It Knows Where You Live (5 page)

Glancing up and down the street, I checked my site plan against the reality before my eyes. Once this had been a long street, with terraced houses on either side, but now all that remained amid the bombsite wreckage of demolition was eight houses, their walls crooked, the brickwork scarred and dirty, the roofs bowed and showing patches where the tiles had been blown off in high winds. Nobody knew why these buildings had been left behind, but now it was finally time to tear them down and re-use the land for a new residential development. Like old bones, the building material would be carried away, ground to dust and used as landfill.

A wind whipped up, travelling along the street from west to east, stirring up the litter and rubble in the shattered gutters. Somewhere, a board groaned. As I looked up, feeling sad and alone, I watched a distant aeroplane draw a white line through the high blue sky. The place seemed to summon or invoke a sense of dread.

Shrugging off these dismal feelings, I made my way towards the first house. None of them had official house numbers, so in my notes I had simply numbered them as one to eight. It was good enough for my purposes.

The security shutters were padlocked, and I had the keys. Each one bore a paper tag corresponding to the numbers in my notes. I selected key number one and unlocked the shutter, then opened it to allow me access to the front door. The door was old, the paint was peeling off like damaged skin, and the timber beneath looked pale, like dried-out tissue. I pushed open the door—this one was unlocked—and a cloud of dust emerged to greet me. I stepped back, waving a hand in front of my face to ward off the musty odour of neglect, and waited for the dimness beyond the doorway to resolve into a room.

Back in the mid 1990s heroin addicts had used the row as a shooting gallery. Then, suddenly, they’d stopped coming here, as if something had happened to scare them away. The place had not been used by junkies since. Not even the occasional homeless person came here to sleep.

 
Despite the weak sun, the street seemed grey and unwelcoming. How much of this was simply down to a psychological reaction on my part, I cannot say. But the inside of the house was even darker, as if there were a barrier keeping out the daylight. Again, I suspect my mind was at least partially creating these effects, but nevertheless they were real enough at the time.

I adjusted my hard hat, tightened my grip on my bag, and walked forward, entering the house. For a moment it felt as if I were being enveloped in a giant fist. I was being pulled over the threshold rather than simply taking a few steps, but the sensation lasted only a moment—barely even long enough to register. It was only afterwards, when I began to examine my time there at the row of houses, that I fully appreciated what I had felt.

The door led straight into what was once a small living room. The ceiling and most of the first floor were long gone; when I looked up, I could see through the rotten joists right up to the roof. Dust hung in the air. The doorway leading to the kitchen was closed. I stepped gently across the uneven floor, trying not to trip on the piles of rubble, and opened the door. The kitchen was a mess, and when I walked in and looked to my right, I saw most of the dividing wall had been torn down to reveal the kitchen of the house next door. Standing there, in that position, it looked as if this process had been repeated along the entire row, as if some raging berserker had travelled the length of the row and torn down the walls, rampaging through each house.

I took a few snaps with my digital camera and then approached the ruined wall. Prodding around the area with a piece of timber, I decided the structure was not unsound. I took a few measurements, made a few notes, and stepped through into the next kitchen. The rooms were like the images on a photographic copy sheet: near identical scenes, the only differences being in the geometric patterns caused by the rubble. It felt like one long house, each room simply a continuation of the uninhabitable space before. That was the only sensation I experienced. I did not feel the presence of ghosts, or memories stirring in the dust. The row of houses was not haunted by restless spirits, but it did seem possible to me the derelict row might be haunted by the idea of what it had been before. Its past life as a street filled with life, with families living and eating and dying within its walls, haunted the place just as surely as any creaky old phantom.

I encountered nothing else strange or unusual that day, and when Dan returned to pick me up in the little council van, I was waiting for him at the kerb, facing the road and with my back turned on the row of houses soon to be demolished.

Dan dropped me off at home. He seemed distracted during the journey, so we didn’t talk much. He asked how things had gone during the survey, and I told him the structure was stable and I could start planning out a schedule of demolition works the following day. He nodded, kept his eyes on the road, and did not say goodbye when I got out of the van at my house.

Debbie was making dinner when I entered the kitchen. I’d walked in quietly, and she had the radio on, so she didn’t realise I’d come in. I stood in the doorway and watched her, taking in her low-key beauty. She stuck out her lower lip and blew hair out of her eyes, stirring a pot of pasta sauce and moving her hips in time with the music.

She turned unexpectedly, probably registering at some deep level I was there and she was being watched, and when she did so the smile lit up her face as if someone were holding a flashlight under her chin.

“Evening.” I walked further into the room, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table.

“Good day?” She turned back to the stove, still stirring the pot.

“Not bad. Do you know that weird old row of houses on Sebastian Street?”

She nodded. “The creepy ones, nobody’s lived there for ten years?”

“Yep. I did a survey. They’re coming down in the next few weeks, and some new flats are going up in their place.”

“Good,” she said, turning off the heat. “That street is an eyesore. It should’ve been sorted out years ago.” She drained the pasta, and then poured on the sauce.

I got up, went to the fridge, and took out a bottle of wine. I spotted a glass on the work bench, next to where Debbie was cooking. “Top up?”

She glanced over, nodded. “You bet.”

That night, as I lay in bed with a book, watching my wife undress, I experienced the uncomfortable feeling that something outside was examining us through the window. This made no sense, because the curtains were closed, yet still I felt scrutinised. I knew it wasn’t a person, but perhaps some kind of consciousness was trying to understand us, the way we lived, the actions we carried out inside the rooms of our home.

When I slept, I dreamed of that row of houses on Sebastian Street, the security shutters removed from the doorways and the doorways themselves simply rectangles of blackness. Nothing moved in the darkness inside the houses, but I had the sense of frantic activity, of something scurrying between the buildings, using that manmade passageway between the kitchens.

I woke up sweating, with a scream lodged like trapped food at the back of my throat. Then I realised it wasn’t a scream at all, and I vomited all over the bed sheets.
 

Debbie reached for me. “Are you okay?” She got out of bed and rushed around to my side, wiping my forehead with the palm of her hand. “God, you’re hot. Like a radiator.”

“I’m fine,” I said, looking up at her, into her worried blue eyes. “Just a bug, or something.”

Debbie stripped the bed and put the sheets in the washing machine as I cleaned myself up in the bathroom. It was too early in the morning to go back to sleep, so we went downstairs and drank hot, sweet tea until the sun came up. Debbie held my hand. I stared at the side of her face as she watched the daylight flaring beyond the kitchen window, her skin turning golden in the emerging rays.

The following week the row of houses was pulled down. The work went well; there were no problems encountered on site. The whole area was fenced off because of the exposed foundations, which would have to be broken up and removed before construction commenced on the new project.

I stood with Dan on the other side of the now flattened street, staring at the rubble. Diggers and muck shifters were parked on the site, workmen sat eating their packed lunches, and Dan smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.

“It actually improves this dump, don’t it?” Dan smiled through a haze of smoke.

“I see your point,” I said, taking a side step to escape the stench of cheap tobacco. “But doesn’t it feel odd...empty? Like a vacuum?”

“Nah,” said Dan, flicking his cigarette end onto the road. “It feels like a load taken off, a burden dropped. I always hated this street—those houses. If anywhere was going to be haunted, it would be them.” He turned away and started talking to the foreman, and both men began to laugh.

I stared at the place where the row of houses had once stood, and imagined I could still see their outlines, shimmering in the dirty air.

In 2001 a child had gone into one of the houses—which one was never specified in the news reports—and not come out again. His friends witnessed the boy climbing in through a window where one of the boards had come loose, and then they waited for him for over an hour. When he failed to materialise, they went off and told their parents, who then called the police. The boy was never seen again. They did not even find a corpse.

Leaving the other men to their chatter, I walked across the road and strolled along the site boundary, gazing at the ground. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find there, among the remains of the houses, but I do know I was disappointed when I did not discover anything. Not a bone, a fragment of human skull, or even weird effigies scrawled on the foundations. There was nothing—just broken bricks, shattered timber, the usual debris associated with an urban demolition site.

We went home early that evening. The work was done; everything was made safe. There was nothing left to do but post a security guard and wait for the construction squad to move in and commence their ground works.

I took a long bath when I got home, but when I emerged I still felt unclean, as if a filthy miasma clung to my skin and I could not get rid of it, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I had no idea why I felt this way, but I didn’t mention it to Debbie.
 

We made love later that evening, but nothing seemed right. The rhythm was all wrong, and I felt ashamed of the imaginary dirt on my skin. As we moved awkwardly on the mattress, it felt as if we were being watched. I kept glancing over my shoulder, at the window, and expecting to see shadows shifting beyond the curtains.

“What’s wrong,” said Debbie, afterwards.
 

“I don’t know. I think I’m just stressed. Maybe we need a holiday.”

She gripped my hand under the sheets, and I squeezed her fingers.

“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps that’s it. A holiday. We haven’t had one for a couple of years—not a proper one, anyway. I’ll start looking tomorrow; see if there are any cheap deals going.”

I said nothing. What I really wanted—what I needed more than anything—was a holiday from myself. If I could have stepped out of my skin, removing it like a costume, I would have traded it in for another, cleaner outfit. The filth of the row of houses on Sebastian Street—the
former
row of houses—was upon me, like a sticky ghost, and I could feel it working its way inside, penetrating my body through my pores to do untold damage within the walls of my frail house of bones and blood and organs...

I dreamt again of the row of houses. The doors were the black openings to coffins filled with endless night, and long, pale hands beckoned from within, calling to me, summoning me inside. I walked along the row, keeping to the middle of the road, and watched those white fingers dancing, trying to hypnotise me.

The dead lived in those houses, but I did not know their names. To me, they were just an abstract notion, an unspecified group of the damned who represented the concept of nothingness rather than anything tangible. These were the spirits of the houses, a bunch of lazy
genius loci
, and because I had been the last person to walk the floors of the places which housed them, I was cursed to see them here, in my dreams, perhaps forever.

I got out of bed, crossed the room, and opened the bedroom curtains. Outside, rather than the street I’d known for years, was a demolition site. Across the way, directly opposite my house, stood the row of derelict houses from Sebastian Street, misplaced and somehow planted here, right where I lived. The doors were open, belching blackness, and as the shadows moved slowly across the road, towards my front door, I saw held within them the shapes of all the people who had dwelled in the row and those who had never got the chance to live there. The dreams to which the houses themselves had once aspired left to rot, to turn into something dark and malign and grasping.

Because houses dream, too, and sometimes those dreams are nightmares.

Debbie was not in bed beside me when I woke from the dream, hot and clammy and filled with a shapeless fear that punched me from the inside, trying to get out. I rolled out of bed and ran onto the landing. “Debbie!” I could smell fresh coffee, but she did not answer. “Debbie? Are you down there?” I ran down the stairs, almost tripping at the bottom, and into the kitchen.

The kitchen was empty. The coffee machine light was on; two empty cups sat on the bench.

Panicked, I searched every room in the house, calling her name, but she wasn’t there. She was nowhere to be seen.
 

Then, defeated, I sat down in the living room and stared at the silent television, imagining her trapped inside those dream houses, chased by something large and unseen through the passageway between the kitchens.

Then I heard the front door open and slam shut.

I ran out into the hallway, and saw Debbie struggling with a shopping bag.
 

“Give me a hand, would you?”

 
I moved quickly, taking the bag as she stumbled through the doorway. “Where have you been?”