The box toppled forwards, crashing into Sam, its contents banging around inside, the box gathering a momentum of its own.
He swore. Yelled.
I heard him stumbling backwards.
But by then I was already running to my right, towards the second window in the room, stretching out my hand to my left, smoothing my fingers along the tops of the chest-high cardboard boxes between us, then springing up off the floor, digging in with my elbow, rolling over onto the top of the boxes as if I was launching myself over the bonnet of a car.
I leaped for the next row of boxes.
But whatever was in them wasn’t solid at all.
I crashed down through a box lid but I was still moving forwards and the box rocked with me, tipping over, spilling me out.
Pushing up to my feet and hands, I was just darting through the bedroom doorway for the landing when he grabbed me from behind, around the waist, and dragged me to the floor.
I tried to get up.
Tried again.
I writhed and twisted, painfully aware of the knife, but he wouldn’t let go.
Using my elbows for leverage, I dragged my upper body towards the stairwell leading up to the attic.
There was no carpet.
The stairs were bare wood.
I jammed my upper arms against the treads, gripped with my fingernails and heaved myself forwards as he pulled me back. Then I turned and reached down very far and dug my thumb into the wound on his leg.
He yowled and loosened his grip just enough for me to slip free and kick and kick and kick.
Hitting his arm.
His chest.
His face.
His nose exploded like a crushed fruit.
He roared in disgust and let go of me and I launched myself up the stairs, a bare bulb lighting my way from above the uppermost landing.
I’d almost reached the top when he roared again and I looked back to see him leaping for me, stretching sideways, his face a bloody mess, his eyes and nose smeared.
I fell backwards through the half-closed door into the room on my right, the back room at the top of the house.
I could hear the sirens outside in the street now. They were loud and raucous.
The room was lit red.
There was a single red bulb in the pendant fitting above me.
No ambient light was coming through the windows at all. They were fitted with blackout blinds.
Sam limped and grunted up the staircase behind me as I backed further into the red-lit room, raising my hands and arms in a defensive posture.
He was gargling horribly as he entered after me, his skin rinsed a deep beetroot by the light of the bulb, hobbling badly, his nose and teeth wet with blood.
My eyes were locked on him but I was also acutely aware of my surroundings.
We were in a darkroom, I realized.
There were photographic prints hanging from wires.
The prints were glossy and lush.
Every image was of me.
Asleep in our bedroom.
In the red light, the colours and the contrasts were washed-out, bleached.
Or maybe there hadn’t been many colours in the first place.
Because the photographs had clearly been taken at night with some kind of specialist lens.
A terrible, invasive feeling.
Those clicks in my dreams.
Perhaps they hadn’t just been my mixed-up, nightmare recollections of my time in the basement.
Perhaps they’d been the sound of a camera shutter, too.
Because Sam hadn’t sold all his photographic equipment after all. Some of it was still here.
My feet caught on something and I looked down to see his backpack on the floor.
Drifts of photographs were crammed inside it amid the cash.
This is why he came here.
This is what he wanted.
My eyes settled on some of the prints spilling out of his bag.
Again, the colour spectrums were washed-out.
Again, the images were bleached.
I could see photographs of me bound in the basement, sitting in a chair with my head hanging low, limp in the basement shower, huddled by the bottom of the stairs.
But somehow even worse were the other images.
There were shots of me that must have been taken before my abduction, where my hair was longer, my clothes were different.
Photographs where I was sitting in the window of a central London cafe.
Others where I was waiting for a bus, walking along the street.
One where I was clenching a pair of parted curtains inside the window of my old ground-floor flat in Tooting, staring out with a scared and pensive expression.
‘I’ve been watching you.’
I reached backwards.
Oh God.
He’d been watching me for such a long time.
That feeling I’d had. The paranoia that I was being stalked. The one that had led me to his support group in the first place.
It had been real.
It had happened.
It was him.