I placed my backpack inside the wall to the left, pressing it into the darkness and breaking the silvery thread of a spider web that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. I put my left leg inside the wall, crouched, leaned heavily on my crutches, then eased my right leg in, keeping it as straight as I could. I rested my crutches against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t give me away. I picked up the hatch door and set it into the wall, entombing myself. Thirty-five seconds was my guess. Maybe forty. Not as fast as in practice. Should have been faster.
The knock came again, still quiet but firmer this time. And a voice with just one word: ‘Sam!’
TWENTY-NINE
IN THE BUILDING
I waited for the voice to come again. My legs and body felt jumpy. I needed to move, but I didn’t dare. Magnesium, I heard Mum say. Have you taken your magnesium?
I hadn’t.
I wanted to check my phone to make sure it was on silent but it was wedged tight into my shorts pocket, jabbing my hipbone. Something crawled across my neck and up into my hair but I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I thought of all the dead things I’d found in the wall earlier in the day and I prayed that I would not be like them soon. The city had been full of dead things for me – mice, rats, bugs, humans. The thing crawling across my scalp was not dead.
‘Sam!’
It was definitely her. I practically burst from the wall, pushing the timber hatch away and rolling out, face-planting on the cold, hard floor. I swiped and scratched madly at my hair to try to remove the spider/cockroach/very small rat that had crawled up my neck. Magic backed up and leapt out, shaking off the cobwebs and spinning in a circle, trying to bite her own tail.
‘Coming!’ I whispered hard into the dark as I pushed up, grabbed my crutches and hobbled to the door.
‘Scarlet?’ I whispered when I was close.
‘Open up!’
My fingers trembled with relief as I twisted the locks. When I saw her face I wanted to kiss it. She was still in her pink onesie and she pushed past me to get inside, out of the hallway.
‘Lock it,’ she said.
I did. Magic sniffed and licked her.
‘Sorry it’s so dark in here. I just don’t want to–’
‘Is your dad home yet?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry about before. I–’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t stop thinking after you left. I wanted to be sure about that apartment. My mum’s the strata manager so she knows all the tenants. She’s got a file on everyone. I took a look at 6A and I have something for you.’
She held up a small scrap of paper.
‘The Hills left the number of someone in their file, a contact for while they’re away. His name is Mick Kelly. You could ring the number.’
I nodded in the darkness. ‘Can I show you something?’ I took the laptop out of my backpack and placed it on the kitchen bench. I flipped open the lid and punched in my birthdate, which gave me that warm feeling again. I showed Scarlet the video that proved the man who had pushed John Merrin over the balcony was the man I had seen standing over the body down below and the same man I had seen in the police station.
‘This is so bad,’ she said. ‘You should come up to my place. We’ll tell my mum. But maybe we should still call the number.’
‘Really?’ I had all the evidence I needed. It seemed like a good time for us to tell Scarlet’s mum and to wait for mine to get here. I needed to text her that I was okay. ‘I can’t make calls on my stupid phone anyway.’
Scarlet pulled a phone out of a pouch in her onesie and grinned gently. She tapped the number in and handed me the phone. I held it up between us so that we could both listen. It was already ringing.
‘Can you hear that?’ I whispered.
There was a phone ringing somewhere in the building at the same time as the ringing in the earpiece. Scarlet pressed ‘end’ and the ringing in the building stopped a second later.
We looked at each other in the light of the phone.
‘That was weird,’ I said.
I grabbed the phone and pressed the green button to re-dial the number. Silence. We both listened, faces pressed close to the phone. The earpiece rang. A second later the phone rang again in the stairwell. Or was it in an apartment? It was the ‘old phone’ ringtone that I used to have on my phone, a bit like the one in the horror movie I saw. A shiver wriggled through me.
After one more ring the call was answered and the phone outside fell silent.
‘Yeah,’ said a voice.
We heard the man out on the stairs, maybe one floor down. I ended the call.
‘It’s him.’ I lowered the phone. It bumped on the handle of my crutch and clattered to the floor. So loud.
Silence for a moment.
Then steady footsteps up the stairs.
I picked up the phone and ushered Scarlet towards the bathroom.
THIRTY
SIEGE
Scarlet gripped one of my crutches, pointing the foot of it at the locked bathroom door, prepared to attack if the door should open. I held two chemical spray bottles, ready to squeeze the triggers into the intruder’s eyes.
I got us into this, I thought. I did this. Now Scarlet is involved, too.
I could hear his footsteps, slow and deliberate, out in the hall. Every second was an hour. Magic rubbed against my leg, breathing quietly for the first time since I’d met her. She knew how serious this was now.
Why hadn’t we run for our lives up to her apartment?
There seemed to be so little oxygen. I felt droplets on my arm. Sweat of mine or Scarlet’s. I wasn’t sure. We were bound together in this.
There was a loud bang on the front door of the apartment. Not a fist. A shoulder. We both jumped. A second bang followed by clattering. I pictured the door falling open, heavy deadlock parts scattering to the floor for the second time today.
For a moment the crack beneath the bathroom door glowed yellow with light from the stairwell. Then it was gone. He had closed the front door.
A shadow passed the bathroom door, left to right towards my father’s bedroom.
We should have run while he was in there. Was he at the entrance or right inside the bedroom? I listened hard but he was very quiet.
Harry’s cheap metal coathangers clanged gently together like wind chimes. I prayed that he wouldn’t check the lower drawers in the wardrobe, particularly that thin, middle drawer with the small, hanging, brass handle where the knife was.
‘Let’s run,’ I whispered, close to Scarlet’s ear.
‘No.’
‘We should.’
‘What if–’
The handle twitched on the bathroom door. It was a low, silver handle, hip height, the kind you push down to open. I could just make out the shadow of it. I knew that the lock was a piece of flimsy plastic.
Please make him go away.
The handle twitched a second time and there was a loud crack of plastic and metal. The door flew back, revealing the enormous silhouette of him painted pitch-black against the backdrop of city light from the rear window. He was even bigger than I had remembered or imagined, towering over us, filling the doorway.
Magic barked while I squeezed both triggers, filling the man’s eyes with long, thin jets of spray. He reached for his eyes and I sprayed again and again. Scarlet whacked him under the chin with the crutch. He stumbled back. She rushed forward, ramming her shoulder into his gut, and he fell against the bookcase. Scarlet ran and I pole-vaulted forward on my crutches, dragging Magic out of the bathroom and across the apartment to the front door.