The Turn of the Key

I swung the torch around the room and saw one of the bedside lamps, which they had unplugged and stacked on top of the pile of stuff. It had fallen to the floor when I toppled the stack, and the shade was wonky, but fortunately the bulb was not broken. Carefully, I straightened the shade, and then plugged it back in and set it on Ellie’s bedside table. As the soft pink glow suffused the room, I saw them, curled together in Maddie’s bed, looking for all the world like two little cherubs. Maddie’s arms were firmly around her sister, almost constrictively, and I thought about trying to loosen her grip but then decided against it. I’d dodged a bullet once with that huge crash, no point in rocking the boat further.

In the end, I moved just enough stuff away from the door to make it possible to slip in and out without causing an avalanche, and then left them, turning on Happy’s listening function on my phone so I could hear if they woke up.

Petra was still sobbing as I tiptoed quietly past her room, but the volume had decreased, and I hardened my heart and didn’t look in. I told myself she would settle faster if I left her to it. And besides, I’d had nothing to eat or drink since noon—too busy trying to feed and bathe the girls to make supper for myself. I was suddenly ravenous, light-headed, and desperate for food.

*

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I walked over to the fridge. “You are low on milk,” said the robot voice as I touched the door, making me jump convulsively. “Shall I add it to the shopping list?”

“Er . . . yes,” I managed. Was I going insane, talking aloud to a household appliance?

“Adding milk to your shopping list,” said the voice brightly, and again the screen on the door lit up, showing a list of groceries. “Eat happy, Rowan!”

I tried not to think about how it figured out who was standing in front of it. Face recognition? Proximity of my phone? Either way, it felt distinctly unsettling.

At first sight the fridge contents looked distressingly healthy—a huge drawer full of green veg, tubs of fresh pasta, various pots of things like kimchi and harissa, and a large jar of something that looked like pond water but which I thought might be kombucha. However right at the back, behind some organic yogurts, I saw a cardboard pizza box, and with some difficulty I inveigled it out and opened it up. I was just sliding the baking tray into the oven when there was a sharp rap from the glass wall on the far side of the kitchen table.

I jumped and swung around, scanning the room. It was getting dark, rain spattering the glass, and although the far side of the room was in shadow, I could see very little outside except the jeweled droplets running down the enormous glass pane. I was just beginning to think I might have imagined it, or that perhaps a bird had flown into the glass, when a dark shape moved against the gloaming, black against gray. Something—someone—was out there.

“Who is it?” I called out, a little more sharply than I had intended. There was no answer, and I marched past the breakfast bar, around the kitchen table, and towards the glass wall, shrouded in darkness.

There was no panel over here—or none that I could see—but then I remembered the voice commands.

“Lights on,” I said sharply, and somewhat to my surprise, it worked—the huge brutalist chandelier above my head illuminating suddenly into a blaze of LED bulbs. The blast of brilliance left me blinking and astonished. But as soon as my eyes adjusted, I realized my mistake. With the lights on, I could see absolutely nothing outside now apart from my own reflection in the glass. Whereas whoever was out there could see me very plainly.

“Lights off,” I said. Every light in the entire room went out immediately, plunging the kitchen into inky darkness.

“Shit,” I said under my breath, and began to feel my way back across the kitchen, towards the panel by the door, to try to restore the settings to something halfway between retina-burning brilliance and total darkness. My eyes were still dazzled and hurting from the blast of light from the chandelier, but as my fingers finally sought out the control panel, I looked back toward the window, and thought, though I could not be sure, that I saw something whisk away around the side of the house.

*

I spent the rest of the time while the pizza was cooking glancing nervously over my shoulder into the dark shadows at the far side of the room, and chewing my nails. I had turned the baby monitor off, the better to hear any more sounds from outside, but Petra’s sobs still filtered faintly down the stairs, not helping my stress levels.

I was tempted to put on some music, but there was something unnerving about the idea of drowning out the sound of a potential intruder. As it was, I hadn’t seen or heard anything definite enough to call the police. A shape in the darkness and a knock that could have been anything from an acorn to a bird . . . it wasn’t exactly Friday the 13th.

It was maybe ten or fifteen minutes later—though it felt like much more—that I heard another sound, this time from the side of the house, a knock that set the dogs barking from their baskets in the utility room.

The noise made me jump, though there was something more homely and ordinary about it than the hollow bang of before, and when I went through to the utility room, I could see a dark shape silhouetted outside the rain-spattered glass panes in the door. The figure spoke, his voice almost drowned by the hiss of the rain.

“It’s me. Jack.”

Relief flooded through me.

“Jack!” I wrenched the door open, and there he was, standing just under the threshold, hunched in a raincoat, hands in pockets. The water was streaming down his fringe and dripping from his nose.