I stand by the front door for a moment, flicking off each of the lights in turn, shadows deepening around me as each bulb goes out. We’ve been here a week but it still doesn’t feel like our house. Like ourhome. It still feels like an Airbnb, a rental property thatwe’re just visiting before going back to our real lives. I hope that will change when we get more of our pictures and books and photos unpacked, put more of our own stamp on the place. When I know I can pay my half of the mortgage again.
When I deal with the threat that still hangs over my family.
I check on each of the kids. All fast asleep. Quiet. Safe. Daisy snoring very softly in the pale blue wash of her night light. In the master bedroom Jess is asleep too, her breathing deep and slow, the Kindle still propped open in its case next to her. I close the cover quietly, put it on her bedside table.
For me, sleep is more elusive.
Reading only seems to make things worse. It’s well past midnight when I last glance at the time, the glowing red numerals of my bedside clock mocking me in the darkness. Eventually, I drift in and out of half-snatched dreams, seeing myself high in the branches of a tall tree with no way to get down. Then stuck in a room with no doors, only tiny red lights blinking in the darkness, each one the lens of a camera pointing at me. I jerk awake and Jess shifts uneasily beside me before settling back into her pillow.
Once again, I turn over and try to push the churning thoughts from my mind, to imagine I’m back in our old room, in our old house. Where everything is familiar.
I’m just drifting off again when I hear it.
The creak of a floorboard, old wood shifting beneath weight: a noise that doesn’t belong at this time of the night. Not a pet scratching at the kitchen door. Not a child crying out from a nightmare.
This time, it sounds like the nightmare is really here.
Because someone is downstairs.
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? Withmy 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.
