The Visitors(71)

‘Holly,’ I whisper, closing my eyes and visualising her soft skin, her light breaths against my face.

I imagine, for a moment, that the wall is dissolving away so I find myself there in the room with her.

My breath catches in my throat and I let my hands fall, stepping away from the wall.

We are meant to be together. I can feel it.





Chapter Fifty-Five





Holly





When Holly first heard the noise, she was still dreaming. In her dream, she was standing in the middle of woodland with nothing on but her nightdress.

There was a shuffling, scraping sound behind her… and then it flipped so it was somewhere in front of her.

Her dream self whirled around, bare-footed and frantic, trying to see into the dark spaces between the ghostly pale tree trunks.

When she snapped awake, the woodland had disappeared, replaced again by the four bedroom walls.

The dream had dissolved but she could still hear the noise.

Holly held her breath and listened for a few more moments. The glowing digits on the bedside table read 2.01.

She quickly identified that the noise was coming from down in the garden. Just under her window. She sat up and swung her feet down to the floor. Her head thumped dully from the drink she’d had before bed.

She knew that only a narrow stretch of unused land lay beyond the back hedge. There were no street lights, but tonight, her bedroom and the entire garden were bathed in moonlight. It should have been beautiful… if she’d been able to ignore the sick feeling already squirming in the pit of her stomach.

She padded over to the window and gently peeled back the edge of the curtain.

From this angle, she could only see the far end of the garden, the shrubs and hedges a dark, dense mass against the wooden fence.

She pressed up against the wall and tweaked the curtain again, pulling it a little further away this time so she could see immediately beneath her bedroom window, closer to the back door.

The breath caught in her throat as a long, thin shadow flitted across the yard, melting into nothing.

On a reflex, she yanked the curtains completely open and pressed her face to the glass, her eyes flashing around the garden to search out the trespasser – if that was what it was.

But there was no more movement. No fleeting shadows.

A puff of breath evaporated on the freezing window and obscured her view, so she unhooked the window and eased it open. Cold air funnelled onto her clammy face as she squinted down into the gloom. Her face grew watchful, fearful, as she waited on the slightest flicker of movement.

There! There it was again. The curious scraping noise that had visited her in her dream.

It emanated from the right-hand side of the yard, near the kitchen door. A small area that sat in complete shadow, untouched by the moonlight. The vague outline of old patio furniture and discarded building materials was only just discernible in the meagre light.

Holly made a sharp hissing noise, in the hope that any cat hiding there would show itself, but although the scraping stopped, there was no further movement.

It would probably turn out to be something quite harmless, she reasoned silently to herself. It could be a cat, or even a fox, crouching beneath the old patio table. Watching and waiting until she closed the window again.

She’d always had an overactive imagination. It had been responsible for her visualising an amazing future when she’d first moved to Manchester.

Now it was telling her that someone had caught up with her. That someone was watching her furtively from down in the shadows.

Yet nobody from her old life knew where she was, so that couldn’t be the case, surely. But… the person at the shop window, a part of her whispered. The phone call.

Maybe it had been a debt collection company that had somehow managed to trace her. Was it feasible that Kellington’s had registered her on some kind of system as an employee, some database that other companies had access to?

She shook her head in frustration.

It was time to knock her volatile imagination on the head. There really was no need to give herself a hard time like this. She should foster a common-sense approach.

She closed the window with a dull thud, praying it wouldn’t disturb Cora. The last thing she wanted, at two in the morning, was a cup of tea and another raft of forty-year-old anecdotes to listen to.

She must learn to keep her fears in check and not panic at the first sign of something out of the ordinary.

If she’d reacted differently, a harmless noise in the yard could have been swiftly forgotten. With a pair of ear plugs and a pillow on her head, she could have drifted back to sleep, but instead she’d allowed herself to snap fully awake in an instant and conjure up a convincing batch of sinister explanations.

She’d basically written the beginnings of a pretty grim horror story in her head. And now she’d have to pay the price. She’d probably lie awake for hours, running over it all in her mind.

She’d arrive at work looking and acting like a zombie, and that was dangerous because she knew she needed to keep her wits about her. If Emily was lurking around, she needed to remain logical and watchful, and that wasn’t easily done with sleep deprivation.

Maybe listening to some gentle music in her earphones might do the trick.

As she grabbed hold of the curtains to pull them closed again, a cry escaped her lips and her hands flew up to her mouth.