“Or how about now?”
Before I could answer, he fired the stapler into his eye.
Vuh-schunk!
“No!” I screamed.
The buzzing in my ears shrilled like the string of a strained violin. Fergus lowered the stapler. I didn’t want to look and yet I was still looking. The metal staple hovered in the centre of his eyeball. As his gaze shifted, it flickered, catching the light, a silver strand of confetti in a night sky. There wasn’t as much blood as I thought there would be. But his pupil… God, it looked like his pupil was melting. It dripped down to the side, like the darkness was spilling out of his eye.
“I don’t feel better,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel better! It never does. It just makes everything worse!”
He froze, staring at me. Two white clouds formed around the punctures in his cornea.
“It always makes things worse.”
And then I realised. This was it. I was being tested. This was my first challenge.
I lowered my axe and reached into my pocket for the thread.
“When she tests you,” Callie-Ann had said, “make a knot instead.”
“That story was never about humiliating me. Not really,” I said. “The way Rowan is around you makes me think that you’re not actually an arsehole. I mean, you’re an arsehole, but he knows why.”
Fergus’s body twitched, but he didn’t approach.
I tucked the axe under one arm and slowly wound the thread around my fingers.
“You told that story about the kid with the birthmark living in this house. So, you grew up in this village. I don’t think you’ve ever left it. And the way you’re so antagonistic to visitors, but not just any visitors—the ones from cities—makes me think everyone you grew up with—all your friends, your cousins—they all left. For university, jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses. And they left you behind. Like this village, and therefore you, weren’t good enough for them.”
I twisted the thread over and under itself, my fingers finding the right loops to pull.
“You accused me of thinking the people who lived around here were dumb. Superstitious. ‘Fucking idiots,’ you said. I don’t think that about you, by the way. But it’s clear that you do. You believe it so much you assume everyone else does, too. That’s why you told that story the way you did. You were shadow boxing with an assumption of an assumption.”
I pulled the thread tight. A knot.
“It was never about me. None of this is. You couldn’t even see me.”
The store was silent. The ringing in my ears had stopped. Fergus stared at me, still with that horrible grin and that awful, punctured eye.
But then the corners of his grin began to falter. The metals shelves in the aisles rattled and the fluorescent light flickered and buzzed. Fergus’s grin pulled down into an anguished scream as a tide of bloody staples tumbled from his mouth. With a roar he rushed me, stapler held at arm’s length in my direction.
I turned and bolted as the store crumbled and fell apart around me. Ceiling tiles rained down in clouds of dust, and cans of wood stain fell from shelves and rolled across the floor. Fergus’s screams were close behind me, along with that horrible metallic sch-unk sch-unk sch-unk! I ran for the front doors and the darkness beyond. Clutching the axe close and the thread tight in my fist, I shouldered the door open.
And fell onto the landing of 1a.
CHAPTER 48
Plaster dust settled around me in the gloom. I looked over my shoulder, half expecting Not-Fergus to still be chasing me with his stapler. Instead, I saw a me-shaped hole in a plaster wall. And through the plaster wall was the bedroom from before, only now it was dark. The beautiful drapes around the bed were grey, moth-eaten dust sheets; the sumptuous bed, a stained mattress, flattened in the middle and nibbled at the edges. Where I’d fallen through the wall, the plaster was crumbling and degraded. The bedroom was dilapidated and rotten, as if decades had passed since that luxurious vision I’d seen just moments before. Even the perfume was now a dank, musty odour of decay.
As my heart rate settled, the realisation surfaced that I must have done something right. I’d passed the first challenge. I ran my thumb over the knotted thread in my hand. I smiled, with relief, with surprise. Maybe Callie-Ann was right. Maybe I could do this.
Okay, I thought. Next.
I looked around the landing and then down. A flight of stairs led to an open floor below.
Oh good. More descending.
A warm light was cast against the wall and the gentle sound of music drifted up. I pulled myself to my feet, bracing my side as I picked up the axe. I hoped she didn’t have any other industrial-use stationery down there. Then I descended the stairs.
