Rebekah’s recurring dream started to emerge from the dark in the week leading up to 1 April. It began in snatches, there and gone again, as she finally drifted off to sleep. She recognized the imagery but didn’t feel any of the dread. The dream was more like blinks of light, never quite fully formed, as if a part of it were still growing and taking shape in the shadows.
It didn’t help that, the closer she got to the first day of the season, the harder she found it to sleep. She would go to bed at night and lie awake for hours, listening to the creaks and groans of the hostel, plagued by images of failure, of not making it to the ferry, or of making it only to find Hain and Lima waiting for her inside. And when she did sleep, other nightmares filled her head, a torrid and dysfunctional stream she struggled to escape from: she saw Johnny, stumbling from the forest, bloodied and injured, and was never quite close enough to grab him; she saw Noella and Gareth lying in bed together, the sheets twisted around their bodies; and she saw her mother, little more than a blur except for a flash of red hair, and always running, even as Rebekah called for her to come back. One night, Rebekah dreamed she was in the house on 81st Street, a place her mother had never been to. She came in to find her at the kitchen table, talking to Johnny, and when they saw Rebekah, they stopped talking, and her mother, faceless, simply got up and left.
Rebekah would wake soaked with sweat and breathing hard, and the longer the dreams went on, the more they began to repeat, to merge with one another, then mutate into something else. And in the final few days before the ferry was due to return Rebekah finally knew what they were mutating into: something more familiar and more terrifying.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
She was back in the high-rise building.
In Apartment 127.
Unable to escape.
The nightmare came on her last night.
Instantly, it felt more frightening than any version of the dream she’d had before. For a moment, Rebekah couldn’t understand why. She was in the same corridor as always, looking at the same cream walls and tan carpets.
But then she realized what was different.
This time, Roxie was at the end of the corridor, half concealed in the gloom. The dog was looking at her, and as Rebekah approached, as she got closer to the open door of the apartment, Roxie began whimpering. It was an awful sound, the same sound she’d made when Rebekah had locked her into the room hours earlier, and now here, in this place, it was even worse. Every whimper squeezed Rebekah’s heart.
I’m so sorry, Roxie, she heard herself saying. I’m so sorry.
But then Rebekah got to the door of the apartment. She glanced at the 127 on it, at the 7 that was askew, and she had the same thought as always, that seven was supposed to be a lucky number – and by the time she looked for Roxie again, she’d vanished. The corridor of the apartment block was empty.
Roxie?
Music started playing inside the apartment. She couldn’t tell what type it was, had never been able to tell, it was just there, but this time it seemed louder, more obscure, and way more painful on her ears. As she pushed the door wide and stepped in, she felt the fibres of the carpet under her bare feet.
They started to squirm and move.
They wrapped around her feet, binding her to the floor, climbing up her ankles, inching up her calves to the inside of her thighs. And then the voice behind her, genderless but ugly, started repeating those same words: I think you should stay. Except this time it wasn’t just words, it was a harrowing rasp.
I think you should stay.
She so desperately didn’t want to stay.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
Please let me go.
I think you should stay.
Please let me wake up.
And then, finally, she did, gasping for breath, as if she’d just climbed from the bottom of the ocean. She looked around the bedroom, expecting it to be a trick, a second nightmare concealed within the first. But she was awake, her skin slick with sweat. When she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she could see her vest was soaked through and there were fine tear trails on her cheeks.
Light poured in through the window.
Rebekah looked across the hallway to the other door, to the room she’d put Roxie in. She wanted to call out to her, to see her and put her arms around her, but she didn’t. Instead, she planted her feet on the floor, her skin still tingling as it had in her dream. On her right hand, along her palm, there was an arc of tiny red gouges: she’d been clenching her fists so tightly, she’d drawn blood.
She closed her eyes for a second, breathing.
Relax, it’s over. It’s over.
She checked Stelzik’s clock on the nightstand beside her. It was 8.56 a.m. She’d set the alarm for nine. The ferry was due in at eleven and, on the practice runs she’d done the previous two days, it took thirty minutes to get from the hostel to the harbour on the bicycle. That meant she had at least an hour to ready herself, change and check she had everything she needed.
Switching off the alarm, she climbed out of bed and started to prepare, washing herself, dressing, making sure her hair was styled in exactly the way she’d practised. She’d gone for a side parting, moulded into shape with some hair paste Stelzik had kept among his things. She knew her features didn’t look particularly masculine, but the hairstyle disguised that just a little, and when she pulled on the men’s clothes, they helped blur the lines even further.
She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself, fear like a ball in her stomach. She’d pictured her death so many times in the lead-up to this, she wasn’t certain if she was more frightened of dying on the island, before she ever got close to the ferry, or making it a distance, feeling a fleeting sense of success and of freedom, and having it torn away from her. There was even a strange part of her that was scared to leave the island: it wasn’t home, it never would be, yet she’d made something of it in the end, especially after she’d found Roxie. There was a kind of safety in the routine she had here.
But then she thought of her girls, and she began checking her hair again, her clothes, her backpack, laying the items inside it on the bed.
That was when she glanced at the calendar.
It was pinned to the wall. Before today, for weeks, it had been circled by scraps of paper, a trail that had led out into the corridor, a pathway she’d built to help her figure out the why and the how. All of that was gone now. She’d taken it all down, her suspect list, her string tethers, her attempts to connect all that she knew, had folded it and put it into her backpack.
All that remained on the walls was the calendar.
It was from the Museum of Natural History and had belonged to Stelzik, and each month was represented by an animal. She hadn’t turned the page to April yet, so it was still on March, a striped hyena. Except it wasn’t the animal that had caught her eye this time.
It was the dates underneath.
It was something printed next to 13 March.
She hadn’t noticed it nineteen days ago, not only because the print was so small, but because she’d been so deeply embedded in building her lists, in taping her pieces of paper to the wall, in moving string from area to area.
But as she stared at it now she froze.
Under 13 March were two words.
She glanced at the alarm clock and saw that it was 10.15 a.m. She should have had plenty of time to get to the ferry if she left now. She should have been able to get there well ahead of when Hain and Lima arrived on the island. But she’d made a mistake.
A terrible mistake.
She looked again at the two printed words.
DST starts.
Daylight Saving Time. She’d missed the switch on 13 March. And that meant it wasn’t 10.15 a.m. right now.
It was 11.15.
Hain and Lima were already here.