The curtain shook, swung, fell back against the window. She had expected a cry of pain as the book was dashed away.
Using the ruler, she parted the curtain.
No one was there. Just the black oblong of night-darkened window. She saw her reflection dimly in the pane. Her hair was wild, disarrayed, as if in fright. She smoothed it down without thinking why. The half-light window at the top of the frame was open, admitting a breeze, a breath of night air. She felt the cooling flow, but now she wanted the house to be secure, sealed. She balanced herself precariously on her office chair and closed the window.
The solitary car was still parked outside, under the streetlamp. It looked like Hike’s, but he was more than an hour away. It could not be him – although mobile phones, wireless broadband, could be accessed from a car. Because of the light shining down from above, the car’s interior was shadowed and she could not make out details – was there someone inside?
She stared, but nothing moved.
Stepping down from her chair she picked up the book that had given her such a fright. It was John Donne’s Collected Poetry, a hardback she had owned since she was at university. She clutched it with the relief of recognition, closed the pages, checked that none of them had been folded back when she knocked it to the floor. There was a dent at the top of the front cover where she had brought down the ruler. The spine, the rest of the binding, the pages, looked none the worse for the incident, but as she turned to put the book on the shelf where it belonged she discovered that there was a large patch of sticky stuff on the back board. She tapped her finger against it and was surprised at the strength of the glue that had been smeared there.
She sat at her desk, despairing, and holding the damaged book. Why this one? She dabbed at the sticky stuff with a paper tissue, but it only made a mess, made the problem worse.
She put the book aside and closed down the computer. She wanted no more incoming emails. At last the room was silent – no whirring sound of the cooling fan, or of the wind from outside, or of anyone or anything moving inside the house. No footsteps or moving objects, no one breathing around her, no suggestion there was anyone near her, or hidden somewhere in a corner she had forgotten to search.
Tiredness was finally sweeping over her, as the physical exertion of the day’s travels and the trauma of arriving home combined against her. But still she could not end the day without being sure.
She moved swiftly from her study, walked straight to the front door, pulled back the bolt and went outside. At once she was in the wind, the sound of trees and foliage moving, the night-time cleansing of the air.
She headed directly for the car parked beneath the streetlamp.
No one was inside, or no one appeared to be inside. She went forward, suddenly alarmed that there might in fact be someone hiding, who had ducked down as she left her house. In her haste she had not thought to bring a torch. She reached the passenger door of the car, braced herself, leaned forward, looked in through the window.
A parallelogram of light fell in from the streetlamp. There was a laptop computer on the front passenger seat, its screen opened up, and lying next to it was a mobile phone. Both revealed by their tiny green LED signals that they were in use, or at least were on standby. There was no sign of anyone hiding in the car. She tried the door, but it was locked. She went to the other side, tried the door there too.
When she turned to go back to her house she realized she had made no attempt to close the front door behind her. In a disturbing reprise of the first sign she had seen of the intrusion, it was swinging to and fro in the wind, a seeming invitation. She hurried back, rushed inside, pushed the door into place and slid the bolt closed.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, listening for sounds from any of the rooms downstairs. The books beside the door, which she had not examined closely before, were still on the shelf where she had thrust them in haste.
Melvina picked them up with a feeling of dread certainty, and looked at the authors’ names: Disraeli, Dickinson, Dickens, Dick, DeLillo, De La Mare...
Once again, full of fear, she toured the house. She checked all the doors and windows, she looked in every room and made sure that no one could be in any conceivable place of concealment. Then, at last, she began to relax.
It was past one o’clock, and although she felt tired she was not yet sleepy. She went back to her cup of drinking chocolate, now lukewarm, and finished it. Then she climbed up the stairs to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and took a shower.
For the first time since she had bought the house, she found being inside the shower frightening: the closing of the cubicle door and the noise of the rushing water cut her off from the rest of the house and made her feel isolated and vulnerable. She wanted to extend sensors throughout the house, detect the first sign of intrusion at the earliest opportunity. She turned off the water almost as soon as she had started, even before it had become warm enough, and stepped out of the shower feeling wet but unwashed. She towelled herself down, still on edge, nervous again.
In the bedroom, she collected the books that had been stacked on the end of her bed, took them down to her reading room. Most of them belonged there, and she would put the others back in her study in the morning. She went downstairs, found the other books, all with authors whose names began with ‘D’. Why?
She turned on the central light in her reading room, and once again she had the unmistakable feeling that something was different, something had changed.
The books on the shelves looked tidier than usuaclass="underline" no books rested face-up on the tops of others. No books leaned to one side. None stuck out.
She looked at the shelf nearest her. Rossetti, Rosenberg, Roberts, Reynolds, Remarque, Rand, Rabelais, Quiller-Couch, Pudney, Proust... All sorted into alphabetical order. By author. In reverse, Z to A.
She put down the pile of ‘D’ authors she was carrying, and turned to the shelves by the window. On the top shelf, to the left, were Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Germinal, La Débâcle, a volume of letters, all by Émile Zola. Next to him, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot and his novel Children of the Ghetto. Next –
She went to the other end of the shelves, by the door. Here was the copy of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, where she had hurriedly stacked it with the three review copies, after she found it in the spare room cupboard. She now realized she had pressed it in beside Le Guin and Kundera.
She took it down, added it to the pile of ‘D’ authors.
One of the hardcovers close at hand was her treasured copy of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. She removed it from the shelf carefully, with her hand shaking again. When she opened the book she found that it was upside-down inside its paper dust-jacket.
Carrying the ‘D’ authors, Melvina went downstairs again to her study. The first book at the top left-hand end of the main shelf was Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, and several more of his novels. Next to those, Koestler. Next to him –
Immediately beside her desk was a long gap in the sequence, which began after Dunstan and the sequence resumed with Defoe. The books she was carrying in both hands, a tall heap of mixed paperbacks and hardcovers, fitted loosely in the space.
She put them back, instinctively sorting them into the reverse sequence – she could not help it.