by Adam Nevill
Stephanie loosened the knife inside her pocket. ‘I wasn’t tempted by anything. I don’t have any bloody money because you kept my deposit. That is the only reason I am still here. I was trying to get enough money together to get out and you know it. But you thought I was some kind of dumb teenager who’d fall for your bullshit and become a slag. And now you’re keeping me prisoner—’
‘Prisoner? Hold on a minute—’
‘Then what’s this? Locking me in this dirty room—’
‘Ain’t that bad—’
They’d begun to talk over each other in tight, breathless voices. Why was she bothering? He was a liar, a pimp, he’d assaulted her, and even now he could not stop twisting everything she said. She was never getting out.
Her thoughts sped up; she thought as quickly as she could of motives, horrible eventualities, possibilities, ideas … anything she could do to free herself.
The knife.
‘You won’t get away with it. People know I am here. What do you think is going to happen? Have you thought about that? No good telling yourself you’re in control and that it’s all going to work out. That your bills will get paid and that I’ll become a whore and start earning money for you, so you can buy trainers and skunk weed. I mean, are you fucking stupid?’
Knacker took two steps inside the room, at her.
Stephanie stared at the dried blood on his shoes. ‘You come near me again and I’ll fucking kill you!’
‘That a fact?’
‘You bloody hit me. Hit me!’
‘Then you should have been quicker wiv them keys, like.’
‘You stole my phone. My money. Locked me in here. It’s all stacking up against you. But you weren’t quick enough. Yeah? Yeah? Because help is on its way, you piece of shit!’
Knacker stepped away from her and seized the door handle. His eyes had lidded and he’d thrown his head back so she could just catch a thin gleam of the reptilian pupils and also see inside his big nostrils. He was shocked because he hadn’t expected this from her.
‘Margaret’s dead, isn’t she? That psychopath killed her.’
As she spoke the girl’s name, she sensed an immediate increase in his indecision, his torment, the endless mental wrangling beneath the curly hair and behind that bony and big-lipped façade of a face. He was scared of Fergal too, maybe more than he was of getting caught. She could sense it, because Knacker wasn’t as far gone as his cousin, hadn’t quite left humanity in the same way. And his partner in crime, his muscle, had done something to unsettle the creature before her. She could smell the fear on him, under the aftershave.
‘How many? How many has he killed?’
‘What you talking about?’
‘Here. In this house. I’ve heard them. Seen them. You know I have. Maybe you have too.’
Knacker looked puzzled. It seemed genuine.
‘The girls. The girls in these rooms. They’re dead. But they’re still here.’
‘You is cracked. Fucking cracked. Here’s you talking about psychos. Have a look in that mirror, girl. You is making my skin crawl. Saying these fings about my muvver’s house. What’s a matter wiv you, yeah? I give you a place to live. Try and help you out wiv some quick cash—’
‘Shut up. Stop. Stop. You didn’t. You did not help me out, or try to help me out. Cut the crap. You wanted me to fuck those creeps for money, you seedy little prick. That’s all this was ever about and you know it.’
Stephanie jabbed her hand at the ceiling. ‘He’s beaten Svetlana and now she is being raped. Raped. You’re a criminal. You made this happen. And you will pay for it. It’s not going to be all right. It’s not a setback or a little problem, you stupid twat!’ She dropped her voice to a desperate whisper. ‘But maybe it won’t be too bad for you if you let me go. If you help me right now. That’ll be taken into consideration, won’t it? You can save yourself here, Knacker. You know it. Why go down with that nutter?’
Knacker clenched his fists.
‘It’s gone too far, hasn’t it? You didn’t want this. But he wrecked it. It’s over now. Murder. Kidnap. Acid…’ Rage and fear had come together to make these words erupt, but now she’d lost her voice. It only took one word to burn the others out of her mouth: acid. This might have been the most desperate and important thing she’d ever said in her life, ever needed to say, but she was too emotional to continue.
Though maybe she had struck a blow, because his face was bloodless, but not from anger. He backed into the corridor and recovered sufficiently to glance over his shoulder and into the waiting darkness, in fear of who might be out there.
When he turned and spoke to her, his voice lacked the usual self-importance and arrogant assertiveness. ‘Fergal hears you, then I ain’t gonna be responsible for what happens. You made your own bed, like. Time to wake up, yeah? Have a good long fink about tomorrow. About what you need to do to make this situation right. To make it better for you, yeah? Cus if you don’t then you is no good to him. You can say all the hurtful fings you want to me, like. But I ain’t your problem. I fink you know what I’m talkin’ about.’
The door clicked shut behind him. Before she could get across the room he’d turned the key inside the lock.
FORTY-THREE
Stephanie awoke on the brittle carpet, shivering. Her discomfort was immediately overshadowed by the sound of a voice above her body.
She’d broken from another bad dream that left her with a vague memory of a discoloured face, whispering from inside a plastic covering, only to emerge into a space where another voice spoke. And the second speaker was either inside the room or situated near the ceiling.
Stephanie didn’t sit up, because that would have meant moving her head closer to where the voice originated, up there.
Still wrapped inside the aged candlewick bedspread, an item she had shaken vigorously and then turned around to keep herself as warm as possible on the floor, Stephanie tried to orientate herself inside a room as black as pitch.
She strove for a recognition of where the door to the room was in relation to her position on the floor, and also where the window was, the bed, the bedside cabinet.
She remained afraid, though identified more resolve in herself than she’d experienced before at night in the building. She was becoming accustomed to these visitations, or manifestations, or whatever they were, though it was a familiarity that brought no real comfort.
Those that actually lived at 82 Edgehill Road, she was reminded with a cruel irony, were now far worse than the muttering but unseen mouths of the building’s dingy cavities. She’d still take this situation over being in a room with the McGuires. But as she stared into the freezing darkness, endeavouring to pinpoint the source of the sound, Stephanie still bit into a hand to stop the whimpering that wanted to struggle out of her mouth.
The voice she could hear was brittle with age. And it spoke English. The speaker was a woman, an older woman, and an angry woman. That was apparent, as was Stephanie’s belief that it was the worst voice she had yet heard at night inside the building.
As if the speaker had swiftly moved into the distance, the voice became faint within an atmosphere of absolute silence that allowed the words to travel, but not carry far enough for Stephanie to really understand all of what was being said. She caught bursts of speech thrown at her in desperation, fragments repeatedly cut off as if by swipes of a headwind, while the room remained unnaturally still and cold.
‘Avoid foolish questions and … contentions … strivings about … they are unprofitable … vain…’
The voice then muffled as if spoken at the ground, or into a hand held across a mouth, or as if a radio signal had momentarily lost its strength.
When the voice surged back into the room, it moved across where the ceiling should be, and in a manner that made Stephanie cringe into near paralysis.
‘A man that is an heretic … first and … admonition … reject…’
Struck by the notion that the speaker was crawling across t
he ceiling and through the darkness above her head, Stephanie cast off her dusty coverings and moved to her hands and knees. Crawled to where she hoped the door would be.
The voice then circled, or perhaps hugged the corners of the ceiling as it moved around Stephanie in an anticlockwise fashion that gradually increased in speed. ‘Knowing that he … subverted … sinneth … being condemned of himself…’
Stephanie groped along one side of the bed, the carpet so dry and rough the fabric could have been snow crunching beneath her tender palms and fingertips.
She turned and sat down and then shuffled across the bottom of the bedframe to the wall. When she found the door with the back of her head and shoulders, she made to stand up with the intention of fumbling for the light switch. But at that moment the voice spoke again. And no more than an inch from her face.
‘Be diligent to come unto me!’
Stephanie screamed until not a solitary molecule of air remained inside her lungs. She screamed to expel the notion that the invisible speaker now hung upside down from the ceiling so that its mouth was level with her eyes.
When her scream tailed into a gasp, so icy was the room that the skin of her face burned. She had not been dismissed by whatever had gathered about her.
Silence thickened around her like a cold sea blackened by night.
A small voice, and one full of tears, ended the calm by whispering into both of her ears at the same time, ‘For I have determined there to winter.’
She could not understand why her heart did not stop at that moment. Had it done she would have considered cardiac arrest the only mercy she had been shown by the house during her short time beneath its roof. But she managed to stand up on legs she could hardly feel, and to find the switch and return light to the horrible room.
There was nothing on the ceiling and no one inside with her. But the room’s dimensions now appeared dirtier and even more forlorn than they had before she fell asleep.
DAY SEVEN
FORTY-FOUR
When Stephanie awoke a figure stood over her body.
Grubby light from the window made her eyes smart. She shielded her face with one arm and waited for a blow.
‘Bed not good enough for ya? Can’t imagine the floor is much better, like.’ This was followed by one of Knacker’s rare cackles.
Stephanie sat bolt upright. ‘Where … You … What the fuck are you doing?’
Knacker stepped away. ‘Who me? Nuffin’, besides giving you a wakeup call. It’s gone eleven, girl. Can’t have people just lying around on the floor, like, when there’s work to be done.’
Stephanie struggled to her feet and lurched for the open door.
‘Aye, aye, hold up.’ Knacker swiped at her arm.
‘Let me go!’ She twisted from his grip, leaving him with a handful of her sleeve.
Knacker nearly yanked her off her feet.
She dipped her free hand inside the front pocket of her hooded top. Her fingers found the knife handle. She brought the knife into the room and before his eyes.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ He released her sleeve.
Her heart sped up with a new excitement, one that was unrecognizable, but it was an excitement that felt welcome and made time accelerate and speed away from her. And she knew she could do it. She could hurt this bastard who had locked her away and who had crept inside her room while she slept, who had hit her – he hit you! – and who wanted to force her to have sex with strangers in this stinking, dark, evil house.
‘You bastard!’ She took one stride towards him. He flinched, his pale eyes bulging from a face stiff with fear. She prepared to swing at him with all of her strength.
Before she could comprehend what was happening, she was unable to move the hand gripping the knife. Her body was tugged backwards. She fell and was dragged across the floor and out of the room.
The doorway, the distant ceiling, the aged wallpaper, the red skirting boards, all rotated about her head. Fingers much longer and stronger than her own peeled her hand open to remove the knife. And when she came to a stop, the ripe and bestial odour that clung around Fergal’s bony legs engulfed her face.
The sole of a big, dirty foot found the side of her head and pressed her skull hard into the grubby carpet. Her arm that had wielded the knife was pulled upwards and straight, and so hard she feared it might pop out of its socket.
The bottom of the shoe holding her head secure was gritty and as rough as emery cloth. A downward pressure squashed her cheeks and made saliva dribble from one side of her mouth. She didn’t struggle in case the foot pressed down harder and broke her head apart like a cabbage.
‘Fuck’s sake, Knacker. She nearly gashed you up, mate. If she had I’d a made you clean up your own claret, you useless twat.’
‘Nah, nah. Weren’t like that. I’d have been there, like. Always am when it counts.’
‘Piss off! This silly little slit nearly done you. I knew you was going soft. All that Ganja since you come out the nick has turned you into a right pussy.’
‘Fuck off! I won’t have it.’
‘You won’t? You will if I say so! You want to go or something? Eh? Eh? Can’t hear you! Yes or no, Knacker? Yes or fucking no? Right here!’
‘Nah. Nah. Leave it. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Bet you didn’t, you tosser. Fink you is the brains and all that, but you can’t get nuffin’ right. I hadn’t been there she’d be in the street shouting her mouf off by now. You’s the weakest link here, Knacker. And we don’t have much use for them that don’t pull their weight. You’re already on a warning. You don’t fink I will put you down then you is fooling yourself. I’ll put you in there, yeah? Right inside wiv it. I’ll hold the door shut while it has its way wiv you, like it done wiv Bennet.’
‘Cut it out. Leave it, yeah? How’s I supposed to know she had a blade? Where she get it from? You is just as much to blame. You put her inside here wiv me. Didn’t see you doing no strip search.’
‘Knacker. Knacker. You start twisting fings…’ Fergal left that as a warning.
Knacker remained uncharacteristically silent.
Fergal returned his attention to Stephanie. He removed his foot and grinned at her. ‘I hear you ain’t ready to start sucking cock yet. Well until you is, you got some cleaning to do. If you ain’t gonna open your legs, you can get on your hands and knees and do some fucking housework. How’s that, eh? And while you’re scrubbing, girl, you’ll have plenty of time to fink about what comes next if you don’t start being a bit more hospitable to our visitors.’
FORTY-FIVE
‘Wipe it down. Anyfing they is touched, like. You’re a woman, you knows what gets messed wiv in women’s rooms and all that, yeah?’
Stephanie knew at once what Knacker was referring to: evidence. And there was plenty of that inside the room. At a glance from the doorway of the second floor bedroom that Knacker clearly did not want to enter in case he incriminated himself by leaving any trace of his presence, Stephanie could see blood on two walls and speckled across the white material of the bedspread. Margaret’s blood.
On one wall the stains had dried black and were flecked in a long arc. Stephanie’s imagination offered the image of a woman’s head snapping sideways after a bone-crunching blow.
The second spatter had the pattern of a smudge, as if a wet face had been pushed into and then wiped down the wall. Beside the main stain were finger marks: drag lines.
Within the doorframe, Knacker crowded about Stephanie and pointed at the floor. ‘And on the carpet. See it? Down there by the bottom of the bed. You need to get it up, like. All of it, yeah?’
Stephanie looked at the shadow beneath the hem of the duvet at the foot of the bed. Someone had lain still in that spot and bled.
She leant against the doorframe and stifled the urge to cry. The need to break down rippled up from her feet and through her body like a current of electricity that took hold of her jaw. She closed her eyes and tensed all of her muscles to force her fa
ce not to crumple.
‘Better get started, like. Cus Fergal— We want it done sharpish, like, yeah?’
In one hand Stephanie held the bucket Knacker had given her, containing whatever oddments of cleaning materials he had been able to rummage out from under the kitchen sink. To remove the traces of a foreign sex worker’s violent death, Knacker couldn’t even organize the right kind of cleaning materials. In the bucket he had given Stephanie there was a rusty bottle of Pledge furniture polish, a near empty spray bottle of Windolene for cleaning glass, a virtually depleted bottle of Best In bleach, and a trickle of Jiff bathroom scourer in a plastic container with a top entirely sealed with crusted fluid. Not the ideal equipment for removing substances that forensic technicians would scour every millimetre of floor space to discover.
Knacker was terrified of going outside the house to fetch new cleaning materials in case he was identified in the street. You don’t know nuffin’ about my background. It was true, but she felt more capable of making informed assumptions now.
Stephanie returned her attention to the room.
Margaret had tried to feminize the space before she died inside it. Silky black wraps and scarves were draped around the curtain rails and over the white fitted wardrobes, perhaps to hide a cheap and unappealing background in a space allocated to sexual activity. An impressive range of perfume bottles and expensive make-up littered the surface of a dresser fitted with a mirror; the mirror was angled to reflect the entire bed for whomever was lying upon it.
The mattress had been dressed with a zebra throw rug too, and the girl must have brought her own sheets and pillow cases with her because Stephanie could not imagine 82 Edgehill Road containing anything as fancy as Margaret’s plump, tasselled, satin pillows.
Beside the wardrobe, a stainless steel rail on little wheels was festooned with gauzy underwear, latex dresses, clothes made from Lycra, and black dresses. At least twelve pairs of high-heeled shoes and boots were scattered beneath the clothing rail.
