His voice sounded different, husky and strained. I wondered if I’d broken something in his jaw when I’d hit him with the hammer.
Or perhaps it was just the real him leaking out.
He surged towards me, hobbling grotesquely on his bad leg, the blade of his knife catching the light.
I shrieked and swung the hammer at him with everything I had.
But he was ready for it this time.
He ducked under my swing and barged into me so hard that I dropped the hammer as I fell back against the stairs.
He advanced on me, and I flipped myself over and scrambled to my feet, hauling on the banister rail with my left hand, vaulting up the first two treads.
It felt like I was trying to run up a down escalator.
A grunt behind me.
Something tagged my heel.
I shrieked again and looked back to see that Sam had lunged for my foot, missed, and was sprawled over the stairs with the knife in his fist, gurning from the pain in his thigh.
A spray of saliva plumed from his lips.
He pushed up from his elbows as I scrambled on, my lungs struggling to suck in enough air.
‘Bethany!’ I screamed.
My heart was pounding so hard it seemed to be beating out of my chest.
I made it to the landing, already breathless, and wheeled left towards the front of the house. Away from the rear bedroom and the family bathroom, because everything was laid out in a mirror image to our place next door.
Or rather, how our place had been before we’d remodelled it.
Stained wallpaper. Threadbare carpeting. Mould spores and patches of damp on the ceilings and walls.
I streaked past a closed bedroom door on my right.
Saw two doors ahead of me.
Unlike in our house, the front rooms hadn’t been knocked through to form one large space.
I chose the door on the right, grasped the handle, put my shoulder to the wood.
Mistake.
The door barely moved before it butted up against something hard on the other side.
I shoved it again.
It didn’t shift.
I couldn’t squeeze through the gap and, when I looked back, Sam had reached the top of the stairs.
He took a rattling breath and used the handrail to swing himself around, grimacing, snarling, limping my way.
My arm jumped with adrenaline as I tried the door on the left.
It opened and I crashed through, my face, hands and upper body slamming into something flat and hard.
The object skidded forwards and toppled at a slant against something else.
I pressed my hands against it to lever myself up.
The curtains hadn’t been drawn. Street lighting illuminated the room, enabling me to see that I was surrounded by cardboard boxes and packaging crates.
They were stacked very high, almost to the ceiling, with narrow, maze-like channels in between. I suspected they contained a lot of John and Mary’s belongings.
The cardboard smelled musty. The room was cold. I guessed the heating had been turned off in here.
Bending low, I ducked along the channel to my right.
Footfall behind me.
It vibrated through the floorboards.
Sam laboured into the entrance to the room. I could hear his wheezing breaths.
Fear squirmed in my belly as I ran at a crouch to my left, then sprang up just beneath a sash window.
There were tall stacks of cardboard boxes behind me.
I couldn’t see Sam.
He couldn’t see me.
I looked out.
No ambulance yet.
No police.
The flames had made it to the first floor of our house. They were lighting up the darkness outside the windows of the bedroom I’d shared with Sam. Dark tendrils of smoke were puckering in the air.
Bethany was standing on the pavement outside John’s gate, stepping forwards and backwards as if she couldn’t decide what to do, looking fretfully between his front door and then off along the street. Donovan’s phone was against her ear and she was shouting into it.
I pressed my hands to the window glass and pushed up, ready to yell to her.
But the sash didn’t move.
I stared at the bolt.
There wasn’t one.
It shouldn’t have been locked.
I hit the glass, thumping and shouting Bethany’s name.
‘I nailed them shut,’ Sam said.
I spun to find him staring at me from the other side of the tall box to my right. A chest-high wall of boxes extended beyond it, separating us. Again, he was leaning to his side. He could barely put any weight on his left leg at all.
My chest was rising and falling. My body felt locked with fear.
I seemed to be looking everywhere all at once, sizing up the distance between us, the shadows in the room, the way he was blocking my route back to the doorway, how he was struggling to stay upright.
‘What do you want?’ I asked him.
‘You. You were all I ever wanted, Lucy.’
A jolt of terror straight to my heart.
My entire body seemed to vibrate as I felt around the window unit behind me. But all I could feel was solid wood and glass.
I glanced over my shoulder at Bethany, and this time she was looking up at me, terrified.
‘They’re almost here,’ she shouted.
‘What was it like?’ Sam asked me. ‘The breakthrough?’
I looked back at him slowly and shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to satisfy his need to know.
But I also understood that I had to stall for time.
‘Did it hurt?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘It was distressing?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
A beat.
My head was spinning.
Then I heard the sirens. They wavered on the air.
We fixed on one another.
The sirens grew louder, screaming nearer.
I saw a fast calculation flit behind his eyes.
The muscles in his jaw bunched.
He raised his knife and glanced towards the bedroom door we’d entered through, as if he was asking himself if he could trap us in here together, and that’s when I shoved off from the wall behind me, braced my palms against the tall cardboard box between us and pushed.