of the garden. My footsteps crunched on the broken glass, echoed in the empty kitchen and I put a hand over my mouth and nose to try to muffle the smell, which was stronger again in here. I shone the torch around the room, illuminating cupboards and shelves and a cooker, which were dirty, the surfaces dulled with a sticky film of dust.
Maybe it was just food that had gone bad, I thought. Maybe whoever had lived here had departed in a hurry and left the remains of their dinner behind. But the fridge door stood open and it was unlit, nothing but black mould inside. It was obviously unplugged.
I pushed the kitchen door open slightly and then there was enough light for me to turn off the torch. I was in a dining room, the table and chairs in place, a tablecloth covering the table and two placemats upon it. A table lamp sat on a sideboard, a modern design but, like everything else, with a thin film of dust blurring its surface. It was lit.
I could hear a sound. Low voices, but a bit tinny – it sounded like Radio 4. The radio was on? Surely, then, someone was in here? I felt as though I was being watched, as though someone just out of my line of sight was waiting.
I told myself not to be so paranoid, and went into the hallway. It looked lived-in, the house – carpet on the floor and pictures on the walls. The only light came from the table lamp in the dining room.
‘Hello?’ My voice was quieter in here, my footfalls on the carpet muffled. The smell wasn’t as bad, or was it just that I was getting used to it, growing accustomed to breathing through my mouth?
The radio was louder now, the sound of an interview between a male voice and a female, the woman arguing a point and the man placating her. Above that another noise, or was I imagining things now?
I felt something against my leg and jumped, a squeak of panic coming out of my mouth before I could stop it. But it was only the cat, winding herself around my ankles once before dashing off through the dining room door and into the next room. ‘Lucy!’ I said, urgently, not wanting to have to crawl behind someone’s sofa to try and coax her out again. I pushed open the door to the living room at the front of the house. It was dark in here, the light from the dining room not penetrating this far into the gloom. The curtains were closed, the gap between them letting in only the faintest glow from the street-lights outside. I turned on the torch again and as I did so I caught a movement, a flash of white. It was Lucy again, rolling on the carpet in the middle of the room. I could hear her purring above the thudding of my heart.
The room was furnished, but sparsely: a sofa, a low coffee table in front of it. On the table, a bunch of what must have once been carnations, stiff and brown in a waterless vase.
The beam of the torch passed over an armchair. And even having felt a presence, half-expecting to find somebody in here, in this room, I gasped at the shock of seeing a person there, one horrifically distorted out of shape: black instead of white, the skin of the face stretched and split in places, the eyelids drawn back into a wide, black, hollow stare and the belly blown up like a balloon, stretching the fabric of what it was wearing – what she was wearing, for it was a skirt, and the hair that still clung to the skull was long, fine, lank, and maybe still fair in places, although it was coated in something – grease, some substance. And what made it worse was that there was movement in the abdomen, as though she was breathing – although surely this wasn’t possible? But when I looked closer I realised that her stomach was composed of a swarming, churning mass of maggots… And despite the horror, and my deep, heaving, choking breaths, I could not tear my eyes away. One hand was resting on the arm of the chair, and the other hand, the forearm from the elbow to the hand, was on the floor beside the chair, as though she’d dropped it, knocked it off the edge like a misplaced remote control.