“Already done it. He’s going to pass on my details.”
“Really wish they didn’t have my number now, wish I hadn’t made that stupid call. The last thing I need is some random angry stranger messaging me.” She stares at the screen. “What shall I say?”
The twinge of guilt in my stomach pulses again.
“Listen,” I say. “You don’t need to reply. I’ll deal with it. You can just block this number so he can’t message you again, OK? Leave it to me.”
She gives a nod of relief. “What are you going to say?”
“Let me worry about that,” I say. “I’ll think of something.”
It’s eight o’clock by the time the two younger kids have had their baths and been put to bed with a story. Leah is on the sofa on her phone, while Jess swipes through a home furnishings website on her iPad, looking at beds and coffee tables and picture frames. Some reality show is on the TV but neither of them are really watching.
I’ve sent a reply a couple of hours ago to the unknown number.
Please clarify re: personal items left at 91 Regency Place mentioned in your last text.
So far, there’s been no reply.
I head upstairs to unpack a few more boxes and eventually find myself drawn back to the annex room on the top floor, with its creaking armchair and bare bulb swinging gently above me. Perhaps ithadbeen some kind of hideaway, just like Jess said. There were times when Jess or I would have paid good money for just fifteen quiet, uninterrupted minutes away from the daily chaos of family life with three children, a dog, a cat, assorted fish, and a rotating cast of hamsters, gerbils, and guinea pigs that occupied cages in the various kids’ bedrooms and made periodic bids for freedom.
But why had the room never been cleared out? And why was someone so keen to recover a few old odds and ends that had been left behind?
The level of secrecy, the effort that must have gone into creating this little space, and making it so hard to find, suggested it was more than just a study, a den, a retreat. There was something much more deliberate about it, much more long-term. Not just plasterboard, but bricks with that master-crafted wooden paneling on top, so the wall would feel as solid as an external wall to the casual observer. So well hidden, in fact, that someone had subsequently put fitted wardrobes in front of the door and forgotten all about it.
Perhaps it was a panic room, a place of last resort in case your house was broken into and you had to flee upstairs rather than down. It would certainly do that job pretty well if you could lock it from the inside.
I pull the door shut until I hear the softclickof the latch. Then reach up and pull the light cord, the darkness instant and absolute.
Even after my eyes have adjusted, it’s a perfect blackness of a kind that’s almost impossible to find in everyday life. Elsewhere in the house—even in the middle of the night—there’s always a whisper of light reaching you through the edge of a curtain, the red glow of numbers on a digital clock, the muted pulse of a device plugged in to charge overnight. Outside we try to keep the dark at bay with street lights, with security lights and headlights and permanently lit shopfronts, with our incessant need to have illumination at all times. Even when you close your eyes, you can still see the light leaking through your eyelids. We’ve evolved that way, to wake with the sunrise.
But the hidden room at the top of my house is perfectly dark.
Totally, fully black, like being at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing leaks through, not even the slightest gray hint of anything outside.
To complement the darkness, the hidden room is also silent in a way that is so rare I’d almost forgotten what it’s like. A stillness that is complete and undisturbed, all sounds from outside deadened by the bricks surrounding me, the thick rugs fixed to the walls and floor. I can’t hear traffic noise, or dogs barking, or the music Leah has left on in her room, or anything. This small space is like a separate, silent world that exists in parallel to the daylight world outside. Whatever else it may be, it’s very well constructed.
The darkness is so thick I can almost feel it pressing against my skin, so complete that I can’t even see the fingers in front of my face when they are only inches away. No light penetrates the ceiling either.
It feels like being blind.
Being buried.
13
It’s barely thirty-six hours since we moved in, since I pulled the old fitted wardrobes from the wall in the smallest of the top bedrooms and discovered this strange cobwebbed space, with its dusty dresser and motley collection of forgotten things. A day and a half in which I had looked for answers to satisfy the hunger of my own curiosity, but found only more questions.
The mystery of the little annex had become more tantalizing and frustrating with every new question. Even as I suppressed a niggling sense that I had awakened something that I didn’t understand—and perhaps should have been better left alone. A threat or a warning, like a whisper on the wind that hints of a coming storm.
I take a small, tentative step, leaning down until my fingertips graze the moth-eaten fabric of the old armchair. Turning, I ease myself down into it until the old springs creak beneath my weight. Sitting there in the perfect darkness, I let my mind wander. Might this actually have been a place where someone had been kept against their will? Could that be it? No, it didn’t make sense. There was a brick dividing wall but anyone shouting at the top of their lungs might still be heard in other parts of the house. Maybe not all the way down to the ground floor but on the first and second floors, almost certainly. Anyone able toshout, to scream, would be able to make themselves heard in the nearest rooms.
Unless… the whole house was empty? There was no window to shout through and this side of the house faced out onto the back garden, so the sound would be muffled, deadened by the bricks and timber of the rest of the house.
Someone in here would need to sit fairly still and quiet to ensure they weren’t heard in any of the top-floor rooms, or the landing that connected them.
Still and quiet.
I click the light back on, blinking against the sudden brightness. Jess was right. This was ridiculous. Eric Hopkins had barely been able to climb the stairs in his last years in this house, according to the estate agent; it was one of the reasons why the first and second floors were so neglected. Why the three rooms up here felt so removed from everything else, from a human touch, as if they’d been all but abandoned.
