She turned, stiffly, and walked slowly along the corridor, tapping her long fingernail on each window as she passed it. She was coming in the direction of the garden staircase. A second shadowy figure moved behind her – the chimpira. Next to my foot a stepping-stone was sunk into the wet ground. I clawed at it frantically, making my fingers bleed, dragging it out and clasping it, with the bag, against my chest. I tried to picture the garden around me. Even if I could get through the twisted branches, the gates were a fifteen-second sprint from there, straight across the naked garden. I’d be safer in here, where my tracks couldn’t be seen for the undergrowth, and if I…
I stopped breathing. They’d found the staircase. I could hear their footsteps echoing on the stairs. They’re coming for me, I thought, all the bones in my body turning to water. I’m next. Then someone was pulling open the screen door, and before I could scramble away the Nurse’s dark profile emerged through the frozen filigree of snow-covered branches. She dipped a little to enter the wisteria tunnel then travelled quickly, smoothly, as if running on invisible tracks, to the end where she emerged, standing straight and dark in the snow-covered rock garden, twitching her huge head in tiny movements, like a stallion sniffing the air. Her breath was white – she was steaming as if from some exertion.
I didn’t breathe. She’d sense it if I did – she was so attuned she’d sense my hairs going up, the infinitesimal widening of an artery, maybe even the crackle of my thoughts. The chimpira hovered in the doorway, peering out at the Nurse, who turned her head first in my direction, then to scan the trees, and then in the opposite direction – to the gates. After a moment’s hesitation, she continued across the garden, every now and then stopping to look around herself with great deliberation. For a moment, as she went into the tunnel, she was lost in a swirl of snow, then I heard her trying the gate, I heard it opening with a long, slow creak. The snow cleared and I could see her, standing very still, contemplating, her hand resting on the latch.
‘What is it?’ hissed the chimpira, and I thought I heard nervousness in his voice. ‘Can you see anything?’
The Nurse didn’t answer. She rubbed her fingers on the latch, then lifted them to her nose and sniffed, her mouth a little open as if to let the scent roam round her mouth. She pushed her head through the gates and looked out into the street and it hit me like lightning: no tracks – no tracks in the snow. She’ll know I haven’t gone out there…
I shoved the package inside my jacket, zipped it up, pushed the stone into my pocket and edged silently, just another shadow slipping round the trees, to where the broken security grille hung on its hinges. The window was just as I remembered it, slightly open, the glass rather mossed. I leaned over as far as I dared, gripping the frame for balance, and hauled myself across the blank stretch of snow, up onto a toppled branch that lay against the wall. I stood for a moment, wobbling, my hot, terrified breath coming back at me, steaming up the pane. When I wiped it my own face met me in the glass and in my shock I almost stepped back. Slowly, slowly, concentrate. I turned and squinted through the undergrowth. She hadn’t moved – her back was still towards me, she was still considering the street in her detached, unhurried way. The chimpira had stepped out of the doorway and was watching her, his back to me.
I pulled the window open in tiny increments, lifting the pane to stop it squealing and at that moment, as if she had heard me, she turned from the gate and looked back in the direction she’d come, her head rotating very slowly.
I didn’t wait. I hooked my leg through the gap and with one push levered myself into the house, dropping down into a crouch in the dark. I stayed there, shocked by the noise I’d made, my hands on the floor, waiting until the sound had spent itself, echoing around the closed-off old rooms. Somewhere in the darkness to my left I could hear the scattering footsteps of rats. I fumbled in my pocket, switched on the torch and, holding my hand over it, allowed a timid beam to creep across the floor. The room leaped into flickering life around me – small, with a cold, flagged floor and piles of rubbish everywhere. A few feet ahead was an empty doorway. The beam extended into it, smooth and featureless, far down into the depths of the house. I clicked off the torch and crawled like a dog, pushing through cobwebs and dust, head first into the doorway, then on into the next, going deeper and deeper into the house until I had gone so far into the warren of rooms that I was sure they would never find me.
I stopped and looked back the way I’d come. The only thing I could hear was the thudding of my heart. Did you see me? Did you see me? Only silence answered. From somewhere in the darkness came a steady drip drip drip and there was a smell, too, rich and peaty, the mineral smell of trapped water and decay.
I crouched there, breathing hard, until, when an age seemed to have gone by and I could hear nothing, I dared to switch on the torch. The beam played over piles of furniture, timbers that had broken from the ceiling, a confetti of plaster and wiring. I could hide here for ever if I had to. My hands quivering, I pulled the package out from my jacket. I’d expected something weighty, something dull and clay-like, but this was too light, as if it contained balsawood or dried bone. I put my fingers inside and found something wrapped in tape, a smooth surface that had exactly the quality of butcher’s paper – thick and shiny. Blood wouldn’t settle long on its waxed surface. I had to stand for a while supported against the wall, breathing hard through my mouth because the thought of what I was holding was too much. I picked at the tape, got hold of the end and pulled at it, when from behind me, a long way back in the darkness, I heard an unmistakable sound. Metal screeching against metal. Someone was pushing open the window I’d climbed through.
57
I shoved the package inside my jacket and scrambled forward blindly, banging into things, my panicky sounds echoing off the walls. Through one room into the next, then the next, not thinking about what I was passing – the rows of kimonos hanging in the corner, as quiet as corpses, the low table in the shadows of one room, still set for a dinner, as if everything had frozen when the landlord’s mother died. I was deep, deep inside the bowels of the house, in endless darkness, when I realized I couldn’t go any further. I was standing in a kitchen, with a sink and a western-style cooker on one wall. On the other wall, unlike the previous rooms, there was a blank where there should have been a doorway leading onwards. No way out. I was trapped.
Fear scuttling up under my hair I whipped the torch round the walls, over the cobwebs, the peeling plaster ceiling. The beam played over a flimsy cupboard panel in the side of the room and I lurched at it, scrabbling at the catch, gouging my fingertips, my feet tattooing on the floor in frantic fear. The panel clicked open with a noise that echoed away into the rooms behind.
I thrust the torch in and saw that it wasn’t a cupboard but a doorway that opened on to the top of a rotting staircase and led away into the darkness. I stepped straight into the opening, carefully pulled the door closed behind me, and went down two steps, clinging to the rickety banister. Dropping to my haunches I shone the torch around. It was a small cellar, maybe a foodstore, about five foot by ten, the walls of thick stone. At head height ran shelving on rusting brackets, upon which crowded dozens of old glass jars, their contents browning. Below that lay a silent, thickened skin of pale pink algae. The stairs led straight down into a stagnant indoor lake.