FIFTY-THREE

Panting, her back and head flat against the door, Stephanie focused her efforts into stopping the spinning inside her skull; a maelstrom of panic and fear had become her entire consciousness.

They were still in the other room. She could hear one of them staggering like an invalid suddenly released from a wheelchair, scuffling on feet that were mostly bone, while the second one wheezed and scratched at the base of the door she held shut.

The room she had fled into was lightless. The windows would almost certainly be boarded shut, like those of the kitchen. And the boards would be fixed to the wall too, screwed flush with the casement, to prevent even a sliver of daylight from intruding into the hell that was the ground floor of 82 Edgehill Road.

Stephanie raised the shaking hand that clutched the unlit candle. Patting the front of her hooded top she located the pocket and the tiny rattle of the matchbox; not many left. She would have to be careful with each match that could still be ignited.

Only when her heavy exhalations subsided into shallower, tauter breaths, did she become aware of the scent of the room. The place smelled of death.

The space was warm and musty with age, but still acrid with what must have recently been an unbreathable stench of corruption in an unventilated, lightless room. A room she had just shut herself inside.

She coughed to clear her nose, mouth and throat of the smell. Crouched down and slipped the candle between her teeth and removed the box of matches from her pocket. If she could even find a match that was firm and intact enough to light the candle, she knew she would not want to catch so much as a glimpse of whatever was inside here, issuing the miasma of decay. But she could not bear to be in the dark either.

She got lucky, or unlucky; she wasn’t sure. The first match she struck against the box fizzed alight. It took her several seconds to hold the candle steadily enough to dip the wick into the flame that left a sunspot in the middle of both eyes. When the candle flame grew large enough to cast a vague, flickering luminance across the room, her initial shock was caused by the sight of the room’s walls.

They were pink. The wallpaper was pink striped with mauve, the dry carpet was cherry-pink, the curtains featured a pink cabbage rose pattern, the dressing table was a dark red wood, or lacquered in imitation. It was hideous, but awful in a manner so different to the black room she had just escaped.

Tasteless, aged, another preserved capsule that must have remained intact for decades. How could something so grotesquely feminine and vulgar share a wall with a room so appallingly evil? Because that is what the black room had been: evil.

Only after the sounds from the neighbouring room ceased did she rise from a crouch and move the candle through the air. The flame’s misty yellow glow revealed white fitted wardrobe doors and a second open doorway leading to an ensuite bathroom. And only when she was standing did Stephanie take more notice of the bed: a vast article of furniture covered with a quilted pink eiderdown. And she nearly opened the door and ran back into the darkness when she realized that the bed was occupied. Though whatever lay on top of the coverings did not rouse at the sound of her shock in the stifling darkness.

As immobile as the subject of her appalled scrutiny, Stephanie watched the body without blinking and clenched her fist around the knife handle until it hurt her hand. There was nowhere else to run inside the ground floor flat. If the thing on the bed moved she would have to . . . have to use the knife on it.

But if it’s not alive, what use is a knife?

The dark figure remained inert upon the bed. From what she could see from the door, it wore black trousers, inside of which the legs looked short and unappealingly thin. The ankles had collapsed inside patterned socks. A windbreaker was zipped up right under the figure’s chin, the head covered by a plastic hood.

Moving around the foot of the bed, close to the wall and the dressing table, Stephanie moved the candle higher to better see the occupant.

A brownish face had sunken into the hood of the anorak. A pair of large spectacles with tortoise-shell frames were still in place upon the mottled skin. What was left of the wide open eyes was magnified through the lenses of the glasses, as was their discolouration and collapse into the eye sockets to now resemble the dried-out bodies of dead snails inside their shells. Long brown teeth, that reminded her of a donkey’s mouth, grinned at the ceiling as if the corpse was pleased with itself.

Bennet.

The face on Fergal’s phone. The rapist. The man who had been put inside the flat before her lay dead on what looked like a grandmother’s bed from the 1980s.

Stephanie moved to the curtains. Death had been caught amongst the fetid folds and floral patterns of the drapes and she coughed to clear her airways of the scents of stale decomposition. She clawed them aside to find pine boards screwed into the walls.

Growling with frustration she hammered the side of one fist against the wood, which returned a hollow sound while the board did not even rattle in its secure moorings.

She tied one curtain back to the wall, using the ostentatious gold and tasselled tie that hung from a brass wall hook. When she looked to see how many screws she would have to get out of the sheet of wood to reach the window pane, she noticed the marks in one corner of the board. Someone had tried to get out before her, using what looked like their teeth. Vague black stains surrounded a patch of wood that had been gnawed, and by a person positioned on their knees.

Stephanie stepped away from the windows and closed her eyes for a moment. She wondered why Bennet had been put inside here; how badly he’d offended Fergal to deserve such a fate.

Had they killed him? Those things out there?

Stephanie looked at the bedroom door she had come through and couldn’t recall her legs and arms ever feeling as weak as they did now. Did they need doors? Or can they just rise?

As if her thoughts were contagious, she heard a rustle of what sounded like nylon.

Heart thumping the roof of her mouth, she turned quickly. When the candle flame settled, she raised the candle higher above the foot of the bed. The desiccated thing in the anorak still grinned with dirty teeth, and the sightless and collapsed eyes were still fixed upon the ceiling. But had one arm moved? The right arm, the one closest to the window? She couldn’t remember whether the withered brownish hand had been in that position before, held so close to the body. The hand was also missing a little finger and the removal had not been neat.

She had imagined the rustling noise. That is all, that is all, that is all, that is all.

Stephanie turned to the window, repeatedly glancing at the corpse as she exchanged the knife for the screwdriver. She slipped the screwdriver head into the first screw and used what felt like all of her remaining energy to get the screw to budge. And it did, or she thought it did, about one millimetre. There were at least a dozen screws to be loosened. How would she reach those at the top?

She collapsed against the wood and began hammering a fist against the surface. She called out, ‘Help! Help me! Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Her hand hurt, but she bit down on the pain and continued to beat the wood because her life depended on being heard.

Beyond the wood a car swished past, moving quickly. No one in a vehicle could possibly hear her and there were never any pedestrians in the street; in fact, she had not seen one during her journeys to and from the house, bus stop and local shop. But there was a neighbour, there were curb crawlers, the punters who came here for sex; one of them might hear her . . .

Stephanie stopped banging the wooden boards. Turned to the bed. Turned to face the awful thing that had just sat up.