Humpty's bones

5. Monday: Midnight

It may have been the chimes of the clock downstairs, striking twelve, that first woke Eden. However, even as the echoing notes died other noises came to the fore.

‘Not again… not fire… ’

She flew from the bed to stand in the darkness, not knowing where to find the light switch in the unfamiliar room. Cold air touched her bare legs. She tried to catch the smell of smoke. The strange whooshing sound took her back to the angry roar of flames as they reduced her kitchen to ash. Don’t shout — listen. Eden held her nerve. Now she focused her attention on the sound to identify it. Fire? Unlikely: not so much as a whiff of smoke. Water gushing? No. It’s not continuous. The whooshing’s broken… a rush-rush sound followed by silence.

Breathing?

No — snorting! That is someone — no, more likely an animal — breathing hard. Trying to catch a scent. What came to mind was a horse picking up a compelling aroma on the air. But why was it so loud in the house?

She pulled back the curtain to look outside. The rain clouds had dispersed. A crescent moon, like a curving steel blade, hung poised overhead. Its brittle light turned a garden bush into a mass of silver speckles. As her eyes adjusted she could make out the relentless black band of the road slicing through fields. At the house it formed a hook shape around the garden before flying toward distant York. No traffic used it at this time of night. Then that had always been the case when Eden visited as a child. Sunset might as well have been a red stop sign for this particular highway. A local man, who was considered to be ‘a bit slow’, would immediately run back to his parents’ home in the village if he was caught out alone on the road at dusk. Eden could still remember vividly how he bellowed in fear as he ran, his arms rotating in a fantastic windmill motion. ‘Mam! Dad! I’m frit… I’m frit!’ Her grandmother explained that ‘frit’ was a local word for ‘frightened.’

Then she glimpsed a figure. It sped across the front lawn. For a moment, she thought it was the man who was scared of the road at night. She half-expected to hear the terrified yell of ‘I’m frit!’ But the shape darted to the base of the house. Then she heard the sound again.

‘My God, he’s smelling the door.’ But the force of that intake of breath? This was the peculiar thing: he must be snorting great lung-fulls of air from the building’s interior. In astonishment, she murmured, ‘He wants to know what the inside of the house smells like. Why on Earth would anyone do that?’

The figure, little more than a shadow, flitted lightly toward the hedge, so it could look up at the bedroom windows. Although Eden couldn’t see properly, because of the gloom, she formed the impression that its head turned sharply from side to side as he searched the house frontage. For what? A way in? She moved back slightly so she was peering past the curtain, suddenly concerned that this strange entity might see her. The notion sent a shiver through her stomach. He wants to get inside. There was something distinctly odd about his movements. He didn’t walk in a normal way. Shadow-man moved in a series of sudden, ultra-quick darts.

There, in the moonlight, a pair of silver lights. A split-second later Eden realised that they were a pair of eyes that stared in her direction. ‘Oh, my God, he’s seen me.’ Eden recoiled back into the bedroom and her right heel slammed into the leg of the bed. Even as she grunted with pain she heard the noises again. This time they were preceded by a thump. Her imagination supplied the image of the stranger slamming his face against the edge of the front door, so eager was he to draw the scents of the house through the joints in the timbers, and suck them deep into his gaping nostrils. The snorting came even louder. The odours excited the trespasser. He found them as irresistible as a dog must find the musk of a bitch on heat. The rasp echoed up the staircase of the old house, then it raced into her bedroom as if to hunt her down.

Eden put her hands over her ears. If I don’t hear it, it can’t get me… The thought darted from some part of her mind that still responded as a child. As she heard that snorting all those childhood fears of the dark came loping back. When the sound of nails being dragged down the door’s woodwork joined the snorting, she screamed.

‘Heather! Curtis! There’s somebody trying to get into the house!’

She blundered toward the bedroom door. At that instant, she didn’t want to put on the light. For it would become a guiding beacon for the intruder. No way in a million years would she signal which room for him to run to first. For what seemed like entire minutes, rather than seconds, she staggered along the landing in the dark, her hands feeling their way along. All the time, the sound of snorting — nothing less than a mauling of her nerves.

Then, when she was outside her aunt’s bedroom, she slid her hands over the wall, trying to find the light switch. Eventually she chanced upon it and her fingers pressed the switch down. Light sprang all around her, blinding her. Squinting against its brilliance, she pounded on the door.

‘Heather. Wake up! There’s a man outside! He’s trying to get in!’

‘What!’ Curtis swung open the door. His long gray hair stood out from his head in a spray of silver.

‘What is it, Curtis?’ Heather sounded only half-awake.

‘It’s Eden. She says — ’

Eden interrupted, ‘Hurry! He’s trying to break the front door!’

This cut through the fog of sleep. Curtis’s eyes were suddenly sharply awake. ‘Wait here.’ He padded swiftly along the corridor. When he spoke again it was in a whisper. ‘Don’t switch on the stairs’ light. The front door’s glass. I don’t want him to see me.’

Despite him telling them to stay, Heather brushed past Eden to follow her husband. Eden didn’t think twice. She stayed close to Heather as they padded down the stairs.

‘What’s that awful sound?’ Heather asked.

‘For some reason the man’s smelling at door — like he’s trying to get the scent of the house.’

‘What on Earth for? That’s a crazy thing to — ’

From the foot of the stairs Curtis shushed them. He reached for the shepherd’s crook that stood in a hallstand along with ornamental walking sticks. Once he’d armed himself he took two stealthy paces along the hallway toward the door.

Heather gasped. ‘Oh my God, look at that!’

Eden followed Heather’s pointing finger. The moment she saw what Heather indicated a deluge of ice cold shivers cascaded down her spine. Slowly, deliberately, yet with a sense of purpose, the trespasser at the other side of the door turned the handle.

Standing there in his pyjamas, Curtis tightened his grip on the staff. That was the instant that the moon brightened. It allowed them a glimpse of the menacing shape through the opaque glass panels in the door. Heather gave a low moan, almost of pain, as she saw how the man moved. His head revealed itself as a dark mass. It turned left and right as the man crouched to snort deeply along the edge of the door. During this he still continued to slowly turn the handle. Fascinated, they watched the black iron handle dip before returning to the horizontal. A smooth repetition, as if whoever tried to open the door couldn’t understand that it was locked. The compulsive action of an idiot? Or relentless determination?

‘Damn it,’ hissed Curtis. He strode toward the door.

Heather lunged after him. ‘Don’t go out there. Stay inside.’

Curtis grunted. ‘He’s disappeared anyway.’

Eden’s mind raced. ‘He won’t give up yet. What if he’s gone round the back?’

‘I’ll smash his skull with this.’ Curtis tightened his grip on the staff. ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll clear off now.’ He opened the door to the lounge.

Eden saw the figure beyond the French windows flit through shadow. ‘He’s going round the back. He’s looking for another way in!’

‘Keep calm!’ He all but screamed the words at her. ‘Heather. Stay by the phone. If I give the word, call the police.’

‘There isn’t a police station for twenty miles.’

‘Heather. Do it!’

A sense of impatience gripped her: husband and wife appeared on the point of standing there to bicker about what to do next. Eden skirted the couple before running down the hallway to the kitchen. There, the back door led out into the garden. She remembered this entrance consisted of a timber frame set with clear glass.

Without switching on the light, she ran lightly across the stone floor toward the door. Through the kitchen window she glimpsed a man-shaped shadow pass by. Despite the fear, a reckless need to see the man gripped her. That need burned itself into Eden’s nerve endings. Suddenly not seeing him had become worse than gratifying herself with a clear view of the invader. Because already her imagination suggested the man wasn’t what he seemed.

Before she reached the door, the handle began to turn. She flung herself forward in order to push her face to the clear glass, so she could see once and for all the kind of person who went round snorting at people’s houses in the middle of the night.

Here, alas, the bulk of the house blocked the moonlight. Beyond the big pane of glass in the upper half of the door was only inky blackness.

‘Who is it?’ She pressed her face to the pane in order to see out. ‘Who’s there? I’m not afraid of you!’

Curtis burst into the kitchen. ‘Eden! Come away!’

‘You don’t scare me!’

Then movement. Black moved against more black. Then white. All white. With a shocking abruptness.

Eden pushed herself back from the door. A crash rang in her ears. At the same moment she saw that the upper door pane had smashed. The glass turned frosty white.

Curtis shouted back to Heather, ‘Call the police… he’s trying to smash his way in!’

Eden blinked: the violent attack on the door left her numb. She stared at the white pane that had been transformed into a sheet of crystals.

‘Don’t worry. You’re safe,’ Curtis told her. ‘It’s laminated glass. Like a car’s windscreen. He can break it, but he can’t get through. There’s a plastic coating… ’ He was panting as he drew her back toward the hallway. ‘It’s security stuff. The doors are reinforced, too.’

‘So this has happened before?’

Curtis called back through the doorway. ‘Heather. Have you got through to them?’

Heather appeared, her eyes staring with shock. ‘What was that bang?’

‘He tried to force his way through the glass in the back door. It’s security grade laminate. He’ll never get through that.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘I’m going to make sure I can see him. The little piece of vermin.’ Curtis opened a cupboard on the wall to reveal a row of switches. He flicked them to unleash a cascade of light outside. ‘We’ll see if mystery boy likes to be floodlit!’ Then Curtis dashed from window to window, this time the garden basked in illumination from halogen lamps. Soon he wore a broad grin. ‘I thought that would sort him out.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Vamoosed. Gone. Skedaddled over the horizon. The coward.’ Adrenalin had taken Curtis on a high. The grin became manic. ‘God, I wish I could have got my hands on him. I’d have ripped the bugger’s balls off.’

Heather seemed dazed. ‘But why didn’t the lights come on when he got close to the house? There’s a sensor… ’

‘Yes. The lights trigger when the sensor picks up body heat.’

‘He must have tampered with the light.’

‘No, no way. They’re fine. Probably found a blind spot by pure chance.’ He panted; his eyes were round as coins. ‘You know something; I’m going to apply for a gun licence. Next time. Bang!’

Heather flinched at the word ‘bang’.

Perhaps it was the way his wife flinched, because the adrenalin suddenly left Curtis. He stopped moving in that animated way. His flow of excited speech abruptly halted.

In that silence that was more than silence — almost like the vibration of a bell so vast that the note it made was too low for human hearing, yet powerful enough to be picked up by some sixth sense — Eden Page knew she had an important observation that must be spoken aloud.

Eden took a deep breath. These were words that had to be clear. ‘Did either of you get a good look at the man? I didn’t properly… but wasn’t there something wrong with his head?’