Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin

“Perhaps her job …?”
    “And that’s another thing,” continued Hetty. “A job. She hasn’t got a job. Of course, I know it’s difficult these days, unemployment and that; but so far as I can see she’s not even looking for one. It makes me really unhappy, you know, the way that girl’s wasting her life. No dates. No proper meals. And if I invite her down, like this evening, when I happen to have done a bit of cooking, what do I get? Such a look she gives me, like she wouldn’t demean herself. ‘Thank you, Mrs Harman’ she says, ‘but I’m not hungry.’ Kind of uppity, you know, as if not being hungry was the in-thing for top people, and the rest of us too uneducated to know it! It makes me really annoyed sometimes, I feel I want to put her in her place good and proper. But then again, I can’t help worrying — after all, she’s only young. There’s something wrong. I know there is. Something badly wrong. But what can I do? I can’t keep asking questions and interfering, can I? It’s not my business. Do you think she’s maybe got that illness they’ve been on about lately on TV — Anna-something?”
    “Anorexia?” supplied Alice. “Well, I suppose she might have. Though she’s a bit past the usual age, I should think — it’s more a thing with teenagers.” And then, in a vague attempt to reassure Brian, who was still sitting unwontedly tense and silent at her side: “Perhaps she eats more than you think she does? Like now — for all we know she might be out getting fish and chips at this very moment.”
    But Hetty shook her head. “I’d have noticed,” she asserted. “I’d have heard her. I’ve got so I listen for her, I’m that worried. Like I say, she stops in nearly all the time. Five weeks she’s been here, and never once has she gone out in the evening —”
    “And can you wonder?” here broke in Miss Dorinda, dabbing her lips delicately and laying down her fork. “ I don’t go out in the evening either, not on my own. You hear of such dreadful things happening nowadays, the rapes and the muggings …”
    “I don’t think it’s as common as all that,” Alice was beginning,but Miss Dorinda interrupted, full of indignation, as people tend to be at any suggestion that something isn’t as dreadful as they thought it was.
    “It’s all very well to talk like that, if you’ll excuse my saying so! You wouldn’t talk like that if you’d been one of the victims! Suppose you’d been attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper? Or the Cambridge Rapist? Or the Flittermouse Fiend? He was a vampire , too, as well as a murderer. That’s what flittermouse means, it means a vampire —”
    “No it doesn’t, it just means a bat,” interposed Brian, roused from his dark mood by the prospect of controversy. “It’s simply the old English word for ‘bat’ —”
    “Well, and that’s just what I’ve been saying!” retorted Miss Dorinda triumphantly. “A vampire is a bat. It’s a huge, savage bat that sucks human blood! Didn’t you ever see the Dracula film? Those awful yellow fangs, and claws dripping with blood? The Flittermouse Fiend must have been …”
    They all heard it. A soft scuffling from beyond the closed door; light footsteps racing up the stairs; and then the slam of a door, high up in the old house. Brian’s chair scraped back with a violent shudder, and he was across the room, out of the door and racing up the stairs.
    The three women, struck silent, were left facing each other, but not for long. In less than a minute, Brian could be heard thundering down the stairs, and he burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed, his whole body grown somehow loose and disjointed with shock.
    “Something terrible has happened!” he gasped. “Her door … Mary’s door, it’s all over blood! I can’t get it open! A hammer, Hetty! An axe! Something to smash it down with …!”
    “All over blood” was an exaggeration. The doorhandle, as Alice bent to examine it, was indeed stained