Two Doors Down: A twisted psychological thriller Page 3

  Oh, that’s just wonderful, I think bitterly.

  Considering this, I can no longer see the point of my nonchalant, night-time stroll along the prom. So I stop, preparing to cross the road.

  Before I cross, I hazard a discreet glance up at Mark’s bedroom. I see that she is gone, the curtains drawn.

  But that’s not to say that she isn’t watching.

  And if she is watching, then who is the voyeur? Me or her? If she knew I was there, and she was showing herself like that, then what, exactly, does that make her? Was she flashing a stranger, or did she know exactly who I was?

  I want to believe that she was just staring out at the ocean. God, I want to believe that so badly, but I can’t quite manage it.

  My skin crawls on the short walk home; I am unable to shake the conviction that my every step is being watched.

  FIVE

  I am watching from my living-room window. Mark’s car pulls up outside his house. The rain is lashing down in sheets, yet somehow – impossibly – the full moon is bright in the cloudy night sky. It hangs low over the horizon of the ocean, a huge, glowing white orb, appearing as big to me as the nearest parked car is outside my window.

  This monster moon troubles me deeply in my dream, it stirs a primal fear deep in my soul, yet I don’t know why.

  The driver’s door creaks open and Mark steps out into the road. The hood of his plain, black hoodie is pulled up against the rain, obscuring his face, but I’d still recognise him anywhere. There is no mistaking his long, gangly body, nor the way he carries himself. He has that distinctive strut – a walk that is more cool than arrogant or aggressive. My Mark is not these things. Not ever. Even with the huge success he has attained in his career, he retains his charming – and quite genuine – boyish modesty.

  He makes his way around the front of the car, his body thrown into stark silhouette because the headlights are still on. I can’t hear if the engine is running, because the rain drowns out all else. It is lashing down, the pitter patter of raindrops so loud it feels as if the noise is coming from inside my head.

  He stops there, in front of the car, facing my window.

  My heart slams in my chest and a small whimper escapes my lips because he is staring right at me.

  I can’t know this for sure, because his face is thrown into the blackest of shadows, but I know it, just the same. The passenger door swings open and out swivel a pair of long, shapely feminine legs.

  Long, shapely, bare legs. Holly emerges from the car, as naked as the day she was born. I blink, sure that I am hallucinating, that it is a trick of the dark and the distorting rain, that she is merely wearing neutral coloured, form-fitting clothing…

  But no. When she walks around the front of the car to join Mark, there is no mistaking the fact she is nude. The headlights illuminate the curves of her tall, slender figure, the light pouring between her slightly parted legs so that I am privy to the outline of her bald labia.

  I can’t look away. And neither, it seems, can they. They stand stock-still in the rain, staring at my window. Holly’s face is also cast into shadows, but not as much as Mark’s, as I can almost make out the details of her features. I can’t say for sure, but it seems like she is grinning.

  I gasp in shock when a nearby streetlamp suddenly bursts into life, illuminating the couple standing there as surely as if they were on a stage. It is way too much light for a streetlamp to be throwing off, but as this is just a dream, and I know that it is just a dream, I accept this. Even in this dream, I understand that the streetlamp represents my subconscious, trying to throw light on something in my mind that I should be understanding, yet is remaining resolutely elusive.

  I can see them both clearly now, all apart from Mark’s face, which remains shrouded in shadows. And I was right about Holly – she is grinning at me. It is a horrible smile, as mean as the day is long. Her classically beautiful face radiates coldness and cruelty. I want to look away from that too-wide smile, to move away from the window, but I am pinned in place by her evil. Her hair hangs in thick, loose waves to the middle of her back, miraculously untouched by the rain, as if protected by an invisible forcefield. It is brown at the roots, graduating to a pale, bleached blonde at the ends, beautifully blended and entirely natural-looking, despite the colour contrast.

  Her body is perfect, her chest full, like an underwear model’s, yet I find her figure repulsive. This isn’t because I am simply not attracted to women – her body is somehow reptilian in its perfection. It is too much, too other.

  My gaze is drawn to movement on her right hip, to her snake tattoo. Terror squeezes my heart, forcing it to pump harder when I see that the tattoo is undulating on her hip. The drawing of the snake is moving, squirming around her jutting hipbone, like a dog trying to get comfortable before lying down in its basket.

  Still grinning, she turns to face Mark. From the side, her stomach is as flat as a board, slightly concave around the ribs and her small backside juts out like a shelf. She reaches across for Mark then swivels her head in my direction again for a moment, as if to check that I am still watching.

  She pushes back Mark’s hood, and he makes no move to either stop her or help.

  I scream when I see that Mark no longer has a face. He is a skeleton – a grinning, white skull with empty sockets and a spine for a neck.

  I stagger backwards from the window in shock…

  … and jolt awake with a gasp, sitting bolt upright with the duvet tangled around my legs. My heart thumps and I clutch my chest through the ancient, Sex Pistols tee I always wear to bed.

  That was some dream. I fumble for my phone on the white-painted coffee table by the sofa that doubles up as a convenient nightstand. The screen comes to life, glowing in the gloom. The time reads 3.47, the date Friday, the 9th of October. Too early to get up, too late for any chance of getting back into a deep sleep.

  Sighing, I flop back down on the sofa bed, staring up at the stone rose in the middle of the ceiling that the Ikea, pale-blue, paper lampshade dangles from the centre of.

  The residue of the nightmare clings to me, and I do this groaning, humming thing to myself, the sound of my own voice going someway to comfort me, to remind me that it was just a stupid, horrible dream.

  But I can’t shake the misplaced sense of dread. I force myself to shut my eyes, roll over, get comfortable, ignore the urge to pee, and go back to sleep without further interruption.

  It doesn’t quite work like that, however, and it takes me an age to drift off again.

  SIX

  I didn’t sleep so well last night. After that weird nightmare, I tossed and turned for the remaining few hours, plagued by more strange dreams that I now can’t remember. They were about Mark though, I remember that much. Mark, and his stupid, naked girlfriend.

  I am bone-weary as I walk Bertie the half mile along the clifftop promenade to the centre point of the seafront. Sometimes, on our morning walks, Bertie and I turn right, walk a few hundred metres and take the one-hundred-and-seven steps carved into the limestone cliff face, down onto the lower cliff path.

  But today we don’t, partly because the tide is in, and, as such, the only section of beach that remains intact is the smallish stretch of sand opposite the main part of the seafront. Also, I don’t bother because I am keen to get into town and see my closest friend, Blythe Johnson.

  Bertie tugs on his lead – or his braces, as I call them. He doesn’t do so well walking with a lead and collar due to him choking himself. I fancy that he is angry with me, undoubtedly because we didn’t take the steps, because even if he can’t get onto the beach, there are still more interesting things to sniff down there and I usually let him off the lead.

  I shiver in the morning air – the weather has definitely made a turn for the worse and the temperature is barely in double figures. I am wearing the same outfit as yesterday, just in case I should run into Mark before our official dinner date. But, as it is cold, I have teamed it with thick woolly tights, and bl
ack, shin-high boots with a small heel, as opposed to the ballet pumps I had on yesterday.

  Also, I am not wearing my green parka jacket, instead electing for a smart, simple, knee-length black coat. I am too embarrassed to wear the other coat after last night, in case she was just randomly gazing out of the window, and therefore could feasibly recognise me as that peeping Tom from my coat alone...

  I am seriously considering burning said coat.

  We are now nearing the part of the cliff where it turns to flat terrain, and Bertie thinks that he is going for a frolic on the beach.

  He isn’t.

  “Sorry, boy, after, I promise. The tide will be starting to go out, and you’ll get beach all the way home.”

  Bertie is not remotely appeased, and he tugs in the direction of the beach. This part of the seafront is now only slightly higher than the ocean, with Broadgate Sands a few metres below prom level. He is desperate to go down the wide and short set of steps, carved into the stone wall where hordes of holiday makers perch in the summer months, eating their ice creams and fish and chips with the seagulls cawing and swooping overhead.

  Instead, I steer him towards the zebra crossing. We wait for the little green man, my gaze sweeping the line of shops and arcades on the other side of the wide road.

  Broadgate is a funny old place. I’ve lived here since I was three years old, and at the ripe old age of thirty-five, I still can’t decide if I love or hate it here. Crime and unemployment levels are high, and if one were to continue walking along the seafront, things get decidedly rougher. The now closed down, once popular amusement park, Dreamland, is at the other end of this strip. It has been boarded up for a few years now, so that end of the seafront is a long row of twenty-metre high planks of thick chipboard that stretch for a good half mile.

  Behind Dreamland, set quite far back, high-rises can be seen – ugly, 1950s, concrete monstrosities that are a far cry from the surprisingly interesting and striking mishmash of architectural styles that Broadgate is comprised of. Indeed, this town in a somewhat bizarre mix of smut, sleaze and elegance. It quite often appears on the TV, hailed as one of those up and coming places, due in no small part to its proximity to London. House prices are certainly beginning to reflect this, which is great for me, as I own the house outright and don’t have a mortgage anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever sell, though. This is home.

  But for every bright light, for every high-end gallery, or new, posh restaurant from some celebrity chef, there is a backstreet strip-club, sex shop, Betfreds, or a kebab house guaranteed to give you salmonella. I love how these two extremes coexist side by side in perverse harmony. Broadgate has character, you can certainly say that about it, if nothing else.

  Even the grey sea, the colour of dishwater after a greasy fry-up, is not without its charm. It has to be the greyest stretch of ocean surrounding the UK, jostling for that dubious honour of first place with Morecambe, or Blackpool perhaps.

  The man turns green, and Bertie and I cross the road.

  Blythe’s clothes shop, Blythe’s Boutique, is near the other end of the half mile or so stretch of shops, not far from the beginning of the boarded-up amusement park. There is hardly a soul on the street as I pass the sleazy joke shop, a long, rundown arcade called TimToms that must take up ten regular shop fronts, a boarded-up ice-cream parlour, a tearoom, a sweet shop that only seems to sell Broadgate rock and ice-cream, two chain boozers, and, randomly, one of the most expensive restaurants in the Southeast, The Oyster House, from that fish-obsessed celebrity chef.

  I push open the door of Blythe’s Boutique, a little bell overhead signalling my arrival. My friend’s shop is next door to the infamous, I Can’t Believe It’s True, a tourist attraction that is part an assortment of macabre wax works, and part tacky, interactive museum. A lot of the waxworks are re-enactment scenes of The Broadgate Butcher at work. He was Broadgate’s answer to Jack The Ripper – a crazed doctor who supposedly slaughtered over twenty women in and around Thanet in the 1890s.

  I Can’t Believe It’s True gives me the serious creeps, not least because a bunch of people were murdered on the premises a few years back – the man who used to run the attraction, along with his wife and daughter. If the stories are to be believed, the psychopath who committed the crime, killed them while dressed in the stolen clothes of The Broadgate Butcher’s wax statue...

  I shiver. I hate that stupid tourist attraction; I don’t know how Blythe can stand to be next door to it. I also don’t know how in the hell it’s still open for business, but that’s Broadgate for you.

  Bertie and I step inside the shop.

  SEVEN

  Inside the clothes shop, Blythe is sitting behind her small, ornate, dark-oak desk at the end of the long, thin shop. She is reading a book; I glimpse the title before she shuts it and lays it face down on the desktop. It is called The Healing Power of Crystals, and I suppress a snigger, because such a book is so typical of her.

  “Hello, sweetie,” she says with warmth.

  Smiling brightly, she stands up and makes her way around the desk to greet me in the middle of the shop, where we embrace.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Oh, I’m just fine. Shall we have a cuppa?”

  I follow her to the end of the shop, marvelling at her back view, wishing that I could pull off such flamboyant clothes. She is wearing a floor-skimming, deep purple, velvet skirt that is ruffled and bunched-up in complicated drapes, as wide at the hemline as that of a crinoline skirt from Victorian times.

  For a fleeting second, her skirt reminds me of the velvet curtains from last night, and I do my best to push aside that toe-curling embarrassment and just general weirdness that still lingers.

  Still watching Blythe, I decide that there is more than a touch of the Victorian about her today, with her ruffled, lacy white blouse that has impressively puffy sleeves. She wears it tucked into the thick, black belt around her waist which is as wide as a waspie corset.

  “Love the outfit,” I say from behind her. “You look like a proper Victorian lady.”

  She laughs, turning around to face me when she reaches the opened door of the stockroom, which is nothing more than a broom cupboard, stacked high with cardboard boxes full of clothes. There is also a tiny sink, with an equally tiny draining board next to it where the kettle lives.

  “Thanks,” she says, “that was just the look I was going for – you know, Steampunk. Thought it might make a nice change from my usual hippy attire.”

  I’m not quite sure what Steampunk is, but I nod and smile as if I do. Neither would I exactly describe Blythe as a hippy, even if she does have a penchant for floaty, silky, strong-patterned materials, and is into all that new age rubbish. She’s just too stylish and unique to be pigeonholed under a specific look. It helps that she is tall and bone-thin, like a catwalk model. She is possibly a smidgen underweight, but there’s no denying the way that clothes hang off her so well.

  She fills up the kettle, and I admire the way her shoulder-length, deep brown hair is curled on the top of her head in an elaborate updo. A few loose tendrils frame her striking features. Blythe is far from conventionally beautiful with her large nose and long, narrow face, but she is magnetic. When she walks into a room, all eyes fall upon her, without fail.

  “So,” she begins, fixing her piercing, dark stare on me. Her eyes are the darkest brown and quite close-set, lending her a look of searing intensity. “Have you seen loverboy yet?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  I shift uncomfortably, suddenly extremely interested in patting Bertie, who sits by my feet. I don’t tell her that I waited for him by the window for hours yesterday, like a dog, waiting for the return of its master.

  “But I bet you’ve been mooning over him like a lovesick teenager, haven’t you? Just sitting around in your little window seat, waiting for his car to pull up. Waiting for the knock at the door.”

  “No,” I mutter, hating the way I can feel my cheeks heat up. God, how does she
know me so well?

  Blythe laughs, turning her attention to Bertie. “Are you thirsty, special boy?”

  I watch her fill a bowl of water, just as she always does when we pop in on our morning walk, which is most days out of season. Bertie goes for his drink in Blythe’s stockroom, and I let go of his bright-red lead. The chances of any customer coming into Blythe’s shop so early in the morning are slim to none. To be honest, I don’t know why she bothers keeping such long hours this time of the year. I think she just enjoys the act of going to work, of having an excuse to leave her small flat for the day. And she does love a good gossip.

  I perch on the edge of the desk, gazing absently around the familiar surroundings of the dark shop. It is so haphazard in here, with the way the eclectic mix of women’s clothes lining the walls jostle for space. It almost has the vibe of a charity shop. Almost, that is, because a touch of eccentric elegance elevates it above that. For a start, it doesn’t smell of mothballs, but faintly of incense, and the dark, gleaming floorboards are adorned with a long, red and gold, Persian rug. Three gold-framed, full-length mirrors break up the lines of clothes, and two, elaborately carved, high-backed, Victorian style chairs, upholstered with deep crimson, velvet cushions, flank the narrow, floor to ceiling window next to the door.

  “So what does this Holly look like, then?”

  “I told you, I haven’t seen her, yet.”

  She stirs our instant coffee, handing me a mug which I accept with a murmured thanks.

  “Uh huh. So you weren’t staring out the window all day and night like a crazy, nosy old lady, twitching your net curtains?”

  “I don’t have net curtains,” I point out, rather churlishly. I sigh deeply. There’s no point lying to her, she can read me like a book. “Okay, you’re right, I may have seen them arrive. It was dark. And raining. But she was quite pretty I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing.”