As my eyes adjust to the dark I see Samantha in the doorway, her back to me. Some of the dust sheets are spattered with paint and damp, giving them an eerie Rorschach effect. It gives me a jolting memory of William and me on our holiday in Tenerife, drinking sweet red cocktails and watery pina coladas. He asked me if I ever used ink-blot tests in my work.
‘Rorschach?’ I said, stirring my cocktail idly. ‘That’s psychology. It’s a different type of therapy. I don’t do that.’
‘Shame,’ he answered. ‘I always wanted to try.’
I picked up the napkin beneath my glass and, eyes fixed firmly on William’s as I did so, poured a little of my cocktail in the crease, folding it carefully before opening it before him.
He studied the dark mirror image for a moment before lifting his head and looking right at me. ‘I see you,’ he said. When he took my hand I felt something blooming in my stomach, a warmth, a sticky, carnivorous love.
When I reach Samantha, I see what she is looking at. Someone has drawn a swastika on the wall. They’ve made a bad job of it and paint has run down into the floorboards. There is a hole in the door leading to the kitchen, like someone has put a fist through it. More scuffling in the corridor and the sound of a door creaking slowly closed. Or open, a little internal voice speaks up. I put my hand on Samantha’s shoulder.
‘Do you smell it?’ she asks me.
I nod. Something has died and rotted away somewhere in this house. I’m reminded of a story I heard once about a remote asylum in Ohio. An inmate there disappeared, the body eventually found in the attic over a month later. When the decomposing corpse was removed, they found a stain beneath it; a ghostly outline of the body in chalky white, and no matter how hard workers tried to clean the floor, the stain would not come out.
‘Back then, the whole graveyard smelt like this,’ Samantha tells me in a low whisper. ‘He was killing rabbits and just leaving them to rot.’
‘What do you think it is?’
‘Well, Frances, I’m no pathologist, but I think there’s a dead body down there.’
‘But – but you know it can’t be Edie, right? She’s been gone almost twenty years.’
Samantha turns towards me in the darkness. I see the flat glaze of her eyes. ‘Well, then, we’d better go and see who it is, hadn’t we?’
Together we sidle down the hallway, backs pressed against the wall where the flowered paper peels away in long strips to reveal grey plaster, damp to the touch. The smell of urine and rot is stronger out here. As we creep towards the kitchen I can see the units have been destroyed; cupboard doors hang from hinges and gas pipes jut through the wall, black holes like wide, unblinking eyes. I can see the place where the sink once stood, and the cooker, and the fridge: the large pale outlines against the dark walls like the ghosts of furniture past. I think of that dead woman turning to liquid in the asylum attic and the imprint that can never be cleaned away and I reach for Samantha, squeezing her hand so hard she gasps. Her skin is icy, and there is a tremor running through her. She’s afraid.
Across the bumpy lino of the kitchen floor is another door, partly open, revealing a slice of black space. The rustling sound is coming from inside. We exchange a glance. Samantha pulls the knife from her pocket and together we cross the room as quietly as we can, trying to ignore the fetid smell that is rising up from the basement like something corroded and black.
It’s Samantha who eases the door open carefully, allowing us room to slide through. The stairs creak ominously, and the darkness is thick and so dense that I feel I might reach out and stroke it. The smell is the worst of it, so putrid it is almost toxic. Sweet, like spoiled meat. I want to go back, I try to say, I want to get out into the light and the clean air. Something bad has happened down here, something unspeakable. This whole house is an open wound, festering. Someone should burn it to the fucking ground.
‘God!’ Samantha suddenly cries out, jumping in horror. I feel the panic run through her and almost turn and bolt back up the stairs.
Instead I hear my voice, high-pitched, scared, saying, ‘What? What is it?’
‘Something just – it got hold of my foot!’
Bile, rising in my throat. Samantha fumbles in the darkness and in that moment when she lets go of my hand the darkness and isolation feel so total I could be adrift in deep space. I resist the urge to reach out for her, panicky. Adrenaline, bright in my mouth and behind my eyes, purple pulses in the darkness. Suddenly Samantha’s face is lit by her phone screen and she swivels it outward in order to see the basement better.
A litter of newspaper across the floor, a stack of mildewy boxes in the corner, collapsing in on themselves. Shelves hanging ragged on the walls, brick walls slick with condensation, and mould spots black as tar.
‘See? There!’
I look where Samantha is pointing. A rat, a big one, bristly body and thick pink tail, suddenly darting for the safety of the shadows. She runs the light along the ground, picking out discarded carrier bags and stacks of yellowed magazines turning to pulp in the damp. Then, we see it.
We both recoil. Samantha makes a noise in the back of her throat, urk!, and for a second I think she is going to be sick. I run my hands over my face, stomach turning queasily. The dog must have been lying down here for some time, judging by the ragged remains. Partially skeletal, glimpses of bone through blackened skin. Where its stomach should be is just a cavity, torn apart by ferocious rodent teeth. There is a pool of dried blood beneath it on which flies settle and lift. Something long and purple has unspooled from the hole in its stomach. It makes me think of the sheep in the well, rotting to liquid while a young boy peered over the edge, fascinated. I look away, my hand over my mouth, the taste of the beer I’ve drunk rising in my throat. Samantha approaches the dog and peers at it. For a moment I wonder what the hell she is doing, and then she turns and looks at me over her shoulder.
‘No collar,’ she says sadly. ‘Poor little guy. Must’ve been the rats we heard. There’s probably hundreds of them eating off this thing.’
Behind Samantha, pushed against the far brick wall, is a long chest freezer. I’m flooded with a sudden dread, a brisk shiver. The image I had earlier of Edie Hudson lying wrapped in her plastic burial shroud – lips blued and dusted with frost, eyes like blank pennies – surfaces suddenly in my mind. Samantha is dusting herself down and telling me we should get out of there.
I point behind her and say, in as normal a voice as I can manage, ‘Check in there.’
Samantha sees the freezer and I notice her face change, even in the weak light of the phone. There’s a falling-away, like a shelf of Arctic ice. Her eyes seem to marble; it’s frightening to look at. It’s like something inside her has been punctured and everything that’s vital is being slowly sucked away. I walk over to her and put my hand on her shoulder.
‘I c-c-can’t—’ she stutters, shaking her head, stepping away from me, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘Frances, I can’t look in there, I can’t.’
‘Okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll do it.’
I think she will stop me. I almost want her to, and then we can get out of this pit and into the sunlight. I want to shower in water so hot it leaves my skin pink and boiled. Tonight I know I will have bad dreams, of dead dogs dragging themselves towards me, muzzles foaming with decay, of dead girls with skin turned blue with cold, opening their mouths and blasting me with chips of ice that slice into my skin again and again and again.