I followed the cord to see if it was plugged in – maybe I’d pulled the plastic out of its socket – but it was connected, all right. I wiggled the plug in the socket, to see if this made any difference. Still nothing. I replaced the handset, then went into the hall to try the phone there. It, too, was dead. I suppose I’d known all along that it would be.
I stood in the darkened hall, trying to shake off my sick, frightened feeling. The mobile. Where the hell was my mobile? Oh yes, I remembered now. I had switched it off and thrown it contemptuously on to the back seat of the car when Lily had tried to call me on the drive home. Not that my mobile would do me much good here – there was hardly any signal out at this end of the village.
I listened intently, but there was nothing but the faint creak of the house settling about me, the tiniest rustle of dead leaves in the cold still autumn outside. Perhaps the phone was nothing, some glitch with the cable company – or perhaps, whoever they were, they were waiting for me outside, waiting for me to realize the line was dead, and to panic and run out into their grasp.
Why on Earth had I come back to the house?
You know, maybe Lily has a point. Maybe I am insane.
I lifted the phone again, but it was still dead.
That draught, that draught in the kitchen when I’d filled the kettle – where had that been coming from?
‘What now?’ I whispered.
I had to get out of here. I had to get my mobile.
I retreated back into the kitchen, the dizzying vertigo of unreality making me feel as light as air, horribly conscious of how the window framed me by the lamplight, displaying me to anyone who might be watching from the night-shrouded garden. There was a steak knife lying in the sink, slightly greasy from the cooking I’d been doing yesterday. My knuckles whitened around the black plastic grip.
‘Calm down,’ I whispered to myself, but the knife shook anyway.
Now I was back in the kitchen the idea of leaving it appalled me. The rest of the house was silent and unlit – the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator, constantly startling me.
I moved to switch the kitchen fluorescents on, to chase the darkness infesting the house back outdoors and into the night, but found I didn’t dare. My hand covered the switch. It was sweating on to the cold white plastic, leaving salty smears.
There was a sudden sound, a momentarily unidentifiable change. I leapt away from the wall and raised the knife – I didn’t think about it, some part of my reptile brain must have done it for me – then realized it was only the fridge motor winding down.
I remembered to breathe again. It was like the first breath I ever took; air flooded my parched lungs. I sighed in relative relief.
Then the table lamp flickered uncertainly.
Surely the bulb couldn’t be going now. Not now, for God’s sake… Gripping the knife, I resolved to hit the switch for the fluorescents. I would not be left in total darkness. I would not…
The table lamp winked out, and the room vanished.
I think I screamed, if you could call it that. It was a dry, choking noise, a high-pitched cawing, like a crow’s. I’d thrown myself back against the kitchen wall, and now the chilly plaster ground against my shoulders.
My hand snaked out frantically for the light switch, but it had disappeared in the darkness. My fingers slid over the paint, making whispering noises as they brushed against it. Then one finger caught on the tip of the fixture. I jabbed hard at the flat switch, which clicked several times, uselessly.
I slid down the wall a few inches, sagging with terror and despair.
I don’t like the dark at the best of times. A little of the streetlight and the vicarious lights of other houses, shuttered in warmth and safety, lightly limned the larger objects in the kitchen, or it may have been my eyes adjusting to the dark.
You must get out of here. Get out. Get out…
The front door was nearer to me than the back. Besides, my car was out front, with my discarded phone lying in it. I would be safe in my car. Or I could go to a neighbour’s house. The nearest was over the garden wall, but the wall was too high to climb in a hurry and the odds were good that if I screamed, no one would hear me.
I would go out the front way.
I tried to stand up properly, but this was impossible. My body absolutely refused – it was as though I’d been nailed to the wall. The same instinct that had had me jump and brandish the knife before now welded me still, locking my joints.
The wall behind me shook, or it might have been me, desperately wanting to move and not daring to. My ears sensitized to the silence to the point where I could hear the tiny, minuscule tick of the kitchen clock and the roar of the occasional traffic on the main road, several streets away. My shoulders were cold and damp, and cramped sporadically.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was simply too dry.
They had cut the phone and the electricity prior to coming into the house to get me. It was obvious, apparent, so why couldn’t I move?
I held the steak knife before me with crabbed white hands.
There was a sound; my head whipped round in its direction. It was coming from the back of the house – someone was trying the handle of the back door.
This broke the spell. I stood up, the now violently juddering knife held ahead of me, and sidled towards the hall doorway, glancing each way. A faint glow suffused the frosted glass of the front door, enough to silhouette my jackets and coats, hung neatly on their pegs, the spaces where Eddy’s would have been louder than bombs right now. My work jacket, containing my car keys, was in the middle of them, and my hand drifted soundlessly into the pockets, searching for them. Behind me, the living-room door was a rectangle of opaque blackness, and through it came the creak of a window being tried – wood squealing against wood – carrying towards me through the blackness clearly and precisely, like notes of music.
My hand closed over the keys.
The sound of the window being raised stopped abruptly, only to be followed by deceitful silence.
I blinked at my front door. One hand let go of the knife to unfasten the latch.
A shadow might have flickered over the front of the door.
I wanted to weep. I was trapped.
What do they want? I screamed at myself, in the roaring quiet.
Suddenly I made my mind up. To linger in the house was impossible. I must brave the door, shadow or no. If I was quick enough, I might surprise him – he would not be able to see me from outside, through the frosted glass.
I gripped my knife and my courage, and wrenched it open.
There was nothing out there but my lawn and my fence, and my red Audi parked on my street-lit driveway.
I practically fell through the door, jerking it back behind me. The glass shattered as the door was flung against the inner wall, swinging wide. Instantly I knew I was not alone. Something cut down through the air, a line of cold fire, down my shoulder, over my collarbone, heading for my heart, my pounding heart… it was a knife, glittering in the icy air, wielded by a man who had appeared from nowhere, a man who must have been waiting for me, a short stocky man with a black coat and furious eyes staring out of a woollen balaclava.
I thrust my own knife forward into his unprotected middle, shrieking as his flesh resisted for a second, rubbery and tough as the steak I usually used the knife upon. I jerked back in horror.
The air left him in a low animal grunt. He doubled over, his weapon clattering uselessly away. I kicked at him, feeling hot liquid running down my breast.
‘Help!’ I screamed, but it was such a thin, strangled, pathetic noise that no one could have heard it. My vocal chords were knotted with fear. The blood on the knife I held was black and gleamed sickly in the orange light.
‘You fucking bitch…’
It was the man from the school gates, Mr Megane – or at least I thought so; he was wearing the same leather jacket. He seemed about to rush me when he noticed what I was holding.