Instead I hear my voice, high-pitched, scared, saying, ‘What? What is it?’
‘Something just – it got hold of my foot!’
Bile, rising in my throat. Samantha fumbles in the darkness and in that moment when she lets go of my hand the darkness and isolation feel so total I could be adrift in deep space. I resist the urge to reach out for her, panicky. Adrenaline, bright in my mouth and behind my eyes, purple pulses in the darkness. Suddenly Samantha’s face is lit by her phone screen and she swivels it outward in order to see the basement better.
A litter of newspaper across the floor, a stack of mildewy boxes in the corner, collapsing in on themselves. Shelves hanging ragged on the walls, brick walls slick with condensation, and mould spots black as tar.
‘See? There!’
I look where Samantha is pointing. A rat, a big one, bristly body and thick pink tail, suddenly darting for the safety of the shadows. She runs the light along the ground, picking out discarded carrier bags and stacks of yellowed magazines turning to pulp in the damp. Then, we see it.
We both recoil. Samantha makes a noise in the back of her throat, urk!, and for a second I think she is going to be sick. I run my hands over my face, stomach turning queasily. The dog must have been lying down here for some time, judging by the ragged remains. Partially skeletal, glimpses of bone through blackened skin. Where its stomach should be is just a cavity, torn apart by ferocious rodent teeth. There is a pool of dried blood beneath it on which flies settle and lift. Something long and purple has unspooled from the hole in its stomach. It makes me think of the sheep in the well, rotting to liquid while a young boy peered over the edge, fascinated. I look away, my hand over my mouth, the taste of the beer I’ve drunk rising in my throat. Samantha approaches the dog and peers at it. For a moment I wonder what the hell she is doing, and then she turns and looks at me over her shoulder.
‘No collar,’ she says sadly. ‘Poor little guy. Must’ve been the rats we heard. There’s probably hundreds of them eating off this thing.’
Behind Samantha, pushed against the far brick wall, is a long chest freezer. I’m flooded with a sudden dread, a brisk shiver. The image I had earlier of Edie Hudson lying wrapped in her plastic burial shroud – lips blued and dusted with frost, eyes like blank pennies – surfaces suddenly in my mind. Samantha is dusting herself down and telling me we should get out of there.
I point behind her and say, in as normal a voice as I can manage, ‘Check in there.’
Samantha sees the freezer and I notice her face change, even in the weak light of the phone. There’s a falling-away, like a shelf of Arctic ice. Her eyes seem to marble; it’s frightening to look at. It’s like something inside her has been punctured and everything that’s vital is being slowly sucked away. I walk over to her and put my hand on her shoulder.
‘I c-c-can’t—’ she stutters, shaking her head, stepping away from me, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘Frances, I can’t look in there, I can’t.’
‘Okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll do it.’
I think she will stop me. I almost want her to, and then we can get out of this pit and into the sunlight. I want to shower in water so hot it leaves my skin pink and boiled. Tonight I know I will have bad dreams, of dead dogs dragging themselves towards me, muzzles foaming with decay, of dead girls with skin turned blue with cold, opening their mouths and blasting me with chips of ice that slice into my skin again and again and again.
They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. How stupid, I’ve always thought. Knowledge is power. I get it now, though. As I put my fingers under the lid of the large freezer and lean in to lift it, I get it. Behind me, Samantha is breathing fast, almost panting. She has retreated to the foot of the stairs, where she stands hunched over herself, just the flat sheen of her eyes visible in the darkness. Just as I heave the lid open I’m almost sure that what I will find in here is not Edie but Quiet Mary, her bones rattling like dice.
I shine the phone in. The beam of light trembles. What I see makes me weak with relief. I almost laugh.
I turn to Samantha. ‘It’s empty,’ I say.
She begins to laugh and then it abruptly changes to harsh, choking sobs, so sudden I don’t know how to respond. I see her buckle, sliding down the damp wall to sit on the bottom stair, clutching herself, hair worked free of her bun and hanging in her face. I cross the room quickly, trying not to cry out when I connect with something soft and yielding underfoot, and kneel in front of her. For a little while she is crying so hard I can’t make her words out. I shush her ineffectively, patting her shoulder, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s okay, Samantha. Edie wasn’t in there.’
By the time she catches her breath the violent shaking has stopped and her face no longer has that dead, slack look that so unnerved me. She wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands and just as I am about to ask her if she is all right, she snaps, ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We find a nearby pub. We must look a sight, the two of us, staggering into the Queen’s Arms with dirt-streaked faces and cuts all over our hands from scrambling out through rusty metal boards. As
