by Adam Nevill
Stephanie thrust one arm out from the covers and seized the lamp beside the bed. ‘No. Don’t,’ was all she could manage in a quiet, almost resigned, tone of voice.
She found the rubber cord, the switch.
Held her breath.
When she saw the face her heart would stop. Which made her wonder if it would be better to endure this within darkness … whatever this was.
Stephanie switched on the light.
TWELVE
She gulped at the air like she had been holding her breath under cold water for a dangerous length of time. She drew her arms and legs into herself and shuffled up the bed and into the corner, dragging the bedclothes with her. Being uncovered within the room was unbearable.
She stared at the walls and the furnishings, peeked around the edges of the bed, and saw only those outmoded articles of furniture within the tacky, scruffy walls, and nothing else. There was no one on her bed and no one in her room.
At least no one you can see.
She stood up on the bed. Took the duvet with her and tottered down the mattress to hit the light switch on the wall beside the door to get the ceiling light on.
Leaning her back against the wall, she peered into the space under the desk, scrutinized the gap between the bedside cabinet and the mattress, assessed the curtains for a bulge in case someone had tried to conceal themselves against the locked windows.
There were no bulges, and no one crouched under the desk or lying on the floor beside her bed. The room was as empty as it had been before she fell asleep with the lights on.
The lights!
Who had switched the lights off? Someone had been in here.
A presence.
A presence that could kill the light.
What else could it kill?
Stephanie looked down at the sheets. Nothing rustled beneath her bed anymore. Nothing had crawled out from under there. The room was sealed. The room was locked.
And you’re locked inside it.
She leapt off the bed and made sure to land clear of an area that an arm might reach into from under the bedframe, with a hand swiping about.
She stared into the empty space beneath her bed: floorboards, a multitude of dust rabbits, a section of red rug, the plain wall in shadow.
She moved to the curtains and yanked them aside to look at the grubby glass of two locked sash windows.
Bent over, her hands placed on the table to support her weight, she breathed in deeply, exhaled, breathed in. She stared at the empty black grate of the fireplace. At the long unused iron hearth, set between two Doric pillars of hardwood, painted a creamy colour. Impossibly, just impossibly, the voice had come out of there.
Across the hallway, her neighbour’s door opened, swung inwards and banged against an item of furniture.
Stephanie flinched and clasped her hands to her mouth. Her face screwed up but she was too frightened to cry. The coming together of noises and movements and energy that should not be, that could not be, seemed to merge into a critical mass around her.
Heavy footsteps crossed the dark corridor and paused outside her door. The round door knob quickly turned: once, twice, three times. The plastic handle rattled loosely inside the wood.
‘Who is it?’ she said to the door in a voice she barely recognized as her own.
There was no answer. But whoever had turned the handle, whoever had tried to enter her room, must still be there, outside, listening. She’d heard no footsteps retreat.
DAY TWO
THIRTEEN
‘Awright, nice day at work? What flavour was them crusts you was giving out today? Don’t know how you can stand a job like that. Demeaning, ain’t it?’ Knacker grinned as if triumphant at her return to the house. He came out of the room at the end of the second floor corridor, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. The hallway lights winked out.
Stephanie had only returned to collect as much as she could carry, and to make the most difficult phone call of her life to Ryan, before heading to New Street train station to buy a single ticket to Coventry with the last of her money, so she could put the disaster that had been her new start in Birmingham out of its misery.
Ryan hadn’t picked up her calls so far, or responded to her text messages, but if he allowed her to return to his place, and if she travelled to Coventry tonight, the deposit and advance rent were gone for good, something she’d begrudgingly accepted that day like the removal of a front tooth to permanently destroy her smile. Ryan would then have to accompany her to this house at the weekend to pick up the rest of her bags, while also needing to sub her with cash.
Either that or she left the building this evening and walked around Birmingham city centre all night until the Bullring opened.
Not even six full months away from her stepmother, after fleeing what she had known as the family home since the age of eleven, but a house that now belonged to Val, and she’d already sunk to last resorts: no money, borrowed beds, an ex-boyfriend’s mercy.
‘Fack’s sake. Put them fings on again, will ya?’
Stephanie hit the switch quickly, her speed motivated by the thought of being inside a lightless passage with Knacker. She opened the door to her room and stepped inside.
‘Hang on, hang on, I need to speak wiv you.’
‘I have nothing to say to you.’
‘Suit yourself. Just wanted to show you somefing.’
Stephanie dropped her bag on the bed and turned to close the door at the precise moment Knacker appeared in the doorway to deter her. The lights went out behind him. He shook his head with irritation and slapped them on again. It struck her as odd that he would be annoyed with his own policy of timed lighting. Maybe it was his parents’ innovation.
His presence made her tense and nervous, but he made no move to enter the room. He sniffed up his long nose; the bones at the top were thickened by poorly healed breaks. ‘I know the conversation we had last night was awkward.’
Awkward? She stared at him, aghast.
‘We might have got off on the wrong foot and all that. So I’ve been having a fink today. And fought I was probably being a bit harsh last night.’ Clearly delighted he had her full attention, he immediately resumed his tedious loquaciousness. ‘I fought, have a heart, Knacker. Girl’s on her own and all that. New city. No fella. No friends…’
‘What? What do you want?’ She couldn’t bare him outlining the downsides of her life; she’d stuff hot wax in her own ears before she listened to another word.
The lights clicked out. She wished he would click out. Knacker slapped them on again. When the light returned he looked startled at having been plunged into such a heavy darkness. Then his eyes lidded, like a crafty serpent she thought, but the half-smile never left his face. Very slowly he said, ‘I was getting to that. If you’d let me finish.’
She raised her hands. ‘What? I can have my deposit, can I?’
He raised a finger as if talking to a naughty child. ‘Ah, ah, ah. Don’t put words in my mouf.’
‘Then what do you want?’
‘If you would care to follow me, I will show you.’
‘Why would I go anywhere with you?’
‘My, my, someone’s had a bad day, but don’t take it out on me, yeah, when I’m trying to do you a favour.’
Stephanie closed her eyes. Another night feeling terrified without sleep, followed by another eight hours on her feet, holding a tray of muffin fragments outside a coffee shop, gave her a sense that something inside her had finally broken and that nothing would be able to fix it. She opened her eyes and when she spoke there was no bite or strength left in her voice. ‘Favour? My deposit is the only favour I want.’
‘You’re like a broken record, you are.’ He broke into a bad falsetto to mimic her voice, in revenge she presumed. ‘Deposit. Deposit. Deposit.’ Then he grinned and showed her his peg teeth. ‘Some fings are worth putting a down payment on, yeah? Holding deposit. You don’t wanna look a gift horse in the mouf, sister. So follow me
and see what you fink a this. No pressure. I ain’t trying to sell you nuffin’. I’m doing you a favour. You don’t want it, I’ll even help you carry them bags down to the street, cus that might be your only other option, yeah? Else why would you be here?’
She wanted to be a man; she wanted to punch his face. But she was a girl denied even rudeness because he was unstable.
‘Come on, come on. This way, darlin’.’ Knacker stepped away and into the corridor, beaming at her. At the new distance his eyes appeared weird, like they were too close together, and a fraction of a second too slow to move, like he’d spent a significant amount of his life frying his brains with skunk weed or glue.
The lights clicked off and returned him to the darkness.
FOURTEEN
‘What you fink of this then?’
The sight of the room made her feel more awake than she’d been all day. It was on the first floor and didn’t appear to be a part of the same building that housed her room, the kitchen or the bathroom. The latter dismal place she’d not even been able to bear that morning; before leaving the house she’d just put new make-up on in her room and dressed in the previous day’s clothes.
And like a replay of yesterday morning, as she’d made her way out of the building she’d heard a man shuffle across the tiles of the hall; he must live on the ground floor, because she was certain there had been no sound of movement on the staircase as she descended from the second floor to the first. So the man must have coincidentally come out of a ground floor door and left the house at the same time as her on two consecutive days. Only this morning her paranoia suggested that he was not running from her but circling her.
Stephanie had paused on the stairs when she heard the footsteps, and not moved until the front door had shut behind him. If the man leaving the building had been throwing himself into the crying Russian girl the night before, then Stephanie had not wanted to so much as glimpse the back of his head. Because he would have been the same man that had stood outside the door of her room, listening, after he’d finished with the Russian.
While Stephanie had waited on the stairs for the male tenant to leave the building, she’d also noticed a strip of yellow light under the door of the bathroom on the first floor. So maybe another tenant had been inside the bathroom getting ready for their day. It could not have been the Russian girl, because Stephanie had not heard her neighbour’s door open at any time during her mostly sleepless early morning vigil.
With the man standing outside her room the night before, she’d sat with her back against the door for two hours before sleep overcame her around one a.m. And within those two hours of tense, alert wakefulness, she had not heard him creep away. Not heard any sound in the corridor outside her room. Or, thank God, inside it either.
Even as the sky lightened at dawn, after she stirred, near concussed with sleep deprivation, when Stephanie eventually inched the door open there had been no one in the corridor and not a trace of the smells or the atmosphere she’d encountered in the night. The Russian girl’s room had been quiet and unlit.
Knacker stood and grinned by the foot of the bed in the first floor room that he was so keen to show her.
Stephanie never passed through the doorway. ‘I don’t understand.’
Knacker’s big hyena grin evolved into a mucky laugh thickened by catarrh. ‘It’s yours, girl. If you want it. Same price an’ everyfing. Least ’til the whole house is done up. Fought it might be a bit more comfortable, like. You know, might help wiv your current dilemma.’
‘What…’ She didn’t know what to say, or what to make of the offer, or the room. This was a room you might see in an eighties film. Two triple-bulb spotlights cast an icy glow over black walls and the starkness of a white carpet and ceiling, but without fully lighting the room. Mirrored wardrobe doors gave the impression the room was much bigger.
‘As I told you, I’ve been fixin’ the place up, room by room. This kind of job takes time, darlin’. I finished it up today. There’s nuffin’ I can’t do wiv these hands. You know the Dorchester, yeah, on Park Lane? I did a total refit there. That kind of craftsmanship don’t come cheap neither.’
He carried on talking but his voice barely registered while Stephanie stared at the room. She heard snatches: ‘Bloke said … how much … I said, get out of it, what you fink I am?’
The bed was enormous, the iron ends decorative and painted white. There was a mirrored glass table with chrome edges set under the window, that appeared to have come from a hairdresser’s that thought itself classy. Across the room from the bed was a bulky television set, with a case made from grey plastic. She remembered the style from years ago.
‘Then I was finking about me old mum and dad’s place … Lot of work, but me and me cousin … what they always did, have lodgers, like…’
Stephanie was aware of the chemical odours of carpet cleaner and air freshener hanging in what smelled like an older space. Because that’s what it was: an unaired musty room, with dated décor that gave the impression it had been sealed away for some time, left unused and unchanged. Knacker might have made an attempt at cleaning it, but the paintwork was old, sallow in places on the ceiling. There was no smell or sign of recent decoration or refurbishments. Knacker was lying. But the room was still a vast improvement on the one she had; a room she would not be able to spend another night inside.
‘Don’t have to make up your mind straightaway, but my phone’s been ringing all day. Rooms here is getting a lot of interest. This one will get snapped up by the first person that sees it. But I fought being as you was already here and paid up for the first mumf…’
If it were possible for her to tolerate one more night at this address, in this room, and to go to work Friday, then she could leave tomorrow night with three days’ pay. And she wouldn’t have to make that call to Ryan tonight.
She could be frightened in this building, and anxious about her safety amongst at least two male presences, or try and get to Coventry tonight, where she had never even found a single day’s work, while dead on her feet and broke, and plunge into another kind of emotional manipulation from an ex-boyfriend. That was the choice.
One more night?
At least this was a new room; it wasn’t that room. No two rooms could be alike.
Could they?
Knacker was manipulative, but his only desire, she was sure, was money. The other one’s business was not clear, but she’d not even seen him, and his dealings were with the Russian girl up on the second floor. This room was even on a different floor of the house.
‘OK. Thanks.’ As soon as she’d spoken, she began worrying that her desperate acceptance might be another mistake she would pay for dearly in the very near future.
‘Fought you’d see sense. Young girl like you don’t wanna be movin’ about all the time, dossin’ on floors, like—’
‘Who lived in here before?’
‘What’s that matter? She ain’t here no more. Place is vacant.’
‘The other room. The one I have. It’s…’
His bony face turned to her quickly, the chin raised. ‘What about it?’
Stephanie didn’t know what to say. I won’t stay inside the room because it’s haunted, was not an option. That morning, as soon as she’d put some distance between herself and the house, haunted became a word coated in an absurd skin; it didn’t even have to leave her mouth to make her feel ludicrous.
Stephanie studied Knacker’s face, and suspected there might be a trace of apprehension in his expression over her line of enquiry. Either that or it was the defensive posture he adopted about the house. But while so tired and confused, she wasn’t sure she could trust any of her perceptions. Perhaps no one could help her, save a priest or a psychiatrist, but the need to talk to someone about the room, to escape the prison of paranoia that her mind had become, became compulsive. ‘It … the room. It’s not right.’
‘Eh? What you talkin’ about? Place is old. Might need a tart-up, but nuffin’ major
, like. This whole place is sound as—’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I heard something. In my room. At night.’
Knacker grinned. ‘Got spooked, did ya?’ He was thinking of laughing at her.
She cut him off. ‘I wasn’t just frightened. It was worse than that.’
Knacker narrowed his eyes as if he was hooding them so she couldn’t read them. He sniffed. ‘Not sure I am comfortable with what you are suggesting.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t have patience wiv all that crap.’
‘But I heard a voice in my room. Two nights running.’
He laughed. ‘You heard a TV. Coulda been mine. Fink I had it on.’
‘Didn’t sound like a TV. And the sound … under the bed, I thought they were mice, but I’m not sure—’
‘Fack’s sake, girl. You jumpin’ at the sound a mice. Not that I’m saying there is any here. I cleared them all out. The house’s been empty for a while, that’s all. They get into empty houses, see. Cus of the cold. Maybe there’s still one left.’
‘But that wouldn’t explain—’
‘You’re pullin’ my leg, you are. What you after, rent reduction? I’ve heard it all now.’
‘Someone was inside my room.’
Knacker stopped laughing and sniffed. He looked wary.
‘I heard someone. Twice. Both nights. But they weren’t there when I turned the light on. Who lived in that—’
‘As I said, I would fank you, yeah, I would appreciate you not making remarks about me mum and dad’s house, yeah? I got no time for none of that rubbish. So you is out of line.’
‘Sorry.’ She said it automatically, though she wasn’t sorry at all.
‘How would you like it, if I came round your mam’s house, and I started going on about all of this, yeah? So I’ll fank you to not talk about it again. This place is gonna be somefing, I can tell you, when it’s all done up, so I don’t want none of that, yeah, about my house. Reputation and all that.’ He sniffed loudly and relaxed his shoulders. Getting his own way was important to Knacker.
