In the garden the four women with long skirts sat on the corners of a large patchwork blanket. Their heads were bowed so she couldn’t see their faces. On top of their heads their dirty hair was piled into coils. She wondered if they were reading. A small wooden box, with a purple velvet curtain draped over the front, was placed in the middle of the blanket.
Someone had put a wooden ladder against an oak tree and arranged four identical wooden chairs beneath the lowest limb.
Only when she sat on the blanket did Stephanie realize the women were all crying into their thin white hands. How had she not noticed before?
Placed on the blanket in front of each of the women was an old creased chapbook with something written on the cover she couldn’t make out.
When one of the women became aware of Stephanie, she removed her hands from her face and revealed what looked like a skull in a wig. The sharp features were tightly papered with a mottled parchment of skin, and the woman’s eye sockets were empty. Stephanie tried to scream but had no breath. The woman said, ‘What’s the matter with my face…?’
Stephanie wasn’t in the garden for long before she found herself inside a dark place with wet brick walls, through which the women in the long skirts bustled. When the tunnel became too tight for them to go any further, the women slipped to their hands and knees and rolled sideways into blackened stone cavities near the floor. The holes looked like drains without grates.
‘This one is yours,’ said a voice behind her.
She looked down at the black space, no more than a little stone alcove at the foot of the wall. ‘In there? I can’t. I can’t. I don’t like closed spaces.’
Stephanie looked over her shoulder. There was no one behind her. And even though she was only a little girl, when she tried to squeeze back through the narrow passage, and towards what looked like a door sunken into one side of the shaft, she became wedged.
What she had thought was a doorway was only a cleft in the brick wall. Inside of the cavity something wrapped in polythene was standing upright. ‘What is the time?’ it asked her.
* * *
Stephanie awoke into silence and a cold so fierce it burned her forehead, the only part of her face exposed above the bedcovers. She tugged the plugs out of her ears. There was a delectable moment of cool air filling the ear canals.
A smear of half-remembered images sank into oblivion, until she could not pin down much about the nightmare at all. There had been wet brick walls … long skirts … a face, a horrid face.
She looked about the walls and ceiling of her room, took in the mirrored wardrobe doors, the little glass table, her bags, the window. She saw nothing move. Sniffed at the chilled air. Detected no trace of the male animal odours.
Thank God.
Silence next door too, and in the rooms of those living above her. But she knew she was not alone on account of the plummet in air temperature.
Pulling the duvet with her she sat up in bed and glanced at her travel clock: three a.m. Her mind scrabbled for ideas of what to do, and for clues about what might be happening, or about to occur.
They can’t hurt you was the only reassuring notion that came to her, though she found that very hard to believe.
A girl: it must be one of the female presences inside her room. Can she see me?
Stephanie swallowed hard. ‘Hello.’ Her voice was no more than a whisper. She raised it. ‘Hello. I know you’re there. I … I can feel you.’
Silence.
‘It’s all right. I promise. He’s not here. And I won’t scream. Are you … are you Russian?’
Silence.
Her sense of being watched was acute. And there was a peculiar tension growing inside her eyes and ears, like anticipation. Something was trying to get her attention; not by movement or sound, but through other means.
Another part of her, like some unused sense, seemed to quiver in response to what felt like a change in the air pressure. She might have been close to the edge of an awful drop, or about to cross a road ploughed by fast traffic in the rain. An unpleasant tightness around her belly grew into her chest and made her breathless. As before, her spirits quickly darkened and she felt as sad and lost as a child separated from its parent in a crowd of indifferent adults.
She was stuck in this house and would never be released or found. No one cared enough to come looking for her. This was her end and also her future, because the house was not a true conclusion to existence, only of life.
She had no role to offer the world and had been shuffled into a forgotten and dreary corner to wait quietly until expiration. She belonged amongst dust and dreary colours, age, stone, the plaster that sealed it, the paper that covered it. She amounted to nothing. She had kidded herself that she could function in the world.
A sob broke from her. Stephanie covered her face.
Fingers pressed her forearm.
Stephanie thrust her body back against the wall.
The touch had been freezing. She could still feel the chill indenting her flesh.
‘Please … don’t. Please,’ she whimpered.
She clutched her hands over her ears because she was sure a mouth had opened, close by, to speak. She didn’t know how she knew this. Maybe she didn’t know and this was nothing but her senses spiking with panic, but she could not bear to hear a voice.
The touch of a cold hand became a gentle squeeze around her wrist. And this time she did not cry out, or even breathe. With the exception of the shivers that erupted over her entire covering of skin, Stephanie remained absolutely still.
The lights are on. There is no one there. Can’t hurt you, hurt you, hurt you …
‘Hold me,’ a voice said. ‘I’m so cold.’
Stephanie closed her eyes tight. Either a young woman had spoken with her mouth a hair’s breadth from her ear, or she’d heard the request inside her mind.
Cold, invisible fingers remained attached to her wrist. And whatever was beside her slowly reclined upon the bed. The mattress gently gave to support a weight that could not be, and perhaps her eyes deceived her, or maybe the exposed bed sheet really did move.
‘Hold me. I’m so cold.’
Staring at her trembling arm, dumbstruck at her own compliance, Stephanie eased herself down to a freezing mattress that she now shared with something she could not see.
* * *
Stephanie struggled to breathe, her facial muscles barely moved. Something covered her face tightly. Opening her eyes fully was impossible. One eyelid was partially stuck shut and the second was completely sealed. The space before her eyes was as black as pitch.
Flurries of panic pricked her stomach. Her immediate and instinctive reaction was to raise her hands and tear off the thing covering her face that smelled of plastic. But her arms were stuck fast against the sides of her body: she was bound from hip to shoulder.
She could wriggle her fingers against her thighs, move her toes, but no other movement was possible. Her legs were also awkwardly and uncomfortably strapped together by bindings she could feel against the sides of her knees and pressing into her ankles and Achilles tendons.
Her skin responded to points of pressure scattered about her body: shoulders stuck against a hard surface; the soles of her bare feet touched what felt like cold bricks without supporting her weight. Whatever had passed under her arms, crossed her chest, and gripped her throat tightly, felt like coarse string. The twine held her in position, held her upright.
Or was she upright? It was so dark and any movement beyond her fingers and toes so restricted, she was no longer sure if she was lying down, lying sideways, or even hanging upside down with her feet pressed against the ceiling.
Hysteria flooded her mind.
Within the secure moorings, the energy of the terror that spread from her core and lit up her muscles only succeeded in producing a frail tremble throughout her body.
The scream she issued through lips clamped around the tube that passed between them, was wholly contained inside her mouth. She tugged at the air with her nose but only drew a short sniff up each nostril. Not much air was coming in through that route.
Powered with all the might of her lungs, her mouth pulled a thin stream of oxygen through the tube. What she managed to draw inside tasted of wood and dust. If she didn’t calm down, catch her breath and regulate her breathing, she was going to suffocate while being unable to move anything but her fingers and toes.
When the lack of air made her chest feel as if it were full of cement, any attempt to calm down was engulfed by a panic so total it was mindless. Amongst the flashes of quickly passing memories that crowded the walls of her skull, came a hope that she would die quickly.
* * *
Stephanie didn’t so much sit up in bed as thrust herself upwards and onto her knees. She kicked off the duvet and dropped to the floor, gasping like her head had been held under water.
For a while she was convinced she had been about to die in her sleep. She must have had her head cocked at an unusual angle to restrict her windpipe, or she had sucked the bed coverings inside her mouth or squashed them against her nose. Restricted breathing had then been transformed into a nightmare. The relief that came with finding herself on the floor of her spacious room and able to move her hands through the air and to blink, to see, to breathe, made her eyes blur with tears of joy that ran down her cheeks.
But the room next door was enduring a break-in, or worse.
Her neighbour whimpered and sobbed as her body, and the feet of her assailant, bumped about the floor of the room. The woman was being moved or positioned against her will in a manner that was painful, that made her neighbour sob and cry at the point before her strength failed.
Stephanie ran to the door of her room. Unlocked it and tugged it open, determined to stop the attack, to end the sounds of violence as she had managed to do before, without having a clue why the activity had stopped that first time.
Who can be sure of anything here?
She banged her hands against the door. ‘I’ve called the police. The police, you bastard! You touch her again and you’ll be sorry. You fucking pig!’
Her delight that the male presence seemed to comply with her demands was short-lived. Because as soon as the room fell silent, the darkness of the first floor began to fill with other sounds. Or other voices.
About her the cold air muttered with what could have been a radio changing channels. Into the hitherto peaceful room on the right-hand side of the corridor she followed one voice, and seemingly with her whole being, until the voice settled behind the locked door into a low, repetitive intonation of …
It sounded like a recitation of scripture.
Stephanie pressed her ear to the door.
The voice on the other side rose and fell, into and out of coherence, to peaks of earnestness before sinking to a muffled, half-sobbed tone of desperation. It was the voice of an older woman she was hearing, a woman speaking quickly.
‘To speak evil … no brawlers … all meekness unto … foolish, disobedient, deceived … diverse lusts and pleasures … malice and envy, hateful … hating one another … kindness … love of God our Saviour…’
From the bathroom came the broken utterances of the girl beneath the floor, spilling across the landing at the end of the hallway, as if she too were now raising her voice to get Stephanie’s attention.
‘Is my name?… before here … that time. Nowhere … to where the other … the cold … is my name?…’
In the room next to her own, the girl who had been attacked had resigned herself to weeping from a misery that seemed bottomless.
‘God.’ Stephanie placed the back of a hand against her nose and mouth because of the smell; the terrible miasma in the cold air now swelled up the stairwell and billowed across the first floor landing before hitting her full in the face. Into her memory came the image of the tatty brown remains of a pet rabbit wrapped in a blue blanket, that she and her friend, Lucinda, had exhumed from a rockery at the bottom of Lucinda’s garden when they were little girls, in a well-intentioned hope of returning the pet to life.
Stephanie turned and fled to her room. Shut and locked herself inside, before sinking to her bottom with her back pressed against the door.