Page 80 of The Stranger in Room Six

Mabel

Mabel wakes with a start. It’s pitch-black outside, although she can hear the sea roar as the old diamond-paned windows rattle in the wind.

‘Alexa, what’s the time?’ she asks.

Such a clever invention!

Mabel tries to get back to sleep but it’s no good. Something feels wrong. She can sense it. Perhaps it’s just the wind.

Then she jumps. What’s that sliding noise? It’s as if a drawer is opening somewhere, a rustling sound.

‘Who’s there?’ she whispers.

Silence. Is she having one of her bad dreams again? Mabel pinches herself. No. That hurts, and pinches don’t hurt in dreams, do they?

There’s a creak and a shuffle.

Mabel sits bolt upright. That sounds like a floorboard. Mabel knows the creaks of these floors well. Hadn’t she herself crept from room to room back in the days when she’d listened in on Clarissa?

‘Who’s there?’ she repeats, this time with a catch in her voice.

Nothing.

It must be her imagination, she tells herself, or perhaps the temperature. Floorboards make noises when it’s too hot or too cold and this place can get so stuffy even at night. Old people need to be warm, and the heating is always on high.

There’s another creak.

Mabel feels her pulse racing, her heart banging out of her chest. Then she remembers what Frannie taught her in case the Germans invaded. ‘Don’t look or sound scared.’

‘Reveal yourself,’ she demands. ‘Or I’ll take a pistol to you.’

She doesn’t have a pistol, of course, but the words capture a bravado that Mabel doesn’t feel.

Is that someone breathing? Mabel’s fingers fumble for the emergency alarm cord.

Where is it? And why can’t she find the wall light switch?

Then to her relief, her hand closes round the spiky hairbrush that she keeps by her bed so she can do the fifty strokes that Mama taught her all those years ago before the bombs came.

Then with all her might she throws it out into the darkness. There’s the sound of it hitting something, followed by a grunt.

‘Don’t you fucking do that to me,’ growls a voice.

Mabel can feel someone’s breath on her face.

‘Who are you?’ she asks, trying to keep her voice steady. Something Frannie once said comes into her head again. ‘Stand up to evil.’

But what if you were evil yourself? Has Mabel’s comeuppance finally arrived?

‘You don’t need to know my name,’ replies the voice. ‘I’m not going to harm you, provided you give me what I want. Where are you keeping the list?’

That bloody list again.

‘I don’t know about any list,’ she says.

‘I don’t believe you.’

The breath is right above her now.

Frantically, Mabel fumbles in the dark for the emergency cord again. Where is the damn thing?

‘If you don’t give it to me right now, I’ll –’

Thank God! She’s finally found it. The alarm is ringing, siren-like, along the corridor.

‘Fuck you, Mabel Marchmont,’ snarls the voice. ‘I’ll be back. You’ll see.’

Mabel can hear something dragging on the ground, as if the stranger has a stick. Then the door opens and slams back on itself again.

‘Help, help!’ she calls out.

Nothing. Where the hell is everyone? Then again, there are only two staff on night duty and alarms are always going off. It seems like an age before someone finally comes. She’d hoped it might be Belinda but it’s one of the new night staff.

‘Everything all right, Mabel?’

‘No, it bloody isn’t. Did you see someone going out of my room?’

‘No, dear.’

‘Don’t “dear” me. It was a woman. At least I think it was, although she had a deep voice. She said she wanted something.’

Instinct tells Mabel not to go into details.

‘There, there. I expect you were having one of your nightmares. Let me give you something for it.’

Too tired to argue, Mabel sinks into a deep sleep into which her past comes too; each memory jostling with another in its impatience to get out.

When she wakes the next day, Mabel can’t wait to tell Belinda what happened.

But her mind feels fuzzy and she can’t quite grasp the memory.

As the morning passes, she begins to wonder if everything was quite as she remembered.

Had someone really asked about the list?

What would any intruder want with her, after all?

Perhaps she should keep quiet about the stranger in the night, in case they think she’s lost her marbles and dose her up again.

So instead, when Belinda comes on shift, Mabel continues her story from where she’d left off.