No One Gets Out Alive (20 page)

‘Hold me,’ a voice said. ‘I’m so cold.’

Stephanie closed her eyes tight. Either a young woman had spoken with her mouth a hair’s breadth from her ear, or she’d heard the request inside her mind.

Cold, invisible fingers remained attached to her wrist. And whatever was beside her slowly reclined upon the bed. The mattress gently gave to support a weight that could not be, and perhaps her
eyes deceived her, or maybe the exposed bed sheet really did move.

‘Hold me. I’m so cold.’

Staring at her trembling arm, dumbstruck at her own compliance, Stephanie eased herself down to a freezing mattress that she now shared with something she could not see.

Stephanie struggled to breathe, her facial muscles barely moved. Something covered her face tightly. Opening her eyes fully was impossible. One eyelid was partially stuck shut
and the second was completely sealed. The space before her eyes was as black as pitch.

Flurries of panic pricked her stomach. Her immediate and instinctive reaction was to raise her hands and tear off the thing covering her face that smelled of plastic. But her arms were stuck
fast against the sides of her body: she was bound from hip to shoulder.

She could wriggle her fingers against her thighs, move her toes, but no other movement was possible. Her legs were also awkwardly and uncomfortably strapped together by bindings she could feel
against the sides of her knees and pressing into her ankles and Achilles tendons.

Her skin responded to points of pressure scattered about her body: shoulders stuck against a hard surface; the soles of her bare feet touched what felt like cold bricks without supporting her
weight. Whatever had passed under her arms, crossed her chest, and gripped her throat tightly, felt like coarse string. The twine held her in position, held her upright.

Or was she upright? It was so dark and any movement beyond her fingers and toes so restricted, she was no longer sure if she was lying down, lying sideways, or even hanging upside down with her
feet pressed against the ceiling.

Hysteria flooded her mind.

Within the secure moorings, the energy of the terror that spread from her core and lit up her muscles only succeeded in producing a frail tremble throughout her body.

The scream she issued through lips clamped around the tube that passed between them, was wholly contained inside her mouth. She tugged at the air with her nose but only drew a short sniff up
each nostril. Not much air was coming in through that route.

Powered with all the might of her lungs, her mouth pulled a thin stream of oxygen through the tube. What she managed to draw inside tasted of wood and dust. If she didn’t calm down, catch
her breath and regulate her breathing, she was going to suffocate while being unable to move anything but her fingers and toes.

When the lack of air made her chest feel as if it were full of cement, any attempt to calm down was engulfed by a panic so total it was mindless. Amongst the flashes of quickly passing memories
that crowded the walls of her skull, came a hope that she would die quickly.

*

Stephanie didn’t so much sit up in bed as thrust herself upwards and onto her knees. She kicked off the duvet and dropped to the floor, gasping like her head had been held
under water.

For a while she was convinced she had been about to die in her sleep. She must have had her head cocked at an unusual angle to restrict her windpipe, or she had sucked the bed coverings inside
her mouth or squashed them against her nose. Restricted breathing had then been transformed into a nightmare. The relief that came with finding herself on the floor of her spacious room and able to
move her hands through the air and to blink, to see, to breathe, made her eyes blur with tears of joy that ran down her cheeks.

But the room next door was enduring a break-in, or worse.

Her neighbour whimpered and sobbed as her body, and the feet of her assailant, bumped about the floor of the room. The woman was being moved or positioned against her will in a manner that was
painful, that made her neighbour sob and cry at the point before her strength failed.

Stephanie ran to the door of her room. Unlocked it and tugged it open, determined to stop the attack, to end the sounds of violence as she had managed to do before, without having a clue why the
activity had stopped that first time.

Who can be sure of anything here?

She banged her hands against the door. ‘I’ve called the police. The police, you bastard! You touch her again and you’ll be sorry. You fucking pig!’

Her delight that the male presence seemed to comply with her demands was short-lived. Because as soon as the room fell silent, the darkness of the first floor began to fill with other sounds. Or
other voices.

About her the cold air muttered with what could have been a radio changing channels. Into the hitherto peaceful room on the right-hand side of the corridor she followed one voice, and seemingly
with her whole being, until the voice settled behind the locked door into a low, repetitive intonation of . . .

It sounded like a recitation of scripture.

Stephanie pressed her ear to the door.

The voice on the other side rose and fell, into and out of coherence, to peaks of earnestness before sinking to a muffled, half-sobbed tone of desperation. It was the voice of an older woman she
was hearing, a woman speaking quickly.

‘To speak evil . . . no brawlers . . . all meekness unto . . . foolish, disobedient, deceived . . . diverse lusts and pleasures . . . malice and envy, hateful . . . hating one another . .
. kindness . . . love of God our Saviour . . .’

From the bathroom came the broken utterances of the girl beneath the floor, spilling across the landing at the end of the hallway, as if she too were now raising her voice to get
Stephanie’s attention.

‘Is my name? . . . before here . . . that time. Nowhere . . . to where the other . . . the cold . . . is my name? . . .’

In the room next to her own, the girl who had been attacked had resigned herself to weeping from a misery that seemed bottomless.

‘God.’ Stephanie placed the back of a hand against her nose and mouth because of the smell; the terrible miasma in the cold air now swelled up the stairwell and billowed across the
first floor landing before hitting her full in the face. Into her memory came the image of the tatty brown remains of a pet rabbit wrapped in a blue blanket, that she and her friend, Lucinda, had
exhumed from a rockery at the bottom of Lucinda’s garden when they were little girls, in a well-intentioned hope of returning the pet to life.

Stephanie turned and fled to her room. Shut and locked herself inside, before sinking to her bottom with her back pressed against the door.

Her eyes hadn’t opened again until ten thirty a.m. and she’d since sat slumped on her bed, wearing the clothes she’d slept in, too tired and too reticent to
venture to the bathroom for a shower, or to the kitchen to boil the yellowing plastic jug for a mug of instant coffee. After the previous night’s disturbances she’d slept for around
three hours that felt like three minutes. The last part of her rest had been as dreamless as a concussion.

Heavy rain struck the window with a violence sufficient to make her shiver in anticipation of entering the cold outside the building’s walls, lit dimly by the rise of the sun behind clouds
the colour of smoke from an oil fire.

She needed to pee. But would
they
be in the bathroom? Did any of the customers stay overnight, or were they only here briefly? Did
they
use the bathroom? There was one toilet
on the second floor but no bathroom. Maybe they came down to the first floor to wash and rinse away the tell-tale smells of perfume and condom rubber. Oh God, it made her feel sick.

Stop it!

Shivery and uncomfortable inside her own skin, she guessed she might now have a chill too. Either that or
something
had chilled her. When she tried to banish the memory of a cold ring
of thin fingers about her arm, the sense of the touch persisted.

As with the other arbitrary visits, at least her visitor the night before had not remained in her bed for long. The fingers had lifted almost as soon as Stephanie lay down. The cold had
dissipated and taken away the awful tension from the air. But had her bedfellow left something behind, inside her? The dream. A message.
A warning
.

The female presence that had been inside her first floor room thus far also suggested a sense of intelligence on the visitor’s behalf; that she was aware of Stephanie. Signs of a sentience
Stephanie would rather not consider, because in addition to the repetitive predictability of voices behind floors, walls and closed doors, her torments had moved to a whole new level last night
– one that suggested interaction.

Even after tugging her woollen cardigan over her hooded fleece, her nerves still chimed with the discomfort she associated with being cold. Her head ached, consistently pulsing with a vague pain
behind one eye and her forehead. Her body was lifeless, her limbs floppy. Even when she finally moved out of bed, a great exertion was required as if her muscles remained asleep. She wouldn’t
have made it through a day’s work even if one had been offered.

You’re broken.

Mentally, she set herself the task of making coffee and washing her face. Her bags were already packed. After a coffee she would call the hotel and confirm a room for tonight. And then make her
way to the city.

*

Her trip to and from the bathroom was made hastily, and she rushed a wash. But she’d found the bathroom quiet and warm. Instead of putting her at ease, the silence
transmitted a nerviness into her and she drew no reassurance from the room’s motives for remaining mute. She suspected the house hadn’t fully recovered from the previous night. The
thickening of silence that came into the house after dark, and the apprehension that accompanied the change of tone, seemed to have lingered deep into Monday morning, as if the demarcation that
separated the vaguely sinister atmosphere of day from the tension and expectation of the night, had been removed.

And perhaps the critical mass of the activity on the first floor, during the early hours, had survived the coming of dawn and now everything was just going to get worse. Even worse than it
was.

Stop it!

The more she reflected on the previous night, the more she believed she had been witness to a phenomenon both contagious and in full swing; an energy that had developed an awful momentum in the
first floor corridor and inside each room branching off it, in turn producing a force of attraction that connected the first floor to something far worse. Something that occupied the ground level,
summoning whatever was down there to produce an unmistakable stench of decomposition. Or so it seemed to her now that she was awake.

Not long now and you’ll be outside and back in the world. Not your problem. Just get out today. Just get out.

A knock at the door.

Stephanie stayed quiet.

A jolly rap, a little drum roll; someone was in a good mood.

‘What?’

It was Knacker. ‘Oh, you is up. I been down twice already but got no answer. Fought you might have been at work, but Fergal says you is in, like.’

Twice? That wasn’t possible; she would have woken, surely, at any sound nearby, let alone a knock. Or would she? Even though her eyes had only opened half an hour ago, she already wanted
to lie back and sink away into a deep, black, indifferent sleep.

Stephanie entertained the idea that she was now too run-down and exhausted to fully wake up until near midday. And Fergal had told Knacker that she was
in
. So she was being watched.
Maybe because she knew what they were up to, what their big entrepreneurial plans had amounted to: flogging the bodies of immigrant women to whoever knocked on the front door.

Knacker drew her attention back to the door of her room and the dark house beyond it. ‘Wondered if I could ask you a favour, like?’

She pictured his horrible face pressed close to the wood, listening intently, and her entire head shook from the pressure of a clenched jaw. ‘I’m not fucking anyone for money, so
piss off! You ask me again and I swear on my life, I don’t give a shit how hard you think you are, I’ll put an end to this bullshit!’

As soon as she finished shouting, she swallowed and stared at herself in the mirror as if trying to reclaim a sense of her real identity. Was she out of her mind?

‘Eh! Eh! Steady on, yeah? We’ve spoken about that, yeah. And you know my feelings on the matter. This has nuffin’ to do wiv that, yeah? The subject is closed. No harm was meant
and I hoped none was gonna be taken. But I can see how you might have got the wrong end of the stick, like.’

Was there a right end to his stick?

He knocked again, harder. ‘Open the door, yeah? Fought you wanted your deposit back, like.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘I’m serious.’

She opened the door, then sat on the bed, sullen, wary, and trying to dampen the anger that wanted to spark into hysteria. God knew she was due.

She’d moved the blunt paring knife from under her pillow to the front pocket of her hoodie, and now pawed her jumper and felt the little cylindrical shape hidden deep inside her clothing.
She wondered if she could use it on anything beside a vegetable.

Knacker came into her room soundlessly, with a feline tread. She watched her visitor closely. His huge, pale eyes immediately flitted about in their sockets, assessing the room, her packed bags,
anything left on the floor, the mobile phone, and all in less than two seconds. His big eyes then lidded and turned on her, their intensity failing to align with the insincere half-smile on his big
lips.

She now understood that his eyes had a separate emotional life to the surrounding facial features. And they tried to pin her down again. Make her squirm. Thwart her own thoughts by somehow
running interference on her mind and baffling her into a frustrated but wary silence. And there was a great potential in those eyes for their owner to do terrible things. She recognized it all over
again.