by Adam Nevill
Yet all of the Albanian girl’s paraphernalia could not disguise the aged and tasteless spectacle of the wallpaper and carpet. The tropical bamboo pattern that had covered the walls of Stephanie’s first room was replicated here.
At least there were no bars on the windows. Stephanie wondered if that was why the girls had been installed on the second floor. Operating from the second floor was hardly convenient, as customers had to walk through two storeys inside the dark, scruffy house on their way to see the girls, with Knacker bantering after them. It would have been much better to have prostitutes work from the ground floor, the part of the building that had always been locked away for renovations, or so Knacker claimed. She had a sense Svetlana and Margaret had been borrowed, or leased from this ‘Andrei’. But if the girls had been given some choice in coming to work here, window bars would have been an instant cause for alarm. Svetlana had once complained about the bathroom; it now looked like that had been the least of her worries.
Her frantic internal inquiry about Bennet, whom Fergal had referred to as if the man was still in residence, along with the cryptic exchange regarding Fergal’s threat to put Knacker ‘in there wiv it’, all derailed once Stephanie entered the room.
Beaten to death. Fists. Kicking feet.
She moved further inside the room. When she saw Margaret’s black furry cat – a soft toy on the chair before the dresser, its neck encircled with a red velvet band and heart-shaped locket – a wash of hot tears made her see the room as if through the windscreen of a car in a rainstorm. She dropped her face into her hands and sniffed back the mucus that ran from her nose.
Oh, God. Dad. Dad. Daddy.
They were about the same age. Margaret had been sweet and happy the one time they had met on the stairs. The girl must have had parents, maybe brothers and sisters, people who loved her, and maybe she was just trying to earn money to advance herself with all she had at her disposal: her beautiful body. Margaret had not looked like she was feeding a drug habit.
Something burst inside Stephanie. She fell to her knees. The levee that had held so much fear, regret, anxiety, hope and despair in check, while she had prayed it would all end quickly as she slogged to and from temping jobs, was swept away. And in a fragment of a second she felt the full force of her situation impact and then engulf her. Her body shook like she was going into shock.
She could not be strong any more. She had been punched, had her hair pulled, had been dragged across a dirty floor and shut inside rooms that no living thing should ever enter. And now she had to get down on her hands and knees and wipe away the blood of a young woman who had been beaten to death.
‘Why?’ she said through her sobs. And she momentarily examined the futility of her recent existence: the endless work and revision for her A Levels so she could escape her stepmother; the soul-destroying jobs that filled her with a boredom that slow-burned inside her stomach and made her want to self-harm; the wretched rooms let by criminal opportunists that she had lived inside because she was poor. All of it. ‘For this?’ To wipe up a victim’s blood in a house that had recorded so much loss and confusion and horror she could not begin to process it. Only to then have her body sold for sex when she was finished scrubbing.
Too much. No more now. No more.
‘I can’t. I can’t. Don’t make me. I haven’t done anything to you. I just wanted a room and a fucking job!’ Her cries ended in sobs.
Behind her, Knacker began to fidget. He softened his voice. ‘Come on. I don’t like to see you like this, Steph. You know that. Aye? Let’s just get this done then lock up, yeah? We’s all gotta pitch in, like.’
She stopped crying and turned on him. And while she spoke she didn’t care whether they killed her or let her live. ‘Pitch in? Pitch in! This is blood. A woman’s blood. She’s dead, I know she is. He killed her.’
‘You don’t know nuffin’. There was a misunderstanding, yeah? But it’s all sorted now, like.’ Knacker wasn’t even convincing himself. He looked like he wanted to cry, but not for Margaret. Stephanie didn’t believe he really understood her death; he was only concerned about self-preservation, his survival.
He slapped a hand to his forehead and winced. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ And at this display of emotion, this regret that his plans had not followed the script, she probably hated him more than she had ever hated him. And she wanted him dead. He should be dead, not Margaret.
Stephanie looked at the blood. I’m sorry, Margaret. I’m sorry, she thought, and swallowed what was left of the emotion in her throat that could have been despair, misery, or even the beginning of madness.
‘What will happen to me?’
‘Eh?’
‘When I have done this. Cleaned her away…’
Knacker composed himself with a big sniff up one nostril. Raised his chin. ‘You do as I say and you’ll be awright. No mouthing off, yeah? I got your back here. You got no other friends in this house, girl.’
Knacker then slipped further inside the room to stand behind her, but not as close as he’d previously favoured since the incident with the knife. ‘Now ain’t the time, like, for discussing what you mentioned earlier, yeah? About who’s responsible and all that, for this, yeah? But strictly between us, yeah, I am concerned by fings as they have turned out. None of this was planned, like. Fuck all to do wiv me, if the truth be told, like. I’m just trying to earn a crust here. So we gotta choose our moment, yeah? Which means you got to play along a bit. You get me? Sake of appearances and all that. You know, bit a cleaning in here. Then maybe we can see about connecting you wiv a client—’
‘Fuck off! Just piss off right now!’ Even in here, where a woman had recently died, he wouldn’t give up.
Having progressed up the corridor without making a sound, a long, thin shape moved across the doorway and the light dimmed; the arms were orangutan like, the shoulders stooped so the horrible head could protrude inside the room.
Stephanie caught her breath. Because for a moment, when she first saw the figure’s shape flow across the doorway, she was certain that in the bad light she had glimpsed a black, eyeless oval extend into the room like the head of a large snake, while the end of the protrusion was engaged in a silent snarl that revealed too many stained teeth in a mouth more primate than human.
The bestial head passed into the tarnished light of Margaret’s room and became Fergal’s face. He grinned at Stephanie and nodded at the foot of the bed. ‘You missed a bit.’
FORTY-SIX
It was after Knacker had walked away from where he stood guard at the door of the bedroom, to move down the second floor corridor towards the stairwell to answer Svetlana’s phone, that Stephanie first noticed the cold in Margaret’s room. Wiping at her nose with the back of a hand that stank of bleach, she stopped scrubbing uselessly at the broad stain at the foot of the bed and rocked back on her heels. Looked about the walls. And then at the window.
But the light had not changed; an iron sky still speckled the dirty panes with spots of drizzle. There was no sun to move behind a cloud because the sky had been grey and grubby with rain for over an hour. This change in temperature was not in her imagination.
The overhead light still shone the dull yellow she associated with long hours in dim warehouses, and the heating had been warming the dusty house for at least half an hour. So there was no reason for Margaret’s room to chill, and so much that Stephanie rubbed the outside of her arms.
In the distance she could hear Knacker trying to speak softly to conceal his conversation. ‘Yeah. Yeah, but make it eight, like. She’s busy, yeah … Course she is. This is right proper here, like. All our girls is clean. Tested. Best, like. Nah. Nah. Just the one tonight. Tomorrow, though, we might have another one…’ He’d dropped his voice even lower.
Stephanie swallowed and looked at the ceiling. ‘Can you see me? Can you hear me? I know you’re there. One of you. Margaret? Is it you? Margaret, I won’t leave you. I won’t leave you alone.’
She looked at the d
oorway. Knacker had gone quiet but she could hear his feet as he paced about by the stairwell. Stephanie turned back to the room. ‘I’ll find out who you are … what they did to you. They won’t get away with it. I’ll get you help. Somehow. I promise. I promise you all.’
The room stayed chilly and still. Either the cold, or the invasive feelings of sadness and fear, pushed her own spirits down with a mournful gravity. A tremor ran through her voice. ‘I know you are afraid … and sad. I can feel it. You don’t know where you are, do you? You can’t remember. You are just there … here. Stuck. You frightened me. But you didn’t mean to. You just wanted my help. I will help you all. I will get help.’
She realized it was the first time in this situation that she wanted a sign, something, anything, any movement at all, even the slightest indication that she had been heard and understood.
Besides the cold, nothing was forthcoming from whatever had gathered around her, though she suspected the room was listening and that something inside the space was trying to extend and feel its way inside her. She sensed … no, she knew, that she was not alone.
And then, as if the room had drawn a breath from shock, the atmosphere altered. She heard nothing but intuited an unseen motion, or an energy, that quickly withdrew from around where she sat by the bucket at the foot of the bed. As if sucked back to the walls, the feelings of grief and loneliness subsided. A pressure lifted from her, upwards and out of her, making her scalp tingle. And something she could not see or hear scattered like a nervous cat around the walls and fled the room.
The temperature of the room dropped even lower. And in place of the departing presence came the odour of sweat and halitosis, as if an unwashed body had just swept inside the room and a dirty mouth had opened and breathed upon her face.
Stephanie gritted her teeth, clenched both fists and raised them into the air. ‘You bastard. You can’t hurt me.’
A bottle of perfume toppled on the surface of the dresser.
Stephanie screamed.
A black shroud of silk flopped from the curtain rail and pooled soundlessly upon the floor beneath the radiator.
In the stench that intensified enough to make her cough, choke and then gag, as if her head had been forced inside something soft and pulpy with death, she realized there was a hand in her hair. Fingers so cold she believed her scalp was being burned gripped a handful of her hair and shoved her face to the floor. A second hand pulled her hooded sweat top away from her waist line and exposed her back to what felt like a freezing draught.
She struggled onto all fours and batted her hands behind her body as if to knock off an assailant. ‘No! Bastard!’ Her hands raked empty air.
In the dim periphery of her hearing and awareness she heard footsteps pound the floor towards the room.
She could see nothing outside of the hair that hung all around her face and stuck to the spittle that looped out of her mouth. And now the painful side of her face was squashed against the floor.
She screamed as a set of cold teeth touched the flesh on her back above her kidney.
Then it stopped. Though her hysteria did not.
Stephanie rolled about the floor, swiping her hands, claws out, at the warming air that surrounded her body. And she kicked out her feet as hard and as quickly as she could at the space above her, at the thin air around her body, because there was no one inside the room any more, and no hand in her hair, or teeth indenting the skin of her back. Not any longer.
On her backside, she shuffled across the floor to the radiator where she sat shaking with shock, panting and wheezing as the adrenaline and cortisone and horror seeped through her body and warmed the crotch of her jeans.
She looked to the doorway and saw Knacker’s face cast with an unfamiliar expression. He was so frightened his lips had peeled back from his teeth and his horrified eyes were too large for his thin face, like hard-boiled eggs painted by a disturbed child.
Fergal came and stood beside Knacker. He was delighted. ‘That Bennet, he just won’t fuck off.’ He loped into the room towards Stephanie.
She pulled her legs to her body and clasped her shins. The muscles of her face shook and she could not stop them moving no matter how hard she tried. Across the room in the dresser mirror, she could see that her mouth was open and that she looked imbecilic with terror. She could not speak and her heart refused to slow its banging inside her throat and between her ears.
‘Fought you might like to see this.’ Grinning, like he was showing a mate a picture of some harmless antic, Fergal crouched beside Stephanie. His long fingers were arranged around a smart phone. ‘It’s him awright. Fat bastard. He was outside Svetlana’s room last night. And I got him. I got him sniffing round her door. They’s all getting stronger cus it’s all going off. Look.’ Fergal turned the handset around and showed Stephanie’s unblinking eyes what was displayed onscreen.
Shaking so hard that her vision moved, Stephanie looked at a dark digital image. One that was, at first, unclear. Until the chaos of shadow and pale smudges on the small screen of the phone suggested a fat, eyeless face wearing spectacles, and a head tightly covered in the hood of a raincoat. When she glimpsed what she believed were a row of teeth in a howling mouth she closed her eyes.
Giggling like a chimp, Fergal spoke with enough familiarity to suggest they were sharing a joke. ‘It’s him, ain’t it? It’s really him. He come back just like he said he would.’
FORTY-SEVEN
The ringtone of her phone erupted from a pocket in Knacker’s jeans.
Fergal whipped his head in Knacker’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Knacker fished the phone out of his pocket. ‘Someone called Ryan. Fird time he’s called today. And twice yesterday. I can’t read his texts. She’s put a pin number in.’
Fergal’s face moved within an inch of Stephanie’s nose. ‘Who the fuck is that?’
She swallowed but could not speak.
When the distant chime of the doorbell announced itself up the stairwell, quickly followed by the sound of a hand hammering against the front door, Knacker and Fergal exchanged glances.
Knacker became antsy with nerves and started to bob on his toes. ‘We ain’t expecting no one til five.’
‘You expecting someone?’ Fergal asked Stephanie, and his breath reminded her of spoiled meat.
‘Course she ain’t,’ Knacker said. ‘Like I said, her friends don’t wanna know.’
‘Shut it!’ Fergal shouted at his cousin.
‘Awright! Leave it out, will ya?’
Fergal pushed his face into hers. ‘What’s the pin number?’
Stephanie swallowed and whispered it. Fergal quickly entered it into the phone. He glared at Knacker. ‘You should have done this yesterday, twat!’ His eyes returned to the phone and he went through her messages. ‘She’s been texting him. This cunt who’s been calling.’ He swivelled his head round to confront Stephanie again. ‘I asked you a question. Is you expecting a visitor, this Ryan? You given him our address?’
She shook her head. She couldn’t manage anything else and was too scared to even sniff at the mucus that had run from her nose. The crotch of her jeans had gone cold and was starting to make her sore.
Through the shock and bewilderment that had not abated since she had been attacked by ‘Bennet’, and which had only been worsened by Fergal showing her the picture of the dead rapist on his phone screen, Stephanie made a connection between the call from Ryan and the sound of banging on the distant front door. She felt a surge of hope that made her want to cry.
‘Get it,’ Fergal said to Knacker.
Knacker pointed at her. ‘Last night. Yeah, last night. She was making freats, like. Said something about someone knowing she was here, like. Sure she did.’
‘I said, get it!’ Fergal roared at Knacker, who almost instantly vanished from the doorway in his haste to escape Fergal’s wrath.
Fergal returned his attention to Stephanie; the sides of his thin lips were white with spittle, and within his exp
ression the hatred she interpreted made her cringe against the radiator. ‘Finks he’s hard, does he? Cavalry? Finks he can come here and sort fings out, does he? Well if he wants some then he can have some.’
‘No.’ Her voice was a whisper and her throat closed again after the faint sound escaped.
Fergal was already on his feet and striding from the room with a purpose that made her feel sick.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t you touch him!’ Stephanie followed Fergal across the room.
He turned in the doorway and glared at her. Nothing else was required to bring her to a flinching stand still. He closed the door nonchalantly. With the key Knacker had left hanging from the lock, the door was secured.
In the far distance, over the sound of Fergal’s retreating footsteps, the front door of the house closed, shutting the visitor inside.
FORTY-EIGHT
Stephanie was surprised that she had still not cried. Maybe the tears would come later, if there was a later.
No, there would be no later, not after what they had just done in the garden. She had seen it and they knew she had seen it. And what she had seen had made her incapable of anything afterwards, except lying on the bed in a foetal position, staring at the wall, back inside her original first floor room.
Such was her shock she wasn’t sure she remembered the events correctly, or even in the right sequence. She could only recall bits of what happened, like clips from a film she’d been watching as she dozed off, and then awoke, and then dozed off again, until she’d finally roused to watch the end credits rolling down a screen. But images from the garden scene would suddenly rush into her mind, and they would be too clear, too loud and too bright, and she would whimper and push the images back into the darkness.
She didn’t know how long she had been lying like this in her old room. Hours, surely.
