It Knows Where You Live (22 page)

“You can say that again, mate.” She stood, moved unsteadily away from the table. “If I hadn’t bought this myself, I’d throw it in your face.” She brandished her glass, threw back her head in a theatrical manner, and stalked away across the room to the end of the bar, where she started talking to a group of men who’d been watching her performance.

People were staring. They were noticing him, but not in a way that he desired.

Trendle left without finishing his drink.

Outside, the cold air was like a slap in the face. What had he been thinking? He’d misread the situation completely, just as he always did. He always seemed out of step with everyone else; it was as if they were working to a set of rules he hadn’t been allowed to see.

He hoped the woman wouldn’t recognise him at work tomorrow. He’d have to hide from her, making sure he sent someone else to do the photocopying or collect the printed reports from downstairs. He couldn’t risk the shame; he didn’t want to confront her when she was sober. God, what if she told everyone about him and when he arrived in the morning they all laughed, or, worse still, just stared at him, smiling at their shared joke?

When would he ever learn? He wasn’t like everyone else. He was different...he was socially defective. That’s why he’d been mugged, and why the mugger had come back for more. His inadequacies marked him out like a scar or a birthmark. He would always be a victim. He was born to be stepped on.

Inside his house, he went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. He drank it sitting at the dining table, with the radio playing in the background. He refused to wipe the tears from his eyes because to do so would be to admit he was crying. When his mother was alive, she always taught him that real men never cried.

Perhaps he should quit his job? That way, there’d be no fear of ever seeing that woman again? What was her name, anyway? She’d not offered it this evening, and he hadn’t even thought to ask. He could barely think ill of her for not being aware of how they knew each other when he couldn’t even remember her name.

Christ, he was pathetic. He saw the woman every day and he didn’t even know what she was called.

He finished his tea, locked up the house, and climbed the stairs. Tonight he decided he’d brush his teeth before turning in. His mouth tasted bitter; his teeth were coated with something greasy and unpleasant. His thoughts began to turn: if one woman could approach him, maybe others would, too. It gave him a reason to take care of himself. Why shouldn’t he try to take something positive from the disastrous encounter?

The first floor landing seemed cold. He might have to turn the heating on before long. The season was changing. Everything was moving on. No matter how hard he might wish otherwise, nothing ever stayed the same.

He left the lights off because he knew his way by instinct. He’d lived here by himself for a long time, and before that he’d inhabited the space with his mother, who always instilled in him a belief that nowhere was ever as safe as your own home. There were times when he questioned that theory, but not many of them. Often he thought what she really meant was the dangers here were simply more manageable than the ones he might find elsewhere.

His feet were silent as he walked. It seemed odd they should not make a sound, but not odd enough to make him stop and think about the reasons why. It was an old house. The acoustics were weird. His mother had always crept about soundlessly, like a ghost.

The bathroom light flickered when he pulled the chord. He turned and approached the mirror and at first he failed to understand what was wrong with his reflection in the glass. Then, as the light bulb settled, he realised exactly what he was seeing. In the mirror, instead of his own face he was looking at the back of someone’s head.
His
head...he recognised the hair colour, the way it turned upwards at his collar, the tiny bald patch at the crown. It was a disconcerting impression, as if he’d sneaked up behind himself. He recalled the same image from the television a few nights ago, and wondered if he’d perhaps glimpsed the future on the screen.

The light flickered again. The filament clicked like an insect rubbing its legs together. He wasn’t afraid. Surely there was nothing to fear here, in his home, in his body, in his familiar image.

The figure in the mirror slowly began to turn.

A thin hand pressed down onto his shoulder, the long fingers clutching, holding him in place.

The head in the mirror completed its turn, the skin of the neck corkscrewing because the body remained facing the other way, as if held there by some unnatural force. When the face came into view, he saw his own features, but altered. The smiling mouth was too wide for the narrow skull. The eyes were dark and spaced too far apart, located almost on the sides of the head. The nose was flat and boorish, the nostrils flared. The cheekbones were much more prominent than his.

The flat, broad lips opened to reveal far too many rows of thin, serrated teeth, which ground together silently.

The voice, when it came, sounded as if it were coming from behind him, despite the mouth in the mirror moving to form the words. It sounded nothing like his voice, the one he’d known his entire life. It was much more assertive, for a start. So much more commanding than anything he could summon. It was the same voice he’d heard when he was mugged, the same one that had spoken to him from the mouth of that alley the other night.

“You haven’t seen me. I was never here.”
 

He opened his mouth but was unable to speak. He wanted desperately to agree with this thing so it would leave him alone, but the muscles in his throat refused to work. He didn’t want this, not any of it. He had never wanted anything like this.

Reality cracked open and strange feelings leaked out; he thought about concepts that had never before crossed his mind. This thing—this reformed mirror image—was what had been waiting for him all along beneath the brittle façade of his persona: something he could not acknowledge, a creature he wasn’t allowed to admit he’d ever seen, despite the fact that it had been hiding inside him since the day he was born.
 

The bathroom light flickered one more time before going out. Glass shattered and showered the floor with lethal fragments. He closed his eyes. “I haven’t seen you,” he whispered.
 

Something that smelled like himself loomed towards him in the darkness, and Trendle prayed it would take him quickly and quietly, and not cause too much pain as it became him.

THE GROTTO

“Aunty Nancy’s locked herself in the toilet again.” Dad stood in the doorway, his hand gripping the doorframe, the knuckles turning white. “You’d better sort her out.” He walked into the room and sat down on the end of the sofa, avoiding all contact with Mum.

“Oh, Christ...” Mum stood and started to leave the room. “Not this again.”

Billy looked at Dad; Dad smiled, but it was a tired expression, one that looked almost defeated.

“It’s okay,” said Dad. “She’ll be fine. She’s just...getting old.”

Billy turned his attention back to the television and watched a parade of costumed children singing as they crossed a large stage. He wondered, briefly, when Christmas had suddenly become such a chore.

Dad poured himself another whisky and picked up his book—it was an autobiography by some politician Billy had never heard of. Mum had bought it for him, along with the usual socks and underpants and a box of jellied fruit.

“I’m going outside,” said Billy, standing and grabbing his coat off the back of the dining chair where he’d left it. “See if anyone’s about.”

Dad nodded, grunted, but did not look up from his hardback.

Billy stepped out into the hall and stood there for a while, watching Mum.

“Come on, Nancy. Please, let me in. Nobody’s angry with you. I just want to see if you’re okay.” She turned her head to Billy and raised her eyebrows, trying to make light of the situation. But her hard forearms were shaking and her face was pale. Billy remembered last year, when Aunty Nancy had done the same thing, afraid because she’d shit in her knickers.

He walked along the hall and opened the door. The day was growing dark. Winter slush filled the flower beds. Grey scraps of yesterday’s snow decorated the lawn. The street was quiet; most people were probably having a snooze after their Christmas dinner, or waiting for the James Bond film to come on.

Billy walked down the path and opened the gate. He looked left along the street, then right. There was no traffic. A hush fell across the estate, and he could pretend he was the only person left in the world. But then the fantasy was broken by the flashing Christmas lights and paper Santas in his neighbours’ windows, the muted sounds of someone breaking into a Christmas carol.

He walked along the footpath and stopped outside the gate of Number 10. The garden was overgrown. There were a lot of items dumped on the grass and up against the house wall—old bicycle frames, a broken bathtub, a chest of drawers, cardboard boxes filled with water-bloated newspapers. Billy didn’t know who lived there, but they were messy. He couldn’t remember who used to live there before the new people moved in, either, but he did know the grotto had always been there.

He stared at it now, feeling the familiar sense of creeping dread. Somebody had wrapped a string of tatty tinsel around the entrance, and a small plaster Santa Claus with a cracked face lay face-up on the ground, as if he’d taken a drunken tumble.

The grotto was made out of old stone slabs with a slate roof. Whoever built it had constructed uprights and then set a stone lintel across the top to form an entrance. It was roughly two-feet high and six-feet long. It looked more than a little like a megalithic dolmen Billy had once seen, and become briefly obsessed with, in a history book. He had been terrified of the grotto for as long as he could remember. Something about the way he could never see more than half a foot inside the entrance, no matter how bright the daylight, unnerved him.

The house looked empty. There were no lights on. The decorations at the window were old and sagging. Billy pushed open the gate and walked up the cracked concrete path, stopping at a point adjacent to the grotto. Sometimes he liked to test himself. He’d walk to this point, then inch closer and closer towards the entrance, waiting to see how long it would take him to get too scared and run away.

Scabs of snow adhered to the walls and the roof slates. Inside, the darkness seemed to move like hundreds of beetles crawling across a wall. He blinked and the movement stopped. He took another step closer and then the darkness began to twitch again. There was something in there, but he had no idea what it might be.

“No way,” he said, then turned his back on the grotto, walked back down the path, shut the gate, and headed home.

Back inside, Aunty Nancy had been coaxed from the bathroom. She was sitting in an armchair gripping a glass of sherry as if it were some kind of life-preserver. She watched the television, nodding her head occasionally. She laughed, a harsh barking sound, and then fell silent again.

Dad was still reading his book. Mum was fussing around the dining table, moving things, putting away the posh cutlery and pouring peanuts into bowls.

“I’m going upstairs,” said Billy. Nobody answered.

He played with his new action figures for a while, and then counted his Christmas money. Fifty pounds, enough to get that new Xbox game he’d been eyeing up. His parents had bought him a couple of games, but neither of them was the one he’d wanted.

He tried to read a comic but the colours bled between the panels, and he realised he was tired. Lying down on the bed, he closed his eyes, but all he could see behind the lids was the grotto. In the dream, he was standing closer to it than ever before, reaching out, reaching inside the little entrance. He felt a cold breeze on his hand and smelled a faint aroma of rotting meat. He pulled back his hand, panicked, and saw that it had been replaced by a large, furred claw...

He woke up sweating and breathing heavily; his heart was pumping hard and fast. Gripping the duvet, he waited for the anxiety to pass. He had not experienced an attack in months. Everyone told him how well he was doing now he’d come off the medication.

He managed to calm himself down and sat up on the bed, then looked out of the window. It was dark outside. The streetlights had come on. His watch showed it was 5 p.m. Not late at all.

He stood and crossed to the window. Out on the street, his friend Tony was sitting on the wall outside his house playing on his new Nintendo DS. Billy made a fist and banged on the window. It took Tony a long time to look up, but when he did he waved, motioning for Billy to come out and join him.
 

Billy went downstairs and opened the door. Glancing back along the hallway, he watched the play of television light around the living room door, and heard muttered voices. He didn’t want to go in there.

“I’m going out,” he called. Then he said it again, louder this time.

Nobody answered.

He went outside and crossed the road, sat down on the wall next to Tony.

“How’s it going?”

Tony shrugged. He set down his DS on the wall next to him. “Okay, I guess. My folks are arguing again.”

“You’re lucky,” said Billy. “I wish mine would argue. They just sit around all day in a strop with each other.”

“Did you get any good stuff?”

“I did okay. I see you got the DS.”

“Yeah. It’s cool. I only got a couple of games, but I got some money so I can buy some myself.”

Billy nodded. “Cool.” He looked across the road, at Number 10. The lights were still out. “Have you seen them?”

Tony looked over there, too. “The new people? No, I haven’t. Mum says they’re feckless.”

“What does that mean?”

“Dunno... but Dad called them spongers, and said they don’t work. Just claim the dole and sit around on their arses all day, smoking cigs.”

“They never seem to be in... so they couldn’t be sitting around on their arses.”