No One Gets Out Alive (33 page)

She inhaled deep from the dead house. Allowed herself to be throttled by her very powerlessness. What did she care now?

Her thoughts leapt on, from face to voice to face to voice, to poor Ryan so limp on the stained concrete patio, to Margaret’s sweet smile, to a tooth uprooted from a jawbone, to black
blood on faded carpet, to an elderly voice chanting scripture, to a girl sealed beneath a bathroom floor, chattering out her confusion. And something began to glow inside her again, at her very
core. Something so hot and unstable it was already black with the carbon of her rage and hatred. She thought of Fergal’s bloodless face, and Knacker’s equine expressions; she thought of
the thing that had been a man called Bennet, and of its speed up and through the house to service its desires on the wretched and the hopeless; she saw the picture of its howling, idiotic face,
bestial with violent intent, on a phone screen.

‘Can you hear me, you scrawny rat bastards? Can you hear me?’

Stephanie banged her hands against the door. ‘They are coming! Yes! And they will take me. But I swear you will not live. You will not leave this house alive. I swear I will come for you.
Both of you. You will know me, you bastards! You will know me in this dark. No one gets out alive! No one!’

She turned and flashed her face at the darkness, showed it a mouth full of teeth. And to the darkness she begged, pleaded with the absence of light and hope for a chance to do those things that
she would now trade anything, anything at all, for an opportunity to do.

‘You think these rats can keep you? You deserve better company. Their blood for my blood.’

And through the cascade and tumult of her blackest thoughts she heard a voice:
I will come unto thee. For I have determined there to winter.

She passed from one darkness into another, from exhaustion into sleep, or perhaps she had slipped into extinction. She didn’t know, nor did she care much. Her only
lingering wish was that the darkness remained still and empty around where she lay, so cold and spent. But inside here and inside her, darkness was the medium through which her visitors and visions
travelled. They came and went, came and went. They told her nothing, as if their presence was sufficient.

On either side of her head plastic rustled. She never saw what was inside the coverings, but heard mouths panting wetly against polythene. She knew sightless eyes were close by and that old
mouths had opened to mutter notions long obsolete. They only wanted to be close to her and they wanted to be heard. Maybe that was enough; she was an audience for what had been lost and forgotten
in the darkness it had been given unto.

In time, the four women wearing long gowns came and stood around her with their heads on one side; they all spoke at the same time like agitated birds in a treeline, though she couldn’t
understand what they were saying. Perhaps they were praying, because they all held little books that looked like they contained hymns.

At first Stephanie thought they were holding their heads at severe angles so they could better see her lying on the dirty floor. But then she realized their heads were bent because of what was
knotted about their throats. Every time the women appeared and she tried to see where the faint phosphorescence bled from, she would find herself moving round in a circle, on the ceiling, and
unable to get back inside her body down below. When she tried to work out how far away her body was from the ceiling, she found herself staring down at four people sitting at the black table with
their hands raised into the air.

The bald man’s face was all loose skin that hung around his jaw; what little of his hair remained was oiled into bootlace strands over his skull. He wore a shirt, tie and braces. Of the
two women, the bespectacled woman with permed hair made a crude and horrible gesture by poking her thin tongue out of her wide open mouth. The other woman wore a headscarf and dark glasses. Her
face was expressionless. On the centre of the table was the wooden box.

The people all looked past Stephanie at something else that unwound on the ceiling behind her head. It made the sound of oily hands being rubbed together. All of the people’s faces were
strewn with tears.

When she came to be upon the floor again, and was, perhaps, even awake, a little boy with sunken milky blue eyes, that were probably sightless even though they showed between the scarf over his
face and his cowboy hat made from purple felt, skipped around her in the darkness. His knee caps were thick with scabs, his grey shirt was untucked from his shorts and his patterned pullover was
dirty and full of holes. Somewhere not far away, old dry hands clapped out a rhythm to which the boy skipped. The boy only ever sang the same thing:

‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four
maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’

Sometimes there was only darkness around her body, but within it she knew she was tiny. A speck in something cold and blank in every direction that went on forever.

She was so small inside the immensity of nothing she found it difficult to breathe.

‘I don’t understand why she ain’t dead. It offed Bennet pretty quick. And she’s trashed the place. Why’s she so special? She was wanted in here.
That’s what they wanted. I don’t get it. Why does she get to come out?’ It was Fergal’s voice that brought her round; it sounded like he was talking to himself.

Stephanie opened her eyes and blinked in a thin, grey light that stung her mind as though she stared directly into the sun. Through a squint she could see smashed crockery, kitchen utensils and
shards of broken glass scattered across the kitchen lino.

Perhaps she should have been relieved to see her captors but she felt nothing.

Fergal put his long hands under her arms and pulled her into a sitting position. Her clothes were filthy; they smelled of dust, sweat and urine.

Fergal’s long fingers dabbed inside the pocket of her hooded top and patted down her jeans with the swiftness of an expert thief. With one foot he slid the kitchen knife away, then dragged
her backwards and across the threshold.

In the dim ground floor hallway, the first thing her vision settled upon was Knacker’s face; it was blanched with fear and twitchy with anxiety. He looked at her like she was a traffic
accident.

Fergal carefully pulled the door shut and locked the ground floor rooms. His own expression had remained rigid with concentration, and he hadn’t adjusted his focus from the door that led
from the kitchen to the black room before he sealed the place. Once the rooms were secure, he rested his forehead and the palms of his hands against the door, his eyes closed. From the rise and
fall of his back, Stephanie saw how hard he was breathing.

While she blinked away her grogginess, wincing at the dull band of pain that thumped like a drum behind her eyes, Fergal turned his head from the door and looked down at Stephanie. And she saw
an expression she had never seen on his face before: suspicion tinged with caution, even incomprehension. ‘It’s all gone very quiet in there. Get her upstairs while I fink this
froo.’

Knacker hesitated. He didn’t want to touch her. When he gingerly reached for her she slapped his hand away. He flinched, stepped back.

Fergal tensed; in the closeness of the hall he smelled dreadful, even worse than she did.

Knacker fumbled the little glass bottle out of the pocket of his ski jacket. ‘Yeah?’ Showed it to her. ‘Yeah?’

Stephanie got to her feet and began walking down the corridor. Both men stared at her without blinking. Knacker shuffled away from her approach.

She turned and climbed the stairs.

Knacker followed warily.

Through the banisters, Fergal watched her every step upwards towards the first floor. ‘I’ll be right behind that twat so don’t even fink about nuffin’.’

‘You owe rent on this room. Like I told you, rent’s gone up. You’s already in arrears, sister. Time you earned your keep, like.’

Knacker looked as skittish as a pony with the scent of a wolf in its nostrils; he was all mouth and front because Fergal had now joined him inside her old first floor room. And Knacker appeared
to be rehearsing an old and redundant draft of a script that no one wanted to hear any more. She doubted Knacker would ever surprise her again, no matter how hard he tried. Even though he carried
the bottle of acid, since she had been dragged out of the ground floor flat, she was no longer afraid of him.

Today, on this drab and wet morning, in a building that belonged to none of them, she knew that everything had changed: her situation,
her.
The atmosphere of the house had subtly
shifted, like the encroach of dusk into an afternoon you couldn’t recall passing. She knew she would never be allowed to leave, but she also imagined she had been released from
down
there
to do something. A task of some kind. And the urgency to perform this function grew like a slow heat inside her blood. Only she didn’t know what the task was; what she
needed
to do.

At least she was indifferent to anything Knacker said now, and that indifference felt like a great relief from an almost unbearable pressure of rage. She’d completely shut his chunter out
of her mind as they ascended the stairs.

Once reinstalled on the first floor, she’d stood beside the window and watched Knacker dump the contents of a black bin bag, what she assumed were Margaret’s clothes, onto the bed. A
froth of black lace fell out of the bag, entangled in a sticky mass of latex. A dead girl’s lingerie.

She was more interested in listening to the women all around her, in case they had a message for her. Through the length and breadth of the house she received the impression that the residents
were either talking or weeping, and mostly in the distance and at the edge of her hearing.

When she’d walked up the stairs, even the tall blonde woman had returned to her position outside, beside the garden wall. She smoked a cigarette like she had done that first time. But this
time the woman looked up and met Stephanie’s eye as she passed behind the stairwell window between the ground floor and first floor. The woman held her stare until Stephanie passed from
sight.

Knacker couldn’t hear anything within the house. She knew this because of his anxious preoccupation with her neutral state: her uncharacteristic calm and lack of fear in his presence. He
didn’t like that, and she almost smiled for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.

But Fergal could hear the women of the house. He peered around himself and through the thin daylight that seeped into the building. Agitated, he blinked red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling and walls.
In one hand Fergal carried an old vinyl holdall. The bag had been on the first floor landing, awaiting collection. He must have left it there before coming downstairs to release Stephanie. In his
other hand he carried the old saucepan she had seen in one of the cupboards under the kitchen sink.

In her room Fergal dropped the holdall at the foot of the bed. Something inside the bag rattled like a chain. He dropped the saucepan next to the bag. Then walked across to Stephanie and craned
his long neck forward so his horrible face could command her full attention.

Knacker had moved onto her other side and stood too close, cocky again. He nodded over at the clothes and high-heeled shoes littered across the bed. ‘See if they fit. You’s got
company tonight, so you better look your best. I don’t want no lip, else yous’ll get another slap. And we’ll tie you to the fucking bed, like Svetlana. Wrists and ankles.
We’d get extra too if you was tied down. Bareback in the black room with Stephy slut. Might give that old bastard next door a dirty ride, on the house, to get you used to the idea.’

Stephanie turned her head and spat in Knacker’s eyes.

Blinking in shock, he raised a fist to strike her. She did not flinch.

Fergal placed a hand on Knacker’s chest, his fingers spread wide. Then turned his face away from Stephanie and pushed it close to Knacker’s until their noses were touching.
‘You fucking stupid as you look or what? That’s all over. Finished. And look at her. She’d as soon bite a cock off than suck it. She ain’t no good for
nuffin’.’

He returned his grimacing face to Stephanie. ‘She’s changed. Only I can’t work out how. So I gotta sort somefing out downstairs before we finish what we’s started. This
ain’t right. Fink there has been a misunderstanding down there.’ His breath made her choke.

Knacker stepped away and bobbed on his toes, his face white with petulant rage at how he had been spoken to, at how she had spat in his face and not been summarily punished.

‘Is they . . . is they askin’ you to do fings, like?’ Fergal asked Stephanie the question in a voice so quiet it was practically a whisper.

She stared back at him without disclosing anything besides the disgust she could not contain at his breath.

‘I ain’t happy wiv this, like,’ Fergal said to himself. He looked about the ceiling, raised his hands. ‘It’s all going off in here, but it’s all quiet down
there. They wanted her. But pushed her out. Don’t make no sense.’ He thrust a finger at the floor to add emphasis to his point. Then quickly turned to Knacker, who flinched. ‘Get
her secure with Bennet’s pervy tat. Can you get that right?’ Fergal clenched his fist around Stephanie’s upper arm and made her hiss from the force of his grip. He marched her to
the foot of the bed. ‘Sit!’

Stephanie complied. Her mind had been broken into and ransacked. She’d come out of that place vandalized. But she had been released, rejected. Was that what Fergal had inferred? She was
done with screaming; she’d learned it would do her no good. She had nothing to fight with but patience, because the house was not finished with her; it had allowed a cessation in her torments
for its own malign purposes. It was the only reason she was still breathing. What its intended goal was for those that remained alive beneath its roof she did not know, but it had not extinguished
her life during the entire period when it had sufficient time to do so. It may have taken most of her wits and her mind and her heart, but it had left her with something, a kind of listlessness
coiled around suppressed rage that seemed to be waiting for an opportunity to rise and strike. But even as a wreck, her being alive troubled Fergal.