Behind him there was a jarring shudder, as though the whole wall had opened. When he turned, a faint line of light was visible at the edge of the front door. Steve could just make out a figure standing inside. Something white appeared in the opening, fluttering in the darkness like a flag of truce. It was an envelope. Steve reached out and gingerly gripped the corner. The other end was instantly released. He could make out nothing of the figure within except for the eyes, brilliant and restless, busily at work, running over the boy’s face and clothing like a pair of scavenging mice, speedy and discreet but missing nothing. Then the door snapped shut. The next moment it looked as though it had not been opened for years.
The list was a lot longer this time, and two five-pound notes were enclosed. It added up to quite a fair weight, too. By now Steve was used to the heavy slingful of papers, but by the time he had finished his round the strap had worn a welt across his shoulder that made it quite painful to carry this additional load, so he decided to stop for a rest. On the way back from the supermarket there was a small park, a triangle of grass intersected by an asphalt path where elderly people stood looking airily around while their panicky-eyed dogs laboured to expel sausage-like turds. Just inside the railings at the entrance to the park was a building providing similar facilities for MEN and OMEN, and Steve had discovered that this was a good place for a rest. You were sheltered from the wind and the rain, and one of the cubicles had a broken window which let in a bit of fresh air to dilute the stink of disinfectant and stale pee. Here Steve would settle down and read through the stories. The walls were covered in them, rambling, repetitive, unpunctuated tales about soiled panties and schoolboys’ bums. By now he’d read them all at least once, but knowing what happened and how it all ended just made them more reassuring and relaxing. Surprise, in Steve’s experience, was an overrated quality.
When he came out, the wind was stronger than ever. His sodden clothes hung stiffly from his body. He suddenly felt tired and hungry and cold, no longer interested in what was going to happen when he got to the house. He turned into Paxton Grove, the street before Grafton Avenue, and trudged the last few hundred yards to the corner. He was still only half-way up the covered steps when he noticed that the front door of the house was open again. Just a crack at first, but as Steve got nearer the gap started to widen. A wave of warmth reached out and enfolded the boy. There were odours in it, intimate and familiar as the smell of his own body. Half-hidden behind the door was a man wrinkled beyond measure, crumpled and shrunk, fabulously old. His skin was dark and blotchy, ridged and troughed with blood vessels and tendons. Only the eyes looked more or less ordinary, which gave them a freakish, alien appearance in that ruined face, as though he had stolen them.
‘Come in,’ he urged, beckoning with a hand which resembled one of the bits of chicken that Steve had sometimes found in rubbish bins but learned to reject as inedible. The boy hesitated. The warmth was still flowing out of the open doorway, as though from a limitless reservoir. Its swirling embrace made him feel light-headed and confused.
‘Tea’s made,’ the old man said.
His eyes never ceased their radar-like sweeps, and in their restless movement Steve read an anxiety even greater than his own. What worried him was the idea that this old man might not really be an old man at all, that once the front door was closed he would start laughing maniacally and then pull off his face and head to reveal the blood-streaked features of the demon beneath, like in Dave’s fave video. But there seemed to be no signs that anything of that sort was likely to happen. The man looked no different from any of the other old people Steve had seen making their slow, painful, lonely way along the streets, as though doing penance for some crime. And although he wasn’t aware of it, the smells and the warmth of the house were whispering to him all the time, telling him that no harm could come to him there. Hoisting the orange sling with a certain professional flair, the boy stepped over the threshold.
Like the house itself, the hallway was tall and narrow. It was lit by a single bulb enveloped in a large bowl of milky glass, which muffled the light so effectively that Steve could only just make out a flight of stairs reaching up to the invisible ceiling and a door standing open into a large front room whose windows were smothered in velvet curtaining. When the old man had finished locking and bolting the front door, he turned the other way, down a long corridor with brass-handled doors opening off it to either side. The walls were covered in discoloured paper decorated with a design of small flowers in diagonal rows. Floorboards creaked beneath the thin runner of threadbare red carpeting. Steve’s fear was still there, but dreamily distanced, like pain by a partial anaesthetic. He had an absurd feeling that they had already walked further than the length of the house. It was no use looking back to correct this illusion, for the old man had already paused to switch off the light behind them.
The corridor came to an end in a cramped alcove with a ceiling that Steve could almost touch. A set of narrow steps ran down to the basement as steeply as a ladder.
‘Nearly there,’ the old man muttered, starting down.
Steve followed, his dreamlike lack of anxiety still intact. As they descended, it got darker and warmer. At the bottom, Steve actually bumped into the old man, who had stopped, groping for a switch, and this first physical contact between them shocked him almost as much as the time he had touched Tracy’s arm accidentally on purpose. Then everything went black as the old man switched off the light at the head of the stairs.
‘Bulb’s gone down here,’ he explained.
Oddly, crazily really, Steve remained unafraid, following the old man forward into a darkness that revealed itself, once he grew used to it, as not quite solid. The leakage of light from somewhere up ahead was just sufficient to reveal the outlines of the old man’s figure and the doorways and openings of passages to either side. At last they reached the source of the glimmer, a door standing slightly ajar. Inside, the heat was overpowering. The smells whose tendrils had crept out of the front door were rooted in it, rank and exotic as tropical foliage.
The old man pointed out a large table in the centre of the room. It was draped in a dark red oilskin on which lay a bottle half full of milk, a shiny brown porcelain teapot, a pair of trousers, two chipped mugs with spoons in them, a bag of sugar and a grimy towel. Steve dumped the orange sling on the table and started to unpack the plastic bags of groceries.
‘They didn’t have Fry’s cocoa,’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll just have to make do, somehow.’
Two drying racks suspended on pulleys from the ceiling supported an assortment of shirts, underclothes and bedlinen, which formed a canopy over the centre of the room. An enormous armchair was drawn up before the cast-iron kitchen range which occupied one entire wall. Both walls and woodwork were covered in thick glossy paint of a creamy yellow shade, the floor in a sheet of dull red linoleum, which was starting to crack and blister and break away from its backing in places.
‘And you are?’ the old man demanded abruptly.