The Girl Below(38)

Back in Harold’s room, I put down the glass of water next to the bed and climbed in. Glasses off, I shut my eyes to sleep. I was calm, hydrated, warm, tired; I should have drifted off immediately, but could not. This time it was a noise that kept me awake, a scraping sound coming from the garden, as if someone was dragging a heavy iron spade along one of the concrete paths. The noise stopped, but then I was bothered by a deep absence of sound, as though I had descended to the bottom of the ocean. No oak leaves rustled, no traffic hummed; all the TVs and their owners had been switched off. So dense, so complete was the silence that I put on my glasses and went to the window to see what it looked like.

Everything below was incredibly familiar, like the scene in a postcard that’s been stuck to the fridge for too many years. There was the paved patio and white gate; the neat begonia beds with their border of pebbles; the barbecue area my father had built out of salvaged red bricks. On the tiny patch of lawn, someone had been ten-pin bowling and left the game out for the night—only they weren’t bowling pins, they were wine bottles. My gaze lingered on the flattened carcass of a Wendy tent—primary red and yellow with five or six tent poles sticking out like broken ribs.

When the truth about what I was looking at sank in, I sprang from the windowpane, and steadied myself against an adjacent wall. Nothing in the room had changed—the bed was messed up where I had been lying in it, and the glass of water on the bedside table was as full as it had been when I set it down. The thing that was wrong was outside, in the garden. Not just the tent, but in the seconds before I looked away I was sure I’d seen a rectangle of black beyond it, slightly larger than a cot mattress.

But how was that possible? I steeled myself to look again. Leaning carefully toward the glass, I gripped the sash window frame so hard that a splinter of chipped paint jabbed into the soft skin under my fingernail, but the pain of it was canceled by what I saw out in the garden in plain sight. There, at the end of the begonia beds, was the hatch to the air-raid shelter, peeled open like the lid of a sardine can.

Two or three times more, I experimented with moving away from the window for a moment, then looking back out to make sure that what I’d seen was actually there. It was, every time. There was no mistaking the layout of the garden, exactly as it had been when I was a child, no mistaking the rectangle of black or the debris that had been left out on the lawn the night after the party.

The windowpane was damp where I’d pressed against it, and I stood back and wiped away the condensation. Real moisture from my breathing, something you could run your finger through, unlike the mirage on the other side of the glass. I rubbed my eyes, but that made no difference. The old garden was still there, as alluring as it was filled with menace.

I decided to open the window. It had been so long since anyone had done so that it took some effort to force aside the half-moon catch between the two sides of the sash. The windowpane itself moved easily enough, but I soon discovered the sash cord was broken, and the weight of the glass in its frame bore down on my hands with tremendous urgency and pressure. Still, I got the thing open, and propped up the sash with a hardback Dickens omnibus from Harold’s schoolboy collection. With much trepidation, I leaned a little way out. The night air was still, but also sultry, humid. With one eye on Dickens—his long-windedness holding fast—I leaned out a bit farther and dared to look down.

One of the French doors—our old French doors—was open, and light spilled out onto the patio. A shadow fell across it and a male figure walked out, followed by another and another—three men in all—their laughter like gunshots on the still night air.

For a second or two, I watched with awed curiosity before I reacted physically to the ghastly spectacle—one of the men was my father—and reeled backward and upward, dislodging the book and sending the window frame downward with the force of a guillotine. The sound of it slamming was enough to wake the dead, and I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled, at great speed, toward the bed.

Once in it, I pulled the musty feather quilt over my head, but it wasn’t quite thick enough to block out the dreadful scraping noises of the hatch being closed, or the giddy, drunken voices, including my father’s, that accompanied the endeavor. The only mercy—and I was absurdly grateful for it—was that from four stories up, I could not make out a word they were saying. After a time the scraping, talking, and laughing all stopped and I guessed that the men had gone back inside, wherever that was, this world or another. The garden, the building, the room, fell quiet once more, not the thick silence of ten minutes earlier but the ordinary hum of late-night London. I could have climbed out of bed and gone to the window to see if sight matched sound, but by then I had run out of gumption, for that or any other task.