Matt heard the faintest sound of Todd’s American accent drifting up from the gap in the door.
‘You say it’s a natural feeling,’ he sounded soothing and pastoral, ‘but, guys let me tell you, it’s not natural. It’s an ungodly urge, see? And if you follow it down that rabbit hole, you’re all gonna wind up back inside. Back in your hole. And who the heck wants to spend time in that sort of hole?’
Laughter.
Matt leant into Jerry. ‘This is the Phoenix Club?’
Jerry nodded. ‘We’re helping ex-offenders get their—’
‘You two,’ Larry whispered. ‘Shush.’
‘… the Devil’s whispering in your ear that it’s okay,’ Todd went on, ‘but that’s just him getting his hooks in. Gets you rationalising sin until you skip right into it. Till you start seeking out some poor—’
‘Enough.’ Jerry yanked himself free from Matt’s grip and headed down the stairs, loudly calling Todd’s name so that he knew full well they had visitors. There was a sudden murmur of nervous voices down there, the scraping of chairs.
Matt glanced at Larry with an uneasy shrug.
The door was opening slowly and Todd emerged in a flicker of light. It looked like they had candles burning down there. Goatee beards have a tendency of making their wearers look like Vegas magicians. Matt trialled one for a month and couldn’t cope with his reflection. He felt like waving his hands in mysterious ways whenever he saw himself staring back. Todd’s goatee flickered in the light and looked a little more sinister than that. Actually, a lot more. Like he might twiddle it while he tied young women to a train track. He was wearing a baggy white shirt tucked haphazardly into jet-black trousers. Quite the Gothic dandy, apart from the bottle of Dr Pepper in his hand. He screwed the lid off and took a long glugging swallow before gasping out a satisfied sigh. He wiped the back of his wrist across his wet mouth and said, ‘Maybe you two could do with a group like this. Couple of full-blooded fellas like you.’
The pale guy Neil, – who carried the police scanner yesterday – came creeping out too. He looked up and frowned, with a wet looking cheek. He wiped it quickly with his sleeve.
‘We’re coming down,’ Larry said. ‘We need to talk.’
‘Nah …’ Todd said, closing the door behind him. ‘We’re coming up.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Rachel stood in front of Holly’s wardrobe with small clumps of hair sprouting from her head, gazing at the imitation wooden doors that hung slightly crooked. They’d bought this from MFI, she recalled, on a very rainy day. Building it had been a team effort and had taken most of that afternoon. Mum and Rachel did most of it, while Holly sat on the floor, excited and giddy to see it take shape. Holly’s job had been to count out the screws and she handed them over like a surgeon’s assistant. Funny how it’s the cheap furniture that often has the most memories. Because you have to build them at home and you need others’ help and you don’t always get it right.
Maybe there was a lesson in that, she thought.
On the left door, a poster of a fairy was stuck to the wood. A drawing ripped from a kids magazine. She could see the date in the top right-hand corner. August 2001. A couple of months before the vault and the haunting, the hanging. Rachel had a vivid memory of this. Of she and the girls striding into the room, spotting the poster and laughing in Holly’s face. Not just metaphorically, either, but a spluttering big guffaw which was their way of saying that she was hilariously immature. That fairies and wizards and talking animals were for babies. But she recalled that the loudest phrase about this image was something Kassy had said.
Or was it Rachel?
Lame, lame, lame!
Rachel looked at the fairy. It was hovering over a white rose and scattering glitter from a basket that turned half of the white flower into red. She’d always assumed this was supposed to depict how roses were made. But the ‘lame’ little fairy looked a lot less babyish now. She had hopelessly underestimated Holly, and also, it seemed, this fairy. In this light those little eyes looked like pinpricks of rage and hatred. She wasn’t building this white flower into a rose. She was destroying it with acid. She was turning the world into blood.
‘How angry are you, Holly?’ she whispered to the fairy, and to herself. ‘Angry enough to kill us?’
‘How are you getting on, love?’
Rachel jumped.
Joyce pushed through the creaking door of Holly’s room and came up behind Rachel, placing a leathery hand on her shoulder. ‘Would you like me to help you get it?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘No, I’m fine. Thank you.’
She swallowed and pulled both doors open. She sucked in a shivering breath at all of Holly’s clothes still hanging there. Mum had kept it neat and ordered. In general colour sequence, because that’s how Holly used to do it. Lots of white and creams, moving into yellow and occasional browns. No pinks, no reds, no blues. Never, ever black. Just one long bright meadow of a fashion sense. Rachel reached out and touched one of them. An orange summer dress that Mum had made Holly wear for a barbecue. Holly had said she felt ‘scratchy’ in it, but she did as she was told because she was always such a good girl. Always Mum’s favourite, as a result. Rachel remembered thinking her little sister looked impossibly beautiful in this dress. She also remembered choosing not to tell her that day, because it felt ‘embarrassing’ and ‘corny’ to say such things.
An idiot. That’s what Rachel had been. An idiot.
And still was.
‘She was a pretty girl,’ Rachel said, softly. ‘Prettier than me.’ Not so much to Joyce as to the clothes themselves and the spirit that might, on some nights, touch them too.
‘Is it in
