Chapter 47
The noise comes again.
Creak. The sound is small and subtle, a floorboard flexing under pressure, but it’s loud enough in the deep black silence of this old house.
I feel myself come fully and shockingly awake, as if I’ve just grabbed an electric fence with both hands, staring into the darkness as if that will somehow make it easier to hear the next noise and figure out where it’s coming from.
Perhaps it was Leah, creeping to the bathroom?
But her room has an en suite; she doesn’t need to come down for the toilet let alone down to the ground floor.
The younger two would call for me rather than wander around in the dark at night. And the noise was definitely below.
The front hall was tiled, the kitchen and conservatory too. A creak of wood meant the lounge, the dining room, the back room.
Or the stairs.
I sit up and flick the thin summer duvet off my legs, a pounding red wine hangover already starting its drumbeat in my head.
At our old house I’d always kept an old wooden chair leg next to the bed after hearing about a neighbor burgled in the night while his family slept.
I’d never needed it, and it had ended up covered in a layer of dust alongside a pile of unread books, but it felt good to have something there. Just in case.
I reach for it in the darkness, my grasping hand finding only the flat cool of the bedroom wall.
The makeshift weapon, I realize, is still in one of the packing crates stacked up in the garage along with most of my books and other bedroom stuff.
There’s no time to look for anything else—I just have to get to the top of the stairs before they do.
Heart thudding against my ribs, I feel my way around the bed, fingers running along the cool metal frame, reach a hand to the wardrobe, the bookcase, the smooth round handle of the bedroom door.
For a moment I wonder whether it will be the man standing on the other side, the ghost that Daisy had seen behind her door. Some wandering spirit come back to haunt us out of his old family home.
Stop it, I say to myself. Stop being ridiculous.
With a fist clenched at my side, I wrench the door open.
The landing seems to be empty.
No ghost. No man. No one at all. It’s almost as black as the bedroom, only the vaguest of gray lines hinting at the staircase to my right.
I fumble for the nearest light switch on the landing, bracing myself for a sudden flood of illumination from the 100-watt bulb.
The breath is coming hot and fast in my throat, every muscle ready to fight, to resist, to do whatever is necessary to stop them from getting up here where my family slumbers on, unaware of the danger.
I flick the light switch.
Nothing happens.
Uselessly, I flick it on and off twice more, but the pitch darkness remains. Surely the new bulb hasn’t blown already? With my left hand out in front of me, I feel my way across the landing to the bathroom until I reach the light switch beside the door there.
Click. Nothing.
With tentative steps, I feel my way to the next door along, to Callum’s bedroom, easing the door open and going close enough to his bed to hear him breathing.
Coco is curled at the end of his bed, her old ears oblivious to everything.
In the next bedroom along, Daisy’s little blue night light has gone dark like everything else but I can just make out her soft snore against the muslin cloth she still takes to bed every night.
At the top of the staircase, I peer down into the shadows below, straining my ears to hear any sound.
There is some kind of intermittent noise down there, a soft tapping or clicking.
Just take the car keys and go, I think. Take what you want and leave my family alone.
Because if you try to come up the stairs, if you cross that line, one of us is going to get hurt.
I need light, any light. With my eyes finally starting to adjust, discerning the blacks from different depths of dark gray, I feel my way back to the master bedroom.
Going back around to my bedside table to find my mobile, noticing something else for the first time: the display on my clock radio is also blank. No red numerals. Nothing at all.
Either a circuit breaker has tripped in the cellar, or…
Or someone has cut the power.
I feel the way to my phone, the flash of the screen dazzling me as I hold down the power button. Come on, come on. I go to my wife’s side of the bed while I wait for the phone to boot up.
“Jess!” I call to her in a hoarse whisper. “Jess! Wake up.”
She doesn’t stir.
I call her name again, louder, tapping her shin with my hand. Finally, she moves her head, eyes squinting into the light from my phone.
“What?” She turns her head away from the light. “Too bright.”
“Jess, listen to me.”
“Turn it off.”
“There’s someone downstairs and the power is out. I’m going to check, OK?”
“Wait, what?” Her voice is still thick with sleep. “What’s going on?”
“Stay here,” I say again, taking her own mobile from the bedside table and pressing it into her hand. “Call the police.”
“What… Who’s here?”
“Just call them. I won’t be long. Don’t open the bedroom door to anyone.”
I’m pulling the door shut behind me as my phone chimes with the four-note sound that tells me it’s booted up, the screen filling with icons over the familiar picture of Jess and the three kids from Christmas last year.
I select the torch app and flash it around the landing, wild leaping shadows dancing away from the bright white light.
Everything looks different in the dark, in the middle of the night.
This house that we’ve only lived in for a week, that still feels as if it belongs to someone else.
Taking a deep breath, I start to descend the stairs, the night air chilly around my shoulders. I’m wearing only boxer shorts and feel more exposed, more vulnerable with every step, the red-wine throb in my head growing worse by the second.
“Hello?” I pause to pan the phone torch around when I’m halfway down the stairs. Shadows upon shadows, only a weak glaze of light filtering through the front from the old-fashioned gaslights out on the street. “The police are on their way.”
I wait for any response, hoping that Jess has already made the call. I strain my ears to hear anything above my own ragged breathing.
Silence.
The tiles of the hallway are ice-cold against the soles of my bare feet.
“Hello?” My voice echoes back to me off the high ceiling. “I know you’re there.”
There is the faintest sound from the sitting room. The shift of fabric against skin, perhaps, or the lightest step on the wooden parquet flooring.
Found you.
I reach out for the nearest hall light switch but it, too, is out of action.
Beside it, leaning in the corner, is the golfing umbrella that I take to Callum’s football matches.
My heart is beating so hard and so fast it feels like it’s coming up my throat, my mouth as dry as dead leaves.
Brandishing the big umbrella in my right hand, I shine the light from my phone into the sitting room, taking two steps in and scanning wildly around for the intruder, left, right, shadows bouncing and dancing, light flashing off the mirror over the fireplace as I turn back to the left again and there is a sudden movement on the floor…
There’s no one in the room. Only Steve, his yellow eyes blinking up at me in surprise. The remains of a small mouse are pinned beneath his paw, the tail just visible.
“Jesus,” I breathe. “Bloody cat.”
He goes back to his prize and I slowly retrace my steps back into the hall. The cat may be roaming around but he wasn’t heavy enough to make the noises I heard from upstairs. There is someone here, I am sure of it. Someone who wanted to stay in the dark.
In the kitchen I go to the sink, putting the umbrella down and shining the torchlight on the drying rack. There. My hand closes on a rolling pin.
The police should be on their way. Although… on a Saturday night they probably had their hands full with drinkers spilling out of city center pubs and bars. The thought brings me up short. What if the police took ten minutes to respond? Twenty? What then?
I had to get the lights back on.
The cellar door is already ajar, and I pull it open further, put out a tentative foot to find the top step.
The staircase is dusty cold stone, edges worn smooth with time; the walls are bare flaking brick in this subterranean part of the house that feels untouched, unchanged since the house was first built more than a century ago.
Dank, stale air greets me as I descend. The damp smells of old earth and rust and rot, but also the faintest note of—what?
Something sweet, musky, like aftershave.
Or perfume? At the bottom of the short flight of steps, I have to hunch over to avoid the cross-beams at head height.
The three pitch-black compartments of the old cellar are creepy enough with the lights on but with only the pale jumping shadows thrown by my torch, they look like something out of a horror movie.
I shine the light into each one as I pass anyway, the rolling pin gripped tightly in my right hand.
But there’s only cobwebbed junk, old boxes, tins of paint, rusting metal garden chairs.
The circuit box is in the third compartment, a two-foot panel on the wall enclosed in a clear plastic cover. I flinch as something drops onto my shoulder and runs tick-tick-tick down my bare arm.
A spider. Just a spider, scuttling off into the dark.
The master circuit breaker on the panel has been flipped down to the “off” setting.
I flick it back up with a solid click to switch the power back on, then reset all other switches one by one, still hunched over to avoid banging my head on the low beams. Everything is still in darkness: the nearest light switch is at the top of the cellar stairs.
I’m halfway up the steps when I hear the scuff of a foot above me, the creak of a hinge.
I shine the torch toward the half-open door at the top of the stairs.
In the second before a blindingly bright light shines right in my eyes I can just make out a figure, a mask, a balaclava with only a pale slit for the eyes before the sole of a heavy boot kicks the air from my chest and then I’m falling, a flash of spinning light as the phone tumbles from my hand and the hard brick floor of the cellar rushes up to meet—