No One Gets Out Alive (15 page)

Stephanie grabbed her bag and phone and left the room she could not abide being inside any longer.

‘God,’ Stephanie said in a kind of nervy exhale, after sharply drawing breath. But the girl in the garden hadn’t seen Stephanie behind the staircase window,
not even when she had moved into the woman’s peripheral vision.

The girl continued to smoke, one hand tucked under an arm, the other arm lazily bent at the elbow. Her cigarette was as long, thin and white as the fingers that held it. Standing beside a
stained double mattress that leant against the garden wall, the girl stared into the middle distance, her face half turned from the house to stare at the thickets of wet scrub choking the overladen
apple trees.

The girl in the garden also ignored Knacker’s dog; this was the first time Stephanie had seen the creature. It was a type of bull terrier with black and brown tiger-like stripes that were
smooth and tight around its intimidating musculature. The dog pulled towards the girl’s legs, half growling and choking itself at the end of what looked like an anchor chain. Which meant the
dog could see the girl too. The dog had also barked when the suggestion of an angry man had run through the house to the Russian girl’s room, and during the nights when the corridor outside
her room had filled with . . . she didn’t know what. So the dog’s reaction might not indicate that the girl was actually
there.

Not for the first time Stephanie was astonished at herself for having such a thought, though it was unaccompanied by a familiar freeze of fear, because it was daylight.
But then . .
.

She had to get to the bank before it closed to withdraw cash with her chequebook and passport, and she carried on down the stairs to the ground floor, wondering if she had just seen the Russian
girl – she of the strong perfume and high heels who had ignored her and seemed to exist without electric light, who wept alone in the dark, and who Stephanie had virtually come to believe
didn’t exist.
The people of the dark.

But she might now exist.
Oh please let her be real.

Stephanie stopped and thought harder about her second night in the building; her sighting of the Russian girl had been fleeting as the woman passed into the room. But she had received an
impression that her second floor neighbour was tall, blonde and attractive; the girl in the garden was pretty and fitted that description.

If it was the same girl then why was she smoking in the garden when she lived on the second floor? And how did she get into the garden? Probably via the ground floor, though Knacker had said the
ground floor was out of bounds. Or maybe she had walked down the side of the house as it was detached.

Excited by the idea that the girl might actually be real, Stephanie turned and jogged back up the stairs to peer through the stairwell window.

The girl had gone; the dog was quiet and had moved out of sight too.

She peered around the garden, from the unappealing, cluttered patio to the high brick walls that ran along both sides of the property and concealed the neighbouring houses. The end of the rear
yard was obscured. Brambles at head height erupted through small bushes and surrounded an ancient oak tree in the middle of the area. The sight of the tree made Stephanie feel uncomfortable, though
she did not know why. Through the oak tree’s lowest branches she could make out the top of a wooden shed, an old structure, lopsided and swallowed by the unruly, inappropriately fecund
vegetation. By daylight she could also see blackberry vines, as thick as serpents, red as fresh blood, entwined amongst the dross.

She guessed the end of the garden bordered the rear garden of a house in the next street, parallel to Edgehill Road. Over the far walls peeked the upper floors and roofs of houses.

Between the oak tree and the patio, chipboard and offcuts of timber had been soaked by rain so many times they’d begun to look like cardboard. She could see two entire doors down there and
another stained mattress close to where the back door of the house should be. Around the timber, huge chunks of plaster and broken masonry had been dumped in untidy heaps, as if thrown out the back
of the house and left to erode in the garden. A great deal of renovation had taken place at number 82, though not recently.

So who would go down there? A hardened smoker? But why, when smoking was clearly allowed indoors?

Stephanie closed her eyes and took a deep breath before resuming her descent of the staircase. She found herself unable to dwell on the girl’s vanishing act as much as she ordinarily would
have done. Or should do.

On the ground floor, she peered around the banisters and into the unlit corridor that tunnelled towards the rear of the house and the solitary locked door, situated at the end of the hall on the
right hand side. Listening intently, she peered back up the stairs but heard nothing.

Curious about what Fergal had been doing outside the door, Stephanie entered the short passage and moved into the shadows. The walls on either side were painted white but had not received any
attention in years. The layers of paint on the wallpaper were thick and the colour of vanilla ice cream dropped upon summer pavements. The area was musty with a hint of gas, an underfloor odour she
associated with old houses divided into sub-lets, and nothing unusual.

There had once been three doors on the ground floor, but two had been bricked up and painted over many years ago. She could see the outlines of the door frames; they reminded her of empty
picture frames in the unused space of an art gallery.

The surviving door that Fergal had been so enthralled by had the vague outline of ‘1A’ between two holes where screws had once held a flat number in place, and a keyhole.

Stephanie put an ear to the surface of the door and listened.

Nothing.

As if in response to her investigation, somewhere, far up inside the building, another door opened.

Stephanie moved out of the corridor quickly and only paused to check the post: the usual flyers for fried chicken and kebab shops, a minicab card – MILLENNIUM – and a brown window
envelope from Birmingham City Council addressed to Mr Bennet. The letter inside was red and the envelope had FINAL WARNING printed across the front.

Bennet?

Stephanie dropped the post and let herself out of the house.

Steely bright light stung the back of her eyes, as though she’d just opened curtains on a new morning, though it was already noon; she’d slept through her alarm that morning and not
woken until 11.30 – something she’d thought impossible to achieve in that room after the night’s disturbances.

The room’s lights had still been on when she’d awoken. Outside her barred window cars had occasionally passed. There was no sign that anyone had been in the bed beside her at any
time during the night once she’d returned from the front path.

Once the sphincter-pinching terror that came with the suggestion of a body lying down next to her had become a long period of silent inactivity on the mattress, and long after the cold and
drizzle of the night air had calmed her down, exhaustion had chosen its moment to overrun her flattened body and mind. She’d remained unconscious until she’d woken late.

No bad dreams had followed her out of sleep and into daylight either. She’d brushed her teeth and washed in a warm and mercifully silent bathroom, feeling as if she were hyper-real and too
large for life; as if she were mimicking a routine that had long become abnormal in the building. But she’d still tiptoed around the parts of the first floor she used, nervous of starting
it
again, of waking
something
up.

At least she was outside now, alive and well. Even pocks of drizzle against her face, that would soon make her hair frizz, were a welcome change to the close air of the house and the smells of
neglect and age. Out here, anyone she came across would probably be of flesh and blood too.

Without another person in sight she hurried to the bus stop. And was reminded again how odd she found this pocket of North Birmingham; it lacked pedestrians until you neared the city centre,
maintaining a condition of near total silence beyond the main traffic arteries. It was either too tired to stir, asleep, or dead.

She withdrew one hundred pounds with a cheque at the bank, then walked the length of Broad Street, wandering about the cafés and bars of Gas Street Basin to check on her
job applications.

After being been told, in the last of ten businesses she’d submitted a CV to, that they were still looking at a waiting list of over 200 applicants, she sat inside a Costa Coffee and
treated herself to the cheapest sandwich on offer and a small latte.

Was there nothing left in this city that anyone would pay her to do? Even the assistant managers of KFC and McDonalds had shaken their heads three months earlier, and she expected them to repeat
the gesture when she tried again this afternoon. Three days’ work last week was starting to feel like a lottery win.

Her desire to not be inside 82 Edgehill Road continued to prickle through her like static, and compelled her to begin a list in her ‘Jobs’ notebook of those businesses on New Street
and Corporation Street where she’d already left a CV, or completed an application form. She intended to check in with them during what was left of the afternoon. She’d do anything to
put off a return ‘home’.

But as her pen scratched in her notebook, her thoughts wandered off the task and off the page. The world of jobs, shoppers, passing motorists and idling families dwindled in her mind, along with
a consideration of her ability to earn enough money to ever do more than scratch out an existence in a rented room.

Thoughts of her access to something far more sinister, and significant, at 82 Edgehill Road reignited flurries of panic in her stomach. If she were honest, a powerful curiosity had come to life
too, until she found it near impossible to concentrate on the limited prospects of the minimum-wage, uniformed, service-industry positions she wanted so desperately. And instead of employment
opportunities, or employment futilities, it was observations about the house that she was soon listing.

She gave each of her encounters in the house a fresh page in her notebook and was shocked to see how quickly the pages stacked up.

From a sense of three presences in her first room, which she listed as UNDER THE BED/FIREPLACE/THE MOVER, to the RUSSIAN GIRL ON THE 2
^ND
FL, the VOICE IN THE BATHROOM, and FEMALE
VOICE, FIRST FLOOR NEIGHBOUR, she progressed to a page titled: THE ONES WHO WANDER. Here she wrote ANGRY MALE – ALL THREE FLOORS and WOMAN WHO MOVES (who ran into my room from first floor
corridor and spoke to me). This final observation was embellished with a footnote: ‘Or could this be the same one that sat on bed in second floor room?’

Her lists amounted to multiple encounters with what might be at least seven different
presences.

A growing suspicion that she was incrementally slipping into some form of psychosis made her wonder how to address the possibility. Maybe at a GP’s surgery. Her stepmother’s mental
illness had been Stephanie’s motive for taking A Level psychology, so she knew something about this area. Theories she’d studied about personality disorders suggested mental ill-health
was often pre-natal and inherited. An uncle had been schizophrenic, on her mum’s side. He’d committed suicide, as had one of his sons who lived in Australia; a cousin she had never met.
Perhaps she had that gene too.

Yet the notion of suffering delusions was contradicted by her current surroundings; now that she sat in a well-lit café, surrounded by a thoroughly material and conventional world, her
perception within the house seemed anything but balanced or rational. Could mental illness just switch itself off when you went outdoors? Surely it was a near permanent state of being. Which
contributed to her doubts that schizophrenia was the cause of her experiences; that condition would give her no rest and she would be hearing voices now.

The world around the café appeared to be a startlingly unimaginative and ordinary place in comparison to the one she returned to each evening in Perry Bar. Gas Street Basin’s
boutiques, restaurants and the skyline dominated by the new library symbolized an affront to the grubby and sinister world of Edgehill Road. Outside the house, the world was a place where
superstition and considerations of the supernormal remained the preserve of children, of fiction, computer games and films.

At least the trip to the city had shaken her out of what was beginning to feel like a constant delirium. And this was a world she had been fully in step with only a few days before. Her
circumstances coerced her to wonder if she now straddled two very different states of existence, one natural and one unnatural.

Making lists of paranormal phenomena in her job-seeking notebook began to feel absurd, and she fought a desire to hide the open pages should anyone at a nearby table glance across. But as belief
and disbelief continued to change like governments within her mind, Stephanie returned to her journal. Within each entry she began to add details, pertinent to each experience, like:
‘sensitivity to sadness, grief, fear, solitude’.

Her sensitivity to these atmospheres also stayed within the four walls of number 82; her receptivity ceased when the encounters stopped. But if she had some special connection with the dead then
surely the dead were everywhere and she would see them everywhere. So what made the house, or her in it, so special?

Maybe a past trauma was locked inside the building and she was picking it up, like a radio received signals. It was an idea or notion she vaguely recalled from a source long forgotten.

And she wasn’t alone in her awareness of the inexplicable; Fergal had confirmed as much about the house’s other occupants. She suspected Knacker could not accept the idea of them
being there, though his recalcitrance did not exclude him from experiencing the same things as her: the camera, the locks on his door?

She added ‘ODOURS’ to her lists and then defined them. Smells that also dispersed as quickly as they appeared and were pertinent to specific parts of the building, or seemed to be
attached to routines conducted within the building.