Chapter Extract

The creaking floorboards were cold under her bare feet and she tiptoed as though walking around broken glass to lessen the discomfort.  She took the stairs two at a time then stopped, sniffing the air like a fox-hound on a hunt.  The smell of the house was worse than she had first thought.  There was not only the damp, musty odour she had experienced when she had first come in the front door; there was a meaty smell also; an off one at that.  It reminded her of menstruation and decay.

She peered into the almost impenetrable darkness at the top of the stairs and suddenly wished she had waited until she got home, or at least asked Matt to come with her.  She thought of calling down to him and asking him to wait in the hallway, but then thought better of it.  She really liked him; liked him a lot, in fact.  And as far as first impressions went, she believed she had made a good one.  She didn’t want to go spoiling it now.  He was too good a catch to scare away by acting like a complete girl who was afraid of the dark.

She crept quietly up into the gloom and opened the first door on her left.  It was a linen cupboard.  She cursed and pulled the door closed.  There were no windows in the upstairs hall and she could tell that all of the room doors were closed by the lack of light which lent to her blind state.  She could hardly even see her own hand in front of her face as she held it up and felt further along the wall for another door.

Suddenly something screeched and thudded downstairs and she let out a small yelp which she quickly stifled with the palm of her free hand.  She thought again of calling down to Matt, but only her bladder stopped her from doing so this time.  She fumbled for a handle when her hand slid across a door and she practically fell into the room she had been looking for as she leaned against it.

The bathroom was well lit, but not from the streetlights.  The room was set to the back of the house so only the moonlight spilled in through the bare window.  All that lay beyond the glass were trees and fields with an impossibly black sky above where the moon shone down, full and silver.

A bathtub sat to the left with its shower curtain still intact and pulled closed.  She pulled the plastic cover back to make sure there were no bogey-men lurking in the shadows and her hand came away covered in damp mildew.  The only thing that stirred in the tub was the continuous drip-drip of the tap which had left a brown stain down the chipped enamel.

 To the right was the wash-basin and ahead of her, under the old fashioned, sash styled window was the toilet.  She hurried to it and sat down, pulling Matt’s shirt up and bunching it into her fist against her stomach.  The toilet seat was cold and she shivered as the contrastingly warm waste run freely out of her.  She was eager to be back downstairs and lying in her new lover’s arms.

When she was finished she pushed down on the flush-handle, and the cistern clanked and sputtered after months of neglect.  No water came out, rusty or fresh, and she cursed loudly.  Matt would need to get the plumbing fixed if he was to make this his new abode.

The water in the wash basin came out just fine though, and she rinsed her hands before cupping them together and taking some up to her mouth to wet her lips.  They were dry and sore from rubbing against Matt’s stubble.  The water was cool and pleasant, not rancid and rusty like her throat had been expecting to reject.

She left the bathroom quickly and crept along the hall towards the dim light of the stairway, less cautious now that her eyes had become used to the dark.  Halfway down the stairs the smell from before hit her again and she gagged convulsively.  It was stronger now, surely.  And there was a new element to it; a coppery undertone that made her want to retch and heave up all the alcohol still sloshing around in her stomach.

She took the rest of the stairs quickly and ran into the front room, eager to be close to Matt’s warm body, but he was gone.

“Matt?” she whispered, peering into the corners as though he could possibly be hiding there.  His jeans and shoes were still piled beside the still-warm mattress, with something dark and flat puddled alongside them.  She crouched down and ran her fingers along the new shape and brought them up to her nose for a sniff when they were wet and shiny.  Even in the light from the streetlamps it was impossible to make out the colour of the substance, but the coppery odour was unmistakable; it was blood, and it went out of the room in droplets and small rivers where it had fallen into grooves that had recently been marked in the floorboards.  She followed the trail out of the room and saw that it led into the kitchen.

“Oh! My God,” she muttered, and something growled from behind the semi-closed door in reply.

She froze, rooted to the spot in a miserable terror she never knew was possible without the heart giving up and the brain temporarily shutting down.  A small trickle of urine that had escaped her last attempt at flushing-out leaked down the inside of her thigh, landing with a small plop in the blood at her feet.

Thoughts flooded her head in a barrage of images and she began to try and rationalise the situation but failed miserably.  She only succeeded in scaring herself even more than she already was.

‘Keys.  Matt had locked the door when they came in and put the keys in his jeans pocket.  The jeans were in the room, not two feet away.  Go in, get the keys and get out of here.  Yes.  Do it.  Do it now, before it’s too late.  Get across the road.  Wake Kirsty.  Yes Kirsty.  She’ll know what to do.  Kirsty would call the police.  Kirsty would protect her.  Just get the keys and go now. Quickly.’

She snapped out of her reverie and ran back into the room.  She bent down and fished in the back-pockets of Matt’s jeans; a wallet. She fumbled in the front pockets; a set of keys for a car, half a packet of chewing-gum and a business card, but on her final search she found them. 

‘Keys.  Good.  Now run.’

She peered around the doorway and into the hall to ensure there was nothing or no one ready to pounce on her as soon as she made her exit from the room.  All she could see through the crack in the kitchen door was half a battered dining table and something on the floor; a dark shape that was half obscured from view.

‘Was that a twitching foot?’

She could not let her imagination run away with her now.  That would be the worst thing she could do if there really was an intruder in the house with her.  She did not want to think like that.

‘Just get out now,’ she kept telling herself.  ‘Now.’

She crept towards the front door as quietly as she could, and then she stopped with the key already halfway to the lock.  A frown creased her forehead.

‘What am I doing?’  She thought.  ‘Am I mad?  Why am I being so irrational?  Matt could be lying injured in the kitchen and here I am ready to run as though all the beasts of hell were after me.  There is a perfectly normal explanation for all of this.  After all, what am I so frightened of?  A bad smell?  A few noises?’

‘Blood on the floor,’ another voice told her.  ‘Don’t forget that ‘little missy scaredy-pants’. Blood on the floor.’

But was that enough?  

‘Okay, it’s not a little drop of blood, but it’s not exactly a lot either.  He must’ve cut his foot on a nail or something stumbling around in the darkness.  That’s it.  That’s got to be it.’

That other voice came back to her and frightened her even more, teasing her with its unbelievable rationale.  ‘What about the growl? Haven’t thought about that, have you?’

‘Over active imagination after seeing the blood.  It was a perfectly rational confusion.  You see blood, you think of wounds.  You think of wounds, you think of something that caused the wounds.  Then your mind just goes AWOL’

‘What about the smell then?’ the voice chanted, mocking her for her ever-increasing rationality.

‘It was an old house, for god’s sake.  There were bound to be hundreds of field mice and other such animals trapped in the walls and under the floorboards.  This is the countryside after all.’

She turned and tiptoed stealthily towards the kitchen door when the voice in her head had been beaten, or at least quietened for the moment.  The closer she got however the more the fear came back because now the immobile foot, for that was clearly what it was, had become a leg, and then another leg had come into view tucked away behind it.  She crept through the door and saw thankfully that the legs were attached to a crotch and the crotch, with the penis hanging limply to one side, was attached to a torso and...

“Oh Shit!” she whispered and held a hand to her mouth to stifle the rising scream.

‘The torso.’ 

The torso was at one moment dark and glistening and covered in cuts and gashes that dripped intestines, and then it was something black and monstrous that glared at her with hateful, yellow eyes as it tore another strip of flesh from Matt’s chest.

It growled deep in its throat and she bolted, muttering a litany of “Oh shits!” until she finally began screaming nonsensically at the top of her voice.  She ran the length of the hall and hit the front door with a thud, pushing the key into the lock.  Wrong one.  It refused to turn.  She screamed a volley of curses and tried again, knowing that her time must be short and it would have to be this one or die trying the next.  She could feel the beast’s eyes boring into the back of her neck.

‘Why isn’t it running?  Why hasn’t it ripped my head off in one big bite?’

That voice came back again and she could have gleefully strangled the owner if it had not been her own.  ‘It’s toying with you, that’s why.  It knows you won’t get away.’

The lock gave on her second try with an almost inaudible click.  It was enough to give her hope and she turned the handle, pulling the door towards her as she did so.  She just had time to see a few inches of normality outside in the quiet street and smell the fresh air of the night before the beast landed on her back, pushing her forward and slamming her against the door, closing it again.  She screamed as it snapped at the back of her neck viciously and she knew it had only missed her head by inches, so hot was its breath on her skin.  She still could not feel claws or teeth, just the terrible weight of it as it pinned her to the door.

‘Still no pain,’ she thought briefly in a strange moment of clarity, and then yelled for all she was worth as a searing agony ripped through her scalp.  She fell backwards, or at least her maddening mind thought she had until she felt herself being dragged along the splintered floor by her hair.  She landed on her back with a bone-cracking thud, kicking with her feet and pounding her fists against the floor as she was pulled towards the kitchen.  She was going to join Matt: a last embrace.

She fell limp and ceased fighting as she gratefully passed out in a dead faint.

 
Abridged extract from Chapter 6