Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

Sophie tailed me down to the kitchen and bathroom. Then, as we were trotting back up to the upper level, she announced, 'There's something you have to see,' and steered me across to the living-room windows. I obediently looked out into the street, but apart from the usual parked cars, there was nothing to see.

'What?' I asked, turning back to her. 'What?

Sophie's face had fallen. Saint Joan's vision had not materialized. 'It's not happening,' she said. 'They must know you're here.'

'What isn't happening?'

'Nothing but music tonight.'

'It must be the man upstairs,' I said. 'Who else could it be?'

'I already told you,' Sophie said. 'I know it's not him.'

I was getting tired of this guessing game. 'You've got hidden speakers?'

'Better than that,' said Sophie.

I bit the bullet. 'It's nothing to do with Dirk and Lemmy, is it?'

'Better than that,' said Sophie. 'Much much better.'

Her eyes were shining again. I began to wonder if she had a fever.

'I give up,' I said. 'You win.'

Sophie smiled triumphantly.

'I've got ghosts.'

Of course there had to be some other explanation. But I let her babble on, because if she was going mad, I wanted to be the first to know about it so I could pass the news on to all our friends.

'In the beginning I blamed it all on the man upstairs,' said Sophie. The music was bad enough, but you know how I feel about smoking. How dared he let his habit drift downstairs to pollute my air, my own private air, the air in my flat, in my lungs? I only hoped he wasn't smoking in bed. That would have been all I needed — the whole house going up in flames and my worldly goods burnt to a crisp before I'd even finished unpacking them.'

'How can you be sure it's not him?' I asked.

'We met,' she said.

It was the look on her face that tipped me off. It was the expression of a cat that had got not just the cream but everything else on the milk float as well.

'I see,' I said, unable to keep the note of disapproval out of my voice. This was classic on-the-rebound stuff. I felt she'd moved with unseemly haste. 'What's he like?'

Sophie went ahead and told me, and in enormous great detail. I didn't know how much of it to believe.

Night after night, the music had woken her up.

Sometimes it lasted for only a few minutes, once it had kept her awake for nearly an hour, but only when it had stopped was she able to get back to sleep. Until this one night, she said. Up until then, the noise had been a nuisance, no more, and she'd been meaning to talk to the man upstairs about it, but on this particular night, something really dreadful had happened and she didn't know how to explain it at all.

Sophie wasn't used to sleeping on her own. At school, I would often creep into her bed after lights out, and we would sit there whispering and giggling and nibbling Chocolate Olivers out of the latest parcel of treats from Hamish — or, to be more accurate, from his housekeeper.

We were both plagued by nightmares. I dreamed repeatedly about a giant one-legged koala bear that hopped through the streets, thirsting for the blood of innocent children. I would have only a few minutes in which to find a safe hiding-place under the stairs or in the wardrobe, but once I'd found it, I'd have to listen trembling as the bear howled and sniffed the air and drooled and came closer, ever closer. Hop… hop… hop… It never found me, of course, though the tension was so unbearable that I sometimes wished it had.

Sophie, whose imagination was never quite in the same league, had been having recurring nightmares about squealing piglets being chased and stung on their fat pink bottoms by bumble bees. This didn't sound terribly alarming to me, but I always shuddered dutifully whenever Sophie told me about it. It seemed only fair — my stories about the one-legged bear, which I tended to embellish with every retelling, would leave her quaking under the bedclothes with fright.

It was on one of these exchange-of-nightmare sessions that we both finally owned up to being afraid of the dark.

'I'm glad you're there when I wake up in the night,' I told her.

'Me too,' said Sophie. 'When I grow up, I'm going to get married, so there'll always be someone there when I wake from a bad dream.'

This time, there was no one there. She dreamed she was drifting through the halls of the Brera Gallery in Milan. It was one of her favourite galleries; after her last visit, she'd sent me a postcard of Mantegna's Cristo Morto — the painting famed for its dramatic foreshortening.

The gallery in the dream was like something by De Chirico, with deserted colonnades and unnaturally elongated shadows. There was something wrong about the paintings and it was making her feel uneasy. She had the uncomfortable feeling that all the virgins and bishops and saints were shifting their positions behind her back.

Past a Poussin landscape she drifted, past a Masaccio triptych, and Matisse's dancers and lots of other pictures which shouldn't really have been there, not all together in that particular gallery, until she found herself standing in front of Mantegna's Dead Christ. His crinkled soles pressed up against the foreground, as though He were actually there, lying in a glass-fronted recess. Sophie stared in horrified fascination at the jagged holes in His feet. The flesh was dead flesh, the colour and texture of old green cheese.

She became aware of a muffled rhythmic booming. It beat up through the floor and she couldn't work out why it was making her feel so panicky. Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk It was coming closer, getting louder, echoing off the walls as it came. She knew she had to tear herself away from the painting before something dreadful happened, but she couldn't.

And now it was too late.

The booming grew louder until it filled her head. It was all around her, now inside her, and there was no escape.

Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk

In one swift and sudden movement, Christ sat upright on His slab. He fixed her with His blazing eyes, and stretched out His arms. Then, unable to reach her through the glass, He threw back His head, and His mouth opened so wide it gaped from ear to ear like a slit throat and you could see His oesophagus quivering on the vaulted ceiling of His larynx, and He let out a bloodcurdling shriek, the sound pitched so high it was barely human.

Sophie jerked awake. The room was cold, but her armpits were damp. She was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, as though she'd been woken like that many times before, and something awful happened next. But she couldn't remember what it was. She didn't want to remember what it was.

Her head was enveloped in silence, but her ears were still ringing with the shriek, and she realized with sickening certainty that it wasn't just inside her head, the sound was ricocheting off the walls of the room. It hadn't been a figment of her dream — it had been real.

She tried to get her senses sorted out. The sound had come from the direction of the living-room. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to snuggle down in bed and pull the duvet up around her ears. She wanted to sink into a dreamless sleep and not wake until it was daylight, when the birds would be chirruping and the other occupants of the house would be going about their everyday business, and she would hear their telephones ringing and their toilets flushing and the clickety-clack of Robert's typewriter and the gentle hum of Marsha's vacuum cleaner.

In the daylight, she knew, her fears would seem ridiculous.

But she also knew she couldn't go back to sleep, not now.

She got up. Something was pulling her towards the living-room. As soon as she opened the door, the music started up. She thought it had probably been there all along, but that for some reason she hadn't been hearing it.