by Adam Nevill
It struck her as odd that he wouldn’t put a name to the subject, but told herself to just focus on getting through the night. Even if it only meant a few hours’ sleep. Get your pay tomorrow. Grab your bags and take off. You can do it. If she upset Knacker now he’d put her back in her old room, or on the street, and she’d spend the next few hours chasing after Ryan, and trying to get a train to another city, to stay in another place she didn’t want to be. And there was no guarantee she even could crash at Ryan’s place. He’d still not been in touch.
Towards the landlord she now felt the edge of an emotion that gave her a shudder of self-loathing: gratitude.
‘Anyway, you got a new place. Best room in the house. Even fought about taking this one myself. But I like my privacy upstairs.’
‘But can you at least tell me who lived in this room?’
His frown told her the question was unwelcome. ‘How should I know? Place was empty when I took it on, like. Me mum and dad had all kinds here. Lodgers. Stoodents. Girls. You know. Gave them somewhere decent to stay, like. I’m just carrying on the family tradition.’
‘Are all the rooms different?’
‘Yeah. A bit, like.’
‘You never came here to visit your parents?’
‘What is this, the fird degree? What’s it matter to you? Specially when you is getting in here on the ground, in a new development, like. Gonna be a show home when I’m froo with it.’
‘That girl in the room opposite me was really upset last night. The Russian girl. I think she is Russian. How many people live here? There’s a man on the ground floor, isn’t there? I heard him go into that Russian girl’s room last night, I—’
‘Bit nosy, ain’t ya?’Again he tensed up but wouldn’t meet her eye.
‘That girl might need help.’
‘My advice to you is don’t interfere with fings that don’t concern you, yeah?’
‘I was just worried about her.’
‘What am I, a social worker? People’s business is their business. Long as people pay and keep themselves to themselves, I ain’t their keeper.’ Then he broke into a big grin to change the subject. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you somefing. You is getting a bit a company soon. Uvver girls, like. There’s two movin’ in very soon. Comin’ up with my cousin.’
‘Great,’ she said, without any conviction, and immediately felt sorry for the future tenants. ‘Coming up’ was an odd expression too. From where? As Knacker spoke she also developed a suspicion that he’d been unable to let the rooms for long periods because of the disturbances. If she had experienced strange things here then surely others would have done too. Experienced what though? And hadn’t he also said that he’d forgotten the ‘Room for Rent’ advert was in the grocer’s window, and that he’d decided not to let the place? That he’d only taken pity on her? His story had changed twice in three days, because now ‘uvver girls’ were moving in. He had lied. Again.
‘Wait there, yeah. I’ll bring your bags down. See, I ain’t all bad, sister.’
‘It’s OK, I can do it.’
Before she finished speaking Knacker’s new trainers were bumping away into the darkness of the first floor corridor.
FIFTEEN
Stephanie rushed a shower and moved her head out of the cascade of water every few seconds to look over the side of the bath tub. Just in case.
But no one muttered beneath her feet.
It felt better, felt safer, to shower and wash her hair before she went to bed, rather than in the morning before work. She had no idea how she would feel by the time the sun rose and whether she would have the courage to wash herself. She refused to go another day without a shower and the water’s heat was a small comfort she was greedy for.
She’d not been able to look up the stairwell as she’d walked down the first floor passage to the bathroom, but repeatedly reminded herself that she now had a different room on a different floor of the house, desperately wringing as much reassurance as possible from the thin new truth.
She felt lightheaded and still hadn’t eaten. Back in her room she had crisps, a Double Decker chocolate bar, some supermarket sandwiches in a plastic carton – half price because they expired today. Something she’d snatched up before catching the bus home, unable to face the dirty kitchen and microwave preparation.
Home? Don’t call it that. It is not home.
When one of her colleagues at the shopping centre had said, ‘Thank God it’s nearly Friday’, and then recited her plans for the weekend that seemed to be entirely constructed out of home, boyfriend, friends, home, boyfriend, friends, each word had struck Stephanie with pangs of envy that wilted to a sadness as thick as the mumps inside her throat. She’d needed to busy herself inside her rucksack, looking for a bottle of water that she didn’t need, so the other two girls didn’t see the tears welling in her eyes.
Home. She had nothing that resembled a home, which in turn reminded her of her stepmother on that final day: the bleached and lined face, the lips sucked into the mouth, the jaw trembling and eyelids flickering, the complexion turning red, but then so bloodless at the point of no self-restraint, while her eyes purpled with rage before the screaming and shaking and slapping. It was something she’d seen too many times since her father died: the ranting that could continue all night.
She recalled Christmas. Val had screamed at her, through a door, for three hours without cease, until her voice gave out. Stephanie had pushed her bed against the door to keep the maniac outside. But Val had run downstairs and used a paring knife to cut Stephanie’s clothes that were drying on a rack, before snapping her CDs in half. Val had then smashed every plate and glass in the kitchen until her fury puttered into sobs.
Against her will she revisited the most enduring memory of her youth, when her dad had held her stepmother by the shoulders and demanded to know what she’d done with Stephanie’s guinea pig. The next day he’d taken his thirteen-year-old daughter to Dawlish for a week, where they’d felt like crying all of the time, and sometimes did, with their heads together.
Home.
Her plans for the weekend revolved around adding Pay-as-you-go credit to her phone, and doing sums to work out how little she would need to spend on food and bus fare to scrape another month’s rent together.
The other two girls she’d worked with already had jobs lined up for the following week: modelling, or standing by a sports car in another shopping centre, wearing red satin shorts and trying to sell raffle tickets. But Stephanie still hadn’t heard from the agency, and all the girls used the same firm.
Shivering, she switched off the shower, climbed out of the bath and yanked her towel from the radiator. The radiator was hot and her towel was warm. She clutched it around her shoulders and nearly wept from the pleasure it gave her.
The room was cold again. She looked to the window and wouldn’t have been surprised to see the glass encased in ice.
‘What is my name?’
‘Oh God, no. No. No. No,’ she whispered into the steam that hung like a mist about her face.
‘What is my name?’ There it was again, a voice rising from where she had just been standing in the bath. And the notion that she had just woken someone was hard to shift.
Stephanie opened the bathroom door and darted outside. Steam from her shower drifted out behind her and into the unlit corridor. The darkness of the house seemed vast.
The bathroom gradually took shape through the thinning steam: speckled mirror, grubby sink unit, grimy windows, red carpet flecked with bits, bath tub. And out of this dismal space came the voice again.
‘… before here … that time. Nowhere … to where the other … the cold … is my name?… I can’t…’
Stephanie’s thoughts scrabbled through a nonsense of panic; chaos filled with a child-like begging for all to be as it was and not like this.
A recording?
This was the same thing she’d heard yesterday morning. Only it was louder now. So it could indeed be a recording. A trick
. A joke. Something – some device – was under the bath and playing the same recording. Maybe this was just someone’s attempt to freak the new girl out.
‘What is my name?’
Stephanie strode inside the bathroom and stamped a foot on the floor. ‘Stop it! Stop it now!’ Stamped her foot again and didn’t care who heard her. ‘Enough!’
‘I … don’t … can you find … where … where … this … am I?’
The speaker, a girl, a teenager maybe, began to cry. And so did Stephanie as a terrible feeling of fear and misery enshrouded and then seeped through her until she was saturated with anguish.
But not her own anguish.
The grim sensations that occupied the physical space of the bathroom did not belong to her. With what presence of mind she retained, Stephanie was certain of this: the tangible misery of the room was contagious, unnatural and fast acting.
Stephanie lowered herself to her hands and knees and crawled across the hard, dry carpet towards the side of the bath. ‘Who are you? Can you hear me? Please, tell me?’
SIXTEEN
Stephanie lay awake in her bed. Overhead, a dim white glow filtered more than shone from the spotlights. The bulbs were thick with dust but their illumination was augmented by her bedside reading lamp at floor level. With the volume muted, the television set provided some extra light. There was no Freeview so the set had five channels; Channel 5 was mostly static and shadows.
Knacker’s cat-lick clean of the room had not extended above head height or involved dusting. The carpet had been vacuumed and the top of the mirrored table had been wiped clean, but on closer inspection not much else had been done to improve the condition of a long unoccupied space.
Stephanie wondered what kind of person would have painted walls so dark and had a white carpet. There was something immature about the style, something masculine too, like it had been put together by a Lothario to attract women, but a long time ago. She couldn’t imagine a mature, working-class couple, with a son like Knacker, was responsible for the décor. Maybe a lodger had personalized the room.
From the bed Stephanie looked about the area she had just searched like a forensic detective. She’d found no trace of the previous occupant, beside a sachet of the tiny crystals included with new garments, and three plastic coat hangers that didn’t match. These oddments were inside the vast mirrored wardrobe. There was nothing under the bed beside the large dust rabbits similar to those in her second floor room.
Her pile of bags rested against the wall beneath the barred window.
Were barred windows even legal?
It wasn’t even ten p.m. and the encroach of sleep was the anticipation of a coma. But her sluggish thoughts returned to the voice of the girl in the bathroom. Whoever had been speaking hadn’t answered her, or even seemed to hear her, despite an uncomfortable assumption that the speaker had been aware of her.
She’d nearly gone downstairs and knocked on the solitary door of the ground floor, which must open onto an apartment beneath the bathroom, but she had not found the courage because the smelly man lived down there.
After a while the voice beneath the bath had faded, and moved further away until it stopped. Only to start up again at a distance, far beneath the floor of the bathroom. The voice, she had ultimately decided, must have been a recording. Same with the voice in the fireplace of her first room. She tried her best to believe that a sophisticated practical joke with a sinister motive, rather than the presence of the supernatural, was responsible for the sounds. And sometimes she did believe this. Mostly, she didn’t know what to believe.
Her attempt at an explanation did not account for how sad and miserable the voice had made her feel. Just being close to it had made her heart break. Nor did her theories account for the plummet in the bathroom’s temperature compared with the draughty but heated corridor outside. Once the voice had stopped and she’d left the bathroom, the remainder of the first floor had felt like a greenhouse.
The side panel of the white chipboard frame that encased the bath tub had come away in her hands after a few tugs. Damp had turned the board at the corners of the panel to what looked like sodden Weetabix. Under the tub she’d found wooden floorboards, balls of grey dust, wood shavings, a screw, an empty paint tin, a curl of tar paper, and a smell of mildew mingled with a trace of the rotten bin smell. It was the same odour she’d detected when she’d first sat on the dusty toilet the day before.
There had been nothing electrical in the visible spaces around the fibre glass tub: no little speakers, no holes or trapdoor in the floorboards, and no wires or electrical paraphernalia. Once the side panel was off, the voice had not been any louder either, or easier to hear, but had sounded as if it were rising from deeper inside the house, from downstairs.
If she heard it again she would go and get Knacker and make him stand in the bathroom and listen to it. She would make him tell her where the voice came from.
Stephanie set the alarm. Squashed herself against the wall and waited for sleep. She was tired enough to hallucinate, but told herself the room was unfamiliar, that she was on edge and she would surely wake at the first strange noise that announced itself. She would not be taken unawares again.
Beneath her pillow lay a blunt vegetable paring knife she had appropriated from the kitchen.
SEVENTEEN
The sound that roused Stephanie from sleep was the door to the neighbouring room opening. This was followed by the sound of feet padding out of the room and into the passage.
Stephanie rolled out of bed and ran to the door of her room.
She was sure the room beside hers was empty. There had been no light beneath the door when she passed the room to go to and from the bathroom earlier. To her knowledge, no one had entered the room since, and not a sound had passed through the shared wall. In fact, all evening following her shower, the entire first floor had remained silent.
Opening her own door a few inches she peered into the unlit corridor. All she could see was the distant stairwell window, nothing more than a dim rectangle of ambient light. But she could still hear the pad of feet, a sound issuing from further down the corridor.
Realizing the light in her room would alert her position to whoever was in the corridor, she opened her door wider, to fully reveal herself and to not appear sneaky. The flood of light from her room showed Stephanie an empty corridor and a lifeless landing at its end. Her entire coating of skin seemed to shrink as each hair follicle made itself known with a prickle of static.
How could this be?
The bathroom door shut.
Stephanie jumped.
Presumably it had been closed by her neighbour who must have just left the corridor to approach the bathroom from the landing. And been out of sight from the doorway of Stephanie’s room?
Possible.
Her neighbour might also have been asleep when Knacker had shown her the room earlier. Or had returned to the room while Stephanie showered or slept. The idea that she was meant to wake now, and had been awoken, had to be supressed.
She went back inside her room and retrieved her phone from the floor beside the bed. The time was twenty to eleven. So she hadn’t even been asleep for thirty minutes and immediately felt cheated by time; she dearly wished that dawn was only minutes away.
Stephanie returned to the door of her room and narrowed the gap, but left it ajar in the doorframe so she could better hear the neighbour come out of the bathroom. She was sure it was a young woman because of the lightness of the step.
She sat on the end of her bed to wait for the bathroom door to reopen; waited long enough to become uncomfortable with her own door remaining ajar for so long. While she waited, Stephanie pondered what the woman could be doing in the bathroom. Shower? Bath? Constipation? She waited another twenty minutes before becoming impatient, and then she marched through the passageway to the bathroom. She would not sleep tonight until she knew who was living in the room next door.
Outside of the bathroom, Steph
anie cleared her throat. ‘Excuse me? Miss? I wonder how long you will be. I need to use the bathroom.’
There was no answer.
Stephanie knocked on the door.
No response.
Stephanie turned the plastic door handle. It was unlocked and opened onto an unlit room. Behind her, the landing light clicked out.
She turned in panic. Rushed across the landing in near darkness to flail at the wall with her hands, but could not find the switch that was somewhere beside the open kitchen door. She shuffled back to the outline of the bathroom doorframe, yanked at the light cord and lit up the empty, silent room.
Where are you?
This wasn’t possible. She’d heard her neighbour’s feet and the bathroom door close.
The other bedrooms were further up the corridor towards the front of the house. So had the girl crept back to her room and re-entered it without Stephanie hearing?
Not possible.
Stephanie hurriedly returned to her own room. Closed the door and locked it. She climbed back into bed and stared at the television without noticing what was on the screen.
Within minutes footsteps padded down the corridor, from the direction of the bathroom. Stephanie did not move. She held her breath so as to not make any sound at all.
The door of the room next door opened and closed.
EIGHTEEN
The space was narrow, dim and lined with old grey pipes. In parts, a furry cladding was wrapped around the pipes and secured with electrical tape that was so old the tape had crisped and begun to peel away.
The walls Stephanie’s shoulders squeezed through were made of plasterboard. Some words had been written on them with chalk. Stephanie read ‘Misha is a slag’, and hurried past to follow her stepmother through the tunnel. Val turned her head and said, ‘Will you keep up. You’ve already made me late!’
