wanted to invite Adam inside, not wanting to be alone, she was glad when he said goodbye at the door.
‘Do you want me to take your rubbish out?’ he asked, picking up the white bag outside her door.
‘Full service hero,’ she replied, leaning against the doorway. His face was already healing, though the two holes in his bottom lip were still there, like badly placed dimples.
He frowned and sniffed at the air as though sensing something disgusting. ‘You going to be alright here? I could have the spare bedroom made up at mine for as long as you want.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Everyone who wanted to kill me is dead, and the police can wait another day. Careful with that,’ she said, pointing to the bag. He looked confused, but said nothing.
Closing the door behind her, she headed back into the flat, aware she’d not left Adam with any impression he’d see her again. That was fine, as far as she was concerned.
Heading into the bedroom, she closed the door behind her and peeled off her dirty clothes. She fished out fresh pyjamas from a drawer — old comfortable ones with the elastic all but gone, rather than the newer ones that came out on the rare occasion she thought someone might see her in them — and pulled them on. In the mirror, she looked herself in the eye. She could do with a shower, but even that seemed like too much effort.
Was there still a bottle of wine in the fridge? If there was, she was going to climb onto the sofa and sleep there with some dreadful tat on the television to keep her company. She fished her slippers out from under the bed, put them on her feet, and opened her bedroom door. She couldn't help but let out a yelp of panic as she took in the scene of complete destruction.
What remained of her door hung loose from its broken frame. The rest lay in splintered pieces across the inside of her flat, cast into the general chaos of her once-again-wrecked apartment. Her sofa lay broken, and plaster lay scattered from the wound in her wall where she’d slammed the blonde vampire into it. She stared at the chaos for a moment, trying to take it in — she’d gone into her room two minutes earlier, and there’d been no sound coming from the lounge.
It was as though time had rewound, back days to after… the witches had magically cleansed her apartment. Or, in fact, not cleansed. It was an illusion, nothing more, and the illusion was gone. Her stomach sank as she thought back to the vampire corpse in her hallway.
She peered out. No decomposing corpse, at least, but that was where the good news ended. Pools of dried and decaying vampire blood lay over the floor, huge bluebottle flies arcing lazily around them. The stench she’d run into in the call centre was here, too, a rancid decay that hit the back of her throat and made her gag.
There were trail marks through the blood, two sets of footprints — one normal, one like a child’s. There was, however, no sign of the times she’d been back to her apartment. It was as though this reality had been shunted off to one side, and another replaced it, one in which the events of a few nights earlier never occurred.
The trail of the bloody footprints led right to Mrs Phatak’s door. Stomach turning again, she walked toward it. The door latch was broken, as though the lock had been blasted right out of the door. Lucy pushed it open slowly, revealing darkness inside. Bloody footprints — Missy’s, by the looks of it — led inside. She followed them into the lounge. On a beautiful rug in the centre of the living room, two small blood pools. They were the sole sign of violence in the house, but they were enough.
She’d seen Mrs Phatak yesterday morning, or had she? Her head swam with too much to take in. Did the magic bring her back?
The magic. The urn.
She left her neighbour’s flat, careful to pull the door to behind her, heart pounding. Adam took the urn in the bin liner outside her flat, said he’d throw her rubbish out for her. Where would he have taken it?
Still in her pyjamas, she stepped carefully across the floor so as not to get grimness on her slippers. She eased through the fire door and ran down the stairs. The main bins were situated outside the side entrance to her modest block of flats. Adam might well not have known, might have taken the bag with him to throw into a public bin. The bag wasn’t full, barely had anything inside. Could be he was still walking down the street with it by his side.
Propping open the door with a brick, she ducked round the side of the building to the three green wheelie bins that serviced the building. She lifted each lid in turn, putting her head inside each to see what was at the bottom. The light here was crap, though, so she had to get her head inside to see to the bottom. `The smell of rotten food stung her nostrils at every attempt.
At the bottom of the final bin, she found a single bag. It was hard to tell in this wretched gloom, but it might be hers. Leaning the bin over, she reached inside, but her arm wasn’t long enough to reach. Carefully, she tipped the bin over and lifted the bottom. Accumulated bin juice ran out — she had to move her slippers in quick fashion to avoid it. She almost dropped the bin, catching it at the last second, as the sound of the bag sliding down the wet plastic rang out above the noise from the road.
It thunked onto the concrete. What if it had broken? She set the bin the right way up and picked up the bag. It was wet with bin secretions, but she could already tell it was hers. Touching the wet bag as little as possible, she untied the plastic knot, revealing the urn inside, fully intact.
Picking it up gingerly, she half expected lightning flashes or deadly magic attacks, but there was nothing but cold pottery. The bag had even kept it dry. Sighing a vast sigh of relief, she wrapped her hand around it and headed back into the building.
She took the stairs slowly, wanting desperately for this to work, for this little pot to make it so that nothing terrible had happened to her neighbour, wanting even more to convince herself this would be the case.
Opening the door from the stairwell, her heart soared.
Everything was as it should be. She could even hear Nadim playing in the next flat over. The sound gave her a moment of peace until she remembered the time. It was gone midnight — far too late for the eminently sensible Mrs Phatak to be letting Nadim play. She was the kind of neighbour who you never learned their first name, let alone heard noise from past midnight. And were those other kids in there?
Heart sinking, Lucy knocked on the door.
Mrs Phatak opened the door, dressed, harassed. ‘Oh, Lucy, hi. I’ve got a key for you,’ she said, flustered.
‘You already gave me it,’ Lucy said. ‘Do you not remember?’
She furrowed her brow. ‘Did I?’
‘Is everything okay?’
‘I… Nadim’s having a party,’ she said, but her face showed nothing but confusion. ‘There are twelve children in here, making more noise than I thought it possible to make.’
Lucy reached forward, compelled to touch her neighbour, unsure if her hand would pass right through her.
‘I…’ Mrs Phatak started, pulling away.
‘Mrs Phatak,’ Lucy said. ‘You know, I never learned your first name.’
Mrs Phatak stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘I don’t…’
They stared at each other for a second, Mrs Phatak looking caught in total panic.
‘Well, good night,’ Lucy said.
Mrs Phatak’s ghost remnant gave a curt smile and closed the door.
As the door closed, Lucy couldn’t help the tears welling in her eyes, nor the squirming in her stomach. Mrs Phatak was dead, and she’d had a conversation with her… her what? Her ghost? Her avatar? Was she still on the other side of the door? Or did she disappear into nothing? Looking down at the small vase in her hand, Lucy almost dropped it in disgust.
Wiping her eyes on her sleeves, she went back to her door, finding it locked. She had left through a broken door and returned to a whole one. She tried the handle and found it firmly locked.
Even through her tears, she had to laugh, a startled sound that rang out in the empty, sterile, completely fake corridor around her. She looked at the vase. Maybe if she smashed it to the ground, the magic would evaporate, and she’d be left with a shattered door she could walk through. Did she want that?
How the hell did she get back in? The door was back, and locked, the key inside the flat — probably still shoved into the back pocket of her jeans.
Shaking her head, she took the vase to the bottom of the stairs and left it on the window ledge. Running back up the stairs, she found her corridor decimated once more. She walked gingerly around the blood, through the shattered door, and headed for her bedroom. She grabbed her jeans and fished around the pockets for the key.
No key.
She laughed again. Great. Her magic door had a magic key, which only existed when she was close enough to need it. It was impressive, if slightly maddening. She picked up the jeans and placed them outside the wrecked door before heading back downstairs. Once the vase was in her hand once more, she ran back upstairs. The jeans were outside the repaired door. She checked the pocket and found the key, replete with a little blue tag.
You had to hand it to the witches; they had an eye for detail. She opened the ghost door with her ghost key and went back inside. All was as it should be, except she could put her finger on the feeling from before. She had lost ownership of this place, of her things. How could she sit on a sofa she knew to be a magical construct? How could she walk past Mrs Phatak's door?
This wasn’t home. In either state, this wasn’t home. And she couldn’t stay here with the weird animatronic neighbour, or the heartbreak of knowing her actions had gotten the real Mrs Phatak and her son killed.
If Cain hadn’t done the job already, she could kill Missy and Elle.
She sank onto the sofa; the thought troubling her. Had she become so accustomed to killing she wanted to up her body count? Not that it mattered anymore. She couldn’t live here, in this… artifice. But neither could she whisk it away and put it in the bin. She got up from the sofa and placed the vase on her mantelpiece. It could stay here for a while, at least. Lucy did not know if the thing living next to her had a semblance of Mrs Phatak’s reality, but on the off chance it did, she couldn’t wipe it from existence, either.
She went into the bedroom and packed a bag. Enough things for a few days. She had to gather her thoughts. She got dressed once more, pocketed the ghost key, and left her flat. Halfway down the stairs, the lump of plastic pressing against her leg disappeared. She paused, went back up a few steps, and it reappeared. So that was the threshold.
Out in the chilly night, she realised she’d not decided a destination other than it had to be away from here. She thought briefly about her parents, of travelling down to Gloucester to stay with them. But that would lead to too many questions, not about anything that had happened over the last few days, but about why she hadn’t settled down yet, replete with endless hints about getting too old to be grandparents. She could go to Adam, but he was too close to all this. Hell, he was all this. No, she needed a friend.