hold it up to my face. He’s right. In the absence of light, a faint sheen of illumination seems to seep up out of my skin, the lightest mother-of-pearl glow. It lights up the immediate area around me.
I frown, and then a hazy memory of the bookshop girl, the girl whose name I can no longer remember, breaks the surface of my mind. Her new boyfriend had said something similar once, on a walk home. It had been a moonless night. We’d been drinking and giggling all night long like thieves, though it had been more of an act on my part. I don’t even like the taste of beer, but I’d downed a truckload of the stuff and it had still done nothing for me. ‘It must be love,’ I’d replied at the time, puzzled. ‘Or beer goggles, Bernie.’ He’d laughed and forgotten all about it in the harsh light of morning; and I’d left soon afterwards, left the tentative courtship, the rest of her life, to her. The strange comment had completely slipped my mind. But now I saw it for myself.
For a moment, I’m grateful for the memory, it’s a beautiful memory and I’ll hold onto it for as long as I can.
But I’m also angry. It’s just another stupid complication for me to deal with. Right now, it’s not supposed to be about me, although some day soon I hope it will be.
I let my glowing hand fall gently to my side.
‘Oh, that,’ I say casually. ‘Well, I guess I won’t be needing to borrow a torch from you, after all.’ Perversely, as we approach the back door of the manse and absolute silence is what the situation calls for, all Ryan wants to do is talk.
‘How do you do that?’ he hisses. ‘It wasn’t my eyes playing tricks then, back at home. It’s really faint, but noticeable. Like you’re made of it.’ He runs a finger quickly down one of my arms and it’s electric, his touch. I shake him off quickly, though a big part of me doesn’t want to.
‘Shut up and focus,’ I snap.
I scout the barren backyard for any signs of a trapdoor, a basement; see nothing but withering lawn and concrete. These are not green-fingered people. Their concerns are clearly not of this earth. The house is low to the ground, ugly and functional. There are no suspicious outbuildings, no other structures at all. If there is any kind of hidden cavity or chamber to this place, it will have to be hewn into the ground itself and accessed from somewhere inside that house.
Ryan won’t leave it alone. ‘Are you a ghost?’ he demands. ‘You feel pretty real. Has Lauren “crossed over”, is that it? Is she trying to tell me something? Is that why you’re here?’ I put my hand on the unlatched screen door and say icily, ‘ No, no, no and no as far as I’m aware. If I was a ghost with omniscient powers, you think I’d need to be breaking into some stranger’s house with you? You think I’d even be here? I’d just walk through the walls, wouldn’t I? I’m just a freak with freaky skin, okay?’ Out of ideas, I show him the unhealed eczema scars on both wrists and he frowns rebelliously.
‘I’m not stupid,’ he growls after a moment.
‘And I’m not saying you are,’ I reply fiercely under my breath. ‘But I don’t have all the answers, and that’s the truth. Now either you start digging up the whole backyard like you tried to do around the church today, or we figure out whether this place has a basement from the inside. And I know which option I’m liking better, so get in there, hero boy. We don’t have much time.’ Ryan’s mouth compresses into a straight line. I know we will be having this talk later. He pulls a pair of gloves from a side pocket of his pack, takes the screen-door latch out of my hand, and pushes me out of the way.
Of course, being Paradise, the back door is unlocked.
Shooting me a hard look, Ryan removes a torch from his pack and opens the door silently.
We comb the house on sneakered feet, from room to room. Study the joints in the floorboards, lift up the rugs and bath mats, play the beam of the torch along the skirting that hugs the intersection between walls and floor, the single manhole cover in the bathroom ceiling, doing everything together, me watching his back, him watching mine.
The wind begins to build outside, rattling the windows of the little house, masking Ryan’s careless stumble against the television in the front room, the squeak of the pantry door being opened, the sound the cabinet door under the sink makes when it’s pushed shut, of Ryan forcing aside the manhole cover above the toilet and playing his torch around the empty space above our heads. Nothing but dead air and insulation, his eyes tell me, disappointed, as he climbs back down.
The house gives away nothing more deadly than religious bric-a-brac and framed photos of the Reverend and his good wife on holiday in the Sinai, the dust-gathering knick-knackery of a God-fearing couple that is childless by His will. They sleep heavily, the sleep of the untroubled, and I am momentarily envious.
The only room we have not searched is the couple’s own bedroom and we stand outside the closed door now, debating with our eyes what to do.
What are the chances? I gesture. She can’t possibly be in there.
I suddenly have a bad feeling about all of this.
Something doesn’t feel right, and I can’t shake off the idea that Lauren’s singing is somehow at the heart of everything and has to be looked at more closely. What we’re doing here has dead end written all over it.
We have to know for sure, he signals back urgently.
You distract them, I’ll search the room.
I shake my head angrily, slice the air in front of me with one faintly glowing hand. YOU distract them, I’LL search the room.
He doesn’t have my child’s build, my quicksilver sight. It will be faster this way. In and out.
We stare each other down until he finally pads reluctantly along the hall and kneels in the broken moonlight streaming in from the long panel of glass beside the front door. I see him take a black ski mask from his rucksack, then put it on. Slide something else out of his pack and slip it into his back pocket. Then he is outside with the pack on, closing the door softly behind him.
For want of a better plan, I duck behind the bathroom door across the hall from the sleeping couple and wait for Ryan to work his magic.
I hear the explosion before I see it.
Chapter 9
Through the gap, I see the bedroom door across the hallway fly open.
A gaping man is silhouetted there, the man from the photos. He is middle-aged, apple-shaped, balding, dark, coarse hair on his legs, the backs of his arms, unremarkable. But then they say psychopaths usually just look like your neighbour anyway, so his features tell me exactly nothing.
He hastily belts on a bathrobe over his singlet and shorts while his wife lingers in the doorway, the whites of her eyes showing.
‘What is it?’ she says fearfully, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as they both stare towards the front of the house.
Angling my eye around the gap, I see a weird, red glow reflected through the front windows. Fire. The night is lit by fire. What has he done?
‘If I don’t come back in fifteen minutes, Esther,’ the man says, ‘call the police, the fire brigade. Just stay indoors, whatever you do. I’ll come back for you.’ He picks up something smooth and heavy that is resting just inside the doorframe of their bedroom and is out the front door, weapon in hand. From the way the woman runs immediately for the telephone in the front room, wringing her hands, I’d say Ryan has ten minutes, tops. I hope he can take care of himself. It’s time for me to move.
I open the bathroom door wider. When the woman’s back is to me, I dart across the hallway to their bedroom, leaving the door slightly ajar to give me more room to work without being seen. A quick scan reveals nothing out of the ordinary, just rumpled bedding hastily discarded. Taking a deep breath, I crawl around the margins of the room on hands and knees, then beneath the bed, searching for a hidden trapdoor, a loose floorboard, anything to indicate there’s a secret world beyond this chamber. But my search yields nothing. Just four walls, four cross-stitched pillows, a vanity unit and the bed. I look up. The ceiling is white on white from end to end. Seamless.
I need to get out of here. We were wrong. This is wrong. It has something to do with the fact she can
