FIFTY

Stephanie walked through the dark house between the two men. Fergal led the procession at an eager pace, Knacker following with less enthusiasm and a limp. She could hear him sniffing behind her, as if to clear the situation out of his nose and start over. No harm done, like. All she could feel was a relief she knew would be temporary, but at least the cap had stayed on the bottle of acid, and they hadn’t repeated their performance on the garden patio. Not yet anyway.

Stephanie could only guess at Bennet’s relationship with Knacker and Fergal. But if Bennet had been put inside a certain place as punishment, within this building, and if she was going to be put inside the same place so they could remove an inconvenience, then the destination she was being led to was as welcoming as the gallows.

She suspected the unseen occupants of the house had fallen into a hushed and expectant silence, like a crowd of shocked spectators with mouths agape because they knew all about the destination of the condemned. Because that is what Fergal had just done: sentenced and damned her. ‘They all end up in there anyway. Down there.’ So maybe the other women, the ones she heard at night, had been put inside a special place inside the house. And those that had died there had somehow survived.

Hints and subtexts, it was all she had to go on – all she ever had to go on in this house. If things were not clear from the outset in a situation that a person had any doubts about, that person should just start running. Nothing was worth the risk of this. She knew that now. But the penny had dropped too late for her.

Her mind drifted to a memory of Fergal’s long silhouette bowed, as if in worship, outside the solitary interior door of the ground floor. Because that was where she was going. To meet whatever occupied the locked rooms in the lowest level of the house; whatever had obsessed Fergal and made him stand alone in the musty darkness, as if he were waiting for a sign, or listening to instructions from it or Bennet, from the other side of that door.

We’s all got our little quirks, like.

The door had opened the day Margaret was killed; the day there was no going back for anyone.

Black Maggie.

Stephanie kept her face turned away from the stairwell window to avoid a glimpse of the freshly stained garden patio. The innards of the house suggested the structure was more active now too; silent, but humming with an unwelcome energy. Was it her imagination or had the death of youth awoken the site from slumber? She believed she had been trapped inside the house’s dreams, but now prayed that she would never have to bear its fully awoken consciousness. She wondered if anyone ever got out of this building alive.

Stephanie stopped on the first floor landing and closed her eyes until the worst of the feeling of dread and vertigo passed. She would do anything to be back inside her old room there, even with the hole burned through the floor.

You will never leave here.

She would become one of them. An unrecorded death. A trace of someone who sobbed through the night and muttered from behind a poorly decorated wall; one of them who murmured from the floor, or paced the wretched passages of the house, cold and lonely and looking for companionship.

‘Oh, God.’

Fergal stopped and turned to confront her. ‘He ain’t here no more.’ His face was expressionless, but his eyes were alive with what could have been excitement tinged with awe, or even terror.

He eventually smiled in acknowledgement that she must have fully grasped the enormity of what she was about to experience and endure, but would never walk away from, not in any physical sense. Fergal was proud of his role as facilitator. She suspected the cousins might be middle men for something that one of them denied the existence of, and the other didn’t fully understand.

Stephanie’s face screwed up for tears that never came because she was too frightened to cry. She clutched her hands to her cheeks, then placed one hand on the banister rail before she fell. ‘I’m not . . . No . . . I’m not . . . I won’t leave.’ She wasn’t sure who she was even speaking to.

An eternal sorrow. A freezing forever. Perpetually trapped, lost, and only feared if discovered.

It never ends.

‘What . . . will I be?’

Would she remember anything, or only bits of things? Would she shiver and repeat herself in the darkness, always wanting to wake while being unable to rouse? Would there be some sense of will and volition in an endless entrapment? Would only her final state of terror transfer into the cold infinity?

Bennet. Bennet the rapist still followed his nature. So who was she? What was she now? She was terror, grief, despair and confusion. Just like the other women. Was that to be her sentence? Forever.

Stephanie turned around and tried to run back up the stairs to the second floor. Knacker caught her in his arms like a deceitful saviour. Fergal came up quickly from behind and slipped long fingers through Stephanie’s hair. His hand became a vice to hold her head steady. His terrible breath puffed about her face. ‘You belong to the Maggie, bitch. We’re all hers here.’