The house hunt, p.25
The House Hunt, page 25
‘Had to push you. Needed . . . answers . . . My brother.’
‘You could have just talked to me. You could have—’
But his pupils lost focus and his eyelids fluttered shut again. He looked deathly pale.
‘Donovan?’
I shook him by his shoulders.
‘Donovan?’
I patted his cheek but this time he didn’t come round.
Inside the house the flames were twisting and roiling. They were beginning to consume the staircase, billowing against the ceiling.
I coughed into my elbow, then with what felt like the last of my strength I rolled Donovan onto his side until he was lying in the recovery position and pushed up to my feet.
I swayed and choked on a lungful of air, then doubled over and coughed and wheezed, hacking smoke, spitting onto the ground.
The smoke alarms were much quieter outside the house, even with the door open. None of our neighbours had emerged from their homes to investigate what was happening. No one seemed to be aware of the fire.
I swiped the back of my hand across my mouth before asking Bethany, ‘How long?’
‘He says under five minutes.’
She was kneeling on the gravel with the phone in her hands, the torchlight glaring and winking, a damp glassiness to her eyes.
I turned from her to look off along the street in both directions, coughing again, but I couldn’t see Sam.
I was just turning back in the other direction, my gaze sweeping across the front of John’s house, when I glimpsed something from the corner of my eye.
John’s front door was ajar.
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The door was only slightly open but I knew we hadn’t left it that way.
I’d watched Donovan lock up and toss John’s keys into the corner of his yard. But I also knew that Sam had a key to John’s place. He’d shown me that he still had his keys and then he’d zipped them inside his backpack.
But why would he have entered John’s home?
I felt a tightening across my scalp.
I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
It was deathly quiet all along our street.
Five minutes until the emergency services would be here.
I felt a pang as I thought about John. I knew how vulnerable he was, how upset and agitated he’d been earlier.
I checked on Bethany, who looked petrified and spent, then looked down at Donovan.
Sam had stabbed him, kicked him.
And that’s when a deeper realization struck home.
Sam was a monster. He’d brutally attacked Donovan. He’d killed Oliver. He’d trapped me here under false pretences for almost two years.
And throughout that time, Sam had visited John every single day.
I’d believed it was because Sam was a kind person. A good neighbour. I’d thought he’d been caring for John.
But suppose I’d been wrong about that, too? Suppose he’d been just as big a threat to John as he’d been to me?
Oh no.
A hollowness formed inside me as I looked from Bethany to the street once more.
There was still nothing to suggest that any of our neighbours were reacting to the fire in our home. With the box hedge shielding our front yard and most of the shutters closed, nobody could see in easily.
I should have yelled, ‘Fire!’
I should have let this all be somebody else’s problem.
But again, something stopped me.
That molten rage. It was flooding my veins.
If Sam was in there, I wasn’t going to let him get away with this.
Bending down, I picked up the hammer from where I’d dropped it.
‘Wait here,’ I told Bethany, and then I pushed out through our gate onto the street and crept up John’s path towards his front door.
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The lights were on inside but there was silence from within.
I edged forwards, put my free hand on the open door and listened, a soft breeze tugging at my clothes.
I couldn’t see or hear any sign of Sam.
‘What are you doing?’ Bethany hissed.
I looked back at her and pressed a finger to my lips.
Extending my other hand, I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the door, eased it open and placed a careful foot just inside, fighting hard against the need to cough again.
Every little sound seemed magnified.
The rasp of my jeans against my thigh.
The movement of the wind through my hair.
The softest creak of the door hinge, and the settling of the floorboards under my weight, and the muted hush and strange absence of sounds from within.
I eased the door back further until I could see all along the empty hallway towards the kitchen, the staircase in front of me, the open doorways to my left.
The hammer felt too heavy in my hand.
I heard a moan.
It sounded feeble and pained, confused, forlorn.
I almost whispered John’s name but I managed to stop myself.
Slipping off my shoes, I shuffled forwards.
The moan had come from the second room on my left, the one that now functioned as John’s bedroom.
I took several careful steps, then stopped and listened.
There was no obvious response of any kind.
I couldn’t hear Sam.
He wasn’t anywhere in front of me.
Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I could feel the heat of the fire seeping through the wall at my side. The smell of the smoke seemed to be permeating the brickwork but it could just as easily have been coming from my clothes and hair. My lungs itched with the need to cough.
Another moan, this one more dismal and prolonged.
I was certain now it was coming from John’s makeshift bedroom.
Swallowing against the dry tickle in the back of my throat, advancing cautiously, I passed silently around the bottom of the stairs and tiptoed towards the room.
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I stopped again before I entered John’s bedroom.
Glancing back towards the front door I’d left open, I could see the faint glow and flicker of flames.
When I turned frontwards again, the vertebrae in my neck creaked and crunched.
I raised a hand up and cupped it over my mouth, stifling a cough.
I readied the hammer.
It felt for a moment as if even the house itself was listening to me. As if my breathing would give me away.
Then I took one large stride into the room.
The first thing that struck me was the odour.
There was the stale, fuggy scent of bed sheets and sleep.
But also something else.
A trace of ammonia. A sweaty back note of something sour and dismal.
John was sitting on the hospital bed with his back to me, facing the old disused fireplace. His shoulders were hunched, his head bowed, his hands in his lap.
He moaned again.
I didn’t think he knew I was here. I got the impression he was moaning to himself.
‘John?’ I whispered.
He hunched up tighter without turning around.
I blinked, my eyes feeling gritty and sore from the smoke, my throat parched and hot.
I checked all about me, but if Sam was here, he wasn’t in this room.
John was alone with whatever jumbled thoughts were keeping him company in his head.
‘John, what’s wrong?’
He quivered but he didn’t reply.
I checked the doorway behind me, then took a step to my side, venturing carefully around the end of the bed and moving closer to John.
‘John, will you look at me? I need to get you out of here.’
‘John mustn’t look,’ he muttered, shying away. ‘John has to stay in his room.’
A squeamish sensation as I stared at the way he was huddled and cowed. As if he’d adopted this position and pose before.
‘Oh, John, no.’
A rush of heat blazed up from my toes to my hairline as I thought of all the evenings when Sam had come next door to check on John. All the times when he’d told me how they’d spent their evenings together.
Sam had told me he’d read books or the newspaper to John.
He’d said he’d marked essays while John had watched TV.
But now I suspected it hadn’t been true.
Or only part of it had been true.
Because John’s hunched posture, his soft, sad moaning, spoke of a wholly different experience.
‘Oh, John, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.’
I reached for his hands but he withdrew from me, moaning louder.
I froze and cast a look towards the door, listening hard for a response.
When none came, I was careful to lower my voice.
‘Do you know where Sam is?’
‘John won’t look. John can’t look.’
A sudden, desperate cramping.
My greased fingers slipped on the handle of the hammer.
‘John, what is it you’re not supposed to look at?’
But instead of answering me, he just shook his head and gazed down at a spot on the floor.
I raised my palm to my chest, my aching lungs.
‘I won’t go upstairs,’ he whispered.
‘Upstairs?’
Taking three jolting steps backwards, I leaned out into the hallway, craning my neck to look up.
I felt as if I understood several things all at once, then.
Whatever Sam had come here for – whatever had lured him inside – could be upstairs in this house.
Did it also explain why Sam had moved John’s bedroom down to the ground floor? I suspected it was about more than simply keeping John safe.
‘Mary went upstairs,’ John muttered. ‘She shouldn’t have gone upstairs.’
I spun back.
No.
Sam had been the one who’d found Mary after her fall.
It was Sam who’d called for the ambulance.
But it was also Sam who’d pushed Oliver from the roof of his apartment building.
It was Sam who’d shoved me down the steps to the basement.
And with Mary out of the way, the only person living next door to us in this house was John. He was alone and he had dementia.
Had Mary heard something that had made her suspicious, I wondered? Had I screamed? Banged on the basement walls? Had she confronted Sam?
Another flush of anger.
I needed to get John outside but I didn’t want him to become agitated or shout if I tried.
I drifted further out into the hallway, staring up the staircase towards the landing, feeling my spine pull so taut it seemed to lengthen, picturing Mary and the distance she would have fallen, how hard she’d hit the bottom, the pain she would have been in.
She’d been unconscious when Sam had called me in to help. I’d held her hand as the paramedics had wheeled her out on a stretcher.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and rested my leading foot on the lowest riser, taking hold of the banister in my hand, clenching the hammer next to me.
Was I really going to go up there?
A soft click behind me.
I swivelled to see Sam pressing his back against the front door he’d closed behind him.
He was sweating, wincing, leaning all his weight onto his good leg, his bad leg propped lightly on his toes.
‘Look at us,’ he said. ‘Alone again.’
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His voice sounded different, husky and strained. I wondered if I’d broken something in his jaw when I’d hit him with the hammer.
Or perhaps it was just the real him leaking out.
He surged towards me, hobbling grotesquely on his bad leg, the blade of his knife catching the light.
I shrieked and swung the hammer at him with everything I had.
But he was ready for it this time.
He ducked under my swing and barged into me so hard that I dropped the hammer as I fell back against the stairs.
He advanced on me, and I flipped myself over and scrambled to my feet, hauling on the banister rail with my left hand, vaulting up the first two treads.
It felt like I was trying to run up a down escalator.
A grunt behind me.
Something tagged my heel.
I shrieked again and looked back to see that Sam had lunged for my foot, missed, and was sprawled over the stairs with the knife in his fist, gurning from the pain in his thigh.
A spray of saliva plumed from his lips.
He pushed up from his elbows as I scrambled on, my lungs struggling to suck in enough air.
‘Bethany!’ I screamed.
My heart was pounding so hard it seemed to be beating out of my chest.
I made it to the landing, already breathless, and wheeled left towards the front of the house. Away from the rear bedroom and the family bathroom, because everything was laid out in a mirror image to our place next door.
Or rather, how our place had been before we’d remodelled it.
Stained wallpaper. Threadbare carpeting. Mould spores and patches of damp on the ceilings and walls.
I streaked past a closed bedroom door on my right.
Saw two doors ahead of me.
Unlike in our house, the front rooms hadn’t been knocked through to form one large space.
I chose the door on the right, grasped the handle, put my shoulder to the wood.
Mistake.
The door barely moved before it butted up against something hard on the other side.
I shoved it again.
It didn’t shift.
I couldn’t squeeze through the gap and, when I looked back, Sam had reached the top of the stairs.
He took a rattling breath and used the handrail to swing himself around, grimacing, snarling, limping my way.
My arm jumped with adrenaline as I tried the door on the left.
It opened and I crashed through, my face, hands and upper body slamming into something flat and hard.
The object skidded forwards and toppled at a slant against something else.
I pressed my hands against it to lever myself up.
The curtains hadn’t been drawn. Street lighting illuminated the room, enabling me to see that I was surrounded by cardboard boxes and packaging crates.
They were stacked very high, almost to the ceiling, with narrow, maze-like channels in between. I suspected they contained a lot of John and Mary’s belongings.
The cardboard smelled musty. The room was cold. I guessed the heating had been turned off in here.
Bending low, I ducked along the channel to my right.
Footfall behind me.
It vibrated through the floorboards.
Sam laboured into the entrance to the room. I could hear his wheezing breaths.
Fear squirmed in my belly as I ran at a crouch to my left, then sprang up just beneath a sash window.
There were tall stacks of cardboard boxes behind me.
I couldn’t see Sam.
He couldn’t see me.
I looked out.
No ambulance yet.
No police.
The flames had made it to the first floor of our house. They were lighting up the darkness outside the windows of the bedroom I’d shared with Sam. Dark tendrils of smoke were puckering in the air.
Bethany was standing on the pavement outside John’s gate, stepping forwards and backwards as if she couldn’t decide what to do, looking fretfully between his front door and then off along the street. Donovan’s phone was against her ear and she was shouting into it.
I pressed my hands to the window glass and pushed up, ready to yell to her.
But the sash didn’t move.
I stared at the bolt.
There wasn’t one.
It shouldn’t have been locked.
I hit the glass, thumping and shouting Bethany’s name.
‘I nailed them shut,’ Sam said.
I spun to find him staring at me from the other side of the tall box to my right. A chest-high wall of boxes extended beyond it, separating us. Again, he was leaning to his side. He could barely put any weight on his left leg at all.
My chest was rising and falling. My body felt locked with fear.
I seemed to be looking everywhere all at once, sizing up the distance between us, the shadows in the room, the way he was blocking my route back to the doorway, how he was struggling to stay upright.
‘What do you want?’ I asked him.
‘You. You were all I ever wanted, Lucy.’
A jolt of terror straight to my heart.
My entire body seemed to vibrate as I felt around the window unit behind me. But all I could feel was solid wood and glass.
I glanced over my shoulder at Bethany, and this time she was looking up at me, terrified.
‘They’re almost here,’ she shouted.
‘What was it like?’ Sam asked me. ‘The breakthrough?’
I looked back at him slowly and shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to satisfy his need to know.
But I also understood that I had to stall for time.
‘Did it hurt?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘It was distressing?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
A beat.
My head was spinning.
Then I heard the sirens. They wavered on the air.
We fixed on one another.
The sirens grew louder, screaming nearer.
I saw a fast calculation flit behind his eyes.
The muscles in his jaw bunched.
He raised his knife and glanced towards the bedroom door we’d entered through, as if he was asking himself if he could trap us in here together, and that’s when I shoved off from the wall behind me, braced my palms against the tall cardboard box between us and pushed.
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The box toppled forwards, crashing into Sam, its contents banging around inside, the box gathering a momentum of its own.
He swore. Yelled.
I heard him stumbling backwards.
But by then I was already running to my right, towards the second window in the room, stretching out my hand to my left, smoothing my fingers along the tops of the chest-high cardboard boxes between us, then springing up off the floor, digging in with my elbow, rolling over onto the top of the boxes as if I was launching myself over the bonnet of a car.
