Chapter 17
I didn’t remember much after my neighbour fell through the door.
I remembered throwing myself up the stairs. I remembered piling what belongings I had up against the bedroom door. I remembered the night sky through the window, swaying in my inebriation, and then darkness.
When I woke, I was gifted a few seconds of grace, of just lying in my bed in the soft light of morning, of feeling my way back into the world, toes and fingertips first.
Then I remembered what I had done.
I sat up suddenly and immediately regretted it. A stab of pain shot through my skull. God, after everything last night I’d almost forgotten about the pub. And all that beer.
Groaning, I tucked myself into the far corner of the mattress and hugged my knees to my chest. I was still wearing last night’s clothes.
My beautiful Aran jumper, lying limply beside the mattress, stank of vomit.
My head swam. My body convulsed with my heaving breaths, fast, faster still, heart a pounding drum. Oh God, oh God, what had I done now?
It’s not my fault, I told myself. I couldn’t be responsible. I wasn’t with it. I was drunk. It was dark. She snuck up behind me. What was she even doing in my basement?
I could see my defence. I was home, chopping wood, someone surprised me in the dark.
I startled. I swung. I didn’t expect there to be anyone in my house.
It was self-defence. It was a horrible accident.
I could see the police officer nod sympathetically, the jury look at me with understanding. A horrible tragedy. No one at fault.
I rubbed my chest.
They wouldn’t see my thoughts. The thoughts I was having just before it happened.
How wound up I’d been. How angry I was. Angry at the smirking faces behind computers.
Angry at Fergus’s sneer. Angry at how my neighbour had hovered and grinned.
Angry at how I’d let her get to me. Angry at how I’d probably frightened off Rowan and all my chances at settling in here and leaving my past behind.
I shook my head, wishing I could just refuse it all away.
I could still feel how the handle of the axe juddered up my arm with the force of my blows as I split wood.
Was it really an accident? Or did you just snap?
I held myself tighter, feeling profoundly sick.
No one would have to wonder anything, I realised. They’d only have to ask why I hadn’t checked to see if she was alright.
I threw on last night’s jeans and the hoodie I’d been using as a pillow and staggered downstairs.
I’d just left her. She’d fallen through the door and I’d left her.
How could I do that? I paced at the top of the stairs to the basement.
I’d assumed no one could open that door down there.
Could I have opened it last night and checked?
Even if I couldn’t, I could have gone round to see if she was alright.
I hadn’t raised the alarm. Hadn’t called an ambulance.
I’d run and left her.
My hands shook in front of me. I had to go down and try to get in. At least to say I did. At least to be a person I could live with being. I flipped the light switch, forced myself forward, and headed down into the basement.
I prepared myself for horror, for blood and viscera.
There was nothing.
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, convinced I was seeing wrong.
Haphazardly chopped wood and jagged splinters littered the concrete floor where I’d scattered them in my frustration last night.
My axe lay where I’d dropped it. The door in the wall was still sealed over.
And there wasn’t a drop of blood to be found.
No destruction. No gore. Just a basement, dusty and dim and cold.
I picked up the axe. No blood on the blade. I ran my fingers gently across it. A black sticky soot smeared across my fingertips, but that could easily have come from some residue on the wood or grease from the boiler.
I pressed a palm to my chest. No, I had to be sure before I gave in to relief.
I padded across the basement and felt for the edges of the door in the wall.
The plaster looked and felt as sealed as ever.
I pushed at the centre of the doorway, but it didn’t give.
It was as if it had been cemented shut, almost part of the brickwork.
Aside from the fact that it clearly looked like a door, there was no indication it had ever been openable, let alone opened last night.
I scanned the floor again for any sign, a spot, a spray, of the violence I was convinced I’d committed.
A bright glint of something metallic at the centre of the concrete floor caught my eye. I knelt down to look closer.
A thick, curved needle.
I carefully picked it up with my thumb and forefinger.
It was a hefty thing. Thicker than the delicate tinsel-like sewing needles in my grandmother’s sewing box, it had a weight to it, a robustness.
It could probably be used to sew leather.
Maybe it had belonged to the leatherworker Fergus talked about.
I’d assumed he’d just made the whole thing up, but clearly there was some truth to his story.
I rolled the needle between my fingers and looked up at the floorboards above.
That was the spot where I’d been pricked when I first arrived.
No wonder it hurt so much. But this didn’t explain what happened—or what I thought had happened—last night.
Tucking the needle into my pocket, I went back upstairs.
I looked about the quiet house. Maybe it hadn’t happened at all.
I slumped down onto the floor in the middle of the living room, not stopping until I was fully laid out across the floorboards, head finding its way to the sheepskin rug. Relief flooded my body alongside the rising nausea and growing headache.
Of course I wouldn’t do something like that.
It wasn’t too crazy to think that I’d imagined her there.
Swung at nothing in the dark. Frightened myself.
I’d been half-convinced there was some monster in the basement after the pinprick in my foot.
But now I had the needle in my pocket. No monsters.
No blood. No bodies. Just an old needle and a hangover.
I fingered the needle in my pocket.
Had I really imagined it all? It had felt so real.
Gingerly, I turned my aching head to the wall I shared with my neighbour and listened. She was quiet again today. It was strange. That first night I could hear every creak and groan in that place as if it had been my own house.
Now this morning, silence again.
I got up and listened. Nothing.
I pressed my ear to the wall. Still nothing.
She was alright, right? Probably just sleeping off last night’s pub visit. She hadn’t looked like the type that got out often. Maybe she was just hungover in bed, like where I should have been in that moment.
Or maybe she’s lying cold on the floor of her basement.