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‘Who the hell are you?’ she cries as she discovers that this house of horrors contains yet another surprise for her. As if a wife returning home to catch her and her lover in bed before stabbing a man to death and then chasing her with that same knife wasn’t enough, now she has me to deal with. But I don’t have a knife. Just a backpack full of stolen goods.
She has the knife.
Which means she has the power.
‘You don’t know me, and I don’t know you,’ I say firmly. ‘I think it’s best if we keep it that way, considering what has happened here.’
I try to take a look down the stairs then to see if I can spot Maggie and whatever condition she might be in, but I can’t quite see her. But the fact she still isn’t making any noises is telling.
‘You’ve been here this whole time?’ the woman cries aghast. ‘Where the hell have you been hiding?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, figuring that telling her I was under the bed where she was having sex before all the stabbing started is not going to help anyone. ‘What matters is what we do next.’
‘I just want to get out of here,’ the woman cries, and I can see that. It’s clear from her expression and her posture. She is afraid, and weak, and tired. But she is still holding the knife, and while she might not look like a killer, she still possesses the kind of weapon that could make her one.
‘I understand,’ I reply calmly. ‘Me too.’
I see her look down the stairs then.
‘I think she’s dead,’ she says, referring to the woman she fought on the staircase before she emerged as the victor.
‘Can I check?’ I ask, unsure what answer I might get.
The woman thinks about it for a second before she nods.
With permission granted, I very cautiously walk towards her, approaching the staircase with my eyes on the knife.
‘Any chance you could put that down?’ I ask her hopefully, but the woman shakes her head.
‘This is the best I’ll do,’ she says as she takes a step backwards, giving me the space to pass her by, but not giving up her control of the blade.
‘Okay,’ I say with an accepting nod as I reach her, as satisfied as I can be in the circumstances that she isn’t going to stab me as soon as I am within striking distance.
As I move past her, I look down the stairs, and that’s when I see Maggie. Her body lies twisted on the floor, a striking sight that confirms why she hasn’t made a noise since falling down the staircase.
She does look dead.
But I’d have to properly check to be sure.
I descend the stairs, glancing back behind myself a couple of times to see what the woman with the knife is doing. But she remains in the same place she was in when I passed her, the bloodied blade still in her hand, but the only part of her that is moving is her eyes as she watches me go.
I reach the bottom of the stairs, and now I am as close to this body as I was to the one upstairs. But while that man was clearly dead and covered in enough of his own blood to make that obvious, there are no markings on Maggie. She doesn’t look good, but I’m going to have to feel for a pulse to find out how bad things really are for her, so I kneel and do just that.
Pressing two fingers against the side of her contorted neck, I wait to see if I feel any signs of life within her.
The fact that I don’t almost moves me to tears for the second time today.
But just like the first time, I stay strong.
That’s because, just like the first time, this is not over yet.
‘I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident! She slipped and fell! She was trying to kill me! Anything that I did was in self-defence! You know that, right?’
The frightened cries from the top of the stairs wash over me as I contemplate the two corpses in this house. How sweet it was when I had this property to myself. How easy and effortless it was to roam about the rooms without a care in the world. But now I’m here with two dead homeowners and a babbling woman who is the only person besides me who understands what happened here.
I look away from the woman at the bottom of the stairs and look to the one at the top of it.
‘Come down here,’ I say to her.
