ELEVEN

And within the darkness she heard a voice. A woman’s voice. The voice in the fireplace. Only the voice was louder than it had been the night before. And now Stephanie better understood the tone to be comprised of weariness and resignation, a tired voice that seemed to be recounting grievances.

Snatches reached her ears. ‘And then you said . . . I said . . . I wouldn’t . . . unreasonable . . . but who was I . . . you, you told me . . . you swore . . . it was . . . meant something . . . a sign . . . frightened, the more I . . . and now I know . . .’

Stephanie lay still and acknowledged that her desire to know what the woman was saying exceeded her reluctant curiosity about why she could even hear the voice. This speech wasn’t aimed at her; she was overhearing something, like a phone call further down a train carriage, or someone talking to themselves who didn’t realize you were within earshot.

‘. . . involved . . . you are . . . you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . .’

The monotony, the continuous nature of the dialogue, also suggested a preoccupation with something unresolved that a mind was making audible to itself, as if a relentless communication with oneself might lead to an answer. Stephanie had often walked in on her stepmother doing the same thing, or stood in great discomfort outside a room while Val worked herself into a volatile state through imaginary conversations, either with her, her dead father, people she knew, people she didn’t know but knew of, while always playing herself as the injured party.

Only when polythene crinkled beneath the bed did Stephanie stop listening to the voice in the fireplace. Alarming as the voice was, there was something passive and disinterested about the tone. The sounds under her bed were incalculably worse. Particularly tonight, because they immediately suggested that something much bigger than a mouse had roused mere feet beneath where she lay.

The activity was reminiscent of rustling caused by whatever the polythene was wrapped around gradually shifting inside its coverings. And she’d happily accept a rat as an explanation right now. But as the only legitimate resident of a room that was so cold, either chilled to the bone by her fear, or naturally bereft of even a vestige of warmth because the central heating was off, she felt a scream build as her thoughts fragmented.

She looked down her body but couldn’t see the duvet she lay beneath, and just peered, unblinking, into the lightless space that began on the surface of her eyes and seemed to continue into a freezing forever.

For a moment she suspected she was upside down and that the top of her head was level with the floor. The suspicion became belief as her mind failed to orientate the position of her body. And into the maelstrom of half thoughts, instincts and imaginings that her mind struggled to be more than, she received an impression that there was no floor at all and that she hung in space, revolving and adrift from solidity.

Dead. This is death.

She desperately wanted to move to regain a sense of the physical world she must have woken into. But if she moved she was terrified the other things in the darkness would be alerted to her presence: predators with blank eyes and gaping maws, changing course to follow a vibration in the depths of a freezing black ocean.

Her scream only added itself to the room when a floorboard shifted and groaned at the end of her bed, mere inches from her feet.

Into her awareness the missing dimensions of the physical world reassembled, prompted by the sound of the intruder, as if gravity itself had made a sudden reappearance inside the black space. An understanding that she was lying down, flat on her back, and not turning in the air should have been a blessing. But how could it when someone stood at the foot of her bed? An intruder who leaned forward, poised to climb onto the mattress with her. The bed coverings dipped on either side of her ankles.

Stephanie thrust one arm out from the covers and seized the lamp beside the bed. ‘No. Don’t,’ was all she could manage in a quiet, almost resigned, tone of voice.

She found the rubber cord, the switch.

Held her breath.

When she saw the face her heart would stop. Which made her wonder if it would be better to endure this within darkness . . . whatever this was.

Stephanie switched on the light.