“I know. You’ll feel better after the funeral, I think. They’re supposed to give you closure, aren’t they, funerals?” Nikki pursed her lips, as though she wasn’t sure this was true. “Have you started …?”
“Oh, it’s mostly sorted.” Heather smiled a little. It was good to see Nikki, to have someone steering her back toward the practical things. “People are really helpful in these situations, you know? Her phone though, she had it with her, and it … well, it didn’t survive. So, I need to find her address book, if she had one. Do people even do that these days, write down phone numbers? I suppose if anyone does, it would be my mum.”
“Well. Mum and Auntie Shanice are ready and willing, just say the word. Anything you need. Here, look.” Nikki nodded toward the curb. “There’s our cab.”
Several hours later, Heather woke up in the spare room of her mother’s house, eyes opening onto utter blackness. Panicked, she grabbed her phone off the side table and the light from it threw the room into a collection of grayscale shadows. Just the spare room, she reminded herself, just the stupid, thick curtains. The window in her own bedroom looked out onto a street light and the place was never properly dark. Here, with the trees outside and the long, heavily embroidered curtains, she had woken into a kind of blindness. Trembling slightly, she snapped on the bedside lamp and sat up, phone held loosely in her hands.
A noise. A scuffling from directly overhead. Heather rubbed at her eyes, reminding herself that she was a grown adult in an unfamiliar house—she should expect strange noises, and she should expect to be creeped out. The scuffling became a kind of flapping, and goose bumps broke out across her skin.
“Okay,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s a bird in the attic. A pigeon got in there, or there’s starlings nesting or something.” Her voice was familiar and normal, and she nodded to herself. “A bird is just a bird. Nothing to worry about.”
She lay there for a few more minutes, listening to the faint noises and getting more and more irritated. Eventually, she threw the duvet back and stomped out of the room and down the hallway. Perhaps, she reasoned, the noise of her footsteps would startle the bird into leaving. The landing was especially dark after the lamplight, and Heather blinked repeatedly, waiting for her eyes to adjust. It was cold, the carpet under her bare feet oddly frigid.
“Bloody place.”
The door to the loft was a barely glimpsed shape on the ceiling. As Heather came to a stop underneath it, the scuffling and flapping noises stopped abruptly, as if they had been listening for her. Still curious, and much more awake than she had been, she stood for a time underneath it, just listening and occasionally rubbing the tops of her arms. It was cold enough, and she was half convinced she could see her own breath.
The house was utterly silent; even the thumps and creaks of a building settling seemed to have stopped.
Heather turned to go and caught sight of the window down the far end of the landing. Just for an instant, she saw movement out there, as though something was watching from the thick line of the trees. Eyes, wide and bright and utterly inhuman, peered in through the darkened glass.
“What—”
A second later a gust of wind blew through the trees and whatever had been causing the illusion was scattered into nothing. Because that’s what it had to be, she told herself, your eyes playing tricks on you. You idiot. Even so, she went over to the window and peered out. There was nothing but the street lights filtering through the branches of trees, the moonlight creating strange shapes and half glimpsed forms.
Annoyed with herself, she went back to bed. The lamp light stayed on until morning. And although she didn’t hear the noises again that night, her mind kept returning to them, and when she did sleep, she dreamt of feathers, downy and brown, and her dad’s round face, scarlet with rage.
CHAPTER5
THE NEXT MORNING was not a pleasant one for Heather.
She had known that staying in her mother’s house would summon a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and so it was with no great surprise that she felt a shroud of misery settle over her when she woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Once this room had been her dad’s box room, full of his random junk—old car manuals, big plastic buckets for home brewing beer, and a massive chest freezer, which mum had filled with frozen ready meals and tubs of Neapolitan ice cream. As a kid, Heather had loved the room, convinced it contained all her dad’s secrets. Now, the guest room was small, and neat, and entirely without personality, but even so Heather couldn’t help but feel her mother there still—in the pile of towels on the footstool, on the doily on the windowsill, the empty vase. It was too quiet, and too cold, so she got up and put the heating on as high as it would go, and put on both the television and radio. Once there was a comforting level of noise, she made herself a strong cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table, and began making a list of things that needed doing.
To her surprise, she found her mother’s address book almost straight away—it was sitting in a wooden magazine rack in the living room, half forgotten—and as quickly as possible, she called everyone who needed to be called, passing out bad news, and taking in condolences. When that ugly business was done, she found herself wandering back upstairs, her hand resting on the doorknob of her old room. Holding in a sigh, she stepped inside. It was still possible to recognize it as hers; the duvet cover on the bed, neatly turned down and
