Dark Screams: Volume Two (7 page)

From his forearms, past his shoulders, the skin was weathered and blistered. Like the melted skin of a doll. He’d burned himself.

“After he set me free, I knew you had to do it next. I had to find you again and bring you back to me. That took a lot of patience. The right circumstances came—it only took a few years. In the meantime I found this house and its secrets. I won’t reveal what you already figured out—that Abraham had buried his cheating wife in the sitting room wall.”

“You’re…not well.” Swallows became difficult. “And I don’t want or need your help. Now release me before things get more out of hand.”

“The minute you stepped through those doors, you were back in Iowa again in that farmhouse.” His voice rose. “You were locked in that bedroom with your starving mother. You were watching her put food in your mouth and not into hers—”

“Shut up—”

“You were remembering everything you pushed away by living in New York.” He advanced across the room. He grabbed her chin, his fingertips pressing hard into her flesh.

“Don’t hurt me…”

“As much as you’d like to suppress what you’re feeling, I’m here to bring it out.” He released her face, shifting to grab her arm. He yanked her toward the fireplace.

“No. Please, don’t do this.” The heat flared against her skin. The very skin that would soon burn and blister.

Instead of the fireplace, he dragged her closer to the far wall.

“Noooooo!”

He hoisted her up, securing her firmly to wood supports he’d nailed on the laths.

“My master told me a fire god consumes us, transforming mere humans from simplistic to the divine. But for me, I believe fire has a much more powerful purpose.” He touched the waxen skin on his arms. “Fire sets us free. The pain from the burns is a reminder to value the flesh. I searched for the meaning behind this concept—until I came to this house and learned why Abraham hid his wife behind all that plaster.”

Eleanor whimpered, trying to swallow down her rising panic.

“There’s power in the very act of preserving instead of consuming. For all of my life, I’ve been afraid of fire. I saw my brother burning. Gagged on the stench of burnt flesh. Imagined his tiny body crisping and turning black.” He continued to place straps on her limbs and hammer her in place.

How had the world gone mad? Was she dreaming?

“I want to set you free, Ellie. I want you to accept what you ran away from.”

He fit the final brace. After he tugged each brace to test the secureness, he opened a white box. From her current position she couldn’t make out what he was doing until he returned to her with an intravenous fluids kit. He leaned over her to add the IV. She waited for the prick, the moment of pain when the needle was inserted, but none came.

“Don’t…” she whispered.

He ignored her pleas, moving next to add sections of wood around her so he could apply bonding agent. An adhesive for the plaster.

Most walls had three layers on them. And now those layers would be on her.

“In one week,” he spouted, “you’ll be a phoenix rising from the flames.”

He covered her mouth with a gag.

Panic rose in her throat as she squirmed and tried to move dead limbs. Nothing budged. Time passed with each stroke of the plaster across her skin. As the plaster hardened, her prison closed in tighter around her. By the time he was up to her chin all she could do was deliver a blackened stare.

Even that didn’t last long.

A single tear escaped down her face. She couldn’t even hide her pain anymore. Her soul had been revealed and all she had left was an open wound. He’d left nothing but her eyes exposed.

After he finished applying the plaster, he aimed a fan in her direction. There wasn’t much to see. Only the view straight ahead, since she couldn’t turn her head anymore.

Patrick took a spot in the seat next to the fireplace. He didn’t speak, merely stared into the fire. Briefly he left the room, returning with a painting in each hand.

He glanced in her direction. “I need to clean up tomorrow. Your production company will arrive on Monday, and I need to make sure everything is in place.”

Get me out of here,
she wanted to scream.
Set me free.

Her lids dropped. Sleep tugged at her senses—the ones she had left.

But then the whirl of the drill filled her ears. Her eyes shot open. She knew this step. Didn’t want to
think
about it. Didn’t want to hear it. He was pre-drilling a hole for a hook. A place to securely hang a painting.

The icy chill along her back was nothing compared to watching him adjust the frame. He checked the back, making sure the wire was secure.

With each step he took toward her, Ellie’s heart hammered against her ribs. Every breath came as a choked gasp.

No, don’t. Please, don’t!
All she could do was mumble against the gag. Her throat was raw from crying out.

A wall of darkness slowly descended, leaving her right eye with a pinprick of light.

The very hole she’d seen in the fearful eye of the hunted fox.

Dawn was dreaming of Christmas and snow and jingle bells.

She was sitting in a black-painted sleigh, sliding across a frozen lake under a charcoal-gray sky. The steel runners hissed on the ice, the jingle bells jingled. Strangely, the sleigh seemed to be self-propelled, and as it came closer and closer to the edge of the lake she began to worry about how she was going to stop it.

Help!
she called out, or thought she called out. But there was nobody in sight, only snowdrifts, and fir trees, and the louring gray sky, and the sleigh continued to glide across the ice with its runners hissing and its jingle bells merrily jingling.

Somebody help me!
She was panicking now, but seconds before the sleigh could reach the edge of the lake she woke up and opened her eyes. She wasn’t in a sleigh at all; she was lying in bed, in her own flat in Chiswick.

The jingling, however, carried on. She frowned, and listened.
Jing-a-ling-jing-ching.
She couldn’t work out where it was coming from, but she could hear it quite distinctly. How could she still be hearing the sleigh bells from her dream, when she was awake?

She lifted her head from the pillow and reached across to the bedside table for her mobile phone. As she did so, she heard a soft creaking sound, like a door being opened. The jingling grew louder for a moment,
jing-chingle-jing-ching,
but then it became softer, and more sporadic, as if the sleigh had come to a halt. Then it stopped altogether, and there was silence. She pressed her phone and saw that it was two thirty-seven a.m.

Another creak, but more like a floorboard this time. She sat up in bed, her heart thumping painfully hard. Her curtains were velvet, and tightly closed together, and so her bedroom was totally dark. Yet another creak, and now she was so frightened that she didn’t even have the breath to ask if there was anybody there.

There was a long, long silence. She remained sitting upright, one hand gripping the bedcover, listening. She could hear her own blood rushing through her ears, so loudly that she wasn’t sure if she could hear somebody breathing, too. Was there somebody else in the room? How could there be, when her bedroom door was locked and her window was bolted? And yet she was sure that she could feel somebody’s presence. She sniffed, and she thought that she could smell something
burnt.

Very slowly and carefully, she leaned sideways until her fingertips found the button on the base of her bedside lamp. She stayed in the dark for a few seconds longer, still listening, and then she pressed it. Her bedroom was instantly lit up: her white wickerwork chair, with her smiling pink teddy bear sitting on it, her dressing table, crowded with creams and lipsticks and nail polish. Her own watercolor painting, on the wall, of the bloodred autumn trees in Firestone Copse.

And standing by the door, with his hand reaching out for the handle, there was a man.

Dawn was too shocked even to gasp. The man was dressed entirely in black, with black hair and a black face, not African black but soot black, although his eyes and his eyebrows and his mouth were ghostly white, as if he were a photographic negative. He was wearing a flat cap, although it looked frayed, or burned into tatters, and his jacket was tattered, too.

He appeared to be grinning at her, or scowling. With his negative face, it was difficult for Dawn to tell which. He didn’t move. His hand remained two inches away from the door handle.

“Get out,”
Dawn heard herself saying, although she said it so quietly that she couldn’t be sure if the man had heard her. He stayed where he was, motionless, staring at her with his black teeth bared. Then, with a harsh snortling sound, almost like a pig, he took a step toward her bed.

“Get out!”
she screamed, but at that moment the bulb in her bedside lamp popped out, and she was left in overwhelming darkness.
“Get out! Go away! Don’t touch me!”

She scrambled out of bed, although the bedcover twisted itself tightly around her left leg as if it were trying to stop her. She half hopped, half hobbled to the window and dragged back the curtains, so that her bedroom was lit up by the sodium lamp in the street outside. Panting with fear, she turned the key in the window lock and tried to pull up the window. It wouldn’t budge. The frame had been recently repainted and the window was stuck solid.

Dawn grasped both handles and tried again to heave the window up, although she knew she wasn’t strong enough. She was weeping with helplessness, tugging and tugging and gritting her teeth with effort.

She was ready to give up when she heard a door slam behind her—and then, again, she heard jingle bells. She turned slowly around. The black-faced man had vanished. After a few seconds, the bells stopped, too.

“Hallo?” she said, although she knew how empty and ridiculous that sounded. “Hallo?”

She went across to the bedroom door and turned the handle. It was still locked, and the key was still in it. So the man couldn’t have gone out that way. She sniffed. She could still faintly smell something burned, like paper, or wool, or horsehair.

She tilted her head sideways and looked quickly under the bed, even though it was a divan bed with less than a two-inch gap underneath it, and he would have had to have been as flat as a sheet of paper to have hidden himself there.

There was only one other place where the man could have concealed himself. He must have had been hiding in there all the time, and the thought made Dawn feel shivery and sick. She had come home at ten o’clock that evening, after working late at the restaurant, and she had taken a long shower and then sat naked in front of her dressing table, with her hair in a towel turban, filing and polishing her fingernails. Suppose he had been watching her?

She circled around the bed and approached the wardrobe. It was huge, and shiny, covered in light brown walnut veneer with darker streaks in it. It had a single door with an arched top that could almost have suited a chapel, with decorative Gothic beading around it. Dawn had always thought that the walnut veneer appeared to have the face of a werewolf.

The wardrobe had been given to Dawn last month by her aunt Selina, who owned an antiques business in Oxfordshire. All Dawn had really wanted was a simple Ikea flatpack wardrobe, but Aunt Selina had insisted. “Let’s say that it’s a premature inheritance, for when I die. It’s worth a fortune, I promise you. It belonged to somebody quite famous, that’s what I was told. Cyril Connolly, or Charlie Chaplin. Somebody beginning with
C,
anyway. I forget.”

But now Dawn was standing in front of it with her hand pressed over her mouth, wondering if she had the nerve to open it. What if the burned-smelling man was standing inside it, among all of her dresses and her jumpers? He couldn’t be anywhere else, could he? Yet when she had come home last night, she had hung up the long black skirt that she had to wear for work, and he hadn’t been inside her wardrobe then.

She was utterly confused. Perhaps the most sensible thing to do was to lock the wardrobe and then call the police. But what if she had simply imagined him? What if she hadn’t woken up when the sleigh had been sliding nearer and nearer to the edge of the lake, but only
dreamed
that she had woken up, and only
dreamed
that the man had been standing by the door? What if she hadn’t really woken up until the moment she had opened the curtains?

What if she called the police and told them that there was a strange black-faced man hiding in her wardrobe, but there was nobody there?

She went up to the wardrobe and turned the key in it, and rattled the handle to make sure that it was locked. Then she leaned close to it and said, “Is there anybody in there? Because if there’s somebody in there I’m going to give you one chance to come out of there, and then I’m going to call the police.”

She waited, but there was no response. Perhaps it was stupid of her to expect him to answer, if he was in there, and did she really want him to come out? What if he attacked her? But what else was she going to do? Even though the wardrobe was locked, she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep knowing that a man could be hiding inside it. And if he wanted to, he could probably kick the door open.

She picked up her mobile phone and dialed Jerry’s number. It rang and rang for almost a minute. When he answered he sounded sleepy and clogged up.

“Dawn? What the hell time is it?”

“Jerry,” she blurted, “there’s a man in my bedroom!”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I woke up and there was this man in my bedroom. He was all black like he’d been burnt and then the lightbulb went and now I think he’s hiding in my wardrobe. I’ve locked the door, but I don’t know what to do!”

“Dawn—say that again, slowly.”

Dawn repeated herself, trying to explain more clearly what had happened, although she couldn’t stop herself from repeatedly sniffing and wiping the tears away from her eyes with the back of her hand. When she had finished, Jerry said, “Leave the bedroom, sweetheart, like
now.
Lock the door. You
can
lock the bedroom door, can’t you? Go into the living room and lock that door, too. Wait for me. I’ll be there in ten minutes, okay? But if you hear this bloke trying to break out, call the police—like, immediately.”

The front doorbell chimed. Dawn unlocked the living room and went into the hallway, and through the frosted glass window in the front door she could see Jerry. She unlocked the door and flung her arms around him.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s probably just some nutter who wandered in by mistake. He didn’t try to hurt you, did he, so that’s something.”

Jerry was tall and stickily built, with short brown hair that was no more messed up tonight than it always was. He was handsome in a slightly overweight, rugby-player way, with very blue eyes. Dawn was blond and very skinny, and up until Jerry all of her boyfriends had been almost as skinny as she was, and older, too. Jerry, though, gave her a feeling of being physically protected. He wasn’t artistic, like she was, but he had the boundless confidence of a young man who was sure that he could take care of himself in almost any situation, and she found that strongly attractive.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what this character thinks he’s doing, shall we?”

Dawn gave him the key and he unlocked her bedroom door. The wardrobe door was still closed and undamaged, so the man obviously hadn’t made any attempt to break out of it. Jerry walked up to the wardrobe and banged on it with his fist.

“Hey! You in there! I’m opening the door now and I don’t want any trouble! You got it! You’re not dealing with a girl now, mate, I warn you!”

He twisted the key in the wardrobe door and flung it open, stepping back two paces after he had done so, both hands raised defensively in front of him. On one side of the wardrobe rail there were six or seven empty wire coat hangers, which jangled for a moment and then stopped jingling.

All of Dawn’s coats and dresses and skirts were hanging in the wardrobe, and all of her shoes and boots were neatly arranged underneath them. On one side, there were six shelves on which she kept her sweaters and her underwear and her socks.

But there was no man standing or sitting in the wardrobe, and the only smell was the light flowery fragrance of Allure, Dawn’s favorite perfume, on her clothes.

Dawn looked up at Jerry and shook her head. “He’s gone. I don’t understand it. Where did he go? He
must
have hidden in the wardrobe. There’s absolutely nowhere else.”

Jerry reached into the wardrobe and rapped his knuckles on the back of it. “Solid. No false back to it. And in any case, it’s right up against the wall.”

“Oh, Jerry,” said Dawn, and she suddenly burst into tears. “I must be going mad! I swear I saw him! I swear it! His face was all black and horrible like he’d been burned or something and he grunted at me and he was coming to get me but the lightbulb popped and it all went dark again and I was so
scared,
Jerry! I thought he was going to kill me!”

Jerry held her close and shushed her. “You had a nightmare, that’s all. Plenty of people have nightmares when they think they’ve woken up but they haven’t really.”

“I’m going mad! I
know
I’m going mad!”

“You’re not going mad, silly. You’ve just been overworking, that’s all. Too many split shifts at that crappy restaurant. You haven’t been very well, either, have you?”

“No,” she said, miserably.

“Listen, come back to my place and spend the rest of the night with me. I’ll call up the restaurant tomorrow for you and tell them that you have to go to the dentist or something. I’ll take a day off and we can go for a walk around Kew Gardens or down by the river or something. It’s about time you had a break.”

Dawn nodded and said, “All right. I’d like that. Thanks, darling.”

She dressed and brushed her hair and collected a few clothes together in case she wanted to change later, including her favorite pink jumper. When she was ready she closed the wardrobe door. Jerry was waiting for her in the hallway, and he smiled when he saw her locking it, too.

“There’s no horrible black-faced man inside there, sweetheart, I promise you.”

Dawn said nothing. She still found it hard to believe that the man had been nothing more than a nightmare. She locked the bedroom door, too, and set the burglar alarm before they left.

Jerry put his arm around her and gave her a comforting squeeze. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen somebody setting an alarm to stop an intruder from breaking
out.
”

The following evening Jerry drove her home and came in to check the wardrobe and reassure her that there was nobody in there, or anywhere else in her flat. He even lifted up the cushions on the sofa bed in her living room, in case there was a black-faced man hiding inside it.

“There’s nobody here, sweetheart. You can see for yourself.” He walked through to the kitchen and opened up the oven door and said, “See? Empty. You’re completely on your own.”