She turned back to the house and knocked again.
No answer.
She took a step back.
According to the records, Billy Roberts had been unemployed for a number of years, but obviously that didn’t exclude the possibility of him being out of the house somewhere. Which was fine, of course; she could come back. But she looked at the fish-eye lens again. It had felt like someone had been there, and, given Roberts’s reluctance to answer the phone, she wasn’t entirely convinced his attitude toward the door would be any different. She knelt down on the doorstep and poked the mail slot open.
“Mr. Roberts?”
Nothing.
She peered in as best she could, and was rewarded by a thin view of the hallway. It led down to a door that was open onto the kitchen, the broken slat on the window at the far end hanging at an angle like a guillotine. Everything she could see looked old-fashioned: the patterned wallpaper; the dust on the picture frames hanging in the hall. It was as though Roberts had changed nothing after moving back here. The beige carpet was patchy and threadbare, and there were …
Footprints on it.
Amanda stared for a moment.
Red footprints.
Her heart began to beat a little faster. She allowed the mail slot to close slowly, then stood up and tried the door handle. It turned easily, the door opening slowly inward on creaking hinges.
She took a step inside.
“Mr. Roberts?”
The house was completely silent.
Check your exits.
She scanned her surroundings. There was a door directly to her left, secured by a rusty padlock; presumably that had once led into the garage. Stairs led up, but there was nobody in the gloomy hallway above. The old hallway directly ahead of her was empty, and narrow enough for only one person at a time. Nobody was visible in what she could see of the kitchen—although she guessed there was probably a back door out of sight there.
She looked to her right. The open doorway there led into what appeared to be a front room. She couldn’t see any furniture, and the bases of the walls were lined with empty cans and bottles. Nobody visible there. But that was her immediate flash point. The place she wouldn’t see anyone coming from.
She stepped away from it for a moment.
Now that she was inside, the footprints leading away down the hall looked even more like blood than before. From what she could discern from the pattern, it looked like someone had walked out of the front room to the door, and then headed off down the hallway into the kitchen.
Amanda listened.
Silence.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket and keyed in the number for the police, her thumb poised over the CALL icon as she steadied herself. Then she stepped sideways into the front room.
Immediately she pressed CALL.
It was out of instinct more than anything else, because it took a second for her mind to process what she was seeing. Her attention was drawn to the dark red couch to her left, its back against the wall to the hallway. And then the still figure sitting on it. She didn’t immediately recognize it as a person, only as something that was close to human but also horrifically wrong. The head had no discernible features and was far too large, and it was only after staring at it that she realized the man’s face had been rendered unrecognizable, the skin swollen to almost impossible proportions by the bruises and cuts that had been inflicted upon it.
Amanda held the ringing phone to her ear.
Answer, answer, answer.
“Gritten Police Department, how—”
“Officer requesting assistance. Eighteen Gable Street. I need police and ambulance on scene as a matter of urgency. A man appears to be dead. Suspicious circumstances. Whereabouts of perpetrator unknown.”
She stepped carefully toward the body as she was speaking, taking in the details. The man’s hands were in his lap, every finger broken into a twisted nest. Another step, and her foot squelched slightly. She looked down. The couch wasn’t red at all, she realized. It was just drenched with blood that had soaked into the carpet below it.
She looked up.
A little way past the couch, a door hung open. From the length of the room, it could only lead into the kitchen.
Whereabouts of perpetrator unknown.
“Ma’am, can I take your name, please?”
“Detective Amanda Beck,” she said. “Just get here now.”
The man on the other end of the phone said something else, but Amanda lowered her phone, her heart thudding in her ears and her attention entirely focused on the open door a little way in front of her. She was thinking about the footprints in the hall. They disappeared into the kitchen, but the most obvious route there from here was this door at the far end of the room. And yet whoever had made them had gone out into the hall to the front door instead.
She remembered the sensation she’d had after knocking. The feeling that someone had been staring out at her.
Keep calm.
With her gaze locked on the door into the kitchen, Amanda slipped her phone into her jacket pocket and took out her keys, bunching them between her knuckles. Then she moved carefully across to the far side of the room, giving her more distance, more time, a better angle. Not that, armed as poorly as this, she would stand a chance against anyone capable of the ferocious violence that sat motionless across the room from her.
The kitchen revealed itself by increments. She could see the end of the counter, loaded with dirty plates, and then the edge of the sink. The window.
She hesitated, caught between the fear of what she might encounter in the kitchen and of the ruined, crimson thing sitting behind her now.
Panic was setting in.
I can’t do this.
And for a few seconds, she was eight years old again. Terrified, and yet too frightened to call out because she knew there was nobody in the house who would come.
Then:
You can do this, she imagined her father saying. I raised you better.
She took another step sideways.
The kitchen was empty. She could see the length of it now, all the way to the alcove at the far end, where the black eye of an old washing machine was staring back at her, and she saw the pebbled glass of the back door that was hanging open against the boiler on the wall, desultory sunlight streaming in beside it.
You’re okay.
Relief flooded through her, and she moved more quickly now, treading around the bloodstained footprints leading in from the hall. Despite the heat of the day, when she reached the door and breathed in the air, it was somehow cooler and fresher than the tortured atmosphere throbbing behind her. Out back, there was a disheveled paved area, grass springing up in the cracks between the dirty slabs, and then an expanse of trees at the far end.
Nobody in sight.
She looked down.
The bloody footprints headed across the paving stones toward the trees at the end of the yard. But they faded as they went, as though the person who had left them were disappearing as they ran. And by the time they reached the tree line, they had vanished entirely.
SEVENTEEN
BEFORE
I remember the last time I went into the Shadows with the others.
It was the weekend after the knocks at James’s door in the night, and as usual, the four of us met in the town playground and then walked up to his house. There were numerous routes we could take, but for some reason Charlie always liked to go in from there. As we wandered down James’s backyard that day, I found myself lagging a little way behind the others. The trees in front of me seemed darker and more inhospitable than usual, gradually filling the sky as we approached the fence, and my skin felt chilly in the shade of them.