The House: The brilliantly tense and terrifying thriller with a shocking twist - whose story do you believe?

by Simon Lelic

  So I’m not saying I didn’t say it. I did: I admit it. But the point is, I didn’t mean it. I swear to God I didn’t. I said other stuff as well, stuff I don’t even remember. And that’s part of the point, too: I was out of my mind. All those people can say what they want, can tell the police whatever they like, but there’s no way they can say for certain what I was thinking. I mean, you hear it practically every day. Don’t you?

  I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you.

  It’s just, you know. An expression. Just because someone says it, doesn’t mean they actually plan to do it.

  Sydney

  Jack left me messages. Long, rambling explanations that basically explained nothing at all. It was all a mistake, he said. A misunderstanding. He mentioned a fight at the pub, some altercation – another one – between him and Elsie’s father. He said that Elsie’s father had engineered it all. The photo, our argument, everything. He said he’d set him up at work, that him getting suspended was Elsie’s father’s fault too. Which to me sounded almost delusional, like Jack’s innate insecurity had morphed into crazed paranoia. And anyway it entirely missed the point. It wasn’t Elsie’s father who’d come between us. It was Jack. His lies. His infidelity.

  I called Bart, told him to tell Jack to stop ringing me. I assumed because I hadn’t let him back into the house that Jack must have been staying with him but Bart hadn’t let Jack in either. Jack had come to him, tried to make some half-arsed apology but screw him, Bart had said to me. If what Jack had accused him of was really what he thought of him, Bart said, then frankly it was good riddance to bad rubbish. Which is pretty much how I’d felt as well at first but even so I was surprised to hear it from Bart. He and Jack must have had more of a falling out than I’d realized. I knew how fond Jack was of Bart and all at once I found myself feeling sorry for him. To the extent, actually, that I wondered if I hadn’t been too hard on him. That photo had been pretty fucking compelling but I recognized too that I hadn’t exactly been in the most secure frame of mind when I’d received it. Maybe, somehow, I’d misinterpreted it.

  I made a start on looking through Jack’s stuff. I’m not proud of it. It’s not the type of thing I’d ever thought I would have found myself doing. It made me feel fucking crazy if I’m honest and resentful too that circumstances had brought me to this point where I was behaving like a schizophrenic housewife. But anyway, that’s how I found it. I was rifling through the pile of shoeboxes at the bottom of Jack’s wardrobe, looking for, I don’t know, love letters? More photographs? Fucking panties? Anything, basically, that would prove or disprove that Jack had been having an affair … and there it was, buried beneath a stack of Jack’s trainers.

  He let himself in. I was sitting waiting for him in the kitchen.

  ‘What the fuck is this, Jack?’

  Jack checked his watch. He was early and he must have assumed I was having a go at him for that. He didn’t appear to have noticed the shoebox, which I’d placed on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m sorry, Syd. I thought … I mean, I didn’t think …’ He looked at his watch again and I shook my head at him dismissively.

  ‘I don’t mean the time, Jack. I mean this. This … whatever this is.’ I shoved the box so that it slid across the surface towards him.

  Still Jack didn’t comprehend. He saw the box now but showed no sign of having recognized it.

  ‘Listen, Syd … whatever’s inside that, I swear to you I haven’t done anything wrong.’

  I started to speak but Jack talked over me.

  ‘It’s Elsie’s father. Sean “Begbie” fucking Payne. He’s a nutcase. A mentalist. Everything that’s been happening is because of him. Like that photo,’ he pressed before I could interrupt. ‘He took that. The same way he told work about Sabeen. He’s mad at me. At us. Because of Elsie. Not because of what happened to her – I mean, he doesn’t give a shit about that – but because we interfered.’

  Jack had moved closer as he’d been speaking and was now gripping the back of one of the dining chairs with both of his hands. He looked a mess, I realized. The way he had the day I’d first met him, when he’d blown weather-battered through the doors of that hotel lobby. From the look of him he hadn’t shaved since the day I’d thrown him out and I was fairly sure he was still wearing the same clothes. I wondered where he’d been sleeping. There’s no way he would have gone to his parents’ place, not in such humiliating circumstances, and seeing as Bart had refused to put him up he’d most likely been staying in some cheap hotel.

  ‘Jack –’

  ‘I’m begging you, Syd, please.’ Jack’s knuckles, around the chair back, were bulging white. ‘You have to believe me. Elsie’s father, he practically admitted it.’

  ‘Jack –’

  ‘I mean, for Christ’s sake, Syd – he even broke into our house!’

  I’d been pressing my fingertips to my temples but at that my hands fell away. I looked up.

  ‘He did what?’

  Jack was pacing now, two steps one way, two steps back, traversing the width of our kitchen.

  ‘I can’t prove it was him, but someone was definitely in here. More than once, I’m thinking now. This one time I heard a noise and I went downstairs and when I didn’t find anything I came back into the bedroom. And you, you said …’ Jack stopped then, looked at me. ‘I mean … I just … I had this feeling, that’s all,’ he went on and his eyes skidded away from me. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it, is the point, and I reckon he must have got in through the kitchen, through one of the windows maybe, or even the back door if we left it unlocked. And then, when I came back upstairs, when I went to the toilet I expect, all he would have needed to do was sneak past me and let himself out the same way.’ He looked at me urgently. ‘You see?’

  What I saw was that Jack was even more of a mess than I’d realized. I’d already gathered from the messages he’d left me that he was convinced Elsie’s father was out to get him. That he’d hatched some elaborate plot and was intent on sabotaging Jack’s life. Elsie’s father. The same man who, when he’d had a problem with Jack before, had opted to simply knee him in the bollocks. Clandestine surveillance, to my mind, didn’t exactly seem the man’s style.

  ‘Jack, listen to me –’

  ‘I’m telling you, Syd,’ Jack persisted, ‘he’s a lunatic. At the pub he –’

  ‘JACK!’

  He’d been pacing again and he stopped short, midway between the back door and the oven.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get it? All this … paranoia, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t alter what you did!’

  ‘But that’s the point! I didn’t do anything! I mean, yes, the work stuff I’ll admit to, but in the circumstances you would have done exactly the same thing. They were destitute, Syd. About to be kicked out on to the street!’

  I turned away then and Jack must have realized that he was losing me. That once again what he was saying was beside the point.

  He raised a hand, shook it frantically.

  ‘The photo,’ he said. ‘I get it, Syd. I do. What it looks like. What you must be thinking. But I swear to God: it’s completely innocent. Amira, she’s just a kid. And that photo: I remember now when it was taken. Amira’s brother, he was standing right beside us. It’s just been cropped to make sure he’s out of shot. I told you, it …’

  This time I was the one to hold up a hand. I’d heard enough. About Elsie’s father, about Jack’s precious Amira. Just enough.

  ‘All I want to know,’ I said, enunciating, ‘is where you got that box. What it was doing hidden away at the bottom of your wardrobe.’

  For the first time since he’d entered the room Jack looked properly at the shoebox on the kitchen table. He’d barely glanced at it before but now when he looked at it he saw it fully. And he recognized it, I could tell. He knew exactly what I would have found when I’d looked inside.

  ‘Syd …’ He started forward, his hands spread to try and contain yet anoth
er lie. ‘Syd, that’s … it’s just … it’s nothing. It’s something I found, that’s all.’

  I scraped my chair back from the table. I stood, picked up the box and tipped it so that its contents spilled on to the surface. I held out the lid so Jack could see it. So he could read what was written on its underside.

  ‘Syd, I know. I know what it says. That’s why I didn’t –’

  ‘Jessica,’ I read. ‘My sister’s name, Jack. Written in felt-tip. Like, the way a kid would write it. Is this … I mean … all this stuff … is it …’

  Is it real? I wanted to ask but all I could do was shake my head. Because I knew. Even though I didn’t recognize the things inside – the postcards, the shells, that fucking Care Bear – somehow, the moment I’d found it, I knew the box and everything in it was real. It felt real. Like … I don’t know. Like books. Like the way when you pick up a book that’s been read you can always tell whether it’s also been loved. And I say I didn’t recognize the things inside. Maybe I didn’t – but somehow I felt like I should have.

  ‘Where did you get it, Jack? Why were you hiding it?’

  ‘Syd, please …’ Jack tried to touch me then and I pulled away.

  ‘Just tell me! Just for once give me a straight answer!’

  ‘I did tell you!’ Jack said. ‘I found it! Up in the attic. At the same time I found that dead cat. It was tucked behind the –’

  I’d been looking again at the things on the table. My gaze snapped up.

  ‘What cat?’

  Jack closed his eyes, pinched them tight.

  ‘Jack? What fucking cat?’

  It all came out then. All the things Jack had kept hidden. Beginning with the box, how he’d found it, how he’d concealed it from me. The cat too, which as it turned out he’d buried in our overgrown garden. His worries about the house, about how they’d led him back to Evan – and about how, after that, he’d even spoken to Patrick Winters. They were small things, I suppose. Small pieces, as Jack says, but together they amounted to something bigger. A tableau of lies, just for starters, and the first thing I remember thinking was that I would never be able to fully trust Jack again. But something else was becoming clearer in my mind too. Something darker. It was like I was peering down into a pit, watching the shadows there slowly taking shape.

  ‘What did I say, Jack?’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘You said I said something. That night you heard someone in the house. You said you came back upstairs into the bedroom and I said …’ I left the sentence hanging, tried to stifle my dread as I waited for Jack to finish it.

  He swallowed. ‘You said … you said you’d felt a hand on your cheek.’

  ‘But you … I mean, couldn’t it just have been …’

  ‘It wasn’t me, Syd. But you were asleep. Dreaming probably. I figured …’

  I was shaking my head again, I realized. Not just to cut off Jack’s explanation but to keep at bay the one dawning on me. The house, this house we should never have owned. The box … Jack’s work … that email …

  The hand I’d felt on my cheek.

  The sob built from my stomach and erupted sounding like a plea. I frisked the air blindly behind me and used the chair back to lower myself down. I’d never before had a panic attack, had never really understood what exactly the term meant. But it feels like that moment you wake from a nightmare, when the only thing you’re sure is real is the terror that has its hands around your throat. Your heart is hammering against your ribcage and you’re so cold your whole body starts to sweat. Even sitting I felt short of breath. I sensed Jack reach out to try and steady me but somehow I gestured him away. I didn’t want him near me. I didn’t want anything near me: the walls around me, the floor below me, the ceiling that was pressing on my head. I felt like I was being smothered, like all at once the air was some noxious gas.

  It was my mother who hauled me to my feet. The memory of her, of the time I’d let her in the house. My forearm swept the table as I stood and my sister’s treasures clattered to the floor.

  ‘Syd?’ Jack’s voice, more distant than his proximity to me made possible. ‘Syd, wait. Are you OK? Where are you going?’

  I stumbled past him, into the hallway. I climbed the stairs, tripped, scrabbled higher. I was dimly aware of Jack’s presence close behind me, but my focus was on what lay ahead. On those pictures. Winters’s pictures. All, that is, except one.

  I spotted her instantly. This time, for the first time, she shone out. My arm, though, felt heavy – clumsy with adrenaline – and I knocked several frames to the floor as I reached forward. With the picture in my hand I scrabbled at the backing, then I turned and collided with Jack. He stepped aside or I pushed him, I can’t remember. I was aiming for the newel post, the picture now tight in my grip. I swung it, glass first. It shattered immediately but I swung it again. A third time, a fourth. When I flipped it over I was already bleeding but all I cared about was freeing the photograph from its frame. My grip was slick, sticky, and the glass chewed hungrily at my fingers. I was numb to it, though. All at once, in a way I hadn’t experienced since my childhood, I was numb.

  Coming home. In films, in poetry, in cheesy Christmas songs, it’s become a concept so laden with sentiment it’s almost impossible now to view it as something bad. Yet home, for me, is like a darkened corner. A foul place, somewhere sullied, which for most of my life I’ve been focused on trying to escape. I thought our new house would become my home, at one stage. As things turned out it never had a chance. Perhaps nowhere does. Perhaps the place you call home is something, once it’s been chosen for you, you don’t ever get to alter.

  The journey took less than two hours but somehow, simultaneously, it took both more and less than that. A blink, in one sense. In another, a lifetime. As I sat rocking to the movements of the empty train, I clutched the photograph from the landing in my shredded fingertips. The picture itself – that little girl’s face – was obscured by blood but on the back the writing I’d discovered was still visible. Just a date, a name. The same name I’d found written on the lid of that shoebox. This time, though, I recognized the handwriting, just as my mother had recognized the picture itself. She would have taken it, after all, and the annotation was hers as well. She made a note on all the photographs of me and Jessica that she took. I could see myself watching her doing it.

  It was typical of my mother that she’d failed to move away. Typical of her weakness. Of her cowardice. After my father went to prison she’d had a chance to build her life anew but she’d settled after the house had been repossessed for renting a flat on the edge of the same neighbourhood. The very edge. The grubby fringe. Not really the same neighbourhood at all, in fact, but it was like the way she still dressed, the time she continued to spend applying make-up. If she walked the same streets, shopped at the same shops, she could fool herself that life was a continuum, that the mistakes she’d made – and what mistakes she’d made! What a howler, above all, marrying my father – weren’t forks in the road but bumps, potholes, little things she could glide over as she continued on her journey. It was another act of denial, for all the good it did her. Because although I didn’t understand everything yet, that much, at least, was clear: it was the things my mother had clung to – her habitat, her routines – that in the end had given us both away.

  As I walked I felt the anger in me beginning to build. When I’d stepped off that train I’d expected it to melt away, to turn instead into something like fear. But I barely noticed the landmarks that in my mind had become so loathsome to me, didn’t even flinch when I caught sight of our old house from across the street. When I reached the block containing my mother’s flat I used the tradesmen’s bell to let myself inside. I took the stairs, two at a time, and once I’d located the door I was looking for I beat at it with the fleshy part of my fist.

  ‘How could you?’

  My mother’s startled eyes peering through the gap. She had the chain in place, otherwise I would hav
e forced my way inside.

  ‘Do you even know what you’ve done?’

  I glared at her and hit the door again, with both hands this time, both palms, so that even though the chain held firm, my mother’s instinct was to recoil.

  ‘Sydney, please,’ she hissed. ‘You shouldn’t be here. You –’

  ‘Open the door! Open the fucking door or I swear to God I’ll break it down!’

  I hit the door again and didn’t turn when I heard another door opening just behind me.

  ‘What’s going on out here?’ came an old woman’s voice.

  ‘Let me in, Mother,’ I said without looking round.

  ‘Sydney, please …’ she replied, her eyes darting between mine and her busybody neighbour’s.

  ‘Open. The fucking. Door.’

  I heard tutting from across my shoulder as my mother retreated inside. As soon as the chain was off I shoved my way into my mother’s hall. She spread her arms wide and continued to try and barricade my path.

  ‘Listen to me, Sydney. Please. You need to leave. You need to go.’ Even though the door to the flat was closed now she didn’t raise her voice above a whisper.

  ‘What did I say to you?’ I said, ignoring her. ‘What was the single thing I asked?’ It didn’t escape me that I was the one speaking like a parent. My mother, before me, was cringing like a frightened child.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said – pleaded, even – and I could tell she was just about to cry. ‘But Sydney, please. Let’s … let’s go outside. OK? Let’s talk about this outside.’

  ‘I’m not going fucking anywhere until you give me an explanation!’

  Which is when it struck me that she already had. That day she’d come to see me. I’m not strong enough, she’d said. I’ve just never, ever been strong enough. And what else, really, was there to add?

  My mother shrivelled on her side of the hallway. Her resistance had crumbled: against my onslaught, to her tears. But that wasn’t all. She appeared to be waiting for something, resigned to it. As though my onslaught, her tears, weren’t the only things she’d been trying to hold off.