chapter one
“I should not have watched that horror movie after dark tonight.” Sophie groans quietly.
What could possibly have possessed her to do that? Sophie Smith is home alone. Her company for the night is a small sleepy cat and an excitable imagination. Her housemate, Jenna, is away visiting her parents, and Sophie feels her absence acutely at night.
It is always at night that the less rational parts of the brain take over - fear of things under your bed, someone hiding in your closet, an imagined knock on your window. But knowing that doesn’t make it any less creepy. How easy to terrify yourself alone in a house after the sun goes down. You can’t see what’s going on in the dark. You can’t see into the dark corners, or see out into the yard, you can’t even see out the windows through your own reflection. Who’s skulking around outside? Who’s trying to slip in the backdoor? And what the hell is that noise in the upstairs bathroom?
Sophie takes a deep, forced breath. “It’s okay Sophie, you lunatic, you’ve just seen too many horror movies. What a stupid thing to do." Talking aloud to herself perhaps wasn’t helping. Her voice sounded too loud in the silence.
She glances at the kitten by her feet, curled up tight and fast asleep. He’s not scared. Sophie has a theory that if the cat is not worried then there’s nothing to worry about. She sighs and settles back into the couch. She reaches for a book, glancing distrustfully at the cover before opening it. Reading about the misadventures of a crazy man haunted by Satan is probably not the best way for her to throw off the tingling unease nestled under her skin.
There is a second noise upstairs in the bathroom, and Sophie’s heart skips a beat. Shivers race up the back of her neck, and the hairs on her arms stand abruptly on end. She forces a nervous giggle. “I’m an idiot.” She mutters to herself. She flicks the television back on. It is too quiet in the house. In the neighbourhood even. She can’t hear anything from the street outside at all tonight.
Deftly ignoring the sensation across her shoulders that there’s someone standing right behind her, she focuses all of her attention on the screen before her. Too many horror stories in her head does not mean that she happens to live in one too. Reality and fiction blur completely when you’re irrational. There’s some vampire show on television.
“Don’t know that this is going to help so much...” A stray branch scratches at the window. Sophie’s heart is starting to beat a little too fast.
Fear-induced and befuddled her mind abruptly dredges up a memory of her ex-boyfriend. It is the night he scared her under the oaks in the avenue by the cemetery. Strangely this memory appears to calm her. Sophie sees red every time she thinks of Evan DeSanto, so much red and so much anger that for a moment she forgets she is even afraid.
She wonders abstractedly if the red she associates with Evan’s cocky face doesn’t have something to do with the cherry-coloured roses he sent to her by accident with another girl’s name stamped across the card. Another flush of anger makes her chest tighten painfully. Yes, the fear is fading fast.
Another memory surfaces. This one is of Evan’s best friend, sent to tell Sophie that Evan was seeing someone else. How truly mortifying and heart-breaking that had been, how... oh good lord Sophie is suddenly furious. She takes an unsteady breath. Jonas. That was his friend’s name. Nice guy, even given the circumstances... How uncomfortable it had been for them both.
The night is now flooded with images of Evan. Sophie throws her book down in disgust. She will never be able to focus now. Even the images on the screen are slipping by unnoticed – handsome vampires and all.
Evan had never sent her flowers, not once, nor did he ever call and leave sweet messages, not like the one she had received, again by accident, on her phone and addressed to someone else. It was a different girl than the first one too. He was incredibly cute, Evan, and ridiculously stupid as it turned out.
Sophie resolutely picks up her book and forces herself to open it. She tries desperately to sink into the story. She does find it oddly fascinating reading about the absolute ruin of a susceptible man, and is that because of the correlation to Evan by chance? No. Evan is too self-obsessed to take advice from the devil.
She doesn’t know how long it is before she notices that the room, the house, has slipped back into that ominous silence. Slowly Sophie lets her book drop into her lap. She looks around. Everything is so still. She suddenly feels scared for no reason at all. Sophie looks down for the reassuring peace of her cat.
He’s gone.
Her heart thumps in her chest. She calls out for him, but there’s little point, he never comes anyway. Her voice sounds panicky in the quiet house. “Wow Sophie, get a damn grip.” She takes a deep breath. “Stupid scary movie.”
She glances at the show flashing across the television screen. It’s doing little to alleviate her sense of isolation. She can’t seem to shake this awful nervous feeling. She just keeps thinking about that irrelevant noise from the upstairs bathroom.
She tries again to think about Evan and how much she hates him. It is no longer helping. It’s like there is tension in the air all around her, all around the house, as though something terrible is about to happen...
Sophie gets up so quickly she startles herself, and her heart starts to really pound in her chest. She does a double take on her own reflection in the living room windows, and she stifles a scream. Sophie groans loudly, she’s scaring herself to death.
She wanders cautiously around the house, checking cupboards, checking closets and empty rooms. She feels stupid, but she can’t stop doing it. The doors are locked, of course. The windows are all closed. There is nothing here, everything looks as it should. But she can’t seem to find the cat.
Upstairs she stops outside the bathroom door. She takes a deep breath. Of course there’s nothing in here, she shakes her head at her silliness. The noises were indistinct, nothing, just over-exaggerated figments. Even so, the uncertainty refuses to abate and her heart is fluttering erratically in her chest. She swings open the door quickly. Fast is less painful. She takes in the bathroom.
Perhaps not.
Her heart stops.
Blood red rose petals. That’s all she can see. Scattered and strewn all across her bathroom floor, all across the top of the bathtub, all through the floor of the shower. Sophie can’t quite grip the reality of a scene so foreign. What...the...hell?
The coincidence doesn’t escape her that she was only just minutes ago thinking of red roses... and Evan... could Evan have done this? She shakes her head. No. She hasn’t seen him in months. And why would he?
Her scrambled thoughts take their time with the realisation that she was right, that she did in fact hear something in the bathroom earlier... Panic whips up on her like a cyclone. Sophie spins around. Dear god, someone was in her house! She is suddenly wishing frantically that it was Evan. She stands facing up the hallway, rigid and still, her back to the red-petalled bathroom. Is there someone in her house?
