Page 3

Joseph touches the tomahawk’s polymer handle. When he wraps his fingers around the grip, he feels instantly sick. He retrieves the weapon regardless, along with the torch. Then he moves to the bedroom door.
Downstairs, he hears the yawn of a hinge; a thud. He no longer merely feels sick; there’s a very real risk he might pass out.
‘What’re you doing?’ Erin whispers, from the bed.
‘Getting my phone.’ Joseph remembers, now, where he left it before following Erin to bed: on the arm of the sofa, stacked between the TV remote and his paperback. ‘Stay here. If something bad happens, lean out of the window, start screaming. Then barricade this door until help arrives.’
‘What about Tilly?’
Christ, he thinks.It’s not even a good plan.
‘I won’t let anyone get up here with you.’
Silence, for a moment. Then: ‘Joe?’
‘What?’
‘Is that a fuckingaxe?’
Erin’s incredulity sends his heart-rate skyrocketing. Because if his own wife doesn’t believe in him, how the hell can he? Joseph closes the door on her and takes four quick steps along the hall to Tilly’s room. He ducks his head inside, hears his stepdaughter’s breathing, knows from its rhythm that she’s asleep.
At the top of the stairs he pauses in a narrow triangle of moonlight. He wants to grab the bannisters, steady himself, but in one hand he holds the torch, still unlit, and in the other he grips the tomahawk.
The ridiculous tomahawk, he thinks.A weapon more suited to an SAS operative than a middle-aged guy with two kids.
He clenches his teeth and descends, sinking into purest black.
The ground floor is an alien place, bereft of oxygen or light. Joseph feels like he’s arrived at the bottom of an ocean trench.
The pressure down here is enormous. His ears pop; his jaw aches. He hears movement in the kitchen, the scrape of something across the floor. There’s no tell-tale glow around the doorframe. Whoever’s inside is operating in perfect darkness.
The tragedy of five years ago had struck in the depths of winter, not late summer, but it had arrived just as unexpectedly – a few minutes of insanity stealing his late wife’s life and robbing Max of his mother.
In his head, he hears his last conversation with Claire, terrifyingly similar to the one he just had with Erin:
‘Joe, wake up. I heard noises. I think someone’s downstairs.’
‘Just the heating, probably.’
He’d gone back to sleep, hadn’t even heard her leave their room to investigate. He’d woken next to her scream; followed, moments later, by a terrible low-pitched moan. Even then he’d lain there in confusion for a handful of seconds before leaping up.
The burglar Claire had disturbed clubbed her three times with a metal bar before fleeing. Only one of those blows had proved fatal. A handful of seconds might have made all the difference.
Claire’s antennae for danger – always more finely tuned than his – had been surpassed only by her instinct to protect their son. He should have trusted her, should have known she’d wouldn’t ignore a suspicious noise.
He should have gone in her place.
Sweat rolls cold from Joseph’s armpits. It makes him shiver despite the night’s heat. He thinks about shouting a warning, scaring off whoever’s there. Odds-on they’ll flee, but what if they don’t? He’ll have alerted them to his presence, squandering the advantage of surprise.
His first plan is a superior one: retrieve his phone, get back upstairs, call the police, guard the landing.
Joseph swims forward through the gloom. He remembers leaving the living-room door ajar. It might be dark, down here in the hall, but he knows this house, can navigate it without fear of striking furniture or other obstacles – until his toe catches one of Erin’s ballet flats and sends it spinningacross the wooden floor to the wall, where it ricochets off a bookcase.
The sound is an artillery strike. An orchestra’s percussion section. But what Joseph hears from the kitchen, moments later, is even worse – the unmistakeable scrape-slide of a knife being drawn from its block.
And then silence.
He thinks of the YouTube guy, of how he talked so confidently about situations exactly like this. Of how he’s probably never come close to facing one. Certainly not two.