FORTY-SIX

It was after Knacker had walked away from where he stood guard at the door of the bedroom, to move down the second floor corridor towards the stairwell to answer Svetlana’s phone, that Stephanie first noticed the cold in Margaret’s room. Wiping at her nose with the back of a hand that stank of bleach, she stopped scrubbing uselessly at the broad stain at the foot of the bed and rocked back on her heels. Looked about the walls. And then at the window.

But the light had not changed; an iron sky still speckled the dirty panes with spots of drizzle. There was no sun to move behind a cloud because the sky had been grey and grubby with rain for over an hour. This change in temperature was not in her imagination.

The overhead light still shone the dull yellow she associated with long hours in dim warehouses, and the heating had been warming the dusty house for at least half an hour. So there was no reason for Margaret’s room to chill, and so much that Stephanie rubbed the outside of her arms.

In the distance she could hear Knacker trying to speak softly to conceal his conversation. ‘Yeah. Yeah, but make it eight, like. She’s busy, yeah . . . Course she is. This is right proper here, like. All our girls is clean. Tested. Best, like. Nah. Nah. Just the one tonight. Tomorrow, though, we might have another one . . .’ He’d dropped his voice even lower.

Stephanie swallowed and looked at the ceiling. ‘Can you see me? Can you hear me? I know you’re there. One of you. Margaret? Is it you? Margaret, I won’t leave you. I won’t leave you alone.’

She looked at the doorway. Knacker had gone quiet but she could hear his feet as he paced about by the stairwell. Stephanie turned back to the room. ‘I’ll find out who you are . . . what they did to you. They won’t get away with it. I’ll get you help. Somehow. I promise. I promise you all.’

The room stayed chilly and still. Either the cold, or the invasive feelings of sadness and fear, pushed her own spirits down with a mournful gravity. A tremor ran through her voice. ‘I know you are afraid . . . and sad. I can feel it. You don’t know where you are, do you? You can’t remember. You are just there . . . here. Stuck. You frightened me. But you didn’t mean to. You just wanted my help. I will help you all. I will get help.’

She realized it was the first time in this situation that she wanted a sign, something, anything, any movement at all, even the slightest indication that she had been heard and understood.

Besides the cold, nothing was forthcoming from whatever had gathered around her, though she suspected the room was listening and that something inside the space was trying to extend and feel its way inside her. She sensed . . . no, she knew, that she was not alone.

And then, as if the room had drawn a breath from shock, the atmosphere altered. She heard nothing but intuited an unseen motion, or an energy, that quickly withdrew from around where she sat by the bucket at the foot of the bed. As if sucked back to the walls, the feelings of grief and loneliness subsided. A pressure lifted from her, upwards and out of her, making her scalp tingle. And something she could not see or hear scattered like a nervous cat around the walls and fled the room.

The temperature of the room dropped even lower. And in place of the departing presence came the odour of sweat and halitosis, as if an unwashed body had just swept inside the room and a dirty mouth had opened and breathed upon her face.

Stephanie gritted her teeth, clenched both fists and raised them into the air. ‘You bastard. You can’t hurt me.’

A bottle of perfume toppled on the surface of the dresser.

Stephanie screamed.

A black shroud of silk flopped from the curtain rail and pooled soundlessly upon the floor beneath the radiator.

In the stench that intensified enough to make her cough, choke and then gag, as if her head had been forced inside something soft and pulpy with death, she realized there was a hand in her hair. Fingers so cold she believed her scalp was being burned gripped a handful of her hair and shoved her face to the floor. A second hand pulled her hooded sweat top away from her waist line and exposed her back to what felt like a freezing draught.

She struggled onto all fours and batted her hands behind her body as if to knock off an assailant. ‘No! Bastard!’ Her hands raked empty air.

In the dim periphery of her hearing and awareness she heard footsteps pound the floor towards the room.

She could see nothing outside of the hair that hung all around her face and stuck to the spittle that looped out of her mouth. And now the painful side of her face was squashed against the floor.

She screamed as a set of cold teeth touched the flesh on her back above her kidney.

Then it stopped. Though her hysteria did not.

Stephanie rolled about the floor, swiping her hands, claws out, at the warming air that surrounded her body. And she kicked out her feet as hard and as quickly as she could at the space above her, at the thin air around her body, because there was no one inside the room any more, and no hand in her hair, or teeth indenting the skin of her back. Not any longer.

On her backside, she shuffled across the floor to the radiator where she sat shaking with shock, panting and wheezing as the adrenaline and cortisone and horror seeped through her body and warmed the crotch of her jeans.

She looked to the doorway and saw Knacker’s face cast with an unfamiliar expression. He was so frightened his lips had peeled back from his teeth and his horrified eyes were too large for his thin face, like hard-boiled eggs painted by a disturbed child.

Fergal came and stood beside Knacker. He was delighted. ‘That Bennet, he just won’t fuck off.’ He loped into the room towards Stephanie.

She pulled her legs to her body and clasped her shins. The muscles of her face shook and she could not stop them moving no matter how hard she tried. Across the room in the dresser mirror, she could see that her mouth was open and that she looked imbecilic with terror. She could not speak and her heart refused to slow its banging inside her throat and between her ears.

‘Fought you might like to see this.’ Grinning, like he was showing a mate a picture of some harmless antic, Fergal crouched beside Stephanie. His long fingers were arranged around a smart phone. ‘It’s him awright. Fat bastard. He was outside Svetlana’s room last night. And I got him. I got him sniffing round her door. They’s all getting stronger cus it’s all going off. Look.’ Fergal turned the handset around and showed Stephanie’s unblinking eyes what was displayed onscreen.

Shaking so hard that her vision moved, Stephanie looked at a dark digital image. One that was, at first, unclear. Until the chaos of shadow and pale smudges on the small screen of the phone suggested a fat, eyeless face wearing spectacles, and a head tightly covered in the hood of a raincoat. When she glimpsed what she believed were a row of teeth in a howling mouth she closed her eyes.

Giggling like a chimp, Fergal spoke with enough familiarity to suggest they were sharing a joke. ‘It’s him, ain’t it? It’s really him. He come back just like he said he would.’