Katya came after her; Tammy stumbled as she got up, and Katya would probably have caught up with her if Todd hadn’t finally found the courage to put his arms around Katya from behind, and hold her back. “All right!” he yelled to Tammy. “Go!”
Tammy didn’t need a second invitation. She ran out into the passage and slammed the door after her. It had a lock but regrettably no key.
She looked down the passageway to the back door. There was a glass panel in it. The glass wasn’t flawless, but it was clear enough for Tammy to see the shapes of the ghosts, assembled like a pack of hungry dogs eager to be let into the house. She could hear the odd, listless murmuring they made, the words like objects that had been used so many times they had lost all their shape.
Did they know, somehow, that she was on her way to let them in? Was that why their murmuring became a little more urgent as she opened the door, and the silvery stare in their eyes a little brighter?
“Wait.” she said to them, “I’m going to do this. But you have to wait.”
There was noise from the kitchen behind her. Plainly Katya was attempting to persuade Todd to go and fetch her — probably kill her. Tammy couldn’t make sense of the words, and that was probably for the best. She couldn’t afford to be panicked any more than she already was, or she’d screw this up.
Tammy glanced back over her shoulder, to check that Katya wasn’t already in the passageway, then she went down on her hands and knees and examined the threshold. The wood was worn with time, and rot had got into it, softening it. She ran her fingers over the full length of it, clearing away the dirt. The area smelt vaguely of vomit, but she supposed that was the rot she was smelling. At three or four inch intervals along the length of the threshold there were metal markers, like nails with large, elaborately configured heads, hammered into the timber. She dug around one of them with the nail of her forefinger. It seemed very solidly imbedded in the wood. But she had no doubt she was on the right track, meddling with these things, because as soon as she started to do so the ghosts’ murmuring became almost reverent in tone; worshipful.
She looked up at them. The light they emitted had grown brighter; either that or they’d narrowed their eyes. Yes, that was it; they narrowed their eyes to study what she was doing.
“This is it, isn’t it?”
They answered the only way they could: they fell completely silent. This was not a procedure they wanted to put at risk by making so much as a single sound.
There were five icons in the threshold, the middle one slightly bigger than the other four, which was a circle with two irregularly-shaped ‘arms’ coming from it, at noon and seven o’clock on its dial.
She dug her knife into the centre of the symbol. “Okay,” she said softly to it, “out you come.”
The wood was so wormy it crumbled beneath her knife-point. She dug deeper, exposing parts of the icon that were still dean. It gave off a subtle iridescence, like mother-of-pearl. Her confidence growing, she kept digging until she had cleared the wood away around the whole thing. Then she put her knife-tip under the rim and tried to lever it out. Much to her disappointment, it wouldn’t budge; not even a little bit.
“Damn,” she said softly.
She worked at it a little more, then remembered the old school adage, trotted out before every test. “If you can’t answer the first question, don’t waste time on it. Move on to the next one.”
That’s what she did. She moved left, and started to stab at the wood around the icon at the far end of the row. If anything, the threshold was even more rotted here than it was at the centre; the wood came away in fat splinters.
There was more noise from the kitchen shouting now, but she ignored it. Just kept digging. Bigger splinters flew. She felt a rush of certainty. She was going to do this. She pressed the knife under the edge of the icon. There was a moment of resistance, then the pressure of the blade on a nerve in her hand sent a spasm of pain up her arm. She yelped. And in the same moment the icon jumped free of the wood, landing on the tile outside.