No One Gets Out Alive (53 page)

‘Ryan.’ She swallowed to clear her throat of emotion. ‘Ryan?’

‘Ba . . . a . . . ee.’
Baby
: that’s what he used to call her.

‘Stefff.’
Steph
.

There was now a terrible sniffing, and a wheezy inhalation, as if the speaker was afflicted with infected sinuses that filled his airways with liquid. It sounded as if someone in her garage was
not only struggling to speak, but to breathe.

Blood. Drowning in blood.

‘Stefff . . .’

What followed the attempt to pronounce her old name sounded like ‘Here’, or even ‘Come here’, but Amber couldn’t be sure, so insufficient, or mangled, was the mouth
that uttered these horrid but pathetic sounds.

Amber took four steps across the kitchen towards the doorway. ‘Ryan?’

The presence was close to the floor, in a far corner, struggling to move around the bonnet of the car.

She stopped and told herself that she could not be sure that it was Ryan inside there, fumbling in the darkness. This could be a ruse: a scent, a pitiful whimpering of her name created as a
lure, a trap, to get her inside that dark, cramped space. A place that might swiftly change and suddenly have no walls, no floor, no up or down, like the ground floor of number 82.
She
made doors. There were doors around
her
that opened into other places.

When you die you fall through the doors.

Amber clenched her jaw at the thought of the savagery and indignity and pain that had been inflicted upon the young man, the only person who had cared enough to try and free her with what little
money he possessed.
They
had broken Ryan’s arm in the house, then dragged him outside and stamped on him, crushed his sweet head with a brick. Her heart broke again. How many times
could a heart break? It could break in two over and over again until it withered the soul; she was discovering this the hard way.

‘No!’ She shook her head like a wounded horse, leant against a kitchen counter. ‘No!’ she shouted, and wanted to shoot something, and then keep shooting it in the face.
‘You bitch. You bitch. You bitch. You bitch!’

Amber walked to the gaping doorway. ‘Baby. I’m coming. I won’t let them have you.’

She looked into the garage. Could she see him? ‘Ryan?’

She sensed as much as saw a vague silhouette against the grey metal door of the garage, the top of a head with an uneven outline above the black roof of the car.

There was a light in the room too, faint but unaccountable: a bluish ambient light before the doors of the garage that faced the front driveway. Amber screwed up her eyes and stared right at the
shape that began to harden within the thin illumination. An indistinct and pale oval seemed to be in the process of slowly moving, or edging, from the closed door towards her, until it appeared to
reset its trajectory back to the garage doors, before slipping out again, but no more than a few feet each time.

The pale smudge in the air by the door made a sound. And the very moment Amber heard the liquescent noise she received a new and wholly unwelcome perspective on the phenomenon: if this was a
head, a head and an indistinct white face, then it was leaning into the garage before being rewound to its starting position, to then move inside the room again, like a film stuck in a projector.
Either that, or a body cloaked by darkness was taking a step, over and over again, and some vague ambient light was catching a suggestion of its face.

The noise was repeated, wet and thick; a sucking mouth in the darkness.

Amber swallowed the lump in her throat.

The visitor’s attempt to communicate, if that was what it was, was hampered, as if what serviced for a mouth was badly obstructed or could no longer function as it had once done. Sibilant,
almost drooling, she thought another attempt had just been made at her name. ‘
Shhtefff
.’

‘Ryan.’ Her own voice was at the edge of breaking, eroded by fear and shock and disbelief.

‘
Pozzzzit
. . .’ What followed was unintelligible, but repeated three times, until she interpreted ‘We can go now’ from something resembling ‘
Ick an go
nowsh
’, or whatever the salival mess tried to pronounce.

Amber wondered if she was hearing the voice inside her own mind. ‘Ryan? I’m not there any more,’ she said to the flickering that was now dimming. ‘Ryan, Ryan, I’m
not there any more. Not there. Why are you here? Why are you . . .’

She lost sight of the dim smudge of light, which became a greenish, degraded phosphorescence beyond the bonnet of her car. It began to resemble the motion of a silhouette superimposed over a
dark background, was X-ray vague, a blurred film negative, until it vanished from the air.

Amber stepped into the garage. The cement was instantly chilly against her feet. She could smell oil, the silent respirations of a new car at rest, fresh bricks, new concrete. Dust balls
gathered around her feet like she’d stepped inside a large pen filled with grey rabbits. ‘Ryan?’ she whispered. ‘Ryan?’

She turned and raked the wall for the light switch, clicked on the overhead light. Shadows instantly shrunk, the murk cleared, the white plaster ceiling gleamed. She walked along one side of her
car to the garage doors, all the time afraid that something might reach out from beneath the vehicle and seize her bare ankle.

There was no one down there. Nothing but dust.

But there had been someone there.
Hadn’t there?

‘Ho, ho, ho.’

Amber screamed.

The laughter that issued from directly outside the garage doors was deep and forced, mirthless and mocking, and she knew where she had heard such a derisory sound before.

The air of the garage bloomed with the fragrance of stagnant toilets, stale tobacco smoke, fusty carpet worn white to the weave, underfloor exhalations: dusty, mouse-tainted,
nitrate-sharpened, pissed upon, scented, and pissed upon again.

Amber began to hyperventilate.

She fell more than stumbled back to the kitchen.

Outside the kitchen windows, the security lights clicked on.

‘What is my name?’

The voice in the hallway outside the kitchen either changed quickly, or was replaced by a more nervous speaker, as if these familiar words had been uttered by a young woman who stood near the
front door. But the urgency with which the second woman spoke transmitted an even greater panic into Amber. ‘Before here . . . that time . . . Nowhere . . . to where the other . . . the cold
. . . is my name? . . .’

A third voice announced itself and sounded as if the speaker was halfway up the staircase. And whatever now spoke sounded exhausted. ‘And then you said . . . I said . . . I wouldn’t
. . . unreasonable . . . but who was I . . . you, you told me . . . you swore . . . it was . . . meant something . . . a sign . . . frightened, the more I . . . and now I know . . .’

Amber stepped into the hallway. There was no one there, and no one on the staircase.

‘Involved . . . you are . . . you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . . Not going . . . refuse. I said it. I said it . . . wouldn’t stop . . . and look . . . what
happened . . . the lights . . . even listening.’ This was the voice from a distant fireplace. The words swilled through the air, accompanied by a gust of dilapidation that came out of the
kitchen.

Amber backed towards the doorway of the living room. Slapped on the overhead lights.

Another voice rose from the kitchen she had just fled; that of a teenager, a frightened and confused girl, once buried beneath the floorboards of hell. ‘I . . . don’t . . . can you
find . . . where . . . where . . . this . . . am I?’

A spark of blue across the ceiling of the living room and hallway, a sound of thin glass imploding, and the house went dark.

Amber screamed.

From the garden a yellow glow hit the house and sought cracks to seep through. It took Amber a few seconds to realize the halogen security lights on the rear exterior walls of the farmhouse had
come on.
Intruder.

She wanted to be sick. Her mouth managed nothing but a whinny while her thoughts fell apart inside black chaos. Losing her balance, she stumbled then righted herself, only to thump her face
against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Get out, get out, get out!
The front door; she had to get to the front door and get out of the building. Behind her, close to her back, the quiet, tremulous voice of a young girl
whispered, ‘I’m cold . . . I’m so cold . . . Hold me.’

Amber turned to see who was now standing at the foot of the stairs.

No one there.

Footsteps thumped around her in the hall to get ahead of her and to the front door. A slipstream of cool air prickled about her throat like ephemeral hands. There was a snigger, ‘Ho, ho,
ho!’, from across the darkened living room.

From another unseen mouth, inside the garage, came the voice of an older, brittle, aggressive woman, that slowed the flow of blood inside Amber’s seemingly weightless body to what felt
like a sluggish trickle: ‘To speak evil . . . no brawlers . . . all meekness unto . . . Foolish, disobedient, deceived . . .’ The voice flowed through the unlit air of the ground floor,
to hit the ceiling and slap the walls, to fill the entire space of the hallway that Amber had stopped moving within. ‘Diverse lusts and pleasures . . . Malice and envy, hateful . . . hating
one another . . . Kindness . . . love of God our Saviour . . .’

Amber crouched down and covered her ears. The sound of the voice was too horrid, was maddening. Every word from the woman’s mouth chipped away another fragment of her restraint. Behind the
restraint was something red and black and thoughtless; she sensed its wild, addictive furnace of energy.
Pushing.

‘A man that is an heretic . . . first and . . . admonition . . . reject . . . Knowing that he . . . subverted . . . sinneth . . . being condemned of himself . . .’

Shoot yourself.

‘Stop it!

In the mouth.

‘No!’

They’re filling you, filling you up with black things, with dead things.

Something began a tapping at the patio windows, on the far side of the lounge.

The rear garden remained flooded with an orange glow from the security lights. The light seeped across the lounge and into the hall. Through the living room doorway, Amber could see fresh clumps
of dust spread about the floor. Could make out the black trees and dark grass of the garden, highlighted by an orange tint of what looked like premature, or fake daylight. Someone was standing on
the patio, looking in.

She inhaled so quickly she issued a little shriek and nearly fell. So severe was her fright, her mind felt disembodied from a sense of where her physical form had been moments before. She stared
at the long, blackened shape, at its head bowed and its filthy body withered and hunched over what it held tight to its chest.

‘I see you,’ she whispered, or thought she whispered, but was so beside herself with shock she may have thought she had spoken without actually speaking. She pointed the gun at the
figure. What stood before her eyes was no illusion.

So dramatic was the switching off of the security lights, and the sudden return of the darkness outside, Amber thought she heard a click.

She fired the gun. Her hand rocked. A flare flashed. The window splintered.

The house had long returned to silence. Amber remained still, listening hard, waiting for her eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness inside. Across the living room, the
gradual seeping of dawn revealed a spider-webbed glass door and an empty patio.

Her phone vibrated against her buttocks in the back pocket of her jeans.

It was Josh and he didn’t waste his breath on preliminaries. He had always been direct, if not abrupt, but his tone startled her. ‘Amber. Where are you?’

‘Here—’

‘Where’s here?’

‘Home. The farmhouse.’

‘OK. Listen to me. I do not want you to be alarmed. This is a precaution. Think of it as a fire alarm at school. A drill. Take it seriously, but it’s almost certainly nothing to
worry about. Can you get to your car?’

‘Of course.’

‘I need to see you right away. Now, where is your car?’

‘The garage.’

‘Good.’

‘Josh?’

‘No time. Listen up. I need you to get into your car with your
little friend
and pepper spray. And I need you to make sure your car is locked and that your windows are sealed
before you leave the garage.’

She could tell Josh was speeding and that he was speaking on his phone at the same time as driving, something she had not known him do before. ‘Josh. My messages—’

‘Forget them. Just listen. Open the garage door. Then open the gate from inside your car. I’m coming towards you. Meet me at Pit Wood.’

Pit Wood was not far from the farmhouse: by the crossroads, about two miles from her. ‘What? What is it? I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about.’

There was pause as Josh chose his words. ‘
He’s
here. Devon. Has been all along. You were right. Now bloody move, please. Get out of that house.’

Josh nodded his head towards the caravan. ‘He’s been living in there.’

His grip tightened on Amber’s upper arm when she felt her knees sag. Within her vision, the grass, stone walls, a distant copse of trees in the field’s corners, and the blue,
cloudless sky all shifted around her, swooped slightly, and then settled. She clutched Josh’s arms until the strength returned to her legs. ‘Here? You sure?’ Her voice was little
more than a whisper.

Josh nodded.

They stood side by side in a sloping field used for grazing sheep. A cold wind crawled over the northern wall, picked up and batted Amber’s hair about. Towards the southern edge of the
pasture a collection of grubby sheep chewed the thick, dark grass that grew close to the stone wall separating the bottom of the field from another beyond. The herd was aware of their presence but
not alarmed.