Chapter Eight
EIGHT
The house is quiet, the night air sticky and close to the skin like a hot, damp breath. Thin curtains hang lifeless in front of the open window as I climb into bed and lie there in the dark, hands folded on my chest. It’s hard to fall asleep, my brain clicking and whirring and jolting like a broken clock. A little past one I must start to drift off because I’m woken what seems like seconds later by a sound outside the closed bedroom door.
I lie for a moment, half-conscious. It had sounded like scrabbling claws, pawing at the wood. I lie still, my mind turning to Eddie in an absent, somnolent way. The two of us in our old house in Clovelly, sitting on the beanbags in that sunlit spot of the attic that had always smelled a little like mothballs and damp. “Mouseshit Corner,” Eddie had christened it, because we’d regularly find mice droppings up there no matter how many traps our mother put down. We’d take up our father’s copy of Mysteries of the British Isles and pore over the stories about demons and ghosts in quiet, awed wonder. Eddie was particularly fond of Black Shuck, the legendary devil dog that prowled the dark Suffolk lanes with flaming red eyes, his appearance a portent of death and disease.
Then the noise comes again. It sounds like an animal is out there. A big dog, mouth laced with drool. Grunting, panting. Scratching at the wood. There is a wet snuffling sound along the bottom of the door like it is seeking ingress. Hunting me. I force my rigid muscles to move, hearing the click of my spine, the sharp, shallow breath in my lungs. I think of calling out for Sam but he’s downstairs and I can’t alert him without waking the whole house. My eyes fall on the key Lisa handed to me earlier. I didn’t lock the door when I went to bed and now, seeing a large shadow briefly blot out the light in the gap along the bottom, I wish I had. I wonder if it’s possible a stray dog has broken in somehow ( “Can she find Donald? Ask her to look for him. Please!” ) and as I edge slowly toward the door, I can’t help feeling that whatever is out there is low to the ground, predatory. I hear that hoarse panting again, like an animal caught in a snare. Close-up, the sounds are heavier, more primitive. Porcine. It makes me think not of a dog but of a beast covered in wiry bristles with thick, ugly tusks that scrape along the floor.
I press a hand to the door and the movement seems to pause, as if sensing me. It knows you’re there, Mina, some quiet, internal voice tells me. I take a short breath and then another. I am a statue, perfectly still. I wonder if it can hear how fast my heart is beating. Then I open the door.
The hallway is empty, the air still. In the darkness there is a static that lifts the hairs on the back of my neck and tightens my lungs. I stare into the gloom, eyes strained for movement, but no shadow darts across the hallway or peels away from the wall, no creeping hand clamps around my ankle. There’s nothing there, I tell myself after a moment, closing the door and climbing back onto Billy’s narrow, sagging mattress. Nothing there, silly.
Still, though. I lie awake a long time afterward, eyes peeled open in the dark, listening for the rattle of the doorknob or the quiet click of the latch as whatever I thought I heard out there finds a way in.