The New Uncanny (11 page)

She pressed the speed-dial key, then the ‘1’ on the keypad. The ringing tone sounded in her ear.

She moved the handset away briefly, to listen for sounds from upstairs. She went back to the door, peered out at the bottom of the stairs, the part of the wall where one of Hike’s old paintings still hung. The ringing tone continued.

How late was it? She glanced at her wristwatch: it was just after midnight. Hike was sometimes asleep by this time. She felt the back of the handset growing slippery, where she held it so anxiously. Then at last he answered.

‘Hullo?’ He sounded curt, muffled, annoyed at being woken.

She started to say, ‘Hike...’, but as she tried to speak the only noise she could make came out as a single gasping syllable. ‘
Ha-a-a-a!
’ That uncontrollable sound amazed and appalled her. She sucked in air, tried again. This time she managed a high-pitched squeak:

‘
Hi-i-i-i!
’ Silence at the other end. Humiliated by her own terror, she tried to control herself.

Finally, she got his name out, nearly an octave too high: ‘
Hike?
’

‘Yeah, it’s me. Is that you, Mel?’

‘
Hi –!
’ She swallowed, took another shuddering intake of breath, concentrated on the words she had to say. ‘Hike! Help me!
Please?
’

‘It’s the middle of the night. What’s up?’

‘Someone – there’s someone in the
house!
Here, when I came in. I found the door –’ Again she remembered what had happened at the start, just those few minutes earlier. That dread feeling when she found the door open in the night, the darkness within, the silence. She almost let go of the handset at the memory. She sat down, lowering her backside against the edge of her desk, but immediately stood up again. Trying to keep her voice low, but hearing the stress make it harsh, she added, ‘I think someone’s still here.’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Yes. No! I haven’t been upstairs. I’m too frightened. They might still be
in the house!
’

‘Is this what it takes to get you phone me?’

‘Hike, please...’

‘How long has it been? Five or six weeks?’ Melvina could not answer, cross-currents of Hike and the fear of an intruder flooding together. ‘Is there anything missing?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ The cross-currents gave her thoughts sudden freedom. ‘Was it you, Hike? Have you been over here while I was out?’

He said nothing.

‘Maybe it was just local kids,’ he said after a moment. ‘Kicking the door in for fun.’

‘No... it’s been forced. A chisel, a hammer, something heavy.’

‘Are you asking me to drive over?’

Hike lived more than an hour away, by car. He had always said he disliked driving at night. She had kept him away all this time.

‘No, I’m OK,’ Melvina said. ‘I’ve just had a fright, that’s all. I don’t think there’s anyone still here. I’ll be all right.’

‘Look, Mel – I think I’ll drive over and see you anyway. You want me to pick up my stuff, and this might be an opportunity to do that.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you and you agreed, you bloody agreed, that you would send a
friend
to get the stuff. I want that room cleared out.’

‘I know. But you need me, otherwise you wouldn’t have called me in the middle of the night.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll call the police. That’s what I ought to do.’

Suddenly the phone went dead at the other end. Hike had cut off the call.

She put down the phone, laid it on her desk next to her keyboard. A mistake! A mistake to call him... but there was no one else. The flashing LED on the answering machine radiated normality, and for a moment she reached over and rested her finger on the
play
button. Then she remembered what had happened to the house. Talking to Hike had changed nothing. Just delayed things, just as always.

In the hallway she returned to the front door, looked again at the broken lock. She tried pressing the door into its frame and discovered that if she let the hanging lock be pushed back she could hold the door closed long enough to shoot the bolt at the top. As soon as she had done this she felt safer.

She picked up the pile of books that had been on the doormat when she came in, and without examining them stacked them roughly on the end of the lowest bookshelf.

Looking anxiously ahead of her Melvina began to climb the stairs, pausing for a few seconds on each step. She was straining to hear any sound from above. The silence was absolute: no apparent movement, nothing being moved about, no footsteps. No one breathing.

The mobile handset suddenly rang, behind her in the study where she had put it down. She went rigid for a moment. Then, relieved, she ran down the four or five steps she had climbed and hurried back into her study.

‘Mel, did you call me because you wanted me to drive over tonight?’

‘No, I –’

No, I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t you, Hike
, she added silently, looking over her shoulder at the light coming in from the hall.

‘I’m a bit more awake now,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed anything stolen? Has anything been moved? Is there any damage?’

‘It’s OK. I’ve searched the house. There’s no one here and nothing’s gone.’

‘Couldn’t you ask one of the neighbours if they saw anything?’

‘Hike, you know I’m alone here. The other houses are still empty.’

Some of them were used as summer lets and would start taking visitors in the next few days, but because of the recession most of the houses in this terrace were permanently vacant. Hike knew this, he knew the collapse in property values was why she had been able to afford the house on her intermittent earnings.

‘Where did you go today?’ he said suddenly.

‘
What?
’

‘You’ve been out of the house all day, and I’ve been trying to call you. Are you seeing someone?’

‘It’s none of your damned business! Is that all you’re thinking about? What I’ve been doing all day? Someone’s broken into my house and for all I know is still in here somewhere.’

‘I thought you said no one was there.’

‘I was still looking when you called again.’

‘Are seeing someone, Mel?’

She tried to think of some answer, but she was obsessed with thoughts of the house, the open door, that darkness and silence. She felt the paralysis of her throat again, the mysterious seizing up of breath and vocal chords, the dominance of fear, the dumbness it caused. She gasped involuntarily, then moved the phone away from her ear. No more Hike.

She pressed the main switch on the top of the handset, watched the logo spinning back into oblivion, then darkness.

There were fourteen messages waiting on the landline answering machine – most of them would be from Hike, just as they were every other day. She flicked it off. Her hands shook.

Something moved upstairs, scraping on the floorboards. Involuntarily, she glanced at the ceiling. The room above, the spare room, the one where Hike’s stuff was still piled up awaiting the day when he or one of his friends would collect it. She strained to hear more, thinking, hoping, she had misheard some other sound, perhaps from outside. Then again: a muffled scraping noise, apparently on the bare boards above.

She emitted another involuntary, inarticulate noise: a sob, a croak, a cry of fear. Propelled by the fright that was coiled inside her, but at the same time managing to suppress it somehow, adrenaline-charged, she ran two steps at a time up the stairs. She went straight to the door of the spare room, threw it open and pressed her hand hard against the light-switch inside. She went in.

Familiar chaos filled the room, the remaining debris of Hike’s departure. His uncollected stuff had been pushed against one of the walls: piles of paper, canvases, pots, boxes. His broken computer scanner and a tangle of cables. Three large crates of vinyl records and CDs. That bloody music he played so loud when she had been trying to work. Two suitcases she had never opened, but which she assumed contained some of his clothes. Shelves where he had stacked his stuff, but not books – these were the only shelves in the house that were not crammed with books. This was the only
room
without books. Hike was not a reader, and had never understood why she was.

There were other traces of him everywhere, reminders of him, his endless presence in the house, the upset he had caused her almost from the first week, later the resentment, finally the anger, the days and weeks of pointlessly wasted time, all the early curiosity about him lost, the endless regrets about letting him move in and set up a studio, the feeling of being invaded, of trying to make the relationship work, even at the end.

Nothing in the room had been moved or interfered with and nothing had apparently been taken. The window was wide open as she had left it that morning, but the wind was blowing in from the sea. She pushed it closed, and secured it. There was a cupboard door hanging open, a glimpse of the dim interior beyond. Still fired up by anger and fear, she strode across the room, stepped past Hike’s cases and pulled the door fully open.

The cupboard was empty. The rack where his clothes had hung, the shelves where he had crammed his messy things, were all vacant. Nothing in there. Just a paperback book, tossed down so that its cover was curled beneath the weight of the pages.

She picked it up: it was Douglas Dunn’s
Elegies
. It must be her copy – Hike had no interest in poetry. She straightened the cover and gently riffled the pages of the book, as if comforting a pet animal that had been hurt. Holding it in her hand she left the room, but deliberately did not switch off the light. She now had an aversion to unlighted rooms, dark corners.

The light on the landing had gone out while she was in Hike’s room. She turned it on again, only half-remembering if she had switched it off herself as she dashed upstairs to this floor. Why should she have done that? It made no sense.

The room next to Hike’s was her own sitting room, a room set aside for reading, with more books, hundreds more books. There were shelves on three of the walls, floor to ceiling, a large and comfy armchair which she had bought as a treat for herself after Piet died, a reading lamp, a footstool, a small side table. A desk with papers and a portable typewriter she sometimes used if she didn’t want to break off and go downstairs to the computer. The room had a closed, concentrated, comfortable feeling. She remembered Hike’s derision when he saw the room the day he moved in. He said it was middle-class, bourgeois.
No, it’s just where I like to sit
. The room had become a sort of battleground after that, a minor but constant aggravation to Hike. After he left, she realized that she had frequently found herself making excuses to be in here, to explain that which could not be explained to someone who would never understand.

She was glad he was gone, glad a hundred times, now a hundred and one. She never wanted him back, no matter what.

She glanced around the room: it was lit only by her reading lamp, but everything seemed to be untouched. Just books everywhere, as she liked them to be, in their familiar but comprehensible jumbles. She pressed the Dunn into a space on a shelf beside the door, preoccupied still with her worries, not noticing or caring which books she placed it beside.

She went next to the bathroom. Three of her books lay on the floor beneath where the glass cubicle door overhung the rim of the shower cubicle. They were three recently published hardback novels she had reviewed for a magazine a month before, and which she expected would have a resale value to a dealer. How had they come into the bathroom, though? She never took books in there.

She picked them up, examined them for damage. As far as she could see no harm had been done by water dripping on them. She opened the top one, and immediately discovered that it was upside-down. The paper dust-wrapper had been removed and put back on the wrong way round.

The other two books were the same.

Melvina stood on the landing outside her reading room, replacing the dust-wrappers one by one. She felt her throat constricting again – her hands were shaking. She could not look around, fearful of everything now in the house.

She took a step into her reading room, and placed the books on the shelf near
Elegies
. She backed out of the room without looking around too closely, horribly aware that something in there had been changed and she did not like to think what, nor look too closely in case she found out.

Hairs on her arms were standing upright. She was sweating – her blouse was sticking to her body under her armpits, against her back. But she was now determined to finish this. She climbed the final flight of stairs to the top floor of the house. She went to her sewing room first, under the eaves, with a dormer window looking out towards the road. The bluewhite glare fell on the car parked close to her house. It looked like Hike’s car, but then most cars did.

She checked the room for any sign of intrusion. It was here she kept her sewing table

with the machine, the needlepoint she had been working on for a year or more, the various garments she had been meaning to get around to repairing. There was a wardrobe, and in that she kept the old clothes she was planning to take one day to a charity shop. Some of those clothes were Hike’s.

The unshaded lightbulb threw its familiar light across everything – there was no one in the room, nowhere that anyone could be hiding.

Finally, quickly, she went to her bedroom. This was the room with the best view of the sea. She had originally planned it to be her office, but once she moved in she realized she would be distracted by staring out all day.

She turned on the central light, went straight in, saw her reflection in the largest pane of the window. She paused just inside the door, remembering. Hike had tried to change this room, said it was too feminine. He hated lace, frills, cushions, things he deemed to be womanly. He never found out that for the most part she did too, and that there was no trace of them, never had been. It had not stopped him criticizing. He did move the bed away from the wall where she had initially placed it, because, he said, he did not want to fall over her stuff if he had to get up in the night.