Stalker

91

The door is yanked open and a man with a pistol steps backwards. His mouth is half-open and his dark brown eyes are staring at her. A smell of sweat reaches her. She registers every detail at that moment. His worn jeans with turned-up cuffs, the grass stain on his right knee, his padded black nylon jacket, and the logo of the New York Yankees sewn badly on to his cap.

‘I’m a police officer,’ he says in a gasp, and lowers his gun.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispers, and feels tears begin to flow.

He takes her hand and leads her towards the hall as he reports back to control on his radio:

‘Katryna is unharmed but the suspect fled through the kitchen door… yes, get the road-blocks set up and send some dog-units over here…’

She walks beside the police officer, leaning her hand against the wall, brushing against her diploma from her make-up course.

‘Give me a moment,’ the officer says, and opens the front door to secure their exit.

Katryna bends down to put her trainers on as a cascade of blood sprays across the hall mirror. Then she hears the sharp crack of the gun and the echo from the house on the other side of the road.

The plain-clothes officer throws his arm out, manages to grab the coats and pulls them with him as he falls. He collapses on his back among the shoes. The hangers rattle as blood pulses from the bullet-hole in his black jacket.

‘Hide,’ he gasps. ‘Go and hide again…’

Two further shots ring out and Katryna moves backwards. Someone is screaming like an animal outside. She stares at the wounded police officer, and at the blood seeping along the cracks in the tiled floor. A window pane shatters as another shot echoes through the neighbourhood.

Katryna runs at a crouch through the living room, slipping on the Tabriz rug and hitting her shoulder against the wall, but she manages to keep her balance, carries on out into the passageway and opens one of the cleaning cupboard doors. The mop handle falls out, pulling the red bucket with it, and the strainer comes loose and clatters on to the floor. Katryna picks the mop up and tries to get it to stand up among the clothes. A jacket falls down and the thick hose of the vacuum cleaner pushes the other door open.

She hears two more shots, leaves the cupboard and carries on towards the kitchen. She sees the glass door and the darkness outside, opens the cellar door and starts to go down the steep staircase.

She’s so frightened she can barely breathe, and can only think that this is an organised hate-based crime, that the racists have found them, that they’re upset about Adam buying a new Jaguar.

She can hear police cars through the stone walls, and thinks that she can hide in the boiler room until the police have caught the intruder.

Her anxiety increases as she heads down into the darkness.

She clings on to the cool handrail, blinks and opens her eyes wide, but can hardly see a thing.

The air smells of stone, damp pipes and oil from the boiler.

She’s treading carefully, but the steps still creak under her weight. Finally she reaches the tiled floor. She blinks and can make out the washing machine as a paler shape in the darkness next to the door with the rope around its handle. She turns round and moves in the opposite direction, past Adam’s old pinball machine, and into the boiler room. She carefully closes the door behind her and hears a whining sound.

Katryna stands still with her fingers on the door handle, listening. The pipes are clicking faintly, but otherwise everything is quiet.

She moves further in, away from the door, thinking that she’ll just sit here, it won’t be long, not now that the police have arrived.

She hears the whimpering sound again. Very close to her.

She turns her head but can’t see anything.

The whimpering becomes a weak wheezing sound.

It’s coming from the safety valve of the hot-water tank.

Katryna feels her way forward and finds the paint-stained stepladder standing against the wall.

She unfolds it in silence and moves it to the wall beneath the window up by the ceiling.

Someone has stolen Lamassu, she thinks. The embroidered cloth with her protective deity, her protector, that’s why this is happening.

She can’t stay in the house, she never wants to come back here again. She twists the two catches of the window and is pushing the little window against the weeds when she feels a cold draught around her ankles.

Someone’s coming up behind her, she’s convinced of it.

Someone’s got in through the cellar door, they’ve cut the rope holding it closed and are on their way inside.

It’s impossible to open the window properly. She tries again, but it keeps hitting something. Panting for breath, she reaches out with her arm, through the weeds, and feels that the lawnmower is parked too close.

She tries to push it away with her hand, pushing even though she can feel the stepladder slide backwards beneath her. She turns the wheel of the lawnmower by hand and manages to roll it a few centimetres.

The window slides open and she starts to crawl out as the door to the boiler room bursts open and the light is switched on. The old starter switch makes the fluorescent tube flicker. Katryna tries to scramble out as the steps are yanked away from beneath her and clatter to the floor. Her legs thud against the wall, her knees sting, but she clings on to the frame and fights to pull herself up.

The first stab of the knife hits her back so hard that she hears the point scrape the concrete wall in front of her.