The Reunion

Natalie asked her. ‘Is there another cupboard maybe, somewhere in the living room?’
    ‘Oh fuck,’ Jen said quietly.
    ‘What?’ everyone asked in unison.
    ‘I didn’t buy them.’
    ‘What?’ Dan yelped, louder than he’d intended.
    ‘I just remembered, I was on my way to get them from the alimentation generale in Draguignan, and then I saw that rug in the window of that design shop… Oh, bloody hell. I don’t believe I did that. I never got any candles.’
    ‘Do you have a torch?’ Zac asked her.
    ‘There was one somewhere…’ she said, casting around in the darkness.
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Dan said, hoping that exasperation might cover fear.
    Jen couldn’t find a torch, so they lit their way with mobile phones.
    ‘At least they can be used for something,’ Zac pointed out cheerfully. ‘Since there’s no signal, I mean.’ Dan had had just about enough of Zac, his bravado, his optimism, his sunny fucking disposition. They moved back into the living room and sat around the fire. Dan had brought a bottle of whisky with him from the kitchen; he poured himself a glass, offered one to Natalie who seized it gratefully. Her hands were shaking, her breathing a little ragged. During the whole candle crisis she’d been holding things together, but he could see now that with nothing to do, no way to contact her husband, the storm still raging outside, she was starting to unravel.
    Bang, bang, bang.
    ‘Jesus,’ Dan breathed, gulping down a mouthful of Scotch. ‘That really is starting to set me on edge.’
    ‘Relax,’ Zac said, smiling at him encouragingly. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’
    ‘What do you mean, it’s nothing? How could it be nothing? It’s obviously
something
. Something is making a banging noise.’
    ‘The attic,’ Jen said.
    ‘You think there’s something in the attic?’ Dan asked, his stomach curling itself into a small, hard ball. ‘It’s not coming from the attic. It’s coming from outside, surely?’
    ‘No, not the noise. There were a couple of boxes of stuff, left here by the old tenant. Some kitchen utensils and things. I put them up in the attic. I think there might have been some candles in there. Those thin, churchy ones. I didn’t bother to take them out because I had plenty of my own.’
    ‘Right you are,’ Zac said, leaping to his feet. ‘I’ll go up and get them then. How do you get into the attic?’
    ‘I’ll show you,’ Jen said, getting up.
    ‘No, I remember,’ Dan said reluctantly. ‘There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling just outside your bedroom, isn’t there?’
    ‘That’s right. There’s a ladder you can pull down. The boxes should be just to the left-hand side I think. There’s not much up there, so they shouldn’t be too hard to find.’
    ‘It’s OK, Dan,’ Zac said as Dan got up to go upstairs, ‘you stay here with the girls. I’ll manage.’
    Dan clenched his fists and his jaw.
Stay with the girls?
Condescending wanker. ‘No, I know where I’m going. I’ll do it.’ He took his phone out of his pocket, checked one more time for a signal and then held it out in front of him, lighting his way into the hallway and up the stairs. He was pathetically, shamefully grateful that Zac did not allow him to go alone.
    It took them a little while to get the trapdoor open and pull the ladder down. Dan went first but managed to trap his finger in the mechanism, so Zac took over. Dan was constantly fighting the urge to tell Zac to bugger off, although he hadn’t quite had time to analyse why he found him so irritating. It wasn’t just that he didn’t run out after Lilah when she left, and it wasn’t the fact that Zac was so good-looking, although he realised that no doubt everyone would assume that was the reason. Watching him clamber fearlessly up the ladder, into an attic that might contain any number of deeply unpleasant things (rats, dead birds, the evil spirit of some long-dead former inhabitant of the house), he decided that it wasn’t even his seeming imperviousness to peril. It was the ease with which he’d slipped into the group. He’d known everyone less than twenty-four hours and, already, Dan sensed people looking to him for leadership. Well, the girls, downstairs, they clearly thought of him as the one who could fend off danger or get them out of trouble. Dan was an afterthought. Andrew, yes, Conor, yes. They were alpha, he was beta, the lost boy, Jen called him. That’s just how it was back then. But now he was