Scratch, scratch, scratch: ‘He will.’
Bob’s smile faded.
‘May I ask Holly a question?’ Matt said.
Scratch, scratch.
Bob said, ‘I don’t know if that’s—’
‘Yes.’ Rachel read out the word.
Bob looked at the paper, nervously. ‘Go ahead.’
Rachel was looking at him, and he wondered if Joyce might be doing the same. What if she was looking at him through a forest of lashes from her supposedly shut eyes?
‘Holly …?’ Matt said into thin air. ‘What’s the black rabbit?’
Boom.
Joyce’s arm stopped dead. The room plunged into silence.
He waited for a moment. ‘Holly? Holly … are you still there?’
Bob looked pissed off. ‘Yeah, thanks for—’
Joyce was off again, arm scraping. Carving out capitals.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Rachel read it out. ‘RABBIT’S COMING.’ She muttered to herself, ‘Jesus.’
Scratch, scratch.
Manic, childish-looking words, which she read out, on autopilot.
‘WANT. Rachel. Rachel … WANT. Rachel.’
‘She’s right here,’ Bob said. ‘You can speak to her.’
Another word. Then another.
‘WANT. With. ME.’ When Rachel read that part out she looked up from the paper, shaking her head. The pencil marks were growing more intense, angrier, enough to cause tearing and scrunch triangular holes in the paper. Joyce’s head swayed left to right, left to right. Stevie Wonder playing a gig in hell, until her neck immediately stopped with an audible, sharp cracking sound. Her head was locked to the left at a vile, inhuman angle.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, word.
Rachel read the word out, confused. It was a name. ‘Kassy?’
‘Kassy’s not with us, Holly,’ Bob said. ‘Would you like her to be with us?’
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘Want. With. Me.’
‘You’d like Kassy and Rachel to be with you? I see.’
‘But where are you, Holly?’ Matt cleared his throat. ‘Where?’
Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘With Steph.’
Scratch. Scratch.
‘With Jo.’
He saw Rachel take one hand and clutch the front of her top.
Joyce’s jaw was starting to hang and her shoulders began to shiver and convulse. Like the early stages of that guy’s fit, just before he dropped his Starbucks coffee all over the train floor and hunched over in his seat. As Matt’s eyes were adjusting to the light he could see a thin film of sweat resting in the deep cracks of Joyce’s forehead. She didn’t look good at all and Matt started wondering when the point would be when a medium’s trance turned into a full-on stroke. To him it felt like … right about now.
‘Bob?’ Matt nodded towards Joyce. ‘Look at her. I think we better wrap this up.’
‘Holly?’ Bob didn’t catch his eye. ‘Are you saying that Jo and Steph are with you right now?’
Scratch, scratch, scratch, word:
‘YES.’
‘But where are you, love?’ Bob asked.
Joyce’s wrists weren’t just sweeping left and right any more, now they flew in wider and wider arcs of pencil. Way, way, way more frantic than before, sliding the whole paper back and forth with it. He noticed suddenly that the pencil was no longer between her fingers. Now it was clamped in her fist like a kid might hold a crayon and as he looked up at her in the dim candlelight he saw the old lady’s tongue was poking through the right corner of her lips, concentrating as she scribbled.
The scrapes started to form bigger, furious-looking words, filling the page.
Matt stared down at the paper but didn’t speak, and he had the wild notion that if he was to look up at the pictures on the walls, all those animals would be moving in their frames.
Rachel looked at the sheet, and the scraped writing. She said nothing.
‘Well?’ Mary said. ‘What does it say?’
Silence.
‘We can’t see it from here,’ Mary snapped, angrily. ‘Where is she, Rachel? Read it!’
Scrape, scrape.
‘Read it,’ Bob said, starting to stretch forward so he might see too. ‘Come on.’
Joyce suddenly groaned and flung her arms wide. The sheet slid away under her wrist and Matt watched the entire stack float in arcs all across the carpet. Then she started on the next.
Scrape, scrape, scratch, scrape.
‘Why are you upset, Holly?’ Bob asked. ‘Can you calm down a second … you’re among friends. People who love you.’
Rachel had frozen, so Mary pushed herself up, hands still on the table. She squinted to read. ‘It says … Why am I in the dark? In the dark. I’m scared of the dark.’ Her face crumbled and she called out to the ceiling. ‘Don’t be scared, love. I’m here now.’
Joyce’s hand was thrashing wildly across the paper, writing the same thing over and over on multiple sheets as they flew to the floor in a haphazard pile. No wonder Bob had numbered them to keep them in sequence.
Bob slapped his palm hard on the table. ‘I said keep going, Rachel. You read it out.’
‘Hey,’ Matt shouted. ‘Take it easy.’
Rachel shook her head.
Mary suddenly obliged, and no amount of Bob glaring was going to stop her. ‘Steph. In the dark. Jo. In the dark. Holly. In the dark. WANT Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. Rachel and my rabbit. In. The. DARK.’
A sob erupted out of Rachel and she pushed her chair back. It scraped hard on the floor.
‘Wait!’ Bob said, angrily. ‘Don’t you break this circle.’
‘I can’t do this.’
Matt pushed back too. ‘We’re done.’
‘Just give it a litt—’
‘That’s enough,’ Matt shouted back. ‘In fact that’s way more than—’
Something happened.
Something happened and everything changed.
A muffled sound of breaking glass cracked the air and suddenly the piercing bleep of an alarm went off upstairs. The motion detector in Holly’s room was going haywire.
Everybody’s eyes shot up.
A horrible, heavy thud came from the ceiling, and his brain quickly assembled an explanation for it. That it was a dead little girl up there dropping from her noose to the carpeted floor, so that she could finally come downstairs and greet the ones that had called her. One slipper on, one slipper off. The dark dining room flickered with new light from the detector’s LEDs. He saw the cat had roused itself from sleep and was looking up at the ceiling, hissing in fear.
Mary was already on her feet.
‘Mrs Wasson!’
