Trouble in Paradise

3. Joseph

Joseph didn't answer the door. My suggestion that he'd perhaps just gone out for a walk didn't wash with Maya; she left me with her bike and went around the back of the house to see if that was more successful, while I poked around the front garden and waited for her to come back.

It was a good size, as all the gardens here were. By the look of it there'd been a desultory attempt at a vegetable patch, though it was now thick with weeds, and here and there were things that could have been potted plants. Parts of the fencing were mostly ivy. More creepers of it wound up the porch and poked at the shutters. Joseph liked his house dark, it seemed.

"Sephy! God's sake, just open the door! Or I'll have to break in, and I've barely got any nail polish left and do not want to have to redo it today!" There was a thumping noise. "Open. The. Fucking. Door."

At a guess, Maya wasn't having much joy at the back door either.

It was... I didn't want to think it was creepy, because creepy was a word for fear, and I was more puzzled than scared. But it wasn't right. Enning was a place of light and, on the flat land and around people's houses, open spaces. Every garden I'd seen had been given attention, even if it was just a few flowers and a splash of paint on the porch; every bungalow gave the impression that visitors were always welcome. It was friendly, at times uncomfortably so, but still. Friendly.

Joseph's plot wasn't. As I'd noticed before, it wasn't exactly derelict, but it looked like nobody cared for it. The trees here were dense and leafy and created dark shadows even with the sky overhead a clear, bright blue, and the more I stood there, the more I felt like they were gradually creeping towards me, held back only by the fence. The track seemed a long way away.

I'd seen a few horror films, mostly from behind a cushion. I knew that the absolute last thing we should do was go into the house-

CRASH!

"Okay, you so asked for this," called Maya's voice. "I'm coming in!"

Various options flashed through my mind. I could run away, or rather, walk away nonchalantly. Joseph would be out for a walk, Maya would be fine, and the worst thing that could happen would be that she might be a bit pissed off with me for leaving her. I could stay here. No danger, eventually Maya would realise how overly-dramatic she was being and come back out, everything fine.

Or I could take the chance that, to start with, something was wrong, and secondly, that it was something I could help with. That was what my feet were doing. I was halfway around the porch before I managed to frame the thought that I barely knew Maya and although I actually quite liked her, I didn't like her enough to risk getting an axe through the neck for.

Too late. I was already at the door.

What remained of the door, anyway. Half of it had been battered in. If I'd had to guess, the baseball bat lying in the middle of a pile of splinters had probably been involved. Maya was stronger than she looked.

She hadn't thought to keep hold of a potential weapon. I picked the bat up, thinking that Brooke would have been much better suited to this than me, and followed her. Nobody jumped on me. That was a good start, but it didn't make me feel any calmer.

Joseph's house was, like most of the ones I'd seen, a wooden one-floor building with a couple of rooms. The mess from outside had made it indoors too, but it wasn't that bad. I'd seen worse at university. The pots and plates lying around weren't too furry and they were in places that made sense, like on tables and right where someone might leave their glass if they'd been reading on the sofa. A blanket lying forlornly on a rug nearly gave me a heart attack, until I stepped out of the light and realised what it was.