Not only they had. As he tugged the frayed cord to kindle the bare bulb, he heard a muffled giggle from the region of the bath. He threw his bag onto the hook on the door and yanked the shower curtains apart. A naked woman so scrawny he could see not just her ribs but the shape of bones inside her buttocks was crouching on all fours in the bath. She peered wide-eyed over one splayed knobbly hand at him, then dropped the hand to reveal a nose half the width of her face and a gleeful mouth devoid of teeth as she sprang past him. She was out of the room before he could avoid seeing her shrunken disused breasts and pendulous gray-bearded stomach. He heard her run into a room at the dark end of the corridor, calling out “For it now” or perhaps “You’re it now.” He didn’t know if the words were intended for him. He was too busy noticing that the door was boltless.
He wedged his shoes against the corner below the hinges and piled his sodden clothes on top, then padded across the sticky linoleum to the bath. It was cold as stone, and sank at least half an inch with a loud creak as he stepped into it under the blind brass eye of the shower. When he twisted the reluctant squeaky taps it felt at first as though the rain had got in, but swiftly grew so hot he backed into the clammy plastic. He had to press himself against the cold tiled wall to reach the taps, and had just reduced the temperature to bearable when he heard the doorknob rattle. “Taken,” he shouted. “Someone’s in here.”
“My turn.”
The voice was so close the speaker’s mouth must be pressed against the door. When the rattling increased in vigor Shone yelled, “I won’t be long. Ten minutes.”
“My turn.”
It wasn’t the same voice. Either the speaker had deepened his pitch in an attempt to daunt Shone or there was more than one person at the door. Shone reached for the sliver of soap in the dish protruding from the tiles, but contented himself with pivoting beneath the shower once he saw the soap was coated with gray hair. “Wait out there,” he shouted. “I’ve nearly finished. No, don’t wait. Come back in five minutes.”
The rattling ceased, and at least one body dealt the door a large soft thump. Shone wrenched the curtains open in time to see his clothes spill across the linoleum. “Stop that,” he roared, and heard someone retreat—either a spectacularly crippled person or two people bumping into the walls as they carried on a struggle down the corridor. A door slammed, then slammed again, unless there were two. By then he was out of the bath and grabbing the solitary bath towel from the shaky rack. A spider with legs like long gray hairs and a wobbling body as big as Shone’s thumbnail scuttled out of the towel and hid under the bath.
He hadn’t brought a towel with him. He would have been able to borrow one of Ruth’s. He held the towel at arm’s length by two corners and shook it over the bath. When nothing else emerged, he rubbed his hair and the rest of him as swiftly as he could. He unzipped his case and donned the clothes he would have sported for dining with Ruth. He hadn’t brought a change of shoes, and when he tried on those he’d worn, they squelched. He gathered up his soaked clothes and heaped them with the shoes on his bag, and padded quickly to his room.
As he kneed the door open he heard sounds beyond it: a gasp, another, and then voices spilling into the dark. Before he crossed the room, having dumped his soggy clothes and bag in the wardrobe that, like the rest of the furniture, was secured to a wall and the floor, he heard the voices stream into the house. They must belong to a coach party—brakes and doors had been the sources of the gasps. On the basis of his experiences so far, the influx of residents lacked appeal for him and made him all the more anxious to speak to Ruth. Propping his shoes against the ribs of the tepid radiator, he sat on the underfed pillow and lifted the sticky receiver.
As soon as he obtained a tone he began to dial. He was more than halfway through Ruth’s eleven digits when Snell’s voice interrupted. “Who do you want?”
“Long distance.”
“You can’t get out from the rooms, I’m afraid. There’s a phone down here in the hall. Everything else as you want it, Mr. Thomson? Only I’ve got people coming in.”
Shone heard some of them outside his room. They were silent except for an unsteady shuffling and the hushed sounds of a number of doors. He could only assume they had been told not to disturb him. “There were people playing games up here,” he said.
“They’ll be getting ready for tonight. They do work themselves up, some of them. Everything else satisfactory?”
“There’s nobody hiding in my room, if that’s what you mean.”
“Nobody but you.”
That struck Shone as well past enough, and he was about to make his feelings clear while asking for his key when the manager said, “We’ll see you down shortly, then.” The line died at once, leaving Shone to attempt an incredulous grin at the events so far. He intended to share it with his reflection above the sink, but hadn’t realized until now that the mirror was covered with cracks or a cobweb. The lines appeared to pinch his face thin, to discolor his flesh and add wrinkles. When he leaned closer to persuade himself that was merely an illusion, he saw movement in the sink. An object he’d taken to be a long gray hair was snatched into the plughole, and he glimpsed the body it belonged to squeezing itself out of sight down the pipe. He had to remind himself to transfer his wallet and loose coins and keys from his wet clothes to his current pockets before he hastened out of the room.
The carpet in the passage was damp with footprints, more of which he would have avoided if he hadn’t been distracted by sounds in the rooms. Where he’d seen the teddy bear someone was murmuring “Up you come to Mummy. Gummy gum.” Next door a voice was crooning “There you all are,” presumably to the photographs, and Shone was glad to hear no words from the site of the lopsided knitting, only a clicking so rapid it sounded mechanical. Rather than attempt to interpret any of the muffled noises from the rooms off the darker section of the corridor, he padded downstairs so fast he almost missed his footing twice.
Nothing was moving in the hall except rain under the front door. Several conversations were ignoring one another in the television lounge. He picked up the receiver and thrust coins into the box, and his finger faltered over the zero on the dial. Perhaps because he was distracted by the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember Ruth’s number.
He dragged the hole of the zero around the dial as far as it would go in case that brought him the rest of the number, and as the hole whirred back to its starting point, it did. Ten more turns of the dial won him a ringing padded with static, and he felt as if the entire house was waiting for Ruth to answer. It took six pairs of rings—longer than she needed to cross her flat—to make her say “Ruth Lawson.”
“It’s me, Ruth.” When there was silence he tried reviving their joke. “Old Ruthless.”
“What now, Tom?”
He’d let himself hope for at least a dutiful laugh, but its absence threw him less than the reaction from within the television lounge: a titter, then several. “I just wanted you to know—”