by Adam Nevill
‘Stop! You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.’
‘You’d be surprised what I know about all kinds of fings. Only a fool would fink otherwise about a McGuire, girl. And who’s the one sitting pretty in a six-bedroom house wiv a loft conversion, eh? Wiv his own business? Me. Not you. You got nuffin’. But I’m reaching out. Offerin’ a helpin’ hand. First rung on the ladder. Last fing you want to do is take me finger off, sister.’
‘Monday. That’s my last day.’
‘My you are a stubborn one. Don’t know what’s good for ya. But go on then, Monday it is. Suit yourself. You paid for a mumf, you can stay a mumf, or fuck off tonight. I can do without the grief, quite frankly. But you ain’t having the deposit back. That’s non-negotiable. You’s broken the contract. I mean, what am I, a charity?’
Knacker grinned at her. She endured a long silence while he stood there with his eyebrows raised, waiting for her to argue. ‘You’ve gone all quiet on me again. Cus you know you ain’t got a leg to stand on, sister.’ He sidled through the door, bouncing on his heels, the curly-haired head cocked with satisfaction.
Stephanie scrambled up from the bed and slammed the door.
Outside, she heard Knacker’s footsteps pause as if he was thinking of coming back to address the slamming door, like she was a teenager having a tantrum. She thought again of Val, her stepmother, and wanted to scream.
Stephanie turned the key in the lock so quickly she twisted her wrist and then waited, pressed against the door, until she heard his feet creak up the stairs to his flat. In the distance a door closed.
She lay on the bed and clasped her hands over her face.
NINE
As Stephanie undressed for bed, the tenant in the room across the hallway began to cry.
It had to be the same girl Stephanie had glimpsed earlier. The tall woman with the lovely perfume was now producing a shuddery weeping sound that travelled through two walls to Stephanie, the kind of despair that came from the bottom of the lungs, when a throat burned with the taste of a swim in the sea. A sound that felt complementary to her own situation and the very house, as if this building was a place where misery flourished.
All of Stephanie’s resentment at the girl’s refusal to acknowledge her vanished. The grief she could hear heaved with everything that made life temporarily unbearable.
No good. She wouldn’t be able to just lie in bed, swimming in her own self-pity, while listening to that. The girl across the hall was really hurting. Her distress might also explain why she hadn’t spoken to Stephanie earlier, or even paused in her headlong charge back to her room; maybe the woman had simply been unable to face anyone.
But was this also the same woman she had heard behind the fireplace last night?
It couldn’t have been, because the voice in the fireplace had come from a different direction, seemingly from the other side of the house. So there could be two deeply unhappy women here. Three if she counted herself.
Another idea struck Stephanie. The other tenant might be in the same situation as her: broke, a victim of coercion, under the threat of violence for defiance, stuck, trapped … Was she being dramatic or had that been the subtext of her most recent exchange with the landlord?
BIG ROOM. 40 QUID FOR WEAK. GIRLS ONLY. Why?
Stephanie opened the door to her room and stepped into the hallway.
And came to a standstill before reaching for the light switch.
The sensation was akin to stepping outside the building without a coat. There was a plummet in the air temperature – a terrible cold that registered the moment she was engulfed by the thick darkness. And a smell that brought her to a halt – an odour akin to being inside a wooden space, fragranced by emptiness, dust and old timber, like a wooden shed. She was overwhelmed by the notion that she had just stepped into a different building. Or the same place altered so profoundly that it may as well have been somewhere else.
A solitary streetlight beyond the garden offered a meagre glow to silhouette the wooden handrail and a pallid patch of staircase wall. A strip of light fell out of Stephanie’s room and suggested a dark carpet, some scuffed skirting board. The red door opposite her own was barely visible.
But these vague suggestions of the building’s scruffy interior were oddly welcome, because they were real, while she felt … Yes, she could better identify it now … she felt an acute anguish. Abandonment. Like the first morning after her dad passed away. A hopelessness fully realized and suffocating and exhausting at the same time: something that would drive you insane if it didn’t pass within minutes; if it wasn’t relieved. But the feeling tonight, outside her room, was worse, because the overwhelming solitude wouldn’t end for whoever was truly experiencing it. And that was the strangest thing of all.
This atmosphere, or sensation, that occupied the physical space of the passageway was not recognizable as being of her own making, as being generated by her own emotions. And this notion that she had been engulfed by someone else’s distress, in effect stepped into its orbit, as irrational as it was, did not feel imagined either.
Or was it?
Now she was beyond the reach of a balanced state of mind herself, and what felt like actual physical safety after no more than a single step outside of her room, she heard herself whimper. And the shock of hearing her own small cry, in the cold and half blindness that was so vast it gave her vertigo, made her strike out at the light switch on the wall.
But the horrid feelings persisted through the sudden coming of light to the corridor, which also did nothing to stem the cries of the grief-stricken girl.
No light escaped from the room opposite her own. The occupant was weeping in the dark.
Stephanie forced herself to cross the corridor to go to the crying woman. She knocked on the door. ‘Hello. Please. Miss. Miss, please. Can I help?’ She knocked again, twice, and stepped back.
But the girl was inconsolable, undeterred and undisturbed by the sound of a neighbour.
Stephanie tried again and spoke at the door. ‘I just want you to know that you can talk to me. If you want to. I’m just across the hall. In the room opposite.’
The girl began to talk, but not to her and not in English. It sounded like Russian. A language as hard and fast as the Russian she’d heard spoken before, the words struggling through sobs.
‘English? Do you speak English?’ Just open the door, she wanted to shout. We can communicate with our eyes, our faces. I’ll even hold you. But please stop. It’s too much … too much for me …
Outside the house, Knacker’s dog barked and leaped against the full extent of its chain.
Inside the building, from two floors down, footsteps erupted and skittered in haste against the tiled floor.
The footsteps bumped up the stairs to the first floor. Then began a scrabbling, urgent ascent to the second storey.
Stephanie didn’t move, was not sure what to do. Though she was curious as to the appearance of another tenant, she was intimidated by the swift and loud nature of the movement up through the house, that also suggested the motion had been evoked by the woman’s distress.
The light on the second floor landing clicked out. Stephanie turned for the light switch but only succeeded in covering her mouth because of … what? The gust. The sudden pall of … what was it? Sweat? Old male or animal sweat.
She gasped to keep the stench out of her lungs. Remembered the fungal scent when she’d sat on a bus behind a man with no grasp of personal hygiene. The smell in this house suggested a lather had been worked up by anger and alcohol. It was accompanied by a sudden, unpleasant sensation of herself twisting within thickly haired arms while she struggled to breathe. She didn’t know why she had imagined this, and was too panicked to understand, but a determined muscular violence seemed to be driving the odour through the house.
The hot animal smell, now spiced with what she recognized as gum disease, replaced the scent of aged and unfinished wood, and so entirely that she doubted the under
floor cavity scent had ever existed.
Instinct informed her that if she didn’t get inside her room and lock the door swiftly, something terrible, and perhaps final, would happen to her this very night. Irrational to think this, like she was a child running up the stairs to her bedroom all over again, so convinced something was following her that she’d often heard footsteps behind. But she did move, and fast, through the doorway of her room, to fall against the inside of the door. She turned the key the moment the door banged shut.
Upstairs a window opened and she heard Knacker roar, ‘Shat up!’ at the dog, which fell to whining and then silence.
Outside her room the footsteps reached the second floor and stopped, as if the owner had paused to catch his breath, before the bangs of his angry feet commenced down the hallway, to her room …
Stephanie stepped away from the door, on the verge of a scream.
The footsteps stopped outside.
A fist banged on the door of the room opposite her own.
Thank God it’s her he wants and not me.
The door across the hall opened.
‘No,’ she whispered. Don’t let him in! she screamed inside her head.
Silence.
Not moving, she stood in her room, a few feet behind the locked door, her hands over her mouth, her eyes watering from the strain of not blinking, her head aching from the strain of incomprehension.
At the end of her hearing a bed began to creak vigorously, back and forth. The noise failed to conceal the accompanying sound of rhythmic grunts.
TEN
After Stephanie checked inside the wardrobe, under the desk, behind the curtains and beneath the bedframe, she climbed under her duvet and lay awake with the lights on. She’d moved the bedside lamp closer to the edge of the bedside cabinet, with the metal shade angled upwards to add power to the ceiling light, and to make it more accessible for one of her arms in an emergency.
The noise of sex across the hall had been frenzied but brief. The girl had not made a sound during the encounter. Stephanie had feared that she’d heard a rape, because why would a woman so distressed consent to sex with another tenant, and one whose movements through the house implied aggression?
It could not have been Knacker in the girl’s room because he was upstairs; she’d heard him shout at the dog. She wondered if the man that had thundered up through the house was the owner of the leather-soled shoes that she had heard leaving the house that morning. Not catching up with him may have proven to be a lucky escape. The first break she had caught here.
Distaste mixed with her fear of sexual assault as she considered the nature of the relationship between the girl and the man that smelled like an animal. Had the girl offered a whimper of resistance, Stephanie would have called the police. But her neighbour hadn’t made any sound, as if she were no longer even present in the room across the hall.
The man was still with her too, perhaps lying with her as if they were lovers. Maybe they were lovers entangled insanely in one of those love-hate relationships fuelled by aggression, and the girl had grown used to his smell. Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut at all of the horror in that thought.
She opened her eyes and tried to make sense of the atmosphere that had engulfed her out in the corridor: the cold emptiness, fragranced like an uninhabited wooden space, all around her. But she never came close to an understanding of the scent, beyond entertaining a brief and unconvincing notion that she had smelled stale air rising, but rising from where?
The same bewilderment applied to her attempt to understand the bestial smell. From whom could such a powerful gust of raw and feral maleness have risen? For how long would you have to avoid soap and water to cultivate such an odour?
She wondered if her interpretation of the male presence had been affected by her confrontation with Knacker. Maybe their argument had tainted her into believing she was in danger from men in this building. She didn’t know. Didn’t really know anything about this place, or anyone inside it. All she knew was that she was tense and frightened and anxious and exhausted, with nowhere else to go. But she also realized that no matter how bad her life seemed, the life of someone nearby was probably worse. The memory of the woman’s grief still made her nerves jangle. She imagined being in another country and in the same situation as the girl; a country in which she didn’t know the language and couldn’t even understand an offer of help at her door.
How did I get here?
All she’d wanted was a room and a job. Maybe that was all her neighbour had wanted too.
She told herself that she only needed to get through this night, just one more night, and if she heard anything around her bed, she would grab her most essential bag, call a taxi and go straight to the city centre. She would walk around in the dark until the Bullring opened.
Outside her window the thick mass of foliage that engulfed the neglected garden shook, rustled and sighed in the wind. Stephanie imagined a foul sea lapping against the back of the house, an attempt to reclaim the old bricks, stained cement and creaking timbers, to cover it all with the vines and thorns and skeletal deciduous tangles she could see from her window by daylight. It was an unruly vegetation that rose as high as the top of the fence, on all sides of the garden, like a tidal surge over coastal walls.
Her eyelids gradually became heavy from fatigue, from the near sleepless night before. Eventually she relaxed over the edge of sleep.
But only for short periods, from which she would jerk awake to find herself lying in the same position in a lit room, with the garden’s noise still active beneath her window. Once, as she came round from being half asleep, she was sure the window was open because the thrash and scrape of bushes and tree branches below seemed unpleasantly loud and active around the bed.
The final time she awoke, she realized the room had somehow become dark as she’d dozed.
ELEVEN
And within the darkness she heard a voice. A woman’s voice. The voice in the fireplace. Only the voice was louder than it had been the night before. And now Stephanie better understood the tone to be comprised of weariness and resignation, a tired voice that seemed to be recounting grievances.
Snatches reached her ears. ‘And then you said … I said … I wouldn’t … unreasonable … but who was I … you, you told me … you swore … it was … meant something … a sign … frightened, the more I … and now I know…’
Stephanie lay still and acknowledged that her desire to know what the woman was saying exceeded her reluctant curiosity about why she could even hear the voice. This speech wasn’t aimed at her; she was overhearing something, like a phone call further down a train carriage, or someone talking to themselves who didn’t realize you were within earshot.
‘… involved … you are … you said … not that simple … must understand…’
The monotony, the continuous nature of the dialogue, also suggested a preoccupation with something unresolved that a mind was making audible to itself, as if a relentless communication with oneself might lead to an answer. Stephanie had often walked in on her stepmother doing the same thing, or stood in great discomfort outside a room while Val worked herself into a volatile state through imaginary conversations, either with her, her dead father, people she knew, people she didn’t know but knew of, while always playing herself as the injured party.
Only when polythene crinkled beneath the bed did Stephanie stop listening to the voice in the fireplace. Alarming as the voice was, there was something passive and disinterested about the tone. The sounds under her bed were incalculably worse. Particularly tonight, because they immediately suggested that something much bigger than a mouse had roused mere feet beneath where she lay.
The activity was reminiscent of rustling caused by whatever the polythene was wrapped around gradually shifting inside its coverings. And she’d happily accept a rat as an explanation right now. But as the only legitimate resident of a room that was so cold, either chilled to the bone by her fear, or naturally bereft of e
ven a vestige of warmth because the central heating was off, she felt a scream build as her thoughts fragmented.
She looked down her body but couldn’t see the duvet she lay beneath, and just peered, unblinking, into the lightless space that began on the surface of her eyes and seemed to continue into a freezing forever.
For a moment she suspected she was upside down and that the top of her head was level with the floor. The suspicion became belief as her mind failed to orientate the position of her body. And into the maelstrom of half thoughts, instincts and imaginings that her mind struggled to be more than, she received an impression that there was no floor at all and that she hung in space, revolving and adrift from solidity.
Dead. This is death.
She desperately wanted to move to regain a sense of the physical world she must have woken into. But if she moved she was terrified the other things in the darkness would be alerted to her presence: predators with blank eyes and gaping maws, changing course to follow a vibration in the depths of a freezing black ocean.
Her scream only added itself to the room when a floorboard shifted and groaned at the end of her bed, mere inches from her feet.
Into her awareness the missing dimensions of the physical world reassembled, prompted by the sound of the intruder, as if gravity itself had made a sudden reappearance inside the black space. An understanding that she was lying down, flat on her back, and not turning in the air should have been a blessing. But how could it when someone stood at the foot of her bed? An intruder who leaned forward, poised to climb onto the mattress with her. The bed coverings dipped on either side of her ankles.
