Things We Say in the Dark Read online

  *

  I don’t want to do another seance, but Mum says that’s not an option. People have already paid, and she’s already spent their money. She thinks that money is the only way we’re ever going to leave this nasty little house – but I know better. Control is stronger than coins.

  She invites Luke. Of course she does. I think she fancies him, though she says it’s just about the money. She simpers and titters and inhales more deeply when he’s there, making her voice all Marilyn Monroe-breathy and her boobs swell painfully over the low neck of her dress. Luke tries to hide it but his lip curls when he looks at her; clearly the fancying only goes one way.

  She seats him with much fanfare and fanciness opposite me, so he can look right at me the whole time. So he can observe everything I do.

  Well, fuck that. I’m not going to do anything at all. My shoes will stay on and my mouth will stay closed.

  Whatever he wants, he’s not going to get it.

  Whatever he thinks, I’m still in control here.

  *

  The mother tries to seat me opposite the girl. Nice try, but I shall not be so easily fooled. I wait until the girl is in her seat and then I pull the table towards me, its feet scraping. There’s not much room to manoeuvre, but I need to see what the girl is hiding. I have requested for no other participants to be present so that I can conduct a more thorough investigation. The mother tried to bargain with me, but a handful of banknotes changed her mind. These charlatans are all the same. I stand behind the girl’s chair while the candles are lit and the mother begins her woo-woo nonsense. I tell her not to bother. I may be forced to be among fools, but they will not make me one. I lean in to the girl. I can smell her: cheap sugary perfume and something underneath – fear, perhaps? Well, she should be afraid. I am going to find all her secrets and she will be thoroughly, harshly debunked. As I approach the girl, the mother stands as if to get between us, but a few more notes push her back into her seat. I know it is crude to speak with my money, but when dealing with common liars it’s the only way. I hold my hand over the girl’s mouth and command her to make the voice speak. I press my other hand to her chest so I will feel if she breathes in time with the voice. I brace myself against her chair so I can press my hands hard. I feel the press of her teeth, of her collarbones, the fast throb of her heart. She is a trapped rabbit. I squeeze harder.

  His hands are big. His skin is warm. He smells of leather and green leaves.

  He’s so close that the tips of his hair stroke my cheek. His hands are crushing me. My head spins.

  I can’t breathe.

  *

  How is she doing this? The sounds and vibrations are back, stronger than before. I have inspected the house and nothing is hidden. I am holding her body and she is not moving. And yet the sounds are there. The whole room shakes. The moans and sighs build as before. Yet this time she cannot break the circle, cannot pull away. The sounds grow louder. The mother claps her hands over her ears. My own ears are beginning to ache, and I tighten my grip on the girl. At that moment her body convulses and she lets out a cry against my palm. Suddenly the sounds and vibrations stop. I let go of the girl and discover a new mystery. A set of handcuffs links my wrist to hers.

  *

  He is inside me, and I cannot get him out. I had thought that this house was the smallest space I would ever be forced inside, but I see now that wasn’t true. This body, the boundaries of it: even that can be entered, forcing the truth of me down inside, smaller and deeper and dimmer.

  Last time he took photographs. I can feel him looking at them, somehow; even alone in the house I feel his eyes on me, searching, disbelieving.

  How would he like it? How would he like to have no power over the things happening to him? I thought that I had power over him. But I am a girl, and no one hears me when I speak.

  He comes again to the house. He pushes money at Mum without counting it – though she does, of course.

  He checks the walls. He checks the ceiling and floor. He checks my mouth, using a torch to examine between my cheek and teeth. He looks right down my throat, makes me say ah, makes me hold my breath, makes me gasp and cry out so he can see right inside.

  He feels under my armpits and beneath my clothing and behind my knees. Lights and mirrors and probes. He has seen as much of me as it is possible to see. He makes me conduct the seance in a simple slip dress and no shoes, my arms and legs bare.

  And yet: the second we begin, so do the sounds. I convulse, and choke, and retch, no matter how tightly he holds me.

  He forces my mouth open and pulls the thing out: metres of lace, the sort you find on lingerie, unspooling from my throat.

  Later, when I sleep, I have nightmares, rolling and sweating in that tiny bed with my mother, and the nightmares are all about him. In the dreams I point my praying hands like a diver and push them into his mouth, pushing and pushing until my entire body is inside him. I force myself awake.

  But then I’m still in this house: my bed touching the walls, the sounds of strangers on every side. I think about living that way forever. Smaller and smaller and smaller.

  *

  I have checked the house over and over. I swear it shrinks each time I come back. That, or the girl is growing. I have examined the photos I took of her and they are unclear. Her eyes burn so that the rest of the photo seems to blur. I will take more. They will have to be clearer and closer. I will bring a spotlight. At first, when I would observe the girl after the seances, swooning and sweating in her cheap Victoriana, how small she looked. The shoddy plaster walls loomed around her. The fake mahogany chair swallowed her. There was space enough between the table and the walls for me to approach her. I could move freely and check her surroundings and her body. Yet on each subsequent visit, each recording of her shouts and shivers, the walls have seemed closer. Before long I must stand with my back touching the wall and my legs pressed full to the back of her chair. But on the next visit I cannot even shuffle into that space. I am forced to have her sit on my lap, or there would be no space for us both in that room. It’s all in the name of proper inquiry. I suspect that this strange shrinking of space is another of her tricks. Perhaps I have not debunked her yet, but it’s only a matter of time. She’s hiding the thing inside her. I know she is. It’s not in her mouth or her throat. It’s not hidden in her armpits or under her thighs. She sits on my lap in her underwear and it’s so tight to her skin that I would see anything she hid and there’s nothing, but there must be something. How she bedevils me. My oppressor. My tormentor. I will banish the mother with all the money I have. The source is the girl, I know, but perhaps the mother is sparking something in her. There is one more place where women hide things. For scientific thoroughness I must check there too. Probably I should not check myself. Perhaps a doctor would visit? A gynaecologist? I need someone who can open her up and thoroughly check. It’s the only logical thing to do.

  There are no candles now. No velvet. No one.

  I’m alone in the house with him and I’m wearing nothing but my skin. My legs are spread and bound to the wooden chair. All my hair has been shaved off.

  He’s on his knees between my legs, peering inside me, his fingers hot and the heavy eye of his camera winking, and around us the walls are moaning and screaming, and he’s pushing further inside me, and I know that all he wants to do is cut me open so he can see inside.

  He tells me to open my mouth, and I do. I open it wider and wider and wider.

  Six months ago, before all this began, I’d have thought that this man would be enough. But I am vast. He thought he could get inside me – well, tiny man, we’ll just see about that. One of us is in control now, and it isn’t you.

  I swallow him in one go. He doesn’t even touch the sides of my throat. I can’t even feel him go in.

  I stand up with him inside me. This man is so small, and I am so hungry. Around me, the empty house falls silent.

  I turn and leave, only partly full.

  Earlier o
n I told you that I wrote these stories on a writing retreat in Iceland. I made it seem like it was in the past and now I’m home, but in the name of being honest with you – well, I’m still here. I’m still writing.

  I know I said I was here for a month, but books generally take longer than that. This one is taking much longer, anyway. I’m going to go home soon. But not yet.

  Birds Fell From the Sky and Each One Spoke in Your Voice

  At night, the estate was a ghost town. But no one else was there except Sidney, so he guessed he was the ghost. Sidney’s house was the first one to be finished; technically, he shouldn’t be living there yet. But what with the fire in his old place, there wasn’t much choice. He’d thought the developers would have argued with him more, but they seemed to have run out of money to build the rest of the estate, so maybe they were just glad to have at least one house sold. Sidney had planned to move in his own stuff, but it was all rot and soot now.

  He drove through the estate. The roads all started paved and reassuring, but only the one leading to his house remained so; the others were deceptive, turning to dirt partway through, leading nowhere except into the woods. He passed a half-built play-park, ground soil still in huge sealed bags. Everything unfinished, wrapped in plastic, thwacking in the wind. A fox shrieked. He reached to turn on the radio, but changed his mind.

  And there was the house at last, a looming black shape against the deeper dark. He wished he’d left a light on. He parked and scooped an armful of velvet out of the back seat.

  The house smelled of paint. There was a note from the decorators on the kitchen table. He’d been away for a week while they set everything up: painted door frames, tightened threshold bars, polished out fingerprints.

  Sidney deposited his burden on the couch and wandered the rooms. It looked brand new, he thought, then laughed at himself. Of course it was new. Wasn’t that the point? The night windows reflected Sidney back at himself. He stared at this new housemate for a moment, then looked away.

  He lifted the velvet curtains from the couch and hung them from the plastic rail. They were too heavy; the rail sagged, leaving finger-widths of night at the top and sides. So flimsy, these newbuilds. He should have known it wouldn’t work to mix old and new. Tomorrow he’d go and get something light and synthetic, something that crackled and couldn’t be tumble-dried. He pulled down the curtains and folded them; they’d be good for the shop. Velvet curtains were definitely a thing in the 1990s. He remembered his babysitter’s house had them, though of course it was actually his babysitter’s parents’ house as she was only sixteen. Those curtains were a burnt orange, like the insides of cheap fondants. He used to hide between them and the window, cold glass on his back and scratchy fabric on his front, the comforting claustrophobia of his own caught breath. She’d pretend to search the room for him, looking behind the flap of the video player, inside vases, up the chimney, places he couldn’t possibly fit. Finally she’d whip back the curtain and scoop him up, giggling so hard he felt sick, safe and found, never really lost at all. You’d think, considering his line of work, that he’d get used to these sudden swoops of nostalgia, but they got him every time.

  Sidney opened the empty cupboard under the stairs to stash the curtains, but it was unexpectedly not empty. Crouched on the floor in the middle of the cupboard was a large red dial phone. Sidney flinched, but the phone did not ring. He went to throw the curtains on top, but was then seized with a surety that the fabric would somehow catch on fire in the night. Besides, the phone looked vintage. He put the curtains in the corner and lifted the phone. The cable trailed after, hopeful. He put the phone on the hall table, plugged it in to the wall and lifted the receiver.

  Silence.

  Of course the line wasn’t hooked up yet; he was lucky there was electricity. Ah, but they would have needed that to light the place so prospective buyers could look around. There’d be gas too, for the oven – everyone knew those estate agent tricks, baking bread and brewing coffee to make a house smell like a home. Just the thought of that made him hungry. He closed the door to the cupboard under the stairs and went to make himself some dinner, cheered by his twin, the Sidney mirroring him in the windows, following his every movement.

  After dinner, Sidney channel-flicked. He got engrossed in a film before realising it was about a missing child, and quickly changed over. Then he changed it back and kept watching. It was, from his experience, unrealistic, and he found that fact strangely reassuring. The missing child was a moppet; too cute to die, but with appealingly large eyes that carried tears well. Listening to the film’s dialogue, Sidney heard someone refer to the child as Cotton, and for a moment his blood stopped flowing. But he’d misheard; the name was just the sound of the mother catching a sob in her throat. His blood moved again.

  Sidney watched the film to the end, even though he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The child was not called Cotton, and anyway they found him and he was still alive.

  Sidney woke from the depths of night. A loud sound had just stopped. An alarm? Building site security? Thunder, hail. A fox killing something, the dying cry. In his dream, a phone had been ringing. He itched to answer it.

  Sidney slid from bed, feet cold on the bare floors. Tomorrow he’d get slippers. A rug. Adult possessions. Down the stairs in the dark, the house’s held breath. He didn’t want to switch on the light; it would wake him up, and he’d always had trouble getting back to sleep. In the soft night he padded down the stairs.

  There was the banister. There was the bottom step.

  The door to the cupboard under the stairs. The hall table.

  The phone.

  He knew that that the phone could not have rung. Last night there had been no dial tone, and the BT engineers certainly didn’t hook up phone lines at midnight. He’d made a fuss about keeping his old phone number, so he knew all about the intricacies of BT.

  He knew no one had called. But he lifted the receiver. You have to answer the phone.

  Silence. Of course, silence.

  It was a sun-through-the-rain Monday afternoon and Sidney was just counting the pieces in a recently bought Rugrats jigsaw when the bell over the door jingled and the man walked into the shop. Sidney nodded politely and the man nodded back, then went to browse the Game Boy cartridges. Sidney had commissioned a special display case for them, all reclaimed wood, the shelves quarter-height so the cartridges could sit face-out but in proportion, like a doll’s house bookcase; he was proud of that idea, and many a hipster had squealed ironically and asked to buy it, the whole thing, shelves and cartridges, presumably to display ironically in their ironic living rooms.

  Sidney’s shop sold everything he remembered from his childhood, and some things he didn’t. But every single thing was from between the years 1990 and 1999. He scorned remakes, reissues, faux-vintage kitsch; in his shop, it was genuine or nothing. If you wanted a DreamPhone board game, a pink inflatable backpack, a jungle-pattern Adidas shell suit, a box of red floppy disks, platform Buffalo trainers, a Right Said Fred cassette single, Tamagotchis, Goosebumps books, a box of Cherry Coke Lip Smackers still sealed in plastic – Sidney had it. An entire childhood, both real and ideal.

  Sidney observed the man without the man realising he was being observed. It was a vital shopkeeper skill, part of his arsenal against shoplifters. The more he watched, the more uneasy he felt. The man looked like a 1950s greaser, like the one in the film you’re meant to think of as the bad boy – but a Hollywood bad boy, not a genuine one; borrowing cars and returning them later, maybe smoking a joint or feeling up a girl in the back seat. Leather jacket with a popped collar and wide shoulders, fastened a shade too tight over his belly, oily-looking black T-shirt, grey hair quiffed into a ducktail. There was something unwholesome about the man. He seemed stiffly relaxed, too self-conscious, like he was an actor playing a role but could easily switch into another. Sidney sensed that the man was about to look at him, and quickly glanced away.

  ‘Looking for a Nokia,’
said the man. His voice was low, as if mid-seduction. ‘One of the old ones.’

  ‘Everything I’ve got is old. I don’t do replicas. But no phones.’

  ‘No Nokias? I don’t mind which model.’

  ‘No phones. At all.’

  ‘Well, are you going to get any in?’

  ‘No. Don’t do them. Don’t even have a shop phone.’

  ‘Mate.’ The man paused until Sidney looked up from his jigsaw; with the bright cartoon pieces in his hand he suddenly felt ludicrous, like a child playing shops. ‘You’ve got all this shit.’ The man motioned at the Mega Drives, the floppy denim hats, the Maid Marian VHS, the Fisher Price extendable skates, the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk dispenser, the Pogs. ‘And not a single phone? Mate.’

  Sidney shrugged, and felt even more like a child. He cleared his throat and felt even more ridiculous; what was he going to do next – smooth down the moustache he didn’t have?