Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets’ chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.
I sleep lightly and I have good ears. Sometime in the night I woke up, instantly and completely. Across the hall, in Daniel’s room, someone was whispering.
I held my breath, but the doors were thick and all I could make out was the flicker of sibilants in the dark; no words, no voices. I reached out my arm from under the covers, carefully, and found Lexie’s phone on the bedside table. 3:17 a.m.
I followed the faint double trail of whispers, weaving between the bat shrills and the rolls of wind, for a long time. It was two minutes to four when I heard the slow grate of a doorknob turning, and then the soft click as Daniel’s door closed. A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.
Footsteps woke me, thumping downstairs. I had been dreaming, something dark and messy, and it took me a wild second to disentangle my mind and figure out where I was. My gun wasn’t beside my bed and I was grabbing for it, starting to panic, when I remembered.
I sat up in bed. Apparently nothing had been poisoned, after all; I felt fine. The smell of a fry-up was creeping under the door, and I could hear the brisk morning rhythm of voices, somewhere far below. Shit: I had missed cooking breakfast. It had been so long since I’d managed to sleep past six, I hadn’t bothered to set Lexie’s alarm. I stuck the mike-bandage back on, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and a mammoth sweater that looked like it had belonged to one of the lads-the air was freezing-and went downstairs.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it had improved a lot since Lexie’s scary movie. They’d got rid of the mold and the cobwebs and the scummy linoleum; instead there was a flagstoned floor, a scrubbed wooden table, a pot of ragged geraniums on the windowsill behind the sink. Abby, in a red-flannel dressing gown with the hood pulled up, was flipping bacon and sausages. Daniel was at the table, fully dressed, reading a book pinned under the edge of his plate and eating fried eggs with methodical enjoyment. Justin was slicing his toast into triangles and complaining.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Last week only two of them had done the reading; the rest just sat there staring and chewing gum, like a pack of cows. Are you sure you don’t want to swap, just for today? Maybe you could get more out of them-”
“No,” Daniel said, without looking up.
“But yours are doing the sonnets. I know the sonnets. I’m good at the sonnets.”
“No.”
“Morning,” I said, in the doorway.
Daniel nodded at me gravely and went back to his book. Abby waved the spatula. “Morning, you.”
“Sweetie,” Justin said. “Come here. Let me look at you. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “Sorry, Abby; I slept it out. Here, give me that-”
I reached for the spatula, but she whipped it away. “No, you’re grand; you still count as walking wounded. Tomorrow I’ll come up and haul you out of bed. Sit.”
That split second again-wounded: Daniel and Justin seemed to pause, suspended midbite. Then I sat down at the table and Justin reached for another slice of toast, and Daniel turned a page and shoved a red enamel teapot across to me.
Abby flipped three rashers and two eggs onto a plate, without asking, and came over to put it in front of me. “Oh, brrr,” she said, hurrying back to the cooker. “Jesus. Daniel, I know about you and double-glazing, but seriously, we should at least think about windows that would-”
“Double-glazing is the spawn of Satan. It’s hideous.”
“Yes, but it’s warm. If we’re not getting carpets-”
Justin was nibbling toast, chin on hand, gazing at me closely enough to make me nervous. I concentrated on my food. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked anxiously. “You look pale. You’re not going in today, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a full day of this, not yet. And, also, I wanted a chance to check out the house in private; I wanted that diary, or date book, or whatever it was. “I’m supposed to take it easy for another few days. That reminds me, though: what’s been happening with my tutorials?” Tutorials officially end at the Easter holidays, but there are always a few that, for whatever reason, drag on into the summer term. I had two groups left, one on Tuesdays and one on Thursdays. I wasn’t looking forward to them.
“We covered them,” Abby said, loading a plate for herself and joining us at the table, “in a manner of speaking. Daniel did Beowulf with your Thursday bunch. In the original.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “How’d they take it?”
“Not too badly, really,” Daniel said. “At first they were aghast, but eventually one or two of them came up with some intelligent comments. It was quite interesting.”
