No One Gets Out Alive (50 page)

Bands of morning light pierced the clean glass of the patio doors to reveal myriad diaphanous motes wafting on air currents. The harder she looked, the more the very air became a perpetual
shower of dust particles, forever falling, constantly stirred, moving, relocating, glittering, gathering, growing.

She peered at the sole of one bare foot; it was blackened by the filth spread around the floor. Same thing in the kitchen. Her fingertip came away black, time after time, on every flat surface
the kitchen boasted. The surfaces, the pots and pans hanging above the central work station, the breakfast bar, the oven, microwave and sink, were all filmed with dust, a multitude of specks
accumulating and spread finely to fade the room to grey. Twenty thousand pounds to build, but now as dirty as a long-abandoned squat.

Amber opened the patio doors and stepped outside. She sat on the first of the three steps that led to the grassy pasture of the rear lawn and began to cry. Could not stop crying; the tears of
bitterness, rage, frustration and outright despair would not end. Tears of the helpless. Her body trembled, her hands twitched as if cold.

The late summer sun was warm and bright, and only the most talented fine artist could have adequately captured the quiet and gentle beauty of the Devonshire morning: a most English idyll, with a
subtle, intense power. Maize shivered in a faint cooling sea breeze; momentarily the heads of the nearest plants swayed sideways in the capricious air currents, and then nodded towards her. The
crop beyond her garden gate might have become an audience to her wretchedness, raising thousands of hands to the air to wave above a vast crowd that whispered and rustled in anticipation of what
came next.

Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass.

‘My God, my God,’ she said to herself, and to the earth and trees and sky, to whatever bore witness to her misery.

You took her back, you took her back to the green grass . . . the harvest, to the country. Took her from the city. From out of the darkness. And you carried her back here. You are a
carrier.

‘No.’

Or did she take you back?

Black Mag let you run, you stupid bitch. She let you run here. She found you here. She went through your mind. She found your memories of the seaside. Of Dad, Mum. She made you come here.
She wanted it for herself. Because she’s inside you.

Used. Used like the others.

You took an oath. You promised to keep her. You would have said anything to get out of that place . . . did you?

‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!’

You did.

‘I can’t remember. Oh Jesus, I can’t remember.’

She couldn’t fully recall her night on the kitchen floor of the ground floor flat, surrounded by broken glass and crockery and splintered wood; the night she had truly lost her mind
through sustained terror. A time in which she had become convinced that she was no longer inside the house, or even part of a recognizable world; a time in which she seemed to have existed on the
border between one world and another.

And in such places, didn’t she know only too well, that the precision of a person’s recall could not be relied upon. Memory developed a second life, and the imagination cultivated
the visuals of memory and embellished them over time. Isn’t that what the therapist had said: that her memory and imagination had combined within that house, and continued to do so after she
escaped it? Because in hindsight she remembered herself looking down at her body on the kitchen linoleum, and not lying amongst the wreckage and peering up and into the black, so it was never a
true memory, or she would have recalled the room from the floor?

Like so much of that time in her life, she seemed to have walked within a perpetual nightmare that began the very moment the front door of
that place
closed behind her. And what she had
experienced in the rooms of the ground floor flat had made her want to die, and quickly. That she had not forgotten. She had desired the void. Total extinction. An end to consciousness. Had prayed
for it. Because she had seen things no mind was built to withstand.

So maybe the building had been a prison, a place of exile for something older than the house, even the city? The house was a place
it
had scrabbled back into, when called. A temple.
Perhaps called upon innocently and inadvertently by those idiots of ‘Light’. Had they invited something back to twist the minds of the simpletons that occupied its tomb? Or had Clarence
Putnam brought it to the big city from Wales? He had been an amateur historian. But whose will drove his purpose? She would never know. Those fools may have continued a degenerate rite once
practised freely. An ancient honour. And what if they were answered when they called out to the darkness?

Nonsense. Nonsense. It was nonsense.

The song.
Maidens beneath the grass . . . the nursery rhyme of the gypsy boy in the dream she had a thin recollection of. He had been at the house during the Second World War with his
grandmother. They had been committed to an asylum.
Four maids.
Had he sung something about four maids?
To open a door.

Women hanged by washing line. Buried in soil. Cemented into foetal positions like the unborn. Walled up, the crouching bones.

Amber suspected she was going to throw up. She was breathing too quickly and her heartbeat was accelerating her panic to a place where she worried she might need an injection to calm down. She
was mad; these were the thoughts of the damaged, the deranged, the impaired.

Amber stood up and turned upon the house. ‘Who are you? Where are you!’

Her shaking vision raked the window panes for the sight of an unwelcome face; one that might peer out at her, gleeful, triumphant, sated, with little white eyes open. A thing that had followed
her here.

There had been no nightmares, no intrusions, no trespassers, no darkness beyond the doors of her hotel suite in Plymouth. Whatever she had fled from, whatever she had encountered in her first
week in this new house, had followed her here, to this building. So would it follow her anywhere and eventually appear wherever she settled? At sea she had been moving. In sheltered accommodation
she had never been alone.

For I have determined there to winter.

What did that mean?

Me? Winter in me?

Oh, God no. Please, no.

Have you been biding your time?

Amber turned and stumbled onto the lawn, lost her footing while she clutched her skull to still the spin and the flash of the images and the ideas that gushed like condemning evidence into the
courtroom of her mind, testifying to her collusion and collaboration with something no one believed in. Something that could not exist. And at the edge of her vision, the maize plants continued to
flow and wave, like so many small green banners rejoicing at the return of a queen.

All around her property the crops grew to record heights and highs. The local television news said so. She recalled a police constable in Edgehill Road, who had been shushed and glared at by the
detectives that first took her back to the address, after he had remarked that ‘those cookers are a good size’; the constable had been referring to the abundance of massive cooking
apples rotting brown in the grass of number 82, or pulling down the supple branches of the trees that encroached upon the roof of the ancient, sagging shed.

The blue sky now blinded her eyes into a squint. The vastness of the earth’s cold soil suddenly became apparent: deep layers of turf and root and spindly tendril, sucking at nutrients in
the dark, beyond the eyes of the living who occupied some thin, ephemeral film of breathable gas, below the suffocating extinction of the black void above and around, all around.

Was this thin coating of oxygen around such dense earth all there was to life, to existence? How could it be all there was? The idea was ludicrous. The unacknowledged irrelevance of humanity was
the notion’s only defence.

We have never been alone.

Amber felt faint, staggered and then fell to the cool, soft grass that embraced her weight. She wiped her nose with her forearm.

‘No.’ She shook her head. It could not be true. The idea was so crazy you’d have to be crazy to even entertain it. This bounty had nothing to do with her. The harvest in South
Devon had bloomed to its record-breaking surplus before she had even set foot on English soil at Southampton. The agriculture, the weather, could not have any connection to her.

Not everything is about you.
Isn’t that what her stepmother used to shout at her? Was she so egocentric and solipsistic to assume that she had become the focus of the unworldly?
Singled out to carry a message or perform a special divine task? Schizophrenic delusions. Wasn’t she hearing voices again?

‘I won’t accept this. No. Won’t. No. No. No. This is not happening. Not really. None of this. They fucked you up. They fucked you up. You were already fucked up, but they
fucked you up even more.’

Inside her jacket her phone began to tinkle and vibrate.

She stared at the screen. Number unknown.

‘Hello, I’m outside. In the lane. Outside the gate. I must say you’re well hidden. I been past your house three times already!’ A happy, excitable
voice, satisfaction or relief that the obscure destination had been found, human warmth generating from the other end of the call; it took a long time to pierce Amber’s preoccupation with
such unworldly matters.

‘Hello? Hello?’ the voice continued, the enthusiasm ebbing to confusion.

Amber swallowed. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was a hoarse whisper, her larynx thick with tears.

‘Amber? Ms Hare?’

That was her new name, yes, the name of the lonely, pale, rich girl prone to tears, but it seemed an odd signifier, one strangely detached from who she was right now, right here, hunched over in
the garden of a defiled dream house, her face wet with tears, her heart so laden with dread she wondered if she would ever have the strength to move her feet again.

‘Sorry, Ms Hare? Can you hear me?’ Confusion was turning to concern at the other end of the call.

Amber recognized the woman’s voice. This was Carol, the prospective live-in housekeeper and companion she had interviewed by phone on Thursday, just two days ago, the day after she’d
met Peter in her Plymouth hotel. She’d conducted four interviews by phone with applicants recommended by the home help agencies for the residential opening at her farmhouse.

How could she allow anyone else to enter this place that had gone so bad so quickly? A place contaminated, toxic with nightmares, infested with the dead, soiled by dust and rank with the stench
of killers. What kind of house was this to keep? And what kind of person would seek a companion to share hell with them?

During the interview Carol’s warmth and her sweetness, through the sound of her voice alone, had immediately attracted Amber, reminding her of those surviving sensations of her mother that
she still held dear. Carol had quickly become a shortlist of one.

She’d arranged for Carol to visit the farmhouse this morning, Saturday, to meet more informally, to see what she thought of the house. Amber almost laughed at that now; a woman to keep
this dirty shrine to old magic, murder, the restless dead, and the tomb of a still-living mad woman. It would be inhumane to expect another to cohabit a place so unstable. In her desperation, what
had she been thinking?

Amber sniffed, wiped at her nose again. ‘Yes, Carol. I can hear you now.’

‘Oh good. I was saying I am outside.’

‘Fine.’ She had to turn her away. But the woman had driven all the way from Tavistock for the appointment. Carol had been looking forward to the trip; that’s what she had said
on the phone. Carol was a widow and her daughter had recently emigrated to Australia with her husband, taking Carol’s sole grandchild away to the other side of the planet. Carol had confided
all of this to Amber during the phone interview. She’d spoken directly, candidly.

Carol had once supervised the canteen of a stately home open to the public, had nursed her sick mother to the end of a life blighted with cancer, nursed her husband to the end of the horror of
Alzheimer’s, then cared for her granddaughter five days a week, while her parents worked to save for their future, in Australia.

Carol had cared for the young and the old, the sick, the confused, the dying. Amber had sensed compassion, patience, a bedrock of kindness, an innate understanding of the troubled heart, a soft
and nurturing presence that sought to share a rare goodness with another, a stranger like her.

‘I can’t let you in.’ Amber walked to the side of the house and glanced through the patio doors. The dust. ‘It’s a bit of a mess.’ The statement was absurd;
she wished she had said nothing.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been away.’ Amber couldn’t think of anything else to say, and her dread and fear swiftly warmed into a heat of mortification. If Carol saw the dust
and the dross she would think badly of her; think she was a dirty girl. Irrelevant to even think this way. Why did she even care? Her own innate nature was a banality that didn’t cease in the
face of black miracles. And there was no job now, not here.

‘A bit of mess don’t frighten me. Maybe this is something I can help you with.’ Carol’s words bounced along melodically, given flight by an eagerness to help, to
please.

Amber moved past the garage extension and stood on the front drive, stared at the electric gate. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘Pardon,’ Carol said.

Amber swallowed. ‘Sorry. It’s . . . it’s not safe here. In here. Not safe.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I can’t let you in. Can’t let anyone in. I’ll pay for your time. I will. Your petrol. But I can’t let anyone in here. Not now. I’m not really who you think I
am, Carol. I want to be who you think I am, but I can’t be.
They
won’t let me. Because it’s getting worse. And I’m so tired. So tired by it all . . . And it’s
happening again. Quickly. Soon it will get worse, like it did before. Right here. Something followed me. It waited. But it’s inside here now.’