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

climbing. I could hear her footsteps above my head, moving in all directions: left, right, up, down, and up again. She was ascending an imaginary staircase, one that had never existed and could not exist in the real world. But maybe it existed in that liminal space behind the façade, the one the row of houses on Sebastian Street had always concealed...until someone had come along and pulled them down.
    Why had they never been demolished with the rest of the street? What purpose could they have served, standing there like sentinels? I remembered reading somewhere that even when the other houses on the street had been inhabited, those eight had remained without tenants, and nobody had even enquired about buying or renting them.
    Sentinels...guarding us all against the onslaught of something...something terrible, something nightmarish which had always wanted to straddle the façade and enter this side of the screen, occasionally reaching through to pollute the world it so coveted.
    I recalled the dead woman found there with her body slashed and torn and plastic packaging rammed up inside her, the terrified junkies who’d run away and never returned; and finally, I thought of the small boy who had entered one of the properties and never come back out again...was he even now endlessly walking through the empty rooms, looking for an exit and wondering if his friends were still waiting outside for him?  
    Debbie’s footsteps kept on moving, rising, through levels I could never see. I got to my feet and ran to the bottom of the stairs, looked up and watched as the staircase bent and twisted, whipping to and fro like a snake with its tail stuck in a vice. I blinked, trying to erase the vision, but it was real: the staircase was moving, shuddering, spiralling madly, like part of a fairground funhouse.  
    “Debbie!”
    I ran to the crazy moving staircase and started to climb, but the violent bucking movement threw me off. I tried again, and the banister turned to dust beneath my fingers. I fell to the floor, into a pile of rubble, and when I looked up the stairway had stopped moving, it was motionless. But it wasn’t the staircase that had always been in my house...it was from somewhere else.
    When I looked around me, at the bare walls and the snapped floorboards, the piles and heaps of debris, I realised exactly where I was: I was inside one of the houses on Sebastian Street. There could be no mistake; the image of the place nestled deep inside me, and now that it had come back to haunt me I knew it intimately.
    The stairway above me terminated in fresh air; the upper landing had fallen away, leaving only empty space. Joists and the skinned, tattered ends of boards protruded like broken teeth. There was no point in even trying to go up there. Debbie was somewhere else entirely.
    I heard something moving behind me, as if stepping through rubble, and when I turned around I saw the kitchen doorway. I got up and walked towards it, entered the wrecked kitchen, turning right to face the place where the wall had been torn down to gain access to the building next door. I saw a vague human form disappearing into darkness a few rooms along, a small running figure swallowed by dusty shadows.
    “Debbie!” My voice did not echo. The word fell flat and dead upon the floor.
    I stepped through the gap and into the kitchen of the house next door, following the slender figure of my wife as she moved between the houses. The row had taken her, snatched her away from me, and all I had left was the urgency of pursuit. I called her name again, but this time the sound barely even registered in the chill, dead space. Not even as a whisper.

    •     •     •

    Someday, if I shout loud enough, I hope my wife will hear me. One day, hopefully some time soon, I will catch up with her as I move back and forth through the passageway between houses, passing through the rooms between rooms, and it will give me hope—all the hope I will ever