It Knows Where You Live by Gary McMahon Read Free Book Online

skin and I could not get rid of it, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I had no idea why I felt this way, but I didn’t mention it to Debbie.  
    We made love later that evening, but nothing seemed right. The rhythm was all wrong, and I felt ashamed of the imaginary dirt on my skin. As we moved awkwardly on the mattress, it felt as if we were being watched. I kept glancing over my shoulder, at the window, and expecting to see shadows shifting beyond the curtains.
    “What’s wrong,” said Debbie, afterwards.  
    “I don’t know. I think I’m just stressed. Maybe we need a holiday.”
    She gripped my hand under the sheets, and I squeezed her fingers.
    “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps that’s it. A holiday. We haven’t had one for a couple of years—not a proper one, anyway. I’ll start looking tomorrow; see if there are any cheap deals going.”
    I said nothing. What I really wanted—what I needed more than anything—was a holiday from myself. If I could have stepped out of my skin, removing it like a costume, I would have traded it in for another, cleaner outfit. The filth of the row of houses on Sebastian Street—the former row of houses—was upon me, like a sticky ghost, and I could feel it working its way inside, penetrating my body through my pores to do untold damage within the walls of my frail house of bones and blood and organs...
    I dreamt again of the row of houses. The doors were the black openings to coffins filled with endless night, and long, pale hands beckoned from within, calling to me, summoning me inside. I walked along the row, keeping to the middle of the road, and watched those white fingers dancing, trying to hypnotise me.
    The dead lived in those houses, but I did not know their names. To me, they were just an abstract notion, an unspecified group of the damned who represented the concept of nothingness rather than anything tangible. These were the spirits of the houses, a bunch of lazy genius loci , and because I had been the last person to walk the floors of the places which housed them, I was cursed to see them here, in my dreams, perhaps forever.
    I got out of bed, crossed the room, and opened the bedroom curtains. Outside, rather than the street I’d known for years, was a demolition site. Across the way, directly opposite my house, stood the row of derelict houses from Sebastian Street, misplaced and somehow planted here, right where I lived. The doors were open, belching blackness, and as the shadows moved slowly across the road, towards my front door, I saw held within them the shapes of all the people who had dwelled in the row and those who had never got the chance to live there. The dreams to which the houses themselves had once aspired left to rot, to turn into something dark and malign and grasping.
    Because houses dream, too, and sometimes those dreams are nightmares.
    Debbie was not in bed beside me when I woke from the dream, hot and clammy and filled with a shapeless fear that punched me from the inside, trying to get out. I rolled out of bed and ran onto the landing. “Debbie!” I could smell fresh coffee, but she did not answer. “Debbie? Are you down there?” I ran down the stairs, almost tripping at the bottom, and into the kitchen.
    The kitchen was empty. The coffee machine light was on; two empty cups sat on the bench.
    Panicked, I searched every room in the house, calling her name, but she wasn’t there. She was nowhere to be seen.  
    Then, defeated, I sat down in the living room and stared at the silent television, imagining her trapped inside those dream houses, chased by something large and unseen through the passageway between the kitchens.
    Then I heard the front door open and slam shut.
    I ran out into the hallway, and saw Debbie struggling with a shopping bag.  
    “Give me a hand, would you?”
      I moved quickly, taking the bag as she stumbled through the doorway. “Where have you been?”
    “We were out of milk, so I decided to do some shopping. We