House of the Lost

CHAPTER THREE

Each evening, as night fell, Theo found himself listening for the sounds of footsteps outside Fenn House.

He did not immediately realize he was doing this. When he did he was annoyed because he was used to living on his own and, although he had his fair share of writer’s imagination, it did not normally prompt him to listen uneasily for prowlers the minute darkness descended. But then he had never stayed in Fenn House on his own and he had certainly never been at Melbray during a bleak Norfolk winter. And he had never, he thought uneasily, experienced anything quite like that insistent image that had scalded his mind when he arrived – the image of the boy frightened to enter the dark house.

He had been at Fenn for four days and had quelled some of the dusty dereliction, swiping at cobwebs and trundling the vacuum cleaner over a few of the rooms. Charmery would have laughed; she would have said, ‘Theo, darling, how can you be bothered – why don’t you just hire a cleaner?’ But Theo did not have Charmery’s careless attitude to money, and he did not want anyone disturbing his work. He had still not been down to the boat-house, though. He thought it was because he did not want to see it with the remnants of the police investigation strewn around; he wanted it to stay in his mind exactly as it had been all those years ago.

He had worked almost non-stop since he arrived. Once or twice he wondered vaguely what his agent and editor would say when they found out he was writing a totally different book to the one outlined in his current contract, and that it was a book so different from anything else he had written, it might not even be recognizable as a Theo Kendal novel. Still, providing he added a few scenes of classy bonking and injected a touch of humour here and there, his agent would be appeased even if his editor tore her hair in exasperation.

At intervals he went rather absently into the kitchen to make coffee or a sandwich or to heat tinned soup, eating it at the end of the dining table with the laptop in sight, unwilling to stay away from his boy for longer than necessary. Once or twice he paused to wonder where the boy’s story was coming from, but it was tumbling onto the screen with such insistence he was almost afraid of questioning it too much in case it vanished. It did not vanish, though – if anything it grew stronger, and the boy’s world gradually became so vivid that Fenn House and its rooms seemed dim and slightly unreal. If Theo half closed his eyes, he could see the house where the boy lived and the rather sparse bedroom at the top of the house beneath low eaves. It seemed to be a large but slightly shabby house. Like Fenn House? said a voice inside his head, but he rejected this at once because he refused to accept that this was some kind of lingering ghost from Fenn House’s past. But it was a very similar house.

It was just about possible that the boy was some kind of manifestation of Theo’s own childhood: there were several parallels. Theo’s early years had not been as dark and fearful as the boy’s seemed to be, but they had been a bit mixed. There had been patches of unhappiness and times when he had not understood why people around him behaved oddly. His father had died in a car crash when he was four and his mother had been devastated: it was a bit of a family legend that when John Kendal died Petra had, as Nancy put it, gone to pieces for years. Theo could not remember his mother’s in-pieces behaviour, nor could he really remember his father, but he could remember escaping into fantasy worlds of his own making, although in Theo’s case the worlds had been the ones he wrote about. There had been compositions for school – My Holidays, My Pets, My Favourite Place – which had expanded, almost without him realizing, into short stories. He had been secretive about those early stories, scribbling diligently in an old exercise book in his bedroom for hours on end, spawning another little family legend that Petra’s son was slightly odd, although what could you expect? poor fatherless child, without any brothers or sisters. Nancy and several of the older aunts had been thinly disapproving, but Guff, kindly and concerned, had invited the small Theo to stay with him at his own house. It was a rather precise, over-tidy house, because Guff himself was precise and over-tidy, but Theo had liked being there and he liked Guff, who had explained about his mother not being very well. ‘She’ll get better, though,’ Guff said.

Petra had got better as Guff termed it, but she had become what Nancy called very flighty, travelling for long spells while Theo was away at school.

‘Nancy thinks your mother’s a bit of a tart,’ Charmery said, years later, when they were at Fenn House for her ninth birthday celebrations.

‘No, she isn’t,’ said Theo, furious and hurt.

‘Is it a bad thing to be, a tart?’

‘It would be if she was, but she’s not. Nancy’s jealous of her, that’s all. But if you’re going to call my mother a tart I’m not coming here again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Charmery, and Theo forgave her because she was only nine, which was too young to know what a tart was.

The boy in the story was called Matthew. Theo had written the best part of an entire chapter before he realized this. He had, in fact, been getting slightly cross at not knowing the boy’s name, particularly when he knew so many other things about him. He knew what he liked to eat, and how he struggled with arithmetic, and he knew how, every morning, he met a small friend, a girl with whom he walked to school. The girl was a bit of a chatterbox but Theo’s boy liked listening to her, because he was rather quiet himself. Theo knew all this, but he still did not know the boy’s name, and he was starting to think it was a bit much of him to invade his life like this without providing a name.

And then, on the crest of this thought, as clear as lightning against a night sky, the name came scudding into his mind. Matthew.

Matthew. There was a moment when Theo thought – Matthew, yes, of course, that’s who he is, I should have realized right away! He did not think he knew any Matthews but he liked the name. Matthew. Yes, it was exactly right. He pressed the Save key at the end of the scene where Matthew was drawing master-spy faces on his troublesome arithmetic lesson, and ended the paragraph with a description of how Matthew suddenly looked up from his drawing and listened for the footsteps. Matthew’s bedroom curtains were open and for a moment Theo caught a fleeting glimpse of what lay beyond that window – there was a dark garden with an uneven brick wall, and on the horizon was the fearsome Black House which Matthew and the small school friend seemed to fear so much. But what else was beyond that wall? Was it the fields – those fields Theo himself saw from the windows of this house? Was it even possible that the Black House was St Luke’s Convent? He got up to stare through the windows, but the flickering image had already vanished, and in any case it was too dark to see anything, so he closed the curtains, and went back to the table, switching on the small lamp, grateful for the warm pool of light it cast.

He had intended to close the chapter with Matthew’s gradual realization that the footsteps were approaching, which should make for a nicely tense ending. But the paragraph did not go that way and, instead, Theo found himself describing how there was someone Matthew feared even more than the men. This was the person who gave the men their orders. It was not another man who did this, though, it was a woman.

No one Matthew knew had ever seen this woman, but everyone knew how powerful she was. She was beautiful but evil and cruel, and if people did not do what she said, she had them thrown in prison. The younger children said she was like somebody from an old fairytale – the Snow Queen or the wicked stepmother – and if she caught you she would put you in a cage or bake you in the oven and eat you up. Matthew knew this was silly because people did not eat children, but all the same, he hoped he never met her.

Theo typed all this without pausing, then broke off to read it with growing puzzlement. He had not envisaged an evil beauty as being part of this strange story, and even if he had intended to create such a character he certainly would not have added that touch about the Snow Queen or the oven – it gave a Gothic flavour to the whole thing, and Theo’s work had never been remotely Gothic. But he knew this female very well indeed; he even knew her name. She was called Annaleise.

He frowned, and returned to the footsteps. At one moment there was an ordinary quietness inside Matthew’s house – Theo thought that for all the old timber creakings and sighings it was rather a silent house for most of the time – and then the next moment the footsteps began. At first they were faint and distant like a tap dripping or a thin drum skin softly vibrating, but then they grew louder and stronger. Matthew, seated at the ramshackle little desk in his bedroom, looked up, his eyes dilating with fear…

It was at this point Theo realized the sounds were no longer solely in his story – they were real sounds and were coming from just outside. He listened intently but there was nothing. You really are taking me over, Matthew, he thought, but as he prepared to go on typing the sounds came again. Soft light crunches – exactly as if someone was walking along the gravel path that wound down to the old boathouse. There could be no mistake: someone was outside. He pressed the Save key so the Snow Queen would not be lost, reached across to switch off the table lamp, and sat absolutely still in the faint glimmer from the monitor. The footsteps had stopped. Had the walker seen the light go out and paused? Perhaps it was an animal. A fox, maybe. It was then that a new sound sent prickles of fear scudding across his skin.

Someone tapped, very lightly, on the French window. Three light measured taps. Someone must be standing just outside them. Theo waited in the darkened room, aware of his heart thumping erratically. After a moment the tapping came a second time, lightly and eerily. Tap-tap-tap. Almost as if someone was tapping out Morse code. Let-me-in. Or was it, Come-out-side.

Theo stared at the curtained window, fighting for calm, trying to decide what to do. Was someone really standing there? Mightn’t it be a branch brushing against the glass? There was even the possibility that it was a perfectly ordinary caller – it was only six p.m., for goodness’ sake, Theo had heard St Luke’s chime the hour. But there were no other houses in this lane, and would an innocent visitor really tap so furtively on a window? Wouldn’t he or she go openly up to the front door and cheerfully ply the knocker?

It might be a prowling journalist, perhaps a local reporter, an embryo paparazzo who had kept an ear to the ground and learned that Theo had inherited the house and was spending the winter here. If that was the case, he would deal very sharply indeed with the prowler.

He got up slowly from the table, and walked cautiously across to the windows. A faint draught of cold night air came in from round the frames. Theo listened for a moment, then reached up to draw the curtains back.

A face – a pale face that looked as if it was framed in some kind of dark scarf or hood – was looking in at him.

Theo gasped and felt his heart leap into his throat, but in the same instant realized he was seeing his own reflection in the window. It was the thick glass that made it look slightly ghostlike and the darkness of the gardens beyond that had twisted the eerie hood-like shape round it.

Nothing moved in the darkness. The tapping must have been a branch or an animal or even just the wind. In any case, Theo was blowed if he was going to yomp through the unlit lonely gardens in search of an intruder – especially since he was living in a house whose owner had been recently murdered, with the murderer still at large. What he would do was make a careful check of all the locks and bolts in the house to make certain no one could get in, and keep his mobile phone near. He picked up the poker from the fireplace, just in case, and, switching the lamp back on, he set off.

Fenn House had started life as a relatively modest, rather old-fashioned house, but Charmery’s parents had built on to it after buying it and the extension did not completely line up with the original structure, so there were several short, rather dim, passages linking the old to the new. The house was not entirely silent, in the way old houses never were entirely silent, but even though it was ten years since Theo had been at Fenn, its sounds were as familiar as ever. He had no idea what he would do if he really did encounter someone hiding in the house because although the poker made him feel reasonably brave, he was not sure if he could actually use it.

But Fenn’s ground floor was innocent of intruders, and feeling slightly more confident, he crossed the hall to check the first floor. The stairs were wide and shallow, uncarpeted because Charmery’s mother, Helen, had loved the mellow dark grain of the wood. They creaked loudly, as they always had, and halfway up they twisted round sharply, so there was a view through the balustrades to the upper landing. As Theo reached this twist, there was a blur of movement above him, as if someone had whisked out of sight into one of the bedrooms. He stood still, unsure whether it had been a trick of the light, his heart racing. Then he took a firmer grip on the poker and forced himself to go up the remaining stairs. When he reached the top, he looked very deliberately down the corridor.

Icy sweat slid between his shoulder blades. Standing at the far end of the corridor was a pale, bowed figure, its long hair heavy as if dripping wet, as if the figure had just been brought out of deep water… Theo, in the grip of horror, blinked several times before his sight adjusted to the dimness. It was not a ghost. The long window at the far end was slightly open at the top and the pale muslin drapes were stirring in the night wind. As he watched, a section of the flimsy fabric billowed out again.

He kicked his mind back into focus and began a systematic search of the bedrooms. They all had shrouded furniture, bare walls and oblong patches on the walls where pictures or mirrors had hung. There was no one hiding anywhere, although Theo was still glad he had brought the poker with him.

The only room he had still to check was Charmery’s, and he was within two strides of the door when the creakings seemed to shift gear. He paused to listen, not exactly frightened, but puzzled. Perhaps the roof timbers were contracting in the night air, or perhaps the open window was rattling. The sounds were curiously rhythmic, but they were not loud enough for footsteps. He pushed open the door of Charmery’s room and it was then that another sound came – a sound that sent his heartbeat skittering wildly.

The old clock – the clock that Charmery claimed was Fenn’s heart, the clock that had not been wound since she died – had just chimed the half hour. The rhythmic sounds that had puzzled Theo a few minutes earlier had been the clock’s measured ticking.

Someone had wound it up.

Theo came out of his frozen terror and half fell through the door into Charmery’s room, with absolutely no idea what would be waiting for him. But there was nothing. Nothing moved and the room was exactly as it had been on his arrival, apart from the ticking clock. He stood in front of it, hearing the measured tick that had comforted Charmery every night, seeing that the minute hand was moving, slowly but perceptibly. He reached for the small gilt clasp that held the door in place and released it. The door opened with a small soft creak, revealing the brass mechanism. The pendulum with its circular copper striker, swung back and forth, regular and steady, like the good piece of Victorian machinery it was. Theo watched it for several minutes, then looked round the room. There was nowhere anyone could possibly hide in here – even the wardrobe was a small one, with a narrow hanging space and shelves taking up half its interior. He checked it anyway, then drew the heavy curtains back from the deep bay window. Nothing.

It was beyond all logic that an intruder would creep into the house for the sole purpose of starting up an old clock, but it was what seemed to have happened. He went back onto the landing and examined the window with the pale curtains. Was it possible that the faint gust of wind through that open window had somehow disturbed the clock’s mechanism? Along eight feet of corridor and through a closed door? How about mice? Could a mouse have got inside the clock and nudged the pendulum?

Theo found a linen handkerchief in one of the tallboys, and tied it round the copper disc in order to muffle the chimes. He could cope – just about – with ghosts and intruders, but whether the ticking clock was due to an act of God or an errant wind, he did not think he could cope with it chiming the half hour through the entire night.