Transgressions (11 page)

“About this?”

“Yeah.”

He stopped chiseling and tried the box. It slipped in neatly. He stood back and looked at his work. “You’ll think I’m daft.”

She gave a laugh. “No dafter than everyone thinks I am, I can tell you.”

He looked at her. “I think you might have some kind of poltergeist.”

And as he said it something turned over in her stomach, something hot and cold at the same time, and she realized that she had been waiting for someone to suggest if not this, then something like it. “Have you . . . I mean, have you come across things like this before?”

“There’s not a lot I haven’t come across doing this job. But yeah, I’ve seen houses that have had some kind of spirit in them. One lady in the East End had me change all the locks on the doors and windows six times in as many months. It didn’t do any good. She’d still wake up in the morning to find them open again. Nothing taken, nothing harmed. Just wide open again. Back door mainly and the two upstairs skylights. Mischievous little tyke that was.”

“My God. What did she do?”

“No idea. All I know is I stopped doing her locks. I think she probably moved in the end. It’s usually either them or you. Unless you just get on with it and leave them to it.”

“And what makes you think that’s what’s happening here?” she asked almost in a whisper.

“Nothing, except it fits the facts, that’s all. You’ve got stuff happening you can’t explain. It’s not—what’s the word that the woman used to use to me?—not malevolent. Peculiar rather than serious. You say the house feels all right, that you don’t feel scared in between times. And it always happens in the same place. The only funny thing is you’ve not come across it before. From the couple I’ve come across they usually seem to make their presence felt as soon as they find the right person.”

I don’t believe this, she thought. It’s absolute nonsense, like watching some dreadful New Age documentary on television. I don’t believe a word of it. But even as she thought it, she knew that she did. “I . . . well, I haven’t always been alone here. I mean, I lived with someone for the first two years. He’s only recently moved out.”

“And all this has started since?” She nodded. He made a little noise with his tongue. “Well, then, I’d say that’s what you’ve got.”

He stood up and slipped the new key into the lock, then turned it to and fro. It clicked out and in smoothly. He handed it to her, along with a couple of spares.

“What should I do?” she asked, panic-stricken that now that he was finished he might go and leave her.

He bent down and started packing up his tools, “I suppose that depends on you. I mean, on how upset it makes you living with it. Sometimes I gather they just go away. Something about the energy around them. I can’t say I understand that really. You could always see a priest. Come to think of it, that woman I told you about—with the open windows—I think that’s what she did in the end. Got some kind of exorcism done on the place. Though I don’t know how much good that’ll do you.”

“But I don’t believe in God.”

He shrugged. “I don’t believe in luck but I still do the lottery every week. You could always give it a try. It’d be cheaper than fitting new locks, that’s for sure.”

He was writing something on a pad. Maybe he carried certain addresses with him in his head. “Still, you won’t be bothered with burglars for a while.” He looked up. “I can knock off the tax if you’ve got cash. Otherwise the boss insists on a check with a banker’s card number, though, course, you don’t need to put your address on.”

It took her a while to realize the last bit was a joke. She stared at him as he handed her the bill. It hadn’t all been a joke, had it?

She laughed. “I’ll . . . er . . . I’ll get you a check. It’s in my study.” She started to go up the stairs, then she turned. “You’re not . . . I mean, you really think that’s what this is?”

He looked up at her and shrugged. “Listen, you asked me what I thought, and I told you. I said you’d find it daft. With tax that’ll be one hundred and seventy-nine pounds forty, including the call-out charge.”

seven

S
he lay awake for hours after he left, the kitchen door locked, the hall light on, Millie heavy in sleep at the end of the bed.

In the semidarkness of the room, the house felt as it always did: empty, quiet, nothing to get worked up about, unless of course you chose to infect it with your own anxiety. But even as she lay there, theoretically scared witless by the prospect of some kind of presence around her, she felt okay. Despite whatever it was.

Whatever it was . . . That was the point where it all came apart. How exactly do you think about something you don’t believe in? How does one visualize something that doesn’t exist?

What had the locksmith said? That it/they usually make their presence felt as soon as they find the right person. Is that what had happened with her? She’d split up with Tom and in the spaces left in between she’d become a conduit for some kind of lost spirit that had been hovering around, looking for someone appropriate to latch on to. She remembered reading somewhere how poltergeists tended to favor young women, girls on the edge of puberty. Maybe hers was only a learner, had mistaken her fondness for Van Morrison for teenage rebellion.

She shook her head. No. It was absurd. All of it. There was nothing living in this house but her. Her and her subconscious. And since when had that been so demented as to be obsessed with the movement of CDs around kitchen surfaces? No. The only supernatural thing about this evening had been the size of the locksmith’s bill.

But if that wasn’t the answer, then what was? How did one explain the movement of thirty-three CDs from one side of the kitchen to the other? The question played and replayed inside her head like a swarm of flies, until it was hard to make out the sense for the buzzing. Someone or something was getting into her house and trying to scare her. That much was fact. If it wasn’t supernatural (even the word sounded mildly ridiculous) and it wasn’t Tom, then it had to be someone else. But who? What kind of intruder would go to such lengths just to play games? Disappearing CDs, manipulating stereos, moving stuff around the room? It hardly amounted to a sustained campaign of terror. On the contrary, it was more like mischief than malice.

“Of course that’s what it is, darling.” Sally’s voice wafted into her mind, loud and clear. God help any poltergeist that ever tried to muscle in on Sally’s territory. No room. No room.

She let the voice continue, if only to drown out anything else. “I mean, think about it. The police must come across this kind of thing all the time. You obviously just left your handbag somewhere—you know what a ditz head you were those first few weeks after Tom moved out, you were always leaving something somewhere—someone picked it up, maybe even took a duplicate, and, hey presto, decided to have a bit of nasty fun at your expense. They probably live nearby, on the same street or something so they can see when you’re not there. There’s that empty house three doors down, isn’t there? It’s just the kind of thing someone there would do for a laugh. Freaking out the bourgeoisie. Nice couple of CDs and then a bit of intimidation. I mean, look what it’s done to you. Got you listening to spook tales from some guru locksmith, for God’s sake. Poltergeists! You’ll be a candidate for the funny farm if you go on like this much longer, Eliza. What you need is to get out more and have a bit of—”

In her head she faded down the volume. Good old Sally. What would she do? Send Patrick downstairs to wait by the door with a cricket bat? Well, if she was right, time would tell. If someone did indeed have a key, this time they would find it didn’t fit the lock. All she had to do was wait till she heard the rattling and call the police.

In the bedroom the central-heating pipes groaned softly under the floorboards, relaxing after a hard day’s work. Interesting how when you start to listen there’s no such thing as silence. She thought of all the other nights since Tom had gone, nights when Millie would start up from the end of the bed, instantly on the alert, registering some bird wing on the rooftop or a mouse scrabbling in the wainscot two houses away. Or maybe it hadn’t been the call of the wild after all. Maybe she had been hearing something less appetizing.

Certainly Millie’s behavior had changed, too. She no longer spent time in the kitchen, despite the proximity of the food bowl. Of course she had an enemy of her own down there. One with claws and teeth. What is it they used to say about black cats? Witches, familiars? A cat flap needs no key. Any little body with a will and an appetite can squeeze their way through there. . . . But not even a smart cat can pry its way into CD boxes or carry a perfect stack of them across the room.

The absurdity of the thought collided with the terror and she tried to make herself think of something else. But her world seemed to have shrunk, and all roads led back into the dark.

In the search for somewhere where she felt in control she moved to fiction. Yet even there she found scant comfort. Jake Biderman may be better at things that go bump in the night, but he was about to enter his own spiraling nightmare. A few pages on would see the next delivery of mail—a plastic trash bag, left at night in a warehouse where he was on a stakeout, with his name on a label tied around the top. His name and a note: “Now you’ve got the complete set, Jake. Congratulations.”

Even before he opened it and saw the mangled remains, the smell had made his stomach turn, as had the knowledge that someone out there was playing games with him, knowing more about what he was doing than he did himself. And enjoying his discomfort.

Poor old Biderman, she thought. Maybe you should get the locks on your apartment changed, too, just in case. But, then, she knew more than he did, knew what was in store for a man who still loved his wife but didn’t know how to save her.

So much for the reassuring power of fiction. She curled herself up under the duvet trying to shut out the image of the body in the bag, trying not to imagine the burn marks and the slashes. Mutilated female torsos. How was it that so many roads led to the same misogynist nightmare? When did it start, this obsession with sexual violence? Did the legends of the past all go for the vagina and the womb or was it a more modern twist of the imagination? Maybe you could date it back to Jack the Ripper, and the curdling of gynecology into terror. Was it coincidence that such violence took place around the same time that women started asking for more?

The feeble shot of feminism faded, neither triumphant nor fierce enough to cast out the demons. She lay in bed, listening to Millie’s quiet breathing. And what else? A noise from downstairs, a click, or maybe a rumble. Real or imaginary?

It hardly mattered. Once heard there was no stopping her. What if it—whatever it/they was—was back, rattling the front door only to find it newly locked? What if, enraged by the rebuttal, they were even now chiseling their way in through the kitchen window?

Absurd. Don’t even think about it.

But suddenly it was impossible not to. Her ears strained in the silence and located something else: a scraping noise from somewhere below. Her imagination made it flesh. She saw a figure moving across the kitchen floor, this time ignoring the CDs in search of bigger prey, going for the door, silently picking the lock, then climbing slowly upward to the floors above. She could make him out more clearly now: a silhouette darker than the darkness, the features of his face mashed flat by the pull of a stocking, no character, no feeling, just a cold madness intent on violence. He was so familiar he hardly needed imagining. The pathology of the psychopath: sexual pleasure rising with the terror of the victim. It had become so familiar, so grotesque, that you might almost expect it to be easier to handle, easier to mock. Only it wasn’t. Fear spread like an ink stain across her mind. The more she tried to control it the more certain she was that it was actually happening, the more clearly she could distinguish the individual choreography of sounds: the click of the lock, the scraping open of the door, even the telltale creak of his tread on the wooden stairs. The panic wrapped itself around her, making it hard to breathe. By the time he got as far as the landing she was drowning in the echo of her heartbeat as it pumped the blood around inside her head.

But at the same time as she went under, something flew free. A part of her sat above on the bedstead looking down, impatient, scornful. “Just look at you,” it said fiercely. “Scaring yourself stupid. There’s absolutely nothing there. You know that. You’re just making it up. Making yourself sick with fear. Stop. If you stop, so will it.”

Against the odds the voice got through. With what seemed like a superhuman effort of will she pulled off the covers, got up from the bed, walked over to the door, and pulled it open.

The lights from the hall flooded in.

Nothing. The staircase both above and below was quite empty. There was no one there. No madman, no steps, no sound. She pushed herself farther, willing herself down the stairs toward the front door, then, when she found it locked, down again toward the kitchen. She waited by the door, listening. Then she turned the key and went in, snapping the light switch as she did so. The place was empty, the night at the windows silent. No intruders inside or out.

“Whoever or whatever you are, I’m not afraid of you, do you hear?” She waited for an answer, a flying CD or a scrape of furniture, but there was nothing. That’s because there’s nothing here, she thought. If there was I would feel it.