No One Gets Out Alive Page 13

  Knacker turned his head to follow Stephanie out of the room and she caught sight of his pale, angry face haloed by recently pampered curls. He reeked of aftershave. ‘You don’t want to be listening to anyfing other people say, like. What do they know? And she knows how I feel about anyone bad moufing my house. She knows it’s being fixed up too, cus I told her the same fing as you.’

  Stephanie hurried back along the corridor to her room, and caught the end of what had become a confrontation. She admired the girl’s courage in the face of Knacker’s temper; her own had wilted immediately.

  ‘This is not right. Not acceptable.’

  ‘You don’t tell me what’s acceptable. That’s not how it works. You get me? You’s lucky to have a fuckin’ roof over your head, considering where you come from. Lifuania! Now I’m a reasonable man, I don’t…’

  Stephanie closed her door and waited in her room until the muffled exchange moved out of the kitchen, went up one floor and passed out of her hearing. Above her head two sets of feet bumped about angrily in what sounded like a wrestling manoeuvre. A door slammed. She flinched.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Dusk was swallowed by nightfall. The time crept towards ten p.m.

  Stephanie remained upon her bed, lying in the same position she had flopped into after Bekka’s text message had come in at eight. She’d already packed her bags ready for evacuation, checked her train timetable, and then paced for hours waiting for Bekka to call. But the communication was better disclosed by text than phone call; an easier medium when the news is bad. Bekka’s boyfriend ‘didn’t think it was a good idea for you to crash’ and they ‘didn’t have room anyway’.

  The rejection made Stephanie feel ashamed, as if a ridiculous, embarrassing request had been rebuffed. Within her disappointment was also dread, like a doctor had just imparted terrible news. For a while an overwhelming sense of abandonment had made her feel so cold her jaw had trembled.

  Straight after her request for charity had been rejected by the last friend she had appealed to, Stephanie briefly considered putting a call in to her stepmother. An idea swiftly killed in infancy when she realized the ashes of a bridge that badly burned might never be reassembled, even on a temporary basis. And it was already late enough for Val to be drunk, maybe with her boyfriend, Tony, if he had come back since Stephanie had left home. Val would now be half-conscious as white wine swam around antidepressants in an otherwise empty stomach. There was no point trying to communicate with the woman any day after four in the afternoon.

  Her demoralized thoughts continued to trickle down, until they became sluggish and vague, at around the same time the girl in the empty room next door began to cry, at eleven p.m.

  Stephanie retrieved her carrier bag from the floor beside her bed and removed the packet of earplugs: USED BY FORMULA ONE RACING DRIVERS, or so the packaging claimed. This had been an idea she’d had in town, to cope with the disturbances if she was forced to spend another night here.

  She thought about going up one floor and knocking on the door of the room directly above her own, which must now be Svetlana’s room, to ask the girl to come down and see if she could hear the crying in the room too. A witness to the disturbance would be the final assurance that she was not suffering from an onset of schizophrenia.

  But she decided against paying a visit to the new tenant because the second floor was her least favourite part of the building, was too close to the landlord’s flat, and she had a strong suspicion that Knacker would disapprove of any contact between them. Two dissatisfied minds could easily form a conspiracy, or a resistance. And she could not bear the thought of inciting further contact with either of her landlords for the limited time she remained in the building.

  At least Svetlana had remained in residence despite the confrontation with Knacker. She and the new girl were strangers, both disgruntled and wary, but there was safety in numbers. They were witnesses to each other’s presence, and the idea of Svetlana upstairs was profoundly reassuring.

  Intermittently, through the evening, Stephanie had heard the girl’s feet bump through the ceiling while the Lithuanian barked into her phone in her first language. But as with Stephanie’s observation of many Europeans, it was hard to tell, by the tone and volume of a voice alone, whether an argument was in progress or if a grievance was being expressed; on a school trip to Rome she had seen people order coffee in a way that made her recoil.

  Svetlana’s television still murmured, and whoever spoke onscreen sounded as if they were underwater with their mouth full of food. The idea that she may no longer be the primary recipient of Knacker’s bullying, or the focus of his shakedown operation, also provided a guilty relief. Svetlana had suggested that another girl’s arrival was imminent too – a Margaret, or Margereet – who might provide an additional buffer between her and the two cousins.

  If she could cope with the other things, she promised herself she could get through until Monday. If she was offered work Tuesday to Friday, and if the new female tenants remained, she wondered if staying put for a week, while saving her wages for a new room, was feasible. By next Friday she might even have enough money to legitimately move to a new room. Her bank card would be here too.

  Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … through ’til Friday meant six more nights in this building. But the anticipation of just one felt like a penal sentence involving mental torture that was administered arbitrarily.

  Eyeing the empty side of her bed nervously, Stephanie slipped the plugs into her ears and let the spongy devices expand until her hearing was engulfed by the thump of her own blood. She placed her phone handset on the mattress between the two pillows. Finally, she slipped the duvet up to her chin and tried to preoccupy her mind with thoughts of what she could do on Sunday, in the city centre, to fill the day away from the building.

  THIRTY

  The metal of the structure was painted green to match the long grass and clumps of weeds in the overgrown garden. From within the circular mouth of the corrugated iron dome, the old woman did nothing but stare and grin. The elderly figure wore a brown cardigan that was too big for her small shape, over a threadbare tea dress frayed around the hem. Her face was weathered and impossibly old, reminding Stephanie of a small baked apple set inside a white wig.

  Stephanie kept looking over her shoulder at the house behind her, while trying to account for the occasional far off crumps and the corresponding shudders beneath her feet. Up in the air a siren wailed with such urgency and despair it made her panic worse.

  ‘Where should I go?’ Stephanie pointed at the house. ‘Do I go back in there?’

  The old woman didn’t answer or seem to be anything but amused at her plight in the cold rain beneath the featureless metallic sky.

  A little boy dressed in a cowboy costume made from offcuts, hobbled around in front of the old woman. The boy’s identity was concealed by a handkerchief over the lower half of his face, which met the brim of the hat covering his eyes. He sang a song that was muffled by the handkerchief. ‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’

  Come and be his friend, come, come. The woman’s gleeful expression succeeded in pressing home this suggestion, while her black eyes glinted with what could have been welcome or mischief; Stephanie didn’t know.

  A few yards behind the shelter, hanging from the branch of an oak tree by their necks, were the bodies of four women. They wore long grey gowns and their hair was tied up in coils from which stray locks fell across their bloodless faces. All of their wrists were tied together with shoelaces.

  You can beat them too. Come, come. They don’t mind. Stephanie didn’t hear the old woman say this; she heard the message inside her head.

  Even from a distance she could see that the eyes of one of the executed women were open. The moment Stephanie realized this, she saw the hanged woman’
s face in close-up. When their stares met, the woman’s expression filled with a frightful intelligence at the horror she swayed through beneath the tree branch.

  Stephanie turned and ran to the house, the ground seeming to shudder so violently it added a buoyancy to her progress, like she was on the surface of a trampoline that was gradually settling down after a period of frenzied activity.

  Inside the old kitchen with the flagstone floor, someone she couldn’t see said, ‘They’re inside. They want a word with you.’

  The people in the next room she entered had all lifted their arms into the air, as if they had recently been holding hands around the table but now preferred to dangle their fingers in the darkness that filled the spaces between the candle flames.

  The eyes of two of the people were closed as their pale features stiffened in concentration. The jowly face of a bald man, his remaining hair oiled flat against his skull, glistened with sweat. The white shirt he wore with a tie and braces was sodden. Beside him a bespectacled woman with set hair and a severe fringe had screwed up her mouth as if in great pain. The third person at the table was female and wore a hat and dark glasses indoors for a reason Stephanie didn’t understand but immediately disliked. On the centre of the table was a wooden box with what looked like a curtained door of purple velvet.

  Stephanie couldn’t see the walls or floor, despite the four candles set beyond the table and arranged in a line along the dark sideboard.

  Suspecting that something nearby was moving on the lightless floor, she fought a desire to cringe. She flattened her back against the nearest wall. Sounds of a heavy, thick presence uncoiling continued beneath the table.

  The air of the room was cold enough to make Stephanie’s teeth chatter; gusts of air whipped her face like slipstreams of energy produced by darting movements in narrow spaces. The sudden flattening and then springing up of the candle light attested to a motion she couldn’t see and certainly didn’t want to venture her hands into.

  Her legs and feet were numb. Not only was she unable to move across the room to where she knew a door to be, she actually began slipping sideways and away from what she yearned for. The movement of her body brought a fresh surge of panic into her unravelling thoughts. An attempt to cry out from a mouth now swollen with what felt like a squash ball wrapped in a handkerchief, was as ineffective as the resistance of her nerveless feet which slid her body sideways along one wall. Her fingernails snatched at the wallpaper at her back.

  As she neared the head of the table and slipped behind the seated man, her feet also rose off the floor, and she bent double to try and seize something at ground level before she rose any higher into the cold air.

  The moment the three seated people raised their faces to the ceiling and opened their mouths to utter cries of delight, Stephanie understood that her ankles and knees were bound together by a rough string that looked hairy. And her fingers may have been pulling at the twine for long enough for her to have lost several fingernails.

  Her inability to breathe around the sopping impediment in her mouth, that felt in danger of sliding over her tongue and blocking her throat, brought a terror of suffocation into the jostle of trauma, panic and horror already overfilling her skull. It was a terror soon eclipsed by the elevation of her body, further up the wall and into thin air, as if gravity no longer had any claim upon her. No hands pulled or pushed her upwards; she was just too insubstantial to remain on the ground.

  And it was then she knew the destination of her unwilling journey. She was going up and up and up, and there was nothing to hold onto, because she was being drawn into the black thing upon the ceiling. It was already in position and waiting for her.

  DAY FIVE

  THIRTY-ONE

  ‘No! Not up there! Never!’

  Panting like she’d just broken across the finish line of a sprint, Stephanie came awake sitting up, her head thrown back between her shoulders. She stayed that way, staring at the blank ceiling, until her heartbeat slowed.

  An avalanche of horrible clips from the nightmare – another one – sluiced with jumbled recollections about the house and what had climbed into her bed two nights ago. She rocked forward to clutch her face. Checked the time by peering between two fingers. Midday.

  What?

  Not possible. The curtains were too thick to provide any sense of the world outside. She scrambled across to the window and tore the drapes apart. Dull light shone through the metal bars and grimy panes of glass.

  She’d been asleep for twelve hours. Had not set her alarm because she expected to wake, or be awoken, much earlier. Above her head a distant mobile phone ringtone chanted dance music before being cut short by Svetlana’s muffled voice.

  What had she been dreaming of? Hanged women … that face she could still see, so pale, the lips blue, the eyes alight with life, pleading. She doubted she would ever forget it, ever recover from seeing it so vividly.

  A boy in a hat. A woman by a tunnel, or a metal shed; she wasn’t sure what it had been. A siren. A dark room. People sat around a table … an old hat, braces, grey hair … something moving under the table? She’d been choking on something stuffed inside her mouth. Candle light. A box that looked familiar. Was it? Her body floating and unable to get back down to the floor, going up and up …

  Jumbled dark nonsense of dreamtime. The house was driving her crazy.

  Stephanie collapsed into the pillows. Thoughts of going out into the wet, inhospitable street, and waiting for a bus in an uncovered shelter with litter about her feet, of tramping around vaguely familiar streets and closed doors, trying not to spend money, filled her with fatigue in advance of even climbing out of bed.

  ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’

  When the panic of the nightmare subsided, the small space created inside her mind buzzed with a new anxiety about money, CVs, application forms, that drove her into a weariness so profound she wondered if she would ever be able to move again.

  She took a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed it against her eyes. Then crawled back under her duvet and lay still, in silence, and stared at the watery grey light about the window and allowed it to drift inside her.

  She remained immobile for over an hour, until her need for a cup of strong coffee and to pee compelled her to move her legs and swing them over the side of the bed. She would have to go out to buy milk. Perhaps reaching the shop at the end of the road would be manageable.

  THIRTY-TWO

  As Stephanie stepped off the front path and inside the darkened hallway of the house, the aluminium light of the street shrunk behind her with the closing of the front door. The moment both of her feet were grounded inside the house, she stopped moving, and immediately considered running back outside.

  The tall, gangly figure in the dirty puffa jacket that stood at the end of the ground floor passage appeared to have turned its head sharply to greet her entrance with a grimace so aggressive she was sure it had been accompanied by an animal snarl.

  Fergal turned his body away from the door, and the fabric of his coat rustled like a serpent in dry grass. Elevating himself to his full height, with his long, bony neck extended in a nasty rebuke, he seemed to tilt the top half of his body towards her. His long arms remained stiff at his sides, the broad white palms confronting her like faces in a gang of bullies. Come on then! She knew the posture from outside pubs and nightclubs in Stoke, but was shocked to have it turned in her direction.

  Stephanie moved as calmly as she could to the foot of the stairs. Just once, as she passed out of sight, did she glance through the banisters on her way up to the first floor to see that Fergal had returned his attention to the solitary door. He rested his bloodless forehead upon it now, as if with affection.

  At the sight of the girl coming out of the bathroom, Stephanie came to a sudden stop on the first floor landing. The girl jumped. Then relaxed her body, and her face into a broad smile accompanied by a giggle.

  Stephanie didn’t know what to react to first: the fact that ano
ther female stranger was indoors and that the figure was living and real, or how the woman was dressed. Those just weren’t the kind of shoes you saw anywhere besides nightclubs or strip clubs: white leather platforms with transparent soles and heels; outrageous shoes matched by a tight blue dress that zipped up the front and caught the bathroom’s electric light like oil in water. The dress was made of latex.

  The woman’s raven hair was perfectly groomed into a silky torrent that ended in a straight line at her waist, and her skin was evolving from caramel to orange from a great deal of time spent on a sun bed. The girl looked down her body as if to acknowledge Stephanie’s shock. ‘I have date already.’

  The girl must be Margaret, Svetlana’s friend.

  At least this was something Knacker hadn’t lied about. But the incongruity of two glamorous girls accepting rooms in the wretched house from the ghastly cousins struck her as more surreal than odd. She wished she could accept the house’s unpredictable nature; the tension in her neck and limbs warned her that she could not.

  Stephanie laughed nervously, but wasn’t sure why because she found nothing about the situation amusing. It was Sunday afternoon in North Birmingham, so who went on a date looking like that? Unless they were paid to. Stephanie’s blood cooled.

  ‘Margaret?’

  The girl cocked her head in surprise.

  Stephanie near choked in the aerosol of perfume that clouded off the girl; a scent that may have been pleasant, but became sickly on the grim and dowdy landing. ‘Svetlana told me.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. You live too, yes?’

  Stephanie frowned in bewilderment.

  ‘Sorry, my English not so good.’

  The addendum to Margaret’s question enabled Stephanie to understand she was being asked whether she lived in the building and not if she were alive. Though neither question, she decided, was inappropriate at 82 Edgehill Road.