While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine!. Stephanie Merritt
He was no one she recognised from her waking life, of that she was certain. A figment of her imagination, then, an ideal lover who had touched and manipulated her with such authority, such intimate knowledge.
The moon slipped out from between two banks of cloud, spilling pearly light across the floor. Outside, she could hear the low, insistent roar of the sea. She shivered, and was on the point of turning to leave the room, when a shadow shifted at the edge of her vision: the faintest hint of a movement. She stepped towards the windows, peering out at the black water. Immediately she flinched back. There was someone on the beach, huddled into the overhang of rock at the southerly curve, looking up at the house. Or, at least, she thought she saw a figure; panicked, she stifled a cry and grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch, wrapping it around herself before she dared approach the window again. A cloud moved across the face of the moon and the pale rim of sand was lost in darkness; when it reappeared, there were only the rocks and the steady, breaking waves. Zoe breathed out, feeling her pulse hammering in her throat, and almost laughed with relief. She needed to sleep, she told herself; her brain was wired and exhausted, that was all. She rested the tips of her fingers against the glass and took a last look at the beach, to reassure herself that there was no one there; a seabird, perhaps, or even a seal, or the movement of a cloud casting shadows. The beach remained empty. She sighed, letting her breath mist the pane.
Slowly, she became aware of a sound behind her. Barely audible, a faint scratching of nails on wood. Drawn-out, unnerving; her neck prickled and a sick chill flooded through her. Someone was trying to get in. Though the sound had stopped, the stillness that followed was the silence of held breath. She could feel it, unmistakably: a presence on the other side of the door. She did not dare turn around; instead she stood, frozen rigid, her head bowed as if waiting to receive a blow, naked shoulders stippled with cold and fear. The scratching came again, a slow raking against the wood. Zoe heard herself whimper, biting the flesh of her thumb; the sound stopped, abruptly. Whatever was out there knew she was here. Setting her jaw, squeezing her fists so tight she felt her nails cut the skin of her palms, she straightened, crossed to the door, grasped the handle, and in one movement, before the fear could undo her, she wrenched it open—
The landing outside was empty. She slumped, pent breath tumbling out in a gulp that was half-sob, half-laughter, relief turning her limbs to water. She would have to tell Mick Drummond in the morning that, for all his painstaking restoration work, he still had mice in his walls.
She returned to her room, wrapped in the blanket, and was puzzled to see her clothes neatly folded on the armchair beneath the window. When had she done this? She squinted at the clothes, trying to summon some recollection of folding them, placing them, but a great weight of tiredness had descended on her; she could not, at that moment, bring herself to care. There were pyjamas somewhere in her case, but it was padlocked shut and she could not be bothered to rummage for the key. She slipped under the duvet, still wrapped in the blanket from the couch, drained and exhausted, her body sinking into the sheets. Sleep had almost reclaimed her, when the singing began.
It was the song Kaye had sung that evening, the lament that had made the old men cry and stirred such unexpected emotion in her, though she had not understood the words. The song Kaye had told her was a woman grieving for the one she loved, lost to the sea. And now a woman was singing it, somewhere in the house, though with none of the beauty or passion Kaye had brought to the melody. This voice was thin and sickly, scored through with desolation and loss. Zoe’s eyes snapped open; as she lay there listening, it seemed that the singer was in danger of being overwhelmed by the force of her grief; at times the voice would tail off, choked, and Zoe held her breath, waiting, until it resumed, the same refrain, quavering and hoarse. Though she knew it was only the echoes of her memory, another trick of her tired mind brought on by the emotional intensity of her disturbed night, she could not stand to listen to it any longer; she threw off the cover, pulled the blanket tight around her and opened the door to the landing, tensing on the threshold with her head on one side. The song was drifting from the floor above. She groped about on the wall at the foot of the stairs, but could not locate the light switch.
The stairs creaked as she ascended, one step at a time, pausing to listen. Again she felt that creeping cold at the back of her neck, a clenching in her bowel. Perhaps she had not been mistaken; perhaps someone had found a way into the house. She had locked the front door behind Mick, but there must be other doors and windows in a place this size; she had not checked them all before she fell asleep. But why would an intruder advertise her presence by singing? Zoe advanced as far as the landing, wishing she had thought to bring some makeshift weapon – a poker, or even an umbrella. If someone had broken in, they could be unhinged, and potentially dangerous. She glanced over the banister into the pool of darkness below, thinking of the telephone on its table in the hall; briefly she considered running back down, calling Mick and Kaye. How long would it take Mick to drive here – fifteen minutes, perhaps, twenty at the most? She stopped, took a breath, registered her own choice of words. If someone was there. She had somehow undressed herself and sleepwalked naked into the gallery; who was to say she was not still half-asleep, imagining the singing, the presence, the scratching? She could not call Mick and Kaye in the middle of the night, on her first night here, because she was hearing things and it turned out she was not as brave or self-reliant as she wanted to believe. Gripping the banister, she walked the length of the second-floor landing with a purposeful stride, her mouth set firm. The singing continued, its volume unvarying, as if the singer was oblivious to Zoe’s footsteps or the creak of the stairs. It seemed to be coming from behind a closed door at the far end. Zoe stood in front of it, hesitated, then tried the brass knob. The door was locked.
She turned it in both directions, rattled it hard, but the door refused to give, and the singing continued, unperturbed; if anything, the bleak emotion in the singer’s voice intensified. Zoe found herself arrested by the sheer force of the woman’s grief; it infected the atmosphere of the entire house, soaking through Zoe’s skin until she felt saturated with it, until she feared her heart might crack open with the weight of such fathomless loss. She mastered herself, tried the door once more. When it remained stubbornly locked, she knocked on it, hard, with her knuckles.
‘Who’s there?’ she called, tentatively at first, then bolder. ‘Who are you? Come out.’
No one answered, though she thought the voice seemed to grow a little fainter. She knocked again, shook the doorknob, and the next time she called, the song faded gradually away, like a track on an old record, leaving only an expectant silence. The landing settled into stillness. Zoe pulled the blanket tighter around her and leaned against the door, felled by exhaustion. There was no one here; she felt unaccountably angry with herself for her own weakness. As she turned towards the stairs, she sensed a draught on the back of her neck and, in her ear, a breathy sound that might have been laughter, or a sob.
When she woke, it was past eleven and sunlight streamed through a gap in the curtains. She was lying in bed, naked, the woollen blanket she had pulled from the couch in the gallery bundled under the cover beside her. So she had not dreamed that part, at least. She sat up, hugging her knees to her chest, squinting into the light. After the whisky, the jet lag and the disturbed night, she had expected a jagged-edged hangover, but as she uncurled her fingers and stretched her arms out, rolling her shoulders, she could detect no trace of a headache. Instead she felt unusually light and invigorated. She swung her legs over the bed and the sight of them – long, lean, pale – brought back a flash of images from the night before. That dream – she flushed at the memory of it, squeezing her thighs together. She used to have intensely vivid sex dreams when she was younger, but they had retreated into the background somewhere along the way, like the rest of her sex life. Back then, though, the lovers who featured in her dreams were variations on men she knew, often men she had never knowingly entertained any such feelings towards in her waking life. But this dream lover was different; he was unreal, perfect, formed from her own unarticulated longings. If she could, she would have fallen back on to the bed and invited the vision back, but she knew that would never happen. It was fleeting, delicious, gone. And everything that had followed – the fear, the scratching, the singing – seemed easy to explain away now: fevered imaginings of a mind torn abruptly from sleep and confused by dreams. Thank God she had not called Mick and Kaye with her wild night-terrors; how ridiculous she would have looked. She curled