SIXTEEN

Stephanie lay awake in her bed. Overhead, a dim white glow filtered more than shone from the spotlights. The bulbs were thick with dust but their illumination was augmented by her bedside reading lamp at floor level. With the volume muted, the television set provided some extra light. There was no Freeview so the set had five channels; Channel 5 was mostly static and shadows.

Knacker’s cat-lick clean of the room had not extended above head height or involved dusting. The carpet had been vacuumed and the top of the mirrored table had been wiped clean, but on closer inspection not much else had been done to improve the condition of a long unoccupied space.

Stephanie wondered what kind of person would have painted walls so dark and had a white carpet. There was something immature about the style, something masculine too, like it had been put together by a Lothario to attract women, but a long time ago. She couldn’t imagine a mature, working-class couple, with a son like Knacker, was responsible for the décor. Maybe a lodger had personalized the room.

From the bed Stephanie looked about the area she had just searched like a forensic detective. She’d found no trace of the previous occupant, beside a sachet of the tiny crystals included with new garments, and three plastic coat hangers that didn’t match. These oddments were inside the vast mirrored wardrobe. There was nothing under the bed beside the large dust rabbits similar to those in her second floor room.

Her pile of bags rested against the wall beneath the barred window.

Were barred windows even legal?

It wasn’t even ten p.m. and the encroach of sleep was the anticipation of a coma. But her sluggish thoughts returned to the voice of the girl in the bathroom. Whoever had been speaking hadn’t answered her, or even seemed to hear her, despite an uncomfortable assumption that the speaker had been aware of her.

She’d nearly gone downstairs and knocked on the solitary door of the ground floor, which must open onto an apartment beneath the bathroom, but she had not found the courage because the smelly man lived down there.

After a while the voice beneath the bath had faded, and moved further away until it stopped. Only to start up again at a distance, far beneath the floor of the bathroom. The voice, she had ultimately decided, must have been a recording. Same with the voice in the fireplace of her first room. She tried her best to believe that a sophisticated practical joke with a sinister motive, rather than the presence of the supernatural, was responsible for the sounds. And sometimes she did believe this. Mostly, she didn’t know what to believe.

Her attempt at an explanation did not account for how sad and miserable the voice had made her feel. Just being close to it had made her heart break. Nor did her theories account for the plummet in the bathroom’s temperature compared with the draughty but heated corridor outside. Once the voice had stopped and she’d left the bathroom, the remainder of the first floor had felt like a greenhouse.

The side panel of the white chipboard frame that encased the bath tub had come away in her hands after a few tugs. Damp had turned the board at the corners of the panel to what looked like sodden Weetabix. Under the tub she’d found wooden floorboards, balls of grey dust, wood shavings, a screw, an empty paint tin, a curl of tar paper, and a smell of mildew mingled with a trace of the rotten bin smell. It was the same odour she’d detected when she’d first sat on the dusty toilet the day before.

There had been nothing electrical in the visible spaces around the fibre glass tub: no little speakers, no holes or trapdoor in the floorboards, and no wires or electrical paraphernalia. Once the side panel was off, the voice had not been any louder either, or easier to hear, but had sounded as if it were rising from deeper inside the house, from downstairs.

If she heard it again she would go and get Knacker and make him stand in the bathroom and listen to it. She would make him tell her where the voice came from.

Stephanie set the alarm. Squashed herself against the wall and waited for sleep. She was tired enough to hallucinate, but told herself the room was unfamiliar, that she was on edge and she would surely wake at the first strange noise that announced itself. She would not be taken unawares again.

Beneath her pillow lay a blunt vegetable paring knife she had appropriated from the kitchen.