by Mark Edwards
‘The attic,’ I said, thinking back to the night when Karen had freaked out and reported hearing someone telling her she wasn’t welcome. She’d heard singing too.
I went into the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind me, and pulled down the ladder that led into the attic. I climbed, tentatively putting my head through the gap – not just because I was afraid there might be someone hiding there, but because of the bats. Julia had been instructed to leave them alone.
There was no sign of the bats, though. And there was definitely no one hiding up here.
I pulled myself fully into the loft space and crawled over to the area above Ursula’s room and lay on my belly. I spoke, reciting a Halloween rhyme about witches, bats and big black cats in a loud voice. It was the first thing that came into my head. Then I sang several lines from a song. Finally, I tapped on the floor, before heading back down the ladder and into Room 2.
‘Did you hear me?’ I asked. ‘Talking and then singing?’
‘No. Maybe very faintly. I heard you knock but that’s it.’
I turned my attention to the other exterior wall, which was dominated by the wardrobe. I opened it. It was stuffed full of clothes and had shelves which would make it very difficult for anyone to hide inside. I remembered how we’d found Karen with her head in the wardrobe, as if searching for Narnia.
‘Ursula said that when she turned round there was no one there, even though it felt like the voice came from directly behind her.’
I looked at the desk, then at the wardrobe again. ‘Help me with this, will you?’
We shoved the wardrobe, which was lighter than it looked, to one side, revealing an expanse of wall that needed a lick of paint. I tapped it. It sounded hollow.
Julia said, ‘Wait here’, and left the room, returning a minute later with a claw hammer.
‘What are you—’
I didn’t get to finish the question. She swung the hammer at the wall. It went through like the wall was made of cardboard. Shards of thin plaster landed at my feet. Julia swung again, working at the gap with the head of the hammer to create a large hole. We used our hands to expand the hole, throwing chunks of wall behind us. The dust cleared and Julia said, ‘Oh my God.’
There was a space behind the wall, just over two feet wide. A crawl space. Easily large enough for an average-sized person to crouch in. And the plaster was so thin, a voice would be audible through the wall, helped also by a little vent just above the skirting board.
‘They’ve been moving around behind the walls,’ Julia said, shuddering.
‘But how did they get in there?’
We pulled away more of the wall until there was a hole large enough to enter. I peered in. To the left was a dead end, but the hollow space stretched away to the right, beyond the boundaries of this room. Julia produced her phone, switching on the flashlight, and crawled inside before I could offer to go first.
‘Be careful,’ I said.
She went off on her hands and knees, calling back after a minute. ‘It runs alongside Room One.’ That was the room where Suzi had slept. It gave me the creeps, the idea of someone hiding in the walls, listening. But how did they get in?
Julia came crawling back and stuck her head out through the hole. There were specks of plaster in her hair, and a cobweb clung to her shoulder.
‘There are steps leading down to the middle floor,’ she said.
‘You had no idea any of this was here?’
‘No, of course not. The police didn’t find it either when they searched the house after Lily vanished.’
I was about to accuse the police of incompetence, but why would they have found these hidden spaces if they weren’t looking for them?
‘I’m going down.’ Julia turned back around.
‘Wait. Let me go.’
‘No. It’s my house. I want to do it.’ She crawled back through the secret space. As soon as she was out of sight, I ran out of the room and down the stairs to the middle floor, where my room and Lily’s old bedroom were located. I could hear movement inside the walls, as Julia descended the hidden steps. I went into Lily’s room and waited.
Julia tapped on the wall and I placed a palm against the paintwork, knowing she was on the other side.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.
Her voice was a little muffled but easy to make out. This must have been where the singing I’d heard came from.
‘It stops here,’ she said. ‘Oh, hang on. There’s a hatch.’
‘A hatch?’
I heard a grunt of exertion, then she called, ‘I’m going down.’
Again, I hurried down the stairs to the ground floor. I stood in the main hallway, by the front door. Lily’s room was, I was sure, above my head. I could no longer hear Julia. Where the hell was she? I called her name but got no response. Then I heard knocking. It was coming from the Thomas Room.
‘Julia?’ I called again.
Two knocks on the ceiling. She was above my head. It didn’t make sense. But then I stepped back into the doorway and looked into the hallway, then back to the Thomas Room. I had never noticed before, but the ceiling in the Thomas Room was considerably lower.
‘Can you hear me?’ I shouted.
Her voice came back, but it was too faint to make out what she was saying. And then I heard a thump from the far end of the room. It came from behind the bookcases. I hurried over.
‘Hello?’
There was no reply.
My heartbeat accelerated. ‘Julia? Hello? Are you all right?’
I was about to run upstairs to enter the crawl space, convinced someone had attacked her, when she spoke and relief flooded my body.
‘There’s a room,’ she called. ‘A tiny room. Where am I exactly?’
‘Behind the bookcases in the Thomas Room.’
‘Jesus Christ. Listen, there are more steps. I’m going down.’
‘Julia, are you sure?’ This felt bizarre, talking to her through a bookcase. ‘Is there anything in the room?’
‘There’s a glass. A tumbler.’
Someone had been in that little room, with a glass pressed against the wall, listening.
‘I’m going down the steps now!’ she called. ‘Come down to the basement!’
‘No, Julia, wait there!’ I raised my voice. ‘There has to be an exit from the passageway into the house.’ I felt along the bookcase, looking for a loose panel.
Then I remembered something. Karen had reported seeing a new guest in the dining room. We thought she’d imagined it – but what if she really had seen someone?
I asked Julia to give me a minute, then went into the dining room. There was a cupboard against the wall where the Roberts Room – the dining room – was joined to the Thomas Room, at about waist height. I crouched and opened the cupboard. Apart from a few ancient phone directories, it was empty. On my hands and knees, I reached through to the back of the cupboard. There was a handle. I pulled it and the back of the cupboard came away.
‘I knew it,’ I said aloud.
I slithered through on my belly and found Julia staring at me. Her face was smeared with dirt and she was breathing heavily. I entered the little room behind the bookcases, which was too small for me to stretch out my arms, and got to my feet. It was dusty and claustrophobic, the walls furry with ancient cobwebs.
‘Let me go first,’ I said, pushing past her and going down the steps before she could protest. I had my phone out now as well, filling the space with weak light. Julia followed.
I found myself in a narrow passageway, tall enough to stand in, with bare brick walls on both sides. I tapped the wall to my right. ‘This must be the basement. The den.’
I moved slowly through the passageway. It was around eighteen feet long. As I got closer to the end, I slowed, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.
I turned to look at Julia, to make sure she could see it, that I wasn’t hallucinating. She could clearly see it too.
It was a door. A solid steel door.
C
hapter 44
I placed my hands against the cold metal and pushed. The door didn’t budge. I examined it using my phone’s flashlight. There was no handle, no keyhole. It had to be bolted on the other side.
‘Maybe there’s another way in,’ I said, keeping my voice low.
Julia was about to bang on the door but I caught her wrist.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The person who’s been inside your house could be in there now. If there’s another exit, we don’t want to alert her. She’ll get away.’
‘She?’
I put my finger to my lips and squeezed past Julia, leading her back up the steps and into the little room behind the bookcases. We took turns to squeeze through into the dining room. I dusted myself off and did what I always do when I’m trying to think through a problem. I paced.
‘It has to be a woman,’ I said. ‘Ursula’s guide’s voice was female. The voice I heard singing was female.’
Julia nodded. ‘And Heledd was convinced the woman who stopped her last night was the Red Widow.’
‘Come on,’ I said, hurrying from the room. I thought I knew who she was, the woman who had been haunting Nyth Bran, the uninvited guest, but wanted to be sure before I shared it with Julia. ‘The secret room is beyond that door. And I think I know where the other entrance is.’
On the way out, I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen. It was raining, a light drizzle, but I hardly felt it as I jogged along the path towards the woods, Julia at my heels. I phoned the police station and was told DI Snaith and DC Hawkins were busy. Interviewing Rhodri, I assumed. I left a message, asking them to call me back urgently.
Julia and I passed the clearing with the hut and entered the second set of woods. It was my fourth time here and I was becoming familiar with the landscape.
‘Remember I thought I saw Ursula here, wearing her red coat? Well . . . whoever it is who’s been in your house, it must have been her,’ I said. ‘I guess she took a fancy to it. She can’t have known I would see her go into the woods and follow her.’
I stopped.
‘She vanished somewhere around here. Just before the fork in the path.’
Last time I came here, the branches had been bare, everything frozen in suspended animation, waiting for spring. Now buds sprouted, wild daffodils peeked through the grass, and the undergrowth was even thicker. I stopped and scanned the ground, turning around slowly. Beyond a thick tangle of brambles, twenty feet from where I stood, was an ancient-looking oak tree. I headed over, stomping on nettles and stepping over fallen logs until I reached the tree.
Julia caught up with me. I looked around, searching for the spot where I thought I’d seen the woman in the red coat vanish.
‘The entrance . . . It has to be around here somewhere.’
‘The entrance to what?’
‘To the—’ I began, stepping forward, and then I was falling, the ground giving way beneath me.
Julia snatched at my arm, and I twisted, grabbing hold of the ground. Along with damp earth, I got two handfuls of brambles which ripped into my palm. My legs hung in the air beneath me and I kicked out, convinced I was about to fall.
‘Pull!’ Julia urged, holding on to me with all her strength.
My foot found something beneath it. A protruding tree root. By pushing against it, I was able to drag myself back onto solid earth. I lay on the ground, waiting for my heartbeat to slow down.
‘Looks like we found the entrance you were looking for,’ Julia said.
I sat up. ‘Yeah. I did that deliberately.’
She laughed, and for a wonderful moment the tension dissipated.
I checked my phone. We’d reached the point where my signal was fading, but neither DI Snaith nor DC Hawkins had tried to call me back.
‘Do you want to wait for the police?’ I asked.
Julia shook her head. ‘No. I need to see.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ I lay on my belly and peered down into the hole, using the flashlight to see beneath me. ‘Just as I thought, there’s a tunnel. Let me help you down, then I’ll follow.’
I lay on my front and Julia lowered herself into the hole, grasping my wrists.
‘You ready?’ I asked.
She grunted and let go. It was only an eight-foot drop, and she landed on her feet, bending her legs and rolling onto her side like a parachute jumper.
‘Right, my turn.’
‘Wait, there’s a ladder,’ she said. She lifted it until its tip emerged beside me, and I climbed down, leaving it where it was. This was obviously how Julia’s uninvited guest entered and exited the woods – like on that day she’d vanished before my eyes, when I thought I was following Ursula. The fact the ladder had been lying on the ground surely meant she was inside now. It was hard for me not to think of it as her lair, and as I thought that an image from my book hit me. The creature, hiding beneath ground, fat and happy from the souls it had consumed. In Sweetmeat’s final scenes, my hero trudged through a filthy, sewage-caked tunnel to confront the beast. It sent a chill through me. Life imitating art, again.
Except the tunnel we stood in was, apart from a puddle of rainwater around our feet, dry.
‘It must have been part of the mine,’ Julia said. The walls were constructed of compacted slate and the tunnel stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were rusted metal tracks set into the ground. I guessed that once this tunnel would have been used to transport carts full of slate towards the town – or maybe towards the estate where we’d found the chapel. That didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that I was certain this tunnel ran beneath Julia’s house.
The roots of the oak tree, which would have been an acorn when this tunnel was built, hung above our heads. These roots had pushed through the roof of the tunnel and created the hole we’d climbed through. I guessed that, sooner or later, the whole thing would collapse.
I switched on the flashlight.
‘You know,’ Julia said as we made our way along the tunnel, ‘after you leave, I’m always going to associate you with dark, claustrophobic spaces.’
She was trying to keep her voice light, but it cracked towards the end of the sentence.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I asked.
‘Please stop asking.’
‘Okay.’
As we trudged through the darkness, with the woods above our heads, I thought about what she’d just said. After you leave. Despite everything that had happened here, the prospect of leaving and going home filled me with dread. There was nothing for me there, except an empty flat. Loneliness. Here, with Julia beside me, I felt alive, and maybe that was because of everything that had happened since I’d arrived at the retreat. Yes, I felt horribly guilty about what had happened to Zara and Max and the others, and I could foresee a period when I would have to deal with that guilt and the trauma of it all. But now, watching Julia as she walked through the tunnel beside me, I remembered how it felt to be thrilled by someone else’s presence.
I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay here, with her, whatever happened today.
But now was not the right time to tell her that.
As we progressed along the tunnel, we found old pieces of machinery that had been left there to rot. I didn’t know what any of it was called. A contraption the size of a fridge-freezer with a metal wheel that had turned brown. An iron bench that had suffered a similar fate. Lurking at the edges of this forgotten place, they made me think of rusting ghosts, the trapped spirits of ancient robots. The woman who became the Widow of legend – her husband had died down here, hadn’t he? That made me think of other kinds of ghosts and I reminded myself there was no such thing. I pulled my jacket tighter and increased my pace.
‘Surely we must be getting close to the house now,’ Julia said after we’d been walking a while.
The tunnel curved around a shallow bend. I thought of the River Dee, somewhere above us, where all this had started – for Julia at least. I sneaked a glance at her.
Her jaw was set with determination. Someone had been in her house, on her territory. She hadn’t said as much, but I knew she felt violated. Angry. And something else: if the uninvited guest had been living here, roaming the woods, had she seen what had happened to Lily?
And why had she attacked Heledd and opened the door so Julia and I could escape?
We rounded the bend and stopped. It looked like we would be getting answers very soon. A metal ladder attached to the wall led up to a wooden hatch.
Without waiting to argue about who would go first, I started up the ladder. It was slippery, but less rusted than the other metal objects we’d seen down here. I pushed at the hatch. It shifted an inch, then got stuck. I managed to push one edge up, which let through a chink of light.
‘It’s not locked,’ I said. ‘But there’s something on top of it.’
Holding on to the ladder with one hand, I climbed as high as I could and put my shoulders against the hatch, bent into an awkward, painful position. I pushed. Something scraped against the floor above me. I pushed again, until I was able to lift one side of the hatch, tilting it until whatever was blocking it slid away. One more heave, and I was through.
I pulled myself up through the square gap and gestured for Julia to follow.
We found ourselves in a small chamber with stone walls. The ceiling was low, and I had to stoop slightly so as not to bang my head against the slightly damp ceiling. There was nothing here except a trunk that had been covering the hatch. At one end of the chamber was a solid wooden door. I tried it. It was open.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked Julia.
She nodded and we went through. I heard Julia catch her breath.
It was an underground apartment. A bedroom. A mattress lay on the floor in one corner, covered with a dirty quilt that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years. Beside the mattress, a chest of drawers, with chipped and faded baby-pink paintwork. A lamp – battery-operated, I guessed – sat on top of it. There was a little porcelain bowl in the corner. It took me a moment to realise what it was – a bedpan. There was another, larger bowl next to that, and a silver tray bearing a bar of soap, a hairbrush, a toothbrush and toothpaste. There was a tap set into the wall. I gave it a quick turn and a trickle of cold water came through.