Beaches

Part 7

Jacob turned to the window. Whoever was in the house was on the stairs already. Even if there was a safe way down - which he doubted - he didn't have time to open the window. It was probably locked anyway, and he couldn't see anything to break it with. He could try jumping through, but it was too easy to imagine himself lying on the ground, his legs broken, covered in glass. He stood a better chance by turning to face whoever it was.

He had as much right to be in his grandfather's house as anyone. Yes, he had broken a window to get in and whoever was on the landing had a key, but that didn't change the fact that this was his family's home. He looked around for something he could use as a weapon but there was nothing. He turned to face the door.

Jacob realised that he was holding his breath and let it out. The handle began to turn. Whoever was out there hadn't gone to any of the other rooms first, they had come straight to him. Was it possible they knew he was there?

The door began to open, a long shadow crept across the floor towards him. He could see no details of the figure standing there.

"You took your time." The voice was almost friendly. "We were beginning to think you weren't coming."

There was something familiar about the voice and the shape of the person standing there. But the chances of someone he knew surviving and coming back to find him were so impossibly small that it seemed more likely he was looking at an alien in disguise.

"What's the matter?" the figure said, not even clearly male or female. "Don't you recognise me?"

They stepped out of the shadows into the room and Jacob's first instinct was to take a matching step away. He grabbed a handful of curtain material, as if he could use it as a weapon, or hide behind it. Then he saw her face and stopped. "Rosemary?"

"Who else?" she said.

"I don't... how?... what?" He couldn't believe that Rosemary was standing in the doorway of his parents' bedroom. She had lived in the house opposite his grandparents for as long as he'd been coming to visit them. She had lived with her parents and, when they'd died a few years before the virus, she'd inherited the house. "How are you here?"

Rosemary shrugged, just as Jacob supposed he would have done if she'd asked him the same question. No one knew why they'd survived, only that they had.

"You were expecting me?" he said.

"That's right," she said. "You'd better come with me."

Jacob followed her out of the room and down the stairs, the farm pictures now cloaked in the long shadows of dusk. It was easier not to think about where she was taking him, easier not to think about how this was possible and what it might mean.