All at once—
After the blackness, the next thing I feel is dead.
There’s nothing. No light, just pitch black. No air. No noise. No up or down; I’m suspended in space. I’m paralysed, my mind severed from my body. I don’t think I even have a body any more. Being dead is the only thing that makes any sense.
Until the pain comes rushing in.
I am one giant mass of it, an agony suddenly screaming from every cell. I can’t breathe. I can’t stand it. I can’t take it.
But then the pain changes, morphs, splitting down the middle, detaching into two separate parts. Each part splits again and darts to a different location. One goes to the left side of my head, my left cheek, my left shoulder. The other to my right elbow, my right hip, my right knee.
The pain in my head is different. It thunders, pulses, beats from the inside out.
But in the other places, it’s coming from the outside in.
Something hard, pressing into my skin. Stiffness.
Burning muscle. My head is hurting because Erin smashed a cordless drill into my skull, but these other places …
It’s pressure.
That’s what’s hurting me.
I need to move but my brain isn’t listening. I try again.
All at once—
A hot needle of stinging pain shoots up the skin on my right cheek and stays there.
My nose bangs into something solid, alerting me to the fact that something solid is in front of my whole face.
I lift my left arm away from my left leg and bang it into something soft that crackles like thick plastic.
And then, suddenly, horribly, understanding hits.
I can’t move because there isn’t room to.
I’m lying on my side inside something hard, a small space, a box, one that is barely big enough for me to be in it.
Someone has put me in here.
Trapped me.
Buried me.
I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe
There’s a painful fluttering in my chest, the wings of a huge moth flapping against my ribcage, gaining power, gathering speed.
My lungs are closing; I picture those vacuum-pack bags after all the air has been sucked out.
The disparate parts of my pain are reaching for one another, threatening to join up once again.
I am sure, I am positive, that what will happen next is that my heart will explode.
Then I see something, in the dark.
A light, in my peripheral vision.
What is that? Is it a way out?
I try to turn my head – pain. Explosions of it, ripping through my neck. The stinging on my cheek stretches itself across my nose; I think there’s something there that’s scraping skin off my face when I rub against it. It feels like … sandpaper? Rough wood?
What is that light?
I think it’s a small box. A box of light. A phone?
Could it be?
I need to be able to see it. No matter how painful it is, I have to turn my head. I grit my teeth and try again.
Snap.
Inside my neck.
At the same moment a blaze of fire shoots up into my head and sprints down the entire length of my spine.
But I’ve done it! I’ve managed to move. To turn my head an inch.
It’s not a box of light, it’s a hole in the solid black. A hole that’s letting light in. A dull white glow; wherever the light is coming from, there isn’t much of it. And just at the edge is something I’ve seen before: a bouquet of bluntly cut electrical wires.
I recognize them. They’re the same ones that stick out of the wall of the office.
The unfinished office with its plasterboard sheets waiting for render, bare floor and plastic film still on the skylight.
The renovations that started at some point and then stopped for some reason.
But how is it that I’m seeing from this side, from—
As if someone has thrown a match into a pool of lighter fluid, I’m suddenly alight, alert, finally understanding.
I am behind the wall of the office.
I am inside it.
I’m not suspended, I’m lying on my right side, squeezed into the space.
I am in the wall.
But I can’t be. It’s not possible. This isn’t happening. I hit my head and fell unconscious. This is just a nightmare. It has to be.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
I look into the box of light, trying to see if there’s anything beyond it, if there’s anyone out there.
I say, ‘Hello?’
Or I try to. What comes out sounds more like the muffled cry of a trapped wild animal, suffocating slowly.
Am I suffocating? Will I run out of air in here?
The flat black by the hole shifts and morphs, taking on shades and depth. As my eyes adjust, something starts to take shape, to emerge from the dark.
A shape.
‘I’m sorry,’ a voice says.
It’s so quiet, it’s practically a whisper, and I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It sounds far away and also right beside my ear. I think maybe I’m imagining it. I wonder if I’ve lost my mind completely, if maybe I said it.
‘I didn’t think you’d wake up,’ the voice says.
And now, finally, I recognize it.
Erin.
She’s still here. In the room. On the other side of the wall.
Why isn’t she trying to get me out? How did I get in here?
What is that thing, that shape, that’s in here with me?
The doorbell rings.
Then thunder, rumbling. All around me.
No, just on one side of me. Behind me. Because they’re footsteps, on the stairs.
Erin has gone downstairs to answer the door.
I can hear it now, clicking open.
I start screaming. ‘Help! Here! Help! Please!’ I don’t stop. I try to do it louder. I rip my throat raw, I stretch my chest until I think I’ll break it, I try to make more noise than the pain does, thumping inside my head.
And then I hear them.
A woman’s voice, first. ‘Jesus Christ, Erin. What the …?’
And then a man’s. ‘But how did she even …?’
Erin’s, again. ‘I didn’t think she was going to wake up, did I?’
Banging.
Him: ‘We need something to …’
Her: ‘What did you do? What did you do?’
Erin: ‘What I had to.’
Him: ‘Will I call—?’
Her: ‘Not yet. Look for tools. Is there …?’
I don’t understand why they’re talking. Why they’re only talking. Why aren’t they getting me out of here?
I scream again, just once.
Her: ‘We’re coming, love. Hang on.’
Him: ‘Shit, look!’
‘Get me out! Get me out! Get me out!’ Those are the words in my head, but what I hear is one long primal scream.
And then, a whizzing noise.
The drill.
Far away at first, but coming closer. Towards me. Towards my head. I start screaming again, but I’m no match for the whining noise. It drowns me out, and I shut my eyes, waiting for a new pain—
Light.
The wall is disappearing, being ripped away.
Air.
Hands, pulling at me.
I fall forward, on to my stomach – on to the bare floor of the office.
The woman says, ‘Oh my God.’
He says, ‘We have to call an ambulance. Look at her head.’
Erin says, ‘What was I supposed to do? I had to stop her.’
I roll on to my back, look up at the skylight, gulp down air.
And then, floating above me: Annalise.
Coming closer as she kneels down.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asks gently. ‘We’re going to get you some help, all right? But first …’ She glances behind her, to the corner where Erin’s voice seemed to be coming from. ‘We’re going to need to get our stories straight.’
I think, I don’t want to tell any stories.
I turn my head, manage to raise it a little – and see Erin, sitting on the floor in the darkest corner, knees pulled up to her chest. She’s staring into space, eyes unfocused, and she’s covered in blood.
My blood, I’d bet.
Standing a little way away from her is a man who looks like …
Steve?
What’s he doing here?
‘I told you,’ he says to Annalise, ‘this place is cursed.’
I turn my head the other way, back to the wall.
A full sheet of plasterboard is missing, revealing the cavity beyond. I see joists, silvery insulation, wires. I see where I must have been and can’t comprehend how my body fit inside there, or how Erin managed to stuff me in.
And then I see—
The shape.
So easy to identify now that there’s light, despite being tightly wrapped in what must be several layers of plastic. Inside the clear plastic is black plastic – rubbish bags? – so there’s nothing to see, but it is clearly a person and there’s only one person it can be.
All this time, he was in here with me.
I slept in this room, just inches away from his body, broken and crumpled and stuffed into the wall.
Jason.