The Girl Below(72)

“Because you’re so out of it?” I said, thinking of all the strange things that had been happening.

He nodded. “There is one thing that helps though, I find.”

“What’s that?”

He gave me a bold look. “Well, sometimes not sleeping can be a sign that the body is trying to rid itself of certain energies—energies that can be destructive if we don’t release them.” He raised his eyebrows to see if I’d gotten his meaning—which I had, loud and clear.

“I’m not that drunk,” I said, quickly. “But thanks for the advice.” I drained the sink and turned on the dishwasher, a dinosaur of a thing that got loaded and unloaded and reloaded with the same dirty items until they eventually came out clean. Harold went into the living room, and I heard the late news come on.

Later in my room, I settled down to read, but it was a humid night and I found it hard to concentrate. Before attempting to fall asleep, I decided to take a cool shower. I’d been under the showerhead for several minutes when I thought I heard someone moving about in my bedroom. I had left the bathroom door open a fraction, as per Pippa’s instructions—to let the steam out so the bathroom didn’t go moldy—but I’d made sure the door from my bedroom out into the hallway had been shut. The noise wasn’t exactly loud, but I had sharp hearing, perhaps to compensate for my lousy eyesight. I listened again, but heard nothing, and continued rinsing my hair.

The faucet groaned when I turned it off, and water still dripped from the showerhead. I reached out from behind the curtain to grab a towel and heard the noise again. Looking through the gap in the door, I registered a glimmer of movement, but by the time I had wrapped the towel around myself and gone into my room, it was vacant. The door out to the hallway was closed, but when I listened carefully I heard someone thumping down the stairs, and not long after, a door slammed.





Chapter Fifteen


London, 2003





Nothing supernatural about getting spied on in the shower, but creepier in its own way than all the other stuff that had been going on, and I went to bed that night feeling deeply unsettled. Sleep eluded me, and I leafed through a copy of a trashy New Age novel I’d picked up off a bookshelf downstairs. In the early nineties, this book had been all the rage, and I remembered Alana reading it and raving about it and urging me to do the same. About a third of the way through the book, I had almost been lured in by its notion of meaningful coincidence when I turned the page and came smack up against a printing error. The whole middle section of the book had been printed twice, leaving the ending off altogether. My first thought was that it was some kind of joke—perhaps even a prank edition. What better way to poke fun at a book about synchronicity? But then, spurred on by the lateness of the hour, the gullible part of me took over and I began to see the misprint as part of a larger and more sinister puzzle. Stuff like this had been happening to me for weeks, and if the book was to be believed, I was fucked.

I made the mistake, then, of glancing over at the wardrobe door, the one in my room that had a hard time staying closed. Even now, it was open, but shouldn’t have been. Before getting into bed, I had placed a chair in front of it to keep it closed, but since then the chair had moved and the door was ajar. The only remedy would be to replace the chair with something heavier, so I got out of bed and began to slide the desk across the carpet. At first, the thing shifted easily enough, but one of its legs caught on the carpet and it came to a halt, sending a carefully balanced tower of notebooks crashing to the floor. The noise was thunderous in the quiet house, and I held my breath while I waited to see if it had woken anyone up.

When it seemed that it hadn’t, I shunted the desk free, and searched the carpet for the object on which it had snagged. My eyes fixed on what looked like an ivory trinket, its surface luminous against the carpet’s dull weave. I bent to pick it up and placed it in the palm of my hand, where the trinket transformed into something more organic, a small front tooth, its root tapering off at a strange angle.

I dropped the tooth immediately, but even so my hands felt contaminated and I ran to the bathroom to wash them. With the door shut, I scrubbed and scrubbed with warm water and soap until my hands felt raw, one scrub away from bleeding. In the mirror was a surreal cartoon of someone who’d just had a fright, eyes bulging in a pale moon face. Perhaps it hadn’t been a tooth, but a bead or a button. The bedroom had been dark, and I hadn’t taken a proper look before dropping it. Except that I had.

Someone was knocking on the bathroom door, I realized, and I opened it to Caleb’s sleepy face. “What’s going on?” he said. “I heard banging.”