CW: abuse, childbirth/pregnancy, unhealthy relationships, violence.
Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . .
The first time she sees the stranger, he’s coming up the stairs.
The estate agent grimaces at the “UNDER MAINTENANCE” sign, assures them the lift will soon be in full working order.
“What’s down there?”
“Oh, just the basement. Nothing important.”
James squeezes Alice’s shoulder, eyes flicking to her stomach, but she’s turning to catch the last glimpse of a man vanishing around the stairwell corner. He leaves a faint prickling of unease in his wake, a feeling out of kilter with the concrete and glossy white paint.
“Did you see him?”
“See who?”
“The man that just went past. In old-fashioned clothes. One of those flat caps.”
“There’s no one else in the building yet,” the estate agent says. “You’ll have it all to yourselves for a while.” And laughs, as if this were a desirable state of affairs.
• • • •
They move in just before Bonfire Night.
Alice stands on her old doorstep and takes a deep breath. Underneath the bleach, she detects traces of herself, things she’s left behind: patchouli, mulled wine, cigarettes smoked out the window. Her life has been packed up into brown cardboard boxes, and the driver outside is honking his horn. She doesn’t want James to get a bad rating, so she resists the urge to linger.
She’s not yet showing, so she doesn’t have to endure small talk with the driver, who takes a perfunctory glance at her before turning up the radio. Alice wipes one window clean for the last glimpses of Camden: lights shimmer through the rain, and she catches sight of a girl with impossibly tall boots and a polystyrene container of chips, hooting with laughter.
Alice sighs. She can’t live in a studio flat forever. Not with the baby coming.
She takes a phone call from her mother, and the driver turns down Magic FM.
“It’s today, isn’t it?” An exhale. “Haven’t you done well for yourself?”
“I suppose,” Alice says, wondering why she doesn’t sound more enthusiastic. But this is what her mother always does—reduces her to a sullen teenager who resents doing the tidying-up.
“Well, you have.” Her tone is sharp. “You hold onto that one, Alice, he’s a keeper.” Alice stares at her spider plant. Says nothing.
They drive under the Thames, the tunnel’s orange lights flashing past; they emerge amongst skinny concrete towers, the Dome rising up like an accusing blister. Alice looks out at a wholly man-made landscape, and wants to tell the driver to turn around, she doesn’t belong here. Alice is a receptionist, lives in a top-floor studio north of the river, watches the goths parade on Saturdays, eats at Chicken Cottage. That girl in the boots could have been her.
A vast lattice-like structure looms, and Alice has a moment to crane her neck, identifying it as an old gasworks, before the car comes to a halt in front of a new-build block of flats.
Their moving truck is open outside. No sign of James. The rain hisses down, trying to wash away the shiny new pavements; the driver clears his throat, and Alice says goodbye in a hurry, holding her coat over her head as the brake-lights recede.
Reclamation Point.
It doesn’t look real. The building has only just been finished: James bought their flat off a diorama, tiny plastic people posed around trees that haven’t yet grown. In the dark of a November afternoon, acidic light flashes off the puddles. Alice looks up: twelve floors are entirely dark, the empty windows staring glassily, like eyes behind sunglasses. On the thirteenth, two squares of light in the penthouse show her James and the removal men, bullying boxes.
Their flat. Her new home.
A postage-stamp of yellow winks into existence on the twelfth floor, and Alice takes a sharp breath before realising it’s the stairwell. James must have got a notification that she’s arrived. The lights blink on, one by one, like a zip being pulled down. The lift must still be out of order. The removal men must hate them.
“What are you doing out here? Alice!”
There’s nowhere for the rainwater to go, and the puddles are enormous, as if the land resists them. The damp seeps through the soles of her shoes. She tries to banish the image of their flat all alone in that box of darkness. She allows James to lead her inside.
• • • •
She sleeps poorly the first night. James is in his own little world: eye-mask and noise-cancelling headphones. There’s nothing to stop the pitiless glare of the streetlights onto the bedroom walls. Her spider plant casts a grasping, tentacular shadow, and the walls are almost luminous, utterly unmarred. They’re the very first people who have ever lived there. The room is subtly too small for their new king-size bed, as if it wasn’t built with furniture in mind.
She can’t shake the idea she’s not meant to be here.
In the living room, the light gleams off the weird metal sculpture outside, and the shadows are thick girders of darkness. The wall has a ventilation duct, and she can feel the breeze; there’s a metallic quality that makes her think of something burning. Like some kids have set a shopping trolley on fire and are careering it around a car park. Alice puts her hand up to the vent, smiling faintly at the memory.
The breeze stops, as if something is holding its breath.
It makes her heart thud. She thinks about saying, “Hello?” then recognises it as one of those half-asleep impulses. There’s no one there.
The breeze starts up again. Cool air.
“This land has all been reclaimed,” the estate agent had said proudly, showing them around the half-finished estate in a sweltering August, Alice sick with pregnancy.
“Oh,” she’d said, looking at the mean communal garden in which nothing was growing. “From what?”
• • • •
James kisses her on the forehead. “Start with the bathroom? I couldn’t find a towel this morning.” An air of accusation; a damp patch on his pin-striped shirt. He sends his work clothes out to be laundered, and Alice guesses this task will now fall to her. “It’ll give you something to do. You don’t mind, do you?”
Alice still feels startled by the enormity of the undertaking: she’s young, had got pregnant quickly, not on purpose. She’d wept at the thought of this tiny thing growing inside her; the thought that James would leave, and people at the bank—she’d been so proud to get the office job, when her friends were working the kind of gigs where you needed to ask for a loo break—would call her as a gold digger. That’s what unkind people say about girls like Alice.
But no: “Let someone else look after you for a change,” James had murmured into her hair. “I’ve got you.”
“Haven’t you done well for yourself,” her mother’s voice says, sour, in Alice’s head.
She eats a bowl of Coco Pops standing up. The piles of boxes are towering, the room’s corners are all the wrong shapes, and she finds her eye drawn to that vent over the sofa. When James leaves, she hears the hollow sound of the stairwell door, then silence. About five minutes later, James’s Astra inches up the ramp from the underground car park, then crosses the turning circle behind the claw-like metal sculpture.
She raises her hand. James drives swiftly off without a backward glance.
She tries not to take it personally, but she misses work like a stab in the throat: the chatter of the temps, phones ringing. It’s very quiet in Reclamation Point, and she finds herself pressing her ear to the floorboards, trying to make out sounds from below. She knows she won’t hear any.
Alice sits back on her heels and surveys her new home. She’s surprised how ambivalent she feels towards it.
In the bathroom, the towel rail is punishingly hot: when Alice brushes up against it, she hisses in pain. The heating is an underfloor system, one of the flat’s selling points, although Alice prefers the cheerful heat of a radiator she can sit against. The thermostat in the hallway is set to twenty-one degrees, but the towel rail remains scorchingly, dangerously nuclear.
She thinks about texting James, asking him to contact building management. The flat’s in his name, after all—bills too, it’s not as if she has a decent credit rating. But he’s always so rude when she contacts him at work, and she can see the estate office from the window. So she pulls on a hoodie, double-checks she has the flat keys and lobby key card, and lets their front door click quietly shut behind her.
The door leading to the stairwell is cold and heavy, like a walk-in freezer. Concrete steps, a surprisingly cheap-looking handrail; they clearly didn’t intend the penthouse occupants to use the stairs. The white fluorescent lights blink on above her.
As she goes down, each hallway has a ventilation grid: her flat must be linked to the stairwell through those vents. It’s very quiet, just her own footsteps and the humming of those overhead lights. She thinks about them winking off, leaving her in darkness—it’s a pleasant thrill, like biting teeth-first into ice cream. It dissipates when she thinks of the only other person she’s seen on the staircase.
The strange man with the old-fashioned clothing. Something about him niggles, and she eventually puts her finger on it: he’d been going up, into the empty building.
Outside, the morning is overcast. Reclamation Point stands alone—the block opposite far across a scrubland of baby trees on plastic life-support—but kids have obviously been gathering on the benches. Fried chicken boxes are littered under the jagged sculpture: it’s some sort of machinery salvaged from the gasworks that once occupied this land. Alice stares at it with curiosity. There’s no way to tell what it once did, and without context it looks violent, pained, jabbing at the sky. There’s graffiti scrawled onto the sculpture’s base. CONTAMINATION. PESTILENCE. She’s impressed that teenagers seem to be the same everywhere, no matter how much landscaping is done.
The estate office is shut. No lights inside, not even above the dollhouse miniature of their building. A sign: “CLOSED UNTIL NEW YEAR.” She tries to remember if she’d ever seen another couple, another family, looking at the estate. But all she can remember are men in dark suits, men who looked like James.
She’s clearly going to be on her own for a while.
On her way back up the stairs, Alice hears a cough. The sound echoes, and she freezes. She knows what she heard: someone clearing their throat behind her. A wet sound. Phlegmy. There’s the smell—almost a memory—of sweat.
There’s no one there.
Alice sniffs her own armpits, heart racing—says, “Ha!” out loud, trying to frighten away whatever it is. The walls are freshly painted, but it smells like someone worked hard and then fell asleep in their clothes. She goes to the bannisters and looks down. There’s no sign of movement.
It’s such a stupid relief that her heart jitters in her chest. She’s seen pregnant women clutch their bump, but she’s never had that impulse; it makes her worry she’s going to be a terrible mother.
She must have imagined that cough. She’s alone, she tells herself.
She’s alone.
Alice mentions the closed office—the graffiti, the chicken boxes—to James over dinner. She doesn’t mention the cough because she knows he’ll just laugh at her. He’s angry about the state of the place. Saws away at the meat with his knife. “Fucking chavs. We came here to get away from all that.”
She hadn’t been trying to get away from anything.
• • • •
The plants are the first warning sign.
Returning from her scan, Alice is clutching a bouquet of flowers from the hospital gift shop, bright unnatural blue carnations, because her mother’s hoping for a boy; so is James. It’s all the same to her. A baby is a baby. They all cry and need to be fed and washed and changed and—hopefully—loved. Alice doesn’t see that assigning a gender to such a small bundle of needs helps with the process.
She prays the estate will awaken in January, and the lift will get fixed, because she dreads waddling up these stairs when she’s heavier. The stairwell is still unusually cold, and a loud clang makes the bannisters tremble; Alice freezes before she realises it’s the lobby door slamming shut behind her.
Letting herself into the flat, she jams the flowers into a vase. She isn’t very interested in these artificial things, but she appreciates her mother is trying to make a gesture. She sets the vase on the dining table. Then stops.
They’d brought some plants from her flat in Camden—just her favourites, James insisting he wasn’t going to live in a jungle. There’s a jade plant she’d rescued from the pavement when her old neighbours, who fought day and night then had wildly dramatic make-up sex, moved out. A miniature orange tree, fruits glowing. And a poinsettia, from James. Alice is good with plants, that’s one of the things he knows about her.
Not anymore. The jade’s leaves are dropping. The spider plant in the bedroom has curled up like an arachnid suffocating under glass. She looks around the room. The sun is already starting to sink behind the surrounding blocks, casting long shadows over Reclamation Point. The gleaming white walls are oppressive, and the flat is a bell jar with its double-glazed windows. She remembers the howling wind that used to come down her old chimney: blankets in front of the telly, fleecy socks.
She sniffs the air tentatively. Just the antibacterial hand wash James insists they both use. But the vent draws her eye, and she can’t stop seeing the long slots as a mouth stretched tight and horizontal with pain. It stares down like a gargoyle, and when she reaches up a hand, she can feel the bone-aching cold of the stairwell.
Everything in the building is connected. Hot water pipes snake up from the basement to bring baths and warm toes to the top floor. Vents from the stairwell prevent them suffocating on their own exhaled breath.
“This is mad,” she says out loud.
The pale November daylight dares her to make something of it.
After some rummaging, she stands on the sofa and unpeels a fat strip of duct tape. Covers the vent until it looks like a hostage, bound and gagged. She listens, heart pounding. She listens. Nothing.
But she can’t keep a plant alive in that flat.
• • • •
Slowly, like carbon dioxide, it starts to build up. There’s a Christmas tree in the living room, and Alice is having a hot bath as a small act of revenge.
The bank is having a boat party on the Thames. It would be cold and tiring, standing for hours in heels, having to ignore the sideways glances because some of the bankers are still friends with James’s ex-wife.
She’d begged him for an invite all the same.
“You can’t drink—”
“I know!” The suggestion had stung. She took her multivitamins, did everything they told her. But Alice is absolutely returning to work as soon as she’s able, because she thinks she’s losing her mind alone at Reclamation Point. “It’s just that it’ll be a really long time off. I want them to remember me.”
“Oh, sweet Alice.” He’d given her a tired smile. “But you don’t have anything that fits, do you?”
She’d put her hands, reflexively, to her hips. Felt their weight, seen the way he looked at her. The conversation had become unbearable, and she’d let it go.
The flat smells of eucalyptus bath foam. All the vents are taped up, except in the bathroom, so she’s left the door open; she doesn’t like to feel shut in with its gargoyle face. A clicking noise comes through it, blow-back from the wind howling around the gasworks sculpture outside. She ducks under the hot water.
There’s nothing in the vents, she tells herself. This place is brand new, not a haunted house.
The bathroom isn’t exactly warm. She’d cut off the scorching towel rail with a wrench, and the underfloor heating works on its own schedule; sometimes a single toe ventured off the sofa feels like walking on the sun. Blue waves sloshing around her, Alice thumbs the hot tap back on.
It splutters. There’s a gurgling sound, like someone about to be sick. And the water comes out dark and explosive.
She frantically turns it off. A rust-brown, blood-brown clot floats amongst the bubbles. She climbs out shivering, presses a towel between her legs: exhales, placing a hand on her stomach, trying to feel the radiant gratitude she’s seen in all the other expectant mothers. Maybe it’ll come when the baby does.
There’s obviously something wrong with the building. She reaches for the explanation as she dresses, finds it: the boiler.
Now she just has to satisfy herself that it’s true.
Alice grabs her keys, steps out into the hallway. The lift is still taped up, the stairwell door still morgue-cold to the touch. She thinks, longingly, of the party boat, lights reflected in the river, Tower Bridge looming greenish-golden. The laughter and music.
There are footsteps on the stairs below.
Alice clasps her hand to her mouth, cutting off a high-pitched yelp. Her heart is hammering. The footsteps stop abruptly. With the cavernous echoes, they could be right at the bottom, or the next floor down. It’s impossible to tell.
She’s never seen anyone else in the building, and it’s past eleven at night.
A pause. The footsteps come again, and she fights an irrational urge to call out, images flashing through her mind from horror films. Home invasions. Stalkers and masked killers. She’s profoundly alone at Reclamation Point.
But the lobby door and car park require a key card, like living in a hotel. Emboldened, she starts down, knowing that somewhere on these stairs, she’ll encounter another person. Someone who’s meant to be here too.
The lights blink on one by one as she goes.
On the fourth floor, she realises she hasn’t heard the footsteps in a while, and pauses, peering over the edge. There’s still no sign of anyone, although it’s possible they’re hugging the outer walls, hidden by the corners. Whoever they are, they’re utterly silent. No breathing, or throat-clearing, or coughing—the thought of a cough comes to her specifically, makes her skin creep.
The fluorescent light flickers.
She realises the floors beneath her are still in darkness. All the lights are on motion sensors: they click on when someone passes that floor, click off about a minute later.
All the floors beneath her are still in darkness.
Her breath coming in short gasps, Alice makes it down to the basement without passing another living soul. When she looks back up, she can watch the lights winking out of existence.
There’s no point looking for him, the man she’d seen before: baggy brown trousers held up with braces, a beaten overcoat shrugged over his shoulders. No top at all, his bare skin pale and grimy. A cloth cap. A blue scarf. He’d reminded her of an art student, hanging around Camden Lock, smoking roll-ups and looking like they were from another world. Another time.
There’s no doubt in her mind. He’s still in the building.
“Yesterday, upon the stair,” she says slowly. It’s a nursery rhyme, something her grandfather had imbued with enough menace to make child-Alice squeal with terrified delight. “I met a man who wasn’t there.”
Alice stands alone and pregnant. She should have been at that bloody party. There’s a sweet smell of damp down here, a bluish colour where the walls meet the floor. The lights are clicking off, darkness advancing back down towards her. He could be anywhere.
She thinks she sees the swish of a disappearing coat.
• • • •
“There’s someone else in the building,” she says to James. It’s after midnight, and he’s pulling off his Burberry.
He blinks in the Christmas-tree light. “What?”
“Earlier. There was a man on the stairs.”
James shrugs. “Probably just a workman.”
She’s too jumpy to roll her eyes. “It was after eleven.”
His shoulders tense. “Well, I haven’t ever seen anyone.”
It’s clearly meant to be the end of the discussion. His voice is dark with whiskey, reminding her of nights out on the fire escape, when her fairyl ights had twinkled over Camden, and he’d complained about his ex-wife—wryly, not bitter.
Alice takes a deep breath. “I think there’s something wrong with the building.”
“We’ve paid a lot of money. Well—I have.” A small laugh, not intended to include. “This is our new life. Don’t start.”
“But there’s—”
“What? A ghost? No, Alice. I’m not in the mood.” She’d often joked about her last flat being haunted, the bathroom door that sometimes locked itself.
This is different. It feels malevolent.
“I don’t like living here.” It slips out of her.
James collapses on the bed, gives her a sidelong look. “Well. This is where you live.”
• • • •
Alice waits until James is asleep, edges out of bed until she’s standing on the softly radiating floor, and laces up her boots in the dark living room. It’s possible to close the stairwell door quietly. The silence is a breath held before violence.
If anyone could see her, she’d be embarrassed: wrench in one hand, phone in the other, and she wobbles from step to step, unused to carrying the weight of two. She keeps her phone’s torch on, in case the lights suddenly go out—it’s no longer a titillating thought. But she has to see what’s in the basement.
That’s always where the bad things are, isn’t it? In the basement of the haunted house.
Alice creeps to where the bare concrete of the upper stairs meets the plush carpet of the lobby. The building is unfinished; she wonders if anyone was ever meant to move in this early. Whether she and James being there is some sort of mistake. She kneels to touch the first stone step. She’d heard boots. A cough.
The man who wasn’t there.
Her skin crawls. She’s certain—on a blood-and-bones level, in her spine, in the pricking of her thumbs—he mustn’t reach the top floor. The graffiti is right: CONTAMINATION. PESTILENCE. Whatever’s wrong with the building has started to manifest.
The glass panel in the lobby door is a black mirror. Alice looks at her long frumpy grey cardigan, belted high above the visible swelling. Her beloved Doc Martens are the only things she recognises about herself.
“Hey,” she whispers aloud. “Hey, you.”
Descending the final stairs, the smell of damp lingers like a fruit rotten beneath wax. To her left, the door to the underground car park, pigeon-grey and windowless. To her right, a similar one marked SERVICE AREA.
She pushes it open.
The basement.
Alice finds herself in a corridor which could be part of an office block: cream ceiling tiles, thin stippled carpet. The smell is stronger here, sweet and dessert-fragrant, and she covers her nose: she doesn’t know if it’s bad for the baby. The walls are badly scuffed, as if transplanted from another building entirely—this place hasn’t seen enough traffic. A succession of grey doors. She feels nauseous, oppressed. This is like those endless corridors you see when you sleep.
And it’s hot.
Early December, and snow is threatened but never materialises. The wind whistles outside, and the stairwell had been predictably cool. But this is different: a sense of burning, the metallic dry heat of a fire.
Alice steps further into the corridor, looking for a fire extinguisher or an alarm point, although she knows she’d use neither.
Well then.
She pushes the door marked BOILER. It’s locked from the inside, as if to taunt. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, please.”
There’s no keyhole. Alice tries her full strength against it, but it won’t budge. Pressed to the door, she thinks she can hear a distant low crackle. She listens. The sound of machinery, somewhere far away, a steady chug-chug-chugging. Metal sliding over stone. Cracks. Something being struck.
It’s getting hotter. Alice can feel the hairs in her nostrils tingling.
Coming closer: shouts. Voices. People are behind that locked door, in the basement of the locked building.
She tries it again. But there’s movement on the other side, and she can see a crack underneath, glimmering with warm orange light. A shadow moves.
Someone is standing there.
Someone is listening to her in return.
She jumps back, scalded. Her boots make a squelching sound and she recoils, taking an unsteady dance step across the damp carpet. The smell rising from it makes her think of Christmas. Bakewell tarts. Thick white marzipan on a fruit cake. Almonds. It reminds her of something, and she’s started to run before she places it.
Cyanide.
She doesn’t stop running—heart pounding, breath gasping—until she’s reached the top of the staircase, and the lights have started to click off behind her.
• • • •
Alice sits in the glow of James’s laptop. She still has his password, from the day she’d offered to update his contacts, and he’d bought her lunch. It strikes her that there was something transactional about it all.
The contamination had been disclosed in the surveys. The land around Reclamation Point was once Bugsby’s marshes, drained in the sixteenth century to become the site of Europe’s largest gasworks. Men crouching in pits, scooping out poisons with thin cotton gloves. Asbestos. Dirt. Medieval levels of poverty and injury, and when the strike came, the destitute workforce disappeared overnight. It became a barren wasteland. The soil was bad. The coal and gas waste had seeped into the ground.
The earth turned bright Prussian blue when oxygen touched it, couldn’t be handled without protective equipment. High levels of cyanide, with a name picturesque enough to stick in Alice’s mind: Billy Blue.
She has a name.
• • • •
In the morning, James is groaning. “These blinds,” he says. “They’re useless.”
Alice brings him a cup of tea, leans over with an “oof” as her stomach presses against the bed. He eyes her suspiciously, trying to work out if she’s making fun of him.
“How was the party?”
“Good,” he says. “Loud. Crowded. The food was terrible.” He’s making it sound less appealing by way of apology; she knows better than to bring up the rest. He hoists himself up. “Look, I have to go in today. There’s stuff to sort out.”
“But it’s a Saturday.”
Alice feels it stab in her chest, the prospect of another day alone at Reclamation Point, sitting on top of that boiler room, like a crack in the earth’s crust. Her voice is shrill. She catches her own reflection: the woman is a stranger, round and scared looking.
“I know.” He puts a hand on her cheek. “But you’re okay. There’s no one else in the building. Get some rest.”
He heads into the shower, where the hot water works perfectly: clean and clear and smelling of nothing sinister. Alice stares at the showerhead, at the blank face of the vent above it. At the naked body of her partner.
“What?” he snaps. “The water’s working fine, look.”
“The survey said—”
“It’s been reclaimed.” He puffs out his cheeks in irritation. James hates to repeat himself. “They’ve sealed the site—the ground is wrapped in plastic. Nothing can get through.”
He won’t let her cover up any of the vents; had protested at her irrationality, at the duct tape’s ugliness. Thrown an entirely disproportionate strop at the sliver of paint which came off the one in the living room when he’d yanked it down. She doesn’t want to stay in this flat, where the water comes from under the building, and the heating turns itself on and off. Where she’s on edge for a cough—maybe a voice, what if I hear a voice—from the vents.
She thinks she’ll go on a walk; it’s mild out, and fresh air would do her good. She could find the nearest corner shop. Buy a packet of crisps, a Diet Coke, lick salt off her fingers.
“Can I have your key card?” James asks. It takes her aback.
“What? What happened to yours?”
“I think I dropped it,” he says vaguely, shrugging on his coat. “Maybe at the party. I’m sure it’ll turn up. But I need it for the car park.”
She pulls a face, reaches into her back pocket. “Here you go.”
There’s a strange sensation in her stomach, a low sour feeling. Without the key card she can’t go anywhere.
She can’t leave Reclamation Point.
“Thanks, Alice. I knew you wouldn’t be weird about it.”
“There’s something wrong with the building,” Alice says. “We shouldn’t be here.”
The stairwell door slams, as if in agreement.
• • • •
It creeps up.
Alice tries to keep busy. The flat is spotless, because there’s nothing in it, not like Camden. “Living like a student,” James had said: he likes to cast himself as her rescuer. He buys expensive bactericidal products. Getting the place clean—getting her clean—on a molecular level.
But there’s something in the building that nothing can clean away.
So she goes on little expeditions to other floors, to identical white hallways. Standing and breathing in and shuddering when she smells the cyanide coming out of the building’s pores. Fourth floor. Then fifth. Then sixth. Sometimes it skips one. But it hasn’t reached the penthouse yet; she still has some time.
She pleads with James. They fight. Reach a stony peace. Fight again.
This land is dirty. The trees outside will never grow. The pavement will always be filled with chicken boxes, even though Alice stands at the window as the afternoon sinks into twilight, watching the sculpture and the benches. But she never sees the kids, and no one ever comes in or out. Only James in his Astra; she’s never learnt to drive. There’s a whole host of skills she needs for this new life, but when she tries to talk to James about booking some lessons, he waves it off.
She wonders if she’s really going to be allowed to return to work.
She doesn’t think so.
• • • •
“When did you last leave the house?” the nurse asks on her next antenatal visit. Christmas is here, and the clinic is full of tinsel, bristling and frantic.
“A couple of days ago,” she lies. “I thought I’d show baby the Thames.” It’s impossible, of course. She couldn’t get back into the building without her key card, and James’s has never materialised.
Her own mother beams at this previously undiscovered maternal instinct. She pats the back of Alice’s hand.
“Mum, could you get me a coffee?”
A frown. Caffeine isn’t allowed. There’s a long list of things Alice can’t have.
“Sorry. A hot chocolate.”
James is coming to pick them up soon.
When she’s alone with the nurse, she panics. She doesn’t know how to explain the creeping dread, and she only has a few minutes to try. “I think there’s something wrong with my flat,” she says. “Please can you do some tests? It’s an old gasworks, there are high levels of cyanide. I’m worried about the baby.”
He looks at her as if she’s gone mad.
Her mother comes back, and they discuss whether it’s safe for Alice to paint the nursery. She’s having a boy.
• • • •
Lying on the sofa, Alice stares up at the vent. She tapes it up every morning. She doesn’t run water in the flat when she’s alone. It gets stuffy, and she has a headache—probably dehydration.
“A lot of first-time mothers get the creeps,” the nurse had said. “Worry their environment isn’t clean enough for the baby.”
The baby blues. It’d be funny if she didn’t feel like screaming, beating her fists against the smooth glass wall of the lobby, let me out, I shouldn’t be here—
She wakes with a start. The light has changed, the sun setting behind the blocks opposite, and there’s a noise in the hallway she’s never heard before. Rubbing her eyes, Alice tentatively puts one foot on the floor. It’s painfully hot. The underfloor heating is going full tilt, water churning up from that boiler room, from the building’s molten core.
The thermostat still says twenty-one. Everything is lying to her.
When she opens the flat door, there are lights above the lift: the UP/DOWN arrows are illuminated in the most hopeful shade of reddish orange. She hears a ping, doors opening, deep in the building below. It’s such a normal sound, a human sound, that she presses the call button.
Then claps her hand to her mouth, wide-eyed with horror. The faint ping bangs around her head like a siren, because it’s the sound of a lift fulfilling a request, an invisible demand, and there’s no one else in the building.
No one except Billy Blue, and she’d thought it needed the stairs.
The sound of machinery makes her feel sick. She knows no one has come to fix it, because the neatly laminated “UNDER MAINTENANCE” sign is still sellotaped over the crack between the doors, and she hasn’t seen a single white van on the estate, or anyone else, not ever.
“Don’t be him,” she whispers. “Please.”
Alice backs towards the flat, screams when her fingers meet the cool wood of their front door behind her, clicked discreetly shut. She’s trapped. Her breathing comes in shallow bursts, and she finds herself pressing one hand to her stomach, fingers splayed wide, trying to protect something: an instinct she hadn’t thought she had.
A ping. A squeak. The lift doors strain open, the sellotape stretching like gooey toffee. It snaps, and light floods out into the hallway, smelling of Christmas baked goods. Marzipan. Cyanide. Poison.
Underneath, the whisper of smoke, of metal.
Alice crouches. Picks up the wrench—hidden beside the door, beside a rack of shoes she doesn’t think she’ll wear again—and advances.
The lift is empty. It’s very small, and she sees herself in the mirrored walls, face pale, body swollen, hair up in a messy bun. There’s a set to her jaw she recognises, and she thinks: oh, there you are.
She looks down. For a moment she teeters, fearing for her bare feet. The impression of fires burning, streams of molten metal, gleaming and arcing, deadly. But it’s the golden mirrored floor, creating the illusion she can see a long way down, into the basement. Into his domain.
She’d thought she had more time.
• • • •
“You haven’t even started on the nursery, have you?” James says flatly. He’s standing in the doorway holding a stuffed toy.
She wears her boots like armour. The floor is burning, and although she’s taped up all the vents, she can feel the air moving, the warm incoming wind that threatens a summer storm. The building is breathing. “Listen,” she says. “Listen. We can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”
“Not this again.” He tosses the toy into the nursery like he’s throwing the first rock at a riot. Then stops, as if something’s caught his eye.
She seizes her moment. “I think the plastic sheeting, or whatever—it’s burst. There’s blue stuff coming up through the basement. It’s right beneath us.”
He gives her a look over his shoulder. Eyebrows arched, lip twisted, perfectly conveying the absurdity of her days: charting the upwards creep of the blue floor by floor, rooting around under the carpets, behind the skirting-boards, using knives and screwdrivers and her own bare hands. He’s never agreed to look, even when she’s shouted herself hoarse, slammed the bathroom door, dissolved into tears. Her nails are torn off at the bed. She thinks they’ll grow back stronger, but doesn’t really know. The baby is probably taking all her calcium.
“You don’t want our son exposed to it, do you?”
That’s her trump card. The only one she’s got left.
“As if you care,” he says. It stings.
“I do. And we’re not alone in this building.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” James snaps. “Your—person with the strange clothing, isn’t it? He’s a workman, fixing the lift. That’s all. Not some fucking ghost.”
She sags against the sofa. Horror crawls down her spine.
“You’ve seen him?”
“A few times. On the stairs. He was carrying tools.”
“What sort of tools?” she blurts out. Then, more urgent: “Where on the stairs?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, Alice.” James spits her name like she’s his first wife. He takes off his coat in a convulsion, goes to hang it on the rack. The keys jangle in his pocket. They’re heavier than Alice’s, all the trappings of a life outside the flat.
“Where’s my key card? You said you’d give it back.”
“Planning a trip?” He gives her a look, because he doesn’t have to say it out loud: where would you go?
Her heart is pounding, thudding in the side of her neck, and she knows what it means to see red, except she’s seeing white: the luminous walls of their flat crowding in on her. “Give it back. I know you haven’t lost yours.”
He pauses. Half-turns.
“You said you lost it at the party.” Her voice cracks, but not with weakness. “But the car park won’t open without it. You couldn’t have got in without it. You lied.”
“What else could I have done?” James hisses. His face is splotchy, damp circles starting to appear under his arms. He looks like he’s boiling; the whole flat is boiling. “Or I’d come home to find you sitting in the cold, talking about the vents or the stairs or some idiot fucking nonsense—”
“I don’t want to live here anymore!”
“Honestly.” He makes his face look sympathetic. “I thought you were getting better. We thought you were getting better. At least you’ve started—”
He glances at the nursery door.
She hasn’t been in that room much. Sometimes she curls up on the cream carpet, away from the underfloor heating, trying to get a sense of what it’d be like to be a baby, safe and cocooned. She certainly hasn’t been painting. The windows are too heavy to open against the constant buffeting of the winds, and the fumes made her feel lightheaded.
“What,” she says, the word like a stone. “What.”
“Putting your lazy arse to work.”
He holds the door open for her to see.
There’s colour smeared across the skirting boards. Prussian blue, horribly bright and iridescent. It shines. It makes the ceiling too low, the angles all wrong, as if the colour is a blacklight for everything wrong with the flat. It’s wavy and unformed, organic.
Bubbling up from the floor below, it’s reached them at last.
Billy Blue. For a boy.
Alice screams.
“What the—”
And James is grabbing her wrists, physically shaking her, a look of tense concentration on his face, as if she’s one more thing he has to fix. He’s strong. Her teeth clack together. She thinks about the baby, swimming inside her, and screams again, a high wordless sound of despair.
“Stop it!” James is shouting.
But there are no neighbours to hear, no kids sitting by the sculpture, and she keeps screaming.
The flat door is open—James had been distracted. The gap is a few inches wide.
Beyond: the lift, opening. Ping.
She sobs.
He’s coming out of the lift. Someone from a different time, the same place. His worn leather boots are steeped in coal contaminate. The bright blue scarf is the only colour about him, everything else dark and sepia. Perhaps he’d died in an accident. Perhaps he’d inhaled the fumes. Perhaps he’s buried under the building, down in the basement, where the smell of cyanide rises as pestilence.
He’s here now, old Billy Blue.
Alice shoves James as hard as she can, and he crashes back against their dining table, swearing. Then he grabs her again, eyes small and black and hard like coal, and she knows there’s something wrong with the building—but there’s something worse in the flat.
She pushes him again, stronger than she’s felt in months, and sprints to the door, eyes shut, because if she doesn’t see Billy, if she doesn’t see him, maybe she can make it through.
The air of the hallway stinks of burning and sweat.
“Don’t you leave me!” James bellows. “Alice!”
Then a wordless sound of incomprehension. Alice feels the air moving around her, the sense of something man-shaped stepping past. She sobs—loud, raw—and misjudges the distance between their door and the lift, falling hard onto her side. The baby. She throws out a hand to grab the cool metal of the lift door, an inch away from closing, and prises it back open.
She crawls in, cradling her stomach, telling her baby again and again that they’re going to be alright. James is shouting. She reaches out blindly, jabs the button, and the doors whine closed.
She only cracks her eyes open when the lift starts to move. She’s alone in a small box. She pushes up off the golden-shimmery floor. When she sees the maelstrom below, she’s scrabbling to press herself into the furthest corner.
She can see right down to the basement, and it’s—
Hell. Or something very close.
Towering metal basins the size of houses, sparks flying and whirling around them like moths battering against glass. A long waterfall of liquid fire, and the chug-chug-chug of machinery, intermittent screams, discordant and inhuman. Everything is red and orange and golden, and she’s picking up her feet, whimpering, because the floor is hotter than ever before, like walking barefoot on sun-scorched sand.
“Alice!” James is howling in the stairwell. It’s a mad echo, distorted and wild.
The lift shudders, as if it’s losing steam.
Beneath her, coming closer: the old gasworks. She can make out those silent and impassive figures labouring under the glowing furnaces, too exhausted to wipe the sweat streaming down their bodies. The heat threatens to singe her nostrils, burn her eyelids, and she folds her arms across her bump, trying to shield it, thinking, crazily: it’s boiling in there.
The lift is filling up with sooty smoke, billowing like blood in water.
It creaks to a halt.
“Alice!” someone yells in the distance, and she can hardly recognise James’s voice.
The lift doors ping open at ground level, just short of the hellish shop floor, and she’s staring out into more smoke. A burning, suffocating whirlwind. Sparks fly past her face. She can just make out the pristine white tiles and glass walls of the lobby area. The real world, built over and on top of this ancient wound.
James is crashing down the stairs.
She shields her mouth with her sleeve, gulps in a breath. Takes a tentative step out into the lobby. There he is, approaching through the smoke: Billy Blue.
He reaches out his hand.
She runs towards him, away from the sound of James screaming, away from the crashing and churning, and the ground gets cooler under her feet with every step. The white tiles become more real. The glass walls start to reflect this world, not the fire and burning coke of the Victorian gasworks.
For a second, she’s face to face with Billy. She can see every line and crevice. Spidery veins around his nose. Coal dust in his eyebrows. Smudges in the dirt where sweat has run down. He stinks of cyanide and burning, something creeping and insistent, like smoke filtering under your bedroom door at night.
His eyes, though—his eyes are kind.
He puts a knuckle to his cap. Opens the lobby door like a concierge, inviting her to leave. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it? For her and the baby to leave.
She can’t believe it took her so long to realise.
Alice runs out into the cold night air, hand on her bump, past the ugly sculpture and the chicken boxes and the sad flower beds where nothing grows. Someone is having a Christmas party on the far side of the stubby-tree forest. Slade is blaring out from an open window, lights all gaudy and colourful.
Alice runs and runs towards it, and she doesn’t look back.
