The Thirteenth Step

The first thing I did in Gran’s house was count the stairs.

I didn’t know why. It was the sort of thing you do in a new place, the way you check where the fire exit is. There was a long, narrow hallway with a brown carpet that smelled of dust and Gran’s lavender hand cream, and at the end of it a staircase rose to a landing and a dark shape that turned out to be a coat-stand. I went up and counted under my breath. Twelve steps. Then the landing, then another short flight to the bedrooms.

I came back down. Twelve.

“What are you doing?” said Mum, from behind a box that was bigger than her.

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing the lips thing.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You do it when you’re counting.” She put the box down on the hall floor with a thump that rattled a mirror, and for a second I saw her face properly, the way I hadn’t in weeks: worn at the edges, hair coming loose, eyes red from nights she thought I hadn’t noticed. “Sorry. It’s a lot. All of it. I know it’s a lot.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s Gran’s house and she’s gone and I’ve dragged you out of Leeds and your school and all your friends.” She laughed in a wobbling way. “But we couldn’t afford the flat, Jonah. And this is paid for. It’s ours.”

“I know, Mum.”

“I’m trying, love.”

“I know,” I said again, and put my arms round her, which was awkward, because I’m fifteen and nearly as tall as she is and the box was in the way. She smelled of tiredness and shampoo. Over her shoulder, the staircase went up into the shadow, and I thought, for no reason at all, twelve.

That first afternoon was all boxes. The house was one of those tall thin terraced ones, with creaky floors and radiators that clanked like someone knocking from inside the walls. Gran had lived here for fifty-one years. Her things were still in every room: a crocheted blanket on the settee, a clock that had stopped at ten past four, a jar of buttons, a hundred little china birds on every windowsill, facing the glass.

“Dad said she got a bit funny at the end,” I said, unpacking plates.

“Funny how?”

“I don’t know. He said she wouldn’t sleep upstairs.”

“Your gran slept on that settee for the last two years,” said Mum quietly. “I thought it was her hip.” She wiped a plate that was already clean. “She wouldn’t go up. She’d never say why.”

We looked at each other.

“She was old,” said Mum, firmly. “Old people get habits.”

I nodded. I was fifteen, and sensible, and I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t see. I went upstairs with a box of books, and as I climbed, my lips counted the steps by themselves.

Twelve.

It was Mum who found the cupboard.

She had been looking for the fuse box, and instead she opened the little door under the stairs, the one I’d assumed was a coat cupboard, and called me over in a strange flat voice. Inside there was no fuse box. There was a camp-stool, a flask, a torch, a heap of blankets, and a nest of old cushions, and on the inside of the door, stuck up with yellowed tape, a sheet of lined paper covered in Gran’s handwriting.

It was shaky. It had been written in a hurry, and gone over more than once in pen, so that the letters were thick and dark.

THE STAIRS

1. Always COUNT before you go up. Out loud if you have to.

2. If it is twelve, you are safe. Go on.

3. If it is THIRTEEN, do not go up. Go back. Sit on the settee. Leave the hall light on. Wait for the light.

4. Never put your foot on the thirteenth. Not for anything.

5. If someone calls your name from the landing, it is not me. It is not your mother. Do not answer.

6. Do not tell it what you are afraid of.

7. There was a long smudge, and then nothing. The paper had been torn.

I read it twice. Then I read it again, while Mum stood behind me, and I felt the skin go tight along my arms.

“She was ill,” said Mum at last. “She was eighty-four. It’s—she was confused, Jonah.”

“There’s a blanket in here,” I said. “She was sleeping in the cupboard, Mum. Look at the cushions. She was in here at night.”

“I know.”

“She wrote rules.”

“I know. I know.” Mum put a hand over her mouth. When she took it away her eyes were wet. “She’d have been so frightened. All alone. Why didn’t I know?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what you say.

We left the paper where it was. We closed the door. We ate beans on toast at the kitchen table, and Mum said all the right things about Gran and old age and memory, and I said yes, and agreed, and was very sensible. And at eleven I went up to bed, and at the bottom of the stairs, with my hand on the rail, I felt incredibly stupid and counted anyway.

One. Two. Three.

I counted all the way up, and my voice was a whisper in the dark, and I felt like a child.

Eleven. Twelve.

I reached the landing. I breathed out.

See? I thought. Nothing.

I woke at ten to three.

I had no idea why. It was very quiet. The radiators were ticking as they cooled, and the wind was blowing softly across the roof, but under both of them there was something else: a feeling, hard to describe, like the pause before a lift stops. I lay still and listened to the house.

I needed the loo.

That was all it was. The bathroom was downstairs, across the hall, and I had been putting off going for twenty minutes. In the end it got too much. I swung my legs out of bed, shivered across the cold boards, and went out onto the upper landing, where the light from the street made the stair-rail glow a dull and sickly orange.

I stopped at the top of the lower flight.

I’d like to say I didn’t think about it. I’d like to say I just went down. But the thing about a list of rules is that once you’ve read it, you can’t un-read it. I stood there with my toes on the cold wood and I thought of Gran, small and frightened and sleeping in a cupboard, and I thought, just once. Just to be sure.

I put my foot on the first step and began to count.

One.

The hall light was on, a feeble bulb far below, throwing my shadow up the wall.

Two. Three. Four.

It was like walking down into a well. The staircase seemed longer than it had in daylight, and narrower, and the carpet was soft under my feet, and the air grew colder with every step.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

I could see the bottom. The brown carpet of the hall. A blot of shadow where the coat-stand was. I counted ten, and I counted eleven, and I put my foot down on twelve—

—and below it there was another step.

I saw it with my eyes. I didn’t imagine it. A thirteenth stair, in the dark where the hall floor should have been, a long flat tread of the same brown carpet, ending in a skirting-board that had never been there before.

My foot was already coming down.

I stopped it. I don’t know how. I snatched it back so hard I lost my balance and sat down heavily on the twelfth step with a thud that rang through the house, and I stayed there with my heart hammering and my hands pressed flat to the carpet, staring at the thirteenth.

It was just a step. That was the horrible thing. It looked completely ordinary. Only it was a bit darker than the others, a bruise-coloured sort of brown, and when I looked at it for long enough I started to feel it was warm. A faint heat was coming off it, the way it comes off a hand held just above your skin.

And then, very slowly, it rose.

Not much. A half-inch. Perhaps less. The carpet lifted and sank, lifted and sank, with a patient, even rhythm, and I realised with a long dawning swoop of horror that it was breathing.

Don’t put your foot on the thirteenth. Not for anything.

I went back up that staircase on my hands and knees, backwards, with my eyes on the bottom step, counting under my breath like a prayer. Twelve, eleven, ten. I didn’t take my eyes off it once. Not once, not until I’d got to the landing, and then I ran for the bedroom and shut the door and sat with my back against it and my fists in my mouth.

Downstairs, in the hall, somebody said my name.

“Jonah?”

It was Mum’s voice. I’d have known it anywhere. Soft, warm, a bit hoarse with sleep, the voice she used when she’d had a bad dream and wanted me to come and sit with her.

“Jonah, love. Can you come down? I can’t sleep.”

I stopped breathing.

If someone calls your name from the landing—

But that wasn’t the landing. That was the hall. That was downstairs, and Mum’s room was upstairs, down the corridor from mine, and I could hear, quite clearly, through my own door, the soft snore she made when she was asleep. She was twelve feet away, through a wall.

“Jonah,” said the voice in the hall. It was closer now. It was at the foot of the stairs, and it was coming up. “Come on, love. Come and sit with me. It’s cold down here.”

I put my hands over my ears and I counted. It was all I could think to do. I counted to a hundred, and then to two hundred, and somewhere about three hundred and sixty the voice stopped. It did not go away. It simply stopped, mid-word, like a record being lifted. And the house was very quiet.

I stayed against the door till the sun came up.

“You’re not going to believe me,” I told Mum at breakfast, “so I won’t say it.”

“Say what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Jonah.” She put down the teapot. “Is this about the list?”

I wanted to say yes, to tell it all, to watch her face while I did. But in the morning light the kitchen was warm and yellow and ordinary, and the stairs through the doorway were just stairs, and I could already hear how it would sound. A step breathed at me. Something did your voice. I’d be sent to a doctor. Mum had enough going on.

“I just didn’t sleep well.”

“Neither did I,” she admitted. “I kept dreaming someone was standing at the bottom of the bed.”

My stomach went to ice.

“What did they look like?”

“I couldn’t see.” She smiled at me crookedly. “It’s the house. It’s just a strange new house.”

I waited till she left for the shop. Then I went next door.

I’d met Mr Adeyemi the day before, briefly: a tall old man in a cardigan, who had stood watching us unload the van from behind his front gate with a very particular expression. Not unfriendly. More the look of a man watching a car go the wrong way down a one-way street. He answered the door on the second knock, and I saw him take me in, my pale face and bitten nails and the shadows under my eyes.

“You’ve counted them,” said Mr Adeyemi.

“How did you—“

“Come in, young man. Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.”

He told me over tea, in a front room full of photographs of a woman I took to be his late wife. He had lived next door since 1974. He had been friends with my gran for fifty years. He had helped her put the tape on the cupboard door.

“It started with her husband,” he said. “Your grandfather, Arthur. Before you were born. He was a hard man, Arthur. A bully, if I’m honest. Drank. Shouted. And one night in the winter of 1989 he came home late, and there was a quarrel, and your gran locked herself in the bedroom. And Arthur went upstairs in the dark. And he counted. Out loud, the way he always did, because he was a man who liked to know how many of everything there was.”

“And?”

“And it was thirteen.” Mr Adeyemi turned his cup in his big hands. “I heard the fall from here. I was in my kitchen. It took me a good minute to understand what I’d heard.” He sighed. “They said he’d slipped. But Edith knew. She said she’d listened through the bedroom door, and he’d said, ‘That’s not right,’ and then he’d said it again, and then there was a sound like—like a door opening somewhere it shouldn’t.”

I felt very cold.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. She never knew. She called it the Counting.” He rubbed his face. “It lives in the stairs. It’s been there since before the house was built, as far as I can tell. I think the builders knew. There’s something in the deeds, an odd clause about the staircase, that it must always be built to twelve. They never said why. But it has a way of showing its thirteenth, in the dark, to anyone who’ll count. And then it wants to be answered.”

“Answered how?”

“It copies. It learns voices. It uses them to bring you down.” He met my eyes. “Edith’s rules were the best she could do. She worked them out over twenty years. Always count, because it can’t fool you if you know the number. Never answer, because it only learns from your replies. And don’t—“

“Don’t tell it what you’re afraid of,” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because then,” said Mr Adeyemi, “it will use it.”

He got up and went to a drawer. He rummaged for a minute, and came back with a torn sheet of lined paper and put it in my hand. It was the bottom half of Gran’s list. The ragged top edge matched, I thought, the missing seventh line.

7. It cannot stand in light that you have chosen. Count it OUT. And then say it: THERE IS NO THIRTEEN.

“She was going to tell your mother,” he said. “She kept meaning to. She was always frightened it would make her seem mad.” His voice cracked. “And then her hip went. And then the rest. And I think by the time she knew she was dying, she was so afraid for you both that she wrote it down and tore it, so that no one could use it in the wrong order. And I didn’t know where to find you.”

I looked at the paper.

Count it out. And then say it.

“Does it work?”

Mr Adeyemi looked at me with great sadness.

“Edith only ever tried it once,” he said. “She said she’d done it right. But she never slept upstairs again, not for a night, so I can’t say I believe it.”

I told her the next evening. I told her everything.

It didn’t go well. She listened to the first minute with her face going through a slow, careful series of expressions, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. When I got to Mr Adeyemi, she stood up.

“He’s lonely, love. He’s an old man, and he’s lonely, and your gran frightened him—“

“Mum. Please. Just count. Tonight. Count them. Just do it for me.”

“Jonah, I’m not going to—“

“Please.”

She looked at me for a long moment. And for the first time I saw something shift in her face, a flicker of doubt, or maybe only tiredness.

“All right,” she said. “Fine. I’ll count. And then tomorrow we’ll go and see someone. Someone kind. All right?”

“All right.”

That was how I came to be sitting on the settee at ten to three the following morning with a torch in my lap, listening to the radiator tick.

I couldn’t sleep upstairs. I’d put my sleeping bag on the settee, like Gran, and Mum had grudgingly said she’d stay in her room and “do the counting if it keeps you quiet.” I lay in the dark with the hall light on and the cupboard door shut, and every minute of every hour, I listened.

At ten to three, a stair creaked.

I sat up.

The hall light was a feeble yellow bulb. It lit the bottom of the staircase, the coat-stand, a slice of brown carpet. Above that, the stairs rose into the shadow, and at the top, on the first landing, I saw a shape.

A woman, in a dressing gown. Her hair loose. One hand on the rail.

“Mum?” I said, and my voice cracked.

“Jonah,” said Mum. “Don’t be frightened.”

I was off the settee in a second. I was in the hall. I had the torch clutched in both hands, and I was shining it up the stairs, and it lit her face, pale and strange and sleepy, her eyes open. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the steps, and she was walking down them, one at a time, with her arms loose at her sides.

Sleepwalking, I thought. Oh, God. She’s asleep.

“Mum! Mum, stop!”

“Eleven,” said Mum, in a flat dreamy voice. She put her foot on the next. “Twelve.”

And in front of her, in the circle of the torch, I saw it.

The thirteenth step. Dark, bruise-brown, rising and falling. And her bare foot hung over it, in the air, with the toes just beginning to lower.

I did the stupidest thing I have ever done.

I ran up the stairs.

I counted aloud as I went. I didn’t mean to; the numbers just tore out of me, loud and cracked, in the voice of someone drowning. “One! Two! Three! Four!” And the light from the torch jerked up and down the walls, and the steps seemed to stretch under my feet, lengthening, thickening, and at the sixth my legs went weak and I was sure that it would be my turn next.

“Eight! Nine!”

“Jonah,” said the voice that was my mother’s, from somewhere right beside my ear, close and warm and fond. “Jonah, you’re so frightened. Aren’t you? You’re frightened of losing her too.”

My foot slipped on the tenth step.

“That’s what you’re afraid of. Isn’t it? That she’ll go the way Gran went. That you’ll be alone in a house with nobody.”

I could not stop it. I felt the fear open up in me like a trapdoor. It was true. It was the truest thing I’d ever felt, and it was enormous, and the thing on the stairs could see it.

“Rule six,” it whispered. “Oh, Jonah. She did tell you.”

I got to the eleventh. Mum’s hand was in front of me, pale in the dark, floating in the air. Her foot was a hair’s breadth from the step.

I reached out, and grabbed it, and pulled.

We went down in a heap. She hit the stairs and slid, and I held on, and the torch spun away and clattered down the steps and rolled to a stop, shining at the ceiling. In its light, I saw the step.

It had turned its attention to me.

It wasn’t a step any more. It was a long, flat, shifting darkness, like the surface of a black pond, and a smell came off it of earth and cold iron. And it rose, up the stairs, one tread at a time, as if it was climbing us. It had stopped being polite.

I had my mother in my arms. I could feel her breathing, warm and slow. And I knew exactly what I had to do, because it was written on the torn paper in my back pocket, and because I’d never been so afraid of anything, and because there was nobody else.

I took a breath. I shut my eyes.

“One,” I said.

My voice was shaking.

“Two. Three. Four.”

It was coming closer. I could feel the cold.

“Five. Six. Seven.”

I counted all the way up, steady as I could, with my mother in my arms, and I made myself count slowly. I counted up to the number I wanted, and I did not let it hurry me. I could hear it breathing. I could hear it wait.

“Eleven,” I said. “Twelve.”

I opened my eyes.

“There is no thirteen,” I told it.

Nothing happened.

For a long, long moment, nothing at all. The torch lay on the stairs, a yellow ellipse on the ceiling. The darkness hung over the steps, trembling.

Then it flinched.

I saw it. I’ll swear to that for the rest of my life. A shudder ran through the black surface from one end to the other, the way a pond shivers when a stone goes in. It drew back, down the stair, one step at a time, with a long slow sound like a hundred people breathing out.

“There is no thirteen,” I said again. My voice was stronger this time. I had stopped shaking. “There’s twelve. There’s always been twelve. Go away.”

It went.

It went down through the carpet and the wood and the earth, and the last I saw of it was a faint dark ring on the hall floor that faded like breath from a mirror. The bulb in the hall flickered, steadied. The house ticked and settled.

Mum was heavy in my arms. I sat on the eleventh step with my back to the wall and held her, listening to her breathe, until the sky outside the landing window turned the colour of weak tea and a blackbird started up in the garden.

She woke at six. She looked up at me, bewildered, with sleep in her eyes.

“Jonah?” she said. “Why are we on the stairs?”

I told her I’d explain later. I told her it was a long story. I told her I’d make her a cup of tea and that we could go and see Mr Adeyemi, and she looked at me for a long time with that new strange quiet in her face, and then she said, “I dreamed I was walking to somewhere. Somewhere I’d been before, a long time ago. And someone was saying my name in your voice.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I know.”

She didn’t say anything else. She just put her arms round me, on the stairs, and held on, as hard as she could.

We left that morning. By evening we’d rented a room above a chip shop on the high street, with a bathroom you could touch both walls of and a view of a bus stop. Mum said we’d put the house on the market. She said it flatly, as though she hadn’t said it before and didn’t quite believe it now. She didn’t say anything about the stairs. She didn’t have to. She’d found Gran’s list, in my pocket, torn and rewritten, and read it three times in the light of the tiny kitchen, and then she’d gone very quiet and put her hand on mine.

I went back once, the next afternoon, alone. I told myself it was for the books I’d left upstairs.

It was a bright warm day. The sun was in the hall. The dust hung in a golden slant. The china birds on the windowsills all looked at the glass, and the clock that had stopped at ten past four was still stopped at ten past four.

I stood at the foot of the staircase and counted.

I did it aloud, firmly, the way I’d learned. One. Two. Three.

I counted all the way to the top. I reached the landing.

I stood a moment, with my heart beating. Then I turned, and went back down, counting again. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to hear twelve.

“Nine,” I said. “Ten.”

There was a pause.

“Eleven.”

I put my foot out for the next one, and found the hall floor.

I stood very still. The sun slanted through the fanlight. The house was silent, and I was standing at the foot of the stairs with the front door open behind me and the blackbird singing in the garden.

I went up again. I counted.

Eleven.

I counted a third time, with my lips moving and my hand tight on the rail, and I got the same number. Eleven. Eleven steps, in the golden afternoon light, where there had been twelve. I stood and stared at the staircase and a slow cold understanding crept up my back.

I told it there was no thirteen.

I never said anything about twelve.

Somewhere far above me, on the landing, where nothing was standing, a soft voice began to speak. It was my own voice. It was calm, and patient, and delighted with itself, and it was learning to count backwards.

“Ten,” it said.