No One Gets Out Alive (30 page)

Knacker hobbled away and she heard the stairs creak under his feet as he returned upstairs to find ‘polyfene’ and cleaning materials.

Fergal stayed in position at the door. What he was listening for she didn’t know, but the idea of him waiting for something to happen in this darkness she had been entombed within was a
prospect that came close to turning her stomach inside out.

Only once fright cleared the emotional storm that the reminders of Ryan’s murder had created, did she become aware again of how weak she was from hunger and a thirst aggravated by crying.
She slid down the door and sat on the floor. She tried to curb her fear enough to think of what to do. And while she waited and prayed that her mind would clear, she listened hard.

Nothing. Not even an ambient sound. Just the distant static of her own hearing inside her skull.

She padded her hands about the floor beside her buttocks. Felt linoleum. She was in a kitchen. She pulled her hands back to her body and then extended them into the darkness again. They met thin
air before her face. After gently pushing her hands out from the sides of her body, her left hand touched wood and withdrew as though it had found a live wire.

She felt for the surface again. Wood, possibly laminate. A kitchen cabinet? Maybe.

She wondered if there was a back door inside the room. If she was inside the kitchen at the back of the property then this room should have access to the garden. Maybe the windows were not
barred. The door might have a glass panel too that she could smash and crawl through. Her breathing sped up to catch her thoughts.

Down on all flours she placed both hands on the smooth flat plane on her left, then worked them sideways to an edge. With what she assumed was a kitchen cabinet pressed into her left side,
Stephanie crawled towards the rear wall of the room. Her nose detected mildew and damp plaster, before an under-sink odour wafted close as if she was near a drain. This was an old space, unused for
a long time.

Grit indented her hands. The floor wasn’t clean. Small pieces of debris or mouse droppings were collecting on her sticky palms. She swatted them clean. Moved on. Until her fingernails
brushed fabric. She explored the thick material with her fingers. Curtains? Must be.
Please don’t let it be a long dress.

Behind the thick fabric she found wood.
A door!
Curtains over a door. The back door.

Stephanie found the door handle and pulled herself upright as though she was dragging herself over the side of a lifeboat.

Locked. She turned the handle again and again, as quietly as she could. Spread her hands wide and padded them over the wood behind the drapes. There were no glass panels.

She lost her balance in the darkness and tottered sideways until the flesh of her hip folded around a hard edge. Another cabinet. Her arms moved quickly, without instruction, to explore the
sides and contents of this trap. When she touched a ridged stainless steel surface she understood she had reached a sink area. Leaning forward she searched for a kitchen window. Her fingers touched
small glass items that moved and chinked together. A spice rack, or something like that. Then her hands discovered cold plaster: a wall beside a set of small shelves.

She shuffled sideways, away from the door, her fingertips retaining contact with the wall until the painted plaster became wood again. What felt like another sheet of wood. She ran her fingers
up and down the edge of the board and found dimples that housed screws.

Below the counter edge that pressed her stomach was the sink. She touched metal taps, knocked a plastic bottle over. ‘Shit.’

The noise of the plastic bottle impacting with the bottom of the dry sink unit sounded far louder than it should have done. She was moving her hands too quickly.

Stephanie swallowed and listened to the darkness behind her, around her.

Nothing.

So wooden boards had been screwed over the kitchen windows and the back door.

Why would anyone do that?

Because it is vacant, locked up, closed away.

To stop something getting out that doesn’t like light.

Stop! Stop! Stop it!

Her imagination could sink her. It was a liability on a dangerous voyage into the unknown. Something best left behind by the front door, because her imagination was an entity that would cling to
her neck like a horrible chattering monkey, its eyes wide and white with alarm in the darkness.

She had to stay as calm as possible. Rational.

Think. Think.

Keep going.

Just past the sink her hip bumped the edge of another hard surface. It rattled. She pulled her hands into contact with the hard shape set at a right angle to the sink unit.
Metal.
Gas
rings. Dials for controlling the gas. Three small buttons indented against the front of one of her thighs.

Light!

Light issued from somewhere in front of her legs: an oven light shining through a door made of glass. The glass was stained with brown grease spatters, but a beery glow still managed to seep
into the kitchen.

Stephanie turned around quickly, her breath caught high in her chest.

For a moment she thought the dark towering shapes all around the room were tall people leaning towards her. Until the inert shapes became silhouettes made up of right angles: painted wooden
doors, kitchen cabinets.

She felt like a diver inside a sunken wreck. She could see the door she had come in through, and the pine boards over the windows above the sink, a pantry door, other cabinets mounted higher up
the wall with frosted glass doors, a tiny table and two quilted chairs. There was a light switch beside a closed door that connected the kitchen to another ground floor room.

Stephanie skittered across the linoleum. Her fingers scrabbled at the light switch. Flipped it down at the same time as she looked up at the strip-light in the middle of a ceiling brown with
ancient cooking fumes.

The light didn’t flicker. If this was a self-contained flat they could have switched off the lights at the fuse box, or maybe the tube was dead.

From beside the door she looked about the kitchen again. It was old and cheaply fitted. The cooker belonged to a sorry period of time that nostalgia and antiquity had yet to increase the value
of. The floor covering was yellow and had a floral pattern, which in turn had been soiled by dirty footprints that were now mostly dusty outlines. The back door had been sealed by floor-length
black curtains. Through a chink she could see the wooden boards.

Sealed inside. You are not getting out.

Stop. Think. Kitchen drawers!

Stephanie flitted across the room. There were three drawers above the cupboard doors she had crawled alongside. She eased the cabinet drawers open. Saw string, an old calendar featuring terrier
dogs, screws, nuts, rawl plugs, metal hinges, a tape measure, shoe polish, rolls and rolls of brown parcel tape, a screwdriver, a box of candles, a little plastic toy from a cereal box.

She clawed the screwdriver out of the drawer. A Phillips, but she could jab with it. The box of candles felt so light her spirits plummeted. But at least the box was rattling. One white candle
remained inside and was unused. She held it in her hand with the screwdriver.

She slowed down; she was making too much noise with her hands, scattering objects inside drawers she could not properly see. The dim light from the oven door was fading, like a torch powered by
a dying battery.

In the last drawer her fingers found cutlery and kitchen utensils. She dropped a spatula and fished out the longest knife by the brown wooden handle.

She slipped the screwdriver and candle inside the front pocket of her hooded top. Swiped a strand of hair off her face. Retied her ponytail as quickly as possible with the knife clamped between
her teeth.

She made another, more careful appraisal of the kitchen. Saw the box of matches on the stove’s hood, above the grill tray. Ran to it.

A centimetre of dust, adhered to grease, coated the top of the oven hood. When she tugged, the match box came away with a ripping sound. Part of the cardboard box remained fossilized on the
stove.

She scraped one match out of the box. Struck it against the ignition strip. The head of the match crumbled until she was scraping wood on sandpaper. She tried another match. Same thing. And
another. And another. When the fourth match caught fire she nearly wept. She dipped the candle wick into the flame and threw the spent match into the sink.

What was Fergal thinking? She had a knife, light and a screwdriver.

Gripped by a new idea she ran across to the back door and moved the curtains to one side. She moved her fingers around the edge of the wood until she found the first screw hole.
Yes!
Phillips screw-heads. The screwdriver even fitted the first head she tested.

She peered all around the door frame, her fingers crawling over the wood she could barely see.
One, two, four, another two, one, two, three, four, five, six, shit . . .
At least ten. It
would take forever to get them all unscrewed.

The door lock.
Could she unscrew the door lock? If she took the handle and plate off, would the door just open? She didn’t know.

Her considerations were cut short by a noise in the neighbouring room.

An item of furniture, maybe a chair, had just been scraped across a floor. It was followed by a soft bump reminiscent of a child or animal slipping off a chair. And then came silence.

Stephanie’s shoulders started to shake like she was standing in waist-deep, freezing water. She couldn’t breathe quickly enough. It was much colder in the kitchen than it had been a
moment ago. Her hands were shaking so much she dropped the candle. The flame doused.

She placed everything clutched in her shaking hands on the counter beside the sink unit. Then began to extract another match.

Another bump from the neighbouring room. Then another.

Stephanie swallowed. Struck the match against the side of the box. Not hard enough because she was trying to be silent.

The bumping was soon accompanied by a shuffling sound, as if something was pressed against the other side of the wall and moving slowly. Yes, it sounded like a person or a large animal was low
to the floor and gradually moving across the adjacent room towards the kitchen door.

Stephanie hadn’t been to the toilet for a long time. Her jeans and underwear were still damp from the last time she’d wet herself in Margaret’s room. Her crotch glowed again
and the warmth spread down the inside of her thighs. When she finished peeing, the denim on her thighs quickly cooled because the air was close to freezing now.

She struck the match again, but her hands had become too heavy and clumsy for the task and she couldn’t even get the match to connect with the box. She whimpered, forced herself to
concentrate. She tried again. The match-head flared. She found the candle by her feet and dipped the wick into the flame.

Whatever was on the other side of the wall reached the kitchen door. From beyond the door came a new sound, perhaps the worst one yet. A noise that made her think of hoarse breath being pulled
through something wet, like someone was struggling to breathe through a moist cloth draped over their face. This was followed by a groan. Not one of her own; she was too frightened to make any
noise.

Another muffled groan. Then the sucking sound again. Or was it wheezing? Whatever was out there sounded like an animal in great difficulty.

She thought her heart might stop. She wanted her heart to stop.

Stephanie made it across the kitchen so quickly she couldn’t recall how she arrived on the other side of the room. The candle flame flattened and then wobbled in her trembling fist but
stayed lit. She pressed her entire weight against the wood to hold the door closed. Her other hand gripped the knife.

From deeper inside the ground floor rooms came a fresh commotion from what, she could only imagine, was a new entrant to the room on the other side of the kitchen wall. When a distant door
slammed she thought her heart had, in fact, ceased to beat. And whatever had come inside began an immediate casting about.

Walls were bumped. Furniture was thumped. An eager search was in progress, though by whom, and for what, she didn’t want to imagine, but she was reminded of the noises of her first floor
neighbour and the nocturnal visitor. Yes, this sounded like a search motivated by rage and frustration, and each emotion was out of control.

Whatever was pressed against the other side of the door began to make a new series of sounds: a piteous keening that pierced the wheezing.
Fear.

The thumps and bangs paused. And then Stephanie received the impression that the second occupant had heard the whimpers and immediately rushed across the room to come to a halt by the kitchen
door. There was a muffled squeal that might not have been human, followed by a series of deeper swinish grunts from the aggressor. The sounds of wheezing only lessened when whatever was making the
pitiful noise was dragged across the floor and away from the kitchen door, and deeper into the room beyond.

Silence fell in the way that silence always descended in the house: with a totality after these bursts of unseen activity from participants who just seemed to vanish.

In relief that the episode appeared to have concluded, Stephanie’s mind cleared enough for her to consider the previous night and the various distances at which she had heard the elderly
woman’s voice. The unlit bedroom she had been locked inside had seemed to enlarge under the influence of the visitor and then contract after
its
passing. She assumed that if she was
to move out of the kitchen, which she would have to at some point soon, she should only move when all was quiet and the air temperature had returned to normal. Only then, maybe, might the
dimensions of the building remain recognizable and her path through it logical.

Dragging her fingers down her cheeks she tried again to recall the terrible dreams of which only vestiges had ever remained in her mind. She had seen a horrible bloodless female face, had been a
little girl trapped between brick walls, had been on the ceiling, there had been a dark room with candles, some kind of chest or box, curtains . . . most of the rest was a murk that still refused
to reanimate into something informative. And yet she now had no doubt that the house, or whatever was inside the building, had been communicating with her through sleep, and using its own idiom:
nightmares.