Jan jolted as she heard a sudden shout from below and stopped at the top of the stairs. It was a man’s voice; followed by a dull thump. Jan crept down until she reached the bottom stair and jumped with fright as a tall man suddenly emerged from a doorway. He looked right at her; she could see the fury etched into his face, and his knuckles were white where his hands were clenched tightly. She cringed, waiting for him to rush at her and hit her just as he had done to his wife. But he walked right past her and ascended the stairs. Jan watched as a slight young man then appeared in the doorway clutching his face, his cheeks rosy with fury he blended into the floral wallpaper behind him. Jan wondered if this was Clive. She soon got her answer.

“Clive, don’t go up there. Don’t follow him. It’ll only make him angrier. Leave him be.” His mother put her hand on his shoulder to stop his progress towards the stairs.

“How can you just let him do it, Mum? He’ll kill you one day.”

“No he won’t. That’s just silly talk, that is. He’s just an angry man. He has to take it out on someone. I don’t help matters along by dropping things all the time. That always makes him cross.”

“Of course you drop things. He broke your fingers; you should have gone to the hospital and had them set properly.” Jan watched as the woman held up her right hand; three of her fingers were bent out of shape.

There was a sudden loud noise, like a siren or a scream. Jan looked around wildly in a panic for the source of the noise. She sat up in bed and realised with relief it was just the alarm going off. Dave was eyeing her curiously.

“What’s up with you? You look like you’ve been fighting bears in your sleep. Had a nightmare?”

“What? Not a nightmare, no. More of a bad dream. I dreamt about what I found in that cabinet. The piece of paper with the numbers on. They were dates and details of the injuries of a woman being beaten up by her husband. He beat up the son too. He’s called Clive, the son that is, not his father. He’s called Ted.” She realised her own husband was now looking at her as if she’d just escaped from residential care, the secure kind.

“I worry about you, Jan, I really do. Go and have a nice shower.  I’ll bring you up a cup of tea.”

“Thanks, love.” Jan got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom. She looked in the mirror at her dishevelled appearance. Sweat had made her hair stick to her brow and there were dark circles under her eyes. She groaned and switched the shower on, stepped inside the cubicle and closed her eyes as the water splashed onto her face. She stayed inside the shower until the bathroom was filled with hot fragrant steam.

“Tea’s outside the door.”

“Thanks!” she shouted, busy towelling her hair dry.

When Jan had dressed and gone downstairs she found Dave munching an overflowing bowl of cereal as he read a computer magazine.

“Dave.”

“What?”

“Do you think my bedside cabinet did come from a house clearance? And if it did, do you think the house will still be up for sale?”

“Dunno. What are you asking me for?”

“I thought you might know. I want to find the house. I want to see if it looks like it did in my dream.”

Dave poised with his spoon mid-way to his mouth, laden with another load of Wheaty Treaties.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it a few hundred more times – I worry about you, Jan.”

“Well don’t. I can look after myself.”

“How are you going to find the house?”

“I think I’m going to look online at all the estate agents’ sites then I can make a note of any likely properties. Then I’m going to go and check them out.”

“Have fun. I’m going to set up a parabolic reflector on the router.”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t understand what it was if I told you,” he laughed and walked to the sink to deposit his empty bowl on the draining board.

For two hours Jan trawled the Net looking for local properties for sale. She had spotted three which looked as if they were likely candidates and a few more which might be possibilities. She printed out the property specs and put them in her bag, calling out to Dave that she was going out before she slammed the door shut behind her.

Although the sun was out, the wind was quite chilly but then it was only April, Jan thought. The air wouldn’t warm up for a while yet.

She drove to the first house on her list. There was a large red ‘Sold’ sticker right across the estate agent’s sign. She walked up the driveway and peered inside the front window. The walls were all painted magnolia and not a shining new ‘we’ve had the builder’s in’ magnolia; more a shade that had been on the walls for 10 years or more. There were some glass panels in the front door which Jan peeked through. The hallway was square and floored with seagrass; she felt a sudden surge of disappointment and headed back towards her car.

The second house was still up for sale. Thick overgrown bushes crowded the front garden, giving a perfect cover for Jan as she slipped down the path to the big bay window at the front. One huge room stretched away towards a conservatory in the back, the sunlight streamed through, making her blink in the glare of its brilliance. It wasn’t the house from her dream.

Visits to a further two houses again proved disappointing and Jan’s spirits began to flag. She decided to try one more house before giving up and going home.  The next house was detached rather than a semi. It had a bay window on either side of the front door and Jan knew at once this wasn’t the place in her dream because the stairs had no rooms on the right hand side. She sighed and turned around, taking the property specs out of her bag for one last look. Noticing the final house was in the same road as this one, she decided she may as well have a look at it while she was in the vicinity. Jan walked down the road looking at the numbers on the houses; they seemed to go in clusters rather than odd numbers down one side of the road and evens down the other. She decided the houses must have been built in batches for some reason. She eventually discovered number 46  was next to number 45. The ‘for sale’ sign was staked into a flower bed right between two daffodils that were swaying in the sharp breeze.

As Jan walked up the drive towards the blue painted garage door, she saw a nice looking porch attached to the front of the house and felt another surge of bitter disappointment, but something spurred her on until she had rounded the side of the porch and reached the front window. It was an old style Crittal window, flat fronted and painted blue to match the garage door. She looked inside and gasped when she saw the large roses on the wallpaper and remembered them from her dream. This was the house! May’s house. Her hand quivered with excitement as she looked at the property spec, searching for the estate agent’s phone number. She rang it at once and made an appointment to view the house the following evening after she finished work.

Jan returned home and shouted to Dave that she was back. His head popped out of the living room with a roll of silver foil in his hand. She frowned at him.

“What are you doing with my foil?”

“Nothing. Making a reflector.”

“Good grief. I’m going to dial a pizza tonight. What topping do you want?”

“Pizza? Really? Can I have a mega meat feast?”

“Sure, it’s your arteries.”

Jan’s pizza was a four cheese special; she was hoping to tempt some interesting dreams to visit her that night. But later when she was in bed, Jan lay awake for a quite a while, her heart was beating with a fluttery feeling of anticipation. She tried to breathe slowly to calm herself, counting each slow breath as it came. She could feel her mind relaxing and soon she slipped into a embracing slumber. As soon as she was in dream-land, Jan became aware that someone was crying. She tried to see through the fog that was clouding her vision, wondering if this was what always happened when she first fell asleep and she just hadn’t noticed before now. She soon realised the fog was a thick smoke wafting from inside a kitchen and the crying was coming from that direction too. Then she heard voices from deep inside the smoke.  

“It’s alright, Clive, it’s alright. It’s not your fault.” It was May’s voice, Jan was sure of it. She realised she must be back inside the house, the same one she had visited earlier that day. She wondered what Clive had done and she tried harder to see through the smoke. Now inside the kitchen, Jan could see shapes as she drew closer to objects. There was the cooker, the oven door  opened wide, emitting the thick black smoke which was filling the kitchen and drifting down the hallway and up the stairs. Jan reached out to touch the cooker, but it seemed to move away from her fingers as she tried to turn off the knob for the oven.

“What’re we going to do, Mum?” Clive’s voice was answered by a sob. “We’ve got to get rid of it before anyone finds it.”

“He’s your father, not an ‘it’,” May responded through her crying.

Jan heard Clive pull out a chair and sit down. “Turn the bloody oven off.”

“Don’t swear, Clive, you know your father doesn’t like it when you swear.”

“He’s not here to mind now is he?”

Jan heard May switch off the oven; she opened the back door and began to waft the smoke away with a tea towel. Very slowly, the kitchen began to re-emerge from the fug. The body of Ted lay in a puddle of blood on the black and white chequered linoleum floor. By his side was a mess of burnt food and a broken glass dish, a shard of which protruded from his neck.

Clive got off the kitchen chair and walked to the window to open it. All of a sudden he turned back and looked quite excited. Jan wondered what he had seen outside to have changed his mood so quickly.

“I know what we can do. When it gets dark we can put his body in the foundations of one of those new houses further down the street.”

“You can’t do that. Someone will see you.”

“No they won’t. There’s no moon tonight. I’ll be hidden, completely hidden.”

Jan walked towards the body of Ted; the sight of all the blood was making her feel quite sick. She could see its stickiness clinging to the glass dish in clumps as it clotted. She felt overcome with sickness and reeled backwards into the door with panic.

To be concluded

Copyright Suzanna Stanbury 2009 All Rights Reserved