FIFTY-FIVE

Inside the darkness hysteria finally came. Madness too. She welcomed madness.

In the surge of a mindlessness born of sustained terror, the violence of her screams took her into a space she had never known before, but had occasionally sensed in the wings of her mind. When she came close to being conscious of this state, she suppressed any flickers of awareness, in case she departed chaos.

Round and round in the darkness of the kitchen she turned and spun and unravelled herself and cut at the nothingness with her knife. Slashed above her head where a face might hang, and down below where something could be crawling towards her legs.

Against cabinets she banged herself but ignored the pain. Over the little table she sprawled only to right her body and to whip the knife through the air, at head height, should anything be closing in.

She picked up a chair and hurled it through the absence; it seemed to travel a long way before smashing the glass out of a cabinet door. She sent the second chair after it.

Drawers were emptied and implements thrown anywhere and everywhere. Some of the things she threw bounced off the walls and struck her body. Cupboards were pawed at. Their contents were released with her screams, to accompany the flight of objects through the lightless place, through the end of the world and through the final reaches of herself.

When she could no longer raise her tired arms, she slumped to her knees and asked the darkness for death.

‘Now. Come on. Now. Now.’

There would be some pain and then she wanted black. Nothing mattered any more. She didn’t want to think or remember anything. She just wanted to go.

‘I want it now. Now. Now. Get it over with, you bitch.’

Her energy, her spirit, her life was spent. She was glad to be rid of it; the struggle for survival was a pain she no longer wanted.

And then she went quiet for a time and wondered if she was already dead, and if a new tenant, some fragrant girl from Bulgaria or Latvia, was lying stiff with fright inside an old bed while listening to Stephanie’s cries in the night.

She didn’t know. But she didn’t think she was dead. Bennet had looked very thin on that pink bed. So perhaps he had starved to death inside here, his last days a relentless torment as visitor after visitor came rustling and sliding about him in the darkness.

And from the moment he’d shoved her inside here, this was what Fergal had been waiting for: the crescendo. He had waited for her cries.

Was he out there now?

Stephanie crawled across the broken things and found the door she had first come through; it felt so long ago, when she had been another person, someone who cared about life. She pushed herself up the door. Struck the surface with both hands. Grimaced at the darkness.

She saw their faces inside her mind, their simian faces, clever and thrusting. She saw again the weasel-quick eyes. Faces fronting minds erased of compassion, of decency, of humanity. She could hear Knacker’s voice, which in turn became the memory of a ghost’s incapacity and cries.

She inhaled deep from the dead house. Allowed herself to be throttled by her very powerlessness. What did she care now?

Her thoughts leapt on, from face to voice to face to voice, to poor Ryan so limp on the stained concrete patio, to Margaret’s sweet smile, to a tooth uprooted from a jawbone, to black blood on faded carpet, to an elderly voice chanting scripture, to a girl sealed beneath a bathroom floor, chattering out her confusion. And something began to glow inside her again, at her very core. Something so hot and unstable it was already black with the carbon of her rage and hatred. She thought of Fergal’s bloodless face, and Knacker’s equine expressions; she thought of the thing that had been a man called Bennet, and of its speed up and through the house to service its desires on the wretched and the hopeless; she saw the picture of its howling, idiotic face, bestial with violent intent, on a phone screen.

‘Can you hear me, you scrawny rat bastards? Can you hear me?’

Stephanie banged her hands against the door. ‘They are coming! Yes! And they will take me. But I swear you will not live. You will not leave this house alive. I swear I will come for you. Both of you. You will know me, you bastards! You will know me in this dark. No one gets out alive! No one!’

She turned and flashed her face at the darkness, showed it a mouth full of teeth. And to the darkness she begged, pleaded with the absence of light and hope for a chance to do those things that she would now trade anything, anything at all, for an opportunity to do.

‘You think these rats can keep you? You deserve better company. Their blood for my blood.’

And through the cascade and tumult of her blackest thoughts she heard a voice: I will come unto thee. For I have determined there to winter.