by Adam Nevill
She collapsed against the wood and began hammering a fist against the surface. She called out, ‘Help! Help me! Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Her hand hurt, but she bit down on the pain and continued to beat the wood because her life depended on being heard.
Beyond the wood a car swished past, moving quickly. No one in a vehicle could possibly hear her and there were never any pedestrians in the street; in fact, she had not seen one during her journeys to and from the house, bus stop and local shop. But there was a neighbour, there were curb crawlers, the punters who came here for sex; one of them might hear her …
Stephanie stopped banging the wooden boards. Turned to the bed. Turned to face the awful thing that had just sat up.
FIFTY-FOUR
When Bennet grunted Stephanie screamed.
She ran across the pink room to the doorway. Her hands bumped around the door handle. She was carrying too many things: knife, candle, screwdriver. She could not get purchase on the round door handle.
She dropped the screwdriver, put the knife between her teeth, turned the handle, opened the door. Glanced over her shoulder at the noise of bed springs, but instantly wished she had not. The figure on the bed swung thin legs over one side of the mattress and hissed with excitement.
Stephanie slammed the bedroom door behind herself. The speed of her exit put out the candle.
Turning about, in the absolute darkness of the black room, she felt her body shake, and not just from the sudden freeze and stagnant odour of corruption she had plunged herself back into; terror that threatened to become a seizure had taken hold of her limbs.
With near useless hands she retrieved the box of matches from the front pocket of her hooded top. Slid the box open, withdrew one match. Others dropped and scattered across the floor at her feet. She shut the box.
Against the other side of the door the dead thing in the windbreaker turned the handle and pushed.
‘God, God, God,’ she muttered at the darkness.
He ain’t in here no more.
Stephanie struck the match she held. It flared alight.
She whimpered when she saw all four chairs drawn back from the black table in anticipation of guests.
Nothing was sitting in them, yet. But whatever was inside the little wooden box upon the long sideboard, hidden behind the purple curtain, began to beat out a muffled rhythm. And into her mind flashed an image of small black hands banging a leather-skinned drum.
Old hair … black horse’s tail … wiry hair, doll hair … leather skin … little black hands beating a drum with a stick.
She dropped the match when it burned her fingers. Back into darkness she sank with the sound of a drum thumping inside her ears.
Using the tatters of her concentration she fished another match out of the box; there were not many left.
The door handle stopped swivelling in the small of her back, and Bennet stopped pushing at the door. But he had not gone because she could still hear the sound of his odious breathing: fast breathing that comes from arousal, from delight. But why had he stopped trying to get out?
As if summoned by the drum, there was a shuffling sound upon the floor of the black room which tore her attention away from Bennet.
Something not wrapped in polythene, something heavy and yet soft, was moving through the darkness that engulfed her. Whatever produced the susurration, this sliding, was concealed by the broad drapery of the black tablecloth. A small mercy and one she was sure would be short lived.
Stephanie suffered the sensation that the darkness about her was filling and expanding with motion. She flinched back tighter to the door, afraid something might be closing in on her face, and struck a match against the box.
No spark, just the sensation of crumbling close to her fingertips.
The next match she tried flared and briefly spat, then sputtered extinct. She dropped it and pulled out what she realized was the second to last match.
This match ignited. Before the flare retracted, she saw movement on the far side of the room, near the head of the table. There was definitely motion, but she could not see what was responsible for stirring the darkness.
Stephanie glanced at the wooden box on the sideboard; the purple curtain was still drawn while the muffled beat thumped inside.
She dipped the candle wick inside the match’s flame. Waited for the trembling light to struggle and to grow and to reveal what new and, perhaps, final horror awaited what was left of her mind.
Once the wick caught, Stephanie looked to the door that led into the kitchen as if it offered some hope of salvation.
Gas yourself. Start a fire.
At the furthest reach of the candle’s flickering flame, she detected the vague outline of a shape against the far wall, one almost as dark as the paintwork. A silhouette rising from the floor in a gliding motion. From a spasm of renewed terror her head shook, her mouth twitched, her breath condensed about her face. ‘Dad. Daddy. Dad,’ she muttered, as if he were able to come into the room when called upon to save her.
Up and off the floor the thing moved, as though the lower half were serpentine and the ceiling its intended destination. Stephanie screamed and threw the candle at the movement. It missed and hit the far wall. But as the flame arced across the room she glimpsed what might have been a tatty black head, close to the ceiling, and a pair of shrivelled arms beneath.
Maggie. Black Maggie. Maggie. Black Maggie.
She heard the voices inside her head. Not her own voice, but other voices. Lots of other voices. Voices that now travelled over the ceiling as she fled beneath them and across the room towards her memory of where the kitchen door had been.
Round and round and round the voices went.
Up and up and up the black thing slid to be among the voices calling out its name upon the ceiling.
The drum beat grew louder.
Stephanie batted her hands across the wall, whimpering in her blindness and in her frustration that she could not find the wood of the door, because her hands were now sliding across wet bricks.
The blackness was inside her lungs; she had inhaled too much of it, drawn the darkness inside her chest and through the chambers of her heart like dirty smoke. A taste of water rank with ashes and burned bone filled her mouth.
She turned around and fumbled the match box out of her pocket and then scraped the last match out of the box. With fingers she could barely feel she struck the match against the wrong side of the box. Then turned the match box over and tried again.
The match flared.
In the air, near the ceiling, a pair of small white eyes, inside a face she was glad she could not see, closed. But when the head slowly moved down and towards her, as if to investigate her presence, it shook what might have been hair with an emotion that resembled joy.
She turned her own face away from the thing above her, glimpsed the kitchen door behind her shoulder. Reached for the door handle. Stepped out of the black room and slammed the kitchen door shut.
FIFTY-FIVE
Inside the darkness hysteria finally came. Madness too. She welcomed madness.
In the surge of a mindlessness born of sustained terror, the violence of her screams took her into a space she had never known before, but had occasionally sensed in the wings of her mind. When she came close to being conscious of this state, she suppressed any flickers of awareness, in case she departed chaos.
Round and round in the darkness of the kitchen she turned and spun and unravelled herself and cut at the nothingness with her knife. Slashed above her head where a face might hang, and down below where something could be crawling towards her legs.
Against cabinets she banged herself but ignored the pain. Over the little table she sprawled only to right her body and to whip the knife through the air, at head height, should anything be closing in.
She picked up a chair and hurled it through the absence; it seemed to travel a long way before smashing the glass out of a cabinet door. She sent the second chair after it.
&nbs
p; Drawers were emptied and implements thrown anywhere and everywhere. Some of the things she threw bounced off the walls and struck her body. Cupboards were pawed at. Their contents were released with her screams, to accompany the flight of objects through the lightless place, through the end of the world and through the final reaches of herself.
When she could no longer raise her tired arms, she slumped to her knees and asked the darkness for death.
‘Now. Come on. Now. Now.’
There would be some pain and then she wanted black. Nothing mattered any more. She didn’t want to think or remember anything. She just wanted to go.
‘I want it now. Now. Now. Get it over with, you bitch.’
Her energy, her spirit, her life was spent. She was glad to be rid of it; the struggle for survival was a pain she no longer wanted.
And then she went quiet for a time and wondered if she was already dead, and if a new tenant, some fragrant girl from Bulgaria or Latvia, was lying stiff with fright inside an old bed while listening to Stephanie’s cries in the night.
She didn’t know. But she didn’t think she was dead. Bennet had looked very thin on that pink bed. So perhaps he had starved to death inside here, his last days a relentless torment as visitor after visitor came rustling and sliding about him in the darkness.
And from the moment he’d shoved her inside here, this was what Fergal had been waiting for: the crescendo. He had waited for her cries.
Was he out there now?
Stephanie crawled across the broken things and found the door she had first come through; it felt so long ago, when she had been another person, someone who cared about life. She pushed herself up the door. Struck the surface with both hands. Grimaced at the darkness.
She saw their faces inside her mind, their simian faces, clever and thrusting. She saw again the weasel-quick eyes. Faces fronting minds erased of compassion, of decency, of humanity. She could hear Knacker’s voice, which in turn became the memory of a ghost’s incapacity and cries.
She inhaled deep from the dead house. Allowed herself to be throttled by her very powerlessness. What did she care now?
Her thoughts leapt on, from face to voice to face to voice, to poor Ryan so limp on the stained concrete patio, to Margaret’s sweet smile, to a tooth uprooted from a jawbone, to black blood on faded carpet, to an elderly voice chanting scripture, to a girl sealed beneath a bathroom floor, chattering out her confusion. And something began to glow inside her again, at her very core. Something so hot and unstable it was already black with the carbon of her rage and hatred. She thought of Fergal’s bloodless face, and Knacker’s equine expressions; she thought of the thing that had been a man called Bennet, and of its speed up and through the house to service its desires on the wretched and the hopeless; she saw the picture of its howling, idiotic face, bestial with violent intent, on a phone screen.
‘Can you hear me, you scrawny rat bastards? Can you hear me?’
Stephanie banged her hands against the door. ‘They are coming! Yes! And they will take me. But I swear you will not live. You will not leave this house alive. I swear I will come for you. Both of you. You will know me, you bastards! You will know me in this dark. No one gets out alive! No one!’
She turned and flashed her face at the darkness, showed it a mouth full of teeth. And to the darkness she begged, pleaded with the absence of light and hope for a chance to do those things that she would now trade anything, anything at all, for an opportunity to do.
‘You think these rats can keep you? You deserve better company. Their blood for my blood.’
And through the cascade and tumult of her blackest thoughts she heard a voice: I will come unto thee. For I have determined there to winter.
FIFTY-SIX
She passed from one darkness into another, from exhaustion into sleep, or perhaps she had slipped into extinction. She didn’t know, nor did she care much. Her only lingering wish was that the darkness remained still and empty around where she lay, so cold and spent. But inside here and inside her, darkness was the medium through which her visitors and visions travelled. They came and went, came and went. They told her nothing, as if their presence was sufficient.
On either side of her head plastic rustled. She never saw what was inside the coverings, but heard mouths panting wetly against polythene. She knew sightless eyes were close by and that old mouths had opened to mutter notions long obsolete. They only wanted to be close to her and they wanted to be heard. Maybe that was enough; she was an audience for what had been lost and forgotten in the darkness it had been given unto.
In time, the four women wearing long gowns came and stood around her with their heads on one side; they all spoke at the same time like agitated birds in a treeline, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Perhaps they were praying, because they all held little books that looked like they contained hymns.
At first Stephanie thought they were holding their heads at severe angles so they could better see her lying on the dirty floor. But then she realized their heads were bent because of what was knotted about their throats. Every time the women appeared and she tried to see where the faint phosphorescence bled from, she would find herself moving round in a circle, on the ceiling, and unable to get back inside her body down below. When she tried to work out how far away her body was from the ceiling, she found herself staring down at four people sitting at the black table with their hands raised into the air.
The bald man’s face was all loose skin that hung around his jaw; what little of his hair remained was oiled into bootlace strands over his skull. He wore a shirt, tie and braces. Of the two women, the bespectacled woman with permed hair made a crude and horrible gesture by poking her thin tongue out of her wide open mouth. The other woman wore a headscarf and dark glasses. Her face was expressionless. On the centre of the table was the wooden box.
The people all looked past Stephanie at something else that unwound on the ceiling behind her head. It made the sound of oily hands being rubbed together. All of the people’s faces were strewn with tears.
When she came to be upon the floor again, and was, perhaps, even awake, a little boy with sunken milky blue eyes, that were probably sightless even though they showed between the scarf over his face and his cowboy hat made from purple felt, skipped around her in the darkness. His knee caps were thick with scabs, his grey shirt was untucked from his shorts and his patterned pullover was dirty and full of holes. Somewhere not far away, old dry hands clapped out a rhythm to which the boy skipped. The boy only ever sang the same thing:
‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’
Sometimes there was only darkness around her body, but within it she knew she was tiny. A speck in something cold and blank in every direction that went on forever.
She was so small inside the immensity of nothing she found it difficult to breathe.
DAY EIGHT
FIFTY-SEVEN
‘I don’t understand why she ain’t dead. It offed Bennet pretty quick. And she’s trashed the place. Why’s she so special? She was wanted in here. That’s what they wanted. I don’t get it. Why does she get to come out?’ It was Fergal’s voice that brought her round; it sounded like he was talking to himself.
Stephanie opened her eyes and blinked in a thin, grey light that stung her mind as though she stared directly into the sun. Through a squint she could see smashed crockery, kitchen utensils and shards of broken glass scattered across the kitchen lino.
Perhaps she should have been relieved to see her captors but she felt nothing.
Fergal put his long hands under her arms and pulled her into a sitting position. Her clothes were filthy; they smelled of dust, sweat and urine.
Fergal’s long fingers dabbed inside the pocket of her hooded top and patted down her jeans with the swiftness of an exp
ert thief. With one foot he slid the kitchen knife away, then dragged her backwards and across the threshold.
In the dim ground floor hallway, the first thing her vision settled upon was Knacker’s face; it was blanched with fear and twitchy with anxiety. He looked at her like she was a traffic accident.
Fergal carefully pulled the door shut and locked the ground floor rooms. His own expression had remained rigid with concentration, and he hadn’t adjusted his focus from the door that led from the kitchen to the black room before he sealed the place. Once the rooms were secure, he rested his forehead and the palms of his hands against the door, his eyes closed. From the rise and fall of his back, Stephanie saw how hard he was breathing.
While she blinked away her grogginess, wincing at the dull band of pain that thumped like a drum behind her eyes, Fergal turned his head from the door and looked down at Stephanie. And she saw an expression she had never seen on his face before: suspicion tinged with caution, even incomprehension. ‘It’s all gone very quiet in there. Get her upstairs while I fink this froo.’
Knacker hesitated. He didn’t want to touch her. When he gingerly reached for her she slapped his hand away. He flinched, stepped back.
Fergal tensed; in the closeness of the hall he smelled dreadful, even worse than she did.
Knacker fumbled the little glass bottle out of the pocket of his ski jacket. ‘Yeah?’ Showed it to her. ‘Yeah?’
Stephanie got to her feet and began walking down the corridor. Both men stared at her without blinking. Knacker shuffled away from her approach.
She turned and climbed the stairs.
Knacker followed warily.
Through the banisters, Fergal watched her every step upwards towards the first floor. ‘I’ll be right behind that twat so don’t even fink about nuffin’.’
