by Patrick Ness
‘Tanya,’ Miss Quill says. ‘Knowing more than anyone else is one of your defining features. It’ll be good to challenge that, won’t it?’
Tanya’s jaw cranks backwards and forwards.
‘I have some suspicions, but they don’t add up,’ Miss Quill says. ‘There were two types of web present in the sample, one of which is not from this planet.’ She holds a hand out to stop Tanya speaking. ‘I don’t know any more yet. There’s still more testing to do. You’re going to have to trust me for now.’
Tanya nods. ‘OK.’
Matteusz picks up the stepladder. ‘Shall we go up, then?’ he says.
Charlie shines his torch up the stairs. The meagre light makes it seem even darker up there. Maybe Tanya shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe they all shouldn’t be doing this. They’re here because of her. April has already been hurt and she’s still here, being braver than Tanya is right now. Everyone is being braver than Tanya.
‘After you,’ Tanya says.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SPLITTING UP
Miss Quill watches them go upstairs. A hush descends.
‘Do you think they’ll be OK?’ April says.
Miss Quill stands up straighter and turns to her and Ram. ‘They will be absolutely fine.’
‘And now we’re a team,’ Ram says flatly.
‘You needn’t sound so unenthusiastic,’ April says.
‘There are very many places I’d rather be right now.’
‘And I can think of places, times, and planets that would be infinitely preferable to spending any more time with you, Mr Singh, but this is the situation I find myself in.’
‘So,’ April says, shining her torch on the old layout. ‘We need to find a way down to the cellar from the kitchen.’
‘I didn’t see anything when we were last there,’ Ram says. ‘Do you think there’s a secret passage?’
‘We’ve got every other haunted house trope going,’ April says. ‘Why not add that to the list?’
‘It’d be good if we found one, though, wouldn’t it?’ Ram says to her. ‘Maybe it’s a person behind all of it and they’re just running behind the walls and down concealed passageways, setting off projections. Or holograms.’
‘You want the Scooby-Doo ending,’ April says with a mixture of affection and exasperation.
He wanders round the hall, hand outstretched like he’s a great director on a film set. ‘He or she could have footage that they play to keep people out. Scare them away. What is it you always say, Miss Quill?’
‘“Go away”?’ April suggests. ‘Or maybe, “The excesses of your stupidity are only matched by your capacity to irritate”?’
‘“If in doubt, follow the money,”’ Ram says.
‘So you have been listening,’ Miss Quill says as they walk slowly down the hall. ‘Next time you fail a test I’ll know you’re being deliberately stupid and/or obtuse.’
‘You don’t think he’s right, do you, Miss Quill?’ April asks.
‘We don’t know anything about the source of these phenomena.’
They enter the room of dolls. The torchlight slides between their plastic faces, making it look as if they’re blinking.
‘But there is artron energy here, you demonstrated it yourself—’
‘With the sexy pen,’ Ram interrupts.
April closes her eyes briefly. ‘Yes, thank you, Ram. And electromagnetic irregularities,’ she says.
‘That’s also true. But we have to ask, in a similar way to what Ram just said: Who has something to gain?’
‘Do you know?’ Ram asks.
‘I know, at least on the surface, who has something to lose from all of this,’ Miss Quill says.
‘The developer,’ April replies. ‘Constantine Oliver.’
‘Obviously. This isn’t doing his project or his bank balance any good whatsoever.’
‘But that might be a cunning plan,’ Ram says as they move through into the kitchen.
‘How?’ April says.
‘No idea,’ Ram says.
Knives glint on the draining board. Miss Quill examines each one, running her finger down the blades. They’re as blunt as onions. Onions are good in many recipes but are of no use in a knife fight. Shame about these knives, though. Fortunately, she’s brought her own.
‘Someone’s been here again,’ April says, pointing to the different plates in the sink.
‘Probably the builders,’ Ram says. ‘They need to eat, you know.’
‘Why would you rather that it wasn’t supernatural?’ April asks.
‘Why would you rather that it was?’ Ram replies. They stare at each other.
‘This is highly uncomfortable. Could we please move past this awkward impasse?’ Miss Quill says.
‘I bet you that, at the end of all this,’ Ram continues, ‘it’ll be Oliver or someone we knew all along. I’ll lift a mask from someone’s head, they’ll shake their fists, and say that thing about pesky kids.’
‘You are pesky kids,’ Miss Quill says. ‘Now be quiet. We need to find this door. Check for an unexpected influx of air.’
Ram looks at April. ‘Are you going to pick up on that or can I? ’Cos that’s just a gift.’
‘Do you really want to test my patience anymore?’ Miss Quill asks.
Ram looks at her then gets down on all fours.
‘A wise choice for once,’ Miss Quill says.
April joins Ram in feeling out the edges of the tiles while Miss Quill runs her hands over the walls. They are the kind of cold that feels wet. No sign of any draughts, though, not in the walls or inside the cupboards full of orange canned goods.
April stands and opens the door into the utility room. She looks through. Then back into the kitchen. And into the utility room again. Placing the map on the counter, she points to the kitchen. ‘They’ve halved the old kitchen,’ she says. ‘The utility room on the layout is really small, and was probably the pantry. This’—she pokes at the wall that divides the two rooms—‘isn’t load bearing. It must’ve gone in after these plans.’
‘You do realise you sound like a forty-year-old architect?’ Miss Quill says.
‘You’re only saying that because I’m right,’ April replies. Grabbing a knife from the draining board, she crouches in the doorway into the utility room and levers up the lino. It peels away easily, the glue that once held it to the floor now grey dust. Underneath, placed into the boards, is a door.
‘I think we’ve found the basement,’ Miss Quill says.
TWENTY-NINE
THE BED
Tanya starts up the second staircase. The floorboards make a ‘craak’ sound, like crows with smoker’s coughs.
Matteusz stumbles, knocking the ladder into the banister. The sound reverberates. The whole staircase seems to groan.
‘Oh great,’ Tanya says. ‘You’ve woken up the house. I was hoping we could get a few minutes in without being set upon by something weird.’
‘Stay quiet and it might not notice,’ Matteusz says.
‘That’s like saying “Back away from the hungry bear, it might not notice you’re carrying a picnic,”’ Tanya replies.
‘This isn’t helping,’ Charlie whispers from the top of the second staircase. ‘Watch your step at the top, the rug is frayed. I nearly slipped on it.’
They walk through the same corridor where everything kicked off last time. It’s as if nothing happened. The door has returned to its place, the walls show no sign of having been through an indoor storm.
‘They’ve got a good housekeeper,’ Tanya says.
‘Maybe we all suffered from mass hallucinations,’ Matteusz whispers loudly. ‘I’ve been looking into it. It’s possible. We should be looking out for a substance or a plant that could cause us to all see the same thing. That’s if we did see the same thing. I know we compared notes but that’s hardly a sound methodology.’
‘You should say that in front of Miss Quill,’ Charlie says, turning round to kiss Matteusz. ‘She’d be impress
ed.’ Tanya says nothing. Mass hallucinations could actually explain this better than most things. A house that causes a group to imagine certain things, to draw them there and back again. But why? What does it want from them?
In the bedroom, once again, everything has been put back where it was. The wardrobe is shut. The chest contains its drawers. The trunk, though, is open, with books stacked inside. The beds have been made up. There’s a dent on one of the beds, as if someone is sitting on it.
She walks over to the bed. Heart thumping, she reaches her hand out above the dip in the mattress. She feels, for one moment, something wispy, like fine threads passing across her palm.
‘What are you doing?’ Charlie says. ‘Come and help.’ Tanya stares at that spot for a moment, then turns.
Charlie and Matteusz are both balancing on the ladder, trying to push up the hatch. It lifts slightly, then drops.
‘Pass us one of the drawers, please,’ Charlie says.
Tanya pulls out a drawer. It’s full of lace handkerchiefs, all folded. Flowers are sewn onto the corners. Forget-me-nots.
She begins taking them all out and stacking them on the chest.
‘Just tip them out,’ Matteusz says. ‘We haven’t got time for this.’
She can’t though. She doesn’t know why, apart from that it doesn’t seem fair. Someone cared enough to spend the time folding; she’s not going to disrespect that.
The handkerchiefs now laid on the chest, she lifts the drawer and hands it up to Matteusz. He holds it up, pushing against the hatch. The board lifts high. Charlie stands on the top rung, straining up. He manages to slide back the hatch until they are all looking up into the dark attic.
‘I’ll go first,’ Tanya says.
‘But you’re the youngest,’ says Matteusz.
‘So I’ve had less time to matter and make my mark. You can’t argue with that logic. Well, you can, but I’m not going to let you. Now climb down and let me through.’
Matteusz and Charlie jump off the ladder. Tanya takes their place, climbing up to the thinnest top rung.
‘Now what are you going to do?’ Charlie asks.
‘Simple,’ she says. ‘I’m going to beg you to give me a lift up.’ Silence. Although not quite. Somewhere deep in that silence, sounding very faint, Tanya’s sure she can hear someone crying. Trying to cover it, she says, ‘Well, come on then.’
THIRTY
THE CELLAR
The cellar seems to eat up torchlight, absorbing it into the walls.
‘It’s like a goth’s bedroom down here. Everything’s painted black,’ Ram says, getting up close to the webbed walls.
Miss Quill checks her pen. It’s glowing bright purple. The artron levels are getting higher. Or they are getting closer. Maybe they’re playing hide-and-seek after all. Not good. She only likes playing games if she has devised them, and even then prefers to let others play them to the end.
‘Lots more cobwebs than the rest of the house,’ Aprils says, holding out her hands. It’s as if she’s wrapped them in white lace. She rubs them together as if she thinks she’ll never get them clean again. ‘Particularly in this corner.’
Ram and Miss Quill join her. She’s right. One section of the basement is curtained off with cobwebs. They can’t see through, not even by shining the lights centimetres away. Miss Quill places her shoe against it and pushes. It’s firm, barely giving in to the pressure. Ram presses his palms to the sheet of web. It undulates. It even resists when, extracting his hands with difficulty from the web, he turns round and leans against it. ‘It’s like a standing-up bed,’ he says. ‘Good mattress. Firm.’
‘Would you stop that, Mr Singh?’ Miss Quill asks. ‘I don’t want to have to cut you out of an enormous web. Too tiring.’
‘What worries me,’ April says, moving away from the collection of webbing, ‘is what would make that, and why?’ She walks backwards into an old wooden box. Her torch drops, breaking the bulb. The room dims even more.
‘Share mine,’ Ram says, moving closer to her.
Miss Quill turns back to the webbed section. This is the heart of it. It must be. Constantine Oliver told Charlie that workers were found in webbing. What if whatever they were up against had taken the girl, Amira, down here, and left her wrapped up to die? Maybe those rumours of children lost to the house were true.
Miss Quill removes her rucksack and takes out her knives, all wrapped up in embossed dark red leather. She unrolls them and takes out her favourite.
‘What’re you doing with those, Miss Quill?’ Ram says.
‘I’m seeing what we’re dealing with,’ she says. She places the tip of the knife against the wall of web. It shudders. ‘Step back.’ Ram and April move to the base of the ladder.
Miss Quill presses the knife into the web. It is resisted at first then pierces through. A scream comes from inside. She cuts deeper, farther. Something scuttles behind the web. A scratching sound comes from the walls and then tearing. Ripping.
A hand reaches through the web from the inside. Then another. They pull at the web, stretching it. Miss Quill tries to help, slicing at the web around where the person is trying to get out, trying to ignore the screams of pain coming from within the cocoon.
‘Help me,’ says a voice she knows. And then she remembers those hands. Hands she held when she was a kid. A friend lost in a war.
More hands appear through the web, one of them tries to take away her knife, another to get her torch. She wrestles them away, only for more to grip on to her forearms and pull her in. Her mouth is pressed against the web. She closes her lips but it’s as if the fibres can find their way through.
Arms wrap themselves about her waist. She twists away but she’s held fast. The web weaves itself around her, taking away all light and making her long for sleep.
THIRTY-ONE
THE ATTIC
‘Can you see her?’ Charlie calls up.
‘Give me a chance,’ Tanya says, shining her torch into the corners. It smells of damp wood and wet dust up here. There’s the usual collection of things that generations have left in the attic for the next owner. Boxes and trunks, an old cot, bits of lawn mower. Far less spooky than you’d expect for a house where dolls are left in a room to multiply and furniture cleans up after itself like a creepier Beauty and the Beast.
Walking across the attic isn’t easy. There are no floorboards, only sheets of cardboard covering exposed struts. The struts run widthways and she has to take a wide step to cross from one to the other, ducking under webs that canopy the ceiling. Water drips down her neck.
There’s probably a hole in the roof, but it could be coming from anywhere. It’s like IP redirection for water: you’ll never know its source till the whole web is exposed.
‘We’re coming up,’ Charlie says. She can see his hand grasping for the edge of the opening into the attic. ‘Matteusz is going to give me a hand then I’ll pull him up.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ she says. ‘There’s not much room in here.’
‘I don’t like you being by yourself,’ Charlie says, ‘and before you say anything, it’s because we’ve been told to stay together, not because of your age, gender, or dress sense.’
‘Or because we like you, obviously,’ Matteusz says cheerfully.
‘I can’t see her anyway, or much of anything else.’
‘No adverse weather conditions?’ Matteusz shouts up. ‘Or faceless people?’
‘Nothing. Pretty boring, really. I’ll see if there’s anything useful then come straight down.’
She squats by some boxes. There must be something in there that can help. The first one contains a huge pile of clothes. They look old. Sixties and seventies styles. Moth-eaten and mould-speckled. Someone could probably sell the lot to a posh vintage shop. Places like that probably have special dry-cleaning nozzles or a magic hoover that makes it disappear until you get it home and that yellow stain reemerges under the armpit.
She opens boxes containing records that have been stuck tog
ether with some of the drips from the roof; a cabinet of old perfume bottles; more dolls, this time out of national dress and in Victorian dresses; piles of papers. It’s brilliant, looking through other people’s stuff, as well as sad. Someone loved, wore, played with these things once.
She sits down carefully on one of the cardboarded areas, making sure a slat is right beneath her, then starts taking out handfuls of documents. Maybe something in there will help. Some of them are almost blank, faded with age before they were placed in the box. Faint signs of writing can be seen when she holds each one close to the torch. No way she can do this with thousands of sheets of paper.
‘I’m bringing something down,’ she shouts from the far corner of the attic. ‘Give us a hand.’
No response.
Crawling forward, she reaches for a beam to help stand, then crosses the attic, strut by strut. She peers over the edge of the hatch. It’s completely dark. She shines the torch down, hoping that they won’t be dazzled by it and fall off the ladder.
But Matteusz and Charlie aren’t there. And neither is the stepladder.
‘Oi,’ she shouts down, ‘that’s not funny.’
They’re probably hiding under the beds. Or under the sheets, ready to rise up and scare her. ‘You can come out now,’ she says. ‘I need help. There’s a box of documents. Could be useful.’
No answer, not even the echo of her voice, as if the house is listening so intently it’s kept them in its walls. It feels colder. Probably because she’s been up there so long. How long has she been up there? Possibilities twist through her mind. Time portal? No, the most likely explanation is that they’ve heard something from downstairs and gone to find out, knowing she was safe in the attic. But why wouldn’t they tell her?
She leans further over, stretching out her arm to point the light in every corner. Her jacket catches on a splinter of wood, causing her arm to jerk back. The torch falls through the hatch onto the bedroom floor. At least she can see the place where she can jump down and break her leg.