A sombre Katherine looms above me, the door to the room at the end of the landing right behind her. How did I get to this side of the landing? Gulping, I realise Katherine must have dragged me.
‘Why did you have to come up here, Janine?’ she complains. ‘I was going to ask you for a quote for my book cover. Now I have to kill you instead. All that wasted PR potential.’
As Katherine sets her hands on me again, I order my body to fight back, but it’s too dazed to obey. She pins my hands to my chest with her knee. Then, from the back pocket of her jeans, she pulls out a length of rope and a kitchen knife.
I recoil at the sharp blade, but Katherine shakes her head.
‘I’m not going to stab you here, silly. It will ruin the carpet.’
Resting the knife on the floor, Katherine begins coiling the rope around my wrists. Desperately, I try to pull my hands free, but she swats my attempts away.
‘I’ve got to restrain you. You might try to escape otherwise, and I’m too tired for that. I was up all night perfecting a torture scene.’ Katherine pulls the rope tighter, crushing my wrists together. ‘Writing coaches always say how important the start of a book is. They rarely talk about the build-up or the end, but you’ve got to make sure readers don’t see the big reveal coming, haven’t you?’
My brain strains to make sense of what Katherine is saying. Everything about this feels surreal and wrong.
With my binds securely in place, Katherine stands by the door. ‘Brace yourself. She’s not smelling great these days.’
Then, Katherine presses down on the handle.
If I wasn’t already on the floor, the stench that escapes the room would have me on my knees. Bile rises up and burns my throat.My body jerks to the side to vomit, but Katherine stops me by pushing me onto my back. As I choke on vomit, her hands make themselves at home on my ankles once more.
When the grip of her bony fingers tightens, something primal in me comes to life. I thrash my limbs, convulsing, desperate not to be dragged into the room.
‘Janine, stop!’ Katherine shouts, but I refuse to listen.
Jerking my body in all directions, I expect Katherine to become more aggressive, but instead she drops my legs. They land with a thud that clatters through my skull. I let out a pained groan, but the sound is cut short when Katherine kneels beside me and grasps my jaw.
‘What’s so special about you?’ she hisses. ‘You don’t know literary theory. You’re not well-read. You’ve never even taken a creative writing course. Yet there you are, in the window of every bookshop I see. You don’t deserve it. Not as much as I do.’
I stare at Katherine through a fog of confusion. ‘This… this is about a book?’
‘Oh, don’t dismiss the thing that’s earned you thousands just because you’re going to die for it. That’s so hypocritical.’ Katherine lets go of my head with such venom, it flops to the side. ‘You know what it’s like to have a story inside you, but do you know what it’s like to have every publisher in the world say you’re not good enough to tell it? To have spent your entire life picking up your children’s socks and cooking dinner, then when you finally get time to do something for yourself, being told you shouldn’t have bothered?’
Katherine tips her head back to stare at the ceiling. I follow her eyeline, taking in the tiles above me. My head is reeling so much from the attack, the pattern seems to be moving.
‘I’ve had a lifetime of flimsy justifications from people who wouldn’t know talent if it punched them in the face, yet they control whether I make it or not. They say my writing isn’t bold enough, isn’t active enough, isn’t realistic enough. Not realistic enough, eh? Let’s see how realistic it is now I’ve described death more accurately than anyone ever has before.’
Gulping, my attention moves back to the woman before me. ‘What have you done?’ I whisper.
When Katherine fixes her stare on me, gone is any sign of the person I thought I knew. Instead, I come face to face with pure evil.
‘You always say real life is inspiration for stories, Janine. Well, I just happened to make my real life all about the tragic demise of Alexa Clarke.’
The world around me stops. ‘You’ve – you’ve killed Alexa?’
‘All those twists, yet you couldn’t figure this one out? And you call yourself a thriller author.’ Katherine tuts, standing and stretching her neck, while a disbelieving sob escapes me.
‘Why?’ I cry.
‘It was an accident,’ Katherine admits. ‘Alexa’s death, writing a crime novel – it was never meant to happen. But they’re always the best stories, aren’t they? The ones that come to you through the mist.’
With a sigh, Katherine leans against the wall behind her.
‘I always go for a walk a day, rain or shine. When she was alive, so would Alexa. We’d occasionally bump into each other. Over time, we got chatting. I’d tell her about my writing. She’d tell me about her life. But that day…’
Katherine’s eyes close as a ripple of rage washes over her.
‘I’d just been rejected again. This time by an agent I didn’t even want to work with,’ Kathrine spits the fact like it’s poison. ‘Do youknow how demoralising that is, to be told “no” by people you don’t value? I went to walk it off, then I saw Alexa. It was clear she’d been crying. God knows about what. That woman had it all.’