While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  She wiped the drops from her lashes. ‘I didn’t think it would be dark so quickly.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ Mick gripped the steering wheel with both hands, steadying himself. ‘Most city folk aren’t used to that. You think you know what night looks like, but it’s nothing like you get out here. No light pollution, see. And the weather – it’ll ambush you in a matter of minutes.’

  ‘I see that. I thought I’d have time to get back before it got too bad.’

  He gave a half-laugh and gestured through the windscreen to the indistinct dark beyond. ‘I hate to tell you, but you’re on the wrong road, for a start. You needed to take the turning back there, otherwise you’ll have to double back along the coast road, and I wouldn’t recommend that in the dark.’

  ‘Shit. I’m an idiot.’ She pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘I’m so sorry, Mick, really. How long till I’d have reached civilisation, if I’d kept going?’

  ‘There’s no houses along this road till the other side of the island. It’s lucky I found you. You’d have frozen,’ he said, grudgingly mollified.

  ‘But I saw a woman out here walking. I thought there must be a cottage or something.’

  He swivelled to look her square in the face. ‘A woman? Out here?’

  ‘I lost sight of her – I guess she went off the road. I called but she didn’t hear me.’

  Mick continued to stare at her, puzzled. ‘I can’t think who that would be. There’s sheep up in the hills and a couple of old bothies but they’re no really used – you might have seen one of the shepherds, I suppose.’

  ‘Maybe that was it. She had a long coat on, with a hood. Or he.’ Now that she thought about it, she could not say why she had been so sure it was a woman; she had only seen the figure at a distance.

  ‘Best get you home then,’ Mick said, releasing the handbrake, as if it was time to change the subject.

  Once again she gently but firmly declined his offers to lay a fire for her, get the range going, make her a cup of tea. ‘Well, if you’re sure you’ll be all right,’ he repeated, hovering in the doorway and twisting his hands together, until she almost had to shut the door in his face, only persuading him to leave with the promise that tomorrow she would see his friend at the golf club about renting his car.

  She didn’t bother to switch on the light in the hallway; with water running from her clothes and pooling on the tiles at her feet, she picked up the phone from the table and called home. Twice she got the international code wrong; twice she redialled, her fingers so frozen she could barely punch the numbers. Then the unfamiliar tone, thousands of miles away. Drops scattered from her hair as she pushed it back; she pictured the phone ringing in the kitchen at home and realised, with curious detachment, that hot tears were sliding down her nose. The shock of Dan’s voice, so close, cheery and familiar in her ear: ‘We’re not in right now, leave a message, thanks!’ She waited for the beep and put the phone down. She could try his cell but she knew she could expect the same result, and she couldn’t think what message to leave. There was too much to say, or nothing at all.

  She stood in the dark hallway, fingertips resting on the receiver in its cradle, in case he had just missed her and tried to call back. As she waited, the silence grew thicker until she became horribly aware that she was not alone. The same presence she had felt the night before: watchful, intent, not benign. Her skin prickled into goosebumps; she tensed, dreading a repeat of the scratching noise, but there was no sound except her own breathing, the ticking of the clock and the steady drip of water from her jacket. But someone was there, all the same; she could sense their breath moving in and out, matching the shallow rhythm of her own. Her limbs felt brittle, likely to snap if she tried to move them. She dared not turn her head and yet she knew she must; a charge of pure terror flashed through her, the heart-racing rush that comes with the sudden certainty that horror is imminent and unstoppable, the way she had felt in the instant she saw the truck. Mustering all her will, she wrenched her foot forward and lunged for the light switch; as she did so, she thought she heard that same half-laugh, half-sob, close to the back of her neck. Light flooded the hall; she whipped around, started and cried out at the sight of movement, a pale face in the window, half a second before her brain caught up and told her it was her own reflection. The house was as empty as she had left it. She double-checked that the front door was locked behind her, to make sure.

  6

  Zoe huddled at the kitchen table with her back to the wood-burning stove, dressed in warm sweatpants, a hoodie and a fleece, with a towel turbaned over her wet hair and her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. She had dumped her soaking clothes in a pile on the floor of the laundry room off the kitchen and made herself a tuna sandwich while she left the bathtub upstairs filling with hot water and lemon-scented steam. The food and sweet tea had steadied her a little; she’d been pleasantly surprised to find how efficiently the heating worked, and with the kitchen blinds pulled down the house had begun to seem cosy, the rhythmic booming of the sea outside and occasional burst of rain against the window almost reassuring. The silence in the rooms still unnerved her, though that at least she could remedy. She had brought her laptop down to the kitchen; she flipped it open now and searched for music, some cheerful sunshiny pop that would help her shake off the residual fear that had followed her in from the moors, clinging to her like the smell of fog. She clicked on a favourite song, exhaling slowly as West Coast harmonies and guitar jingles filled the room. She left the music playing while she ran up to check on the bath.

  Brushing aside a spume of bubbles, she turned off the tap and perched on the edge of the tub, waggling her fingers below the surface, feeling the heat slide over her skin. Without the sound of running water, she caught snatches of the music floating up from the kitchen, but an odd shift in the cadences made her stop and strain to listen. Again she felt that cold prickling on the back of her neck. The song she could hear was not the one she had left playing; instead it was that old, heartsore ballad from the night before, the lament of the woman who had drowned herself to be with her dead fiancé. It drifted through the house in the same thin, desolate voice she had imagined coming from the turret room in her sleepless hours. Zoe breathed in and out deliberately, forcing herself to note the cold enamel of the bath under her thigh, the sensation of her hand in the water. Overwrought, was the word that came to mind. That’s what Dr Schlesinger would call it. She made herself walk out to the landing. All the lights were lit. She was fully awake, and yet the singer continued to pour out grief in her strange guttural language, and this time the song was coming unmistakably not from the turret above but from the kitchen, where she had left her laptop playing her own music.

  She moved down the stairs towards it, counting each step, her skin cold despite the heating. The singing stopped abruptly as she entered the kitchen, to be replaced by a pregnant silence, as if the room were holding its breath. From beyond the window, the sea continued its steady rhythm: distant, implacable. The laptop screen had fallen dark; when she touched the keyboard it flashed into life to show that the track she had chosen had played and finished. It was her own fault, she thought; she had asked Edward to play that song and now it was stuck in her head, she was hearing it everywhere, imagining it in every piece of music.

  She tipped the tea down the sink and instead opened the bottle of red that had battered her shin on the ride back from town, an effort that seemed worthwhile now that she could pour herself a large glass to take up to the bath. She would relax, warm up, have an early night. Tomorrow she would speak to Dan, or leave him a calm message telling him everything was fine. She would have liked to hear Caleb’s voice, but she could not be selfish about that; it would be easier for him – for both of them – to get used to the idea of her absence if she left it a couple of days. Easier for Dan, too.

  Tomorrow, she decided, she would hike along the cliffs and start work, make some preliminary sketches, give herself a project to concentrate on – a small c
anvas, to begin with, nothing too ambitious. Once she was rested and focused, these wild dreams and irrational imaginings would stop. It would take time to adapt to the silence, to re-learn how to be alone; she had known that. She reminded herself that she had chosen this; she had fought for her right to be here, and at a cost. Everything would be fine, once she could sleep.

  He came to her again that night. In the dream she opened her eyes to see him standing by her bed, holding out a hand, inviting her. She reached out and allowed him to lead her, down the dark landing towards the open door of the gallery from which spilled a dim, flickering light, as of a fire or a bank of candles. As before, she felt the sensation of being awake within the dream, conscious of what was happening to her, powerless to control it. Still she could not see his face, but she knew with terrible certainty that he was unbearably beautiful, that if he were to turn and meet her eye, it would make her heart stop. Her skin prickled with anticipation, every nerve vivid, as he pushed the door open.

  The light wavered up the walls, though she could see no source of it, illuminating the figure of a woman in the centre of the room, her arms stretched above her head and fastened by thin manacles to a chain suspended from the ceiling. The woman was naked, light and shadow playing in patterns over her bone-white skin. She wore a black hood over her head, obscuring her face. Zoe quickened, drawing breath; the dream lover, the shadow, gently opened her hand and placed in it a thin birch cane, folding her fingers around it. She understood; lifting the stick, she sliced it through the air until it whipped across the girl’s naked haunches, leaving a scarlet welt. The girl twisted silently at the end of the chain, her thin body flinching away from the contact. A furious surge of arousal coursed through Zoe; she raised her arm a second time and brought the cane down sharply on the back of the girl’s thighs, feeling the heat and wetness rising between her own legs as she lashed out, surprised by the force of her desire to hurt. Give in, he said, though she heard his voice as before, as thought rather than sound. Again she sliced the cane across the girl’s skin, harder, and again, until she saw she had raised drops of blood in a thin line. Each time the girl writhed under the stroke without a sound, her nipples hard and pointed. Zoe lifted the cane for another blow but felt his hand around her wrist, restraining her, guiding her to slide the length of it between the girl’s legs. At this, the tethered figure made a mewling sound, rocking her body against the movement, though whether in pleasure or pain was impossible to tell with her face hidden. Zoe felt her own arousal mounting as she increased the pressure, pushing the cane harder against the girl’s skin, but as she felt her crescendo approaching, he folded his hand around hers and drew her arm back. He moved between them, his back to Zoe, and lifted the hood. The girl’s head hung down limply, her chin to her chest, long hanks of reddish-brown hair covering her face. He beckoned to Zoe to come closer; she felt an obscure stirring of fear, but her dream-self could not resist, so she took one, two steps towards the limp figure and watched with appalled fascination as he lifted the girl’s head by the hair and she recognised, unmistakably, her own face, though gaunt and wasted, her eyes half-open, glassy, unfocused. A sick coldness spread through her; as if by compulsion, she turned away from the sight towards the black window to see her own reflection. Staring back at her was the stony face of Ailsa McBride, exactly as she had looked in the photograph, in her high-necked black dress, the silver cross pendant hanging from her neck, glinting eyes dark with hate. Zoe opened her mouth to scream, the face of Ailsa also opened its mouth, and in the heartbeat before the sound woke her, she glimpsed him in the reflection, standing behind her by the suspended body of the girl, there and gone in an instant. She had only the fleeting impression that he was as dreadfully beautiful as she had supposed, and that there was nothing good in his smile.

  She screamed herself into a frantic consciousness and found that she was standing once more in darkness in the long gallery in front of the windows, naked and trembling, her hands bunched into fists so hard her nails dug into the flesh. Gradually she became aware of how cold she was, her bare skin icy to the touch; she sensed again that same shallow breathing, rising and falling in time with her own, coming from beyond the closed door. Slowly, she turned to face it and thought she heard a low murmuring on the other side, monotonous and indistinct. Her breath jammed in her throat; she strained to listen harder and caught it again, too faint to make out the shapes of words, only the tone of suppressed rage and the odd guttural sound that made her think the voice was speaking in the old language, the language of the song. She gathered her breath, opened her mouth to call ‘Who’s there?’, but the words clotted on her tongue; she realised she did not want to know the answer. ‘No!’ was all she managed to croak, but it seemed enough; the murmuring stopped, though the presence behind it was still there, she was sure. She listened, but heard only the creaking of timber and the distant thunder of the sea. The room was barely lit, a shred of moon visible through the windows behind scudding clouds, but as she stood shaking, she glanced down and became aware of dark stains on the wooden floor. She pressed the heel of her hand to her eye, uncertain whether she was hallucinating or dreaming. Moving with the steady precision of a high-wire walker, never taking her eyes off the door, she bent and touched her fingertip to one. It came away crimson and sticky. She cried out and jumped back; the blood was fresh. Bloodstains led in a trail to the door; she gulped back a sob, terrified now that she was trapped inside the dream and would never wake, until she looked down at her own body and saw the ribbon of blood running down the inside of her leg.

  Weak with relief, she slumped against the wall, knees bent, the cold plaster solid against her back. She had not known it was coming; it had been six months since she had last had her period. Stress and weight loss can do that, the doctor had said, when she had finally gone to make sure she wasn’t pregnant, even though she knew in her heart it was impossible, she and Dan had not been near one another since before the accident. After that she had almost forgotten them; the absence of blood seemed in keeping with the loss of everything else that had made her feel like a woman.

  She had thought her body had given up; now this seemed to explain everything. Her strange, febrile moods of the past few days; the sudden surge of sexual hunger, after months of nothing; the dreams, the hallucinations; all of it could be attributed to a flood of hormones. She should have realised. In the worst days of her depression after Caleb was born, there had been times when she’d thought she was going mad: she had heard voices and grown convinced that someone was in the house, come to kill them. Sometimes she had had to shut herself in the closet because she feared she was the danger, to herself and the baby. She had not told Dan the half of it, out of a terror that if people knew how tenuous her grip on herself had become they would declare her unfit to be a mother and take Caleb away. That was when Dan had first taken her to Dr Schlesinger, after he’d come home to find that she had spent the day locked in the bathroom with the baby to protect them from an imaginary intruder. She had never told anyone, not even the shrink, about the waking dreams she had in those days: how vivid they seemed, how often she dreamed of violent death. But that had been ten years ago; they had prescribed medication, she had got better. More common than you might think, Dr Schlesinger had said. Some women are extremely sensitive to hormonal disruption. And was it starting again, now? Was this what she had to look forward to, at her age? She did not want to dwell on that. Although better hormones than ghosts, she thought, and forced herself to laugh; it sounded too loud in the empty room, and seemed to echo back at her from beyond the door.

  She tipped her head against the wall and closed her eyes. The house held its breath around her. A hand pushed hard between her legs and she no longer knew if it was her own hand; all she could do was squeeze her eyes tight shut and rock herself against the pressure, feeling the warm wetness welling up to meet it, left palm pressed against the cold wall at her back, until she felt herself rising to a swift, brusque climax and cascading down t
he other side. Her knees buckled; she allowed her limbs to fold, sinking to the floor to catch her breath, blood trickling along her thigh. In the silence that followed, she heard a scratching at the door, fingernails on wood, slow and deliberate. Someone wanting to be let in.

  Bending every last shred of will, she forced herself to her feet and lunged at the door, scrabbling at the handle with bloodied fingers. From the other side she heard a snatched laugh, followed by the skittering of footsteps down the landing and away up the stairs towards the other end of the house and the turret room; light, quick steps, like a child’s. She flung open the door and switched on the light. The landing was empty. She paused, but the house had resumed its tight-lipped silence; there was only the ticking of the clock and the waves outside.

  In her room, she cleaned herself up and pulled on sweatpants and a jumper. Not anticipating her period she had not come prepared; she would have to stuff her underwear with toilet paper until she could go back into town tomorrow and buy some supplies. She glanced at the clock. Ten after three; too much of the night left, but she was afraid to sleep. Flicking on all the lights, she made her way downstairs to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Her laptop was open on the table where she had left it, the screen dark. She recoiled from it, recalling the song, but to prove that she would not be shaken, she pulled it towards her and stirred it into life, then shut down iTunes to make certain that could not happen again. She was about to close the lid when she noticed that the Wi-Fi icon was showing a full signal.

  Her first thought, with a prickle of anger, was that Mick had lied to her about the Internet; he had set it up after all, but maybe it was for his own private use and he didn’t want the expense of her using it. Then she thought that made no sense; he was never here, and she was paying enough that it wouldn’t kill him to throw in a basic connection. And if that was his idea, he should have switched it off so that she couldn’t see it.