It Knows Where You Live (2 page)

“Then what?” she whispered.

“Then the figure steps sideways, moving away from the camera lens...and a few seconds later our guy hears the sound of the door as it clicks shut behind him.”

The silence in the room seemed to stir, wrapping itself around them on the bed, and then Terry broke the spell by laughing.

“Bastard,” she said, feeling disproportionately angry. She slid out of bed and walked towards the wall, right to the spot where he’d said there was a hole. Standing there naked, with the cool air caressing her buttocks, she groped across the wall with her fingertips. “There’s nothing here,” she said, more to herself than to him. “There isn’t a hole, or a camera.”

Terry was still laughing when she turned around, but when he saw her from the front—the breasts she knew always drew stares, the neatly trimmed patch between her smooth, gym-honed thighs—he suddenly stopped laughing.

She smiled, leaning her weight on her left leg. A flattering pose.

“Come here,” he said, drawing back the covers to expose his erection. “Daddy wants to play.”

She smiled despite her misgivings, forgetting the previous chill and the fact that the sadistic bastard enjoyed frightening her so much. Then, throwing back her head and adopting a faux catwalk strut, she went over to the bed and joined him, joined
with
him, forgetting about the silliness from earlier.

•
   
•
   
•

She woke much later, or that was how it felt. Darkness pressed against her face like a vast silken sheet. The window blind was closed; one of them, perhaps even she, must have closed it on a toilet run during the night. Her head felt big and heavy; a hangover was perched just over the rim of her skull. Her body ached from all the fucking and she felt clammy, as if she’d retained a layer of dried sweat over her skin.

“Terry...” She nudged him, jamming her elbow into his ribs, but he didn’t move. He did not even make a sound. “I’m hungry.” Nothing: he slept on, or pretended to.

She slipped out of bed and crossed the room, fumbling around on the floor for her clothes. She didn’t want to turn on the light—not even one of the small lamps—in case she woke him. They had their friction, their silly little arguments, but deep down she thought she loved him more than anyone. Certainly more than her weak-willed husband, or the many lovers she’d taken prior to their hasty marriage.

She pulled on her jeans without putting on her knickers, and then slid her sweater over her head without bothering to even look for her bra. Her shoes were here somewhere. She remembered kicking them off. Over there: by the chair against the wall. She slipped her feet into the backless pumps and glanced back over her shoulder at Terry.

He lay there like a corpse. He wasn’t even snoring.
Drunk as a skunk
, she thought. There was a book on the bed, a small hardback volume. She’d not noticed it before, when she got up, but now she spotted it immediately. She couldn’t remember Terry bringing a book; he rarely even read magazines, let alone novels. She was the reader, the prose addict, in their furtive relationship. Maybe the book had been left behind by a previous tenant, and Terry had been browsing through it during the night, unable to sleep.

She walked over to the bed and picked up the book.
Horror Stories
,
it said on the faded red cover. No illustration, just a bare cardboard frontage. No author or editor’s name. Just the title: two words in black, a hackneyed phrase. The same words were repeated in the same workmanlike font along the cracked spine of the book.

Nancy turned over the book in her hands. The back cover was blank: no blurb, no cover quotes from other authors. It felt like a cheap binding: pulped card, rough to the touch. She turned the book back over, looking again at the cover.

Horror Stories

Her fingers played across the cover, but she was afraid to open it up and take a look. This reaction puzzled her. It made her feel like things had been taken out of her hands and she was unable to dictate her own actions.

She glanced over at Terry. He was lying on his right side, facing away from her. His head was a dark blur; his left arm was a lump attached to his side. It could have been anyone there, in the bed. Even a stranger.

Her gaze returned to the book in her hands. She wanted to throw it away, hurl it through the window and out into the night...instead, she put it back down on the bed, where she’d found it. Next to Terry’s apparently sleeping form.

“Hungry,” she said into the room, hoping there was no one else to hear. A soft rumbling in her stomach was the only response she received.

She turned and headed towards the room’s door, and then at the last minute she veered sideways and returned to the spot on the wall that had featured in Terry’s story. Her hands crawled across the smooth, dry wallpaper, looking for a hole, or perhaps a tear in the surface. She found nothing: just the skin of the paper and the lumpy wall beneath. She shook her head, feeling stupid for thinking of the story now, in the dark, and believing it might contain even a kernel of truth.

She went back over to the bed, and in an act of defiance she picked up the book and opened it to the first page. The paper was blank: no publishing history, no printer’s name, and no list of acknowledgements. She turned to the next page, where she expected to find a table of contents, and saw yet another empty page. The paper looked cheap: it was rough to the touch and she could see the shape of the pulp.

She turned another page, and found the first, untitled story. The opening line—a snatch of dialogue—made her take a step back, keeping the book at arm’s length:
 

“‘I remember hearing about something that happened here once.’”

They were Terry’s words, the ones he’d started his story with. She couldn’t be certain if they were the
exact
words, of course—her memory wasn’t good. But she was pretty sure that he’d used a phrase very much like the one she’d just read.

She closed the book, hard, slamming the covers shut. Then she placed the book carefully on the bed, but not too close to Terry, not this time...Why? In case the book was harmful?

It was like a dream had bled into waking life. None of this seemed entirely real, but it felt real enough to make her afraid. “Terry?”

Again, there was no response. She knew she could reach out, shake him awake, but for some reason she didn’t want to make a move.
What if he doesn’t wake up?
The thought, along with everything it implied, was simply too terrifying to contemplate.

She walked backwards, staring at the bed, the book—but not at Terry. Then, when she brushed against the chair with her thigh, she turned around and reached for the door handle. She opened the door. The landing outside was quiet and empty. Light spilled through the window at the end, the one situated near the staircase. She listened, but there was nothing much to be heard. Night noises; sleep sounds; the whispers of a building at rest.

She closed the door. Then she opened it again, but slowly this time. What was it she had noticed? The thing that had disturbed her yet intrigued her enough to look back out there.

She turned her head to the side. Yes, that was it: the door to the room next to theirs was open. She hadn’t seen it—not exactly—but she must have sensed it, like a disturbance in the natural order of things. And the story—Terry’s story; the one she’d seen at least partly retold in that book—was still fresh in her mind.

She’d read the stories and seen the movies. A woman roaming a darkened building, walking around and poking her nose into rooms she should have ignored. Acting silly, like a victim-in-waiting, as if she were deliberately looking to be hacked or slashed or beaten...

Yes, she knew all the stories by heart, but still she stepped out onto the landing and turned to face the partially open door. Blackness showed at the edge of the frame. She reached out a hand and pushed, gently, almost hesitantly, and the door opened further: the darkness at the edge grew wider.

“Hello. Is anyone in there?” Again, she felt silly saying the words, but it was all just part of the plot, an element of the story someone else had written. Why did she feel this way, as if her actions were being determined by another? Was it because the situation was so familiar from all the old stories and the scary films she’d ever seen?

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, answering her own question. “It’s just an empty room. You know that.” And she did; she knew it very well. Terry had asked when they checked into the hotel if there was anyone in the room next door. They both made a lot of noise during sex, and he didn’t want to disturb anyone. The receptionist had blushed at his audacity, and then regained her composure, the professional mask slipping back into place.
No
, she’d said.
The room next to yours is empty. There’s nobody staying there
.

 
Nancy pushed open the door. The room beyond was still and dim and not unlike their own. Light from the corridor illuminated the interior, not a lot, but just enough for her to see what was inside: a double bed, a wardrobe, a rickety chair by the door. Another door, this one closed to the frame, which must lead to the bathroom. A pile of books on the bed. A camera set up on a tripod against the adjoining wall.

Something flickered inside her head, like a faulty light bulb. Her thoughts went dark.
 

She was caught in a moment, stuck between two different reactions: should she backtrack and return to their room, and confront the possibility of Terry’s deep sleep not being sleep at all, or should she push on into this new room, this new situation, and face whatever was waiting for her?

She found herself stepping across the threshold, moving into the room. She made her way to the bed, and before she’d even picked up a single book she knew what she’d see on the cover. Two words; a hackneyed phrase:

Horror Stories

She picked up one, two books. They were identical...and exactly the same as the one she’d found in the other room, on the bed, next to her motionless lover. She opened one of the books and found it filled with blank pages. The next one was the same. And the next, the next, along with the several others she tried after that...perhaps a hundred copies of the same book, all filled with empty pages. She couldn’t remember there being that many books when she’d first seen them.

She turned away from the bed and focused her attention on the camera. She knew nothing of this kind of technology, but it didn’t look current. It wasn’t digital. It was hooked up to a video recorder on top of a small television she had initially failed to see because it was on the floor, with its screen turned to face the wall.

Recalling the specifics of Terry’s scare-story, she moved closer to the camera, trying not to touch it, not to brush against the legs of its tripod. The end of the lens was pressed right up against a small hole in the wall. She backed away, feeling a rush of panic. Then, recovering herself, she crouched down and turned the television set around so she could see its screen.

She glanced over her shoulder, at the door, and there was nobody out there on the landing. She was still alone. There was no threat here. This whole scene possessed the quality of an art installation: lots of attention to detail, a sense that somebody had arranged things in a certain way to evoke a specific emotional response.

On the television screen she could see the bed in the other room, and the shape of Terry on the mattress. The image was grainy, like CCTV footage, and it flickered constantly. She watched as a woman she knew to be herself entered the shot. The woman—this other Nancy—stood over the bed and picked up the book. She opened the book and looked at the pages. It was impossible to tell if they were blank or if anything was written on them. It was like a time-lapse image, a delayed recording of events she’d already lived through, things she had already done.

And then everything changed.

The woman began to read aloud, facing the bed, as if she were reciting a bedtime story to the man who was lying there, so unmoving. There was no sound; hers was a silent performance. The window blind was closed. The darkness in the room seemed to stir, but that could have been a result of the constant flickering of the image on the screen.

Nancy was no longer afraid. None of this felt real or solid. It was just another horror story, but one she was now part of. She stood up straight and walked across the room, casting one final glance at the pile of books on the bed. This time the books were all open to the first page, and there were regular lines of cramped text covering the paper. She didn’t pause to read them; she just continued on her way, out of the room, onto the landing. To her right, where the staircase had been, there was now a wall of books—a dusty red hardbound barrier stretching from floor to ceiling, each component of which had the same three words printed along its spine.
 

She turned left, away from the overwhelming sight, and walked into the other room.

Terry was still on the bed, but the other woman—the alternative Nancy—was no longer there. She had left behind her copy of the book.

Horror Stories

Nancy approached the bed and picked up the book. She opened it to the inaugural story, the one without a title. The opening lines had changed from those she’d seen before, when she had first discovered the book. She began to read the prologue out loud:

“It begins with a man and a woman in a room. It always begins this way; has done since time immemorial. A couple, a pair of lovers on a bed in a single room, sprawled across the mattress, their bodies still slick with sweat from a bout of lovemaking. Words of passion still tremble on their lips like hummingbird wings. The lights are low. All is silent. Then, abruptly, one of them speaks...”

Below her, curled up on the bed where Terry should have been, something with a strange, muffled voice began to read along with her.