No One Gets Out Alive

by Adam Nevill

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ‘You owe rent on this room. Like I told you, rent’s gone up. You’s already in arrears, sister. Time you earned your keep, like.’

  Knacker looked as skittish as a pony with the scent of a wolf in its nostrils; he was all mouth and front because Fergal had now joined him inside her old first floor room. And Knacker appeared to be rehearsing an old and redundant draft of a script that no one wanted to hear any more. She doubted Knacker would ever surprise her again, no matter how hard he tried. Even though he carried the bottle of acid, since she had been dragged out of the ground floor flat, she was no longer afraid of him.

  Today, on this drab and wet morning, in a building that belonged to none of them, she knew that everything had changed: her situation, her. The atmosphere of the house had subtly shifted, like the encroach of dusk into an afternoon you couldn’t recall passing. She knew she would never be allowed to leave, but she also imagined she had been released from down there to do something. A task of some kind. And the urgency to perform this function grew like a slow heat inside her blood. Only she didn’t know what the task was; what she needed to do.

  At least she was indifferent to anything Knacker said now, and that indifference felt like a great relief from an almost unbearable pressure of rage. She’d completely shut his chunter out of her mind as they ascended the stairs.

  Once reinstalled on the first floor, she’d stood beside the window and watched Knacker dump the contents of a black bin bag, what she assumed were Margaret’s clothes, onto the bed. A froth of black lace fell out of the bag, entangled in a sticky mass of latex. A dead girl’s lingerie.

  She was more interested in listening to the women all around her, in case they had a message for her. Through the length and breadth of the house she received the impression that the residents were either talking or weeping, and mostly in the distance and at the edge of her hearing.

  When she’d walked up the stairs, even the tall blonde woman had returned to her position outside, beside the garden wall. She smoked a cigarette like she had done that first time. But this time the woman looked up and met Stephanie’s eye as she passed behind the stairwell window between the ground floor and first floor. The woman held her stare until Stephanie passed from sight.

  Knacker couldn’t hear anything within the house. She knew this because of his anxious preoccupation with her neutral state: her uncharacteristic calm and lack of fear in his presence. He didn’t like that, and she almost smiled for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.

  But Fergal could hear the women of the house. He peered around himself and through the thin daylight that seeped into the building. Agitated, he blinked red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling and walls. In one hand Fergal carried an old vinyl holdall. The bag had been on the first floor landing, awaiting collection. He must have left it there before coming downstairs to release Stephanie. In his other hand he carried the old saucepan she had seen in one of the cupboards under the kitchen sink.

  In her room Fergal dropped the holdall at the foot of the bed. Something inside the bag rattled like a chain. He dropped the saucepan next to the bag. Then walked across to Stephanie and craned his long neck forward so his horrible face could command her full attention.

  Knacker had moved onto her other side and stood too close, cocky again. He nodded over at the clothes and high-heeled shoes littered across the bed. ‘See if they fit. You’s got company tonight, so you better look your best. I don’t want no lip, else yous’ll get another slap. And we’ll tie you to the fucking bed, like Svetlana. Wrists and ankles. We’d get extra too if you was tied down. Bareback in the black room with Stephy slut. Might give that old bastard next door a dirty ride, on the house, to get you used to the idea.’

  Stephanie turned her head and spat in Knacker’s eyes.

  Blinking in shock, he raised a fist to strike her. She did not flinch.

  Fergal placed a hand on Knacker’s chest, his fingers spread wide. Then turned his face away from Stephanie and pushed it close to Knacker’s until their noses were touching. ‘You fucking stupid as you look or what? That’s all over. Finished. And look at her. She’d as soon bite a cock off than suck it. She ain’t no good for nuffin’.’

  He returned his grimacing face to Stephanie. ‘She’s changed. Only I can’t work out how. So I gotta sort somefing out downstairs before we finish what we’s started. This ain’t right. Fink there has been a misunderstanding down there.’ His breath made her choke.

  Knacker stepped away and bobbed on his toes, his face white with petulant rage at how he had been spoken to, at how she had spat in his face and not been summarily punished.

  ‘Is they … is they askin’ you to do fings, like?’ Fergal asked Stephanie the question in a voice so quiet it was practically a whisper.

  She stared back at him without disclosing anything besides the disgust she could not contain at his breath.

  ‘I ain’t happy wiv this, like,’ Fergal said to himself. He looked about the ceiling, raised his hands. ‘It’s all going off in here, but it’s all quiet down there. They wanted her. But pushed her out. Don’t make no sense.’ He thrust a finger at the floor to add emphasis to his point. Then quickly turned to Knacker, who flinched. ‘Get her secure with Bennet’s pervy tat. Can you get that right?’ Fergal clenched his fist around Stephanie’s upper arm and made her hiss from the force of his grip. He marched her to the foot of the bed. ‘Sit!’

  Stephanie complied. Her mind had been broken into and ransacked. She’d come out of that place vandalized. But she had been released, rejected. Was that what Fergal had inferred? She was done with screaming; she’d learned it would do her no good. She had nothing to fight with but patience, because the house was not finished with her; it had allowed a cessation in her torments for its own malign purposes. It was the only reason she was still breathing. What its intended goal was for those that remained alive beneath its roof she did not know, but it had not extinguished her life during the entire period when it had sufficient time to do so. It may have taken most of her wits and her mind and her heart, but it had left her with something, a kind of listlessness coiled around suppressed rage that seemed to be waiting for an opportunity to rise and strike. But even as a wreck, her being alive troubled Fergal.

  Fergal nodded at Knacker, who approached her warily, then dropped to his knees and cuffed her left ankle. He extended the chain to the bed frame, raised the mattress and closed the second cuff around a metal strut that ran across the width of the bedframe. Glaring like a sullen child, Knacker removed the tiny keys from the locks on the cuffs and slipped them into his pocket.

  ‘Next time you need a piss,’ Fergal said to Stephanie, his face split by a grin, ‘piss in that.’ He dragged the saucepan by the handle and left it beside her legs. ‘I fink we run out of polyfene,’ he said through a smile. They must have used up the last roll on Margaret and Ryan. ‘I’m gonna go fetch some from that raghead shop.’

  ‘You going out? That wise?’

  ‘You!’ Ignoring Knacker’s misgivings, Fergal jabbed a grimy index finger at his confederate’s face. ‘Watch her wiv your life, yeah?’

  Fergal stalked from the room. She listened to his footsteps pound away, along the corridor to the staircase, and then heard them boom-creak down a flight of stairs.

  Knacker looked at the underwear, clothes and shoes piled on top of the bed, and with such dismay it was like he was surveying the wreckage of a life’s work, hopes and dreams after a stock market crash.

  Eventually he broke his grim silence. ‘I fink you know what he’s fetching polyfene for, eh? I fink you know. You could’ve had it so good too. And Svetlana. And Margaret. I liked her.’ He looked wistful at this mention of the late Margaret, and Stephanie wanted him dead with such an urgency she had to grit her teeth to suppress a scream of animal rage.

  Knacker strolled across the room, checked the corridor outside to make sure Fergal had gone. He stared into the dim, ugly building until he heard the front door clos
e in the distance. He turned around and sauntered back to the bed, sniffing. He sat down a few feet away from Stephanie, out of her reach, and retrieved the bottle of acid from his jacket pocket and placed it on the bed beside his hip. Played with the lid with one idle finger, his lips pursed. ‘Don’t got much to say for yourself no more, has you? You know he’s gonna do the uvver one too, like. Svetlana. That ain’t right. Your fella was askin’ for it. That’s fair. But the girls. That’s bang out of order, like. They was good earners. They never hurt no one.’

  Maybe this was a late appeal for her sympathy. While he explained that the murder of Stephanie’s innocent boyfriend was justified, perhaps Knacker was trying to come back over to her side by showing his compassion for a girl who had been beaten to death and another who was currently tied to a bed upstairs so she could be raped by strangers. Even after all that, I still have a heart, like. Stephanie swallowed at her fury, but it just kept boiling back up her gullet.

  ‘He sleeps wiv his eyes open,’ Knacker said, as if the thought had just drifted through his mind.

  She could see Knacker’s face in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. In this pensive mood he looked older, his face more lined now, and the thick youthful curls both ushered and worsened the effects of age and violence and strife he had held back with his garrulous, disingenuous street attitude and his youthful clothes.

  He wasn’t aware she was studying his reflection as he reminisced. But a change of aspect to something thoughtful did not soften his hard face; it just made him look pathetic, and troubled. She doubted anything could redeem him. And if he ever appeared rehabilitated, that too would only be an act to get what he wanted. ‘You ever seen that? I ain’t, not even in the nick, like. His eyes ain’t right no more. They’s all red and horrible. It’s in him. That fing. He needs a doctor.’ He grinned. ‘But we can’t go to the quacks cus we been a bit naughty, like.’

  ‘He’s mad. And he hates you.’ It was the first time Stephanie had spoken since they had removed her from the ground floor flat.

  Knacker started at the sound of her voice, like he’d been slapped across the back of the head. He gathered himself, slipped off the bed and walked across the room to the window. He clasped his hands upon his cheeks. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered. Without turning around he then asked her, ‘What is it, like? That fing down there? You been in there, you tell me.’

  ‘You’ll find out. Soon enough.’

  Knacker flinched more than turned towards her. ‘Eh? What you on, yeah?’

  Stephanie enjoyed the spread of the smile across her face. ‘You think the polyfene is just for me?’

  ‘You watch your mouf. I ain’t telling you twice.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about it. And I’ll tell you what I know.’

  His face visibly quivered with rage. ‘There ain’t no deals. None of this, you tell me somefink and I’ll tell you summat. Who you fink you is dealing wiv?’

  ‘A dead man. So fuck off. Go on and fuck off out of here. You think I want to look at your ugly face, you prick. I’m already gone. I’m still down there, with them, with her. I don’t give a shit. But when I go, I don’t want your stink anywhere near me.’

  What little colour and animation had remained in Knacker’s face, vanished.

  Stephanie shrugged. ‘You think I am afraid of death? It’s what comes after that’s worse. But I’m prepared. You’re not. He can’t do anything to me that’s worse than what happened to me down there. What I have seen. What comes next. But you … you won’t even be half ready. It’ll be bad, Knacker. Really bad for you. I only wish I could watch. Maybe I will.’

  Knacker swallowed. He’d started to look at her in the same way he regarded Fergal, whenever his partner in crime mentioned the ground floor flat, or alluded to what was inside it. ‘Piss off.’ It came out of his mouth without any edge or force; the tone of a scared and beaten man. He paced across to the door in a hurry, as if he were about to pitch himself through it, but paused in the doorway, afraid of disobeying Fergal. And maybe he had nowhere else to run.

  ‘You’re a prisoner too, Knacker. You’re going nowhere. Not after what’s happened here. Not after what you’ve done.’

  ‘I ain’t done nuffin’.’

  ‘Oh you have. You’ve stood by and let him kill. You’ve supplied him with victims, aided him, abetted him. No one will see your role as any different to the one who laid the final punch.’ She thought of Ryan and nearly lost her voice. The sudden pang of heartbreak surprised her so much she lost her train of thought.

  Knacker stopped pacing and filled the silence, desperate to release the pressure in his tormented and frantic mind. It was as if he now needed to make himself understand the impossible. ‘He’s always had a screw loose, but this place … fuck’s sake. What’s down there … it made him worse. That fing Bennet told us about.’

  ‘The Maggie. Where’d it come from, Knacker?’

  ‘His mum and dad had it wiv them since he was a kid. I reckon they was all at it. All of ’em. Whole family was perverts. His Dad put girls in there … in there wiv it, like.’ He came towards her. ‘Where you was, what did you see? You see it? That horrible fing. It’s been trying to get inside my head. In dreams, like. Nasty fucker. It’s turned me own against me. Fergal is in wiv it. They’re togever now. They fink they can cut me out!’

  He was coming apart. All the tight flesh on his narrow, bony face seemed to be alive with jitters, like there was something twitching beneath the skin. One of his eyelids went into a spasm around a big open eyeball, exposed by fear. And then, as if they were friends, he tried to smile at Stephanie. ‘You’re a smart girl, so you tell me. Tell me what’s here, like. You been in there, where we put Bennet. What is it? You tell me, yeah?’

  She shook her head. ‘You tell me about Bennet first.’

  Knacker clenched his fists and paced about by the window like he was eager to be on the other side of the bars. ‘Smelly cunt. It’s all his fault. He let us come in here, yeah. What, did he fink we would believe them porkies he was telling in the Scrubs? It’s all fucked up. Cus of it, like. Cus of it. I hate that fing. Fergal’s gone the same way as Bennet. He don’t wash his clothes no more. And he ain’t never took his coat off once, like, not since he was let out. I know it. The unclean are pure, he kept saying that when I told him he was riffy. Bennet used to say the same fing, in the Scrubs, like. They couldn’t get a comb froo his hair. They shaved it off. He was crawling with lice. Assaulted a guard when they hosed him down.’ Knacker’s shudder was almost a convulsion. ‘Bennet was a dirty bastard. He always was. But not Fergal. He had pride, like. What makes them like this?’

  ‘This is Bennet’s house?’

  ‘Yeah, too right. And everyfing in it. Ain’t got fuck all to do wiv me, like. And I will tell them, like. Yes I will. You don’t need to worry about that. They’ll know who done what in here.’

  ‘Why did Bennet’s family bring it here?’

  Knacker shuddered and scratched at his arms, under his sleeves. ‘Was already in here, like. When his mum and dad bought the house. Somefing “bad” had been in the house for a long time. Bennet used to say that. This ain’t my house, he’d say. Weren’t my mum and dad’s house neither. Don’t matter whose name is on the deeds, or who inherited what, he always said this place belonged to the Maggie. Has done since before his lot come here. And he would say she likes fings done her way, like.’

  ‘But you came. You stayed.’

  Knacker clenched his fists again and partially spat out his evident regret. ‘We fought Bennet was mad. Easy mark when he told us about running girls here, like his dad had done. Christ, the money they was making. The money we could have made. Hurts to even fink about it. Wasted. All of it, wasted. It’s criminal. But he was really onto somefing, yeah, with the girls. Bennet. His dad and him had a nice little business going that we was gonna take over when Bennet snuffed it, like. But he was nuts. His whole family was fuckin’ nuts to have that fing in their house … It was their rel
igion. You believe that? Their religion.

  ‘Bennet used to say, never ever go froo that door downstairs. Cus no one can live in there, like. His dad went mad in there, yeah. He was down there wiv it for years, like. His mum fucked off. It’s why the social took Bennet off his dad when he was a kid. His dad was fucked in the head.

  ‘And they made it worse wiv giving it girls, like. Anyone you give to it don’t last long, he said. It’s big, he kept saying. It’s got so big now it’ll put you out after it’s played wiv you. We fought he was crazy, cus of them drugs he was on. Morphine. But there was somefing in there. This fing that Fergal started hearing.’

  ‘Why did you put Bennet inside?’

  ‘Cancer. He hadn’t got long and he was getting on our tits. Fucking whining. Coughing like a cunt all the time. We couldn’t sleep in the flat. That’s when he starts going on about down there and all. All the time, like. I fought it was the morphine they give him at the hospital, that made him say fings, hear fings. Said he could hear all the girls he’d done. The ones his dad done too. And the ones that was done by others before his family come here. And then we get here and he keeps saying he don’t know if he wants to stay in the house no more. Fought it was a mistake coming here, back home. He’d come here to die. Said he had somefing planned. Arrangement wiv that fing down there. He was let out the Scrubs early, cus of the cancer. But then he weren’t sure he wanted to go froo wiv it anymore, this arrangement he had wiv down there. He started saying he wanted to die in the hospice instead. We said fuck off, like, cus he had to help us set up the girls. Teach us how and all that.

  ‘Mumbo jumbo, I fought. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But Fergal did. Cus it was already telling him fings too. Told him it wanted Bennet, like. In there wiv it. That they had a deal for when Bennet come out the nick. This house don’t forget nuffin’. And when we was pissed up one night, fings got out a hand, like.’