her any more. She poured herself a tumbler at least three-quarters full and sat on the piano stool, drinking it slowly and methodically. From time to time she looked at the book on the piano and wondered how it had got there. She did not remember bringing it down here, but she knew her behaviour was becoming erratic and forgetful.

  She had almost finished drinking the whisky when she heard a noise in the hallway. A swift, busy rustling, as of legs upon the marble tiles. She stood up and walked slowly across the room. She stopped before reaching the doorway, listening. Then, very slowly, very carefully, she crept towards the doorway and peeped round it.

  The hallway was empty.

  The hallway was empty, but something had changed. It took Rachel a few moments to realize what it was. On the staircase, something had been twined around the banister. Rachel stepped forward, relieved now, assuming that the children were playing a joke on her: they had stolen downstairs and wrapped a ball of string or a washing line around the uprights. But no, as she came closer, she thought that it didn’t look like string. It was thinner, and more silvery. She reached out and touched it and it stuck to her hand.

  Shaking the thread loose, Rachel followed it down the hallway until she came to the stairwell that led down to the family kitchen. At this point, her way was blocked: and this time, there was no mistaking the obstruction. It was a giant web, made of the same glutinous, gossamer thread.

  Rachel stared at the web in horror, but soon, not knowing where her own strength or courage was coming from, she found herself reaching out and tearing at it with frantic, clutching fingers. It stuck to her everywhere: her shoulders, her legs, especially her face, but finally, panting with effort and revulsion, she had broken her way through it. She rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen, which was in darkness. Hollow with dread at the thought of what she might see, she flicked the lights on.

  Nothing there. She ran back up to the hallway, then upstairs to Sophia’s bedroom. The girls were still asleep, blameless, angelic. Through the mirrored door, back into the servants’ half of the house, then all the way down the narrow staircase, and into the staff kitchen. Here, threads and webs had been strung up everywhere. The very air was thick with them. Rachel forced her way through them – a particularly tough thread got caught in her mouth, and she bit through it, almost gagging at the bitter, poisonous taste – until she reached the knife drawer, which she threw open, extracting the biggest, sharpest, most lethal carving knife she could find, fully ten inches long.

  She turned and faced the back doorway. The door was open. How could that have happened? If it had been her doing, then she’d been very careless.

  A particularly thick and elaborate web had been woven across the doorway, but she slashed her way through it somehow, then ran straight out into the garden and towards the corner of the pit where the tarpaulin had been loosened. In the distance, a siren wailed, grew louder and closer, then faded into the distance: a reminder that elsewhere, not far away, normal life was still in progress, bringing home to Rachel the nightmarish unreality of her own situation.

  The single thread that led down into the pit itself was as thick as a rope. She sawed away at it for a few seconds and it snapped with a satisfying twang. Then Rachel lifted the tarpaulin and peered inside.

  She could see nothing. Just a yawning void; a bottomless pool of blackness.

  She stared harder. Perhaps she could discern some outlines. A platform, was it, down there? Scaffolding? Was that an immense ladder fixed to the wall? Impossible to say.

  She must have stared into the darkness for three minutes or more. The handle of the knife grew moist with the sweat from her palm. And then, at last, she did see something. Way down in the depths of the shaft, more than a hundred feet away, two pinpricks of light suddenly appeared. A pair of eyes. Whatever the eyes belonged to, it had seen her, and it was staring back at her.

  Rachel met the creature’s distant gaze and held it. She stopped breathing. She clutched the knife more tightly. She felt herself mesmerized. She couldn’t move.

  And then, at the same distance, at the very bottom of the pit, two more amber pinpricks appeared. Then two more, and two more, and then four more, and a dozen more. Soon Rachel knew that she was being watched by at least fifty pairs of eyes.

  Still she did not move. She could not force herself from the spot until the eyes themselves started moving. In response to some sort of collective will, the creatures stirred themselves and smoothly, silently, with unthinkable agility, they began to swarm up the sheer walls of the pit. Their progress was swift and inexorable. In just a matter of seconds they were only fifty feet away. The eyes came closer and closer, never diverting their gaze from Rachel for an instant.

  Then, and only then, did she scream. She screamed and ran: ran back to the house, where she slammed the kitchen door shut, bolted it, ran to the staircase, closed that door behind her as well, then hurtled up the stairs, up to the ground floor, the first floor, the second floor and the mirrored doorway that led through to the other half of the house.

  Before passing through it for the last time, she turned and looked out from the landing window. The spiders were massing in the garden, overturning the builders’ tools, scuttling over the garden walls, breaking down the trellising. And some of them were trying to get into the house.

  Rachel ran into Sophia’s room and shook the twins awake.

  ‘Get up! Get dressed!’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to leave, now!’

  The girls tumbled out of bed drowsily and rubbed their eyes.

  ‘What? Where are our clothes?’

  ‘No time! Put your dressing gowns on.’

  They struggled into their dressing gowns. Grace got her arm caught in one of the sleeves and realized she was trying to put it on inside out. Sophia fumbled for ages in her attempt to knot the cord at her waist.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Rachel.

  She grasped Sophia’s hand, and Sophia grasped Grace’s hand, and in that way she tugged them out of the bedroom and onto the main staircase. Their way was blocked by two dense, glistening webs, which she slashed to the floor with a couple of strokes of her blade.

  ‘What are you swinging that knife around for?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Why do you even have a knife?’ asked Sophia.

  They reached the main hallway and Rachel threw open the front door. Three spiders were gathered at the foot of the steps, barring their path to the door in the hoarding. They were huge, and their swollen bodies shone in the moonlight, burnished with lurid green.

  ‘Keep back,’ said Rachel. ‘We have to get past them.’

  The girls waited at the top of the steps, while Rachel descended, step by step, her knife outstretched. The creatures never took their small, vicious, bulbous eyes off the blade. When Rachel lunged out at them they hissed, reared up on their two back legs, but gradually backed off.

  ‘Now!’ Rachel called to the
girls. ‘To the doorway! Run!’

  Grace and Sophia tore down the steps, through the mass of builders’ rubble, past the site office and waited panting by the door. Rachel joined them, walking backwards, the knife still outstretched to keep the monsters at bay, then switched the electronic latch and shouldered the door open. They were out in the street.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Sophia. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to go back to bed.’

  They were out in the street, but they were not safe. The creatures were here as well. In their loathsome droves they swarmed, milling along the pavements and carriageway, spreading destruction in their path. They clambered on to cars, overturning them, toppling the massed rows of Range Rovers, Porsches and Jaguars. They ran up the walls of the vast, arrogant houses, tearing into brickwork, smashing glass. Property was their first target; after that would come people. The moon was at its fullest and everywhere Rachel looked she could see the green bodies of these vile, mutant insects, crawling across white stuccoed walls, rearing up triumphantly at the summit of chimney stacks. The night air erupted with shrill, deafening noise as a symphony of burglar alarms began to play up and down the street.

  ‘Hurry!’ she shouted to the twins. ‘We’ve still got time!’

  Grabbing Sophia’s hand again, she began to drag them both along, breaking into a sprint. Miraculously, the hideous, rampant creatures would back off and allow them to pass whenever they were approached. And so the thing that finally stopped them in their tracks, at the end of the street, was not a spider at all, but a human obstruction: a man. DCI Capes, standing at the corner, who seized Rachel in a rugby tackle and brought her to the ground, while DC Pilbeam wrested the knife from her grasp.

  ‘It’s all right,’ one of them was saying. ‘Calm down. It’s all right now. Everybody’s safe.’

  They held her like that, pinning her to the asphalt, until her breathing had subsided into a calmer, more regular rhythm, the dinning of the burglar alarms had faded away, the spiders had retreated to their subterranean home and Rachel realized that, apart from the sobbing of Grace and Sophia, the world was now empty and silent.

  19

  Alison was not thinking about anything in particular. She sat in the armchair at the bay window, watching the sunlight throw elaborate shadows across the curlicued red-and-yellow patterns of the old-fashioned carpet. It was odd how well she remembered this carpet, given that she hadn’t seen it for more than twelve years. The house itself hadn’t changed much. Beverley hadn’t changed much, for that matter – except for Number 11, Needless Alley, which, it turned out, had been shorn of its leafy aviary, and was now home to a prosperous, well-dressed family, who had tidied up the garden and fitted a new front door and repainted the window frames. What had become of Phoebe? Nobody seemed to know.

  Rachel’s grandmother seemed cheerful enough on the surface – could not have been more delighted, really, to welcome Alison and Rachel back to her home, even if was just for a day – but there was no escaping the fact that her husband’s absence now filled every room, settled everywhere like a film of dust, in a way that his presence never had. Gran herself, under the strain of this absence, had almost buckled, become wraith-like. She passed through doorways, from kitchen to living room, from bathroom to landing, as silently as a ghost. Even now, as Alison sat in the sunshine daydreaming, she did not even notice that Gran had entered the room, and quietly settled herself on the sofa. Not until she heard her say:

  ‘Rachel was telling me that your mum’s had a stroke of luck.’

  Startled, Alison turned round. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well …’ After telling so many people, so many times, over the last few weeks, Alison still found the story hard to believe. ‘She was coming home on the bus one afternoon, just like any other day, when the phone rang, and it was this woman she’d been on TV with. Danielle Perry. She’s a sort of singer, actress … I don’t know what you’d call her really.’

  ‘I know who you mean,’ said Gran. ‘She’s ever so pretty.’

  ‘And she said she wanted to record one of Mum’s songs. The one she’d heard her sing in the jungle when they did that show together. “Sink and Swim”. So that’s what she’s done. And it’s selling really well. In the charts and everything.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ said Gran. ‘Will she make some money out of it?’

  ‘Yeah, she already has. Quite a bit in fact.’

  ‘Everybody deserves a bit of luck now and again. Jim used to do the Lottery, you know. Every week. He never won a thing.’ She was looking at the chair in which Alison was sitting, but it was as if she didn’t see her at all. ‘I can picture him now, sitting right there, crossing out the numbers. That was his favourite chair. His favourite spot.’

  Alison started to get up. ‘You can sit here if you want, Mrs –’

  ‘No, don’t be silly. You stay where you’re comfortable. Enjoy the sunshine. Best time of the day to sit there.’

  She was perched on the edge of the sofa, clutching a mug with ‘World’s Best Gran’ written on it, a Christmas present from Rachel long years ago.

  ‘In the mornings, too. Always sitting there, he was, when I came down. He was waiting for the paper boy, you see.’

  Alison nodded, and smiled. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘That was how the day used to start,’ said Gran. ‘I’d come down. Put the kettle on. Make the tea.’

  She smiled, faintly. The recollection seemed to warm her.

  ‘Then the paper would come. He’d get it first. I’d make some breakfast, get him his cereal. Then we’d have it in the kitchen together.

  ‘Then he’d go on his computer. He loved his computer. That was the best thing he ever bought. He’d do the letters, and the bills, whatever needed doing.

  ‘I’d stay downstairs, while he was doing that. Start the crossword.

  ‘Middle of the morning, we’d have another cup of tea. Together. In here. That was his chair, the one you’re in. Then I’d go out to the shops.

  ‘We had lunch in the kitchen. Just soup, normally. Tomato for me, mushroom for him. He’d put the radio on. Always wanted to hear the news at one o’clock.

  ‘Then if the weather was good, we’d go out in the garden. He was proud of the garden. We never had a gardener, never had anyone to help. Right to the end, we’d do it ourselves. Trim the borders and keep the hedge tidy.

  ‘Then he’d come inside for a sit-down. That chair where you are now. He always knew where to catch the sunshine.

  ‘I’d want to watch television later on. Quiz shows and things. He didn’t like them so much, so he’d go back upstairs, on his computer. We weren’t in the same room, but I always knew he was here, always knew he was in the house.

  ‘Dinner at six. We never had it much later than that. Neither of us liked fancy food. Fried mushrooms were his favourite, he’d like anything with them. Just mushrooms on toast, we’d have sometimes.

  ‘We never agreed what to watch on television. He liked the news, current affairs, anything political. I liked plays and comedy programmes, something to make you laugh, but they don’t make such good ones any more, do they?

  ‘He had a whisky at night, just before he went to bed. There was no harm in it. He only ever had the one. It helped him sleep.

  ‘He went to bed early. Always in bed before eleven. He’d put the radio on, not very loud. I think he just liked to listen to the voices. I’d be down here. Still trying to finish the crossword, probably. I couldn’t hear anything from upstairs, but it was enough. It was enough just to know he
was there.’

  She fell silent. Hunched over her mug, she wasn’t crying, but she looked frail, and tired. The afternoon sunlight fell upon her face, finding wrinkles, illuminating the folds of skin at her throat.

  Alison stood up and walked over to her. She put her arms around her, felt the brittleness of her bones beneath her jumper, leaned in, saw the whiteness of her scalp through the thinning, frost-coloured hair. She kissed the top of her head, a gentle, lingering kiss.

  ‘Rachel was calling for you,’ Gran said. ‘I think she needs your help.’

  *

  Rachel was sitting at the top of the plum tree, her face tilted towards the sun, enjoying the warmth of its rays upon her face. She loved sitting amidst the branches of this tree – had loved it ever since she was a child – with its view over the neighbouring gardens, the tidy patchwork of suburban life laid out beneath her, and in the distance, the monumental, greyish-cream towers of the Minster.

  She looked down when Alison approached and said:

  ‘About time too. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Chatting to your gran. Are you all right up there?’

  ‘Very comfortable actually.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to exert yourself.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ve been fine for ages. I wish everybody’d stop worrying about me.’

  And it was true. Rachel was looking healthier than she had looked for many weeks. She’d been living at home with her mother in the months since her discharge, and she was rested, and she was happy again. She had put it all behind her.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Alison. ‘Those plums aren’t going to pick themselves. Chuck them down and I’ll catch them in the basket.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  Rachel reached across to the furthest bunch. There had been another wonderful crop this year. They were purple and luscious, perfectly ripe, with soft powdery skins.