Two Doors Down: A twisted psychological thriller

by Collette Heather

  I groan, cradling my throbbing head in my hands, my brain hurting with all this sick, occult stuff. It’s far worse than I ever dreamed – Holly is clearly a Satanist.

  You don’t know that, I tell myself. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  But God, the evidence is pretty damning. Does Mark know about these books?

  I still can’t make sense of any of it – I’m seeing it, but I’m not seeing it.

  Sighing heavily, I open another window and go onto Amazon, where I type in the name of the two books, firstly in their original Latin titles and then in the English translation when that proves fruitless. It throws up a lot of Satanic-themed books, but not these particular books. I kick myself for not looking at their dates of publication, or the publisher.

  I decide to go back to basics, namely Wikipedia, for a simple break down of the two words that I feel are the most pertinent here. Grimoire and necromancy…

  I skim the entry on Grimoire:

  A textbook of magic – a sacred text – including instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells and divination, and how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, deities and demons. In some cases, the books themselves are believed to be imbued with magical powers… A grimoire contains information on spells, rituals, the preparation of magical tools and lists of ingredients…

  I stop reading at this point, and turn my attention to the entry for necromancy:

  Necromancy is the practice of magic, involving communication with the dead, either by summoning their spirits as apparitions, visions, or raising them bodily. This is sometimes for the purpose of divination, whereby the deceased impart the means to foretell future events. Also can be to discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the dead as a weapon. Sometimes referred to as “Death Magic”, the term may also sometimes be used in more general sense to refer to black magic…

  Once again, I stop reading. This doesn’t really tell me anything that I don’t already know. Or it’s telling me very little, anyway. Their snake wedding rings pop into my head, and I wish I’d had the foresight to take a picture of those, too, then I could have posted them on a forum like Reddit, asking if anyone knew the meaning of the rings.

  Instead, I google snakes and what they are supposed to symbolise, pausing at the first chunk of text that comes up on the search page itself:

  Historically, snakes and serpents represent fertility or a creative life force. As snakes shed their skin through sloughing, they are symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality and healing. Of eternity and continual renewal of life. The snake is a complex symbol. It can represent death, destruction, evil, and poison…. In the bible, The Devil, in the guise of the serpent, instigated the fall by tricking Eve into breaking God’s command….

  Okay, I think, I get it. Snakes are creepy bastards. Just like Holly.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger. I can feel a migraine coming on. Doing my best to shake it off, I turn my attention to the few words about Frucissiere, the 13th demon under Duke Syrach – the very same words that came before the poem, or incantation, that I managed to photograph the first page of before I got spooked. And what is it with that incantation? I wonder. Is it to be read aloud as part of some sort of ceremonial ritual? And if so, to what purpose?

  Moaning in frustration, I type this Frucissiere into the search bar, clicking on a website about demonology that looks the most promising.

  With bated breath, I read about this demon:

  Frucissiere is the 13th demon under Duke Syrach. There are 18 inferior demons in his servitude.

  Frucissiere receives the dead. He is primarily associated with necromancy.

  As with the other 18 demons under Duke Syrach, there isn’t much information available. It is therefore impossible to comprehend the demon’s nature. If he is properly invoked, the risk of malevolence is significantly reduced. This is important because the true nature of this demon is not known in demonology circles. No one knows if he is malevolent, benevolent, or if he is indifferent towards mortals…

  I stop reading, for the writing becomes increasingly jumbled and rambling as it progresses. In a fit of irritation, I slam shut the laptop lid – I feel like my brain is about to explode with all this occult crap.

  Who are you, Holly? And what do you want with Mark?

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Holly arrives back in Broadgate the following day, on a rainy, Monday evening at seven thirty.

  At first, I don’t know for sure that it’s her, for I don’t recognise the car that pulls up outside Mark’s house. It is a brand spanking new BMW, I believe, judging from the curved frontend, and it is the most dazzling, darkest black. It looks entirely incongruous in Broadgate, like a millionaire landing in a slum area of a third world country in his helicopter.

  Needless to say, I have been waiting for this moment all day, loitering in my spot instead of doing anything useful, and jumping to my feet every time I hear a car pull up. All this hovering around doing nothing is mentally exhausting.

  I knew it would be her, even before her long, elegant legs emerge from the passenger side onto the pavement. It has been bucketing it down the past few days, and today is no exception. The rain and the dark mean I can’t so clearly, but I can just about make out that she is wearing shin-length boots in what is probably black leather. Her legs look dark, the slender shape of them clearly visible, indicating that she is wearing black tights rather than trousers.

  The rest of her body emerges, legs that go forever protruding beneath a hip-skimming black coat in an A-line cut. The coat makes her look like she is naked underneath it. I can’t see her face because the coat has a hood pulled up against the rain, but a figure like that – legs like that – can only be hers. The hood pulls back slightly and I catch a glimpse of her profile – yes, it is definitely Holly.

  I am so transfixed on Holly, I don’t immediately notice that the driver’s door has opened, and the male figure spilling out into the road. He moves around the front of the car and my gaze swivels towards him, my heart leaping into my throat. There is something so inherently familiar about the man’s proportions and gait…

  It’s Bill.

  I am rocked by the strength of this assertion; it is like a punch to the guts.

  Then good sense takes hold. Just because the man in question is tall and broad-shouldered, it doesn’t automatically follow that it is Bill.

  I watch as he hurries around to Holly on the pavement. Like Holly, the fur-lined hood of his dark puffa jacket is pulled up against the stormy night, but unlike Holly, his hood is that much deeper and fur-lined. The fur renders his face a blackhole, a bottomless pit of nothingness. It is disconcerting, to say the least.

  He joins Holly on the pavement where they stand close together, exchanging a few words. They don’t touch; there is nothing in their body language that outwardly signals anything sexual between them. But then, they are in the middle of a street on a cold and rainy night, with the neighbours – i.e. me – potentially spying on them. If Holly were having an affair, she would have to be stupid to flaunt this fact directly outside my living-room window.

  Holly then hurries into the house, hunched over against the rain, while her male friend

  Bill it’s Bill

  goes to the rear of the car, where the boot springs open. The man is momentarily hidden from view, until the boot slams shut and I can see him once again, clutching a box to his chest. The box isn’t big – I would guess no more than fifty centimetres across and forty centimetres deep. Big enough to hold a few sensitive knickknacks that she possibly doesn’t want Mark to see, hence, she is bringing them here while he is away. Bits and pieces like the books I found yesterday, and the shoebox full of private things…

  I watch the hooded figure carry the box around the car. I fully expect him to hurry into the house after Holly, but he doesn’t, instead pausing on the pavement in th
e pouring rain.

  And his fur-lined, obscured face seems to be looking right at me.

  I am only peering through the tiniest chink in the blinds – surely this person simply cannot see that I am watching – but I jump back from the window as I have been electrocuted, such is my shock.

  I slump to the floor, giving in to the weakness and flat-out humiliation at being caught spying that I have no need to disguise as I am alone.

  “Jesus,” I say to myself. Or Bertie, perhaps, who is watching me quizzically from where he sits on the sofa.

  This won’t do. I have to get a grip. If the man outside, did, indeed, see me watching, I will not give him the satisfaction of gawping a second time.

  No. Not The Man. It was Bill.

  I groan loudly in the quiet room. I have to stop this, I have to get a grip. But the sheer surety of that thought makes my head spin. It’s just, I can’t stop thinking about that photo of the three of them, of Jasper, Holly, and Bill together.

  But that photo doesn’t have to mean anything, I tell myself. It doesn’t mean that she’s involved with Bill.

  I get to my feet, cross at myself for my sudden bout of hysterics. Whoever that man is – and he isn’t Bill – I’m categorically not spying on him again. Because I am going into the kitchen to attack that bottle of wine on the countertop. I grab my laptop and phone, assertively striding into the kitchen with Bertie hot on my heels.

  *

  I sit at my simple, white kitchen table, staring unseeingly at the laptop screen, sipping my wine. An hour has passed. Inevitably, I am on Facebook, stalking Bill’s fan page. He still hasn’t posted anything since the last time I checked. Part of me desperately wants to text, or even call him, but I refrain.

  Blythe and Mark are also still ignoring me, and the latter must be in Berlin by now. Does Mark know about the mystery man giving his girlfriend lifts to Broadgate?

  The mystery man that looked so much like Bill…

  Stop, I tell myself. It wasn’t him.

  I sigh heavily, angry at myself for my thoughts that are going round and round in tiny circles in my head like a merry-go-round. I close my eyes, picturing Holly getting out of the car, the way she stood with the mystery man on the pavement for a moment, talking. I shudder, for that image reminds me of the dream I had not so long ago – the one where Holly had been standing in that exact same spot on the pavement, stark naked, Mark next to her, wearing an outfit not dissimilar to the one whom the man who isn’t Bill was wearing. And when Mark had thrown back his hood, his head had been a grinning skull…

  I shudder, remembering the way the mystery man had stood alone on the pavement, his head seemingly swivelled in the direction of my window, his face a black void surrounded by fur. This two-second experience had felt like my nightmare made real.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I tell myself sternly.

  Bertie thumps his tail once, letting out a funny whumpf noise where he is laying on his side next to the radiator.

  I can’t not look. I have to see if the car is still there or not. I have to know if Holly is still entertaining this mystery man.

  “Stuff it,” I tell Bertie. “I’m gonna look.”

  I get to my feet, scraping back the chair noisily across the stone floor. Bertie too, springs up. Instead of going into the living-room I bound up the stairs, heading for the guestroom that I know offers the best view of the street – the very same room I was in when I watched Holly arrive with her van load of stuff.

  When I peer out the window in the darkened room, the BMW is gone.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  MOON PHASE: WAXING CRESCENT

  On this day, the Moon will be in a Waxing Crescent phase. A Waxing Crescent is the first phase after the New Moon, and it is a good time to see the features of the Moon’s surface. During this phase, the Moon can be seen in the western sky after the sun dips below the horizon at sunset. The Moon is close to the Sun in the sky. Now, it is mostly dark, except for the right edge of the Moon, which becomes brighter as the days get closer to the next phase, which is a First Quarter with a 50% illumination.

  22nd October

  I have decided to keep myself busy the past three days, in light of how obsessive I have been getting lately over the goings on two doors down. The way I see it, my options are limited. Mark isn’t due back until the end of the month, and his phone is always switched off when I call. Which is a lot. It is the same with Blythe. And as for Bill, well, I’m certainly not chasing that up, not after seeing that photograph of him with the two people he professed to hate the most in the world.

  I’m all out of benefit of the doubt.

  I plan to talk to Mark when he gets back, but beyond that, I’m going to stop agonising over Bill, and how he connects to Holly.

  I am going to make myself ill, obsessing as I am over all of this. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Call the police? And say what, exactly? My best friend went on holiday and she didn’t tell me? My neighbour’s new girlfriend has some books on the occult? I do believe that Blythe is a completely separate issue, but her sudden disappearance weighs heavy on my mind.

  But you don’t understand, officer, I picture myself saying. I broke into Mark’s house and I found a photograph of the guy I slept with, with his father and his father’s second wife, who is now the girlfriend of my neighbour, Mark. I think the son was having an affair with the second wife – the one whom my friend is involved with – and together they plotted to kill his father.

  I mean, no. Just no.

  The more I think about it, the crazier I think I sound. Obsessing over two men that probably don’t even give me a second thought. Insanely jealous of a woman who barely even knows that I am alive, apart from the fact I’m an annoying friend of her boyfriend’s.

  Quite simply, I don’t want to think about it anymore.

  Stuff the lot of them.

  So, instead of endless naval-gazing, I have flung myself into repainting one of the guestrooms. I like painting and decorating, it’s my thing. I am a fan of the colourful books from the seventies and eighties on DIY which I regularly check out from Broadgate library and buy on Amazon.

  I particularly love those books with a feminine bent, back when it was quite the thing for upper, middle-class girls in trendy boilersuits to ‘restore’ old furniture with the aid of white paint, stencil equipment and tiny tiles. I am sucker for any books with the bywords, distressed, shabby chic, beachy and rustic. I love painting, playing around with furniture and interior design in general. I totally have the knack for it; maybe I should write a book on the subject one day.

  I am engrossed in painting the walls of an upstairs room in a bright, sunny yellow, as such a cheerful colour lifts my mood. I need to do something to snap me out of the funk I’ve been sinking into lately. I am lost in my own, cathartic thoughts of various paintjobs when the doorbell goes on this overcast, Thursday afternoon.

  Bertie, who has been lying in the hallway as he doesn’t like the smell of the paint springs to life, running down the stairs and yapping.

  I rest the paint-roller in its tray, wiping any drips of paint off my hands with a nearby rag, then I too, head for the stairs.

  I am shocked to see Holly on the doorstep. My first thought is entirely shallow; I look like crap in my ancient, baggy, paint-splattered jeans and baggy white T, and Holly looks like a goddess, as per usual, in a skin-tight pair of blue jeans and a nicely-fitted, cream rollneck.

  “Holly,” I gasp.

  Bertie barks, but doesn’t try to jump up on her like he does Mark.

  Holly smiles, but I detect little warmth in her eyes.

  “Hello Claire, are you doing a spot of DIY?”

  “Yeah, I’m painting one of the guestrooms.”

  Smirking, she looks me up and down. “In yellow, I see. Such a cheerful colour.”

  “Do you want to come in?” I say in a rush. “I need to go and cover the paint, but do you want a coffee, or something?”

  “No, it’s fine,
I can see you’re busy. I’ve been meaning to knock the last few days, but time keeps getting away from me. I’ve been so busy writing, and with the house, and stuff. Do you fancy coming round for a drink and a bite to eat later?”

  She knows I’ve been snooping in her stuff, comes the sure and true thought, and my heart kicks up a notch.

  “Sure,” I reply, feeling dazed. She always has the effect on me. She’s always so dazzling. “I mean, thanks. Yes, that would be lovely.”

  “Great. How does seven sound?”

  “Seven sounds fine,” I say.

  “Super. Look forward to it, then.”

  Before I have a chance to formulate a reply, she is off down the path. I watch her, a cloud of anxiety settling over me.

  *

  I knock on the door at precisely seven p.m., brandishing a bottle of my favourite red wine.

  “Claire, how lovely, do come in.”

  Holly ushers me into the hallway. She is wearing the same outfit of jeans and jumper that she had on earlier that afternoon, making me feel overdressed and faintly ridiculous in one of my favourite ‘best’ outfits of a red flared skirt in a soft velvet material, teamed with a thick shiny black belt and a tight, short-sleeved black blouse.

  “For you,” I say, passing her the bottle.

  She accepts it with a thanks and a smile, but again, the smile strikes me as cruel. Maybe I’m being unfair; she can’t help the way her glittering, green eyes slant upwards slightly at the corners, or the way her perfect bone-structure lends her an almost feline appearance.

  Or maybe she really is just a stone-cold bitch.

  “Shall we go into the living-room? It’s so much cosier in there, and I’ve lit the fire. I haven’t cooked a proper meal, I’ve just made us a few nibbly bits.”