to play a sort of game, okay? First, you’re going to be super still, then you’re going to run as fast as you can.”
The cellar door opens inward into the stairwell. If Sophia flattens herself to the wall behind it, Becca won’t see her.
“Take off your dressing gown and put it over there.” I nod toward the darkest corner of the cellar. “We’re going to pretend you’re lying on the ground.”
Sophia obliges, her teeth already chattering as she arranges the dressing gown. It’s not perfect, but Becca’s eyes will be adjusting to the darkness, and all I need from her is a few steps into the cellar…
“I’ll tell her you’re sick,” I tell Sophia. “That she needs to help you. As soon as she comes down the stairs, you run into the kitchen and straight out of the house, okay? Don’t stop for anything, you understand?”
“And you too?”
“You’re going to have to do this one on your own, sweetheart.” I lock my eyes on hers. “You can do it, I know you can.”
The light beneath the door flickers, Becca moving about the kitchen. We haven’t got much time.
“Behind the door, now, sweetheart. Quiet and still as a mouse.”
Sophia scurries to take up position at the top of the stairs, pressing herself into the wall. The light is too poor for me to see her face, but I know she’s looking at me, and I wish I could give her a thumbs-up instead of the encouraging smile she won’t be able to make out. A door bangs upstairs. “Ready?” I whisper.
“I’m ready.”
Too late, I realize I only told Sophia to run, not where to run. Mo won’t open her door at this time of night, and the third cottage in our terrace is a holiday house, rarely visited. The next nearest house, as the crow flies, is across the park to the housing estate. Even if Sophia makes it across the park, whose bell will she ring? Her friend Holly lives somewhere in the estate, but even I struggle to find it amid the maze of streets. What if she gets lost?
What if Becca catches up with her?
I’m about to risk another urgent whisper across to Sophia when there’s a scraping noise and a loud thud. I look to the top of the cellar steps, but there’s no shadow, no movement across the strip of light beneath the door, and suddenly I feel a gust of cold air from above my head. Becca’s outside the front door, by the old coal chute. The entrance—an opening around two feet square—is hidden in the grass by the front wall of the house. It emerges around halfway up the cellar wall, the sloping angle of the chute itself making it impossible to see the outside world. The cold air is close enough to feel, yet I can’t see it, and I think how the opposite will be true for Mina.
Something drops from the ceiling, hitting my shoulder, then bouncing onto the floor. I hear the concrete slab being dragged back across the opening, and the air changes, as though a window’s been closed.
I stay still for a moment, listening to Becca’s footsteps running back toward the house. The front door bangs, and despair floods through me. Our only chance to escape, and Becca made damn sure we couldn’t take it. I call Sophia back.
“But when she opens the door, I have to be ready.”
“She’s not going to open the door, sweetheart.”
The package that hit my shoulder is a supermarket carrier bag, its handles tied tight in a knot Sophia can’t unpick. She rips at the plastic instead, taking out a bottle of water and two foil-wrapped sandwiches, one of which she hands to me.
“You’re going to have to feed it to me.”
“Like a baby?”
“’Fraid so.”
Sophia takes a sandwich in each hand, already eating hers as she holds out the other to my open mouth. It’s cheese, roughly cut and with no spread to moisten the bread, and my first bite sticks in my throat. I have a fleeting panic that I’m choking before the lump moves down my gullet and I can breathe again. Sophia copies me, an exaggerated gulp that uses her whole body, before she tears off another mouthful of sandwich.
“Better?”
She nods, her mouth too full to answer. The soothing tones of the graveyard shift radio presenter tell us they have more on tonight’s breaking news story, and I shush Sophia, jerking my head toward the radio.