No One Gets Out Alive (28 page)

Shaking so hard that her vision moved, Stephanie looked at a dark digital image. One that was, at first, unclear. Until the chaos of shadow and pale smudges on the small screen of the phone
suggested a fat, eyeless face wearing spectacles, and a head tightly covered in the hood of a raincoat. When she glimpsed what she believed were a row of teeth in a howling mouth she closed her
eyes.

Giggling like a chimp, Fergal spoke with enough familiarity to suggest they were sharing a joke. ‘It’s him, ain’t it? It’s really him. He come back just like he said he
would.’

The ringtone of her phone erupted from a pocket in Knacker’s jeans.

Fergal whipped his head in knacker’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Knacker fished the phone out of his pocket. ‘Someone called Ryan. Fird time he’s called today. And twice
yesterday. I can’t read his texts. She’s put a pin number in.’

Fergal’s face moved within an inch of Stephanie’s nose. ‘Who the fuck is that?’

She swallowed but could not speak.

When the distant chime of the doorbell announced itself up the stairwell, quickly followed by the sound of a hand hammering against the front door, Knacker and Fergal exchanged glances.

Knacker became antsy with nerves and started to bob on his toes. ‘We ain’t expecting no one til five.’

‘You expecting someone?’ Fergal asked Stephanie, and his breath reminded her of spoiled meat.

‘Course she ain’t,’ Knacker said. ‘Like I said, her friends don’t wanna know.’

‘Shut it!’ Fergal shouted at his cousin.

‘Awright! Leave it out, will ya?’

Fergal pushed his face into hers. ‘What’s the pin number?’

Stephanie swallowed and whispered it. Fergal quickly entered it into the phone. He glared at Knacker. ‘You should have done this yesterday, twat!’ His eyes returned to the phone and
he went through her messages. ‘She’s been texting him. This cunt who’s been calling.’ He swivelled his head round to confront Stephanie again. ‘I asked you a question.
Is you expecting a visitor, this Ryan? You given him our address?’

She shook her head. She couldn’t manage anything else and was too scared to even sniff at the mucus that had run from her nose. The crotch of her jeans had gone cold and was starting to
make her sore.

Through the shock and bewilderment that had not abated since she had been attacked by ‘Bennet’, and which had only been worsened by Fergal showing her the picture of the dead rapist
on his phone screen, Stephanie made a connection between the call from Ryan and the sound of banging on the distant front door. She felt a surge of hope that made her want to cry.

‘Get it,’ Fergal said to Knacker.

Knacker pointed at her. ‘Last night. Yeah, last night. She was making freats, like. Said something about someone knowing she was here, like. Sure she did.’

‘I said, get it!’ Fergal roared at Knacker, who almost instantly vanished from the doorway in his haste to escape Fergal’s wrath.

Fergal returned his attention to Stephanie; the sides of his thin lips were white with spittle, and within his expression the hatred she interpreted made her cringe against the radiator.
‘Finks he’s hard, does he? Cavalry? Finks he can come here and sort fings out, does he? Well if he wants some then he can have some.’

‘No.’ Her voice was a whisper and her throat closed again after the faint sound escaped.

Fergal was already on his feet and striding from the room with a purpose that made her feel sick.

‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t you touch him!’ Stephanie followed Fergal across the room.

He turned in the doorway and glared at her. Nothing else was required to bring her to a flinching stand still. He closed the door nonchalantly. With the key Knacker had left hanging from the
lock, the door was secured.

In the far distance, over the sound of Fergal’s retreating footsteps, the front door of the house closed, shutting the visitor inside.

Stephanie was surprised that she had still not cried. Maybe the tears would come later, if there was a later.

No, there would be no
later
, not after what they had just done in the garden. She had seen it and they knew she had seen it. And what she had seen had made her incapable
of anything afterwards, except lying on the bed in a foetal position, staring at the wall, back inside her original first floor room.

Such was her shock she wasn’t sure she remembered the events correctly, or even in the right sequence. She could only recall bits of what happened, like clips from a film she’d been
watching as she dozed off, and then awoke, and then dozed off again, until she’d finally roused to watch the end credits rolling down a screen. But images from the garden scene would suddenly
rush into her mind, and they would be too clear, too loud and too bright, and she would whimper and push the images back into the darkness.

She didn’t know how long she had been lying like this in her old room. Hours, surely.

After Ryan had arrived and Fergal had locked her inside Margaret’s old room, Stephanie had heard raised voices issuing from deeper inside the building. She’d heard them while pressed
against the door. The voices had grown in strength and volume and changed tone. She’d wanted to break the window and scream for help. But fear,
yes fear
, of displeasing the cousins
and provoking reprisals she might not awake from, had kept her sobbing and pressed into the door. And fear had become guilt while she repeated a mantra to herself:
Ryan must have told someone
he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming.

Guilt had since sunk into regret. Because now, more than anything, she regretted not breaking the window and jumping from the second storey of the building. She was responsible for what had
happened to Ryan. Like Knacker had said, she was responsible because she had told Ryan where she was and ‘bitched to him, like, about this house. No one likes a grass.’

‘Oh, God. No, God, no,’ she said to herself as the most memorable scene flashed into her mind once again; a scene from midway through the proceedings, after she had managed to knock
Knacker aside and briefly escape the room. A vivid scene which featured Fergal’s lanky shape dragging something by a foot through the rubbish sacks and building refuse and long weeds of the
patio: a body not really moving beside the clutching motions it made upon its own wet and crimson face.

Ryan.

That was before Knacker ran and caught her in the stairwell. He had grabbed her by the hair just after she had raised a hand to bang the stairwell window. He’d taken the wrist of her
raised arm with his other hand, and even he had paused at that stage and said, ‘Better not look, eh? When Fergal loses it he don’t fuck around, like.’

Her memory revisited an earlier scene: the one when Knacker came to her room a few minutes after the shouting and bellowing had stopped downstairs. Right after Fergal had screamed like an animal
and then bellowed, ‘You want it! You want it! You want it!’ at the visitor, at Ryan.

Knacker’s face, when it appeared at the door of the room in which Margaret had died, was bloodless and wet with sweat and he had been wheezing like an asthmatic. He had run up two flights
of stairs to check on her, to make sure she ‘wasn’t trying anything on, like’.

One of Knacker’s hands was red and some of the knuckles were already blue-purple. He’d held one hand against his stomach like a claw and kept wincing as he spoke to her. The big toe
of one foot had come through one of the new lime green trainers. The shoe looked like a child had blown scarlet paint through a drinking straw across the top.

And then her memory drifted forwards to the sound of Fergal’s dirty shoe coming down on Ryan’s face on the garden patio, and then stamping onto the side of his head, and then onto
his face again, and then onto the back of his head, after Ryan had rolled over and tried to get to his knees.

One of Ryan’s arms had been broken and hung limp under his ribs, which was why he had not been able to get up from the dirty ground. They had broken his arm inside the house before they
dragged him into the garden. They had disabled him first.

The sounds then issuing from the patio, under Fergal’s stamping shoe, had been a
whumf, whumf, whumf.
The following sound, the final noise, had reminded Stephanie of a chamois
leather being slapped onto the windscreen of a car. It was the last thing she had heard before Knacker yanked her onto her back and then dragged her up the stairs and marched her down the corridor
to her old room.

‘I got the bottle. You wanna see it? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ Knacker had whispered over Stephanie’s shoulder and into her ear. ‘God help me I will use it too, sister. On my
muvver’s life I will frow it in your face, girl. After what you done you is lucky you still got lips round your mouf.’

That is what Knacker had said to her – yes, because he was referring to an earlier scene, when he had first come to her door, panting, with his painful hand and his bony face drained of
blood after his exertions with Ryan downstairs. And when she had seen that Knacker was lame – that the hand he’d used against Ryan’s handsome face was injured – she had
lashed out and punched Knacker. Smashed her knuckles into his big lips and made him squeal. And while his eyes were full of tears, she had knocked him out of the way and had run to the stairwell,
screaming Ryan’s name into the dim, warm claustrophobia of the house’s interior. By the time she’d reached the stairwell window Ryan was past help and past hearing her.

The dog had been barking. She remembered the violence in its bark as it wanted to join its masters and shake the inert meat around the broken patio upon which Ryan had been slaughtered. They had
murdered Ryan with their fists and feet, like simple apes whose territory had been infringed by a rogue male.

The noises came back to her. Again and again.
Whump. Whump. Whump. Slap.

Stephanie turned over on the bed and looked at the window without seeing it.

Not long now.

They’d be coming for her soon. How would they do it?

How will I die?

She looked at the light fitting and briefly thought about hanging herself. But with what? A belt . . . tights . . .

She didn’t know how to tie good knots and knew she wouldn’t be able to step off the end of the bed and into thin air. The very thought brought her close to a faint. Part of her mind
seemed to be shouting,
I can’t believe you are having these thoughts.
But she almost laughed at the sentiment. No, she would carry on breathing until they decided they would stop her
heart and end everything that she was: the thoughts, feelings, memories and attachments. Her.
Me.

Around her, inside the atmosphere of the house, she sensed the continued descent of a heavier gravity. A blackening of the air. A big, old, deep breath had been pulled into dirty stone lungs
lined with vulgar wallpaper. It wasn’t the same house she had been inside even two days ago. This was another time and place now. Hate and sadism had anointed the air in the same way sex had.
The cries and footsteps of long lost women had been the chorus at the beginning of the ritual, a polyphony of misery.

The atmosphere had become enriched and built to a critical mass. Yes, she perceived this now, understood how it worked. A terrible unstable energy had grown inside the space once the right
components were in place to trigger a reaction. And she was just more fuel, another sacrifice to something that had been here much longer than she had. She didn’t matter, neither did Ryan, or
the sobbing girls that were already dead, but were still beaten and raped night after night by something that smelled of human disease. Fergal, Knacker, Bennet:
they
had won.

Once you came within
their
reach in the worlds
they
created, nothing really held them back. Not for long. They changed everything before you noticed, while you were still
smiling and trusting and hoping. They had made everything she took for granted redundant, like cooperation and manners and civility and privacy and laws. Silly things that pinged out easily like
old light bulbs.

She’d swum through a little bit of the world for a tiny fragment of time until she’d happened across
them
, and now she was going to be put out like a spark pinched between
grubby fingers. When she realized this was how her end would look to most people, she seemed to slip over an edge existing somewhere in the middle of herself. And she wasn’t sure who or what
remained behind.

Fergal stood at the foot of the bed grinning, as if the lanky animal had done something clever.

Knacker peered over Fergal’s shoulder like a younger boy admiring booty snatched from a school bag. ‘Must have given him the address when they was calling each uvver. Big
mistake.’

‘Yes, that is a fact, Knacker.’ Fergal jutted his chin at Stephanie. ‘And I do bet he wished he never come.’ He embellished the taunt with a titter.

Knacker smirked approval at the jest.

Fergal pushed his face at her. ‘Who else you give the address to?’

Stephanie stared back but never spoke.

Fergal’s grin broadened and he showed all of his yellow teeth. ‘Knacker. Have you still got somefing that belongs to me? Somefing that keeps tarts in line?’

At that Knacker didn’t even smile. ‘Upstairs, I fink.’

‘Bullshit!’

Knacker jumped backwards, then swallowed.

‘I can see it in your pocket, you big pussy. Gotta be the bottle cus your cock ain’t even half that size. Give it over.’ Fergal snapped two absurdly long fingers in the air,
the ends black with grime and Ryan’s blood.

Knacker pulled the bottle of acid out of the front pocket of his jeans.

‘Tut, tut, tut. Shouldn’t keep it by your pecker, Knacker. Don’t you know nuffin’? Top might have come off. Your nudger getting burned off won’t be no loss to the
girls though.’

At that Knacker winced and placed the small medicine bottle in Fergal’s outstretched fingers. Knacker’s own hands were shaking.