by Adam Nevill
Petrified with shock, and sickened enough by what she was hearing to know she’d never been truly repulsed before, Stephanie was unable to react.
A female stranger was being beaten. The sounds made her feel giddy and strengthless, as if she were seeing violence, or as if it were happening to her instead. Even her stepmum’s boyfriend, the little bespectacled runt that had liked to stand in her doorway when drunk, leering at her every time he came upstairs to use the toilet, hadn’t come close to disgusting her as much as what she could hear in the room next door.
Stephanie climbed off the bed, as quietly as possible, wincing at every creak of mattress spring and then each squeak of floorboard. She approached the door on tiptoe.
So was there a girl next door after all, and had Fergal gone to her?
It could have been you.
She went back to her bedside and picked up her phone. Tapped in 999. Then paused with her thumb over the CALL button when she remembered her inability to catch sight of her neighbour the previous night, and her failure to find the girl in the bathroom. She also considered the absence of any light in her neighbours’ rooms, and their refusal to respond to her pleas.
Stephanie opened her door and stared into the unlit passageway of the first floor. As usual, the rooms on either side of the hallway were in darkness. So a girl was being beaten in the dark by a man who had searched for her without turning the lights on? This didn’t make sense. Or perhaps she was hearing something that wasn’t really happening. That made even less sense.
Stephanie moved to the neighbouring door. On the other side she could still hear the thumps and the groans, the whimpers and the horrible plodding of male feet. But she was also aware of something else: a strong odour. A reek of gum disease, beefy bestial sweat revived by fresh perspiration in unwashed clothes, an oily scalp, alcohol breath. A stench instantly recognizable from her second night on the floor above. This was the smell of the man who went to the crying Russian girl and had sex with her, and then stood outside Stephanie’s room in a silent vigil.
Stephanie wanted to scream. But she was also tired of being confused and frightened and rejected and poor and trapped and bullied and …
Engulfed by an urge to punch and claw and kick, she gripped her head and shouted ‘No!’, and before she even had time to question her actions she began pounding the palms of both hands against the door. ‘Stop it! Stop! Leave her alone! Leave her alone, you bastard!’
She was astounded by the volume of her voice in the darkness of the corridor, and shocked because she’d done something she’d believed herself incapable of. Just as quickly, Stephanie was seized by an apprehension that hardened under her skin like a film of ice, because the neighbouring room had fallen silent. After apprehension came anticipation, the unpleasant kind, when she knew that a face out of sight, that she didn’t want to be noticed by, had just turned in her direction.
They are aware of you.
The nape of her neck and her scalp goosed and she shivered in the cold; a cold she’d plunged into on leaving her room, that had grown so debilitating, as though the house no longer possessed a roof or walls to hold back a freezing absence outside itself, through which they came with their footsteps and their cries and their voices and their smells … to show you things.
Stephanie hurried back inside her room and slammed the door, locked it. But felt as vulnerable as she had been in the corridor, peeled of the sense of physical security a locked door usually provides.
And the cold. It was still cold inside her room. Her feet felt like they were turning blue. Her breath shuddered in and out of her chest.
When you are cold you are not alone.
She swallowed. ‘Who?’ She looked about the walls, the ceiling, as she inched towards her bed.
They can’t hurt you.
‘Who are you?’ She kept her voice down; even in her shock she was conscious of being overheard. Knacker and Fergal would be asleep two floors above her room, and if they hadn’t heard her outburst, or the beating of one of their tenants, they probably wouldn’t hear her now. She raised her voice. ‘Who is there? Tell me. Please. I can’t stand it any more…’ Her voice started to shake. ‘I can’t … I can’t get out … I can’t stand it…’ Emotion closed her throat.
‘I’m cold.’
At the sound of the voice next to Stephanie’s ear, she fell upon the bed and shoved herself backwards to the headboard with the balls of her feet, untucking the fitted sheet from the mattress as she moved.
Had she heard a voice?
Yes, she had heard something. But was the voice in the room or inside her head? Was she only doubting the voice because she couldn’t see anyone? And if she believed someone had spoken, well then … she was mad because she was hearing voices. Either that or everything she’d ever accepted as the truth about the natural world and the laws that governed it, had just come up really short.
She reached for the TV remote and switched the muted set off, then nervously eyed the mirrored doors of the wardrobe, but wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was operating on some instinctive superstition, or had recalled something fantastical about mirrors that she’d picked up from a book or a film a long time ago. But there was no one reflected in the glass, other than herself, who literally looked like she’d just heard a ghost.
She shuffled under the duvet and drew it under her chin. ‘Who are you? Tell me.’ Stephanie’s voice shook from the cold.
Silence.
She felt wild and mad, almost hysterical and slightly beyond her terror, and in a new mental space she’d not inhabited before; one that was open and unrestrained, receptive and reckless, unthinking. ‘Why are you here?’ She concentrated her thoughts and feelings into the room; her mind grasped, reached and strained to see, to hear, to know.
The room was taut with tension, like the air of a classroom full of nervous children suddenly exposed under the gaze of a brutish teacher. It was a similar feeling to walking alone at night and hearing footsteps following. The air was somehow thinner, the space quieter, as though the room was holding its breath. It made her feel small, at the verge of something much greater than herself, like an ocean, or a vast night sky. And she felt so sad within it all, and so lonely. The crushing solitude brought a quiver to her jaw and blurred her eyes with tears.
‘I’m cold…’ There it was again, the voice. ‘… me. I’m so cold…’
The voice was over by the window. Young, female, distraught. Lost?
‘I … I can hear you,’ Stephanie said after a big swallow. ‘Who are you?’
Not in answer but seemingly in acknowledgement of Stephanie’s challenge, the girl began to cry from a third location, from over by the wall behind the television set, or even slightly beyond the wall.
‘I want to help you,’ Stephanie said, but indecision about whether she wanted the contact to continue, on any level, reduced her voice to a whisper.
‘Hold me.’ This was spoken close to her ear as if someone was now stood beside the bed and leaned towards her.
Stephanie shrieked and backed further into the wall.
Nothing there. No one and nothing in the cold room she could see. But if they spoke again she was sure her mind would fizz out like a pinched candle flame, and that would be it for her.
Her skin tingled with pin pricks while she sat still and quiet in a cold silence for five minutes, according to her phone. Her mind became strangely absent, as if it were trying to slip towards, and then permanently maintain, a stunned nothingness.
Eventually, once her astonishment that she was still conscious and breathing, and had survived, slipped into curiosity again, she tried to comprehend what she was experiencing. Something so monumental it made her feel weightless.
Rearranging her position on the bed, she lay down, one side of her body crammed against the wall as if she needed to cling to something physical and tangible. ‘Are … are you still here?’ she asked the room again.
The mattress dipped and the bed softly rustled a
s the weight of another body lay down beside her.
TWENTY-FIVE
On the cold, wet path outside the house, upon which she stood in bare feet, Stephanie bent double and sucked hard at the night air. Her heart thumped thick inside her ears. She feared she was going to be sick.
Before throwing herself out of her room, and then the house, she’d possessed the presence of mind to pull her coat over her underwear, but had forgotten to force her feet into the unlaced trainers beside the bed.
Clutching her phone in a trembling hand, she worried she might drop the handset and quickly cupped it with both hands.
Rain vigorously speckled her face and bare legs. She stepped back to the front door hoping for cover, but a thick stream of water spattered the concrete and splashed her legs. The guttering high above was holed.
The cold was sobering.
Beyond the small metal gate between the ink-black mass of the encroaching privet hedges, she could see three houses across the road; all of the front windows were unlit. Some of the curtains hadn’t been drawn in the upper windows. The houses and those who lived in them suggested disinterest in her plight. The horrible man who lived next door would not be safe to go to.
What could she actually say to anyone about what she had just experienced?
As she’d run through the house to the front door she had told herself she would call the police. But now she was outside, the urgency of the idea shrank inside her. What would she say to them? A ghost had climbed into her bed? People she could not see were coming into her room? A girl in an empty room next door had been beaten? Her landlords intimidated her?
‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.’ Her body trembled as her breathing shuddered in and out of her still heaving chest.
She should run right now, go somewhere.
Where?
Some kind of shelter for the homeless? A police cell would be better than that room. Maybe if she told the truth to the police she would be committed and sedated in a hospital. She seriously considered it as an option until the solid tangibility of the street and the great black house behind her, and the physical discomfort of the cold and wet, blunted the spike of her shock and drained the swamping terror that had compelled her to flee the room and stand outside the house like a frightened child stands outside the closed door of its parents’ bedroom after a nightmare.
She looked at the time on her phone: two a.m. Three hours until the sky lightened. If she could stay awake that long, and then gather her bags and call one of the girls back home, and call a taxi to New Street Station, then this could all end. Three more hours.
Stephanie wiped the rain off her face, turned around and went back inside the dark house.
DAY FOUR
TWENTY-SIX
‘Mmm. I just don’t like this place. The other people here … And the work is shit. But there’s not enough of the shit to go round, Bekka,’ Stephanie said into her phone, and then continued to gnaw at a fingernail.
‘Same all over, bab. If you can’t make a go of it down there, makes you wonder where’s any better for the rest of us, don’t it?’
‘It would only be for a while. Maybe a week, two at most. I’ve … I’ve just had a real setback. Please, Bekka.’
‘I’ll talk to Pete. It’s his place. He’s at football. I’ll ask him soon as he gets in. Will call you right away, yeah?’
‘Thanks.’
There was pause before Bekka said, ‘You OK, pet?’
The sympathetic concern in her friend’s voice introduced a tremor to Stephanie’s own. She moved the handset away from her face to swallow and regain control of herself. She wiped her eyes, swallowed. ‘Later then, yeah?’
‘You wouldn’t think about going back…’
‘Not Ryan.’ There were no bones holding her voice upright. She could barely hear herself and had to clear her throat again. ‘He’s seeing someone. Already asked.’
‘Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know whether you knew. But I meant, you know … Val? Home?’
‘Never.’
‘Just a thought if it’s that bad down there—’
‘I can’t. It’s Val’s house. I’m not eighteen any more. I have no rights there. Even if I wanted to go back she wouldn’t let me in. We really went at it that last time. Permanent damage.’ As Stephanie said this to her friend she wondered if she would soon have to beg her psychotic stepmother to give her shelter.
They said goodbye. Stephanie threw her phone onto the bed behind her. Three down, none to go. Joanie had been her first port of call. She was back with her mum and dad, sleeping in the spare room with twenty grand’s worth of debt from student loans. Philippa was three months pregnant – why hadn’t she told Stephanie before? – and staying with her boyfriend’s mum. Besides Bekka and her boyfriend, an Asda cashier and a tyre-fitter respectively, none of her friends or their partners had jobs, despite one degree and over ten good A Levels between them.
We are all, literally, in it together.
She’d also phoned all five temping agencies before they closed to see if they had any work for her. They had all said the same thing in the same voice: nothing’s come in yet. She’d even asked them to consider her for telesales, but they still offered nothing.
Stephanie grabbed her bag and phone and left the room she could not abide being inside any longer.
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘God,’ Stephanie said in a kind of nervy exhale, after sharply drawing breath. But the girl in the garden hadn’t seen Stephanie behind the staircase window, not even when she had moved into the woman’s peripheral vision.
The girl continued to smoke, one hand tucked under an arm, the other arm lazily bent at the elbow. Her cigarette was as long, thin and white as the fingers that held it. Standing beside a stained double mattress that leant against the garden wall, the girl stared into the middle distance, her face half turned from the house to stare at the thickets of wet scrub choking the overladen apple trees.
The girl in the garden also ignored Knacker’s dog; this was the first time Stephanie had seen the creature. It was a type of bull terrier with black and brown tiger-like stripes that were smooth and tight around its intimidating musculature. The dog pulled towards the girl’s legs, half growling and choking itself at the end of what looked like an anchor chain. Which meant the dog could see the girl too. The dog had also barked when the suggestion of an angry man had run through the house to the Russian girl’s room, and during the nights when the corridor outside her room had filled with … she didn’t know what. So the dog’s reaction might not indicate that the girl was actually there.
Not for the first time Stephanie was astonished at herself for having such a thought, though it was unaccompanied by a familiar freeze of fear, because it was daylight. But then …
She had to get to the bank before it closed to withdraw cash with her chequebook and passport, and she carried on down the stairs to the ground floor, wondering if she had just seen the Russian girl – she of the strong perfume and high heels who had ignored her and seemed to exist without electric light, who wept alone in the dark, and who Stephanie had virtually come to believe didn’t exist. The people of the dark.
But she might now exist. Oh please let her be real.
Stephanie stopped and thought harder about her second night in the building; her sighting of the Russian girl had been fleeting as the woman passed into the room. But she had received an impression that her second floor neighbour was tall, blonde and attractive; the girl in the garden was pretty and fitted that description.
If it was the same girl then why was she smoking in the garden when she lived on the second floor? And how did she get into the garden? Probably via the ground floor, though Knacker had said the ground floor was out of bounds. Or maybe she had walked down the side of the house as it was detached.
Excited by the idea that the girl might actually be real, Stephanie turned and jogged back up the stairs to peer through the stairwell window.
The girl had gone; the
dog was quiet and had moved out of sight too.
She peered around the garden, from the unappealing, cluttered patio to the high brick walls that ran along both sides of the property and concealed the neighbouring houses. The end of the rear yard was obscured. Brambles at head height erupted through small bushes and surrounded an ancient oak tree in the middle of the area. The sight of the tree made Stephanie feel uncomfortable, though she did not know why. Through the oak tree’s lowest branches she could make out the top of a wooden shed, an old structure, lopsided and swallowed by the unruly, inappropriately fecund vegetation. By daylight she could also see blackberry vines, as thick as serpents, red as fresh blood, entwined amongst the dross.
She guessed the end of the garden bordered the rear garden of a house in the next street, parallel to Edgehill Road. Over the far walls peeked the upper floors and roofs of houses.
Between the oak tree and the patio, chipboard and offcuts of timber had been soaked by rain so many times they’d begun to look like cardboard. She could see two entire doors down there and another stained mattress close to where the back door of the house should be. Around the timber, huge chunks of plaster and broken masonry had been dumped in untidy heaps, as if thrown out the back of the house and left to erode in the garden. A great deal of renovation had taken place at number 82, though not recently.
So who would go down there? A hardened smoker? But why, when smoking was clearly allowed indoors?
Stephanie closed her eyes and took a deep breath before resuming her descent of the staircase. She found herself unable to dwell on the girl’s vanishing act as much as she ordinarily would have done. Or should do.
On the ground floor, she peered around the banisters and into the unlit corridor that tunnelled towards the rear of the house and the solitary locked door, situated at the end of the hall on the right hand side. Listening intently, she peered back up the stairs but heard nothing.
