It Knows Where You Live (6 page)

“We were out of milk, so I decided to do some shopping. We needed quite a bit.” She stared at me, her eyes narrowing. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I had another nightmare.”
 

She looked at me like a teacher reassuring a small child. “Oh, you poor boy.”

“Stop it,” I said. “I dreamt something had happened to you—I know that sounds lame, but for a minute there, I believed it. I...I panicked when you weren’t here.”

“I’m sorry.” She moved towards me, closing the door. “I didn’t mean to tease you. It’s just...well; you don’t usually act like this.”

I shook my head. “You mean weak? I’m not usually this weak?”

“Come on, let’s have breakfast. All I meant is you never have nightmares. Not in all the time I’ve known you have you had a nightmare. Maybe you really are stressed.”

She was right. Even as a child, I’d never experienced bad dreams. I’d just never had them...until now. I was infected, as if the nightmares of those sleeping houses had somehow seeped into me, burrowing into my brain to metastasise like a cancer. I was under their influence. The demolition had let out their dreams and they had come into me...

I did not go in to work that day. My boss reacted kindly when I told him I had a virus, and I hadn’t slept at all the previous night. He told me to rest, to come back only when I felt better. The work would still be there when I returned. I did not enjoy lying to him, but nor could I face going into the office, or, worse still, going out to inspect another building site.

Debbie looked after me; she made sure I had plenty to read and a constant supply of DVDs. The day passed slowly, and I started to feel better. I even began to doubt my previous ill feelings about the row of houses on Sebastian Street, and wondered what was causing me so much stress I would imagine such things as communicable nightmares and the ghosts of dreaming houses...

“Feeling better?” Debbie handed me a mug of tea. “You look better. The colour’s come back into your cheeks.” She sat down beside me and took my hand. I wanted to apologise, to say sorry for being such a weak man.

“Yes, thanks.” I sipped my tea. It was too hot so I put it down on the coffee table.

“I was online earlier and found a cheap holiday. Greece. In a little villa by the sea. I thought we could book it this evening. It would give us something to look forward to.” She smiled, kissed my cheek, rubbed my chest.

“That’s great,” I said. “I think you’re right. We should book it. Let’s not wait.”

“Okay, I just need to tidy up a bit first, and then I’ll sort it out. I think this’ll be good for us.” She touched my shoulder, lightly. “Good for you. I’m not sure what’s gotten in to you lately, but you’ve been acting strange.”

I sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I haven’t a clue what’s going on inside my head, but I sometimes feel like I’m losing my grip.”

Debbie’s fingers ran along the line of my throat, tickling me. “We’ll be fine. This holiday will make everything good again. I know it will. A little trip away always makes people feel better.” Her smile was brief, but it was warm and filled with love.

She went upstairs to the study, her steps quick and light on the carpet. Somehow her footsteps seemed to rise much too high in the house, towards levels that did not exist, as if she were moving too far away from me and I might never get her back. I thought again of that ghostly row of houses on Sebastian Street, and how my first impression of them had been of a façade, a false front built to conceal something no human eye had ever seen. What if relationships are like that? The walls we build to keep the darkness at bay. And what happens when those walls are breached?

“Debbie...”

It was like an emotional echo of what I had felt earlier, when I’d thought Debbie had vanished. But this time it was for real; this time she really was leaving me, and if I didn’t do something I might never see her again.

She kept climbing. I could hear her footsteps above my head, moving in all directions: left, right, up, down, and up again. She was ascending an imaginary staircase, one that had never existed and could not exist in the real world. But maybe it existed in that liminal space behind the façade, the one the row of houses on Sebastian Street had always concealed...until someone had come along and pulled them down.

Why had they never been demolished with the rest of the street? What purpose could they have served, standing there like sentinels? I remembered reading somewhere that even when the other houses on the street had been inhabited, those eight had remained without tenants, and nobody had even enquired about buying or renting them.

Sentinels...guarding us all against the onslaught of something...something terrible, something nightmarish which had always wanted to straddle the façade and enter this side of the screen, occasionally reaching through to pollute the world it so coveted.

I recalled the dead woman found there with her body slashed and torn and plastic packaging rammed up inside her, the terrified junkies who’d run away and never returned; and finally, I thought of the small boy who had entered one of the properties and never come back out again...was he even now endlessly walking through the empty rooms, looking for an exit and wondering if his friends were still waiting outside for him?
 

Debbie’s footsteps kept on moving, rising, through levels I could never see. I got to my feet and ran to the bottom of the stairs, looked up and watched as the staircase bent and twisted, whipping to and fro like a snake with its tail stuck in a vice. I blinked, trying to erase the vision, but it was real: the staircase was moving, shuddering, spiralling madly, like part of a fairground funhouse.
 

“Debbie!”

I ran to the crazy moving staircase and started to climb, but the violent bucking movement threw me off. I tried again, and the banister turned to dust beneath my fingers. I fell to the floor, into a pile of rubble, and when I looked up the stairway had stopped moving, it was motionless. But it wasn’t the staircase that had always been in my house...it was from somewhere else.

When I looked around me, at the bare walls and the snapped floorboards, the piles and heaps of debris, I realised exactly where I was: I was inside one of the houses on Sebastian Street. There could be no mistake; the image of the place nestled deep inside me, and now that it had come back to haunt me I knew it intimately.

The stairway above me terminated in fresh air; the upper landing had fallen away, leaving only empty space. Joists and the skinned, tattered ends of boards protruded like broken teeth. There was no point in even trying to go up there. Debbie was somewhere else entirely.

I heard something moving behind me, as if stepping through rubble, and when I turned around I saw the kitchen doorway. I got up and walked towards it, entered the wrecked kitchen, turning right to face the place where the wall had been torn down to gain access to the building next door. I saw a vague human form disappearing into darkness a few rooms along, a small running figure swallowed by dusty shadows.

“Debbie!” My voice did not echo. The word fell flat and dead upon the floor.

I stepped through the gap and into the kitchen of the house next door, following the slender figure of my wife as she moved between the houses. The row had taken her, snatched her away from me, and all I had left was the urgency of pursuit. I called her name again, but this time the sound barely even registered in the chill, dead space. Not even as a whisper.

•
   
•
   
•

Someday, if I shout loud enough, I hope my wife will hear me. One day, hopefully some time soon, I will catch up with her as I move back and forth through the passageway between houses, passing through the rooms between rooms, and it will give me hope—all the hope I will ever need.

Because houses dream, too, and sometimes those dreams become nightmares. Some places don’t need ghosts to be haunted. I am the only ghost in this place, the lost spirit that walks between the walls. This unseen row of houses is inhabited at last, but only by the sound of my screams.

WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES

Another day, another failed interview...
 

Nick was beginning to suspect there was something wrong with him—some physical or mental imbalance he could not see but everyone else picked up on as soon as he walked into a room. That would explain how, no matter what he did to impress them, no one wanted to employ him. He had attended several job interviews over the past month, since losing his job at the packing factory, but nothing else had come up to fill the gap and replenish the coffers.

Maybe he had somehow become
unemployable
(an awful word; the one they spoke only in a whisper at the Job Centre). Was it like a permanent mark on his flesh, or a giveaway in his walk or the way he held himself? Was it so obvious he didn’t really want the fucking jobs anyway? That he saw nine-to-five work only as a way of paying the bills while he waited for the world to notice his novel?

Nick walked down the high street with his hands stuffed in his pockets, fingers clutching his empty wallet and the scant few coins he’d managed to salvage to pay his bus fare. It was all becoming so depressing; all these job interviews amounting to nothing, not even a paltry second interview.

He ambled to the bus stop and joined the back of the queue. He stared at the back of the head of the man in front of him: greasy hair, flaky scalp. When the bus finally arrived the queue shuffled forward, as slow and orderly as a Russian bread line. The people climbed aboard one by one. When Nick reached the doors he was shocked to see them jerk shut, and to hear the bus hissing at him like a big, angry cat.
 

He looked through the grimy plexi-glass, at the fraught and overweight driver. The driver shrugged, fiddled with his control panel, and when the doors still refused to budge he shrugged again. The bus moved slowly away from the kerb, joining the traffic like a fish entering a migrating shoal in some busy gulf stream.

Feeling like this was some kind of metaphor for his day, Nick set off on the short walk home. At least this way he could save some money; the coins in his pocket might be put to better use elsewhere.

Annie was there when he got home, eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. “Hi,” he said. “I didn’t get it.” He had learned some time ago to pre-empt her questions; this way the conversation did not go on for long and he was spared at least some of the shame he associated with constant rejection.

“Another dead end, eh?” Her eyes remained focused on the paper. “Jesus, you could use some luck.” She frowned, but he could not be sure if it was over the news item or his report of yet another unsuccessful meeting.
 

Annie finished her lunch and put the plate in the sink, then leaned forward to distractedly kiss his cheek. Her lips were cold and damp. They left crumbs on his skin when she pulled away. “I have to rush off—only came back for lunch, to save some pennies.” The smile didn’t touch her eyes; they remained narrow and hard and unfocused.

“See you tonight.” Why did that sound so much like a question?
 

Annie didn’t reply. She just went out the back door and disappeared through the gate.

Nick shuffled over to the sink and filled a glass with water. There was a chip in the glass—a small imperfection—and he twisted it so the sharp edge faced away from him, so it wouldn’t touch his mouth.

He wasn’t hungry so he didn’t bother with lunch. Instead he made instant coffee and read Annie’s paper—the Guardian, the fucking
Guardian
? Who the hell was she trying to impress? She only ever used to read the tabloids, but since starting her new job at the financial company, her reading tastes had changed. It was as if she were trying to exclude him from that side of her life: the side where she held down a respectable job in an office full of Guardian readers...

About an hour later he decided to go upstairs and clean the bathroom. Might as well utilise his time productively, and God knew the job needed doing. If he didn’t get into the habit of carrying out these little household chores, he knew he would grow increasingly idle. He wasn’t even in the mood to write—he kept saying to Annie that he was “between novels” but the truth was he had invested everything in the one novel he had sent to a list of literary agents gleaned from the internet one slow, dull afternoon over a month ago.

Putting all his eggs in one basket... It was a line he’d cringe at if he read it in a book, and he certainly wouldn’t use it in his own writing. But, like most clichés, the phrase served better than any he could concoct himself.

He put the coffee cup on the draining board and headed for the door, his mind caught up in dreams of literary stardom. Reaching out, he grasped the door handle and turned, but the door didn’t open. It stayed jammed in its frame, not budging an inch. Puzzled, Nick twisted and turned, turned and twisted...but he could not open the door.

After countless minutes engaged in this increasingly futile endeavour, he began to sweat and his fingers ached as if he’d bruised them. He moved away from the door, rubbing his hands together, and sat down at the table. He stared at the door. The locked door: the locked door that didn’t even
have
a lock. He felt bewildered and strangely hurt, as if this was yet another example of how the world was conspiring to shut him out. Or, as in this case, to shut him in.

Nick waited a few minutes and then tried the door again, but the same thing happened. The door, he reasoned, must have got stuck in the wooden frame. Something in the mechanism had broken and become lodged in the latch or something.

He went to the back door and pulled the handle. That too was locked. Agitated now, he took his key from his pocket and tried to unlock the back door. But nothing happened: the key just spun in the lock, as if it was meant for another lock altogether.

Fear nudged up close to him in the small kitchen, pressing its nose against his face. This was insane—things like this didn’t happen, not in the real world and not to normal, everyday people. Once again he tried the doors; and once again they remained shut.