Page 35 of We Live Here Now

By Wednesday it’s minus four outside and the cold traps me in the house. Even though I can’t see any ice, I haven’t even been out to the woodstore for logs or coal for fear of slipping, instead keeping the house warm with the central heating and all the lights on to try to dispel the gray gloom. I still haven’t been up to the third floor, and even though the house has been quiet I can’t shake the foreboding that seems to come from within its walls, and I know I won’t be able to until I’ve faced the primary suite again. Every time I tell myself I’ll do it, I find an excuse or a reason to delay. The truth is that I don’t want to go up there while I’m alone in the house. I’ll wait until Freddie’s back tomorrow.

It’s his leaving drinks tonight, so I don’t expect any texts from him—we’ve never been in each other’s pockets—but as evening rolls around I can’t help wondering what he’s going to be doing and with whom. If she’s someone he works with, even if he’s ended it, will there be some last booze-induced moment?

I browse his Facebook looking for women from his work and evaluating them against myself. Women whose bodies didn’t break and who didn’t spend months in the hospital. Fully functioning women. In the end, my head is throbbing so much that my suspicions burn themselves out in the pain. He’ll be back tomorrow. I can talk to him them. Hopefully he will just be shocked and laugh at me. Maybe he deleted an email because it was sensitive information for work. Maybe he’s not lying to me at all.

I cook fish-and-chips from the freezer but I can’t find muchenthusiasm to eat more than half, so I put the rest out the front in case of birds and wildlife who might want it. Maybe my raven will come for it. I haven’t heard him for a day or so. I hope he does. The air is icy and I bolt the door closed and wish we had a cat or something so I didn’t feel quite so alone and morose.

45

Emily

The nightmares come for me again.

In the dream, Larkin Lodge is folding in around me like origami paper. I’m standing on the middle landing and in the window there is a mouth, opening and closing, mist coming into the house like exhaled smoke.

In the gloom I hear a moan, and I look behind me through the bedroom door to see the vicar, Paul, sitting on the bed, the awful demons from the church windows clinging to him, their claws digging into the flesh of his cheeks, dragging his skin downward, his jowls tearing.

Good and evil live in us all, he mutters at me.Even in you, Emily. You did a bad thing. You tell yourself it wasn’t your fault and you didn’t have a choice, but there’s always a choice. You did what you wanted. You always do what you want.

The claws reach his mouth and eyes, and as they start to tear him apart the bed bends in around him and he vanishes just before the whole room does. I’m left staring at a blank wall.

Need and want are different things, a voice hisses and, as the window folds and vanishes, a light overhead comes on, the bulb swinging violently from side to side on the cable. I see Freddie then, crouched, crab-like on the wall leading up to the third floor. He’s facing downward, head turned to look at me, as he scuttles backward, up into the gloom, his feet and hands clacking against the plaster.

I told you not to touch the floor, he hisses as he moves jerkily back a few more paces until only his head is visible in the blackness upstairs.I told you.

My feet are suddenly cold, and I look down, shocked, to see the floorboards, all with nails sticking out of them, snapping over each other,clack-clackingas they bend. Before I can move, they’re over my feet, trapping me, and with each further fold, I drop suddenly a few inches, my legs disappearing. I’m being eaten up by the house.

You’ll never get out now, Freddie says, with that awful dream grin that stretches his face wide.Never, never, never.As he disappears backward into the void of the third floor, the pressure around my legs increases and I start to scream, but my voice is a raven’s caw, louder and louder, and I can understand what it’s calling—YOU WILL DIE HERE—and then—

I wake up with a start, the nightmare and reality blending as I can still hear the grating bark of my dream scream, and then I realize that there is a real live raven cawing loudly somewhere outside the bedroom window.

Downstairs, I check outside while the kettle is boiling, and even though my heart sinks at the sight of the damp, freezing mist that’s clinging to every outside surface, heavy and ominous, there’s no ice and the fish-and-chips left outside have all gone. I hope it was the raven who fed, cawing his thanks when he woke me. It’s a small moment of joy in an unsettling morning.

I can’t shake the nightmare, and in the quiet, the house once again feels strange and darker, and I’m constantly glancing this way and that, things shifting in the corners of my vision, like there are worms under the wallpaper, rippling and wriggling just below the surface. Every corner is filled with threatening shadows no matter how many lights I put on, and in the end I take my tea and toast into the sitting room and wish I had the coals to light a fire. I want the comforting crackle and the glow of the flames.

The only book I can read without going into the study is the Poe collection on the coffee table, and with a perverse curiosity to see if I can look at it without my imagination running away with me, I read “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It’s a heavy-going piece, for meat least, because I’m out of practice at reading anything but modern books, but I still feel a shiver when a body is found up the chimney and there are broken nails in windows. It all feels a little close to home, and I end up cheating and googling a summary before putting the TV on and filling the sitting room with the cheerful chatter of morning chat shows.

Outside the mist refuses to shift, and I text Cat and Iso to say how much I’m looking forward to seeing them again at the weekend and not to worry about dressing up for the party. Iso can get quiteout there, and I expect the locals will not be turning up in five-inch heels and skin-tight dresses. Neither of them answer, both busy at work, and once again I feel like I’m still somewhere in limbo between life and death out here in the Lodge by myself while everyone else is caught up in the cut and thrust of big-city industry.

In a sudden bout of self-pity I get a craving for crumpets and head back to the kitchen to top up my tea and toast. Maybe I’ll find a comedy on Netflix. Have a sofa day. Sod even doing my physio. Anything but think about Freddie and missing emails and my own unreliable brain.

I’m in the downstairs hall, heading to the kitchen, when the smell hits. That same awful, rotten stench that choked me upstairs. I take two steps forward and it clears. Then I take two steps back and it returns. I go up two stairs and it thickens like the blanket of fog outside and my mouth dries, ready to gag. It’s coming from upstairs.Or is it? Maybe it only exists inside your post-sepsis brain, crazy Emily.

I stand, wide-eyed like a rabbit, alert and unsure. Even if it is just in my head, that doesn’t take the stink away. I’ll burn some toast maybe. Get the coffee machine on. Then open the front door. Drown out the bad smell with other strong ones. Confuse my damaged brain. I have to stay sane. Focus on what’s real. I’m about to turn away when I hear it.

A creak.

My heartbeat immediately picks up. Not a creak. This isn’t the door upstairs opening and closing; this is something else. The sound comes again. It’s atread.A heavy foot on the stairs, and I feel thebanister tremble under my fingers where I’m gripping it. Another footstep, and then another, closer together,four, five, six, and I stand back, alarmed. Something’s coming down the stairs. With each tread, the noise is louder. I back away. Whatever it is—whoeverit is—must be nearly on the middle landing by now, and the vibration that was coming through the banisters now shakes the walls of the house.

I hear the thud of unnatural footsteps closer overhead, threatening to come through the ceiling, and once again I’m sure the walls are closing in on me, the fronds in the awful flock wallpaper rippling like ivy, ready to tear away from their place on the walls and wrap around me, trapping me here until whatever is coming down from the third-floor room reaches me and I die of fright at the sight of it.

As the thumping footsteps turn into a run above me—thud thud thud—racing for the last flight now, I can’t take it anymore, and I grab my keys from the side table and yank the front door open before slamming it behind me and running, no longer caring about ice, into the enveloping mist.

46

Emily

I’m not even sure where I’m running to. I stumble down the drive, my face burning despite the freezing mist that scalds my lungs as I gasp. When I glance back, the fog is so thick the house is barely even visible, and for all I know the front door is wide open and whatever was coming down the stairs is about to reach out and grab me.

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