No One Gets Out Alive (7 page)

Silence.

Not moving, she stood in her room, a few feet behind the locked door, her hands over her mouth, her eyes watering from the strain of not blinking, her head aching from the strain of
incomprehension.

At the end of her hearing a bed began to creak vigorously, back and forth. The noise failed to conceal the accompanying sound of rhythmic grunts.

After Stephanie checked inside the wardrobe, under the desk, behind the curtains and beneath the bedframe, she climbed under her duvet and lay awake with the lights on.
She’d moved the bedside lamp closer to the edge of the bedside cabinet, with the metal shade angled upwards to add power to the ceiling light, and to make it more accessible for one of her
arms in an emergency.

The noise of sex across the hall had been frenzied but brief. The girl had not made a sound during the encounter. Stephanie had feared that she’d heard a rape, because why would a woman so
distressed consent to sex with another tenant, and one whose movements through the house implied aggression?

It could not have been Knacker in the girl’s room because he was upstairs; she’d heard him shout at the dog. She wondered if the man that had thundered up through the house was the
owner of the leather-soled shoes that she had heard leaving the house that morning. Not catching up with him may have proven to be a lucky escape. The first break she had caught here.

Distaste mixed with her fear of sexual assault as she considered the nature of the relationship between the girl and the man that smelled like an animal. Had the girl offered a whimper of
resistance, Stephanie would have called the police. But her neighbour hadn’t made any sound, as if she were no longer even present in the room across the hall.

The man was still with her too, perhaps lying with her as if they were lovers. Maybe they were lovers entangled insanely in one of those love-hate relationships fuelled by aggression, and the
girl had grown used to his smell. Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut at all of the horror in that thought.

She opened her eyes and tried to make sense of the atmosphere that had engulfed her out in the corridor: the cold emptiness, fragranced like an uninhabited wooden space, all around her. But she
never came close to an understanding of the scent, beyond entertaining a brief and unconvincing notion that she had smelled stale air rising,
but rising from where?

The same bewilderment applied to her attempt to understand the bestial smell. From whom could such a powerful gust of raw and feral maleness have risen? For how long would you have to avoid soap
and water to cultivate such an odour?

She wondered if her interpretation of the male presence had been affected by her confrontation with Knacker. Maybe their argument had tainted her into believing she was in danger from men in
this building. She didn’t know. Didn’t really know anything about this place, or anyone inside it. All she knew was that she was tense and frightened and anxious and exhausted, with
nowhere else to go. But she also realized that no matter how bad her life seemed, the life of someone nearby was probably worse. The memory of the woman’s grief still made her nerves jangle.
She imagined being in another country and in the same situation as the girl; a country in which she didn’t know the language and couldn’t even understand an offer of help at her
door.

How did I get here?

All she’d wanted was a room and a job. Maybe that was all her neighbour had wanted too.

She told herself that she only needed to get through this night, just one more night, and if she heard anything around her bed, she would grab her most essential bag, call a taxi and go straight
to the city centre. She would walk around in the dark until the Bullring opened.

Outside her window the thick mass of foliage that engulfed the neglected garden shook, rustled and sighed in the wind. Stephanie imagined a foul sea lapping against the back of the house, an
attempt to reclaim the old bricks, stained cement and creaking timbers, to cover it all with the vines and thorns and skeletal deciduous tangles she could see from her window by daylight. It was an
unruly vegetation that rose as high as the top of the fence, on all sides of the garden, like a tidal surge over coastal walls.

Her eyelids gradually became heavy from fatigue, from the near sleepless night before. Eventually she relaxed over the edge of sleep.

But only for short periods, from which she would jerk awake to find herself lying in the same position in a lit room, with the garden’s noise still active beneath her window. Once, as she
came round from being half asleep, she was sure the window was open because the thrash and scrape of bushes and tree branches below seemed unpleasantly loud and active around the bed.

The final time she awoke, she realized the room had somehow become dark as she’d dozed.

And within the darkness she heard a voice. A woman’s voice. The voice in the fireplace. Only the voice was louder than it had been the night before. And now Stephanie
better understood the tone to be comprised of weariness and resignation, a tired voice that seemed to be recounting grievances.

Snatches reached her ears. ‘And then you said . . . I said . . . I wouldn’t . . . unreasonable . . . but who was I . . . you, you told me . . . you swore . . . it was . . . meant
something . . . a sign . . . frightened, the more I . . . and now I know . . .’

Stephanie lay still and acknowledged that her desire to know what the woman was saying exceeded her reluctant curiosity about why she could even hear the voice. This speech wasn’t aimed at
her; she was overhearing something, like a phone call further down a train carriage, or someone talking to themselves who didn’t realize you were within earshot.

‘. . . involved . . . you are . . . you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . .’

The monotony, the continuous nature of the dialogue, also suggested a preoccupation with something unresolved that a mind was making audible to itself, as if a relentless communication with
oneself might lead to an answer. Stephanie had often walked in on her stepmother doing the same thing, or stood in great discomfort outside a room while Val worked herself into a volatile state
through imaginary conversations, either with her, her dead father, people she knew, people she didn’t know but knew of, while always playing herself as the injured party.

Only when polythene crinkled beneath the bed did Stephanie stop listening to the voice in the fireplace. Alarming as the voice was, there was something passive and disinterested about the tone.
The sounds under her bed were incalculably worse. Particularly tonight, because they immediately suggested that something much bigger than a mouse had roused mere feet beneath where she lay.

The activity was reminiscent of rustling caused by whatever the polythene was wrapped around gradually shifting inside its coverings. And she’d happily accept a rat as an explanation right
now. But as the only legitimate resident of a room that was so cold, either chilled to the bone by her fear, or naturally bereft of even a vestige of warmth because the central heating was off, she
felt a scream build as her thoughts fragmented.

She looked down her body but couldn’t see the duvet she lay beneath, and just peered, unblinking, into the lightless space that began on the surface of her eyes and seemed to continue into
a freezing forever.

For a moment she suspected she was upside down and that the top of her head was level with the floor. The suspicion became belief as her mind failed to orientate the position of her body. And
into the maelstrom of half thoughts, instincts and imaginings that her mind struggled to be more than, she received an impression that there was no floor at all and that she hung in space,
revolving and adrift from solidity.

Dead. This is death.

She desperately wanted to move to regain a sense of the physical world she must have woken into. But if she moved she was terrified the other things in the darkness would be alerted to her
presence: predators with blank eyes and gaping maws, changing course to follow a vibration in the depths of a freezing black ocean.

Her scream only added itself to the room when a floorboard shifted and groaned at the end of her bed, mere inches from her feet.

Into her awareness the missing dimensions of the physical world reassembled, prompted by the sound of the intruder, as if gravity itself had made a sudden reappearance inside the black space. An
understanding that she was lying down, flat on her back, and not turning in the air should have been a blessing. But how could it when someone stood at the foot of her bed? An intruder who leaned
forward, poised to climb onto the mattress with her. The bed coverings dipped on either side of her ankles.

Stephanie thrust one arm out from the covers and seized the lamp beside the bed. ‘No. Don’t,’ was all she could manage in a quiet, almost resigned, tone of voice.

She found the rubber cord, the switch.

Held her breath.

When she saw the face her heart would stop. Which made her wonder if it would be better to endure this within darkness . . . whatever
this
was.

Stephanie switched on the light.

She gulped at the air like she had been holding her breath under cold water for a dangerous length of time. She drew her arms and legs into herself and shuffled up the bed and
into the corner, dragging the bedclothes with her. Being uncovered within the room was unbearable.

She stared at the walls and the furnishings, peeked around the edges of the bed, and saw only those outmoded articles of furniture within the tacky, scruffy walls, and nothing else. There was no
one on her bed and no one in her room.

At least no one you can see.

She stood up on the bed. Took the duvet with her and tottered down the mattress to hit the light switch on the wall beside the door to get the ceiling light on.

Leaning her back against the wall, she peered into the space under the desk, scrutinized the gap between the bedside cabinet and the mattress, assessed the curtains for a bulge in case someone
had tried to conceal themselves against the locked windows.

There were no bulges, and no one crouched under the desk or lying on the floor beside her bed. The room was as empty as it had been before she fell asleep
with the lights on.

The lights!

Who had switched the lights off? Someone had been in here.

A presence.

A presence that could kill the light.

What else could it kill?

Stephanie looked down at the sheets. Nothing rustled beneath her bed anymore. Nothing had crawled out from under there. The room was sealed. The room was locked.

And you’re locked inside it.

She leapt off the bed and made sure to land clear of an area that an arm might reach into from under the bedframe, with a hand swiping about.

She stared into the empty space beneath her bed: floorboards, a multitude of dust rabbits, a section of red rug, the plain wall in shadow.

She moved to the curtains and yanked them aside to look at the grubby glass of two locked sash windows.

Bent over, her hands placed on the table to support her weight, she breathed in deeply, exhaled, breathed in. She stared at the empty black grate of the fireplace. At the long unused iron
hearth, set between two Doric pillars of hardwood, painted a creamy colour. Impossibly, just impossibly, the voice had come out of
there.

Across the hallway, her neighbour’s door opened, swung inwards and banged against an item of furniture.

Stephanie flinched and clasped her hands to her mouth. Her face screwed up but she was too frightened to cry. The coming together of noises and movements and energy that should not be, that
could not be, seemed to merge into a critical mass around her.

Heavy footsteps crossed the dark corridor and paused outside her door. The round door knob quickly turned: once, twice, three times. The plastic handle rattled loosely inside the wood.

‘Who is it?’ she said to the door in a voice she barely recognized as her own.

There was no answer. But whoever had turned the handle, whoever had tried to enter her room, must still be there, outside, listening. She’d heard no footsteps retreat.

‘Awright, nice day at work? What flavour was them crusts you was giving out today? Don’t know how you can stand a job like that. Demeaning, ain’t it?’
Knacker grinned as if triumphant at her return to the house. He came out of the room at the end of the second floor corridor, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. The hallway lights winked
out.

Stephanie had only returned to collect as much as she could carry, and to make the most difficult phone call of her life to Ryan, before heading to New Street train station to buy a single
ticket to Coventry with the last of her money, so she could put the disaster that had been her new start in Birmingham out of its misery.

Ryan hadn’t picked up her calls so far, or responded to her text messages, but if he allowed her to return to his place, and if she travelled to Coventry tonight, the deposit and advance
rent were gone for good, something she’d begrudgingly accepted that day like the removal of a front tooth to permanently destroy her smile. Ryan would then have to accompany her to this house
at the weekend to pick up the rest of her bags, while also needing to sub her with cash.

Either that or she left the building this evening and walked around Birmingham city centre all night until the Bullring opened.

Not even six full months away from her stepmother, after fleeing what she had known as the family home since the age of eleven, but a house that now belonged to Val, and she’d already sunk
to last resorts: no money, borrowed beds, an ex-boyfriend’s mercy.

‘Fack’s sake. Put them fings on again, will ya?’

Stephanie hit the switch quickly, her speed motivated by the thought of being inside a lightless passage with Knacker. She opened the door to her room and stepped inside.