House of Malice

SEVEN

It was with a lot of trepidation that Mandy returned to the manuscript that afternoon. She couldn’t understand why it had remained on her computer. She knew she’d deleted the file before Chester had turned up. Killed it, obliterated it.

But it had come back. As if it didn’t want to die. As if it wanted to be written, and had chosen her to be its channel.

She was so disgusted by what she’d written that she could hardly bear to read it, let alone consciously come up with more of it. And yet, as she put her fingers to the keys, out of nowhere the flood resumed. Locking her mind into itself, making it impossible to stop.

Mandy wrote until the study windows were in darkness and the only light in the room was the glow of her screen. Only then did she feel as if she’d been released. The word count now read 19,758, almost a quarter of a full length manuscript. It took her breath away to think she’d done this.

Wearily, her eyes burning, she staggered to the kitchen and ate a sandwich that barely seemed to taste of anything. She dragged herself upstairs for a shower, then pulled on jeans and a sweater. In the entrance hall she grabbed the torch, stepped into her pair of Wellingtons and called Buster out into the cold evening for his walk. The dog seemed unusually glad to escape the confines of Summer Cottage.

Crossing the dark meadow behind the house and listening to the whisper of the trees that lined its edges, Mandy shivered and flicked torchlight here and there into shadows that looked alive and moving, only to see bushes and dying leaves rustling in the wind. ‘You’re scaring yourself,’ she said with a nervous chuckle. After a few minutes she called Buster back, and had to coax him to return to the house.

She’d willed herself not to go straight back to the computer, but there it sat, calling her. She wrote until midnight and then trudged upstairs to bed, too exhausted even to think. The moment her head touched the pillow she was ready to fall into a deep and instant sleep.

But when she did, the nightmares quickly returned. Horrific nebulous figures that seemed to swirl and swim around her, taunting her with whispering voices. The creeping certainty that there was something, someone, in the room with her, breathing on her and running icy cold fingers down her face.

Then she was wandering through the darkness of Summer Cottage, walking the passage that led from the hallway past the kitchen and her study and onwards through the house. Her bare feet shambled forwards as if in trance as a strange greenish-yellow glow led her through the winding passage, seeming to lure her on step by step. Shadows flitting all around her. Perspectives distorted as if through a lens. Deeper and deeper into the house, the passageway narrowing until the walls, now dank and dripping and mottled with black mould, brushed her shoulders as she walked.

Ahead of her, the yellowish glow seemed to emanate from a half-open doorway. She knew the source of the light lay beyond. The voices were calling for her to join them there.

She saw her hand reach out to the door, but before her fingers touched it, it swung open as if of its own accord. The light was brighter down there, drifting like a thick mist. The whispers spoke more loudly inside her head.

Then, a low, chittering cackle. Frightened, she tried to pull away from the light, but found it drawing her towards it like a magnetic field of invisible power. She didn’t want to go there. The voice filled her head until it felt it could split apart. Her mouth gaped open in a silent scream.

Crash.

Mandy’s eyes snapped open. She was covered in sweat. Her bedcovers were thrown back. She’d been thrashing about in the throes of her nightmare and knocked over her bedside table lamp.

Breathing hard, she swung her legs out of the bed, picked up the fallen lamp and tried the switch. It was working, and she was deeply grateful for the light. She left it on and crawled back into bed, afraid to close her eyes. Too tired and drained to go downstairs the way she’d done the night before, she just lay there staring at the ceiling until dawn.

The first thing she did the next morning, before she’d brewed her coffee or even let Buster out into the garden, was to revisit the passage downstairs. She paced its length, trying to remember the way it had been in her dreams. It was all so different now, sunlight streaming in through the small leaded window-panes and dappling on the walls, which were far enough apart for her to extend both arms full-length without her stretched-out fingers touching them. Where in the dream the passage had led to a door, there was only a solid wall. She tapped it with her knuckles, listening for any kind of hollow resonance. Nothing but thick stone. Foolish to imagine it would have been anything else.

Pull yourself together, girl. You’re losing it. It was just a stupid nightmare. Writing all this horror shit is getting to you.

Fighting to shake the memory from her mind, she returned to the kitchen to make her coffee, attend to Buster and face up to the day ahead. In a water-filled jug on the kitchen worktop were the flowers Chester had brought her, now all curled up and brown, looking as if they’d been left neglected there for weeks. ‘Wonder what filling station you bought those in, Chester.’

She thought about the white roses that Sarah Grace had left her as a welcoming gift, and how fast they’d seemed to die, too. Strange. Maybe the cottage, with its thick walls and small windows, just wasn’t suited to flowers.

She was tossing the wilted chrysanthemums in the bin when she heard the phone.

Chester again, sounding as if he was bubbling with excitement. Mandy’s eyebrows rose. Nobody had ever seen or heard Chester bubbling with excitement, unless it was a million-pound publishing deal.

‘It’s great! Great! Fantastic!’ he kept repeating.

‘What is?’ she said blankly.

‘The sample, the sample. I mean, wow! Just wow! It’s sadistic, it’s cruel, it’s morbid, it’s vicious, it’s twisted, it’s wonderful! I fucking love it! You hear me? If I’d known you could write like this, I’d have got you out of doing that romantic slush years ago. You have a title yet? I had some ideas we could throw around otherwise.’

‘Hold on, Chester. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What sample?’

‘Are you suffering from amnesia or something? The sample you emailed me. It hit my inbox at four in the morning. I got into the office an hour ago and I’ve been reading it ever since, all twenty thousand-plus words of it.’

‘But I—’

‘I just came off the phone with Norris Elliot at Pan, and before that I was talking to Melanie Rothwell at Penguin’s new horror imprint, DarkNite. They’re both hot for it. Of course, I haven’t told them who the author is. I’m letting them dangle for now. All they know is, it’s from a debut writer who’s gonna blow everyone’s socks off and pull a high six-figure advance. Easy.’

‘But Chester, I never emailed anyth—’ she tried to say.

Chester went on talking, running over her like an express train. He was in full piratical mode now, buzzing with the thrill of the thing he loved most: the colour of publishers’ money. ‘But I’ll have to throw them a name before long if we want to close a deal. Oh, listen — someone’s on the other line. Could be one of our fishes biting. Got to go. Don’t stop what you’re doing. Work! Work! Send me more as soon as you got it!’ He hung up.

Mandy’s head was reeling after the call. She hurried into the study to check her computer and, sure enough, the 22,000 word sample had been emailed to Chester from her account just after four a.m. She could not remember having done it. Was she going mad?

Returning to the kitchen she felt badly in need of a drink. As a rule she never boozed alone, and certainly not in the morning — but now she craved something stronger than coffee. She opened the wine Chester had brought and poured herself a large glass, slumping at the table to gulp it down.

That was when she noticed Buster. He was cringing near the back door, as if afraid of something. ‘What is it, boy?’ she asked him, frowning. She put down her wineglass, stood up and went over to him.

He whimpered. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ She knelt down beside him, running her hand down the coarse fur of his back.

She stopped as a sound came through the wall. An electric jolt of alarm shot through her heart.

There it was again.

Someone was inside the cottage. In her dining room, playing her piano.