The Girl Below (25 page)

“Are you all right?”

“I found a tooth.”

In Caleb’s expression, I saw how pathetic that sounded.

“It’s probably one of mine,” he said. “Can I see it?”

We went back to my bedroom, turned on the light, got down on all fours, and crawled over the carpet looking for the tooth, but like a contact lens that had popped out of my eye, never to be found again, the tooth had fallen from my hand and disappeared. After ten minutes, we still hadn’t found it, and I sat down on the edge of the desk, despondent.

“Are you sure it was a tooth?” said Caleb. “Maybe it was just a button or something.”

“No, it was definitely a tooth. A small front tooth.” I had only wanted it to be a button.

Caleb sat on the edge of the bed and yawned. “It must have been mine,” he said. “This used to be my room—remember?”

“You’re probably right. I’m still a little freaked out about the, ya know, presence, that’s all.”

He flopped over and frowned at the ceiling. “Have you heard the noises?”

“What noises?”

“Children’s voices. They whisper sometimes.”

A bolt of such hysterical fear went through me that I laughed out loud. “What do they say?”

“I haven’t heard them for a while, but they were mostly taunts, like at school. They talked about me like I was the stinky fat kid and they were coming to get me. Like they wanted to kill me.” His voice fell to a raspy whisper. “Kill him. Kill him. Eat his heart.”

We fell silent, listening, but heard only the faint rumble of Harold’s snoring, coming from downstairs. He’d been trashed when he went to bed, and I thought, with a shudder, that he must have been the spy. A strange rustling sound came from the bed, where Caleb was lying, and when I looked over, he was scratching his skin and pulling at his hair, eyes rolling back in some kind of fit.

“Caleb, are you all right?” I actually went over to the bed to get a closer look.

His chest heaved with silent spasms, and he was laughing hard enough to choke. “ ‘Eat his heart,’ ” he repeated. “You should have seen your face—it was priceless.”

“You scared the shit out of me.” I tried to laugh, but felt like crying, and turned away, only to come face-to-face with the damn wardrobe. Even with the heavy desk slammed up against the door, it had found a way to spring open a fraction.

“Sorry,” said Caleb. “I was trying to make a joke of it—so you wouldn’t be frightened.”

I was sick to death of feeling like such a sissy, and went over to the desk and hauled it away from the wardrobe. I flung open its doors, and pulled out all the boxes and other junk. “Who are you?” I said to the empty space. “And what do you want?”

The wardrobe did not reply.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Caleb. “Why don’t we stake it out? Like they do on TV.”

I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.

“It’ll be fun,” he said. “And anyway, nothing will happen, because I’m here.”

Half an hour later, we were propped on our elbows, facing the wardrobe, bedded down on pillows we’d dragged from our beds. The wardrobe doors were wedged open, the desk on one side and a tea chest on the other, and in the middle was an empty space.

“I feel silly,” I said.

Caleb zipped up his sleeping bag and handed me the torch. “Then you can take the first shift.”

“We’re not taking shifts,” I said. “We’re in this together.” But within minutes he was fast asleep, and I was watching light patterns flit across the ceiling.

It was never completely dark in the city, or even very quiet, but the night was peculiarly still, as if the neighborhood had been covered with a tarpaulin. I looked over at Caleb, breathing slowly. His sleeping face was exquisite, like something out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. I wanted to run my finger down the length of his nose and over the bow of his lips. I wondered if his skin felt as smooth as it looked, and tried to imagine what it might taste like. Then I caught the direction my thoughts had been going in and stopped them. Caleb was just a boy. I had no business thinking about him in that way, none whatsoever.

I shone the torch into the wardrobe and directed the beam upward, illuminating a lone spider in its web. Next to my head, the carpet smelled of dead beetles and shoe dust, and something like sour milk, the stain from a spilled coffee perhaps. The torch was rubbery and heavy in my hand, and I felt my grip on it loosen as my body relaxed. Lulled by Caleb’s regular breathing and the sound of distant traffic, I let my eyes close, just for a minute or two, and enjoyed the weighty feeling of exhaustion. The torch swooned to the bottom of a coffee pond and I swam through floating beetles toward a pair of dirty socks. How long I was under, I’ll never know, but the pull upward was violent and complete, as though being wrenched from a hot bath and held up naked in a blizzard. Gasping, I opened my eyes, or thought I had opened them, but nothing registered except darkness so thick it was like trying to see through oil. I thought the disorientation was because I had been asleep, but rather than abating as I came to, it increased.

The only thing I was sure of was that I was no longer in the attic bedroom. Wherever I was, it was claustrophobic, with a harsh smell of mildew and wet concrete. Overhead, thick earth bore down and my hands, I realized, were lying in a puddle. My clothes had become heavy with water.

The experience was dreamlike, but it was not a dream. Instead, it was like being pulled backward through time to a distant memory, reliving it with perfect sensory recall. In the dark, when I reached out, I was able to touch the dry nylon coverlet of Caleb’s sleeping bag, but when I tried to shake him, my hand was too weak to close around the fabric. My voice, when I shouted his name, went backward into my throat.

Shifting my weight to try and stand up, my hand struck a group of small, wet objects that were smooth and hard, like pebbles. Straightaway, from their irregular shapes, I knew they were teeth—not just two but enough for a whole set—and my hand shrank from them, colliding with other debris. The water was crowded with matter that hadn’t been here on my first visit, and I groped at textures that were hard, like bone, but also slick. Mixed in with those were fragments of organic material, hair perhaps, and fingernails, an unholy bric-a-brac of human remains. In protest at the strong smell, my nostrils clamped shut. My chest heaved in a sob that I couldn’t hear, and in spite of a rising feeling of disgust, my hands kept searching through the swill for something I’d lost. On my hands and knees, I crawled forward, and encountered a familiar child’s leather shoe, rounded at the end with a metal buckle and an old-fashioned T-bar strap.

My fingers closed like a vise around the shoe, and in the same instant a tapping began, quiet at first, then louder and more insistent. The rotting odor receded, replaced with the doughy smell of a sleeping body, and I was completely dry, no longer submerged in water. Before I opened my eyes, I noticed that one side of my body was jammed up against an intense source of heat, but the knocking sound distracted me from that. My eyelids flicked open, I was back in the attic bedroom, and there stood Harold, framed by the doorway, his body a dark silhouette.

Three or maybe five seconds later, I clocked that Caleb had shunted over in his sleep until he was crammed hard up against me. I rolled away from him, but too late. From his vantage point by the door, Harold would have seen Caleb and I wedged together, my belated attempt to roll away from him, and worst of all, my stunned expression—a possum caught in headlights. I reached for my glasses, and put them on.

In the early morning gloom, the look on Harold’s face was hard to make out, and he was unmoving, silent.

“Hi,” I said. “How long—how long have you been there?”

“Long enough to figure out what’s been going on in this house,” he said.

While I tried to think of something to say, Caleb sighed awake, registered it was morning, and looked over at the wardrobe. “You didn’t wake me up for my shift,” he said. “What happened?”

Harold cleared his throat and flicked on the light switch, startling Caleb. “I’m sorry to interrupt your slumber party, but Pippa just called from Greece.”

Something in his tone made us both sit up and try to look awake.

“It’s Peggy,” he said. “Her fall was worse than anyone thought, and because it wasn’t treated immediately . . .” He trailed off.

“Is she okay?” I said.

“Not really, but she refuses to go to Athens, where they could treat her. She wants to stay put in Skyros, come hell or high water.”

“What does that mean?” said Caleb.

“It means we need to get there as soon as possible,” said Harold. “And that includes you, Suki.”

“Me?”

”Yes,” said Harold. “All three of us.”

“Great,” said Caleb, throwing off his sleeping bag. “That’s just fucking wonderful.” He got up and stomped to the bathroom, banging the door shut behind him.

“Why am I going too?” I asked Harold.

“I don’t know,” said Harold. “You tell me.” He looked meaningfully around the room at the pillows, torches, and junk piled up on the bed. Surely he could also see that my sleeping bag was zippered to the top, as Caleb’s had been.

“You don’t think—” I began, but didn’t know how to continue.

“You might want to put this room back the way you found it,” said Harold, and turned on his heel and left.

Alone in the attic room, I felt a stinging sensation in my hand, and unclenched my fingers from around the phantom shoe. On the palm of my hand, small, but very clear, was a dot of blood where the pin of a shoe buckle had gouged a hole in my skin.

Chapter Sixteen

London—Paris—Athens, 2003

O
ut the train carriage window, London’s backside was on display, and even at six
A.M.
, eyes clogged with sleep, I couldn’t look away. Satin sheets and flannelette, cloth nappies, magic knickers, garter belts, socks, tights—even the things people didn’t want you to see had to be washed and hung out to dry. Some gardens were profuse with vegetables and roses, scattered with abandoned children’s toys and signs of life. Others were barren squares of concrete, windswept or clogged with litter, and I wondered if whoever lived there was as untended, as unloved, as their backyards.

But I was only distracting myself. The discovery of the tooth and what had happened afterward—the grisly remains in the bunker—were still fresh in my mind. I was worried too about what Harold had surmised from what he had seen. I didn’t think Pippa would have summoned me to Greece and paid for my ticket solely because she wanted to tell me off, but in the absence of another, it was the only explanation that seemed plausible.

At such short notice, no direct flights from London to Athens had been available, so we were taking the long route to Skyros, catching a train and hovercraft to Calais—the tunnel train was fully booked—and flying out of Paris. We would overnight somewhere near Athens and catch the ferry from a nearby port.

The night before, Harold and I had been sent to Peggy’s apartment to pick up items on a list given to us by Pippa. Peggy wanted some of her personal belongings brought to Greece—photograph albums, various mementos, and a heavy white fur coat. Despite the Skyros heat, she would not budge on the fur coat, though her request to bring over Madeline had, thankfully, been refused. While we were over at her apartment, Harold and I had gone into his old room and he had shown me the clipped wires under the floorboards where Jimmy’s illegal phone line had been disconnected. Jimmy had stuck the wires to the plaster with pale green putty that looked like chewing gum. I hadn’t noticed the wires when I was staying there, or the scratch marks around them, as though a small dog had been digging under the floorboards.

“Maybe she thought he was still down there,” said Harold, poking his finger into a crumbling plaster hole in what would have been Jimmy’s old ceiling.

“Maybe he is,” I said, half joking, half not.

While we were at Peggy’s, Harold was civil with me, though I had been on edge, wondering when he would mention the sleepover again. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Caleb was with us, that he reverted to being frosty and sarcastic—or perhaps I was reading too much into his mood and he was just tired. Whatever the case, we almost came to blows over Peggy’s extra suitcase, a giant, cumbersome thing that required the three of us to cooperate in ways that were beyond us at that or any other time of the morning. Still, we made it onto the train to Dover, and Caleb immediately fell asleep with his head against the carriage window, oblivious to the greasy smear next to his face that someone else’s hair gel had left behind. Harold was reading one of the left-wing newspapers, holding it up in front of his face to shield himself from the rest of us, and I closed my eyes and pretended to snooze but could not. At Dover, we boarded a hovercraft, and watched uneasily as it farted its way to inflation. Hovercrafts had seemed so futuristic once, but now the thing just seemed like a relic, unseaworthy and rank, especially inside the grubby main cabin where the wet carpet ponged of diesel and latrines.

We took our seats and I thought of coffee, teased by the sweet smell of powdered hot chocolate that began to waft through from the onboard cafeteria. We were lined up in a row with Caleb in the window seat, but any views that might have been there were obscured by fog and violent hurls of sea spray.

“Can I get something to eat?” said Caleb, turning to Harold. “I’m famished.”

“There won’t be anything decent.”

“I don’t care.” He climbed out past Harold and rolled his eyes when he got to me.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

A long queue curled around the refreshment kiosk, and everyone in it looked grim, deflated from rising too early. Even Caleb had bags under his eyes, and was yawning enough to make his jaw snap.

“Has Harold said anything to you about the other night?” I asked when we were in the queue.

“Nope,” he said. “He just told me to stop pissing around and pack my shit.”

Briefly, I caught another whiff of the onboard toilets, and it reminded me of the dreadful smell in the bunker. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it all to myself. “That night while you were asleep,” I ventured. “Something did happen.”