The Magpies: A Psychological Thriller

  He went back into the bedroom and she looked up at him hopefully.

  ‘Sorry, there’s no sign of it. I’m sure it’s long gone. Come on, let’s put dinner…’

  Kirsty let out a yelp and jumped backwards onto the bed. Jamie spun round. A brown spider was scuttling across the carpet towards him.

  ‘Catch it!’ Kirsty yelled.

  He crouched and cupped his hand over it, then picked it up and took it over to the window. He could feel its feathery legs wriggling against his palm. With his free hand he opened the window – breathing in another lungful of that sickly sweet, foul smell – and tossed the spider down into the garden. He walked towards Kirsty.

  She shrank away and pointed towards the bathroom. ‘Go and wash your hands before you touch me.’

  ‘It won’t have given me any contagious diseases, Kirsty.’

  ‘Just wash them. Please. I can’t bear the thought that it’s been on your skin.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  He washed his hands halfheartedly, dried them, then walked back into the bedroom. His stomach growled. It was nine-thirty and he hadn’t eaten all day.

  ‘I’m going to put dinner on, OK? What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  In the kitchen, he opened the fridge and stuck his head inside. Recently, they had been living on pre-prepared meals from Sainsbury’s, with a side-serving of frozen chips or vegetables. Jamie pulled out a vegetable lasagne, shook some chips onto a baking tray and turned the oven on. Before closing the fridge he took out a beer and cracked it open. He went over and sat beside Kirsty in front of the TV.

  ‘Was it the same spider?’ Kirsty asked.

  He had no idea. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that?’

  ‘No. I’m sure it was.’

  Thirty minutes later he crossed to the kitchen to check if the dinner was ready. Not quite. He took another beer out of the fridge.

  ‘Are you having another drink?’ said Kirsty disapprovingly.

  ‘Well, I’m drinking for two now.’

  She tutted.

  ‘Actually, I’m celebrating – celebrating Paul’s recovery.’ He paused. ‘Assuming he has recovered.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He just seemed a bit odd. Cold. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see me.’

  ‘You can’t expect him to be exactly as he was before the accident – not straight away. He’s probably experiencing a form of shock. And having all these people expecting him to be just as he was before the accident – I expect he feels a bit confused and pressurised. Like you said earlier, it must be quite overwhelming.’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ll go and see him during the next few days.’ He sipped his beer. ‘I can entertain him with tales of all that’s been going on here. Not that he was very interested when I tried to tell him today.’

  ‘I bet he’ll be really angry with Chris.’

  ‘No, that’s just it. He’s not. He said he was sure it was an accident.’

  ‘Really? Maybe the so-called accident’s made him turn religious. Forgive those who trespass against you and all that. God, what if he had one of those near-death experiences, where he was floating towards the light and a voice was calling him? He might become a born again Christian.’ She laughed at a sudden image of Paul standing in the street handing out religious pamphlets, trying to persuade lost souls to embrace their maker. ‘Maybe he’ll change his name to Lazarus.’

  ‘You’re dread…’ He stopped dead.

  ‘What is it?’ She followed his gaze. ‘Oh, shit!’

  A small black shape crossed the threshold of the room and ran towards them on eight skinny legs. Kirsty jumped up onto the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her. ‘It’s come back.’ In her eyes, the spider wasn’t small or skinny. It was huge, with fat legs that drummed on the floorboards.

  Jamie stood up. ‘No, it’s a different one. This one’s stripy and has got shorter legs.’

  She gasped. ‘I don’t want a fucking description of it. I want you to get rid of it. Quickly.’

  He knelt down and reached out for the spider, which was heading straight towards him. He grabbed it and, as he stood up, he heard Kirsty cry out.

  ‘It’s alright, I’ve got it.’

  ‘No – look – there’s another one.’

  A second spider scurried into the room, heading straight towards the sofa. Jamie could tell that the magnifying glass of Kirsty’s arachnophobic vision made the spider swell to the size of a tarantula. ‘I don’t believe this,’ Kirsty yelled, her voice cracking. ‘What’s going on?

  Jamie ran over to the front window, opened it with one hand, threw the first spider out, then tried to catch the next one. It ran under the sofa. Kirsty jumped off and ran over to the other side of the room. She was breathing heavily, clutching her chest.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Jamie in a soft voice. ‘It’s only a little spider. It can’t harm you.’

  ‘Just catch it. Please. Oh my god…’ She screamed and started jumping up and down.

  Jamie turned towards the doorway, to the spot at which Kirsty was pointing. Another spider entered the room. Then another. And another, and another, and another. A whole family of spiders, all of them with fat brown legs – all of them enormous, poisonous, hungry, as far as the barefoot Kirsty was doubtless concerned – scuttling across the carpet towards her.

  ‘Jamie!’

  She screamed and threw herself back onto the sofa, eyes wide with phobic terror, clutching her feet to protect them from the wriggling legs that she was so scared of. She started to hyperventilate. Tears burned her eyes.

  Jamie was frozen to the spot. He couldn’t believe this. Where were they all coming from? There was no way he could catch them all, so he picked up his shoe and brought it down on the first spider.

  ‘Kill them!’ shouted Kirsty.

  The body of the first spider was stuck to the sole of his shoe. He whacked the second spider, then a third.

  Kirsty shrieked. She had never let Jamie kill a spider before. No matter how much she hated and feared them, she would never allow one to be harmed. Now she wanted to see them crushed. She wanted them all dead. ‘Kill them!’

  He killed them all, one by one, then sat back, panting, his heart thumping. He looked at the little wrecked bodies and immediately felt remorseful. They were only spiders, but they were so small and helpless. It was Kirsty’s fault for getting so hysterical.

  He turned towards her. ‘Look what you made me do!’

  ‘What?’ She looked up at him. Her face was streaked with tears. He realised how petrified she had been, and now he felt remorse for shouting at her. He sat on the edge of the sofa and hugged her. She was shaking.

  ‘Where did they all come from, Jamie?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I really don’t know.’

  ‘They were coming straight for me. They wanted to get me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  She wiped her eyes with a trembling hand. ‘I bet it was them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Them. Lucy and Chris. They sent them up here to get me.’

  ‘How could they have?’

  ‘Easily! They could have put them under the door, or I don’t know, maybe they trained them.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know what Lucy said about Mary being a witch. Well, maybe it’s really Lucy who’s the witch. She’s evil enough. I bet they poisoned us last night. We saw her go into the kitchen in the restaurant. And then they made those spiders come up here to get me.’

  ‘Kirsty, you should hear yourself. And how would they know you’re scared of spiders?’

  ‘They listen to us all the time. They’ve probably got it recorded.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They’re probably listening to us right now, gauging our reaction, laughing at us. Oh God.’

  Jamie shushed her. ‘Kirsty, this is crazy. Lucy and Chris are nasty, twisted people. We know
that. But they’re not witches. They’re not able to command spiders and send them after people.’

  Suddenly, the flat was filled with a deafening series of beeps.

  ‘Shit! The dinner!’ Jamie jumped up and ran towards the oven. Black tendrils of smoke emerged from the kitchen, setting off the smoke alarm which emitted a shrill, maddening beeping noise. He took the alarm down from its position on the wall, turned it off and then opened the oven door. A cloud rose up and made him cough. He pulled out the dinner. The chips looked like charcoal pencils; the lasagne was ruined.

  Kirsty came over and looked at it. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry any more, anyway.’

  Jamie opened the other front window to let out the smoke. Then he dug out the dustpan and brush and swept up the bodies of the dead spiders, throwing them out of the window. He deliberately let them fall onto the Newtons’ doorstep. Hopefully Lucy was scared of spiders too.

  After that, Kirsty made him check the bed, the bath, under the sofa and wherever else there was a nook or cranny that might possibly hold a spider. To his great relief, he didn’t find any.

  Kirsty didn’t sleep that night. She lay awake, staring at the ceiling, imagining that giant spiders were in the bed, or were pattering across the bedroom carpet, coming towards her; coming to get her.

  Sixteen

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘What?’ Jamie was taken aback by the question.

  Mike leaned forward across the desk, his face framed by two computer monitors. ‘I said, What are you going to do about it?’

  Jamie fell silent. He held a ballpoint pen between finger and thumb, tapped it on the edge of his keyboard, stared blindly at the screensaver on his monitor. All around him people tapped away at their keyboards, had important telephone conversations, wandered to and from the coffee machine. The server in the corner hummed noisily; the fax machine bleeped. But Jamie was oblivious to it all.

  What was he going to do about it?

  He had come into work this morning with the need to talk to someone, to pour it all out, to get it off his chest. He didn’t expect catharsis, just some relief. Last night, at 3 a.m., Lucy and Chris had played extracts from War of the Worlds – the seventies ‘rock opera’ – not at full volume, but just loud enough for Jamie to hear it and for it to come seeping into his dreams. He had woken up and jumped out of bed in a state of shocked disbelief and stared at the floorboards. When he was eight or nine, his parents used to play this album late at night after he’d gone to bed. And as a little boy with a large imagination, he had lain awake, convinced that the Martians were coming for him. The album came with a booklet of paintings, in which men and women ran screaming through the Victorian streets, pursued by a Martian death machine; red alien liquid bubbled between once-glorious buildings; a priest held up a cross before an unimpressed Martian who fired off a death ray to obliterate him. All these images of horror and destruction floated before his eyes, along with a few original ones, conjured up by his pre-adolescent mind. In the end, after a week of nightmares, he reluctantly told his mum why he had been so tired and unhappy recently and, filled with remorse, she had binned the album, making him promise that he would tell her if anything scared him in the future. He shouldn’t be ashamed, even if he was a big boy now.

  Maybe I should phone her now, he thought. Tell her I’m afraid. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

  How on earth had Lucy and Chris known? They had managed to pinpoint how the Newtons knew about Kirsty’s arachnophobia – they’d mentioned it at the dinner party – but how did they know about Jamie’s old fear? He racked his brains. Had he mentioned his fear of that music to them? No; no he hadn’t. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Not even Kirsty. In fact, he had practically forgotten that album existed. In the early nineties, someone had released a dance mix of the War of the Worlds music, and he found that it didn’t scare him any more – not in the sweaty centre of a heaving, lively nightclub, anyway. But at three a.m., in the dark, the music coming up from beneath the floorboards brought back all those childhood terrors. He could almost see the alien tripods outside the window. He thought harder, tried to work it out – but there was no way they could have known about his fear. No way.

  But he had to put a stop to it. Kirsty buried her head beneath the pillow while he dressed hurriedly, pulling on his jeans and a T-shirt without bothering with his underwear. He went outside and ran down the steps. It was freezing and, apart from the music coming from the basement flat, utterly silent.

  He banged on the door and on the window pane. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. He lifted the letterbox and shouted through it, ‘I’m going to call the police.’ But he knew he wouldn’t. He would be too embarrassed. The music scares me, officer. How pathetic did he want to look? He went back upstairs and got back in bed, and at that very moment the music stopped. He lay absolutely still, dreading that it might start up again. Eventually, he tried to get back to sleep. But he was too angry; his heart was beating too fast. And it would be time to get up in a couple of hours anyway. So he got out of bed again and plugged the Playstation in. He played Call of Duty, imagining that every enemy soldier he mowed down was Lucy or Chris. Kirsty got up too and sat beside him, watching. She barely spoke.

  Weeks had gone by since the spider incident. For the first week, Kirsty had made Jamie check the bed before he got in it; the bath before she would turn the taps on; the front room before she would enter it. She was convinced that it was going to happen again: another spider invasion. But when it didn’t, she relaxed, and then crossed to a state beyond relaxed. She took on an air of calmness and serenity. She walked around with her hands on her belly a lot, even though she was far from showing. She bought parenthood magazines and looked up baby sites on the internet. She was imagining herself in a perfect future, a future in which she would have her child and everything would be alright. She seemed to forget all about the problems with Lucy and Chris. She stopped mentioning the spiders, although one evening a spider made an appearance on television and she shouted at Jamie to change the channel. Quickly. Quickly.

  Now she sat beside Jamie and watched him exorcise his anger and frustration. At six thirty, as the sun struggled to lighten the sky, she went off to the bathroom to be sick. Morning sickness had arrived with a vengeance. And then they went to work.

  Jamie drove her to the hospital – he drove her everywhere now, since she refused to go on the Tube or catch a bus, and he was glad to – and then he went to his own workplace. God, he was tired. He thought he might fall asleep at the wheel. He turned the radio up and let the DJ’s relentless chatter keep him awake. At work, he took the lift to the floor where his office was located and went straight to the coffee machine. The pale brown drink that emerged from the machine didn’t really taste like coffee, but it contained a trace of caffeine and he added a lot of sugar. As he carried the drink over to his desk a snatch of War of the Worlds entered his head and he shuddered.

  ‘Are you alright, Jamie?’ asked Mike, who sat at the opposite desk. Mike held the same position as Jamie – software installation engineer – and had joined E.T.N. a few months before. He was the same age as Jamie, with the same educational and occupational background, but he was more of a lad: a dedicated pleasure-seeker, firmly single, hanging out with a group of hard drinkers whose main interests were football and women – in that order. As far as Jamie was concerned, Mike was a good bloke to work with, but he wasn’t a potential ‘outside work’ friend. They talked shop most of the time, but today, when Mike asked him if he was alright Jamie saw the opportunity to talk to somebody, no matter how unlikely his choice of confidante, and he grabbed it.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  That was the question.

  ‘Why don’t you move out?’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘No way. I refuse to let a pair of nutters like that drive me out of my home. I love that flat. I know we haven’t been there ver
y long, but it feels like the place I want to be. The place we want to be. All three of us.’

  He and Kirsty had discussed this when the problems with Lucy and Chris started, and then again after the night of the spiders. Should they get away, try to find somewhere new? They both reacted with a firm No. This was their dream flat. Jamie remembered how happy they had been when they moved in just a few months before. It was the most fantastic place – it would be incredibly difficult to find anywhere as good in their price range. There was plenty of space for three, especially after Jamie had turned the spare room into a nursery (he already had grand plans about what he would do). Maybe in a few years, if they had a second child, they would need to find somewhere bigger, but that might also involve a move out of London.

  ‘We can’t let them win, Kirsty,’ Jamie said. ‘That’s what they want, I bet. They want us to move out. God knows why – maybe they just don’t like having people live above them. Or maybe it’s us. Whatever the reason, I am not going to let a pair of psychos like that force me out of my home.’

  ‘I’d feel exactly the same if I were you,’ said Mike now. ‘You’ve got to stand your ground. But I don’t know how you’ve managed to keep your temper. If it was me I’d have been down there to sort them, taken some of the boys with me. I’d put a bomb through their letterbox.’

  ‘I have been down there.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘They won’t talk to me. They never answer the door. And the time I went into their garden to talk to them they called the police.’

  ‘Who were a dead loss, I expect.’

  ‘Yes. They just told us to keep a record of what was going on.’

  ‘Big deal.’ Mike looked left and right to see if anyone was listening, then leaned forward. ‘From what you say, these people need dealing with in a more direct manner. You can’t be reasonable with people like them, Jamie. They don’t speak the same language as the rest of us.’