The New Uncanny (12 page)

Melvina planned to move the bed back soon, but she wanted to put up more bookshelves before she did. Money was tight, so she had been delaying.

Everything she remembered of Hike was negative, unpleasant, rancorous. How had it happened? Since he left she had grown so accustomed to being weary of him that she had to make a conscious effort to remember that Hike Tommas had once been eagerly welcome in her life. The early days had been exciting, certainly because they brought an end to the long aftermath of Piet’s death. Hike intrigued her. His wispy beard, his hard, slim body, and his abrasive sense of humour, all were so unlike genial Piet. Hike changed everything in her life, or tried to. His opinions – they soon became a regular feature, his attitude to life, his harsh judgments on others, a constant undercurrent of ill-feelings, but at first she found his reckless views on other artists and writers stimulating and entertaining. Hike did not care what he said or thought, which was refreshing at first but increasingly tiresome later. Then there were the paintings he executed, the photographs he took, the objects he made. He was good. He won awards, had held an exhibition at a leading contemporary art gallery, was discussed on the arts pages of broadsheet newspapers. And the physical thing of course, the need she had, the enjoyment of it. They had done that well together. They made it work, but the more it worked the more it came to define what it was she disliked about him. She hated the noises he made, the obscene words he uttered when he climaxed, the way he held her head to press her face against him. Once she gagged and nearly suffocated as he forced himself deep into her mouth, but it did not stop him doing it again the next time. Hike was always in a hurry about sex. Get it over with, he said, then do it again as soon as possible.

Well, now, it was no longer a problem.

There was a pile of her books balanced on the end of the bed, placed exactly at the corner, leaning slightly to one side. Ten books, a dozen? They were paperbacks. She recognized them all, but they belonged in her study or reading room. She could not remember bringing them up here. On the top was another by Douglas Dunn:
Europa’s Lover
. Then Nell Dunn’s
Poor Cow
, J. W. Dunne’s
An Experiment with Time
, Dorothy Dunnet’s
The Unicorn Hunt
, Gerald du Maurier’s
The Martian
.

She never alphabetized her books by author. She either stacked her books by type, or more commonly left them in unsorted heaps that she would get around to tidying up one day. She always knew where her books were, or could find them quickly using the habitual reader’s radar. The poetry came from her study, the other books from her reading room. She felt her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands, the cold press of her perspiration-soaked blouse against her back.

Trying to stay calm she went to the books but the slight pressure and vibration of her feet on the floorboards was enough to cause the pile to topple. She lunged forward to catch them but they thudded down on the floor, some of them landing with pages open and the spines bent. She knelt to pick them up.

On that level, face close to the floor, she paused. She was next to the bed, close beside the dark area beneath the bed.

Melvina bit her lip, leaned forward and down, so that she could look under it.

No one there. As she straightened with some of the paperbacks in her hand she felt exposed and vulnerable, moving backwards and getting to her feet without looking, not being able to see behind her, or to turn quickly enough.

But she stood up, looked around the room, then placed the books on the floor so that they would not fall again. She headed for the stairs.

Still feeling her knees quivering as she walked, Melvina went through every room in the house one more time, feeling that perhaps the worst was over. Both doors to the outside were secure, and everything was as she expected it to be.

Just the books. Why had the intruder moved her books around?

She went to the kitchen, closed the Venetian blinds and made herself a cup of hot chocolate. It was already long past midnight, but she was wide awake and still jittery.

She returned to her study and switched on her computer. Her mailbox would be full of Hike but tonight she would just delete everything from him without reading. She stared at the monitor, sipping her chocolate drink, while the computer booted.

She browsed through her emails, skipping over Hike’s or simply deleting them unread. For a while he had been sending his messages from an email address that did not contain his name, apparently trying to get under her guard, but he had quit doing that last week. She stared at the screen, only half-seeing, half-reading the other notes from her friends. None of them ever mentioned Hike; to all her friends, he was a figure of the past.

She knew Hike was stalking her, and that one of a stalker’s intentions was to make the victim think constantly about him. She also knew Hike was succeeding. It must have been him who came to the house. Who else would it have been? But then why had he taken back none of his property, which he knew she repeatedly asked him to have moved, but which he constantly used as one of his excuses for keeping in close contact with her? Perhaps he had said something about coming to the house in one of the emails she had already deleted?

Changing her mind, she found the trash folder of previously deleted emails and opened every one of his messages from the last three days. She skimmed through them, deliberately not reacting to his familiar entreaties, threats, reminders of promises imaginary and real, his endless emotional blackmail about loneliness and abandonment, his pleas for forgiveness, etc. Nothing new, nothing that explained what had happened today.

All she had to do was wait him out. Give it time.

She clicked away the trash folder, but a new message had arrived in her in-box, from Hike. The date stamp showed it had been sent a few seconds before.

Melvina closed her eyes, wondering how much time it would really need. When would he leave her alone?

Behind her there was a sound, heavy fabric moving.

Immediately she stiffened, was braced against fear. She strained to hear. There was a slight sense of movement, then a quiet noise that sounded like a breath.

In the room with her. Someone was behind her, while she sat at her desk.

She froze, one hand still resting on the computer mouse, the other with her fingers beside the keyboard. The computer’s cooling fan was making a noise that masked most of the quiet noises around her. Noises like the sound of someone breathing.

She waited, her own breath caught somewhere between her chest and her throat. She hardly dared move.

Her desk was about a metre away from the bay window, so there was space for someone to stand behind her. She turned in a hurry, accidentally knocking some pencils from her desk with her hand. As they clattered to the floor she looked behind her.

She stood.

Every light in the room was on. She could see plainly. There was a figure standing by the window, concealed by one of the full-length curtains.

She could make out the bulge, the approximate shape of the body hidden behind. She stepped back in alarm but her chair was there and she knocked against it. She stared in horror at the figure. The bulge in the curtains, the sound of breathing, the source of every dread.

Whoever was there had taken hold of another of her books, because she could see it, a black hardcover without a paper jacket, held at waist height in front of the curtain. It was the only clue to the actual presence of the person hidden there. She was so close she could reach out and touch the book. It was being held somehow at an angle, an irregular diamond halfway up the curtain, in front of the bulge, supported from behind... by someone breathing as they stood behind the curtain.

The curtain moved slightly, as if lifted by a breeze. A breath.

Another involuntary sound broke fearfully from her. She pushed back, shoving her chair to one side until she was pressing hard against the edge of her desk. She groped behind and her hand touched some pens, her notepad, the mouse, her mobile phone... and a ruler. A wooden ruler, a solid stick, the sort that could be rolled.

She grabbed it and without a thought of what she was doing she struck with revulsion at the book, like someone trying to kill a snake or a rat. The wooden ruler thumped hard against the book, dashing it to the ground. It fell in a violent flurry of pages, spine upwards, pages curled beneath it.

The curtain shook, swung, fell back against the window. She had expected a cry of pain as the book was dashed away.

Using the ruler, she parted the curtain.

No one was there. Just the black oblong of night-darkened window. She saw her reflection dimly in the pane. Her hair was wild, disarrayed, as if in fright. She smoothed it down without thinking why. The half-light window at the top of the frame was open, admitting a breeze, a breath of night air. She felt the cooling flow, but now she wanted the house to be secure, sealed. She balanced herself precariously on her office chair and closed the window.

The solitary car was still parked outside, under the streetlamp. It looked like Hike’s, but he was more than an hour away. It could not be him – although mobile phones, wireless broadband, could be accessed from a car. Because of the light shining down from above, the car’s interior was shadowed and she could not make out details – was there someone inside?

She stared, but nothing moved.

Stepping down from her chair she picked up the book that had given her such a fright. It was John Donne’s
Collected Poetry
, a hardback she had owned since she was at university. She clutched it with the relief of recognition, closed the pages, checked that none of them had been folded back when she knocked it to the floor. There was a dent at the top of the front cover where she had brought down the ruler. The spine, the rest of the binding, the pages, looked none the worse for the incident, but as she turned to put the book on the shelf where it belonged she discovered that there was a large patch of sticky stuff on the back board. She tapped her finger against it and was surprised at the strength of the glue that had been smeared there.

She sat at her desk, despairing, and holding the damaged book. Why this one? She dabbed at the sticky stuff with a paper tissue, but it only made a mess, made the problem worse.

She put the book aside and closed down the computer. She wanted no more incoming emails. At last the room was silent – no whirring sound of the cooling fan, or of the wind from outside, or of anyone or anything moving inside the house. No footsteps or moving objects, no one breathing around her, no suggestion there was anyone near her, or hidden somewhere in a corner she had forgotten to search.

Tiredness was finally sweeping over her, as the physical exertion of the day’s travels and the trauma of arriving home combined against her. But still she could not end the day without being sure.

She moved swiftly from her study, walked straight to the front door, pulled back the bolt and went outside. At once she was in the wind, the sound of trees and foliage moving, the night-time cleansing of the air.

She headed directly for the car parked beneath the streetlamp.

No one was inside, or no one appeared to be inside. She went forward, suddenly alarmed that there might in fact be someone hiding, who had ducked down as she left her house. In her haste she had not thought to bring a torch. She reached the passenger door of the car, braced herself, leaned forward, looked in through the window.

A parallelogram of light fell in from the streetlamp. There was a laptop computer on the front passenger seat, its screen opened up, and lying next to it was a mobile phone. Both revealed by their tiny green LED signals that they were in use, or at least were on standby. There was no sign of anyone hiding in the car. She tried the door, but it was locked. She went to the other side, tried the door there too.

When she turned to go back to her house she realized she had made no attempt to close the front door behind her. In a disturbing reprise of the first sign she had seen of the intrusion, it was swinging to and fro in the wind, a seeming invitation. She hurried back, rushed inside, pushed the door into place and slid the bolt closed.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, listening for sounds from any of the rooms downstairs. The books beside the door, which she had not examined closely before, were still on the shelf where she had thrust them in haste.

Melvina picked them up with a feeling of dread certainty, and looked at the authors’ names: Disraeli, Dickinson, Dickens, Dick, DeLillo, De La Mare...

Once again, full of fear, she toured the house. She checked all the doors and windows, she looked in every room and made sure that no one could be in any conceivable place of concealment. Then, at last, she began to relax.

It was past one o’clock, and although she felt tired she was not yet sleepy. She went back to her cup of drinking chocolate, now lukewarm, and finished it. Then she climbed up the stairs to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and took a shower.

For the first time since she had bought the house, she found being inside the shower frightening: the closing of the cubicle door and the noise of the rushing water cut her off from the rest of the house and made her feel isolated and vulnerable. She wanted to extend sensors throughout the house, detect the first sign of intrusion at the earliest opportunity. She turned off the water almost as soon as she had started, even before it had become warm enough, and stepped out of the shower feeling wet but unwashed. She towelled herself down, still on edge, nervous again.

In the bedroom, she collected the books that had been stacked on the end of her bed, took them down to her reading room. Most of them belonged there, and she would put the others back in her study in the morning. She went downstairs, found the other books, all with authors whose names began with ‘D’. Why?

She turned on the central light in her reading room, and once again she had the unmistakable feeling that something was different, something had changed.