SEVENTY

They were patting their hands against the walls of the house.

Outside the building in the total darkness of a rural night, the thumps of poorly coordinated arms, that sought and eventually found the windows and doors, carried up to where she lay in bed.

Amidst the bumps and scrapings there came whispers from voices either dreary and muffled with sleep, or sharpened at the foothills of a private panic.

‘What is my name? . . . before here . . . that time . . . nowhere . . . to where the other . . . the cold . . . is my name? . . .’

Amber shivered in the cold and tried to remember where she was. She could not understand why the room around her was so dark. Instinctively, she knew it should not be like this.

Someone below the window was talking. Maybe not to her, though she could not be sure. ‘And then you said . . . I said . . . I wouldn’t . . . unreasonable . . . but who was I . . . you, you told me . . . you swore . . . it was . . . meant something . . . a sign . . . frightened, the more I . . . and now I know . . .’

The first one to get inside the building began to speak from the hall downstairs. ‘. . . involved . . . you are . . . you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . .’

Bare feet scuffled upon the stairs, supported by further evidence of movement: a fumbling out there in the darkness, as if someone aged and blind was determined to find her. The tone of the voice from the stairs was stiff with accusation. ‘Not going . . . refuse. I said it. I said it . . . wouldn’t stop . . . and look . . . what happened . . . the lights . . . even listening?’

The first visitor to rise from the foot of Amber’s bed came off the floor quickly. She could not see who it was, but she heard the trespasser sigh as it reached full height. Thick polythene crinkled as the limbs flexed within their coverings.

‘What is the time?’

But it was not terror or shock that knocked Amber out of sleep. The smell of an old, dirty house from a past life, and the scent of those who had walked its corridors and cried out from behind so many walls and doors, gathered like a heavy black smoke and sank down to where she lay. And it was the stench of these things that choked her awake.