“I think we should paint it,” I said at last. “If Sandra and Bill agree, of course. We can’t—we can’t just leave it. It’s too horrible.”
Jack nodded. Then he pulled the bunch of keys out of his back pocket, where he had stashed them, and began winkling the long black attic key off the bunch.
“What are you doing?” I asked, just as it came clear with a little click. He held it out.
“Take it.”
“Me? But I don’t want—” I swallowed, trying not to show the depth of revulsion I felt. “I don’t want to go up there.”
“I know that. But if it were me, I’d feel better knowing that I had the key in my own hands.”
I pressed my lips together, then took the key from him. It was heavy, and very cold, but to my surprise, he was right. There was something . . . not quite powerful, but at least an illusion of control in holding the key in my own hands. That door was locked. And only I had the power to unlock it.
I pushed it into my jeans pocket. I was just trying to work out what to say, when Jack nodded again, but this time at his watch.
“Have you seen the time?”
I looked down at my phone.
“Shit.”
I was late to pick up the girls.
“I’d better go but—but thank you, Jack.”
“What for?” He looked genuinely surprised. “The key?”
“Not that. Just—I don’t know. Taking me seriously. Not making me feel like an idiot for being freaked out.”
“Listen.” His face softened. “That writing freaked me out too, and I’m all the way across the courtyard. But it’s over, okay? No more mysterious noises, no more writing, no more wondering what’s behind that door. We know now, and it’s creepy and a little bit sad, but it’s done, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and I nodded. I should have known it was too good to be true.
I have been scared a lot in prison, Mr. Wrexham. The first night as I lay there, listening to the laughs and shouts and shrieks of the other women, trying to get used to the feeling of the narrow concrete walls closing around me, and many, many nights following that. And later, after one of the other girls beat me up in the cafeteria and I was moved to another wing for my own protection, as I lay there trembling in a strange cell, remembering the hate on her face, and the way the guards had waited just that slight instant too long before intervening, counting down the hours until the next day when I’d have to face them all again. And the nights when the dreams come, and I see her face again, and I wake with the stench of blood in my nostrils, shaking and shaking.
Oh, God, I’ve been scared.
But I have never been quite as scared as I was that night in Heatherbrae House.
The girls flaked out early, thankfully, and all three of them were out for the count by half past eight.
And so, at quarter to nine, I climbed the stairs to the bedroom—I could no longer think of it as my bedroom—on the top floor.
I found I was holding my breath as I touched the door handle. I could not help imagining something horrible flying out and ambushing me—a bird, clawing at my face, or perhaps for the writing to have spread like a cancer out from behind the locked door and across the walls of the bedroom. But when at last I forced myself to turn the knob, shoving the door open with a violence that sent it banging against the wall, there was nothing there. The closet door was closed, and the room looked just as it had that first night I had seen it, apart from a few flecks of dust that Jack and I had trodden across the carpet in our haste to get out of the attic.
Still though, I knew I couldn’t possibly sleep here, so I slid my hand under my pillow and grabbed my pajamas, quickly, as if I were expecting to find something nasty there, waiting. I changed into my pajamas in the bathroom, did my teeth, and then I rolled up my duvet and carried it downstairs to the media room.
I knew if I just lay down and waited for sleep I would be waiting a long time, maybe all night, while the images of the attic intruded and the words on the wall whispered themselves again and again in my ears. Drugging myself into oblivion with a familiar film seemed like a better option. At least if I had a loud laugh track ringing in my ears, I would not be wincing at every warped floorboard and sigh from the dogs. I was not sure if I could bear to lie there in silence, waiting for the creak . . . creak . . . to start up again.
Friends seemed about the right level of intensity, and I put it on the huge wide-screen TV, pulled the duvet up to my chin . . . and slept.
*
When I woke, it was with a sense of complete disorientation. The TV had gone onto standby in the night, and there was daylight streaming underneath the blackout blinds in the media room.
There was a hot, heavy weight on my legs . . . no . . . two heavy weights, and my chest was tight and wheezing. Hauling myself into a sitting position and pushing my hair out of my eyes I looked down, expecting to see the two dogs, but there was only one black hairy monster sprawled across the foot of the sofa. The other hot little body was Ellie.
“Ellie?” I said huskily, and then felt in the pocket of my dressing gown. My inhaler was in there, as always, but it knocked against something unfamiliar as I drew it out, and with an odd rush I remembered the key, and all the crazy events of yesterday. Then wiped the mouthpiece of the inhaler on my dressing gown, put it to my lips, and took a long hissing puff. The relief was instant, and I took a deeper breath, feeling the release in my chest, and then said again, more loudly, “Ellie. Sweetheart, what are you doing here?”