The Turn of the Key

I woke to the sound of screams and a confusion so loud that my first instinct was to clap my hands over my ears, even as I bolted upright in my bed, staring wildly around, shivering with cold.

The lights were on—all of them, turned up to their brightest, most eye-searing maximum. And the room was icy-cold. But the noise—Jesus, the noise.

It was music, or at least I supposed so. But so loud and distorted that the tune was unrecognizable, the howling and squealing coming from the speakers in the ceiling turning it into a formless din.

For a minute I couldn’t think what the hell to do. Then I ran to the panel on the wall and began pushing buttons, my pulse pounding in my ears, the screeching misshapen music like a howl in my head. Nothing happened except that the lights in the closets turned on to join the rest.

“Music off!” I shouted. “Speakers off! Volume down!”

Nothing, nothing.

From downstairs I could hear furious barking, and terrified steam-train shrieks coming from Petra’s room, and at last, abandoning my attempts with the panel, I grabbed my dressing gown and fled.

The music was just as loud outside the children’s rooms—louder even, for the narrow walls of the hallway seemed to funnel it. And the lights were on down here too, showing me a glimpse of Petra through the nursery doorway, standing up in her cot, her hair tousled on end, screaming in fear.

I snatched her up and ran to the girls’ room at the end of the corridor, shoving the door open to find Maddie curled in a fetal position in her bed, her hands over her ears, and Ellie nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Ellie?” I bellowed, above the noise of the music, and Petra’s fire-engine wails. Maddie looked up, her face blank with fear, her hands still clapped over her ears, and I grabbed her wrist and hauled her to her feet.

“Where’s Ellie?” I yelled, directly into her face, and she pulled away and fled down the stairs, with me following.

In the entrance hall the noise was just as bad, and there, in the middle of the Persian rug at the foot of the stairs, was Ellie. She was crouched into a little ball, her arms wrapped around her head. All about her leapt the terrified dogs, released from their beds in the utility room, adding their frantic barks to the cacophony.

“Ellie!” I shouted. “What happened? Did you press something?”

She looked up at me, blank and uncomprehending, and I shook my head and then ran over to the tablet sitting on the metal breakfast bar. I opened up the home-management app, but when I tapped in my access code, nothing happened. Had I misremembered it? I tapped it in again, the dogs’ furious woofs like a jackhammer of sound against my skull. Still nothing. You are locked— I had time to read, before the screen lit up momentarily and then died—a red battery warning flashing for an instant before it went black. Fuck.

I slammed my hand onto the wall panel and the lights above the cooker turned on and a screen on the fridge began blasting out YouTube, but the music volume didn’t reduce. I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest, growing more and more panicked as I realized I had no way of turning this thing off. What a stupid fucking idea—a smart house? This was the least smart thing I could imagine.

The children were shivering now, Petra still letting out earsplitting shrieks of distress next to my ear as the dogs ran in circles around us, and I tried the power button on the tablet, more helplessly, not expecting the thing to work, and it didn’t. The screen was completely dark. My phone was upstairs—but could I leave the terrified children long enough to fetch it?

I was staring round, wondering what on earth I was going to do, when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I jumped so wildly I almost dropped Petra, and swung round accusingly to find Jack Grant, standing so close behind me that my shoulder touched his bare chest as I turned. We both took an involuntary step back, me nearly tripping over a stool.

He was naked from the waist up and had plainly been asleep, judging by his rumpled hair, and he bellowed something, pointing at the door, but I shook my head, and he came close, cupping his hands around my ear.

“What’s happening? I could hear the din from the stables.”

“I have no idea!” I yelled back. “I was asleep—maybe one of the girls touched something—I can’t get it to turn off.”

“Can I try?” he shouted, and I felt like laughing in his face. Could he? I would kiss him if he succeeded. I shoved the tablet at him, almost aggressively.

“Be my guest!”

He tried to turn the tablet on and then realized, as I had, that it was out of power. Then he went to the utility room and opened up a cupboard there, the one where the Wi-Fi router was kept, along with the electricity meter. I’m not completely sure what he did in there, I was too busy comforting an increasingly distraught Petra, but all of a sudden everything went pitch-black, and the sound stopped with an abruptness that was disorienting. I found my ears were ringing with the aftermath.

In the silence, I could hear Ellie’s panicked gasping sobs and Maddie rocking back and forth.

Petra, in my arms, stopped crying, and I felt her little body go stiff with surprise. Then she let out a gurgling laugh.

“Night night!” she said.

Then there was a click, and the lights came back on—less brightly this time, and fewer of them.

“There,” Jack said. He came back through, wiping his forehead, the dogs padding in his wake, suddenly calm again. “It’s gone back to default settings now. Bloody hell. Okay.”