Now You See Me

Forty-Two: Shattered

I didn't sleep that night.

The rehab centre was silent; the vampires had left a couple of hours ago. Everyone else was in bed already.

There was something about the silence that I didn't like, but I couldn't describe to myself why it felt wrong because almost every night was silent... Aside from the ones where I got into trouble and scared the crap out of everyone. I jumped as Mum mumbled in her sleep and rolled over, casting one arm across my pillow and other over her face. I envied her, I had to admit, but something had me so on-edge that sleep seemed a faintly ridiculous thing to try for.

A shadow flitted across the attic window, and within seconds I was halfway out of the tub, preparing to run. By the time I realised it was just a bird flying past, my heart was pounding so hard that I might as well have run down to the bottom floor and back up again several times.

The alarm clock on the bedside switched to five am, another hour that had gone past. My eyes were aching and threatening to flip shut like old blinds, but the rest of my body was restless.

I couldn't shake the feeling that if I closed my eyes, something bad would happen to me.

It didn't help that the Victorian terrace in which the rehab centre was based creaked and groaned at night, like all old houses did. It was simply that I'd never noticed it before, and now my eyes were open, I couldn't shut my ears, either. The pipes clanked faintly along the walls as water ran through them, clicking and creaking and occasionally moaning when someone pulled a flush downstairs. Every tiny little settlement of the infrastructure suddenly sounded like a foot on the steps to this room. My neck ached from trying to keep an eye on the window and the attic entrance at the same time.

When I heard faint knocking downstairs, I assumed it was another symptom of my hyperactive and sleep-deprived imagination. It took a minute to realise that it was real and that it wasn't one of the many noises I'd overreacted to already tonight.

Something was happening down there.

I lifted myself from the bathtub, trying to do it slowly so that the dripping water didn't wake Mum. I had a feeling she'd disapprove mightily of what I was planning to do, and if I was honest, I did too. It was madness after everything I'd been through. But being stuck up in the attic all night with no sleep had scrambled my head a bit – at least, that was what I told myself as I wrapped myself in a dressing gown and went towards the steps.

I almost turned straight back around when pitch blackness glared back up at me. I paused with my foot hovering above the top stair, and then took a few steps back and went to Leia's cabinet in the corner. The first two drawers yielded nothing. The third, however, containing bandages and miscellaneous objects, gave me a torch. I clicked it to see if it worked, and then headed back to the exit with it to descend to the second floor.

I wasn't sure why it had never occurred to me to look for the hallway light switches, but I was regretting it now.

My own breathing seemed deafening in the darkness as I reached the landing. The knocking suddenly seemed more like thumping now that I was closer, but it was evident it was coming from further down still. Misgivings grew in my stomach as I took the next flight down to the first floor. All the doors were shut tight and the rooms behind them silent. When I realised that the noise was most likely coming from the cellar, I felt sick.

I touched the bruising on my neck subconsciously, and it ached as if in remembrance. I didn't want to go down there, but what if it was an emergency? I wouldn't be able to live with myself if something awful had happened to Chris that I'd ignored.