by Adam Nevill
Curious about what Fergal had been doing outside the door, Stephanie entered the short passage and moved into the shadows. The walls on either side were painted white but had not received any attention in years. The layers of paint on the wallpaper were thick and the colour of vanilla ice cream dropped upon summer pavements. The area was musty with a hint of gas, an underfloor odour she associated with old houses divided into sub-lets, and nothing unusual.
There had once been three doors on the ground floor, but two had been bricked up and painted over many years ago. She could see the outlines of the door frames; they reminded her of empty picture frames in the unused space of an art gallery.
The surviving door that Fergal had been so enthralled by had the vague outline of ‘1A’ between two holes where screws had once held a flat number in place, and a keyhole.
Stephanie put an ear to the surface of the door and listened.
Nothing.
As if in response to her investigation, somewhere, far up inside the building, another door opened.
Stephanie moved out of the corridor quickly and only paused to check the post: the usual flyers for fried chicken and kebab shops, a minicab card – MILLENNIUM – and a brown window envelope from Birmingham City Council addressed to Mr Bennet. The letter inside was red and the envelope had FINAL WARNING printed across the front.
Bennet?
Stephanie dropped the post and let herself out of the house.
Steely bright light stung the back of her eyes, as though she’d just opened curtains on a new morning, though it was already noon; she’d slept through her alarm that morning and not woken until 11.30 – something she’d thought impossible to achieve in that room after the night’s disturbances.
The room’s lights had still been on when she’d awoken. Outside her barred window cars had occasionally passed. There was no sign that anyone had been in the bed beside her at any time during the night once she’d returned from the front path.
Once the sphincter-pinching terror that came with the suggestion of a body lying down next to her had become a long period of silent inactivity on the mattress, and long after the cold and drizzle of the night air had calmed her down, exhaustion had chosen its moment to overrun her flattened body and mind. She’d remained unconscious until she’d woken late.
No bad dreams had followed her out of sleep and into daylight either. She’d brushed her teeth and washed in a warm and mercifully silent bathroom, feeling as if she were hyper-real and too large for life; as if she were mimicking a routine that had long become abnormal in the building. But she’d still tiptoed around the parts of the first floor she used, nervous of starting it again, of waking something up.
At least she was outside now, alive and well. Even pocks of drizzle against her face, that would soon make her hair frizz, were a welcome change to the close air of the house and the smells of neglect and age. Out here, anyone she came across would probably be of flesh and blood too.
Without another person in sight she hurried to the bus stop. And was reminded again how odd she found this pocket of North Birmingham; it lacked pedestrians until you neared the city centre, maintaining a condition of near total silence beyond the main traffic arteries. It was either too tired to stir, asleep, or dead.
* * *
She withdrew one hundred pounds with a cheque at the bank, then walked the length of Broad Street, wandering about the cafés and bars of Gas Street Basin to check on her job applications.
After being been told, in the last of ten businesses she’d submitted a CV to, that they were still looking at a waiting list of over 200 applicants, she sat inside a Costa Coffee and treated herself to the cheapest sandwich on offer and a small latte.
Was there nothing left in this city that anyone would pay her to do? Even the assistant managers of KFC and McDonalds had shaken their heads three months earlier, and she expected them to repeat the gesture when she tried again this afternoon. Three days’ work last week was starting to feel like a lottery win.
Her desire to not be inside 82 Edgehill Road continued to prickle through her like static, and compelled her to begin a list in her ‘Jobs’ notebook of those businesses on New Street and Corporation Street where she’d already left a CV, or completed an application form. She intended to check in with them during what was left of the afternoon. She’d do anything to put off a return ‘home’.
But as her pen scratched in her notebook, her thoughts wandered off the task and off the page. The world of jobs, shoppers, passing motorists and idling families dwindled in her mind, along with a consideration of her ability to earn enough money to ever do more than scratch out an existence in a rented room.
Thoughts of her access to something far more sinister, and significant, at 82 Edgehill Road reignited flurries of panic in her stomach. If she were honest, a powerful curiosity had come to life too, until she found it near impossible to concentrate on the limited prospects of the minimum-wage, uniformed, service-industry positions she wanted so desperately. And instead of employment opportunities, or employment futilities, it was observations about the house that she was soon listing.
She gave each of her encounters in the house a fresh page in her notebook and was shocked to see how quickly the pages stacked up.
From a sense of three presences in her first room, which she listed as UNDER THE BED/FIREPLACE/THE MOVER, to the RUSSIAN GIRL ON THE 2ND FL, the VOICE IN THE BATHROOM, and FEMALE VOICE, FIRST FLOOR NEIGHBOUR, she progressed to a page titled: THE ONES WHO WANDER. Here she wrote ANGRY MALE – ALL THREE FLOORS and WOMAN WHO MOVES (who ran into my room from first floor corridor and spoke to me). This final observation was embellished with a footnote: ‘Or could this be the same one that sat on bed in second floor room?’
Her lists amounted to multiple encounters with what might be at least seven different presences.
A growing suspicion that she was incrementally slipping into some form of psychosis made her wonder how to address the possibility. Maybe at a GP’s surgery. Her stepmother’s mental illness had been Stephanie’s motive for taking A Level psychology, so she knew something about this area. Theories she’d studied about personality disorders suggested mental ill-health was often pre-natal and inherited. An uncle had been schizophrenic, on her mum’s side. He’d committed suicide, as had one of his sons who lived in Australia; a cousin she had never met. Perhaps she had that gene too.
Yet the notion of suffering delusions was contradicted by her current surroundings; now that she sat in a well-lit café, surrounded by a thoroughly material and conventional world, her perception within the house seemed anything but balanced or rational. Could mental illness just switch itself off when you went outdoors? Surely it was a near permanent state of being. Which contributed to her doubts that schizophrenia was the cause of her experiences; that condition would give her no rest and she would be hearing voices now.
The world around the café appeared to be a startlingly unimaginative and ordinary place in comparison to the one she returned to each evening in Perry Bar. Gas Street Basin’s boutiques, restaurants and the skyline dominated by the new library symbolized an affront to the grubby and sinister world of Edgehill Road. Outside the house, the world was a place where superstition and considerations of the supernormal remained the preserve of children, of fiction, computer games and films.
At least the trip to the city had shaken her out of what was beginning to feel like a constant delirium. And this was a world she had been fully in step with only a few days before. Her circumstances coerced her to wonder if she now straddled two very different states of existence, one natural and one unnatural.
Making lists of paranormal phenomena in her jobseeking notebook began to feel absurd, and she fought a desire to hide the open pages should anyone at a nearby table glance across. But as belief and disbelief continued to change like governments within her mind, Stephanie returned to her journal. Within each entry she began to add details, pertinent to each experience, like: ‘sensitivity t
o sadness, grief, fear, solitude’.
Her sensitivity to these atmospheres also stayed within the four walls of number 82; her receptivity ceased when the encounters stopped. But if she had some special connection with the dead then surely the dead were everywhere and she would see them everywhere. So what made the house, or her in it, so special?
Maybe a past trauma was locked inside the building and she was picking it up, like a radio received signals. It was an idea or notion she vaguely recalled from a source long forgotten.
And she wasn’t alone in her awareness of the inexplicable; Fergal had confirmed as much about the house’s other occupants. She suspected Knacker could not accept the idea of them being there, though his recalcitrance did not exclude him from experiencing the same things as her: the camera, the locks on his door?
She added ‘ODOURS’ to her lists and then defined them. Smells that also dispersed as quickly as they appeared and were pertinent to specific parts of the building, or seemed to be attached to routines conducted within the building.
She noted the ‘radical drops in temperature’ which had accompanied each and every experience. Again, such changes to the physical world could not have been imagined. Could they?
What would experts and officials make of the notebook if she went missing? The morbidity of the idea made her shudder.
A member of the counter staff came and collected her coffee mug, which she intuited as an inducement to leave the café. Stephanie retouched her make-up, packed away her things and left.
A break from the house made her feel like she’d been airlifted from a disaster. The opportunity to organize the debris of her thoughts and recent memories had been vital; she’d even partly regrouped the scattered refugees of her wits and remembered who she had been before she’d moved into Edgehill Road. Time spent in a safe environment to consider her situation also left her with the suspicion that she was not in any physical danger – at least not from what had amassed around her in the house while remaining unseen.
With the exception of the male presence, she couldn’t be certain that what she had felt around her in that building amounted to more than fear, loneliness, despair and anger. Or cries for help. And those couldn’t harm you.
Could they?
Who were they? What were they? The idea that the suffering had continued for some time, and would always continue in the wretched building, was unbearable for her to ponder. She dared to wonder what she might be able to do for them – the trapped and the crying, the tormented.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Stephanie entered the house as silently as she was able, then crept up the stairs, but only managed two steps across the kitchen lino before she came to a standstill. Her fingers released the plastic supermarket bag and it hit the floor with a thump.
The girl smoking a cigarette by the kitchen sink turned around. Caution flared in the woman’s bright green eyes. Surprise was followed by relief, as if Stephanie was not who she’d expected to see.
Stephanie was unable to speak. Could this … Is this … Am I seeing a … a ghost?
Greedy for proof she was looking at the living, and without daring to blink in case her eyes opened to find herself alone in the kitchen again, her vision groped about the woman’s body: a collarless leather jacket with a bronze zipper, a black polo neck jumper, skinny-fit jeans tucked into the high-heeled boots, three gold rings on her manicured fingers, highlights in her shoulder-length blonde hair, a pretty face with angular bone structure, bronze eye make-up. The woman was detailed, three dimensional, coloured … there was perfume too. She recognized it: Miss Dior.
Stephanie snapped herself out of the fugue. To regain control of her voice she cleared her throat. ‘Are you … I mean…’
The girl eyed Stephanie from head to toe too, and took in the functional white blouse and black trousers she wore to interviews, and her expression developed a haughty disapproval. The woman’s eyes were beautiful though, like those of a husky or wolf: green flecked with black, the eyelids offering a hint of the Asiatic. Surely a spirit could not be so vivid.
‘I’m sorry,’ Stephanie said. ‘I’m not sure … this might sound crazy…’
The woman frowned.
‘I didn’t expect to see you. You made me jump.’
The woman looked past Stephanie and took in the kitchen with a sweep of her lovely eyes. ‘This was not what I expect.’ The voice was heavily accented, almost certainly Eastern European. The Russian girl? And possibly the one she had seen outside in the yard that morning, though the hair looked different.
‘Are you on the second floor?’
The question confused the woman so Stephanie pointed at the ceiling. ‘Upstairs?’
‘Upstairs, mmm, yes. You live here?’ She seemed to get three syllables into ‘here’, but Stephanie liked the way she wrestled English words out of her mouth.
‘Yes. This floor.’
The girl frowned again and Stephanie identified the first sign of fatigue from communicating with someone for whom English was a second language. Though her relief that the girl was real was far greater. ‘Were you outside this morning?’
Her question was greeted with another frown.
Stephanie walked to the sink unit and passed within a force field of hair spray and skin cream. She pointed at the garden with something approaching desperation. ‘Down there? Did I see you down there this morning, smoking?’
The girl glanced at the tumult of vegetation and building refuse below, as if she were looking at a dog’s excrement on the side of her boots. ‘There? Never. Is shit. Whole place, shit.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Never mind.’
She recalled Knacker saying something about two girls moving in, about her having company, but had assumed it was another one of his lies. ‘You moved here today?’
‘Today? Yes, yes. In the morning I come.’ The girl took a hard drag on her cigarette.
Now Stephanie stood closer she could see the woman wasn’t as young as she’d first appeared. Either the skin around her eyes was aged under so much make-up, or the expression in her eyes appeared too old for the lower part of her face.
Averse to Stephanie’s scrutiny, the girl moved away from the dregs of the sooty dusk light hanging around the sink unit. ‘You work here?’ the girl asked, squinting in the smoke enveloping her head.
‘Here? Birmingham, yes. Sometimes. One day here, one day there.’
The girl didn’t seem impressed with her answer, though Stephanie couldn’t work out why. She already made her feel frumpy, and was now adding worthless to a minor crisis of confidence.
‘But work is good here?’ the woman asked.
‘No. Not really. Same as everywhere.’
‘I have good work. Dusseldorf. Vienna. They say it very good here.’
‘Depends on what you can do. I’m just starting out.’
The girl frowned and looked slightly offended. Though again Stephanie couldn’t understand why.
‘I’m Stephanie.’ She extended her hand, to break the awkward silence.
The girl took it with her long, cold fingers. ‘Svetlana.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Lithuania.’
‘See you’s two met then,’ said Knacker McGuire.
At the appearance of the landlord in the kitchen doorway, Stephanie noticed Svetlana’s face drop at the precise moment her own spirits plummeted.
Dressed once again in his new jeans and trainers, he was grinning and jaunty on his feet, like a stupid youth who thought he’d done something clever. ‘Your room’s ready, girl,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘New bed an’ everyfing, like. Put a TV in there too. If I don’t say so myself, it’s a nice room. Fink you’ll be very comfortable in there.’
Svetlana didn’t answer. She watched Knacker, her gaze hard, and exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘My bags. He bring them?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about nuffin’. All in hand, like.’
‘There is other bathroom, yes?’
‘What baffroom?’
Stephanie didn’t like the way Knacker had started to squint and jut his chin out. His eyes took a moment to glare at her too, making her feel unwelcome in the room now that another tenant’s disappointment in the property was becoming evident. Stephanie turned away and unwrapped her boxed dinner on the counter beside the microwave and feigned disinterest in the exchange.
‘This is not what you say. You said new. New kitchen, new bathroom. But this? This one is not new. I don’t use it. You must be joking.’ Svetlana’s last line sounded Italian and might have been a figure of speech picked up from another traveller.
‘Lick a paint. All’s gonna get done up. That’s what I said.’
‘No, you say new. No one can eat here. Is filthy.’
Stephanie was delighted by the girl’s resistance, but the slither of fear that was beginning to frost her stomach overruled her shame at preparing food in the dirty kitchen.
‘Don’t you worry about nuffin’. Other people might not have the same standards as you and me,’ he said, as if fingering Stephanie as the source of the dilapidation and dirt. ‘But it’s all gonna be fixed up. Be like living in a hotel.’
‘Hotel?’ Svetlana snorted with derisive laughter. ‘What kind hotel? Mr Knacker, I tell you I have major problem with this. This is not what you say.’ She broke off and said something in her own language.
‘You gotta give it time, girl. You know, period of adjustment and all that.’
‘When Margaret see this … I mean, she will say same as me. You have not told truth. I will speak to Andrei.’
‘Settle down. Settle down, yeah!’ Knacker was losing his temper.
Stephanie’s own nervy bewilderment was beginning to make the two minutes she needed to wait for her bolognaise to finish its first cooking cycle feel like a decade. And the food would also needed stirring, before cooking for another two minutes. She turned to leave the kitchen, her eyes lowered.
‘And this girl.’ Svetlana nodded at Stephanie and Stephanie really wished she hadn’t. ‘This girl say the work…’ Svetlana waved a hand dismissively from side to side ‘… is bad here.’
