7
4.37am.
One hour and twenty three precious minutes before she was due to resume her daily battle with the alarm.
Francine frowned, irritated.
She had learned long ago to have her last cup of tea in the evening no later than 10pm to avoid precisely these moments, yet even as she began to pull the covers aside she realised it was not her bladder that had awakened her.
She paused. What then?
When she turned over, she discovered one possible culprit. Her husband's side of the bed was empty. She frowned again.
Joe was resolutely not a morning person, refusing even to set an alarm clock. Instead he relied on Francine to wake him at the last possible moment, giving him just enough time to rush to the shower, hastily chew on some cold toast, and rush out to the Docks.
When they were a little younger Francine had tried to break him of this habit, going as far as to question why it was that a man of God would be content to miss the small miracle that occurred each morning, as light crept over the horizon and the world began to wake up.
Joe's defence had been rock solid:
"God," he said, "got his work done and spent a full day in bed."
She let her head drop back onto the pillow. Joe, having never mastered the don't-drink-before-bed thing, had probably woken up to use the loo, waking her in the process.
He was a big man, and despite his best efforts, his movement made an impact.
Francine closed her eyes, hoping that the brief, unwanted trip into wakefulness hadn't quite alerted her senses, but she already knew it was futile. Her morning routine was off-kilter, and her mind had decided to wake itself up fully by way of protest.
Well, she thought, might as well get the day started.
She flicked the off switch on the alarm clock, postponing the battle until tomorrow, and slid her feet out from under the covers into the cold air, relaxing when they found the soft material of her slippers, waiting at the side of the bed.
Stepping into them, Francine stood, wrapping her cold dressing gown around her, and padded out of the bedroom.
She expected to find the door at the end of the hall - the entrance to the bathroom - shut, with a thin sliver of light escaping around its edges. That was where Joe would be.
In thirty years of marriage, she hadn't known him to be anywhere else in the middle of the night, unless he was sick, in which case he would wrap himself in a duvet and relocate to the couch, aware that his coughing would disturb his wife's sleep.
The hallway was dark and empty.
Francine padded to the top of the stairs and peered down them.
The ground floor appeared unlit – if Joe had been struck by some illness, it must be a bad one, to have him sitting down there in the dark.
"Joe?" She called out softly. "You okay hun?"
No response.
Suddenly Francine felt strangely apprehensive and off balance. The stairs leading down into the darkness, stairs that she had walked for thirty years and more, which were as familiar to her as sunlight, now seemed oddly threatening and alien.
A dark, strange landscape, as though the house was informing her that things were different in the small hours; that she should not be here.
Francine was no fan of horror films.
Like Joe, she was mystified as to what enjoyment anyone could possibly get out of fear and violence. Why would anyone willingly spend time revelling in the darker, evil side of humanity? Still, she had caught the end of one on TV once and found herself reeled in, a clammy, breathless hour spent in the company of a young family living with some fearful malevolent spirit in their house.
The experience had shaken Francine, and for a while it had kept resurfacing whenever she found herself alone in the house, particularly at night. The silence, the emptiness was suddenly a breeding ground for something, alive with dark potential, and around each corner she expected to find some sign of a presence, all the more horrifying for being couched in the friendly familiarity of her little home.
The feeling had worn off of course; she had never seen any such thing, and eventually the memory of the movie had been worn away by time, but an echo of that feeling always remained, a faint feeling that the safety of the home could so easily be twisted by some unpleasant surprise.
She felt it now.
Why wasn't Joe answering?
The stairway light switch was at the bottom of the steps: a fact that had always been faintly irritating, but which now engulfed her in unchristian rage.
She'd have to descend in the darkness.
Setting her mouth in a firm line, reminding herself that movies weren't real, Francine began to descend, heart beating fast.
At the bottom of the stairs stood the front door, which neither Joe nor Francine ever really used, preferring the patio doors in the kitchen to the rear of the house.
To the right, hidden behind a corner, was the entrance to the living room. With each step she crept down, Francine kept her gaze focused more and more intently on this corner, half-expecting some dark shadow to move around it, a patch of blackness in the blackness, moving toward her almost invisibly.
She tried not to think about the possibility that someone was waiting around that corner, grinning, seeing their prey clearly framed by light from above, stepping toward them.
The feeling that something was wrong increased as Francine reached the last couple of steps, and it took her a moment to realise what was causing it.
The draught.
Francine could feel a cool breeze swirling around her bare calves. The back door was open. She swallowed painfully. As soon as she was able, still two steps away from the floor, Francine reached out into the darkness and found the light switch, flicking it on and almost crying out with relief when she saw the menacing shadows flee.
There was no evil presence lurking at the bottom of the stairs.
Turning the corner, she was able to see into the living room.
Dark and empty.
No, not dark. Not quite.
There was light spilling into the living room, a cold, lifeless light. Coming from the kitchen, no, through the kitchen. Coming from the back garden. What on earth?
Francine stepped cautiously through the living room, shivering as the cold night air flooding into the house chilled her, and onto the freezing tiles of the kitchen floor.
The patio door was drawn fully back, revealing a sight that made her breath catch in her throat.
At the far end of the long, narrow garden, was a silhouette that was difficult to make out at first.
As Francine squinted, trying to make it out, and the shape became familiar. Joe, her husband, kneeling on the ground, his hands placed on something in the dirt, something cylindrical and metallic.
"Joe?" Francine whispered softly.
At the sound of her voice, she saw her husband rise to his feet, turning, and begin to move toward her.
Only when he was a few feet away could Francine really see his face, see the eyes bulging in their sockets, blood seeping from the tear ducts.
He was closer still when Francine understood that the man she had loved for over three decades, the gentle, kind man who had treated her like a queen intended to murder her.
So close that when he leapt toward her, snarling, strong fingers grasping for her neck, Francine didn't even have time to flinch.