Perfect Stranger: A gripping psychological thriller with nail-biting suspense

by Jake Cross

  Chris said nothing further. He walked on.

  Katie behind.

  Gun between.

  Fifty-Two

  Mr Jernigan’s backyard was moonlit, which didn’t help. He wanted darkness because it amplified his chances of a counter attack. But Katie was too far back, able to see everything, and he knew he had to wait. But he couldn’t wait long. There was something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what. He stopped and turned.

  Katie stopped, too. Eight feet between them.

  ‘You have some great trick planned to hurt me and save your family. You have the car keys. You can strike me down and get back to Rose and call the police. But what about Julia? She could be anywhere. She could be in a hole in the woods, buried alive with just a straw poking out so she can get air. Hard to see a freshly dug grave in the dark. Maybe she’s whistling through the straw poking out of the ground and you could hear her that way. If you get within ten yards, that is. Could take you all night to run around these woods. Better hurry up and do your trick.’

  Chris turned to face the guesthouse again, which rose before them like a giant clock ticking down. He approached the door. It was already open. Ten feet out, he recognised a familiar smell, thick, encompassing. From the walls inside, from the floor, from everywhere. He stopped again.

  As did Katie. ‘And here we are. Time for your trick. Better hurry in case Julia’s out there somewhere, dying.’

  Chris stepped into the doorway and immediately saw two petrol cans in the gloomy hallway. Now there could be no denying he’d been tricked.

  Katie hadn’t come here to show him something.

  This was where the lunatic wanted to burn him up.

  Katie ordered him up the stairs.

  Chris didn’t even pause.

  ‘So willingly. You still rely on your plan, don’t you? I can’t wait to see it. Go in the main bedroom.’

  It was to the right, but at the top of the stairs, Chris darted left. It didn’t panic her, because there was no shout or thump of running feet – where could he run? She took the last few stairs casually, although she was careful to enter the smaller bedroom with an arm raised in case of a surprise blow.

  No blow, but she got a surprise.

  Chris was in the centre of the room, holding the bottle of lamp oil that Mr Jernigan had left on the windowsill. He flicked it, sending blue-dyed fluid towards Katie, who instinctively put up a hand and took a splash there.

  Chris lifted the lighter and flicked it on.

  ‘Now we’ll go get my Julia. Turn around. Any wacky trickery, I’ll put you in a living nightmare.’

  She sniffed her wet hand. ‘This is it? This was your great trick? To threaten me with fire?’

  ‘Let’s go, now.’

  ‘This is the problem with the modern world, Chris.’

  ‘Shut up and turn around.’ Chris moved the lighter a little closer.

  But Katie didn’t flinch.

  ‘Our ability to create heat and fire-making tools, that’s our problem. In parts of the world where they don’t have that technology, where they have to rely on an actual flame, they’ve learned to accept fire. They master it at a young age, so it holds no allure or intrigue; they don’t treat it like a dangerous animal, or a lethal weapon, and that means they don’t fear it like we do.’

  ‘Stop talking and take me to my damn daughter. Last chance. I swear I’ll burn you up.’

  At first it appeared she was slotting the gun into a pocket. But then she pulled out a lighter of her own, a cheap disposable thing. Still aiming the gun with that same hand, she touched the flame to her soaked palm, instantly setting it alight. Orange light danced in her captivated eyes.

  ‘Fire is new life, like a newborn baby, and I adore it. The most powerful form on this planet, because there is no barrier to what it will destroy, and it never stops devouring. It is my only friend, and I do not fear it. I master it. But not you. You’re in over your head. Go ahead, create that new life. We’ll both be devoured. One of us will scream, and the other will laugh.’

  Despite her claims, the pain soon became too much and she clapped her hand against her chest to kill the flame.

  Chris took a step backwards. Katie closed the same distance.

  ‘I know you don’t fear fire, Katie. Because of this.’

  Chris touched his face, drew a line. Puzzled, Katie drew the same line, but along the ragged scar on her cheek.

  ‘Because of my heroism in a burning building?’

  ‘I did what Julia did and searched online for the name Katie Hugill. I saw that article about the fire. Three people, cut by glass and willing to tell an on-scene reporter about their heroic attempt to get inside a building burning because of a fire that started in a storeroom.’

  Katie gave a long stare, analysing. She took another step forward to match Chris’s backwards one.

  ‘That building was the Bradford branch of a go-karting club called Go-Racers, three years ago. Someone broke in on the night of that fire and took a memento, a trophy, to relive their actions long after the event. Literally: a trophy. The cause of that fire was loose nine-volt batteries and paperclips.’

  For the third time, Katie chose the truth. ‘It wasn’t the only one. Four burned dead, and never been caught. For your home, by the way, I used the old-fashioned tealight candles left next to a curtain. A classic. And yes, I bought them for that reason. Just in case.’

  Chris already knew Katie had set that fire, but it was still a thump to the chest to learn the method. To know that she had planned it for days. He took another step back, towards the wall holding the big bed. A small section of floorboard creaked under his foot.

  But this time Katie didn’t match it. She looked around the room. ‘You know I don’t fear fire, but you rushed up here for this little threat. Which means you didn’t come here for a bottle of lighter fluid.’

  Chris quickly bent down to remove the broken floorboard he’d stepped on. Seeing this, Katie stepped forward and aimed a kick, which missed as Chris fell back and rolled into the wall bed. He scrambled, and got to his feet out of her reach.

  ‘I knew you’d try something else. Stand right there.’ Aiming the gun, Katie knelt and yanked up the floorboard piece. She fed her hand into the hole, eyes and gun on Chris.

  Seven feet away, Chris pressed himself up against the wall bed.

  Katie’s hand found nothing, so reluctantly, she let her eyes have a try.

  The moment she looked down at the hole in the floor, Chris took a step forward then launched himself backwards, hard into the wall bed. Over the thud of his flesh hitting the solid iron base, there was a click. A lock disengaging. He jumped aside as the great slab groaned and started to topple.

  But it moved only an inch, maybe two, and one corner stopped dead, still engaged by a catch. The other shivered as free as a bird. In the next second, something snapped with a pinging sound. And gravity got its moment to create, as Mr Jernigan had said, a scene from an ol’ silent comedy fillum.

  But that one-second delay had given Katie all the time she needed to fathom the danger and dart aside. Fast as a kicked cat, she rolled out of the bed’s shadow, beyond its crush zone.

  The giant bed thundered down, slicing between them, and slammed into the floor with a thunderclap. The legs knifed through ruined floorboards like blades into butter, and the base connected hard enough to create a wide laceration in the floor. The whole world seemed to shudder. Then there was silence. They faced each other across the bed. The rolling motion had snapped the elastic band holding her hair in a bun and blonde waves lay across her face and shoulders.

  Piercing eyes spiked him through the curtain.

  ‘You’d do this to your Julia and Rose? Just as I always knew. You’re no father.’

  She raised the gun.

  Fifty-Three

  What happened next was quick, like a tumbling house of cards.

  It started with mighty snapping sounds beneath Chris’s feet, too thick and meaty to be simpl
e floorboards breaking. Immediately the laceration under the footboard expanded. The floor instantly fell away from the break point, like water down a plughole, spreading outwards as giant cracks became fissures. Like breaking ice. Broken floorboards vanished out of sight, and whole floorboards tipped away. A giant opening, like a sinkhole, exposed the kitchen below. The floor seemed to melt away right under Katie’s feet and she was sucked down with a scream, disappearing between snapped joists.

  As the world fell away beneath Chris, he grabbed the footboard, digging his nails in. The bed continued past ninety degrees, past 9 o’clock, forcing stubborn floorboards to bend or snap free. It jerked to a stop at 8 o’clock and a mechanism connecting it to the wall gave a loud shriek, but held.

  Chris slipped into the void and felt his arms almost wrenched from their sockets as he kept a lock on the footboard. But they held, too.

  Below, Katie was swamped in a lake of wood and plaster, just her right arm and head visible. Like an animal, she screamed and started to pull herself free. Chris’s feet dangled just a few feet above the littered floor, and he knew Katie could reach him. With extreme effort, he hoisted himself up, over the footboard, and lay in the ‘V’ it created with the mouldy mattress.

  But her thick hair was caught in a number of places, anchoring her. She twisted, placed her arms somewhere solid, and heaved, like doing a press-up. The effort raised her back, but bent her snared head forward. With a yell, not of pain but frustration, she got her knees under her and gave a final push, and was free.

  Chris heard the sound of her hair tearing away, but not in clumps. All of it. It came away whole and he realised it was a wig, tightly glued in place. There were thick, misshapen patches of dried glue all over her bald head. She turned to him and started to get to her feet.

  But her jacket was also snagged by sharp wood. She unzipped and shrugged it off and tossed it aside, with only a vest beneath it. Now, he saw the torso burns Julia had described to Rose, but so much more. The scars extended partway down her arms and stopped in a neat line around her mid-biceps. A similar neat line cut a curve of ruined flesh at the base of her throat. The giant wound resembled a T-shirt.

  The burn boundaries Eve Levine had marked on her daughter so many years ago.

  But Katie had found another part of her body to ravage. The patchwork of discoloured lakes and rivers across her scalp wasn’t glue residue but more burn scars, with short tufts of blonde hair in the landmasses between.

  In thirty seconds, she had turned from pretty girl into disfigured beast.

  Katie started to kick at wood, searching, and he realised she wanted the gun. It must have slipped through a gap, under a floorboard or chunk of plaster.

  She stared up at him, all rage. So she did have that emotion in her after all. But amid it she managed a frustrated laugh.

  ‘That definitely counts as wacky trickery.’

  She turned and stomped across the wood carpet, the going tough, like through deep snow. Chris looked at the bedroom doorway. The chasm between the bed and the doorway was vast, no way across the ragged, gaping hole unless Katie attempted a great leap. But Katie wasn’t going for the hallway stairs, he realised. Nor was she going to attempt to haul herself up using snapped joists pointing down like gnarled old fingers. And she wasn’t going for a weapon.

  She was going for the back door.

  Back to the cottage, for Rose. As promised. To make her suffer. To make murder detectives puke.

  And Chris would never catch her in time.

  Katie had to scoop aside wood to clear the back door, but she stopped and turned when Chris shouted.

  ‘You know, I did meet you once as a baby. Your mother found me, came right into my college and confronted me. You were with her, in a pram. I wanted you. I was ready for a family. I even held you in my arms. She never told you that, did she?’

  Chris saw Katie’s eyes narrow as she tried to figure out if he was telling the truth. Still, she gave no reaction that she believed it; she kicked aside the last of the wood, and the door was clear.

  Leaning over the footboard, Chris shouted at Katie’s ravaged back, ‘But I took one look into those little blue eyes of yours, and I knew.’

  Deafened by her focus, Katie yanked the door open, exposing the black night beyond…

  ‘I knew there was something out of whack in that brain, even as a one-year-old. I saw it in your eyes. I knew you were an egg that didn’t cook right, Katie. So what did I do?’

  She stopped, her back still to Chris. And didn’t move. Torn between two decisions, with one hand still on the door and one on the frame.

  ‘I chose to bin Sammy and try again, didn’t I?’

  Katie jerked backwards and slammed the door in one fluid motion.

  And then she turned to face her father.

  Fifty-Four

  Katie stomped across the debris and leaped for the bed. Caught the dangling footboard, and started to pull herself up. The bed sagged, the angle widening, and Chris felt himself about to tumble off. The mechanism holding it all together shrieked again.

  Lightning fast, and with shocking strength, the sinewy, light young woman hoisted her body up so that her chin raised above the footboard, even before Chris could attempt to scramble up the mattress, his plan to get high enough to be able to reach what remained of the upper floor. In the next second, Katie let go with one hand and grabbed Chris’s hair. Tight, hard. The bed rocked.

  She threw up her other hand. It locked around the back of Chris’s neck. With no anchor on the bed, Katie fell, but her weight dragged Chris forward. His throat was forced into the top of the footboard, hard, and he felt his air immediately shut off.

  And then he heard his own neck snap.

  No, something behind him, higher. Another snapping sound, even above Katie’s abusive yelling. The bed sagged lower. Then a final shrieking, grinding snap.

  Like a clock hand, the bed cut fast downwards, eight to six, free end thudding hard into the sea of busted wood. The jolt bounced Chris off the mattress and he hit wooden water hard enough to lose the deep breath he sucked in when the pressure was removed from his throat. Ignoring the pain, he rolled and got to his knees, and he saw the bed sticking up out of the wooden sea, connected still to the frame on the upper floor by twisted tentacles of metal.

  And he saw Katie trapped beneath the bed, her legs lost behind it.

  She was screaming in pain, breathing rapidly, hands trying to shift the mammoth weight. Her coarse bald head was tilted back, pushed down into the busted wood so that she could watch Chris.

  Chris stepped across sharp, jagged wood. Standing over Katie, he saw that the bed had crushed his daughter’s hips into the floor. Staring up, shock numbing the pain, she tried to speak. It took two attempts to audibly beg for help. She didn’t want to die, please, father.

  ‘It’s just your legs,’ Chris said. ‘Not your belly. Breathing isn’t constricted. Just broken hips. You’ll live.’ He turned and moved away.

  He grabbed Katie’s jacket and fumbled out the phone. He hit 999.

  ‘But Julia won’t,’ Katie croaked, her voice a little stronger now. ‘You did me, and you can drive to Rose and you can hug her while the police put me in chains, and I can’t stop that. But there’s nothing you can do to help Julia. Unless you burn me.’

  Chris stared at her.

  ‘She might be taking her last breath now, a mile from here, buried in soil, trying to scream for her daddy.’ She made a scream of her own as she tried to move and something badly damaged didn’t like it. ‘Burn me. End it. Let me go my way.’

  Chris moved again. He started kicking and scooping floorboards and plaster aside.

  An operator answered the phone. Chris gave the address and said, ‘There’s been a murder. It’s my daughter. Get here quick.’ He listened, then said, ‘No, the killer. The killer is my daughter.’

  He hung up and continued to scoop wood and plaster aside, until he exposed what he was looking for. The reason he had tricked
Katie into bringing him here.

  A blue rug.

  He yanked it partly aside to expose the trapdoor beneath, flicked the bolt and hoisted the door open against the weight of wood.

  ‘Julia will die, Daddy. Burn me up. Give me this one thing, the only thing you’ve ever given me. Show you care. Please.’

  Blue rugs, one for each cellar in each house. Exactly how Katie had known where the cellar was in Wooderland: because she’d seen this one, here in Eclipse’s half-built, empty guesthouse, perfect for a night-time rendezvous, whose postcode was listed on House Rules.

  ‘Burn me!’ Katie yelled.

  Chris ignored her and aimed the phone’s flashlight downwards.

  There. At the bottom of coarse wooden steps, lying curled at their feet, dazed and bleeding from her face, and lit up, and alive and staring up with a face creased in fear that what she was seeing wasn’t real.

  Julia.

  ONE WEEK LATER

  Fifty-Five

  When Katie appeared, Chris noted that she had another wig, this one brown, functionally short. It reminded him of Eve, as pictured during a fun day photo shoot for a newspaper. A cut designed only for comfort, screaming that there was no one in her life to impress. Katie’s new wig wasn’t this time a disguise, just something to allay attention. She sat awkwardly in the chair, probably because of a freshly fixed broken hip.

  ‘This is the last time we ever see each other. And I didn’t set this meeting up as some kind of goodbye. I came to make sure you understand that you’re nothing to me.’