In the hallway she returned to the front door, looked again at the broken lock. She tried pressing the door into its frame and discovered that if she let the hanging lock be pushed back she could hold the door closed long enough to shoot the bolt at the top. As soon as she had done this she felt safer.
She picked up the pile of books that had been on the doormat when she came in, and without examining them stacked them roughly on the end of the lowest bookshelf.
Looking anxiously ahead of her Melvina began to climb the stairs, pausing for a few seconds on each step. She was straining to hear any sound from above. The silence was absolute: no apparent movement, nothing being moved about, no footsteps. No one breathing.
The mobile handset suddenly rang, behind her in the study where she had put it down. She went rigid for a moment. Then, relieved, she ran down the four or five steps she had climbed and hurried back into her study.
‘Mel, did you call me because you wanted me to drive over tonight?’
‘No, I –’
No, I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t you, Hike, she added silently, looking over her shoulder at the light coming in from the hall.
‘I’m a bit more awake now,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed anything stolen? Has anything been moved? Is there any damage?’
‘It’s OK. I’ve searched the house. There’s no one here and nothing’s gone.’
‘Couldn’t you ask one of the neighbours if they saw anything?’
‘Hike, you know I’m alone here. The other houses are still empty.’
Some of them were used as summer lets and would start taking visitors in the next few days, but because of the recession most of the houses in this terrace were permanently vacant. Hike knew this, he knew the collapse in property values was why she had been able to afford the house on her intermittent earnings.
‘Where did you go today?’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘You’ve been out of the house all day, and I’ve been trying to call you. Are you seeing someone?’
‘It’s none of your damned business! Is that all you’re thinking about? What I’ve been doing all day? Someone’s broken into my house and for all I know is still in here somewhere.’
‘I thought you said no one was there.’
‘I was still looking when you called again.’
‘Are seeing someone, Mel?’
She tried to think of some answer, but she was obsessed with thoughts of the house, the open door, that darkness and silence. She felt the paralysis of her throat again, the mysterious seizing up of breath and vocal chords, the dominance of fear, the dumbness it caused. She gasped involuntarily, then moved the phone away from her ear. No more Hike.
She pressed the main switch on the top of the handset, watched the logo spinning back into oblivion, then darkness.
There were fourteen messages waiting on the landline answering machine – most of them would be from Hike, just as they were every other day. She flicked it off. Her hands shook.
Something moved upstairs, scraping on the floorboards. Involuntarily, she glanced at the ceiling. The room above, the spare room, the one where Hike’s stuff was still piled up awaiting the day when he or one of his friends would collect it. She strained to hear more, thinking, hoping, she had misheard some other sound, perhaps from outside. Then again: a muffled scraping noise, apparently on the bare boards above.
She emitted another involuntary, inarticulate noise: a sob, a croak, a cry of fear. Propelled by the fright that was coiled inside her, but at the same time managing to suppress it somehow, adrenaline-charged, she ran two steps at a time up the stairs. She went straight to the door of the spare room, threw it open and pressed her hand hard against the light-switch inside. She went in.
Familiar chaos filled the room, the remaining debris of Hike’s departure. His uncollected stuff had been pushed against one of the walls: piles of paper, canvases, pots, boxes. His broken computer scanner and a tangle of cables. Three large crates of vinyl records and CDs. That bloody music he played so loud when she had been trying to work. Two suitcases she had never opened, but which she assumed contained some of his clothes. Shelves where he had stacked his stuff, but not books – these were the only shelves in the house that were not crammed with books. This was the only room without books. Hike was not a reader, and had never understood why she was.
There were other traces of him everywhere, reminders of him, his endless presence in the house, the upset he had caused her almost from the first week, later the resentment, finally the anger, the days and weeks of pointlessly wasted time, all the early curiosity about him lost, the endless regrets about letting him move in and set up a studio, the feeling of being invaded, of trying to make the relationship work, even at the end.
Nothing in the room had been moved or interfered with and nothing had apparently been taken. The window was wide open as she had left it that morning, but the wind was blowing in from the sea. She pushed it closed, and secured it. There was a cupboard door hanging open, a glimpse of the dim interior beyond. Still fired up by anger and fear, she strode across the room, stepped past Hike’s cases and pulled the door fully open.
The cupboard was empty. The rack where his clothes had hung, the shelves where he had crammed his messy things, were all vacant. Nothing in there. Just a paperback book, tossed down so that its cover was curled beneath the weight of the pages.
She picked it up: it was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. It must be her copy – Hike had no interest in poetry. She straightened the cover and gently riffled the pages of the book, as if comforting a pet animal that had been hurt. Holding it in her hand she left the room, but deliberately did not switch off the light. She now had an aversion to unlighted rooms, dark corners.
The light on the landing had gone out while she was in Hike’s room. She turned it on again, only half-remembering if she had switched it off herself as she dashed upstairs to this floor. Why should she have done that? It made no sense.
The room next to Hike’s was her own sitting room, a room set aside for reading, with more books, hundreds more books. There were shelves on three of the walls, floor to ceiling, a large and comfy armchair which she had bought as a treat for herself after Piet died, a reading lamp, a footstool, a small side table. A desk with papers and a portable typewriter she sometimes used if she didn’t want to break off and go downstairs to the computer. The room had a closed, concentrated, comfortable feeling. She remembered Hike’s derision when he saw the room the day he moved in. He said it was middle-class, bourgeois. No, it’s just where I like to sit. The room had become a sort of battleground after that, a minor but constant aggravation to Hike. After he left, she realized that she had frequently found herself making excuses to be in here, to explain that which could not be explained to someone who would never understand.
She was glad he was gone, glad a hundred times, now a hundred and one. She never wanted him back, no matter what.
She glanced around the room: it was lit only by her reading lamp, but everything seemed to be untouched. Just books everywhere, as she liked them to be, in their familiar but comprehensible jumbles. She pressed the Dunn into a space on a shelf beside the door, preoccupied still with her worries, not noticing or caring which books she placed it beside.
She went next to the bathroom. Three of her books lay on the floor beneath where the glass cubicle door overhung the rim of the shower cubicle. They were three recently published hardback novels she had reviewed for a magazine a month before, and which she expected would have a resale value to a dealer. How had they come into the bathroom, though? She never took books in there.
She picked them up, examined them for damage. As far as she could see no harm had been done by water dripping on them. She opened the top one, and immediately discovered that it was upside-down. The paper dust-wrapper had been removed and put back on the wrong way round.
The other two books were the same.
Melvina stood on the landing outside her
reading room, replacing the dust-wrappers one by one. She felt her throat constricting again – her hands were shaking. She could not look around, fearful of everything now in the house.
She took a step into her reading room, and placed the books on the shelf near Elegies. She backed out of the room without looking around too closely, horribly aware that something in there had been changed and she did not like to think what, nor look too closely in case she found out.
Hairs on her arms were standing upright. She was sweating – her blouse was sticking to her body under her armpits, against her back. But she was now determined to finish this. She climbed the final flight of stairs to the top floor of the house. She went to her sewing room first, under the eaves, with a dormer window looking out towards the road. The bluewhite glare fell on the car parked close to her house. It looked like Hike’s car, but then most cars did.
She checked the room for any sign of intrusion. It was here she kept her sewing table
with the machine, the needlepoint she had been working on for a year or more, the various garments she had been meaning to get around to repairing. There was a wardrobe, and in that she kept the old clothes she was planning to take one day to a charity shop. Some of those clothes were Hike’s.
The unshaded lightbulb threw its familiar light across everything – there was no one in the room, nowhere that anyone could be hiding.
Finally, quickly, she went to her bedroom. This was the room with the best view of the sea. She had originally planned it to be her office, but once she moved in she realized she would be distracted by staring out all day.
She turned on the central light, went straight in, saw her reflection in the largest pane of the window. She paused just inside the door, remembering. Hike had tried to change this room, said it was too feminine. He hated lace, frills, cushions, things he deemed to be womanly. He never found out that for the most part she did too, and that there was no trace of them, never had been. It had not stopped him criticizing. He did move the bed away from the wall where she had initially placed it, because, he said, he did not want to fall over her stuff if he had to get up in the night.
Melvina planned to move the bed back soon, but she wanted to put up more bookshelves before she did. Money was tight, so she had been delaying.
Everything she remembered of Hike was negative, unpleasant, rancorous. How had it happened? Since he left she had grown so accustomed to being weary of him that she had to make a conscious effort to remember that Hike Tommas had once been eagerly welcome in her life. The early days had been exciting, certainly because they brought an end to the long aftermath of Piet’s death. Hike intrigued her. His wispy beard, his hard, slim body, and his abrasive sense of humour, all were so unlike genial Piet. Hike changed everything in her life, or tried to. His opinions – they soon became a regular feature, his attitude to life, his harsh judgments on others, a constant undercurrent of ill-feelings, but at first she found his reckless views on other artists and writers stimulating and entertaining. Hike did not care what he said or thought, which was refreshing at first but increasingly tiresome later. Then there were the paintings he executed, the photographs he took, the objects he made. He was good. He won awards, had held an exhibition at a leading contemporary art gallery, was discussed on the arts pages of broadsheet newspapers. And the physical thing of course, the need she had, the enjoyment of it. They had done that well together. They made it work, but the more it worked the more it came to define what it was she disliked about him. She hated the noises he made, the obscene words he uttered when he climaxed, the way he held her head to press her face against him. Once she gagged and nearly suffocated as he forced himself deep into her mouth, but it did not stop him doing it again the next time. Hike was always in a hurry about sex. Get it over with, he said, then do it again as soon as possible.
Well, now, it was no longer a problem.
There was a pile of her books balanced on the end of the bed, placed exactly at the corner, leaning slightly to one side. Ten books, a dozen? They were paperbacks. She recognized them all, but they belonged in her study or reading room. She could not remember bringing them up here. On the top was another by Douglas Dunn: Europa’s Lover. Then Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow, J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, Dorothy Dunnet’s The Unicorn Hunt, Gerald du Maurier’s The Martian.
She never alphabetized her books by author. She either stacked her books by type, or more commonly left them in unsorted heaps that she would get around to tidying up one day. She always knew where her books were, or could find them quickly using the habitual reader’s radar. The poetry came from her study, the other books from her reading room. She felt her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands, the cold press of her perspiration-soaked blouse against her back.
Trying to stay calm she went to the books but the slight pressure and vibration of her feet on the floorboards was enough to cause the pile to topple. She lunged forward to catch them but they thudded down on the floor, some of them landing with pages open and the spines bent. She knelt to pick them up.
On that level, face close to the floor, she paused. She was next to the bed, close beside the dark area beneath the bed.
Melvina bit her lip, leaned forward and down, so that she could look under it.
No one there. As she straightened with some of the paperbacks in her hand she felt exposed and vulnerable, moving backwards and getting to her feet without looking, not being able to see behind her, or to turn quickly enough.
But she stood up, looked around the room, then placed the books on the floor so that they would not fall again. She headed for the stairs.
Still feeling her knees quivering as she walked, Melvina went through every room in the house one more time, feeling that perhaps the worst was over. Both doors to the outside were secure, and everything was as she expected it to be.
Just the books. Why had the intruder moved her books around?
She went to the kitchen, closed the Venetian blinds and made herself a cup of hot chocolate. It was already long past midnight, but she was wide awake and still jittery.
She returned to her study and switched on her computer. Her mailbox would be full of Hike but tonight she would just delete everything from him without reading. She stared at the monitor, sipping her chocolate drink, while the computer booted.
She browsed through her emails, skipping over Hike’s or simply deleting them unread. For a while he had been sending his messages from an email address that did not contain his name, apparently trying to get under her guard, but he had quit doing that last week. She stared at the screen, only half-seeing, half-reading the other notes from her friends. None of them ever mentioned Hike; to all her friends, he was a figure of the past.
She knew Hike was stalking her, and that one of a stalker’s intentions was to make the victim think constantly about him. She also knew Hike was succeeding. It must have been him who came to the house. Who else would it have been? But then why had he taken back none of his property, which he knew she repeatedly asked him to have moved, but which he constantly used as one of his excuses for keeping in close contact with her? Perhaps he had said something about coming to the house in one of the emails she had already deleted?
Changing her mind, she found the trash folder of previously deleted emails and opened every one of his messages from the last three days. She skimmed through them, deliberately not reacting to his familiar entreaties, threats, reminders of promises imaginary and real, his endless emotional blackmail about loneliness and abandonment, his pleas for forgiveness, etc. Nothing new, nothing that explained what had happened today.
All she had to do was wait him out. Give it time.
She clicked away the trash folder, but a new message had arrived in her in-box, from Hike. The date stamp showed it had been sent a few seconds before.
Melvina closed her eyes, wondering how much time it would really need. When would he leave her alone?
Behind her there was a sound, heavy fabric m
oving.
Immediately she stiffened, was braced against fear. She strained to hear. There was a slight sense of movement, then a quiet noise that sounded like a breath.
In the room with her. Someone was behind her, while she sat at her desk.
She froze, one hand still resting on the computer mouse, the other with her fingers beside the keyboard. The computer’s cooling fan was making a noise that masked most of the quiet noises around her. Noises like the sound of someone breathing.
She waited, her own breath caught somewhere between her chest and her throat. She hardly dared move.
Her desk was about a metre away from the bay window, so there was space for someone to stand behind her. She turned in a hurry, accidentally knocking some pencils from her desk with her hand. As they clattered to the floor she looked behind her.
She stood.
Every light in the room was on. She could see plainly. There was a figure standing by the window, concealed by one of the full-length curtains.
She could make out the bulge, the approximate shape of the body hidden behind. She stepped back in alarm but her chair was there and she knocked against it. She stared in horror at the figure. The bulge in the curtains, the sound of breathing, the source of every dread.
Whoever was there had taken hold of another of her books, because she could see it, a black hardcover without a paper jacket, held at waist height in front of the curtain. It was the only clue to the actual presence of the person hidden there. She was so close she could reach out and touch the book. It was being held somehow at an angle, an irregular diamond halfway up the curtain, in front of the bulge, supported from behind... by someone breathing as they stood behind the curtain.
The curtain moved slightly, as if lifted by a breeze. A breath.
Another involuntary sound broke fearfully from her. She pushed back, shoving her chair to one side until she was pressing hard against the edge of her desk. She groped behind and her hand touched some pens, her notepad, the mouse, her mobile phone... and a ruler. A wooden ruler, a solid stick, the sort that could be rolled.
The New Uncanny Page 9
