The Ghost Writer

Try the cellar

In the smoky, flaring candlelight, the tunnel was alive with shadows thrown by the branched candelabra in barred crisscrossing patterns over the timbers of the door, multiplying my own gestures in monstrous dumb show. I felt the heat of the flames as I set down the candelabra and turned the beam of the torch in my other hand on to the black padlock.

Here in the tunnel it would be just as dark at midday. And I would have spent another sixteen hours imagining what I might find on the other side of this door. With a certain fatalistic dread, I saw that the keyhole in the padlock had a short central pin, just right for the barrel of the one key I had not yet identified. The lock scraped and grated; the body of the padlock dropped away from the hasp. I lifted the latch and opened the door a fraction.

Nothing came out. The torch beam wavered down a narrow, precipitous flight of steps on to another flagged floor, dark with moisture. There was a handrail attached to the wall on the left of the stairs, but no banister on thè other side, just a sheer drop to the stones below. A raw, urinous odour drifted up to me. Racks and shelves, mostly empty so far as I could see, extended along the walls. Patches of lichen flickered in the torch beam. The cellar was long and narrow. Beneath the end wall, I could just make out a mound of something that looked like earth.

The more I played the torch over that mound, the less I liked it. The candles gave far more light, but the flames dazzled me no matter where I held it.

I had been kneeling with the open door propped against my shoulder. When I moved away, it swung closed of its own accord: the bar slid almost to the top of the catch. I tried it again, letting the door go from hard against the side wall. This time the bar slid up and over and dropped, unnervingly, into place. One of those massive Victorian irons in the laundry would wedge it securely open. But then I noticed a small metal eye in the top of the door above the latch. At the corresponding point on the wall, in the vertical gap between two blocks of stone, a hook had been mounted so that it hung inside the recess. I dropped it into the eye and shook the door hard to make certain it was secure.

As I did so I noticed that the inside of the door was scarred by numerous vertical gouges, especially along the joints where the planks met, as if some savage animal had tried to claw its way out of the cellar. I remembered the deep scratches in the floor of the bedroom cupboard.

DOWN HERE THE AIR WAS COLDER STILL: CHILL AND DAMP and stale. I had the torch in my right hand, flames trailing from the candelabra in my left. A cobweb flared along the shelves-mostly anonymous tins and bottles, labels long gone-as I approached the dark mound. Not earth: a black tarpaulin shrouding an irregular form about five feet long. I stretched out a reluctant foot and twitched the covering aside.

Something scuttled from the heap. I recoiled, shuddering, and bumped against the shelves. The whole end section came crashing down, shattering glass and sending cans rolling and clattering into the dark. By a small miracle I kept hold of both the candelabra and the torch. The flames guttered wildly but did not go out, and as the light steadied I saw amidst the debris a small yellow package tightly tied with string.

As I bent to pick it up I heard another, softer sound from above. The creak of hinges. I had not even reached the foot of the steps before the door swung shut. The click of the latch dropping into place was audible even through the heavy planks.

BY THE END OF THE THIRD HOUR I HAD EXHAUSTED EVERY avenue of escape. The timber was like iron; the door closed flush onto a broad lip of stone, so that the edges were inaccessible from inside. I might have forced a blade between the planks, or prised them apart with a crowbar or even a heavy screwdriver, but there wasn't a single implement in the cellar. The entire construction of the shelving was wooden, much of it rotten, none of it strong enough to make an impression on the door. There were no tools, no knives; nothing bigger than a rusty nail. I tried scraping at the timber with broken glass, and cut my hand badly without making any impression. I tried the keys themselves: most were the wrong shape for gouging, and those that were thin enough had bent and then broken. I thought of prising up a flagstone to use as a battering-ram, but I had nothing to prise with; they were all immovable. I had even overcome my dread of what might be hidden beneath the black tarpaulin, and found only a pile of rotting sandbags-left over from the Blitz, perhaps. I tried hitting the door with one and it split on the first blow, showering me with damp sand.

Now, as I sat on the top step with my back against the immovable door, the torch was noticeably dimmer, though I had used it as sparingly as possible, and the first of my four candles-I had put out the other three as soon as the first wave of blind panic subsided-was almost gone. On one of the intact shelves I had found a pool of long-congealed candle wax, with an empty matchbox beside it. The corroded tins had all held paint or household cleaners. I had no food, no water, no jacket: only a filthy, sweat-soaked shirt and trousers, a box of matches, almost full, a fading torch, and three more candles.

I had read somewhere that you could survive for many weeks without food, so long as you had plenty to drink, but only four or five days without water. My mouth and throat were already parched. I'll be with you in three more days, maybe sooner, Alice had said in her last message. Tomorrow was Saturday. But even if it occurred to her that I might be trapped here, she had no way of getting into the house, and Mr Grierstone's office would be closed all weekend. So even if a very long chain of even ifs' came out my way, there was no hope of rescue before Monday at the earliest. And would anyone hear through the floorboards whatever sound I was still capable of making by then?

My frenzied efforts at escape had given the panic an outlet. Now it was rising like water up the steps towards me. A force that could use a planchette to write 'Try the cellar could just as easily unhook a door. Exactly the sort of thought I mustn't think. I would be crouching in the dark soon enough. Use the last of the torch to search the cellar again.

I had left the candelabra at the foot of the stairs. Beyond the circle of light, I could just make out the wreckage of fallen shelves and broken glass, and a faint gleam of yellow: the package, which I had dismissed as simply a folded section of waterproof cloth: there appeared to be nothing solid inside, and the knots were too tight to undo. But I might as well be sure.

Only about an inch of candle remained. The flame swayed as I passed, spilling molten wax on to the floor. I used a piece of broken glass to cut the string. In the centre of the package I found several sheets of typescript, also tightly folded several times over, with the typewritten side outwards.

Within seconds she was drenched, and though Harry met her with an umbrella as she approached the house, the roar of the thunder drowned every attempt at speech.

Towelling her hair dry in her room, while thunder rolled and reverberated overhead and the electric light flickered after every flash of lightning, Cordelia was seized by a reckless impulse to put on the emerald green gown. Earlier in the week, she had spent several hours brushing and sponging and pressing it, and airing out the musty smell. But how would she explain its sudden appearance in her wardrobe? and besides, it would upset her uncle. She chose another dress, also green but in a lighter shade, and went down to the kitchen, where she found Harry helping Beatrice assemble a cold supper.

"I'm sorry for what I said in the lane," said Beatrice, as soon as she came in. "You startled me, that's all; I didn't mean it. No"-as Cordelia reached for an apron-"you've done everything all week; Uncle has a glass of wine waiting for you."

"Yes, you put your feet up, old thing," said Harry. "I'll be in in just a minute."

Though Cordelia had grown used to being "old thing" in company, she had not realised until that moment just how thoroughly she disliked it. But after insisting that she was not jealous, she felt obliged to accept. Harry's minute stretched to what felt like ten, and when he did join her and her uncle and aunt, she could not decide whether he was simply being his usual self, or behaving like someone determined to pretend that nothing whatever was wrong. The hiss of rain and the constant rumble of thunder made conversation difficult, and then, after an especially fierce flash of lightning, the electric lights went out, leaving them to dine by flickering candlelight, which made it impossible to read anybody's expression, even when you could hear what they were saying.

Gradually, the thunder receded and the rain diminished until there was only the drip drip drip from the eaves onto the gravel outside. The wind, too, had died away, and when Uncle Theodore opened the window, cool damp air wafted into the dining-room. Aunt Una retired to her room; but still Harry, Beatrice (who had evidently taken the confrontation in the lane as sanction for casting off her reserve with him) and Theodore chatted on, until Cordelia could bear it no longer, and more or less ordered Harry to accompany her upstairs to the studio.

The air was so still that, rather than light a lamp, she simply took one of the candlesticks from the sideboard.

"Anything the matter, old thing?" Harry asked, as they approached the stairs.

"Don't call me that any more! I'm not old, and I'm not a thing." And, she almost added, I'm not yours, either.

"Sorry, old-I mean-er-sorry," he said, sounding aggrieved, and they ascended in silence while she choked back one angry opening after another, so preoccupied with her suspicions in regard to Beatrice that they had reached the second-floor landing before she remembered "The Drowned Man".

It came to her as she went to fetch the key of the studio from her room, leaving Harry to wait in darkness on the landing. She could not say anything about Beatrice without sounding jealous, and putting herself even further in the wrong, for he might be perfectly innocent on that score. But she could set him a test: she would place a strand of her hair between the covers of "The Drowned Man", and leave the door unlocked that night; if he lied about it in the morning, she would know, and break the engagement regardless.

Though it had been cool on the landing, the day's heat was still trapped in the studio. She lit the candles on the table, and placed her candlestick in a holder on the lectern. When she knelt on the bed and opened the window, the candle flames barely wavered. There was no moon, but the sky had cleared and she could see starlight glimmering on the wet grass beyond the flagstones below.

She stood up and turned to Harry, who was standing beside the easel, and, it seemed to her, ostentatiously ignoring the lectern.

"What's the matter, old-sorry, I mean, what's up?"

"Nothing," she said coldly, thinking, how could you possibly not know?

"Not still upset over that little spat in the lane?"

Too angry to reply, she tugged at the ring he had given her, meaning to fling it in his face, but it would not come off.

"Good, I knew you wouldn't be. Look here old-sorry, I'm quite done up, I think I'll turn in. Don't worry about a candle. 'Night."

He dabbed a perfunctory kiss on her cheek and retreated to the doorway. In silence, she extinguished the candles on the table and retrieved her own from the lectern.

"Er-aren't you going to shut the window?"

She shook her head, and removed her key from the open door as she left. Dazzled by the flame of her candle, she could not see his expression, but her own was surely unmistakable.

"I see-leaving it to air-er, good idea. 'Night." He set off down the stairs in his irregular, slightly crab-like fashion, while she watched, still speechless, until he had vanished into the dim, starlit recesses of the flight below.

BACK IN HER ROOM, SHE REMOVED THE OFFENDING RING with soap and sat on her bed rehearsing what she would say when she returned it to him in the morning. Or should she go down to his room and have it out now? No; that would only upset her uncle, and give Beatrice something more to gloat over. She would wait until she could get Harry alone in the wood. For an hour or more she paced up and down her room, sustained by the heat of her fury. But as it began to cool, doubts crept in. Harry hated scenes, and would go to any lengths to avoid a quarrel; perhaps he would have apologised if she hadn't been so hostile. And what-supposing he was innocent where Beatrice was concerned-was he supposed to apologise for? Calling her "old thing"? She had never protested until tonight. For being chronically unpunctual? She had never objected to that, either. For his lack of ardour? Again, she hadn't complained of it. Was he supposed to read her thoughts? Yes, said a rebellious voice, because I know I can read his. But how could she be so sure? He had been ardent enough, last Sunday on the riverbank; her headache had put an end to that. A wave of self-loathing rose up like bile; she buried her face in her pillow and wept for a long time.

She must have fallen asleep, for after an indefinite interval she woke in darkness, with the impression of having heard a door close. Or had she only dreamt it? She slid off her bed, still fully dressed, and crept out into the corridor. No light shone beneath her sisters door, but the door to the landing stood open, and as she came nearer, she saw a faint glimmer of yellow light on the polished floor outside the studio.

Candles burned in the sockets on either side of the lectern. His hair was dishevelled, his feet bare, his shirt half-unbuttoned. He had also lit the triple candelabra on the table; its light shone full upon her face as she stood with her hand on the handle of the half-open door, but he did not see her. His forehead gleamed; she could see the reflection of the flame moving over his temple as he swayed slowly back and forth. Once again she waited, willing him to look up, her anger rekindling as the seconds passed. A stirring of the air set the candles flaring the portrait of Imogen de Vere, which stood just to the left of her line of sight, caught her awareness, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

She closed the studio door softly and returned to her own room, where she lit another candle, and changed into the emerald green gown. It was a little loose around the bodice and shoulders, but that would not matter; and her hair was still pinned up. She took out the veil, and for the third time drew it over her head.

The mirror showed only a flame floating in black mist, but that did not matter either; she knew the way blindfold. Her sisters room was still dark and silent as she made her way back along the corridor.

Even through the veil, she could see that his gaze remained fixed upon the lectern. She took a step into the room, then another. Still he did not see her. Three more paces, and a hooded shadow fell across the portrait as she came between it and the candelabra on the table. He looked up, and though his face was little more than a blurred impression of features, it seemed to her that he smiled. Then he began to speak, but so softly that she could not hear him through the muffling folds of gauze. She raised both hands and threw back the veil.

The smile faded; the words died on his lips. For several seconds he stood petrified. Then, very slowly, his expression changed to one of disbelieving horror. She began to back away, her shadow growing larger as she retreated until she bumped against the table. The room suddenly brightened; something moved upon-no, in-the bed, at which she had not even glanced before. In the flaring, crackling light she saw Beatrice's head upon the pillow, a bare arm and shoulder emerging from beneath the sheet, eyes opening wide as Cordelia tore off the burning veil and beat at her hair with both hands.

The flames around her head went out, with a horrible smell of singed hair; the blazing remnants of the veil floated across the room and settled upon Henry St Clair's palette-tray. Cordelia stood paralysed, watching her own narrowly averted fate enacted upon the canvas. A tongue of fire darted up one bare arm and across the shoulder of the emerald green gown; the beautiful face seemed to rise up in flight; and then, with no memory of an interval, she was stamping with her bare feet at the smouldering ruins of the portrait, with acrid fumes burning her throat, and a thousand tiny red sparks floating and settling and crawling about the floor.

She had knocked over the candelabra on the table; it too had gone out, but the two candles on the lectern still burned. Someone had been screaming; she did not know whom. Harry had not moved; he stood gripping the lectern with both hands, his mouth half open. Beatrice had wrapped herself in the sheet and was shivering on the edge of the bed, staring at her sister with glazed, uncomprehending eyes. Cordelia's hands and the back of her neck were beginning to sting painfully. Aside from the stinging, she felt perfectly numb; her mind had frozen in mid-thought, somewhere between Harry and Beatrice and what her aunt and uncle would do now that Ashbourn would have to be sold.

But now Harry was folding away "The Drowned Man". Meticulous as always, he fastened the clasp, took up the black volume and placed it under his left arm. He might have been walking in his sleep, or perhaps the dream was hers, for it seemed to take him an age to cover the few paces that separated them. She thought he would pass her without speaking, and knew that she ought to be angry, angrier than she had ever been in her life, but the feeling would not come, nothing would come; until he stopped between her and Beatrice and muttered something that sounded like "Sorry old… sorry." And then, quite clearly, "I must, you see."

The open window was directly behind him; one good push would send him reeling backwards past Beatrice, across the bed and over the sill. Something must have showed in her face, for he flinched away from her, hugging the black book to his chest. Beatrice, now with her clothes clutched against the sheet, held out her free hand as if inviting him to help her up. But he did not see her; his eyes remained fixed upon Cordelia, to whom he repeated, "I must have it, you see." Then he turned and made for the landing at a horrible hopping run.

Cordelia followed, not knowing what she meant to do. From the doorway, she saw him silhouetted crabwise against the starlit window as he reached the head of the stairs. Then she was thrust violently aside. A pale figure darted across the landing and flung itself at Harry. His arms flew up, and he lurched violently forward, clutching at the black volume as it sailed over the banister. One foot caught on the rail, and for an instant he seemed to hang motionless in the void. Whatever sound he made in falling was drowned in Beatrice's scream before she vanished, wailing, down the stairs.

A LANTERN GLEAMED ON THE LANDING BELOW, FOLlowed by the sound of Uncle Theodore's hurrying footsteps. Cordelia turned towards the light, but then, remembering what she was wearing, and what he had seen before, she retreated into the darkness of the corridor, to prepare herself for all that she had yet to face.

One came true. I had found the missing pages of 'The Revenant'. Crouched beside the guttering candle, I turned over the last page and saw that there was writing on the back.

My name is Anne Hatherley and my sister Filly-Phyllis-shut me in here. I heard the front door slam hours ago. I'm afraid she's left me here to die. I mustn't waste time, there's only half a candle left. And half a pencil.

I'll try and write in the dark.

Filly slept with Hugh. Hugh Montfort, my fiancé. I heard them in the attic. They were making love on Lettie's old bed. It's all in my grandmother's story-the pages I'm writing on. No time to explain. I thought it was haunting me but Filly was making it come true. She's been reading my diary-I don't know for how long.

I posted Hugh's ring back the next day with a note saying, you know why, I never want to see you again. He didn't reply. And then for a week Filly behaved as if I'd done something unforgivable to her. She was daring me to speak and I

The pencil just broke. I had to light the candle to sharpen it on a stone. Only nine matches left.

A week after I saw them in the attic my face and scalp started burning. Exactly what happened to Imogen in the story. And then it all blew up. Iris heard the row and Filly started screaming at her too. Next thing she was walking out the door. She must have had her cases packed and waiting, I think she went straight to Hugh's flat. Iris was so angry she cut Filly out of her will and left everything to me. She died that same week, I know it was the shock.

Every day my skin's got worse. It burns like fire and I feel sick all the time. The doctor said he'd never seen anything like it. Just like the story again. He gave me some ointment but it didn't help.

She didn't even come to Iris's funeral. I had the locks changed so she couldn't get in. I was staying with friends in Highgate, coming back here to pack when I could face it. I was afraid of her, I even made a will yesterday, hut I didn't tell

The pencil just broke again. Seven matches left.

Nobody knows I'm here. Except Filly. I hid this and my diary in the study where I thought she wouldn't find them again-I wanted to leave them behind but I couldn't. I came out of the study and saw her coming up the stairs with a carving knife in her hand. She smiled when she saw me.

I threw the diary at her and ran, but she didn't follow. If only I'd kept going. Instead I stopped to listen, and got caught in the most terrifying game of hide-and-seek. I slipped the story down the front of my blouse to protect me from the knife. The floorboards kept giving me away, but Filly never made a sound. I knew she was lying in wait. In the end I went down the front stairs to the first floor, making sure I trod on the boards that creak, and then crept through to the back stairs and dawn to the courtyard door. I managed the bolts quietly but the lock

Hours later-I've tried everything I can think of and I can't get out. It's so cold down here. I could burn the rest of Grandmama's story but it would only last a minute or two. I'll hide the pages I've written on in case

The last of the candle's going

Dear God help me

Anne had been braver than me. Far braver. I still had the last of the torch, and a full box of matches. My second candle was more than half gone, and I hadn't once dared sit in the dark. It would swallow me soon enough. Like Anne I had given up scraping at the granite-hard timber; I wondered whether she had sat where I was sitting, huddled on the top step with her back against the door. I was shivering in August; she must have frozen to the bone. Perhaps she had died of cold. It was supposed to be painless at the end. Better than radiation poisoning. You felt warmth stealing over you, and a great desire to sleep, and in the last moments of consciousness you might see brightly coloured visions, blossom and hedgerow and birds singing when you were actually freezing to death on the ice. One of the Antarctic explorers had written about it. Though he couldn't have died that time. I thought of the bottle of sleeping tablets beside my bed in the hotel room and wished I'd brought them with me. I wished they had caught Phyllis May Hatherley and hanged her. Though she was already pregnant by then; they would have had to wait until Gerard Hugh Montfort was born. He at least might have survived if they had.

I thought of Phyllis coming back to dispose of Anne's body. If I was going to die here I wanted to die before the last candle dripped away to nothing and the whispering began again.

I had set the candle about half-way down the steps. The flame burned steadily, motionless except for the faint pulsing of the shadow around the wick. Darkness lurked behind the wreckage of the shelves, biding its time.

I could burn the shelves, I thought. Pull the rest off the wall, build a fire in the middle of the floor and burn them one at a time. It would hold off the darkness for at least another hour, maybe several. If I kept it low there should be enough air to breathe. And if enough smoke got past the door, there was a very faint chance that someone might see it and call the fire brigade.

The door was made of wood too. I could build my fire at the top of the steps… but if it got into the floorboards directly above the door, the whole house could go up, and me with it. Horrible but quick; I'd probably suffocate before I burned. No water to control the fire… but I could empty those damp sandbags and use them as beaters.

Breaking up the shelves and building a pyramid of fragments at the base of the door was easy enough; the hard part was getting it to burn. The wood was too damp to catch. After twenty matches had yielded only faint yellow flames that crawled and turned blue and died, I was beginning to panic again. Two sheets of newspaper would have set the whole lot blazing, but I had no paper to burn.

Except ten sheets of typescript, proof-the only decisive proof-that my mother had murdered her sister.

The second candle was almost gone. It had burned much faster while I was trampling pieces of shelving. If I get out of here, I promised Anne, the whole world will know what happened to you, proof or no proof. I arranged five sheets, loosely crumpled, at the centre of the pyramid and got the other five ready to feed in.

The whole cellar lit up for a few seconds; the heaped wood caught and hissed and died with the blazing paper. I added another sheet, then two more in quick succession. The wood flared again and dwindled; now the flames had a small hold, but they were turning ominously blue as I fed in the last two sheets of typescript. The fire blazed and dimmed for a third time, but now the wood was crackling and catching and licking at the scarred planking. Fragments of Anne's last message floated around me, glowing and fading and sinking to the stones below.

For a couple of minutes, the fire seemed docile enough. The burning patch on the back of the door crept upwards. I was beginning to cough, but the draught was clearing the smoke and bringing up fresh air for me to breathe. Small tongues of flame began to lick over the edge of the stone lintel at the joist and floorboards above. I beat at them with the sack, and the fire leapt back at me. Smoke burned my throat. I turned to retreat, missed my footing and fell in a burst of pure white light that exploded inside my head and went sailing away into the dark.

THE PAIN CAME FIRST, THEN THE HEAD IT WAS POUNDING in. Throat and lungs, a shoulder, an elbow and a hip materialised, burning, throbbing and stinging in chorus. Somebody was moaning in the darkness nearby. Me. I began to cough instead. Slow dripping sounds; a sour, acrid reek of ash. I was lying in a pool of water.

The fire brigade had arrived in time. But where were they? Apart from the drip drip drip of water, the cellar was deathly still. At least I hoped it was water I was lying in, and not my own blood. I discovered I could move, and then prop myself in the angle between two walls. I coughed for several agonising minutes. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.

How long had I been unconscious? Had thé firemen simply not seen me lying below the steps? I felt in my trouser pocket for the matches, and remembered putting the box down on the top step, along with the torch. I stood up, wincing, and felt along the wall to my left until I found the edge of the steps.

As I began to feel my way upward, it seemed to me that a rectangular patch of the darkness above was fractionally paler, an impression that strengthened step by step until a gleam of silvery light appeared in the distance. Moonlight at the top of the basement stairs. The door must have burned right through.

I felt around for the torch, but couldn't find it. There was surprisingly little debris on the steps; the floorboards overhead seemed quite intact. I stepped into the tunnel, put out a hand to steady myself, and the door rattled against its hook. My foot struck something metal that went clanging and clattering across the flagstones. A bucket. There was water on the tunnel floor.

Definitely not the fire brigade. Someone had opened the cellar door within seconds of my fall and flung a bucket of water over the blaze on the steps. Someone who was already in the tunnel when I lit the fire. Listening-for how long?-to my frenzied efforts to escape.

Beneath the distant gleam from the landing, the tunnel was in darkness. Whoever-or whatever-had let me out could be waiting in the black cavern of the laundry. Where perhaps it had been waiting when I first came down here. I backed against the end wall and crouched down. If anything moved, I should see it against the band of moonlight.

Until the moon passed over the roof of the house and the darkness became absolute.

My mouth and tongue were coated in thick black glue; I was appallingly thirsty. Better to make a dash for the stairs now. And then? Out by the courtyard door, clear a path through the nettles to the back wall. I felt for the keys and realised they were lost in the cellar. Useless anyway: I had bent or broken every one.

But the courtyard door was only bolted shut. I strained to listen over the blood pounding in my ears until the effort brought on another fit of coughing. Panic sent me lunging forward, straight into another clash and clatter of rolling metal. I've kicked the bucket again. The echoes pursued me through the kitchen and up into the moonlight. I had drawn the two bolts, and twisted and tugged several times at the handle before I realised that the door-which had certainly been Unlocked three days ago, and which I could not possibly have locked, because I had never found the key-was not going to open.

No one else has keys. Miss Hamish was most insistent about that.

Pale light shimmered down the basement steps, over the empty seed trays in the conservatory. The latticework in the French windows was solid metal. On my right, the door to the breakfast room stood partly open; those windows too were barred. Above the pool of moonlight, the stairs leading up to the dining-room landing were shrouded in darkness. The house was completely silent.

One last bruising rush up those stairs and along the doglegged corridor that ran between the library and the drawing-room would carry me to safety. If I could face the dark. And if whoever was waiting somewhere in that darkness hadn't also deadlocked the front door.

But if I ran I wouldn't be able to hear. I crept across the flagged floor towards the stairs, and began to climb. In the stairwell overhead I became aware of a faint yellow light, which could only be the moon shining through the stairwell windows. Odd, because the moonlight in the basement was a stark, silvery white.

Three more steps brought me on to the landing. Staircase on my right; dining-room beyond that; library to the left; corridor straight ahead. I felt certain I had left those doors open; now all three were closed. In the hall it would be pitch black. Here at least, I could see; the yellow moonlight seemed to be shining directly down on me.

I looked up and saw that it was not the moon, but a light bulb suspended above the half-landing.

I am afraid the electricity was disconnected many years ago.

I tried the switches on the wall beside me. More lights came on, none of them very bright, in the stairwell, beside the dining-room door, in the basement below.

Miss Hamish had lied to me. Though there might be a perfectly innocent explanation: she had changed her mind and got the electricity reconnected before the stroke put her in hospital. The power could have been on the whole time I'd been searching the house.

But someone had switched on the stairwell light while I was in the cellar.

I stood irresolute, glancing from one door to another, trying to decide which way to go. The murky yellow light only accentuated the shadows all around me. I felt the pressure of unseen eyes; the feeling of something monstrous waiting behind one of those doors mounted until the dark stained timbers seemed to bulge towards me and I found myself retreating up the stairs to the half-landing and on to the first floor, where again the door to the passageway was closed, as it surely had not been before.

The stairwell lights burned steadily. I could wait here, I thought; daylight can't be more than two or three hours away. But my thirst had become intolerable, and the craving for water dragged me upwards, towards the bathroom on the second-floor landing. Bathrooms have locks: the thought carried me all the way to the top of the creaking staircase. As below, the door to the bedroom corridor was now closed.

The bathroom door was ajar, as I felt sure I had left it, but the door to the attic stairs stood wide open, and those stairs too were lit from above. The attic where I was conceived, I thought stupidly, and then, no, that was the other Gerard.

I pushed open the bathroom door. But the light did not work, and the bolt had rusted solid. I wedged the door shut with my foot and gulped down handfuls of cold, metallic water. The pane of glass over the door gave just enough illumination… but what if the lights went out again?-and then if something began to push against the door, a slow, stealthy, irresistible pressure… Outside at least I could run.

A floorboard popped and snapped as I stepped back on to the landing. Whoever had turned the stairwell lights on must know I was here. What were they waiting for? Why had they closed the connecting doors? Why let me out of the cellar at all?

Perhaps they really had gone for help.

From where I was standing, I could see all the way up to the attics while keeping the main stairwell and the door to the bedrooms more or less in view. Something about the attic stairs-no, the landing above them-looked different. I moved a step closer and saw that a doorway had appeared in what I had thought was a blank panelled wall at the top of the stairs.

WITH THE SAME DISEMBODIED, SLEEP-WALKING SENSATION that had propelled me into the cellar, I went on up the stairs. A section of panelling had opened into a low, cavernous room, dark except for a glowing crescent a few paces to my left: a reading lamp, with its shade swung right down on to the surface of a large desk. An upright chair stood in front of the desk; heavy curtains were drawn across the wall behind it. Bookcases along the opposite wall; an armchair and chesterfield like the ones in the library; various chests and cabinets. The floor was thickly carpeted; the air smelt of dust and worn fabric and decaying paper and a faint, archaic medicinal odour: something like chloroform or formaldehyde. Nothing moved; the stillness remained unbroken.

Drawn by the light, I moved towards the desk. A humped shape beside the lamp resolved itself into a computer monitor. The screen was dark. Glancing fearfully around, I raised the lampshade and saw that the desk drawers were partly open, as if someone had been disturbed in the act of going through them. In the top right-hand drawer lay a thick bundle of typescript, its tide obscured by a band of black ribbon. A novel. By V.H.

The dusty animal smell of the carpet rose and filled my nostrils, and I was looking down on my ten-year-old self, crouched beside my mother's dressing-table on that stifling January afternoon, staring directly over his shoulder at a large manila envelope addressed to P.M. Hatherley, the row of English stamps with their heavy black cancellation marks along the top of the envelope, the slit in the end, the creases formed by the typescript of 'The Revenant'…

It was gone in an instant, leaving only the conviction that I had missed something vital, something that ought to have been blindingly clear. I tried the left-hand drawer and it rolled smoothly outwards to reveal a long row of folders, all crammed with papers… no, letters…

From: ghfreeman@hotmail.com

To: Alice.Jessell@hotmail.com

Subject: None

Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 19:48:21 +0100 (BST)

Something very weird has happened. I've discovered a diary-Anne's diary-hidden in my mother's room-I'll tell you about that in a second-but in the library this afternoon I found…

My own letters to Alice. All of them. Running backwards in time, from the email printouts at the front, back through the laser and the inkjet and dot-matrix printers, down to the next tier of cabinet, the electric and the manual typewriters, all the way back to my lumpish, sprawling, thirteen-year old handwriting and 'Dear Miss Summers, Thank you very much for your letter. I would very much like to have a penfriend…'

This can't he happening. I must be concussed; I'm hallucinating; I'll wake up in a minute, back in the hotel. It felt exactly like the moment in a nightmare when you realise you must be dreaming. I stood staring numbly at the folder in my hands until the contents slid out and scattered over the keyboard. Lights flashed green and orange; the fan whirred; the screen lit up.

From: ghfreeman@hotmaiI.com

To: Alice.Jesseli@hotmail.com

Subject: None

Date: Fri, 13 August 1999 11:54:03 +0100 (BST)

I've just made the most appalling discovery in the Family Records Centre…

'Gerard.' A slow, insinuating whisper at my back. From the shadows at the far end of the room, an indistinct figure, shrouded in flowing white, detached itself from the wall and glided to the door. Draperies swirled; the door closed; a key turned in the lock. As the figure moved towards the circle of light I saw that she was tall and statuesque and veiled like a bride; a long white veil, floating above a great cascading cloud of chestnut hair that flowed on down over her shoulders exactly as it had in so many dreams of Alice. Her arms were entirely concealed by long white gloves, and her gown, too, was white, gathered high at the waist. Small flowers showed beneath the fringes of the veil, between coiling strands of hair; small purple flowers, embroidered across the bodice of her gown.

'My questing knight,' she whispered. 'Now you can claim your prize.'

'W HO ARE YOU?'

'I'm Alice, of course. Aren't you going to kiss me?' It was the voice I had heard from the gallery, intimate, lingering, with an icy hiss on the sibilant, and an eerie after-echo, as if two-or several-voices were whispering in unison.

The figure moved towards me. I retreated around the desk until it halted a few paces away. No trace of features showed through the veil.

'You don't seem very pleased to see me, Gerard. Is it because I'm dead?'

I made an incoherent sound.

'I died, you see-perhaps I forgot to mention that. In the accident with my parents. But I still want you, Gerard. Body and soul. For ever and ever.'

The floor dipped and swayed. I gripped the edge of the desk and tried to will myself awake, but the veiled figure refused to dissolve. This isn't real.

'Oh but it is.' I did not think I had spoken aloud. I wanted to run for the curtains behind me, but I knew I would fall if I let go of the desk.

'You're not thinking of leaving, Gerard? That would be so rude. We haven't even made love yet. And you've always said you wanted me so much.'

She moved a little closer.

'Shall I take off my veil, Gerard? Or don't you like dead women? No? Would you rather run away? There's a balcony behind you: you can throw yourself over.'

The veiled figure began to circle around the desk towards me. As it came closer still, I saw that it moved with a strange, jerky rhythm-glide and halt, glide and halt-as if it had stepped from the screen of a silent film.

I backed away, keeping the desk between us until I bumped against the open drawer containing Viola's manuscript. For an instant I saw my mother's Medusa face in the bedroom doorway, contorted with fear and fury. The formless suspicions of the past four days flared like the papers I had burned in the cellar.

'You're-you're Miss Havi-Hamish,' I blurted. 'You found Anne's body in the cellar and then-' went mad.

We had come full circle around the desk. The veiled figure halted.

'It's you that's mad, Gerard. You've been mad for years. That's why you can see me.'

'No! You loved her-Anne-you wanted revenge. You traced my mother to Mawson, posted the story-the pages you found in the cellar-and then-why didn't you go to the police?'

For the first time, I heard the hiss of breathing.

'It's your story, Gerard. Your bedtime story: you finish it. And then we'll play here comes a candle to light you to bed.'

She was at least as tall as I was. The veil rustled and stirred: cliches about maniacs having the strength of ten came horribly to mind.

'But I never hurt Anne,' I said desperately. 'I didn't even know she existed until you wrote to me.'

'We all have to pay, Gerard. Unto the third generation. You know that.'

'Then why did you spare my mother? Why didn't you go to the police?'

You know what they say, Gerard, about a dish best eaten cold. There you both were, rotting away in Mawson, wasting your lives… and what would poor Alice have done, without her lover?'

The room lurched and spun. She must have been insane from the start: had she dragged Anne's body out of the cellar and buried her in the back garden instead of dialling 999?

'How did you know where to look for Anne's body?'

Silence. She was no more than six feet away, almost near enough to lunge across the top of the monitor.

'Anne didn't die in the cellar,' she said at last. 'That was for your benefit.' The voice had taken on a deep, rasping note. 'She had nine operations and seven years of radiation treatment. Radiation, for radiation burns. Therapy, they called it. Worse than the torments of hell. You saw where your mother hid the machine. She left it on all night, six inches from Anne's head. They skinned her alive, trying to stop the cancer. And then she died.'

'But-but you said in your letter,' I began, and stopped dead. Most of what I thought I knew had come from that letter. All false, all fake; all bait for the trap she had set. Like that last desperate message in the cellar. Like Alice.

'All fake,' I said numbly. 'Everything I found here.'

'No, Gerard; only the message in the cellar. Everything else is real.'

'You stole my life,' I said.

'Your mother stole mine. But at least the baby died-his baby, the one she really loved-

'Died-how?'

'Pneumonia. Alice would have given you that certificate, if you'd asked her nicely. And remember, Gerard, you enslaved yourself. I didn't force you. Think of the life-all the girls you could have had. Instead you chose to be my eyes and ears, my puppet. My adoring puppet.'

I shuddered, swallowing a wave of nausea.

'Why did you let me out?'

'You set fire to my house; one has to improvise. And now it's time to put the puppet back in his box. The machine still works, you see.'

'You can't mean… you can't make me-'

'Can't I?'

She made as if to circle the desk again. My knees shook wildly; I realised I was gripping the desk with both hands. Through the shrouded layers of material, I caught the outline of something dark and formless: it did not look like a face.

'You really don't like dead women, do you, Gerard? Shall I take off my veil now?'

'NO!' The word echoed around the room.

'That's not very flattering, Gerard. I think I'd better see you off to bed now. In Anne's room. You can crawl, if you like. And then in the morning, I might even let you go.'

I became aware of a low, muffled keening. It sounded like wind in the trees outside. Somewhere a small, distant voice was saying that beneath the veil was an elderly woman called Abigail Hamish who, however crazed, could not actually stop me if I could find the strength to run. But I knew that my legs would not carry me; and that if the veiled figure caught me, I would die of terror.

And if I obeyed her, I would die as slowly and hideously as Anne Hatherley had done. I thought of the fluoroscope waiting in its lair below, and in that instant-as in the instant before a car crash, when time stalls and you seem to slide ever so slowly toward the point of impact-I saw the tangle of cords hidden beneath the bed in my mother's old room, the ragged edges where the pages had been torn from Anne's diary, and understood at last how I had been led, every step of the way. I had assumed that my mother had torn out those pages, carefully preserving the evidence of her affair with Hugh Montfort, and then restored the diary to its hiding-place. I had seen, without understanding, that whenever my mother switched on her bedside lamp, the fluoroscope would have come on too. Flooding both sides of the partition with X-rays from the unshielded tube…

But the lightbulb was blown. The thought hovered for an instant, but made no sense. Just as I had stared at the advertisement for Hugh Montfort, late of Endsleigh Gardens, without once considering that my mother, alone and pregnant, might have asked the solicitor to place it. Thinking that Hugh had abandoned her when he too was already dead. Under the cellar floor, perhaps.

And no record of Anne's death, and not one mention of Abigail Hamish in Anne's diary.

I tried to keep you safe.

'You killed Hugh Montfort.'

I could hear my pulse ticking like a demented clock.

The veiled figure stirred.

'He came crawling back here,' she whispered, whining for forgiveness. And then he was in such a hurry to get away, he fell down the stairs…' I couldn't catch the rest, only something that might have been 'accident'.

'And Anne,' I said. 'You killed her too.'

'In a way,' she said, and raised her gloved hands to her veil.

'Filly slept in the attic that night. Where she slept with him.'

And then, almost inaudibly, 'There was no light under her door, you see. I thought I was safe.'

The veil floated free; the cloud of chestnut hair slipped from her shoulders and fell at her feet with a soft thud. Lamplight gleamed upon a bald, mummified head, skin stretched like crackling over the dome of the skull, with two black holes for nostrils and a single eye burning in a leprous mass of tissue, fixing me, half a life too late, with the enormity of my delusion as I saw that Alice Jessell and Anne Hatherley and Abigail Hamish were one and the same person.

FOR A MOMENT NEITHER OF US MOVED. THE WIND HAD grown distinctly louder. The sound seemed to be coming from beneath the floor. A rushing, crackling sound. She swirled around, glided to the door, and unlocked it. I saw, as I came up behind her, an orange glow in the doorway at the foot of the attic stairs. The air was shimmering with heat.

She stood for a moment with one hand on the doorknob, then moved calmly on to the landing. I thought she spoke, but the words were lost in the noise of the fire. Then she took hold of the banister and started down the stairs. I felt the heat on my face, and could not move. She had almost reached the landing below when a great gust of smoke came boiling up the staircase. I heard myself cry 'Alice!' and fell to my knees, choking. A blast of hot air followed; the smoke cleared, and I saw through streaming eyes that there was no one on the stair.

Then the smoke boiled up again, and I was forced back into the room, slamming the door as I went. The desk lamp shone blue through the smoke; blind instinct sent me crawling towards the curtains behind the desk. I dragged them apart and saw French windows, a narrow terrace, the night sky; and beyond a low parapet, a faint flickering gleam on the nearest treetops. I threw open the doors, breathed fresh air. The trapped smoke began to clear.

But where was the fire brigade? All I could hear was the muffled rumbling of the fire: no sirens, no voices, no alarms. Vertigo seized me; I crawled across to the parapet, a plain brick wall barely two feet high. Even lying almost prone behind it, I found myself gripping the top of the wall with all my strength. Gravity seemed to have altered; I felt the outward pull, the impending headlong plunge to the glass roof of the conservatory far below. Lit by the pulsing glare of the flames in the stairwell and the four great windows of the library, the encircling wall of vegetation looked more than ever like jungle. Despite the ferocity of the blaze, it was evidently still concealed from the neighbouring houses and the Heath. None of the glass appeared to have broken yet, but it could not be long now.

And there was no fire escape. The terrace ran the width of the house, bounded at both ends by the steep descending angle of the roof. The only possibility would be a wild leap from the corner to my left, where the jungle along the edge of the courtyard came nearest to the house, into the crown of the nearest tree. I tried to imagine myself doing it, and the terrace seemed to slide from under me.

Still no sound of sirens. The fire must still be confined to the back of the house; it would have raced up the rear stairwell and spread outwards from there. Perhaps there was another way. I retreated from the parapet, managed to stand, stumbled back into the room. The air was hotter, the roar and crackle of the flames much closer; a line of orange light was flickering beneath the door to the landing.

The desk lamp still shone. I looked at my letters to Alice, my wasted life; thought of Violas library blazing below. There was one thing I wanted to save. I seized Viola's typescript and thrust it inside the front of my shirt, thinking, this is what Anne did, and then, but that never happened either.

Which way? Oily black smoke was seeping under the landing door. I had no idea what lay beyond the other door, in the darkness at the far end of the room. Better to fall than burn. I ran back through the French windows on to the terrace, to the brink of that dreadful plunge. I saw the wreck of the pavilion, bathed in flickering light. I thought of Alice, Miss Hamish, Staplefield, everything I thought I'd known: all phantoms, all gone. With nothing to hold me to the earth, and no life to relive, what was there left to fear? I could simply close my eyes and dive, and vanish in a flash of light.

Then the world breathed fire and my feet carried me, not over the edge but along the terrace and up and over into a dark confusion of tearing branches and a jolt that left me winded and sprawled backwards, but somehow attached to the tree. Through the hole smashed by my fall, I saw flames rising above the parapet. Small tongues of flame began to detach themselves and soar above the main fire, more and more of them, like flocks of fiery birds, flaring and rising and vanishing into the night sky. I felt the weight of the manuscript tugging at my shirt, and began precariously to descend.