TWENTY-FOUR

The footsteps that slowly roused Stephanie from the dream moved swiftly down the corridor outside her room and continued inside her room, as if the door had been left open.

As she came awake a second set of heavier footsteps followed the first, as if in eager pursuit, but stopped outside her door, suggesting reluctance, or merely an inquisitive pause.

With her own sharp intake of breath loud inside her head, she broke from the last tendril of dream and burst out from under the bedcovers.

The sound of her shock appeared to bring everything to an abrupt end – the footsteps as well as the hurtful words that had been chattering from her stepmother’s mouth in the dream; accusations accompanied by horrible grins on the faces of people she hadn’t recognized, who’d all sat around a black table. People holding hands in a dark space with candles set in distant corners. Yet the surreal vestiges of the bad dream were dwarfed by the realization that someone may have entered her room.

The footsteps.

The ceiling lights and floor lamp were still on, and it didn’t take Stephanie long to discover she was alone between the black walls and mirrors. The door to her room was still closed. She remained upright in bed, hands pressed to her cheeks, her chest rising and falling like she’d just struggled to get to the surface of deep water.

In the distance she could hear Knacker’s dog barking at the rear of the house. It now sounded like a bellow combined with a cough.

Feeling her sanity was at stake, she quickly tried to rationalize the nightmare. Being intimidated by strangers in a room with black walls had a clear connection to the evening she’d endured earlier, and being tormented by her stepmother was a constant.

But the footsteps . . . About those she was all out of ideas.

What little calm she felt at being awake was soon obliterated.

In the room next door the heavier set of footsteps returned to life, bumping about the room in an uncoordinated and clumsy fashion. Pisshead feet. Shit-faced feet you hide from.

Stephanie turned to the wall her bed was pressed against. She hadn’t heard the door to her neighbour’s room open, but the sound of thumps and clatters now travelled through to her, as if determined hands had begun to scatter small objects and cast aside items of furniture in the room next door. The footsteps would occasionally pause, then speed up and stagger in another direction to continue what sounded like someone vandalizing the room.

When the footsteps banged towards the wall nearest to her, Stephanie flinched and seized up, and knew she would let go of a scream if whoever was next door managed to continue their antics on her side of the wall, which didn’t seem impossible.

She heard mattress springs creak and a rubbing of fabric directly against the wall, followed by a woman’s small cry announced into the very bricks and plaster that divided the two rooms.

A bang of wood and a clatter of bedsprings followed, and Stephanie received the impression that a bed had just been raised from the floor and then dropped. The woman must have been hiding beneath the bed. Her neighbour’s cries worsened, giving the impression that the woman was now being pulled, or dragged across the floor and deeper into the room beyond.

The whimpers became sobs, until the woman grunted softly after each muffled thud and fleshy slap she received; the blows were all too audible and interspersed with the sound of the man’s heavy feet adjusting their balance as he went to work.

Petrified with shock, and sickened enough by what she was hearing to know she’d never been truly repulsed before, Stephanie was unable to react.

A female stranger was being beaten. The sounds made her feel giddy and strengthless, as if she were seeing violence, or as if it were happening to her instead. Even her stepmum’s boyfriend, the little bespectacled runt that had liked to stand in her doorway when drunk, leering at her every time he came upstairs to use the toilet, hadn’t come close to disgusting her as much as what she could hear in the room next door.

Stephanie climbed off the bed, as quietly as possible, wincing at every creak of mattress spring and then each squeak of floorboard. She approached the door on tiptoe.

So was there a girl next door after all, and had Fergal gone to her?

It could have been you.

She went back to her bedside and picked up her phone. Tapped in 999. Then paused with her thumb over the CALL button when she remembered her inability to catch sight of her neighbour the previous night, and her failure to find the girl in the bathroom. She also considered the absence of any light in her neighbours’ rooms, and their refusal to respond to her pleas.

Stephanie opened her door and stared into the unlit passageway of the first floor. As usual, the rooms on either side of the hallway were in darkness. So a girl was being beaten in the dark by a man who had searched for her without turning the lights on? This didn’t make sense. Or perhaps she was hearing something that wasn’t really happening. That made even less sense.

Stephanie moved to the neighbouring door. On the other side she could still hear the thumps and the groans, the whimpers and the horrible plodding of male feet. But she was also aware of something else: a strong odour. A reek of gum disease, beefy bestial sweat revived by fresh perspiration in unwashed clothes, an oily scalp, alcohol breath. A stench instantly recognizable from her second night on the floor above. This was the smell of the man who went to the crying Russian girl and had sex with her, and then stood outside Stephanie’s room in a silent vigil.

Stephanie wanted to scream. But she was also tired of being confused and frightened and rejected and poor and trapped and bullied and . . .

Engulfed by an urge to punch and claw and kick, she gripped her head and shouted ‘No!’, and before she even had time to question her actions she began pounding the palms of both hands against the door. ‘Stop it! Stop! Leave her alone! Leave her alone, you bastard!’

She was astounded by the volume of her voice in the darkness of the corridor, and shocked because she’d done something she’d believed herself incapable of. Just as quickly, Stephanie was seized by an apprehension that hardened under her skin like a film of ice, because the neighbouring room had fallen silent. After apprehension came anticipation, the unpleasant kind, when she knew that a face out of sight, that she didn’t want to be noticed by, had just turned in her direction.

They are aware of you.

The nape of her neck and her scalp goosed and she shivered in the cold; a cold she’d plunged into on leaving her room, that had grown so debilitating, as though the house no longer possessed a roof or walls to hold back a freezing absence outside itself, through which they came with their footsteps and their cries and their voices and their smells . . . to show you things.

Stephanie hurried back inside her room and slammed the door, locked it. But felt as vulnerable as she had been in the corridor, peeled of the sense of physical security a locked door usually provides.

And the cold. It was still cold inside her room. Her feet felt like they were turning blue. Her breath shuddered in and out of her chest.

When you are cold you are not alone.

She swallowed. ‘Who?’ She looked about the walls, the ceiling, as she inched towards her bed.

They can’t hurt you.

‘Who are you?’ She kept her voice down; even in her shock she was conscious of being overheard. Knacker and Fergal would be asleep two floors above her room, and if they hadn’t heard her outburst, or the beating of one of their tenants, they probably wouldn’t hear her now. She raised her voice. ‘Who is there? Tell me. Please. I can’t stand it any more . . .’ Her voice started to shake. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t get out . . . I can’t stand it . . .’ Emotion closed her throat.

‘I’m cold.’

At the sound of the voice next to Stephanie’s ear, she fell upon the bed and shoved herself backwards to the headboard with the balls of her feet, untucking the fitted sheet from the mattress as she moved.

Had she heard a voice?

Yes, she had heard something. But was the voice in the room or inside her head? Was she only doubting the voice because she couldn’t see anyone? And if she believed someone had spoken, well then . . . she was mad because she was hearing voices. Either that or everything she’d ever accepted as the truth about the natural world and the laws that governed it, had just come up really short.

She reached for the TV remote and switched the muted set off, then nervously eyed the mirrored doors of the wardrobe, but wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was operating on some instinctive superstition, or had recalled something fantastical about mirrors that she’d picked up from a book or a film a long time ago. But there was no one reflected in the glass, other than herself, who literally looked like she’d just heard a ghost.

She shuffled under the duvet and drew it under her chin. ‘Who are you? Tell me.’ Stephanie’s voice shook from the cold.

Silence.

She felt wild and mad, almost hysterical and slightly beyond her terror, and in a new mental space she’d not inhabited before; one that was open and unrestrained, receptive and reckless, unthinking. ‘Why are you here?’ She concentrated her thoughts and feelings into the room; her mind grasped, reached and strained to see, to hear, to know.

The room was taut with tension, like the air of a classroom full of nervous children suddenly exposed under the gaze of a brutish teacher. It was a similar feeling to walking alone at night and hearing footsteps following. The air was somehow thinner, the space quieter, as though the room was holding its breath. It made her feel small, at the verge of something much greater than herself, like an ocean, or a vast night sky. And she felt so sad within it all, and so lonely. The crushing solitude brought a quiver to her jaw and blurred her eyes with tears.

‘I’m cold . . .’ There it was again, the voice. ‘. . . me. I’m so cold . . .’

The voice was over by the window. Young, female, distraught. Lost?

‘I . . . I can hear you,’ Stephanie said after a big swallow. ‘Who are you?’

Not in answer but seemingly in acknowledgement of Stephanie’s challenge, the girl began to cry from a third location, from over by the wall behind the television set, or even slightly beyond the wall.

‘I want to help you,’ Stephanie said, but indecision about whether she wanted the contact to continue, on any level, reduced her voice to a whisper.

‘Hold me.’ This was spoken close to her ear as if someone was now stood beside the bed and leaned towards her.

Stephanie shrieked and backed further into the wall.

Nothing there. No one and nothing in the cold room she could see. But if they spoke again she was sure her mind would fizz out like a pinched candle flame, and that would be it for her.

Her skin tingled with pin pricks while she sat still and quiet in a cold silence for five minutes, according to her phone. Her mind became strangely absent, as if it were trying to slip towards, and then permanently maintain, a stunned nothingness.

Eventually, once her astonishment that she was still conscious and breathing, and had survived, slipped into curiosity again, she tried to comprehend what she was experiencing. Something so monumental it made her feel weightless.

Rearranging her position on the bed, she lay down, one side of her body crammed against the wall as if she needed to cling to something physical and tangible. ‘Are . . . are you still here?’ she asked the room again.

The mattress dipped and the bed softly rustled as the weight of another body lay down beside her.