Run.
I sprint across the tiles, into the icy scullery. I can’t find the light switch, but another flash of lightning exposes my worst remaining fear. The mortice key is gone. When I turn the handle, the door to the back garden is locked too.
There’s nowhere left to go. I need to calm down. Ross will be back soon. I need to think. And then I need to act.
I go into the kitchen. Right my fallen chair. Take out my phone and return Rafiq’s call.
‘I’m in the house,’ I say, when it goes to voicemail. And I’ve no time to say anything more before thunder breaks over the house in an explosive roar, my signal cuts off, and the garden reappears in a frozen white sheet of light.
The orchard, the ugly plinths and paving, the washhouse and its slate roof, its chained door. And there, on the naked expanse of wall alongside, standing out in stark relief against it, like an overexposed photo flash: high and wide and blood-red. Loud enough to be a shout. A scream.
El did scream as she stared out the window, her finger pointing. I saw her reflection against the dark glass, her mouth a horrified O. The moonlight made silver shadows of the apple trees, the exercise yard, the high prison walls. And the words painted in an ugly red warning.
HE KNOWS
The horror of them froze me still.
Until I heard the deadlock. Turning over with a clunk, heavy and loud. Just like the jail cells in the Shank.
The lights go out in another bellow of thunder, and I scream, drop my phone with a clatter. I’m on my hands and knees on the floor, frantically scrabbling around, when the lights flicker back on with a low humming buzz.
‘Cat?’
I freeze. My phone is under the table. I lunge for it, scramble to my feet.
‘You okay?’
Creak, creak, pause. He’s at the top of the stairs.
‘Yeah.’ My voice cracks on the word.
Another creak, a longer pause. ‘I’ll get the torch just in case we’re in for a power cut, and then I’ll be back down.’ Creak. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’ He sounds too cheerful; the smile in his voice has teeth. Especially after our argument. Especially after what I said, and what he didn’t. Especially after my scream.
The bell ring stops me in my panicked tracks. Low and heavy, ponderous. I look up at the bell board, at the violently swinging bell. Thin, tinny, F sharp or G flat. Bathroom is nearly obscured behind the frantic star-shaped pendulum. I look up at the ceiling. Why the fuck would Ross be pulling the bell pull in the bathroom? I look at my reflection in the kitchen window, the dark shadows of my face distorted by the rain. It isn’t him.
This time, when the lights brown out and then flicker before turning the kitchen back into black, I don’t scream. Nor when thunder shakes the house from ceiling to floor and the garden lights up white again. I expect the words to be gone. I want them to be gone, because then I’m just crazy, a person so determined to forever run away that she invents more fantasies than she can ever possibly examine or refute. But there they still are, in the second before the garden turns back to darkness, and the kitchen to light. The words, the facts. The writing on the wall.
HE KNOWS
Mum did scream when she heard the deadlock. Seizing El with her good arm, and me with her bad, she pulled us away from the window, pushed us back into the hallway. We didn’t want to go. Mum shoved us towards the pantry, the Berlin Wall. Get to Mirrorland now. Her lopsided, black-bruised face so determined, her nails scratching, feet kicking – she was never afraid to hurt us. A glance over her shoulder like a bird about to peck, about to fly. I’ll stop him. But you have to be quick. It’s time. It has to be tonight. You have to go NOW. RUN!
There are two bells ringing together now, discordant and frenzied, their stars swinging drunkenly, the bell board shuddering, shedding dust. Bedrooms 4 and 5. The Princess Tower and the Donkshop. Ringing together, because both are opposite each other at the end of the landing. Then Bedroom 3: low and long inside their fading echo. He’s coming back. I stumble out of the kitchen as the lights flicker again, as the bells change again. Bedrooms 1 and 2. The Kakadu Jungle and the Clown Café. He’s at the top of the stairs. I run for the pantry, tear back the curtain. Because it doesn’t matter if those blood-red words are only repressed memory. It doesn’t matter if the ringing bells are real or only in my head. It doesn’t matter that there hasn’t been a Mum or a Bluebeard or a drill in nearly twenty years. They are a warning. A warning that I have to obey. Because even more than fantasies or creaking old floorboards, those bells have always been this house’s best alarm system. And Mirrorland has always been its sanctuary.
In the wake of another roar of thunder, I hear Ross’s shout. I don’t look out the window as I run for the cupboard, lift up its latch, drag the stool over, climb up inside. The lights flicker, and I turn on my phone’s torch, close the cupboard door behind me. The light throws deep shadows; they advance and retreat as I reach up to slide back the two heavy bolts. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can’t stop it, I don’t even want to. For just once I have to trust myself. I open the door to Mirrorland, step down onto the wooden staircase. Freeze when I hear another bell, twice and short. Ross is in the kitchen. He shouts again, closer this time. A jangling, nervy bell. A moment’s silence, and then another. Both muffled, but still my old muscle memory wins out. Drawing Room. Dining Room. He’s running out of places to look.
I close the door, but that’s all I can do. Ross knows it’s here. And he knows that just like the cupboard door, there are no locks on its inside, nothing to wedge up against it. Vertigo has me groping for a hand that isn’t there, and I stop, breathe through it. I move into the dark, stepping down onto the next step and the next, and all I let myself think of is Ross swinging up through the skylight in the washhouse roof like a chimpanzee. Escaping into the day. I whisper the words I thought in this very place eleven days ago. I’m no longer a child. This time, I won’t be too afraid of climbing, of falling.
The rucksacks were too bulky. They dragged and scraped against the staircase walls. El’s hand held mine, too tight, too hot, our torchlight dancing angry spikes. Grandpa roared above us. Mum’s protests soon turned into screams. And when an almighty crash shook the walls, El pulled me down faster. Come on, come on. Quick.
A high, polite tinkle like an old-fashioned clothes shop door. The Pantry. It has to be – the only bell I’ve never heard, not once. Because Grandpa never came into the pantry. He thought it was a narrow, cold schoolroom. Up until that last night, he didn’t even know Mirrorland existed; didn’t know there was a way into the washhouse that wasn’t padlocked or chained. I look up and over my shoulder, but only for a second – the darkness is too thick and the steps too steep. And Ross will be behind me soon enough anyway.
CHAPTER 27
I reach the bottom of the steps, and flail around for the bulb’s dangling cord, pull down hard when I find it. This time, the light is neither immediate nor strong. It flickers, browns, settles on a muted butter glow.
When El pulled down on that same cord, flooding Mirrorland in cold silver, I dropped my rucksack, cringed from an overhead bang loud enough to vibrate the wooden rafters. What do we do now? And I hardly cared that it was the wail of a child, or that El thought so too, pushing me towards the border between the Shank and the Satisfaction. What Mum said. Come on!