by Adam Nevill
After Ryan had arrived and Fergal had locked her inside Margaret’s old room, Stephanie had heard raised voices issuing from deeper inside the building. She’d heard them while pressed against the door. The voices had grown in strength and volume and changed tone. She’d wanted to break the window and scream for help. But fear, yes fear, of displeasing the cousins and provoking reprisals she might not awake from, had kept her sobbing and pressed into the door. And fear had become guilt while she repeated a mantra to herself: Ryan must have told someone he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming.
Guilt had since sunk into regret. Because now, more than anything, she regretted not breaking the window and jumping from the second storey of the building. She was responsible for what had happened to Ryan. Like Knacker had said, she was responsible because she had told Ryan where she was and ‘bitched to him, like, about this house. No one likes a grass.’
‘Oh, God. No, God, no,’ she said to herself as the most memorable scene flashed into her mind once again; a scene from midway through the proceedings, after she had managed to knock Knacker aside and briefly escape the room. A vivid scene which featured Fergal’s lanky shape dragging something by a foot through the rubbish sacks and building refuse and long weeds of the patio: a body not really moving beside the clutching motions it made upon its own wet and crimson face.
Ryan.
That was before Knacker ran and caught her in the stairwell. He had grabbed her by the hair just after she had raised a hand to bang the stairwell window. He’d taken the wrist of her raised arm with his other hand, and even he had paused at that stage and said, ‘Better not look, eh? When Fergal loses it he don’t fuck around, like.’
Her memory revisited an earlier scene: the one when Knacker came to her room a few minutes after the shouting and bellowing had stopped downstairs. Right after Fergal had screamed like an animal and then bellowed, ‘You want it! You want it! You want it!’ at the visitor, at Ryan.
Knacker’s face, when it appeared at the door of the room in which Margaret had died, was bloodless and wet with sweat and he had been wheezing like an asthmatic. He had run up two flights of stairs to check on her, to make sure she ‘wasn’t trying anything on, like’.
One of Knacker’s hands was red and some of the knuckles were already blue-purple. He’d held one hand against his stomach like a claw and kept wincing as he spoke to her. The big toe of one foot had come through one of the new lime green trainers. The shoe looked like a child had blown scarlet paint through a drinking straw across the top.
And then her memory drifted forwards to the sound of Fergal’s dirty shoe coming down on Ryan’s face on the garden patio, and then stamping onto the side of his head, and then onto his face again, and then onto the back of his head, after Ryan had rolled over and tried to get to his knees.
One of Ryan’s arms had been broken and hung limp under his ribs, which was why he had not been able to get up from the dirty ground. They had broken his arm inside the house before they dragged him into the garden. They had disabled him first.
The sounds then issuing from the patio, under Fergal’s stamping shoe, had been a whumf, whumf, whumf. The following sound, the final noise, had reminded Stephanie of a chamois leather being slapped onto the windscreen of a car. It was the last thing she had heard before Knacker yanked her onto her back and then dragged her up the stairs and marched her down the corridor to her old room.
‘I got the bottle. You wanna see it? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ Knacker had whispered over Stephanie’s shoulder and into her ear. ‘God help me I will use it too, sister. On my muvver’s life I will frow it in your face, girl. After what you done you is lucky you still got lips round your mouf.’
That is what Knacker had said to her – yes, because he was referring to an earlier scene, when he had first come to her door, panting, with his painful hand and his bony face drained of blood after his exertions with Ryan downstairs. And when she had seen that Knacker was lame – that the hand he’d used against Ryan’s handsome face was injured – she had lashed out and punched Knacker. Smashed her knuckles into his big lips and made him squeal. And while his eyes were full of tears, she had knocked him out of the way and had run to the stairwell, screaming Ryan’s name into the dim, warm claustrophobia of the house’s interior. By the time she’d reached the stairwell window Ryan was past help and past hearing her.
The dog had been barking. She remembered the violence in its bark as it wanted to join its masters and shake the inert meat around the broken patio upon which Ryan had been slaughtered. They had murdered Ryan with their fists and feet, like simple apes whose territory had been infringed by a rogue male.
The noises came back to her. Again and again. Whump. Whump. Whump. Slap.
Stephanie turned over on the bed and looked at the window without seeing it.
Not long now.
They’d be coming for her soon. How would they do it?
How will I die?
She looked at the light fitting and briefly thought about hanging herself. But with what? A belt … tights …
She didn’t know how to tie good knots and knew she wouldn’t be able to step off the end of the bed and into thin air. The very thought brought her close to a faint. Part of her mind seemed to be shouting, I can’t believe you are having these thoughts. But she almost laughed at the sentiment. No, she would carry on breathing until they decided they would stop her heart and end everything that she was: the thoughts, feelings, memories and attachments. Her. Me.
Around her, inside the atmosphere of the house, she sensed the continued descent of a heavier gravity. A blackening of the air. A big, old, deep breath had been pulled into dirty stone lungs lined with vulgar wallpaper. It wasn’t the same house she had been inside even two days ago. This was another time and place now. Hate and sadism had anointed the air in the same way sex had. The cries and footsteps of long lost women had been the chorus at the beginning of the ritual, a polyphony of misery.
The atmosphere had become enriched and built to a critical mass. Yes, she perceived this now, understood how it worked. A terrible unstable energy had grown inside the space once the right components were in place to trigger a reaction. And she was just more fuel, another sacrifice to something that had been here much longer than she had. She didn’t matter, neither did Ryan, or the sobbing girls that were already dead, but were still beaten and raped night after night by something that smelled of human disease. Fergal, Knacker, Bennet: they had won.
Once you came within their reach in the worlds they created, nothing really held them back. Not for long. They changed everything before you noticed, while you were still smiling and trusting and hoping. They had made everything she took for granted redundant, like cooperation and manners and civility and privacy and laws. Silly things that pinged out easily like old light bulbs.
She’d swum through a little bit of the world for a tiny fragment of time until she’d happened across them, and now she was going to be put out like a spark pinched between grubby fingers. When she realized this was how her end would look to most people, she seemed to slip over an edge existing somewhere in the middle of herself. And she wasn’t sure who or what remained behind.
FORTY-NINE
Fergal stood at the foot of the bed grinning, as if the lanky animal had done something clever.
Knacker peered over Fergal’s shoulder like a younger boy admiring booty snatched from a school bag. ‘Must have given him the address when they was calling each uvver. Big mistake.’
‘Yes, that is a fact, Knacker.’ Fergal jutted his chin at Stephanie. ‘And I do bet he wished he never come.’ He embellished the taunt with a titter.
Knacker smirked approval at the jest.
Fergal pushed his face at her. ‘Who else you give the address to?’
Stephanie stared back but never spoke.
Fergal’s grin broadened and he showed all of his yellow teeth. ‘Knacker. Have you still got somef
ing that belongs to me? Somefing that keeps tarts in line?’
At that Knacker didn’t even smile. ‘Upstairs, I fink.’
‘Bullshit!’
Knacker jumped backwards, then swallowed.
‘I can see it in your pocket, you big pussy. Gotta be the bottle cus your cock ain’t even half that size. Give it over.’ Fergal snapped two absurdly long fingers in the air, the ends black with grime and Ryan’s blood.
Knacker pulled the bottle of acid out of the front pocket of his jeans.
‘Tut, tut, tut. Shouldn’t keep it by your pecker, Knacker. Don’t you know nuffin’? Top might have come off. Your nudger getting burned off won’t be no loss to the girls though.’
At that Knacker winced and placed the small medicine bottle in Fergal’s outstretched fingers. Knacker’s own hands were shaking.
‘She don’t half make you repeat yourself, don’t she?’ Fergal began to unscrew the cap of the bottle. ‘So who else you told about this place.’
Stephanie pulled her legs further up the bed. She swallowed to find her voice. ‘No one. Just him’
‘That right?’
They were going to kill her. Curiously, she entertained the thought dispassionately. But even though her imminent death was becoming a fact, she would choose their punching fists and stamping feet over acid thrown into her face. ‘He was just bringing me a deposit. For a new room.’
Fergal patted the pocket of his jacket. ‘He certainly did. And every little helps.’
The idea of Ryan’s money inside Fergal’s pocket – hard-earned money he had brought down to Birmingham so that she could escape from the house – stung her more than the thought of them being in possession of a toy she might have treasured as a child. Despite what she had read in the news, or studied in a criminology module of her psychology A Level, or even seen on television, she realized she had never fully understood just how base and cruel people like the McGuires actually were. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for them, not even her stepmother.
‘So who else might your boyfriend have told about his little visit?’
‘I don’t know.’
Fergal unscrewed the bottle cap one full turn. ‘Fink harder.’
‘He’s … he’s not my boyfriend. Not any more. He lives with another girl now.’
‘My heart is breaking.’
‘He wouldn’t have told her anything.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because his girlfriend wouldn’t want him seeing an ex.’ She wished she were lying, but realized she wasn’t.
‘Not some slag he used to fuck. I can understand that. And your mum can’t stand the sight of you. Mine was the same. Your dad snuffed it. We got that in common too. Who else knows you is here?’
‘Bank. Temping agency,’ she said before thinking it through, and immediately saw that they both believed her lie with a reluctance that caused them great displeasure.
‘Yeah,’ Knacker said. ‘She’s been giving out these food samples and all, but ain’t had no work for a while.’
Fergal turned his head to Knacker. He was showing all of his teeth and Stephanie was glad he was not showing that face to her. ‘Anyone ever tell you, Knacker, that you is a useless twat? Eh? That can’t get nuffin’ right? Not never since I known you? I fink back to that day they put you in wiv me and Bennet, at the Scrubs, and I fink listening to you was the worst mistake I ever made. Now, what are we gonna do about this situation?’ The question was intoned rhetorically because Fergal had already arrived at a decision.
It was just as well because Knacker didn’t offer an answer; he just stared at Stephanie in silence. And she knew that Knacker wanted Fergal to do something unpleasant, an act Knacker didn’t have the stomach for and wouldn’t take part in. He didn’t care about how it was done, as long as he didn’t have to do it.
She was a witness to Margaret and Ryan.
If the two men were caught, she could already hear Knacker’s wheedling voice, and see the tears in his big, doleful eyes as he told the police how Fergal had killed Margaret, Ryan, her, no doubt Svetlana too by then, and however many other women Fergal had murdered under this roof: ‘Nuffin’ to do wiv me, like. I was scared for me own life. Fought it was gonna be me next, yeah? Swear on me muvver’s life.’
She felt like she was stuck in some horrible dream in which she was taunted with a vision of the next scene before it happened. She only wished she could live long enough to watch Fergal kill Knacker; she knew there was a distinct possibility of that happening. Taking lives for expediency, or as the consequences of blind rage or insanity, was becoming commonplace, and seemed to have long been normalized at 82 Edgehill Road.
She doubted Fergal had any illusions about his partner’s character either. And after his comment about meeting Knacker in what she assumed was a prison cell, in something they called the Scrubs, she now doubted there was even a blood tie between them. A cover story and another lie. She didn’t even know their real names.
‘Only one fing for it at this stage of the game,’ Fergal said.
Knacker raised his eyebrows.
Fergal grinned at Stephanie. ‘Black Maggie. Black Maggie’s got business wiv her. Bennet’s right. Has been all along. So she’s going in. Down there. It’s where they all end up anyway. And Maggie will want her. Bennet says she never says no to a bit of company.’
FIFTY
Stephanie walked through the dark house between the two men. Fergal led the procession at an eager pace, Knacker following with less enthusiasm and a limp. She could hear him sniffing behind her, as if to clear the situation out of his nose and start over. No harm done, like. All she could feel was a relief she knew would be temporary, but at least the cap had stayed on the bottle of acid, and they hadn’t repeated their performance on the garden patio. Not yet anyway.
Stephanie could only guess at Bennet’s relationship with Knacker and Fergal. But if Bennet had been put inside a certain place as punishment, within this building, and if she was going to be put inside the same place so they could remove an inconvenience, then the destination she was being led to was as welcoming as the gallows.
She suspected the unseen occupants of the house had fallen into a hushed and expectant silence, like a crowd of shocked spectators with mouths agape because they knew all about the destination of the condemned. Because that is what Fergal had just done: sentenced and damned her. ‘They all end up in there anyway. Down there.’ So maybe the other women, the ones she heard at night, had been put inside a special place inside the house. And those that had died there had somehow survived.
Hints and subtexts, it was all she had to go on – all she ever had to go on in this house. If things were not clear from the outset in a situation that a person had any doubts about, that person should just start running. Nothing was worth the risk of this. She knew that now. But the penny had dropped too late for her.
Her mind drifted to a memory of Fergal’s long silhouette bowed, as if in worship, outside the solitary interior door of the ground floor. Because that was where she was going. To meet whatever occupied the locked rooms in the lowest level of the house; whatever had obsessed Fergal and made him stand alone in the musty darkness, as if he were waiting for a sign, or listening to instructions from it or Bennet, from the other side of that door.
We’s all got our little quirks, like.
The door had opened the day Margaret was killed; the day there was no going back for anyone.
Black Maggie.
Stephanie kept her face turned away from the stairwell window to avoid a glimpse of the freshly stained garden patio. The innards of the house suggested the structure was more active now too; silent, but humming with an unwelcome energy. Was it her imagination or had the death of youth awoken the site from slumber? She believed she had been trapped inside the house’s dreams, but now prayed that she would never have to bear its fully awoken consciousness. She wondered if anyone ever got out of this building alive.
Stephanie stopped
on the first floor landing and closed her eyes until the worst of the feeling of dread and vertigo passed. She would do anything to be back inside her old room there, even with the hole burned through the floor.
You will never leave here.
She would become one of them. An unrecorded death. A trace of someone who sobbed through the night and muttered from behind a poorly decorated wall; one of them who murmured from the floor, or paced the wretched passages of the house, cold and lonely and looking for companionship.
‘Oh, God.’
Fergal stopped and turned to confront her. ‘He ain’t here no more.’ His face was expressionless, but his eyes were alive with what could have been excitement tinged with awe, or even terror.
He eventually smiled in acknowledgement that she must have fully grasped the enormity of what she was about to experience and endure, but would never walk away from, not in any physical sense. Fergal was proud of his role as facilitator. She suspected the cousins might be middle men for something that one of them denied the existence of, and the other didn’t fully understand.
Stephanie’s face screwed up for tears that never came because she was too frightened to cry. She clutched her hands to her cheeks, then placed one hand on the banister rail before she fell. ‘I’m not … No … I’m not … I won’t leave.’ She wasn’t sure who she was even speaking to.
An eternal sorrow. A freezing forever. Perpetually trapped, lost, and only feared if discovered.
It never ends.
‘What … will I be?’
Would she remember anything, or only bits of things? Would she shiver and repeat herself in the darkness, always wanting to wake while being unable to rouse? Would there be some sense of will and volition in an endless entrapment? Would only her final state of terror transfer into the cold infinity?
Bennet. Bennet the rapist still followed his nature. So who was she? What was she now? She was terror, grief, despair and confusion. Just like the other women. Was that to be her sentence? Forever.
