The Secret of Crickley Hall

AUGUSTUS THEOPHILUS CRIBBEN

1901-1943

No other words had been carved into the stone. No RIP, no IN LOVING MEMORY. Nothing. Just the birth and death dates. 1943: the same year as the flood. A flood victim like all the others in this part of the church cemetery? It seemed likely. But then why was this grave set apart from the others? And why so neglected? If the man had no living descendants to tend his resting place, surely St Mark's curate or groundsman would have made sure the stone was not practically obscured by grass and weeds like this; after all, the rest of the graveyard, front and back, was kept quite orderly. It was almost as if this particular grave had some shame to it.

Gabe stood erect, feeling strangely disturbed without knowing why. Maybe it was because he was still puzzling over whatever nagged him about the children's neat line of graves.

With a shake of his head, he turned away and headed back to the porch, hoping Eve would be waiting for him there; he had no urge to re-enter the church. Before he reached the corner he heard the quiet murmurings of voices.

•

Eve, Loren and Cally were sheltering from the light rain inside the porch, and as he approached he saw his wife was talking to a man and woman, both of whom were wearing green Barbour jackets. Both also had their trousers tucked into high, green rubber boots, the man sporting a smart flat cap, the woman wearing a colourful blue-and-yellow scarf and carrying an umbrella under which they both sheltered.

'Ah,' the man said as he saw Gabe's approach. 'You'll be Mr Caleigh, then.' He smiled and offered a hand.

Gabe shook it and nodded at the woman. They looked to be a compatible couple in their matching coats, both tall, but the man taller than the woman (and taller than Gabe), their features similar: strong nose, high cheekbones, chin a little weak, trim figures. Their eyes were different, though, his a washed-out blue, hers like a hawk's, sharp and staring, grey in colour. He looked to be in his early forties, she possibly younger, and his smile seemed more genuine than hers: Gabe thought there was reserve in her thin-lipped acknowledgement of him, and her gaze was too intense, as if he were a trespasser, there to steal the church silverware.

'Gabe,' said Eve almost nervously, 'this is the vicar of St Mark's, and his wife.'

'Andrew Trevellick,' the man said, still smiling. The Reverend Andrew Trevellick, actually, but please call me Andrew.'

Gabe was surprised that the vicar wore a shirt and knitted tie rather than a white collar.

'Bad weather, huh?' Gabe didn't know what else to say. Besides, the Brits usually referred to the weather after they'd been introduced, didn't they? He'd at least learned something in his sixteen years over here.

'Dreadful, dreadful,' returned the vicar. 'The rain doesn't seem to want to stop, does it? My wife's name is Celia, by the way.' They stood close together under the umbrella, as though joined at the hips.

Again, Gabe nodded his head at her, feeling under scrutiny.

'And your wife, Eve,' the vicar went on, 'tells me you've moved into Crickley Hall.'

'Just for a short spell.' Gabe noticed that the false smile on the vicar's wife had quickly dissolved.

'Splendid,' said Trevellick. 'I hope the place isn't too draughty for you.' Although the vicar had a West Country name, there was nothing parochial about this accent. He was pure Home Counties.

'We'll get by,' Gabe said, and he looked at Eve as though to reassure her. Cally hung on to Eve's sleeve and scuffed the sole of her boot against the porch step, restless and probably bored. Loren paid quiet attention to the adults as she always did.

'Celia and I are so pleased you decided to visit our little church so soon,' said Trevellick.

'It's lovely,' Eve acknowledged. 'Really lovely.'

'Yes, even on a day like today. You'll find it very peaceful inside. Of course, I hope you'll all attend our Sunday service while you're here in Hollow Bay.'

'We intend to,' Eve responded. 'At least, my daughters and I will. I'm not sure about Gabe…'

'Not a religious man, Mr Caleigh? Well, that's fine; you're still welcome to our services, or to visit on your own at any time. I rarely lock the church door during the day even though the rectory is further down the hill, nearer to the village. With two young daughters I'm sure you need some quiet time now and again.'

They all chuckled politely, and then Gabe said: 'I was looking around the grounds…' He waved an arm loosely as if to indicate where he had just come from.

'Ah, yes,' said Trevellick, a self-satisfied smile on his face. 'Walking among the dead, eh? Are you interested in that kind of thing?'

'Andrew.' Celia Trevellick tugged at her husband's arm indignantly. 'What a macabre thing to say.'

'Oh no, dear. Some of the messages on the more ancient headstones can be quite fascinating. One or two are highly amusing, and others a trifle sinister.'

'I saw the row of children's graves at the back,' said Gabe bluntly, and the vicar's jocularity swiftly vanished.

'Yes,' he replied, 'those poor children, all those years ago. They were taken from us during the war, as you will have seen by the date on their headstones. I believe the shock of the flood and the losses it caused has been passed down from generation to generation in Hollow Bay. Sixty-eight people died in one night, you know, eleven of them just children.'

That was it. That was what had been bothering Gabe when he'd viewed the graves. 'But there's only nine markers back there and there's eleven names mentioned on the board inside the church.' As an engineer Gabe's working life was detail—it was an essential requirement of his profession—and now he wondered how he'd missed it before. Nine kids buried, but eleven names on the remembrance board. Two kids missing.

The vicar spoke with great sadness in his voice. 'Unfortunately, the bodies of two of the children were never recovered. It seems the sea claimed them for its own.'

'They were swept out when the village was flooded?' Gabe, perhaps morbidly, was interested to know.

'Apparently, Mr Caleigh.' It was the vicar's wife, Celia, who answered. 'The children were evacuees, you see, sent down from London to escape the Blitz. All of them had been evacuated to Crickley Hall. That was where most of them drowned.'

11: IMAGINATION

'I knew I didn't like this place.'

Eve folded her arms and leaned back against a kitchen worktop while she waited for the plastic kettle to boil. They both needed hot coffee after their uphill trek from the harbour village. The girls were upstairs arranging their new bedroom to their liking, prized possessions they had brought with them to Devon finding suitable places to rest.

Gabe sat at the kitchen table, stroking Chester's head to calm him; the dog had become overexcited on their return and was still trembling.

'It was more than sixty years ago,' Gabe told Eve, exasperated. 'Those poor kids've been long gone.'

She came back at him. 'Time has nothing to do with it. Look, even Chester's nervous of this place.'

'He's not used to it yet.'

Eve ignored him. 'It's as if the house has a memory. I can feel it.'

'You're talking crazy.' Gabe's voice was low and even, but he was becoming impatient. 'You're saying the place is haunted, there's ghosts running around? Sure the house is spooky, but there are no ghosts, no such thing.'

'Of course there aren't any ghosts. But somehow some places are forever marked by their own history. Remember the first time I took you to the Tower of London, how you actually shuddered when we went into the Bloody Tower? You told me it was because you could feel its brutal past, as if the memory of murders and executions still lingered.'

'Ah, c'mon, Eve…'

She turned away from him to make the coffee.

'I can sense something bad about Crickley Hall,' she tried to explain, her back towards Gabe.

'It's in your imagination.'

'Those children died in this house. They all died in the flood.'

It was a terrible story, a deeply tragic one, relayed to them by the vicar himself, his wife frowning all the way through the telling of it.

During the Second World War, when the German Luftwaffe was constantly bombing London and other English cities, many young children were evacuated without their mothers—most of the menfolk were overseas fighting for their country—to safer havens in countryside towns and villages. Eleven boys and girls had been sent to Hollow Bay for the duration from a south London orphanage. They came to live in Crickley Hall, which, because it was empty, had been appropriated by the Ministry of Health with the consent of the owner at that time who rarely used it as his personal residence anyway. There they would be cared for and resume their education.

On the night of the Great Storm, as the vicar had called the 1943 flood, and after the high moors had, sponge-like, absorbed six weeks of continuous rainfall so that they could accept no more, they had disgorged their load into the already rising local rivers and streams around them. The Bay River was a natural conduit more or less straight down to the sea.

Debris and fallen trees had been blocked by the bridges along the river's length, and when these finally gave way under the pressure, the floodwaters were disastrously released. Some houses on the riverbank were demolished, others badly damaged, as the floodwaters had poured down to devastate the harbour village. Although Crickley Hall, built so solidly, was left standing, all the evacuees and their guardian perished. Because the children were orphans, there were no relatives to mourn them, not even uncles and aunts, but the surviving villagers took them into their hearts and grieved for them along with their own lost. A special area of the church grounds that had never been used before became the burial plot for the children and the other members of the community who had died on that terrible night.

When Gabe had asked Trevellick who maintained the children's graves so caringly, he had received a surprise. It seemed it was Percy Judd, Crickley Hall's own caretaker and gardener, who tended them, laying pretty wild flowers under each stone in October every year, the anniversary of the orphans' deaths.

At the time, Gabe refrained from asking the vicar about the neglected grave, the one that stood apart from the rest, overgrown with grass and weeds and left unkempt. It could be that Augustus Theophilus Cribben, who was buried there, was just a local who had died of natural causes (although the marker claimed he was only forty-two when he'd passed away) in the same year as the flood. Maybe he had been buried at the back of the cemetery because he wasn't a popular figure among the locals and hadn't anyone to mourn his passing.

'Gabe, your coffee.'

Eve was standing before him, a steaming mug in her hand.

'Sorry, hon. I was thinking on something.'

'About the house, Gabe. I don't want to stay here.' Her voice was soft, not nagging. She was sincere, genuinely troubled.

'Eve, we've only been here one night and a day.' He took the coffee from her and quickly put it down on the table. He blew at his fingers. 'We gotta at least give it a chance to work out. The job's important.'

She leaned into him, a hand going to the back of his neck. 'I'm sorry. I know it seems stupid, but can't you sense it too? There's… there's a mood about Crickley Hall. Loren said she heard crying coming from the landing cupboard yesterday.'

'She heard a sound like crying. Coulda been a trapped animal.'

'But there was no animal inside when you looked.'

'Mouse or, God help us, a rat. Maybe even a squirrel. Found its way out the way it got in.'

'And the shadow she saw.'

'Trick of the light. What else could it be? Whoever heard of a white shadow?'

'What if it was a memory of someone, a person—a child—who died here in traumatic circumstances? The house has stood empty a long time, we've been told. Don't you wonder why?'

'Yeah, because it's too big, it's too cold, and it smells of damp. I just never realized it when I found the place in the summer. And you're emotionally worn out, Eve.'

She flinched at that, but said nothing, because she knew it was true. Gabe hadn't made her confront it until now. Then: 'Perhaps Loren saw a ghost.'

'I was afraid you were gonna say that. Eve, Loren might believe in that kinda thing, but we're adults—we should have more sense.'

'Meaning I'm being irrational.'

He didn't want to start anything with her; her emotions were too fraught, she'd been hanging on the edge for too long now.

'Crickley Hall isn't haunted,' he said evenly.

'Isn't it? How do you know?'

'Like I said, there's no such thing as ghosts.'

'Gabe, a few years ago I wrote a piece on celebrities and models who used psychics and clairvoyants, people who wouldn't make an important decision without first consulting their personal oracle. It was one of the psychics I interviewed who told me about houses that sometimes held on to memories, usually when something traumatic has happened in them. Like the Bloody Tower. The psychic told me this was often the cause of hauntings, images released into the atmosphere by the house itself.'

'And I guess your psychic had a direct line to ghosts, huh?'

'You can be cynical, Gabe, but three out of the five I interviewed were totally convincing.'

'So the other two were frauds.'

'Not necessarily. They explained to me that occasionally their powers let them down. It didn't mean they were fakes.'

Gabe suppressed a groan. 'Look,' he said patiently, 'let's give it two weeks and if you're still uneasy I'll find us somewhere else to rent. Deal?'

She did not reply immediately and her fingers slid away from his neck down to his shoulder. 'I don't know…' she said eventually.

'Give it a try, Eve.'

'Just two weeks?'

'Guaranteed.' His own hand slipped round her waist. 'If you're still unhappy living here by then, we move on.'

Chester's muzzle pushed into his lap. The dog whimpered as if displeased with the arrangement.

12: SECOND NIGHT

It was night and rain continued to hurl itself against the windows. Heavy clouds concealed a gibbous moon.

Eve lay awake next to Gabe, listening to his gentle snoring, the soft sound reassuring rather than annoying. She would have turned and laid a hand over his hip, but she did not want to disturb him. Gabe was tired; he'd worked hard that morning and afternoon, finishing the unpacking with her, moving furniture so that rooms suited them better, the only break being the trip down into the village. The walk back up the hill in the rain had been pretty tiring. The girls were fast asleep next door, having gone to bed much earlier than usual without complaint.

It was well past midnight and she was restless, even though she, too, was worn out. She hated these nights when her mind would not allow her sleep; she knew she could take a Zopiclone, but she'd been taking the sleeping tablets for too many months now and she wanted to break the habit. But night thoughts tormented her. Haunted her.

Gabe was ever patient, comforting her in her darkest moods, never himself weakening—at least, containing the heartache Eve knew he felt. But then Gabe had learned to repress his emotions at an early age. When she first met him, when he boldly marched up to her in a fashionable bar in Notting Hill Gate that Eve and her friends from the magazine used, he had seemed breezy, confident, sure of himself. Later, when they got to know each other—when they realized they had fallen in love; so fast, it had happened so fast!—he had revealed to her that he'd been scared witless when he had introduced himself that night, scared of rejection, scared that she would turn her back on him. (Gabe never had been aware of the stunning effect he had on most women. Sometimes in a certain light, or if his face was seen at a certain angle, he was beautiful—with cornflower-blue eyes, sandy hair that was neither blond nor brown, and a compact body that seemed always poised as if ready to pounce.) In those days he had a natural aggression that simmered just below a surface of cool. It came from his upbringing.

He had been raised in the town of Galesburg, Illinois and had never known his father, a salesman in pharmaceuticals apparently, who hadn't stayed around when his girlfriend had fallen pregnant with Gabe. Jake was his name—that was one of the few things Gabe knew about the man other than his profession. Oh, and Jake was a gambler and a drinker and a scumbag who, Gabe's mother often told her son, had a bitch in every town he visited.

Irene Caleigh, Gabe's mother, was a drinker too. She was also a cheap lay—by the age of eleven, Gabe had come to know the meaning of the word 'lay'—for men called on her at all hours of the night. Sometimes the man—'uncles' she had told him to call them—and Irene would go out to local bars and return later to the ramshackle apartment that was Gabe's home, but as often as not, the men friends would bring bottles of booze—'hooch' Gabe called it—with them and the boy would be told to wait on the stairway with a warning not to go 'roaming around'. The one bed he shared with his mother would be 'occupied' for the evening.

Sometimes, when it grew late, Gabe would fall asleep on the stairs only to be woken by heavy feet stepping over him, 'uncles' on their way out. His mother would then come to fetch him, picking him up in her arms, cuddling him and planting wet, sour kisses on his cheeks. She seemed most loving then, most tender, and he would curl up contentedly against her back as they slept in the rumpled bed. This from the age of eight.

By ten he was running wild with other, older, neighbourhood kids, stealing from stores, taking hubcaps from cars, vandalizing property, and more than once Irene was called down to the local cop station where they threatened to lock her boy up for a while if he persisted in his antisocial behaviour. That always frightened him, and Irene would belabour the warning on the way home. Yet Gabe could not remember his mother ever raising a hand to him; sure, she tongue-lashed him and made all kinds of threats in the days that followed, but not once did she strike him in anger or frustration. In later years, he thought it might have been her guilt that always stopped her, the guilt of being a poor single mother. Also, he believed, she truly loved him in her own inadequate way.

When Gabe was just twelve years of age, Irene Caleigh died (cirrhosis of the liver, he reasoned years later, because one of the 'uncles' at the funeral bluntly told him, 'She died of the drink, son'). Gabe had spent a month or so (he could never remember how long exactly) in a care home, until one day an aunt called Ruth, his mother's older sister and who he hardly remembered (she hadn't attended the funeral) came to collect him. Aunt Ruth took her nephew back to her old ramshackle but clean clapboard house on the outskirts of Quincy, where some areas were even rougher than those he had been used to.

Aunt Ruth was kind to him, if somewhat distant, but the wildness was already in him, and he was soon loose in the streets, again joining a gang whose members were mostly older than himself. Cars were his obsession—other people's cars, that is—and he soon learned to hot-wire them. In fact, his skill at breaking into vehicles and quickly getting them running without keys and no matter what model quickly earned him the respect of his elders in the gang—even then, he seemed to have an affinity with machinery of any kind. But when he was fourteen, Gabe's increasing delinquency came to a sudden and tragic end.

The pristine stolen Mercedes saloon in which Gabe and his friends were joyriding went out of control on a bend and crashed into three trees, one after the other. The driver, seventeen years old and gang leader, a tough guy who was good in a rumble, went through the windscreen when the car hit the first tree, to die instantly as his body slammed into the tree trunk, his bowed head snapping at the neck and smashing his own ribcage, while the passenger in the seat next to him broke his spine at the second tree and had his foot turned back to front on the third impact. Gabe and another gang member, who shared the rear seats with him, were thrown to the floor at the first impact, and there they stayed, bounced around but saved from serious injury by the backs of the front seats.

Perhaps it was to deter him from a career of crime that the authorities decided to deal with Gabe firmly. For the autotheft itself and because of its serious outcome, plus Gabe's past record of minor offences, he was sent to the Illinois Institute for Delinquent Boys for one year, while his companion, who was even younger than Gabe and had a clean sheet as far as the law was concerned, was given a period of probation. The front-seat passenger, who had broken his back and lost a foot, was deemed punished enough.

Because of Gabe's ongoing problem with authority, he served a further three months at the facility. But something worked there. They found he had an aptitude for machinery as well as calculation and they encouraged him to pursue his gift. Because he did not want to serve any further time, those last three months of incarceration had more value than the first twelve months: Gabe knuckled down and began to study for a career as an engineer, a mechanical engineer. When he was released, he returned to Quincy and Aunt Ruth, went back to high school and attended night college to learn as much as he could about engineering. On weekends he worked as a junior mechanic in a garage and car showroom (which meant mainly washing cars and handing tools to real mechanics), watching everything they did to engines, learning fast while he did so. The meagre amount of cash he earned was handed over to Aunt Ruth to help pay towards his own keep.

At seventeen, having achieved good results in both school and night college, he left Quincy for New York City. Unbeknown to him, his aunt had been secretly saving money for precisely this kind of move, which she knew would come sooner or later; she had even put aside the money he had given her from his weekend work. He had spent almost a year of hardship in the Big Apple, living in a one-room attic apartment in the South Bronx, taking any job that came his way—washing dishes in a Harlem bar, short-order cook in a diner, delivering pizzas, shelf-stacking and serving in an all-night Mini-Mart—mostly night-time labour so that he could hunt for work as an engineer during the day (on occasions, he had introduced himself to as many as five engineering companies during the course of one day). Eventually his persistence paid off: he got himself taken on as a junior trainee structural and mechanical engineer in a large, global corporation, APCU Engineering, and he had never looked back. At the age of twenty-one, Gabe had been sent across to England, and there he'd stayed ever since.

And then, he and Eve had met. In that hip bar in pre-film Notting Hill. They had quickly married when she had become pregnant with Loren and neither of them had regretted the union: she loved him now as much as ever—no, perhaps even more than in the early days; she had come to know so much about him—and she was sure Gabe felt exactly the same way about her. It was just that she was so… so distracted now, thought too much about their lost son. If only Cam would… would he come back? she asked herself. There was still a faint, almost elusive, hope in her that one day soon their son would be returned to them. As long as he remained on the missing list there was always that chance…

A flurry of rain, driven by a vigorous wind, beat against the bedroom's two windows, making her start. She craned her neck to look towards the sound as the windows rattled in their frames. The night outside was wild, unrelenting, and no friend to slumber. Eve faced the ceiling again, lonely because her partner slept. She tried to clear her mind of everything but, as ever, the misery crept back, staking its claim.

Oh God, don't let it be so, her mind pleaded as it had for almost a year. Missing doesn't have to mean dead. Someone could have taken him for their own, some stranger could be loving him as we love him. Please, please send my innocent child back to me! In the daytime lately it had become easier to suppress the torment but in the darkness of night, when others slept and she felt so alone, the thoughts were almost impossible to control. Yet even the possibility that Cam might be dead seemed like a betrayal of her son.

The wind suddenly died and the rain's fury went with it. Now the rain pattered against the glass. Low clouds overhead must have parted, for moonlight entered the bedroom.

Then a sound different from the steady soft drum of the rain. It was a tapping and it came from somewhere out on the landing.

Eve listened, tried to determine its source. It was becoming louder, no longer a tapping but a muffled knocking.

She levered herself up on her elbows, looking towards the open doorway, wondering if she should wake Gabe, whose gentle snoring could not drown out the sound coming from the landing.

After last night, the landing light had been left on so that the girls would be able to see should they stir from their sleep and become disorientated. But it was a dim glow, the lightbulb weak, hardly strong enough to govern the area it was supposed to; instead it seemed to create even deeper shadows, shadows that were impenetrable.

The bedroom became almost darker again as the moon was concealed behind another cloud, but there was just enough light from the landing to see the small figure that suddenly appeared in the doorway.

Eve drew in a sharp, startled breath.

'Mummy,' Loren said from the bedroom's threshold, 'I can hear someone knocking.'

Eve let her breath go and relaxed her tensed shoulders.

'I think it's coming from the cupboard again,' Loren said.

'I can hear it, darling.'

They both listened as if for reaffirmation. Loren took a step into the room. 'Mummy?'

The fear in her daughter's voice caused Eve to tense again. She nudged Gabe's shoulder with her elbow.

'Gabe, wake up,' she said in a harsh whisper. 'Gabe.'

Loren was standing by the bottom of the bed now, a hand on one of the corner posts. 'Daddy!' Although urgent, she spoke in a whisper as if she didn't want to be heard by anything outside the room.

Flat on his back, Gabe roused. He lifted his head from the pillow.

'S'going on?' he murmured, not quite awake.

'Listen,' Eve urged him, her voice low.

Gabe listened.

'What the hell is it?' he said after a few moments.

'Loren says it's coming from a cupboard.'

'Which one?' There were more than a few in the big house.

'Somewhere along the landing, Daddy.'

Gabe pulled the duvet aside and his feet touched the cold wood flooring. Fortunately, he was wearing his grey T-shirt and dark boxers, so there was no embarrassment before his daughter. He sat on the edge of the bed to listen again. Although muted, it sounded like knuckles on wood.

Eve left her side of the bed, the hem of her wrinkled nightie falling to her knees. She went to her daughter, putting a comforting arm round her shoulders.

Loren clung to her. 'What is it, Mummy?' she asked in a scared half-moan.

'We'll find out,' Eve assured her. 'Is Cally asleep?'

'Yes, I checked on her.'

Gabe was by the bedroom door and he peeked out cautiously as if expecting a surprise. The knocking came from his right, somewhere past his daughters' open bedroom door. He squinted into the general gloom.

One hand holding the doorframe as if to pull himself back from harm's way, Gabe took a step out onto the landing. Below, the hall looked like a great dark pit, the poor light from above barely touching the flagstones. Even the big window over the stairway failed to offer any light.

Behind him, Eve scrabbled for the bedroom light switch, then flicked it on. A little more light graced the landing.

The knocking became louder, although still muffled, and it wasn't because he was closer to it. Someone or something was beating even louder against the cupboard door.

Gabe cocked his head as if it would help him hear more clearly. The noise seemed to emanate from a cupboard along the landing as Loren had said; it was the same one he'd investigated for her only yesterday. With a puzzled glance back at Eve and Loren, he moved quietly towards the sound, placing each footstep carefully as if trying not to make a sound himself, which was crazy: he should be stomping and hollering to frighten any intruder off. Instead he continued to tread cautiously.

Eve, with Loren clutching her arm, followed, both of them holding their breath.

There was a key in the lock of the cupboard door, as there seemed to be in all the cupboards in Crickley Hall, but Gabe could not remember if he had left it unlocked. As he stood directly outside the cupboard, the knocking became more intense, as though whatever was inside was becoming desperate. Eve and Loren crowded him from behind, and Eve placed a hand on his shoulder.

'What is it?' she almost hissed.

'I got no idea,' he whispered back. Feeling foolish for keeping so quiet he raised his voice. 'Hey!' he said sharply, expecting the noise to stop.

It didn't. It increased in both volume and rapidity.

'Goddam—' Gabe cursed and he felt Eve's fingers dig into his shoulder in sudden fright. Loren gave out a sharp squeal.

Now Gabe felt his temper rise. Enough was enough. He reached forward to the small brass doorknob just above the key, ready to yank the cupboard door open. But the knocking became a pounding before his fingers could grasp it and the door itself seemed to strain against its frame.

As one, Gabe, Eve and Loren jumped back and Loren gave out a terrified scream. Eve held on to her, squeezing her hard out of her own fear. Still shocked by the loudness of both the pounding and the now frantic clattering of the door, Gabe steeled himself and grabbed at the brass doorknob, determined to put an end to the disturbance.

And, as his fingertips touched metal, the lights went out.

And the knocking stopped.

And a scream came from the nearby bedroom.

13: DARKNESS

Total darkness. Impenetrable blackness.

They stood there in shock for several heavy heartbeats, unable to move until parental instinct kicked in. Cally continued to scream.

Although disorientated, Gabe and Eve moved towards their daughters' bedroom together and, because Loren was still clutching at her mother's nightdress, she went with them.

Gabe felt the wall with his hands, working his way along the landing, Eve following his sound. Dim shapes were slowly beginning to reveal themselves—the balcony railings, the tall window below a slightly paler blackness, the doorway to Loren and Cally's bedroom the same.

Gabe had just felt the emptiness of that doorway when the imperfect moon fought clear of the roiling clouds below it and suddenly they could see more clearly. Moonlight flooded through the hall's tall window, brightening a long segment of the flagstone floor, and Eve was able to discern her husband's silhouette in the opening.

'It's all right, Cally,' she heard him say. 'We're here, you're okay, baby.'

Eve pushed into the room behind him, dragging a terrified Loren in her wake. Cally was kneeling on her bed, the duvet bunched up before her.

'Cally, what is it?' Eve made straight for her, arms outstretched.

Cally had stopped screaming, but her shoulders heaved with her sobbing.

'In the corner, Mummy,' she wailed, throwing herself into her mother's arms.

Eve, Gabe and Loren all looked towards the corner that Cally's trembling finger was pointing at. In the semi-darkness they could see it was empty.

'There's nothing there, darling,' Eve soothed as Cally clung to her. 'You've just had a bad dream.'

'No, Mummy, there was someone standing there, all black.'

'No, you just had a fright when the lights went out. We probably disturbed you when we were out on the landing.'

'The banging woke me up,' Cally complained as she cried against Eve's shoulder, the words coming out between sob spasms. 'I sat up and saw someone in the corner. He was—he was looking at me.'

How could she tell if whatever she had imagined watching her was all black? Eve wondered, but quickly dismissed the thought: logic wasn't going to calm Cally down.

Gabe, who had found his way over to the empty corner, turned back towards the bed. 'It was just a bad dream, Cally,' he told her softly. 'Look, there's no one there.'

'But, Daddy—'

'Hush, darling.' Eve hugged her tight. 'It's over now. We're here with you.'

'I left my flashlight beside our bed,' Gabe said. 'I wanna take a look inside that closet.'

At any other time Loren would have amended 'closet' to 'cupboard', but tonight she was too upset. 'Don't, Daddy,' she pleaded. 'Not while it's so dark.' The moon was abruptly hidden again and she sat on the bed with her mother, pressing against Eve's back.

'It's okay, hon. I just need to find out what was making that racket. We don't want it starting up again.'

He was gone before Loren could protest any more, ducking through the doorway, silently cursing the sudden power cut. Nevertheless, by the time he reached his and Eve's bedroom, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness some more. He felt his way along the side of the bed until he found the cold metal of the flashlight standing erect on the floor; there were no bedside cabinets in this stark room, just the bed itself, a tall chest of drawers, a high wardrobe set against one wall, and an oval mirror hung on another. He pressed the switch and the flashlight came on. He shone it towards the landing so that his wife and daughters would see its glow and feel reassured. He quickly padded back to his daughters, shining the light on Loren and Cally's beds first, and then into the suspect corner. It really was clear; no dark man lurked there.

'See?' he said. 'Nothing there at all.'

Leaving the bedroom again he returned to the cupboard out on the landing.

'Okay, you bastard,' Gabe muttered to himself, 'let's find out what the fuss is about.'

But all remained quiet now, although he didn't trust the silence.

He reached for the brass door handle and tugged it. The door did not move. He remembered he had locked it previously and he dropped his hand to the key below. Without giving himself time for further thought, he turned it.

Gabe felt the easing of pressure as the unlocked door shifted in its frame. He yanked the door open in one swift movement and shone the light beam into the cupboard's depths. Eve and the two girls joined him as he bent to peer inside. They stared nervously over his shoulder.

He shone the flashlight around the interior, checking the corners, the back and even the cupboard's ceiling. All that was there were the cardboard boxes, the rolled-up rug and the mop and broom that he had already discovered. Moving aside two of the boxes, he noticed there were two thinnish waterpipes running along the left wall an inch or so above the floor and disappearing into the back wall.

'Guess there's the answer.' Gabe's light-hearted tone was forced as he aimed the beam directly at the two copper pipes. He reached down to feel them. 'One of 'em's hot. Might be an airlock in it.'

'Gabe, that can't be it. We saw the door move when the banging got really loud.'

He couldn't explain it and he didn't even try. He was looking for a rational reason for the noise; he didn't want to spook the girls any more than they were spooked already—and that included Eve.

'I'll check it out tomorrow,' he promised. As he straightened up, he kept the light pointing into the cupboard as if expecting an animal of some kind—a trapped bird maybe (although how a bird could have found its way inside, he had no idea), a mouse, a rat, or even a squirrel. Nothing stirred, though; nothing appeared from any hole in the skirting board; no bird fluttered out at them.

The overhead light and the one in the bedroom further down flickered, dimmed, came back on for a moment, dimmed once more, almost went off again, then returned to a steady glow.

'Thank God for that,' Eve murmured in a release of breath.

'Percy Judd said there were power cuts here and I think we've just experienced one. I'll take a good look at the gen tomorrow, see if I can fix it. It should kick in when the power goes.'

'This house…' Eve allowed her comment on Crickley Hall to peter out, the inflection in those first two words containing the message.

'Yeah, I know. We'll give it just one week, okay?'

Once more, Eve gave no response to the time limit set by Gabe even though he'd reduced it by a week. She wasn't sure she could stand as much as another day here. She knew it hadn't been the waterpipes creating that din and so did Gabe; he was only trying to soothe the girls with his unlikely—no, ridiculous—explanation.

'Let's all get back to bed,' he suggested, swinging the cupboard door shut and locking it again.

'Daddy, can we come in with you and Mummy tonight?' It wasn't Cally who asked but Loren, and her voice was plaintive.

'Sure you can.' He hugged his daughter close and Cally raised her arms to be picked up by Eve. But before they could find their way back to the bedroom, a mournful howl came from Chester in the kitchen below. Although the kitchen door was closed, the howl seemed to echo around the great hall.

Not only did the children sleep with Gabe and Eve that night, but the dog also slept on the floor close to Gabe's side of the bed.

14: SUNDAY

Gabe had cleaned the generator's spark plugs and reset the gauges. He'd also cleaned the oil filter and made sure that the coolant level was correct. Then he'd washed out the fuel filter and checked the gen's fuse, to find that it had blown, which was probably the sole cause for the machine's malfunction. Luckily he had a selection of different amp fuses in his toolbox, so was able to fit a replacement. Oil level was fine and he tested all the electrical connections to make sure it was not just the fuse that was at fault. The only thing he was concerned about was that if the generator had been standing idle for a long time, then the gas—petrol, he reminded himself—might have gone stale, which would mean draining and refilling it with fresh.

However, the latter proved to be no problem, for when he tested the gen by switching off the main fuse to the house's power, the generator sprang into life like a runner taking over the baton. Satisfied, he switched back to mains electricity and returned the generator to standby.

Smiling at the machine as if they had solved the problem together, Gabe wiped his oily hands on a dry cloth he kept in his toolbox.

'Don't let us down, baby,' he said to the generator. 'We don't need any more scares like last night.'

Carrying the long metal toolbox, Gabe left the boiler/generator room and went next door to the well cellar. Like the landing light, the lightbulb down here was far too weak to brighten the place efficiently and the thicker shadows that were created somehow made him feel uneasy.

The rushing of the river at the bottom of the well was loud enough to catch his attention. Downing the toolbox, he went over to the low wall that encircled the pit at the cellar's centre and shone his flashlight into it. The beam of light reflected off the slick mossy wall before revealing the spumy, surging river thirty or so feet below. Anyone unfortunate to fall in wouldn't stand a chance, he mused: there would be no grip on the rough but slimy stonework and the coursing waters would immediately sweep that person away. He reminded himself to make sure the door at the top of the stairs was always locked in case Cally's curiosity got the better of her (he thought he'd locked it yesterday, but this morning he had found the door ajar again). The stone wall round the well was low enough to be dangerous should either one of his daughters lean over it for a look-see.

The noise of the river was amplified by the round wall to a constant, only slightly muffled roar, and the air here was so chilled he could see his own breath vapour.

Gabe checked himself. He had been leaning too far over the wall, almost mesmerized by the black pit he was staring into. He hurriedly stepped back from the brink and drew in a slow breath. Damn right it was dangerous. Loren, too, would be banned from venturing down here alone.

He climbed the cellar stairs and at the top he carefully locked the door behind him, giving it a pull to ensure it was secure. It was loose in its frame but remained shut. Leaving the toolbox on the hall floor, Gabe went into the kitchen.

Chester had dragged his sleeping blanket into the corner by the kitchen's other door and he looked up expectantly at Gabe.

'Still jumpy, boy?'

Gabe squatted to pat the dog's flank. Although no longer trembling, Chester nevertheless gazed appealingly into his master's eyes.

'Guess you're still not happy with the place, right? But you gotta acclimatize, pal. We all do.'

Gabe wondered if they would. He felt that Eve would leave right now if she had her way. And the girls? Last night's incident scared them, but neither of them had complained this morning at breakfast. It was as if Loren was looking to her mother for guidance, and Cally seemed to have forgotten her upset already. The three of them had gone off to the Sunday-morning service at St Mark's—even though it was C of E—without mentioning the episode; but Gabe knew that Eve was waiting to get him alone.

With one last comforting pat on Chester's rump, Gabe rose and went to the sink where he poured tap water into the kettle. While he waited for the water to boil, his thoughts returned to Eve.

She really was creeped out by Crickley Hall. And he wasn't too comfortable with the place himself. When he had gone downstairs during the night to bring Chester back to their room, he had trodden in more small puddles on the broad steps, and there were others across the flagstone floor of the hall. If the dog hadn't been shut away in the kitchen, Gabe might have suspected him of leaving his mark all over the place. But these had no smell: they were plain water. However, it had been windy outside and he supposed that rain might have been blown through cracks in the tall window over the stairs. Had it been windy when he had first noticed the puddles the night before? He couldn't remember. But anyway, that wouldn't explain the ones across the hall.

Maybe they should get out right away, find some other house to rent, something not as weird as Crickley Hall. A place slap-damn in the middle of a village or town, somewhere not so isolated. Or so lonely. He couldn't risk Eve becoming more depressed than she was already. She had been through too much this past year—they all had.

But the tragedy had changed Eve more than it had Gabe.

When they had first met, she had been a staff fashion writer for a magazine called Plenty, organizing fashion shoots, auditioning and hiring models, choosing photographers, finding suitable locations for background interest, liaising with PR companies, reporting on the main fashion shows in the UK and Europe, interviewing celebrities to discover whose labels they were currently wearing.

She and Gabe were only married six months before Loren came along and Eve went freelance. Her contacts and her reputation were good and before long she was doing work for a number of magazines—Marie Claire, Vogue, Elle, among others—and was able to concentrate on writing purely about fashion without the baggage that went with it. But when Cameron was born, and then Catherine (Cally) a year later, Eve put her career on hold for a while so that she could devote more time to her family.

By then, they were living in a largish Victorian property in Canonbury, north London, and Gabe's salary was high enough to cover most of their needs. She still accepted the more interesting assignments, however, and when she did she would put her best efforts into them, which was why her very last freelance job—covering London's Fashion Week—had left her so exhausted. And that exhaustion had led her to falling asleep for a few minutes in the park where Cameron had gone missing…

Eve was wrong to blame herself, but how could he convince her? He pushed the thoughts away as he spooned coffee granules into a mug, then poured boiling water over them. There had been too much brooding for way too long. If only for Loren and Cally's sake, Eve had to snap out of it. But how could he help her?

Although Cam was a real boy's boy, a son that a father could really enjoy, Eve seemed to have a special 'connection' with him. No, he wasn't a momma's boy, but there was an affinity between them. They even shared the same trivial abnormality: the little finger of Cam's right hand was shorter than the one on his left, the same as Eve's; they also both had fingerprint whorls on the fleshy mount of their right palm. It was a similarity that they enjoyed, for it wasn't an obvious deformity—hands had to be compared to notice it.

Looking out the window, Gabe saw that the rain had stopped, although only temporarily judging by the ominous clouds that cruised the sky. As he watched, the sun broke out from behind one of those clouds and the lawn glistened with raindrops caught in the grass. The sudden brightness and the green denseness of the grass and foliage lifted some of the heaviness of spirit from him. Whatever the shortcomings of Crickley Hall itself, it couldn't be denied that it was in a beautiful location. From where he stood in the kitchen he could see past the old oak from which the swing dangled to the rushing waters of the Bay River, fallen leaves and small broken branches swept along with its hurried journey down to the Bristol Channel. He watched as a heron landed on the opposite bank close to the wooden bridge; the heavy bird must have decided that this was a poor place to catch passing fish, for its great wings soon flapped and it took off again in an impossibly lumbering rise into the air.

Gabe felt the need for fresh air himself and he carried his mug of coffee into the main hall where he unlocked the big front door to let the breeze, such as it was, circulate and disperse some of the musty odour that permeated the house. He stood on the doorstep and sipped the coffee as grey wagtails, with their black bibs, wheeled and dived over the garden, catching insects and celebrating the rare sunshine.

His thoughts returned to Eve, how she had changed, how she was before that fateful day. She was still beautiful to him—slim, small-breasted, long-legged, with deep-brown eyes that matched her deep-brown hair—but now there were lines on her face that had only appeared during the last few months, and there was a darkness round her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and sadness of soul. Her hair, once worn so long that its ends cascaded over her shoulders, was now cut short, urchin-style, not because of fashion but because it was easier to manage, nothing to bother over. A psychologist might suggest it was shorn as self-punishment, arising from guilt.

She used to have a sly humour, a sharp wit, but now Eve was subdued, her thoughts—and her feelings—distracted by the loss. To see her this way added to Gabe's own grief, but there was nothing he could do that he hadn't already tried to ease her despair. Even harsh, desperate words, tough love they called it, had failed to draw any positive response because she fully accepted her own condition and refused to be stung by his criticism. Ultimately, he could only love her, not in an indulgent way, but in a way that let her know that he cast no blame on her.

Gabe drew in a deep breath of fresh moist air. A little sunshine made a difference, he thought. It helped cheer the soul. If only the rain—

His legs almost buckled as Chester brushed by him. The dog scooted across the lawn, past the swing that stirred lazily in the breeze.

Goddamnit! He'd forgotten about the mutt, hadn't closed the kitchen door behind him. Chester had seen his chance for freedom and had taken it. Like a bat out of hell, he streaked towards the bridge.

'Chester! Get back here!'

The dog hesitated at the bridge, turned briefly to look back at his master, then scooted across it without stopping on the other side. Gabe stepped out of the doorway, coffee in hand, and stared open-mouthed.

'Chester!' he tried again. Exasperated, he put the coffee mug on the doorstep, then took off after the runaway. Gabe ran across the bridge, continuing to call the dog's name, but knowing that by the determined way Chester had bolted up the hill he would stop for no one. Gabe stood in the middle of the lane, hoping to see some sign of the dog, but Chester was nowhere in sight.

Gabe called out once more, this time through cupped hands, but it was futile: Chester had vanished.

A shout from behind had Gabe swinging round.

'Daddy!'

Eve and the girls were walking up the hill towards him from the direction of the church.

'What is it, Gabe?' Eve asked as they drew nearer.

'It's that goddamn mongrel' Gabe shook his head in frustration. 'He's hit the road.'

'Daddy.' It was a moan from both girls.

'It's okay. We'll find him. He can't have gone far.'

Cally's face was already screwed up, ready for tears.

'How did he get out?' Eve was a little breathless from the steady climb up the hill.

'Aah, I had the front door open and he hightailed it.' Gabe shook his head once again, angry at himself. 'Goddamnit.'

Loren's face was full of concern. 'We haven't lost him, have we, Dad?'

'No, honey. We'll find him.' To Eve he said: 'I'll take a walk along the road. If I keep calling him, he might just be obedient for once and come back.'

'I'll go with you, Dad,' Loren said immediately.

'Me too, me too.' Cally raced to him and pulled at his arm.

Gabe leaned down to her. 'You go with your ma, Sparky. We'll find him quicker if it's just me and Loren.' He had chosen his words carefully, leaving no doubt that they would find the wayward pet. He kissed her plump cheek, tasting her tear trail that already stained it.

Eve wasn't convinced. 'Oh Gabe, we haven't lost him, have we? You will get him back…?'

'We'll find him, he can't have gone far.' Gabe hoped she would believe him.

15: THE DREAM

In Crickley Hall's high-ceilinged sitting room off the great hall, there was a lumpy but comfortable couch and it was on this that Eve relaxed. She was tired. Last night had left her both weary and tense. The lights going out when Cally had started screaming had almost freaked her out. Thank God her daughter was only having a nightmare. But the knocking from the closed cupboard had been no dream and Gabe's explanation that it was an airlock in the waterpipes inside the cupboard wasn't convincing. But what else could the noise have been? Lying sleepless for much of the night with her imagination running wild had left her edgy and skittish this morning, only the service at St Mark's calming her.

In the church, and in the cold light of day, most of the night fears had been vanquished, common sense prevailing. That it had stopped raining and the sun could find periods of cloud breakthrough had helped accommodate logic—it really had been the waterpipes causing the disturbance and it really was a draught beneath the floorboards that had caused the rattling of the cupboard door—but doubt lingered. There was something strange about Crickley Hall, something dark, Eve could sense it. She could easily believe there were ghosts here.

She leaned sideways and pressed her head into the embroidered cushion that rested against the couch's arm. She closed her eyes.

Gabe and Loren were still out looking for Chester, having come back for the car—oh God, Eve hoped they hadn't lost him—and Cally was upstairs playing in her bedroom. Lunch wasn't a problem: microwaving a couple of the freezer-packs they'd bought in Hollow Bay yesterday wouldn't take long. Sunday lunch was usually a roast, but Gabe and the girls wouldn't mind missing it for one week.

Her eyelids flickered, opened once more. The sitting room, with its high windows and long beige drapes, was one of the nicer rooms in the house, although there was still an air of austerity about it. The windows were almost filled with the trees and greenery of the gorge slope and riverbank so that they were like natural murals. The wallpaper was old, traditional, but its flowery pattern at least cheered the room a little. The couch itself faced an oakwood and brick fireplace where Gabe had laid and lit a fire that morning to chase away the room's chill. The heat from it did not stretch far, but nevertheless it was making Eve drowsy. She blinked, forced her eyes open.

On a round occasional table opposite the couch were framed family photographs that they had brought with them to Crickley Hall and were among the first things Eve had displayed after the main items had been unpacked. They represented happier times. A wedding shot of Gabe and three-months-pregnant Eve, a large colour group shot of them all taken almost two years ago so it included Cam. To the fore was a small silver-framed picture of a brightly smiling Cam. She pushed away the thoughts, afraid of their conclusion. No body had been found, death could not be assumed. In the photograph, his hair, sweeping down almost to touch his eyebrows, was a striking yellow; when he grew it would probably darken, become shades closer to his father's. But the vivacity of those cornflower-blue eyes—so like Gabe's—would remain until old age paled them.

Her eyes moistened.

But her eyelids were heavy and a gentle warmth came from the coal and log fire.

Eve drifted, consciousness waned. She slept. She dreamed.

At the beginning it was bad, for although she slept she was still aware of the brooding house around her. She felt its chill, its shadows. She felt the misery that was in this place, in its memory, in its soul. Eve shivered in her sleep.

There was something wrong inside this house—perhaps it was her subconscious that told her this—some grim secret kept within it. She heard distant whimpers, then quiet sobs. The sounds of misery. Of being lost.

A tear squeezed through the corner of her eye, a silver droplet made red by the fire.

There was something ominous contained—caged—within these stone walls. A truth that was unattainable. A secret. The word formed in her mind as though written in stark, unembellished letters.

She stirred on the couch, twisting her neck to push her face into its cushioned back.

In her dream she was being called, but no matter where she looked, the source lay hidden. Faraway though it was, the voice was that of a child and its urgency was muted by the distance.

And suddenly Eve was dreaming of herself: she was looking down at her own sleeping body as though her mind had left it and was floating near the ceiling. Now her physical self was no longer inside the house. Instead, she was somewhere that was full of green space, a place where children played, where her own child, little Cally, slumbered in her buggy close by the bench, while her brother, almost one year older, played in the sandpit not far away.

Something was wrong, though. Something was terribly wrong. Yet still the body below her—her real self—slept on.

Five-year-old Cameron was slowly vanishing as sand ran through his tiny fingers to pile around and over his bent knees. Disappearing as a whole, not bit by bit, but fading as if a white fog was enveloping him. And still Eve dreamed, unaware of this dangerous decline of her son, sleeping as his image weakened, dimmed from sight, smothered by the fog.

Then she became aware of another presence in her dream, although this was so clear, so real, that she wondered—in her dream—if she was no longer asleep. The dark but sharp silhouette of a man loomed over her. The figure had narrow shoulders and a thin physique, and as he leaned towards her, his shadowed face only inches away from hers, there came a smell that was strange yet somehow familiar, an odour that mingled with his own thick rancid breath. She tried to turn her head away, but twin lights from the dark caverns of his deep-set eyes held her there mesmerized and afraid. Eve no longer viewed herself from above—she was back inside herself. She felt a huge pressure on her, weighing her down.

He exhaled and his breath was worse than before: it was stinking, fetid, the scent of a putrid cesspit. Yet still there was that underlying scent, the pungent odour of… of detergent? She felt scrutinized, inspected; she felt dread. Eve shrank away, but the head, with its gleaming inset pinpoint eyes, followed her. Although still shadowed, the features of the dream-visitor were revealed: he had a sharp, hooked nose, prominent, as his cleft chin was prominent above a thin scrawny neck; she still could not tell the colour of his eyes, she could only see those two gleaming lights that shone from them, reflections only but like searchlights used by him to scour her soul. That this man was wicked, she had no doubt; it was as evident as the malodour that came through his thin lips.

He raised a big-knuckled hand to her cheek, his bony fingers curled. He drew the hand down the skin of her face and, although his touch was weak, his flesh seemed to scratch against her own. In the dream and in the reality she gave out an anguished cry.

A lump of coal on the fire cracked with the heat, but its sound—and the sound of her own cry—failed to rouse her. Still she lay in troubled sleep. She groaned. Her leg flexed, an arm crossed her breasts, hand gripping her shoulder.

The nightmare should have awakened her, as such fantasies do when they become unbearable, but it failed and she dreamt on.

She reared away from the cold touch and just when the terror was at its zenith, she felt the clawed hand withdraw to be replaced by another touch, one that was gentle and soothing. A small soft hand was stroking her cheek and the fear very slowly began to leave her.

Her body relaxed and the touching of this little hand—a child's hand—was healing, driving away both terror… and guilt. She had the vaguest impression of a child's featureless face under a mop of hair so fair it looked white, but the image was both weak and fleeting. The nightmare faltered, became nebulous, finally left her.

She called out his name, a question.

'Cameron?'

And it was the sound of her own voice that finally woke her.

She stirred, almost reluctantly opening her eyes, not wanting the serenity to end, hoping to find it was real.

But the 'presence' vanished with the awakening.

'Cameron?' she said again, and even though there was no reply, the wonderful peace was not completely gone.

Eve sat up and looked around as if expecting to find her son somewhere in the room with her. But the room was empty of any other person. Nothing had changed.

Except the photograph of Cam on the nearby table had fallen on the floor.

It lay on its side, supported by the strut at the back, and Cam's eyes seemed to be looking directly into her own.

And although his photograph drew her attention, she was aware that there was something else different about the high-ceilinged sitting room. That odd aroma still scented the air and she now recognized the smell. It was the sharp reek of carbolic soap; it was all that was left of the dream.

16: CHESTER

'Hold on to Chester while I find something to tie him with.'

Gabe rose to his feet, a dark damp patch on the knees of his jeans where he had been kneeling on the wet grass. He hung on to the dog's collar until Loren took over.

'Good boy,' she said soothingly into the animal's cocked ear. 'Nothing to be frightened of, is there?' She wrapped an arm round Chester's neck.

Gabe shook his head in bemused irritation. He'd tried to coax their pet up to Crickley Hall's front door, but the dog wasn't having it. The more Gabe pulled, the more Chester squatted on his haunches and dug his paws into the turf. Gabe couldn't understand the mutt's fear. Sure, there wasn't much that was homely about the Hall, nothing comfortable about it, but it was just a house, stone, mortar and timber. Maybe Chester was picking up vibes from Eve, who seemed to think Crickley Hall was haunted. Wacky, maybe, but Gabe didn't want to argue with her; his wife was still in an ultrasensitive state. Which was why he had promised to find somewhere else to rent if she hadn't settled in after two weeks—no, one week now. He was sure she'd change her mind once she got rid of the idea that there were ghosts in the place. But in the meantime, what to do about Chester?

Gabe and Loren had found the runaway half a mile up the lane, heading for unknown territory. He had stopped by the side of the road when Gabe and Loren drove up, his head high and eyes bright as though he recognized the Range Rover. And there had been no problem in getting him to hop up onto the back seat, his short-haired stumpy tail wagging happily, responding to Loren's hugs and kisses enthusiastically. But when Gabe turned the 4x4 around and began heading back to Crickley Hall, Chester had become agitated again.

Gabe had to pick up the dog and carry his skinny quivering body across the bridge and then he had to drag the mongrel by his collar across the lawn towards the house's solid front door. Chester had protested all the way, his brown eyes bulging. Gabe had reluctantly taken him back to the oak tree where the swing hung, holding down his exasperation more for Loren's sake than for Chester's; the dog's panic was upsetting her.

'Okay, mutt,' Gabe grumbled, 'let's see how you like being outside all day.'

'Dad!' Loren objected. 'We can't do that. What if it starts raining again?'

Gabe glanced up at the troubled sky and saw the clouds had become dark and threatening.

'We'll have to see,' he told Loren. 'You keep him calm while I go look for something to tie him with.'

He left daughter and dog by the oak, Loren's grip on Chester firm but loving—she was whispering sweet nothings in Chester's ear—and strode towards the battered-looking shed that stood some distance away from the house, bushes on the rising gorge behind it brushing its flat roof. There was no padlock on the door's locking arm and it opened with hinges squealing and bottom plank scuffing the ground.

The interior smelt of dust and damp. It was shadowy, its only window so badly smeared by weather grime it was virtually opaque. He could make out what looked like well-used gardening tools—a rake, hoe, shears and other implements—hanging from the wooden wall opposite the window, and a couple of plastic sacks that may have contained fertilizer or weedkiller, or both, resting on the stone floor, while at the back, behind a lawnmower, an old Flymo hover-mower leaned on its side against the wall, its rotor blade missing. On a shelf above the hooks was a petrol can (gasoline, to Gabe) and a half-sized chainsaw, probably used for trimming tree branches and cutting up logs for Crickley Hall's fires. There were also cobwebs, plenty of cobwebs, dusty nets draped from corners and ledges. The shed needed a good clean-up, which Gabe thought he'd probably do himself rather than ask old Percy who, no doubt, was too used to the dirt to notice. Many gardeners were like that.

Gabe spied what he had been looking for: a length of rope dangled from a shelf hook at the far end of the row. Moving round the lawnmower occupying the centre floor space, he unhooked the rope and carried it back to the daylight coming through the open door. The rope was thin and almost black with dust, but it was long and strong enough to serve his purpose. After scraping the shed door shut and pushing the slot of the locking arm into the metal hasp, he returned to the oak tree where Loren and Chester were waiting.

Loren frowned as Gabe threw one end of the rope round the tree trunk and deftly caught it when it came round the other side. 'It's wicked, Dad,' she complained, holding Chester closer to her.

'Can't be helped, Slim,' Gabe responded, feeling only a little guilty. 'If he won't come into the house, this is all we can do. If we left him untied, he'd scoot again. We don't want to lose him, do we?'

'But we can't leave him out all night.'

Gabe tied a knot so that the rope was looped securely round the tree. He knelt beside Chester and slid the free end through the dog's collar. As he tied another knot, he said, 'He'll wanna play house after he's spent the rest of the day on his own. You hear me, mutt.' He playfully poked Chester's ribs. 'You want company again, you gotta learn to love Crickley Hall.'

'He'll get soaked if it rains.' Loren clung to Chester more fiercely.

'If it rains, I'll haul him inside and if he howls or whines he goes down to the cellar. I don't like it much myself, Loren, but it's the only solution.'

Gabe took his daughter by the elbow and brought her unwillingly to her feet. She stroked Chester's head a few more times before following her father towards the house. When they both looked back, Chester was standing stock-still, his tail in the air, watching them as if expecting their return. Gabe put his arm around Loren's shoulders and gently urged her on.

'Chester's gonna be okay. Wait and see—he'll decide life indoors in comfort and with good company is a lot better than time alone, trussed to a tree.'

'But why doesn't he like Crickley Hall, Dad?' Loren's voice was woeful.

'Well, I guess he'd rather be in his own home, like the rest of us,' he told her. 'Being somewhere strange gives him the jitters. He's a jumpy kind of mutt anyway, always has been.'

If Loren was satisfied with the reply she wasn't saying. She walked alongside Gabe in silence, a troubled look on her young face. He wondered if he'd been wrong in bringing his family down here to Hollow Bay. Hell, even the dog hated it here. But Gabe thought he'd been acting for the best: the anniversary of Cam's disappearance would soon be on them and Gabe hadn't wanted them all—especially Eve—to face it in the house where their son had been born and raised, and where there were so many heart-stabbing memories of him.

Father and daughter bypassed Crickley Hall's main door, Gabe tapping on the kitchen window as they walked past, Eve turning round from the table where she and Cally were setting places for lunch. She gave Gabe and Loren a short wave and a smile.

The door to the kitchen was unlocked, as Gabe knew it would be (irrationally, some impulse deep within Eve caused her constantly to leave the front door of their London house unlocked as if she were afraid that Cam might suddenly appear only to find himself locked out), and they stepped inside, stamping their boots on the thick doormat to shake off loose rainwater and mud. To Gabe's surprise, Eve was still smiling.

'You found him easily enough,' she said, having watched Gabe tether their wayward pet to the tree from the window.

'Yep,' agreed Gabe as he shrugged off his reefer jacket. 'Way up the hill, heading for the city lights.'

To his further surprise Eve gave him a peck on the cheek, and then did the same to Loren. There was a sudden brightness to his wife that had been absent for a long time. Puzzled but pleased, he studied her face with some confusion.

'Daddy, why didn't you bring Chester inside?' Cally looked up at him, a clutch of tablespoons held in one podgy little hand. Eve obviously had lifted her up to the kitchen window so that she could see they'd found Chester.

'Because he told me he wanted to catch some fresh air for a while. He's tired of being cooped up in the house all day long.'

'Chester can't say words, Daddy.'

'Sure he can. You just never seem to be around when he says 'em.'

'Doh,' she said meaningfully.

'You don't believe me? When I was a cowboy back in the States I had a horse that gabbed to me all the time.'

Eve and Loren rolled their eyes at each other.

'Woody hasn't got a talking horse,' Cally responded doubtfully, referring to another favourite cartoon character. Bart and Homer Simpson were not the only guys in town.

'That's because he hasn't even got a horse.'

Eve intervened. 'Gabe, you're going to be in trouble when she wises up to you. You know she believes everything you tell her.'

Gabe only grinned back at her. 'Loren seems to have adjusted well enough.'

'You weren't there, Dad, when my friends laughed at me. I'm still disappointed about Father Christmas.'

Cally's head swung round to her older sister. 'Father Christmas?'

'You're too little to understand, Cally,' Loren informed her patiently. 'Daddy makes up stories.'

Cally's head swivelled back to Gabe.

'Well, look who's all growed up all of a sudden,' he teased Loren.

Eve intervened again before Cally became disillusioned. 'But it seems you haven't,' she said to Gabe, and amazingly her smile was genuine.

Gabe stared at her. Had some of her lustre come back? He felt a lifting of his own spirit.

'You had a good morning?' he asked, probing her. When he and Loren had picked up the car, Eve had looked her usual beaten self. Had something happened while he and Loren were out? If so, was Eve saving the explanation for when she and Gabe were alone? He would just have to wait and see.

•

But Eve gave nothing away, even though the sadness that she had worn like a shroud all these months appeared to have lifted—not entirely, it was true, for there was still an unshakeable air of melancholy about her, but this was now subdued, her manner more alert, her voice a little lighter, her movement not quite so leaden. It gave him a glimpse of her real self, the woman he had loved for so many years, and he was afraid to say anything that might change the mood. The difference in her was not great, but to Gabe it seemed significant. Maybe a turning point.

He hadn't even pressed her when they were on their own, the girls off somewhere playing, Loren probably texting her friends on her brand-new cell phone, but at one point he had softly ventured, 'You okay, hon?' and she had merely turned to him and said, 'Yes.' No more than that.

So he let it be. Maybe her mind had taken all the misery—and guilt—it could handle. If so, he guessed the change probably wouldn't last long; but at least it might be a step towards her recovery. He hoped that it was.

17: THE DORMITORY

Loren and Cally were in the bathroom, Loren brushing her teeth, anxious about the first day at the new school tomorrow, while her sister sat on the toilet nearby, pyjama leggings bunched round her ankles, squeezing out the last few drops of her pee. Cally hummed a tuneless song while she waited, her eyes roving around the stark black-and-white-tiled room.

A deep porcelain bath supported by ugly clawed metal feet took up much of the length of one wall and the octagonal-shaped sink on its sturdy pedestal was set against the wall opposite beneath a tall mirrored cabinet. The light from a pearled bowl centred in the high ceiling was too harsh and made the wall and diamond-patterned floor tiles look garish and cold, the reflection of Loren in the mirror unflattering. The window above the low toilet cistern was frosted and without curtaining; the door at the room's other end was painted black, its brass doorknob tarnished with wear, no key in the lock beneath it. Even more so than most of the other rooms in Crickley Hall, the bathroom was utilitarian and charmless.

Loren had decided, with no urging from her parents, to have an early night. Perhaps it was only because her sleep had been interrupted the previous night, but she felt very tired. She was anxious to be fresh and bright for the next day. She would read for a while as Mum or Dad read Cally a bedtime story (Gabe had fixed up a lamp on the small cabinet between Loren and Cally's beds) and when Cally drifted off as she always did before the story's end, she would try to sleep herself. Perhaps she wouldn't even bother to read; sometimes she liked to listen with Cally—even though her younger sister's stories were childish, there was something very comforting about them.

Loren was also frustrated that her cell phone wasn't working; the whole point of having it was so she could keep in touch with her friends back in London while she was away. She had tried for ages to send text messages, but when she switched on the Samsung the screen just said 'Limited service' and each time she persisted in tapping out a message with her thumb and pressing send, it said 'Message failed'. In fact, she couldn't even call her friends, because 'Limited service' always came up. When she'd complained to Dad he'd tried his own cell phone with the same result. He said it was probably because they were in the ravine—'gorge', she'd corrected him yet again—and most likely there were no masts nearby. Use the land line, he advised her, but she wanted to contact her friends in private and Crickley Hall's 'ancient' phone was in the hall where just everybody could overhear everything she said. It was very annoying.

Loren exhaled a yawn as she brushed.

Cally was sure the last drop had been forced out and so she slid off the cold toilet seat. She bent to pull up her pyjama bottoms.

Then both girls stopped what they were doing and looked up at the ceiling.

•

Downstairs in the kitchen, Gabe and Eve were sharing a bottle of Chablis while their two daughters were upstairs in the bathroom preparing for bed. Gabe leaned across the table and topped up Eve's glass with the white wine and she held up a hand in protest.

'You'll get me tipsy,' she complained but with a smile.

'No bad thing,' he replied, grinning back at her and continuing to pour.

Eve had lit four candles and placed them at strategic points around the room before turning off the overhead light, which exposed the room's plainness too much for her liking. One of the candles was between her and Gabe on the table, its glow bringing a soft lustre to Eve's eyes.

'We used to do this a lot,' Gabe remarked in a soft voice, then immediately regretted having said it. They used to do this a lot before their son went missing.

But Eve did not react, even if she realized the implication. She sipped the wine.

To move on, Gabe said, 'Not like Loren to go to bed early.'

'She seemed very tired.'

'Yeah, and a little antsy about her cell phone.'

'And your mobile too. Won't you need it?'

'I'll use the regular phone.'

'That old thing.'

'At least it's digital. I'm surprised it's not Bakerlite with letters as well as numbers.'

'It looks first-generation digital.'

'It's a man's phone.'

'Yes, completely out-of-date.'

'It'll do. Eve, you seem…' He hesitated, then came right out with it. 'You, uh, you seem more relaxed than of late. You know, I've been kinda worried about you.'

She lowered her gaze. Should she tell him what occurred this afternoon, the dream that wasn't quite a dream? Would he believe Cameron had reached out to her somehow, if only for a few seconds? She was quite sure in herself that it had happened for real, but would Gabe accept it? She had been half asleep, dozing, that was true, and the horrible man with rancid breath and the odd after-smell must have been some kind of waking nightmare, but the presence that could only have been Cam was genuine, she was sure. The undefined vision had come to her. No, she couldn't tell her husband, not yet. Not until she was truly sure that Cam was trying to contact her. Oh, she'd had sight of him before, but these had been in proper dreams, sleep fantasies that quickly faded when she woke. But this afternoon was different. There had always been a uniquely strong bond between her son and herself, and Gabe would never deny it. But would he believe that Cam was now trying to reach her through their psychic link? She doubted it. The idea was too off the wall for someone whose attitude to life had always been pragmatic. No, she would have to prove it to him. But first she had to prove it to herself. And there might just be a way of doing that.

Eve smiled inwardly: for the first time in nearly a year she felt hope, and it was a wonderful thing.

'Honey?'

She realized she had been distracted. 'Yes, Gabe?'

'You really do seem a little different today,' Gabe persisted, hunching forward over the tabletop and brushing her hand with his fingertips.

'Perhaps…' she began to say, but Chester, lying on his blanket by the kitchen door, suddenly shot to his feet and gave out a sharp yelp.

Surprised, they both turned to the dog as one. Chester's fur was bristling, his short tail erect, his teeth bared. Eyes wide and bright, he was staring at the open doorway to the hall.

'What's wrong, Chester?' Gabe pushed back from the table, the chair legs scuffing the linoleum. 'What is it, boy?'

Then both he and Eve heard it.

A faint scuffling noise coming through the doorway.

As if frozen—they had become wary of Crickley Hall's inexplicable noises by now—they listened.

The distant sound continued and Chester's yelps and barks relapsed to a whining. He cowered, his whole length close to the floor, front paws pushing himself against the door to the garden.

Gabe rose and went to the threshold of the hall. Eve followed.

Behind him, her hands resting on his shoulder, she tried to locate the source of the sound.

They both peered up at the hall's high ceiling.

•

Loren and Cally were standing outside the bathroom door, also looking upwards, Loren with her hands on the balustrade, Cally peeking through the rails. They were open-mouthed, their upturned faces pale.

Below, in the hall, Eve hissed into Gabe's ear, 'What is it?'

His gaze did not leave the ceiling. After a moment, he whispered back, 'Sounds like footsteps. Lots of 'em.'

•

They crowded round the door on the landing that led to the attic room—or rooms—the one place that neither Gabe nor Eve had yet visited.

'Is it locked?' Eve asked, for some reason speaking in a half-whisper.

'Don't know,' Gabe replied, his own voice quiet. 'Key's in the lock anyway.' He transferred the unlit flashlight (they couldn't know if the lights beyond the door would work) to his left hand and gripped the doorknob with his right. There was a slight resistance, as if the lock might be rusting inside, but it turned. He pulled, then pushed at the door and it opened inwardly easily enough, although there was an initial squeak of its hinges. Now he clicked on his flashlight.

The sound of numerous soft footsteps from above had faded away (faded as if turned down by a volume control) minutes before and now the family was curious but understandably cautious.

'There's a light switch just inside the door.' Gabe pointed towards it with his beam.

Eve reached past him and flicked the switch. Nothing happened.

She aimed her own small torch up the narrow staircase leading to the attic.

'Look, there's a light connection hanging down, but there's no lightbulb.'

'I'm going up,' Gabe announced.

'We're coming with you,' Eve informed him.

'Not a good idea. There could be, well, you know…' He didn't want to say it in front of his daughters.

'Rats,' Loren filled in for him.

'Might be squirrels.' Squirrels sounded more appealing.

'Gabe, we heard footsteps,' said Eve. 'They weren't made by animals of any kind.'

'Oh yeah? And what's the alternative?'

'Who knows with this house?'

Cally tugged at her waist. 'What is it, Mummy?'

Eve looked down at her, aware that any mention of ghosts would frighten both her daughters.

'Let's go and look,' she said finally.

'All of us.' Cally clutched at her even more tightly.

'All right. All of us.' Eve knew the girls would refuse to stay downstairs by themselves, so she didn't argue.

'You first, Daddy,' Cally insisted anxiously.

'Yep, me first.' Gabe grinned his wide tight-lipped grin, one that was wryly resolute rather than happy.

The wooden steps creaked as he made his way up, his family following close behind, Cally tightly gripping her mother's hand, Loren coming up last and taking each step carefully as if one might break beneath her.

The staircase smelt of rotting wood and dust, and it turned a corner beyond which Gabe found an open hatch. No proper door, just an open hatch.

He poked his head through and paused, shining the light around what was more than just a roof space. The room was long, even though a partition wall appeared to section it off at the far end, but the ceiling was low. Dormer windows were built into its slanting walls and two rough brick chimney stacks disappeared into the roof (there must have been similar stacks out of sight on the other side of the partition, for the house had more than two chimneys on its roof). Bare floorboards ran its length and there was no furniture other than what looked like iron-framed cotbeds piled against one corner.

Dust motes danced crazily in the beams of light as if disturbed by fierce draughts. Yet no windows were open or broken and he felt no breeze on his face. Only faint moonlight shone through the grimed glass, casting dark shadows around the room. He pointed his light at the skeletal cotbeds again and realized that this place must have been the dormitory for the evacuees who had come to Crickley Hall all those years ago.

Eve's voice came from the stairs below. 'What's the holdup, Gabe?' She still spoke in a half-whisper as if afraid of being heard by someone other than her husband.

'Just checking—' He caught himself whispering his reply and continued in a normal voice. 'Just checking it out. Doesn't appear to be anything much up here 'cept a bunch of old bedsteads.'

He climbed through the hatchway and stood looking around. What had stirred up the dust?

Eve helped Cally through and Loren scrambled up behind them. Eve swung her torch beam from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling.

'Gabe. The dust…'

'Yeah, I know. Can't feel or see anything that could've caused it.'

He ran the light the length of the room. Two bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling.

'Can you see a switch anywhere?'

Eve turned the torch towards the wall nearest to the open hatch. 'Over here,' she said, going to the single light switch that was fixed into the angled wall. She pressed it down, but only one overhead light came on and its power was insufficient, as, it seemed, were most of the lights in Crickley Hall. It was positioned at the far end of the long room and it did manage to reveal a door in the wood partitioning. She shivered. It was very cold in the attic.

Eve spotted the iron cotbeds piled together and taking up most of one corner. There must be a dozen, she thought to herself, or at least eleven. 'Is this where the children slept, d'you think?' she asked Gabe. 'Was this their dormitory when they stayed here during the war?'

'Yeah, it figures.' Gabe ran his lightbeam over the jumbled frames. 'If they'd stayed up here when the flood hit they would've survived. Makes no sense.'

'But it's so bare. Surely they'd have had their toys and other things with them.'

'It was a long time ago, hon. The place would've been cleared out.' He pointed his flashlight towards the partition door at the other end of the room. 'Unless a lot of stuff was stored away.'

He started forward, his footsteps sounding hollow in the room's emptiness.

Eve caught his arm as he went by. 'Have you forgotten why we came up here?'

'Uh?'

'The noises, the footsteps,' she reminded him. The footsteps sounded light, like children running around in bare feet.'

He hesitated. Thought for a moment. Then: 'Coulda been anything.'

'No, you know I'm right. It was children we heard. I think this house holds on to its memories.'

'Not that again. Crickley Hall isn't haunted.'

He regretted the words as soon as he'd uttered them.

'Dad?' Loren looked up at him, fear in her wide eyes.

Eve went to her. 'It's all right, Loren. We didn't mean to frighten you.' She put her arm around her daughter's shoulders.

'But you said it was haunted.' Loren was frozen; she did not move into her mother's embrace.

Eve tried to reassure her. 'No, I didn't mean that. I said the house has memories. That doesn't necessarily mean there are ghosts here.'

'I don't like ghosts, Mummy,' Cally piped up.

There was no anger in Gabe's voice, only despair. 'You're spooking 'em,' he said to Eve.

'Then you tell me what made the noise.'

And that was the problem: Gabe had no idea.

'Maybe there's something behind that wall.' He waved the flashlight at the partition and started to walk towards it through the floating dust.

'No, Daddy,' Loren pleaded.

Cally looked at her older sister and her mouth was downturned. She quickly joined Eve and Loren. The three of them stared at the far door as if something horrible might be on the other side.

'I'm just taking a look,' Gabe reassured them as he went.

'Gabe, I don't think…' Eve began to say, but stopped. What was there to be afraid of? If it was only memories that haunted the house, then there'd be nothing to fear. Yet she still felt a strong sense of foreboding.

'You stay there with the girls,' Gabe suggested over his shoulder.

Eve recognized his determination. He was cautious, she knew that, but it would take more than unaccountable noises to intimidate him. She ignored his suggestion and, gathering up her daughters, Eve reluctantly followed him through the unexplainable dust storm. The dim overhead light barely lit his head and shoulders.

Gabe halted before the plain hardwood door and examined the doorknob. There was no lock below, only a swivel latch. He pushed the latch with his finger so that it was vertical and he felt the door jolt slightly as it released from pressure. Eve and the girls silently watched as he pulled the door forward.

The utter darkness inside slunk back from the torchlight as if caught unawares.

Gabe poked his head into the opening.

'Junk,' he announced after a moment. 'Nothing but stored-away junk in here.'

He disappeared inside and Eve and the girls filled the open doorway. Eve waved her torch around, more curious than scared now, and although the lights chased shadows away, it caused others that were dense. She saw odd pieces of furniture—chairs with straight backs, boxes piled high on a table with thick rounded legs, more boxes on the littered floor; an old-fashioned two-bar electric fire; rolls of what looked like curtain material; lampshades; a figurine whose head was broken off at the neck; a small statue of Christ with a burning heart, one of its supplicating arms missing; two tall matching vases, both chipped and cracked. There was more: a round hanging clock lying flat on its back and minus a minute hand; a framed landscape painting leaning against a box, its glass cracked; a dented iron bucket; several battered cardboard suitcases with broken handles; other items covered by dirty wrinkled sheets. The partitioned room was filled with Crickley Hall's detritus, oddments of no value or use any more.

Eve moved further in, the girls, clutching each other's hand, following, afraid to be left alone outside. She could see Gabe moving things around in the gloom. The atmosphere was thick with dust and stagnation.

She heard Gabe whistle through his teeth. 'Will you look at this,' he said.

She caught up with him to see what he'd found. 'Toys,' she said almost breathlessly.

'Old toys,' he corrected her. 'Look at 'em. Some are still in their boxes. You can make out what they are under the dirt.'

It was true: the images of their contents were partially visible beneath the thick layers of dust. A train set. Snakes and ladders. A farmyard with painted wooden animals. Eve picked up a flattish box and wiped her hand across it. The box apparently contained a jigsaw; the picture was of a park, with illustrated children playing, some of them on swings, others on slides… a cartoon boy on a roundabout, yellow hair… like Cam's.

Gabe interrupted her melancholy thoughts. 'And check this out.'

His light revealed an archaic blackboard, its corners rounded, chalk markings just visible underneath the dust. It rested against the angled wall, its easel leaning against it. Crammed close to the blackboard were stacked rectangular trestle-tables, their metal legs housed beneath the flat surfaces.

Gabe went over to a large open cardboard box and dug his hand into it. He brought out a strange rubber contraption with large glass eyeholes and a stubby round nose.

'I'll be damned,' he murmured.

'A gas mask,' Eve said.

'Yeah, from the Second World War. But it's small, meant for kids. There's more in there.'

'Do you think all these things have been stored away since then?'

'Seems likely. Look at those toys. They don't make simple stuff like this these days.' He reached down for something lying at his feet and showed it to her, blowing some of the dust that dulled its brightness. 'Made of tin. Look, it's even got a key to wind up the engine.'

Slipping the flashlight under his armpit, Gabe used thumb and forefinger to wind up the old motorcar but the key stuck on the first turn. 'Must've rusted up inside,' he remarked, gazing at the machine in wonder.

Eve picked up a limp ragdoll lying on top of a carton. 'You won't find many of these around any more,' she said, turning the soft doll over in her hand, the reason for searching the attic lost to her for the moment. 'It's a golliwog. It's just not PC for children to play with anything like this these days. I had one myself when I was very young.'

'You know what's strange?' Gabe, having discarded the tin car, was crouching by a cardboard box and wiping away the covering dust with the palm of his hand. 'Look, this one's never been opened and, from what I can tell, nor have any of the others. These toys have never been played with.'

'But why? It doesn't make sense.'

'Maybe they were being kept hidden in here for Christmas. The flood took the poor kids before they got the chance to be given 'em.'

'You think that was it?'

'Only guessing. But they were out of sight behind other boxes and stuff. I moved that blackboard and easel to get to the toys. Could be that they were forgotten after the disaster and more junk was stashed in here in front of 'em so they couldn't be seen. S'way I figure it, anyhow.'

'Daddy, what's this?'

Gabe and Eve turned and searched out Cally among the shadows. She was squatting on her haunches, a podgy little hand resting on a round object standing on the floor.

'Don't touch it, Cally, it's filthy,' Eve warned her. 'Let Daddy have a look at it first.'

Gabe climbed over boxes and other neglected toys to reach his daughter.

'I think it's a top, Dad,' said Loren, who had become interested in her sister's find. 'You know, one of those spinning tops. I used to have one like it when I was little.'

'Let's see.' He knelt on the floorboards and picked up the toy with his free hand. He wiped it on his sweater sleeve and bright colours sprang into life.

Cally gave out a small squeal of delight.

'Don't get too hopeful, Cally. Doubt it's gonna work after all this time.'

He steadied the spinning top on the floor, then pushed down its spiral plunger. It gave out a rusty growl as it spun one and half revolutions before stopping with an ominous clonk.

'Yep, probably rusted inside.'

'Can you mend it, Daddy?' Cally asked hopefully.

'Sure, I can try.'

'Can we take it downstairs? Can I play with it?'

'Lot of other toys here to choose from, Sparky.'

'No, this one, Daddy. Please.'

Gabe straightened. 'Okay, let me carry it 'til we can give it a good wipeover, okay?'

'Yes, please.'

Eve, apart from them in the gloom, felt a sudden shiver run through her. She thought of the sounds they had heard coming through the ceiling when they were downstairs. A scurrying. A rushing of feet. From the attic room that had once been used as a dormitory.

A sound that was loud on the bare floorboards; yet somehow light. As though the sounds belonged to children scampering in bare or stockinged feet.

Running, scattering, children.

18: THIRD NIGHT

Yet another night they slept together, the girls snuggled between Gabe and Eve. The only difference this time was that the dog refused to leave the kitchen, the rain having forced Gabe to bring him in. Chester had resisted Gabe's tugging at his collar, whimpering at his master's coaxing, haunches low. Despite Gabe's entreaties, the mongrel had refused to leave his spot beside the garden door; he cowered there, eyes wild with fear that only he could understand.

In the end, Gabe could only shake his head in mystified frustration. Sure, Eve was right—there was something weird going on in this place—but last night the mutt had howled to be allowed upstairs with the family; tonight nothing would induce Chester to leave his blanket by the door. The engineer was certain that if he opened the outside door the dog would be through it like the wind and this time, in the dark, they'd never find him.

Exasperated, Gabe had left Chester there, hoping he wouldn't howl in the night.

Naturally, Loren and Cally wanted to know who or what had been running around in the old dormitory earlier (although Cally had seemed more interested in the spinning top she was allowed to bring downstairs) and there was no logical explanation either parent could give them. Gabe had unconvincingly muttered about airlocks and waterpipes once more and the girls were not taken in. They were too tired, though, to be more curious, especially Loren, who, unusually, wanted to go to bed. Gabe and Eve knew their daughters would be too jittery to fall sleep on their own, despite their tiredness, so had retired with them.

Because of this, Gabe and Eve had no opportunity to discuss the phenomenon between themselves, and the truth was, neither of them felt like it that night; they both lacked the energy.

They were all fast sleep within minutes of settling down and the only noise in Crickley Hall, apart from the distressed mewlings of Chester in the kitchen, was the creak of rough floorboards and timbers, and the faint but constant whispering of rushing water that crept up from the bowels of the house and through the open cellar door…

19: MONDAY

'You nervous, Slim?' Gabe changed up a gear and stole a glance at Loren, who was strapped into the Range Rover's passenger seat beside him.

There was no guile about Loren; she was still young enough to be open and honest and totally without front. She responded without hesitation: 'Yes, Dad.'

'Don't be. You'll soon make new friends.'

'I'm not from around here.'

'It'll make you more interesting.'

He slowed the car, indicated left, and swung out from the narrow lane with its high hedges on either side into a wider and busier road.

'I've spoken to the headteacher, Mr Horkins, a coupla times, once on the phone and once in person when I scouted out the school last time I was down here. Seems an okay guy, runs a tight ship. The kids impressed me when I visited, almost civilized, y'know?'

Gabe was taking Loren to Merrybridge Middle School on her first morning, but the school bus would bring her back in the afternoon. They had all overslept, even Cally, who normally could be relied on to be wide awake and singing loudly or playing with her dolls at the crack of dawn. But it had been a late night for her and a troubling one for them all. Gabe had lamely put the sleep-in down to 'good country air' and there had been no time to discuss the events—the mysterious running footsteps—of the previous night. A quick breakfast of coffee and toast for Gabe, cereals for the girls, and then he and Loren set out for Merrybridge. Chester, who once again had been tied outside to the tree, barked after them as they hurried across the bridge.

Gabe slowed down with the flow of traffic. It seemed even coastal Devon had its rush hour.

'It's horrible not knowing anybody,' whinged Loren, gazing ahead through the windscreen, chewing at her lower lip.

'Hey, you'll find someone to hook up with. You're good at making friends.'

'I really don't want to go to a new school.'

'It's only for a short time. We talked about this.'

'Will Mummy get… will she get better?'

'I think being away from our old house might help her come to terms with the situation. New surroundings, new people.' He didn't add that the first anniversary of Cam's disappearance was almost upon them. 'It won't make her forget, but it might divert her attention for a while, maybe help her get a grip.'

'But she's been sad for such a long time.' Loren turned towards her father. 'Mummy still cries when she's alone. I can always tell, even when she pretends she's all right.'

'I know.'

'We're all sad about Cam. I still miss him a lot, but…' Her words trailed off.

'But eventually you have to get on with life.' Gabe finished for her. He took a quick look her way. She was pale and troubled and there were faint smudges under her eyes.

'Sometimes I feel guilty because I think of Cam less and less,' she said.

'Don't be. It's natural. You can't grieve for ever, especially not at your age. So long as you remember him from time to time, it's okay. No one expects more of you.'

'I still cry sometimes.'

'Sure, but not so much any more, right? And that's good, Loren, it's part of the healing. But we all have to carry on with our lives, it's the only thing to do.'

'Dad…'

Gabe felt her eyes on him again.

'Cam is dead, isn't he? He must be, mustn't he? He couldn't just disappear.'

It was the first time Loren had come straight out with it and he had been dreading such a moment. What to tell her? What did he himself believe? What did he really believe?

'I don't know,' he answered after a few moments. He couldn't lie to her; yet neither could he affirm what he knew they all thought. There was no other way to say it. 'Until they find his body we can only assume he's been taken away by someone.'

Loren was equally frank. 'If he was alive the police would have found him by now. No one could've hidden him all this time.'

This was the reality but, mostly for Eve's sake, Gabe would not admit it, even to himself.

'Could someone have stolen him because they didn't have a little boy of their own? Perhaps they were lonely. They took him from the park because he looked so nice. Cam was always smiley, even with strangers.'

He blessed Loren for her innocence. A kidnapping was what Eve wanted to believe even now. She'd been in denial from the first day Cam had vanished. Something deep within her refused to accept the worst and it was this faulty reasoning that kept her from complete breakdown. And, in truth, maybe the same unrealistic hope lay within himself—why else had he not wept for his own son?

They had reached the town and the main street was busy with people, among them, in groups of three or four, the blue uniforms of Merrybridge Middle School pupils. Loren watched them apprehensively, hoping they wouldn't treat her as an outsider, praying she wouldn't make a fool of herself on her first day.

Soon the uniforms—navy-blue trousers or skirts, electric-blue jumpers and blazers over white shirts worn with blue-and-grey-striped ties—began to multiply, then mass, so that it seemed the world's predominant colour was blue. Gabe hung a right into the wide side street and there it was, Merrybridge Middle School—or Merrymiddle as it was known—a concrete congestion of two-storey plain stone-and-glass buildings so beloved by misguided architects and cost-conscious town-planners in the Sixties. If the town itself still had a modicum of charm left, it was lost on the solid but drab interjoined buildings.

Gabe pulled up behind another 4x4 whose passengers were being disgorged and set the handbrake. Some of the children passing by gawped in the passenger window at Loren as if already sniffing a stranger in their midst, and she studiously ignored them. She reached over to the back seat for her school bag. Perhaps in a few days, when she herself wore the Merrybridge uniform, she would not be so visible.

'All right,' Gabe smiled reassuringly: he understood her nervousness. 'You want me to come in with you?'

'No, Dad!' She looked alarmed at the very idea.

'Sure?'

She nodded her head vigorously.

'Okay. So just go inside and ask someone where you can find Mr Horkins. He'll see you right.'

They leaned towards each other and Loren gave her father a peck on the cheek. She grabbed her school bag from the back, then pushed the passenger door open. Gabe saw the apprehension on her face and his heart nearly melted.

'Bye, Daddy,' she said, before slamming the door after her.

'See you tonight.' He watched her go through the gate following two uniformed girls, and he pressed the switch to lower the passenger side window.

'Hey, Slim!' he called, stretching across the seat.

Loren turned and looked back at him.

'Don't talk to boys!' He gave her a broad smile.

She rolled her eyes heavenwards and the two girls in front looked over their shoulders and giggled.

Then Loren was gone and Gabe felt a heel.

20: THE SPINNING TOP

Eve snatched another look out of the kitchen window, checking on Chester who lay forlornly on the grass, roped to the tall oak tree from whose lowest branch the swing hung. His head was down, muzzle resting between his front paws, and he was looking forlornly towards the house.

She was relieved to see it wasn't raining this morning, although the dark clouds looked threatening, otherwise she would be forced to bring him inside, and the thought of dragging him all the way across the lawn while he fretted and resisted was unappealing.

That morning there had been too much frantic bustle to reflect on the events of the previous night because the whole family had overslept. Hasty breakfasts, Chester taken out on his lead to do his stuff, quick kisses goodbye for Gabe and Loren, Eve especially twitchy for Loren, who was starting her first day at the new school, finally waving to them as they crossed the short bridge, and then the panic was over. Peace returned. Eve helped her youngest wash and dress, then came back down for a second cup of coffee at the kitchen table, while Cally played with her toys upstairs until it was time for her reading lesson.

The house seemed different today, not so dispiriting, not so—not so joyless. Perhaps it was because the sun kept breaking through the rainclouds, cheering the air itself as it flooded through the hall's tall window, brightening even the gloomiest corners, its warmth stirring the air so the dust floated in its beams. Still in her white waffle dressing gown, Eve sipped from the mug, holding it to her lips with both hands, the coffee's heat reviving her, yet a calmness seeping through her limbs, her back, her neck. It had been a long time—almost a year—since she had felt this level of relaxation, this lessening of tension, and it was good. No, it was wonderful.

But why? she asked herself. Then she remembered, although it had not truly been forgotten, just temporarily laid aside as life around her continued with its flow. Yesterday, in the sitting room, on the couch. The dream. The bad dream. Something—someone—horrible, leering over her. The foul smell; then the other smell underlying it: the stinging scent of harsh soap. And the paralysing fear that had gripped her while she dozed.

Then its easing. She had felt—she knew she had felt—Cam's presence. She had not seen his face, but then never in her dreams had his features been clearly defined. And with most of those dreams had come a terrible sadness. But not so yesterday. Yesterday there had only been a calmness and a sense of loving. Cam, somehow, had reached out to her.

She had been under threat, she remembered that; threat from something wretched in this house; something horrid; something hidden inside Crickley Hall itself. But then the relief: Cam touching her, unseen fingers soothing her brow and cheek. It hit her then: was it his spirit that had come to her?

No! No, it couldn't be! If that were true, if it was his spirit, then Cameron must be dead! And that just could not be! She could not allow it to be!

Besides, there was another conclusion, she told herself, almost slyly, for she could not—would not!—accept the death of her little boy.

It wasn't Cam's spirit that appeared to her, not his soul. No, it was his mind. There had always been a telepathic link between them, between mother and child, but it had never been anything to wonder at, nothing so strong that it demanded anything more than casual interest. Neither was it particularly odd: many mothers had intuitions about their offspring, knew instinctively when their child was in pain or disturbed in some way when they were in different rooms, or even miles apart. Mothers could understand their baby's incoherent cry, mothers could sense their child's moods and ills. But her psychic connection with Cam was stronger than just that. Three out of the five clairvoyants she had interviewed some years ago had virtually convinced her of supernatural power, but she had never followed through, had lost interest once the feature had been written. Yet afterwards, she could never again deny there was something more than mere physical existence.

Hadn't she, herself, sensed the strangely sombre ambience of Crickley Hall? She had felt it even before she set foot inside, when she had studied it from across the bridge. Was it haunted, then? No, she couldn't quite buy that. But it seemed susceptible to paranormal activity. Was that the same as being haunted? Eve had no idea, although she was vaguely aware that paranormal didn't always mean supernatural. She needed guidance.

Leaning against the counter and putting her mug down, Eve brought her hands to her face and pressed the fingertips against her closed eyelids.

What did it mean? Had Cam subconsciously contacted her from another place? Was it possible? Was it really possible?

She lowered her hands again and turned from the window, intending to finish her half-drunk coffee, when something caught her eye.

The old-fashioned tin spinning top that Cally had found in the upstairs storeroom last night was standing nearby on the work surface where she had left it. Attractive colours gleamed from the section Gabe had wiped with the palm of his hand; she moved closer.

Those colours were primary and vivid. Curious to see more of the toy's pattern, Eve reached into a drawer and took out a soft duster. Cally was anxious to play with the top for reasons only a child would understand and that morning Gabe had promised to check out the mechanism when he returned from work. 'Drop of oil is probably all it needs,' he had reassured his daughter.

Eve picked up the toy by its plunger and began wiping the metal surface with the duster, soon revealing glorious colours and patterns. She could not help but smile at its gaiety. Running round its bulging circumference were dancing children, their tiny hands joined and their knees bent in frozen motion. Their depiction was simple and quaintly archaic in style, but wonderfully rendered. They played under a bright blue sky, with gentle but radiant green hills on the horizon, a deeper and no less pleasant green beneath their feet.

She blew away dust from her face and continued to clean the toy. There were coloured rings top and bottom, with small stars in the bands of red and yellow. It was a joy to look at and Eve could only wonder why it appeared never to have been used—nor even touched. There were no blemishes or scratches, no dents in the tin, nor any chipped paint. The spiral plunger was not rusted, although it refused to sink into the ball when she pushed at it. Perhaps the turning wheel inside was locked with lack of use.

She was about to call Cally to come down and see it, but had another thought. She put the spinning top back on the work surface and went to the cupboard beneath the sink where Gabe had stored his toolbox. Drawing the scuffed and grimy metal box out and planting it on the floor, she opened up its flaps, then pulled it open wider to reveal all its sections. There was a small can of light machinery oil lying on its side, pointed plastic cap firmly in place.

Taking out the can, Eve returned to the pristine spinning top. She uncapped the oil nozzle and pushed it against the tiny gap where the top's spiral drive rod entered the tin body. She squeezed drops of oil into the gap, the rod's spiral shape helping the fluid to sink down into the interior workings of the top itself. For good measure, Eve lubricated the visible part of the spiral rod. Satisfied, she put down the oil can, wrapped her fingers round the handle at the top of the rod, and plunged down.

The ball began to turn and then the plunger rod stalled, became stuck. She drew it up once more, counted to three, and tried again. This time the rod went all the way down and the top began to spin. She pulled it up again, then pushed down, working up a rhythm, the ball spinning faster and faster, the dancers moving swiftly, catching more speed as Eve plunged, lifted, plunged again. The colours began to flow into each other, began to meld, the dancers becoming a blur, Eve holding her breath as she worked, a humming noise now rising from the toy, soaring higher in tone with each spin, the colours beginning to fade, to become white, absent of any design, and Eve, as she pushed and pulled, remembered that the absence of colour was not black but white, white like the spinning top, its whiteness capturing her attention, the humming somehow hypnotic, the gyration mesmerizing, so that she could feel herself sinking into a void…

The top spun faster, faster, the humming pitched higher, higher…

And then she experienced a blissful peace, a consuming warmth that could only be described as spiritual, its catalyst the spinning toy.

She moaned as in the whirling bleached brightness she saw the dancing children reappear but without colour, only in subtle shades of ghostly grey. Eve's head felt light and giddy, but her gaze never abandoned the soft spinning images before her. The humming transcended into voices and they belonged to children at play a long distance away. She searched for Cam's voice among them, but there were too many to distinguish just one.

The spinning top began to lose speed and the voices reverted to the high-pitched humming, which now dropped to a softer thrumming, which then sank into a drone, which sank to a dissonant groan. The colours returned, the patterns reappeared, the painted children continued their dance. The top rocked on its base, then came to a gradual stop.

There was a stillness in the kitchen until Eve blinked and swayed against the counter.

Outside, the sun still shone intermittently through breaks in the scudding clouds.

Inside the house, there was only quietness.

Until a child's voice called out to her.

21: DANCING DUST

It was neither excited nor urgent; just a small voice calling from a distance.

'Mummy.'

At first, Eve had to dissociate it from the other voices she had heard while entranced by the bright whirling toy. It was a little cry, but at the top of its range and it entered the kitchen from across the cavernous hall.

'Mummy,' it came again and Eve, still lost in her imaginings, languidly stirred. Instinctively she moved towards the sound, a mother's natural response to the call of her child. Dazed, expectant, she hoped beyond all realistic hope that it was her son's voice she heard. Her heart beat faster; her breath was caught in her throat.

She stopped in the kitchen's open doorway and stared across the broad expanse of flagstones at her daughter, who stood at the turn of the stairway opposite. Sunlight flooded through the tall window behind her, transforming a drab mausoleum into a room of antiquated charm. Dark wood panelling blazed intricate grains of brown and honey, the stone slabs of the floor had mellowed to a soft yellow, and old pieces of furniture were given fresh grandeur.

'Look, Mummy.' Cally, with her pink teddy bear tucked under her arm, pointed at the middle ground between them.

Eve looked, but all she could see was thousands—millions—of golden dust motes drifting in the air as if disturbed by the warm rays from outside mingling with the cold draughts of the hall itself to generate lively breezes that carried glittering particles which wheeled and turned and dazzled like a galaxy of minute, shifting stars.

Eve gasped at the splendour, but she did not yet see as her daughter saw. She remembered the dust storm in the attic dormitory yesterday, how it had risen and whirled in the glare of their torches, but it had been nothing like this, nowhere near as thick and fast moving. These radiant particles seemed to be forming definite patterns.

Cally giggled. 'See them, Mummy, you see them dancing?'

And that was when Eve began to discern shapes among the tiny purling dust motes. It was like staring into one of those illusory picture puzzles where hidden in repetitious patterns were individual objects, persons or animals; unfocused eyes had to be used until, usually quite suddenly, the main image appeared in 3-dimensional effect. The same kind of thing seemed to be happening to Eve right now. The figures inside and also made of swirling dust became clear in a rush. They were still part of the great mass filling the sunlight in the hall, but they suddenly took on individuality, images emerging from the whole while still remaining part of it. The closest of the children had their backs to her as they danced past, holding hands, moving from right to left in a circle so that she could now make out the children facing her on the other side. The spinning top! They were like the children on the spinning top! Dancing in a ring, holding hands, their legs bending and straightening as they skipped along, as if they were real children, not just colourful illustrations. And now she heard their happy chants, distant as before, but nevertheless voices raised in happy union.

The same warmth as before came back to her—that spiritual warmth—and she wanted to weep because there was a sadness mixed with the joy, a longing, a yearning, for something that could not yet be.

She became lost in the vision. Fantasy or revelation, what was it meant to be? Cally saw them too; she jumped up and down on the small square landing at the turn of the stairs and she pointed at the dancing children, crying out at the fun of it. Because of that, Eve knew that it was real, it was no hallucination: she shared the sight with her daughter.

She could not see their faces clearly, but she could at least make out their attire, the boys in short trousers and braces, the girls in frocks and some with plaits in their hair. Shoes were not visible, but Eve could see socks on the boys, most rumpled down round ankles. She tried desperately to distinguish their features, but it was like watching a moving stippled painting, the dust motes representing the stippling. But she could count them as they passed by. There were nine of them. Nine children. Nine little headstones down at the church graveyard. Nine out of the eleven child victims that had been taken by the flood more than half a century ago.

Why were their ghosts still here?

What could be here for them at Crickley Hall?

It was as though the questions had broken the vision.

For everything changed.

•

The sunlight disappeared, the sun obscured by an immense roiling raincloud, and the great hall was once more thrown into gloom and shadow. Rain pattered on the tall window and Cally's figure on the landing was suddenly shaded.

Eve felt her heart lurch, as if fear itself had entered the hall. Before her, the swirling specks of dust that had glittered so brilliantly but a moment ago dispersed, then disappeared. Eve either heard, or imagined she heard, a faraway wail that swiftly faded to a barren silence broken only by the rain on the windowpanes.

'No, wait—' Eve began to plead but almost instantly there was nothing left of the dancing wraiths or the dust that had constructed them.

Eve's body sagged as if a peculiar despair had hit her, and she almost sank to her knees. But she soon stiffened when she heard a new sound. Cally had heard it too and she was looking wide-eyed up at the landing above her. Eve slowly turned her head, following her daughter's gaze, her eyes lifting.

Swish-thwack! The sound came. Again: swish-thwack! A pause, again: swish-thwack. It seemed to be moving along the landing, although there was no one there to be seen.

Swish-thwack! Swish-thwack! Moving towards the stairway.

To Eve it sounded like something smacking leather… no, like something smacking against flesh. The swish of its fall, the thwack when it hit.

Swish-thwack!

The loudest of all, at the top of the stairs.

Then, nothing more.

Only the rain continuing to beat against the window.

22: THE CARD

They trudged down the lane, Eve and Cally with their hoods pulled over their heads against the soft rain, Chester trotting alongside them, restrained by his leash which was gripped by Cally. The tufty-haired dog was mindless of the wet, only happy to be free of that cold old house that wasn't his proper home. Occasionally, he would peer up at his mistresses as if to ask where they were going, but they both just made encouraging noises at him.

The river beside the lane rushed by, journeying in the same direction, towards the sea, its flow much swifter than their pace; white spume washed against the leafy banks and broke over embedded boulders; debris of leaves, small branches and stones were carried in the flux and water spray cast a thin mist over the river's rough bubbling surface. Trees that edged the lane and the opposite river-bank glistened with silvery raindrops, while the steep verdant cliffs behind them were darkly lush, which somehow made the gorge seem narrower, more enclosed, than it really was.

As they passed the small Norman church of St Mark's on their left, Eve made a surreptitious sign of the cross over her left breast, offering up a short silent prayer as she did so. Cally barely gave the church a glance; she was too busy trying to keep Chester from running ahead of them.

'Is it far now, Mummy?' she asked after bringing the dog to heel with a sharp tug on the leash.

'You know it isn't, silly,' Eve told her, smiling down at Cally and taking pleasure in the rosiness that had appeared in her daughter's cheeks. 'You can see the village from here. Look, there's the big bridge and the shops are just beyond it.'

'I like walking downhill,' Cally announced, 'but I don't like walking up. It makes my legs sleepy.'

Eve chuckled. God, it was good to be out in the fresh air, rain or not. Good for both of them. And good exercise for Chester, too. He'd almost gone into hysteria when she attached the leash to his collar and he realized they were going for a walk. He couldn't get away from Crickley Hall fast enough. Before the vision, she had felt the same way.

She wondered at what she and Cally had really witnessed in the sunny, dust-filled hall.

For a brief time, the sunshine pouring through the big window over the stairs had altered the whole atmosphere of Crickley Hall, changing this one room at least from a sombre, dispiriting chamber into an imposing open space, whose panelled walls and flagstone floor embraced the light, became warm, radiated their own glow. (Had this been the original architect's intention? Had he specifically designed the great hall with its high, south-facing window to catch the sunlight and reveal the room's true grandeur? If so, it was the only redeeming feature in a house that had all the charm of a large neglected tomb.) It was the sun's rays that had made the dust visible, draughts and heated air causing the particles to rise and float. And it was the dust that had made the dancing spectres visible; and it was when the sun had been obscured by rain clouds and Crickley Hall was once again cast in shadow and gloom that they had disappeared.

Eve knew in her heart that those visions were the ghosts—if not ghosts, then remembered or recorded images—of the boys and girls who had once lived in Crickley Hall. The poor orphans who had drowned. Eve also knew in her heart, though reason told her otherwise, that there was a link between these spirits, these images, and her son, Cam, whose presence she had felt only yesterday.

It was a mystery—that frightening smacking sound alone was a mystery—and Eve needed help. But not from Gabe, whose pragmatism—and yes, his cynicism—would make him dismiss the whole idea. Certainly, he would be sympathetic, but he would tell her that her grief was 'messing with her head'. He wouldn't accept the notion of ghosts.

Eve shivered and it was not because of the rain.

She ushered Cally and Chester onto the grass verge at the side of the lane as a white van approached from the village. The van's wheels sent up a spray of water that spattered Eve's ankle boots and Cally's colourful Wellingtons as it passed by. Chester dodged behind Eve to avoid further drenching. A red Almera followed close behind the van and its two passengers stared at them rudely.

Once the traffic was safely by, Eve, Cally and Chester continued their walk down to the village. The wide bay, filled with the gunmetal-grey waters of the Bristol Channel, spread out below them, the rocky cliffs on either side filled with dampened vegetation. On a bright day, Eve thought, it would have been a magnificent sight, but today the constant chilly rain had muted the scenery to lacklustre hues.

Twice more Eve and Cally had to step onto the lane's verge for safety as more vehicles going in either direction passed them by, but soon they were at the long iron and concrete bridge which joined the lane to a wider and busier road that also led away from the village but in a different direction. They reached the row of shops lining one side of the harbour road, which ended abruptly at the cliff face.

It was one of the first shops that interested Eve. She stepped into the small porch of Hollow Bay's general store, gently pulling Cally in behind her. Chester hopped onto the step and busied himself sniffing at a corner by the entrance door.

'Are we going in the sweetshop?' Cally asked expectantly, her eyes beneath the hood lighting up. 'Can I have some Smarties? Please, Mummy?'

Eve had pushed her hood back onto her shoulders and was scanning the cards in the display cabinet fixed to the porch wall.

'We'll see,' she answered distractedly.

She caught her breath, her heart beginning to sink. She recognized some of the business cards and personal ads that had been pinned inside on Saturday, but most of the older-looking faded ones were missing. The particular card she was searching for had gone. Eve gave a little inward groan of disappointment.

Cally was already reaching up and tugging at the shop's door handle, eager to get inside where the goodies were, and Chester was trying to push by her, just as eager. The bell tinkled as the door opened a few inches and, with a rush, girl and dog had entered. Eve took another quick scrutiny of the cabinet's contents, then followed her daughter and the dog into the shop.

There were two other customers, both at the cash register counter, one of them sifting through her purse to pay for her goods, the second woman waiting patiently behind her holding a wire basket filled with household items and packets of food. Cally made straight for the sweet shelves, Chester trotting beside her, stubby tail wagging, while Eve pretended to be interested in the magazine carousel. She took one out and flicked through the pages but, even though it was a fashion magazine, it failed to gain her interest.

Behind the counter was the same broad-looking woman who had served Eve two days ago—green apron over blue-spotted dress, horn-rimmed spectacles, short greying hair permed rigid, severe expression—and she was just giving change to the first customer. Eve remembered she was supposed to do a proper week's shop today and had intended to catch the bus she knew ran from the village to the nearest town, where hopefully she would find a good supermarket. Well, change of plans. More frozen dinners for the next day or two. Gabe would survive as long as there was quantity, and the girls wouldn't be fussed either way. Besides, shopping here would help underplay her enquiry.

She slipped the Cosmopolitan back in its rack and went to the corner by the door where the wire baskets were stacked, one on top of the other. Taking the first, she moved to the freezer cabinet and loaded the basket without paying too much notice of what she was choosing; really, she was waiting for the second customer to leave so that she could make her enquiry with as little embarrassment as possible.

At last, the bell over the door rang and the customer was gone. Eve quickly closed the freezer lid and went to the counter.

The shopkeeper frowned at her at first, then looked at her quizzically; some of the hardness left her features.

'You were 'ere Saturday'—Sat'day, it was pronounced—'wasn't you? Yer've moved into Crickley Hall for a spell, that's right, isn't it?'

'Yes, we're here for a while,' Eve replied.

'Thought as much. Recognized the pretty little girl.'

The shopkeeper smiled down at Cally, who had joined her mother with a tube of Smarties clutched in one hand and holding Chester's leash in the other.

'Helped yerself, have yer? Well, I'm sure Mummy don't mind.'

Eve placed the full wire basket on the counter and took the Smarties from Cally to lay next to it. The tube started to roll away, but the shopkeeper snatched it up and stood it on its flat end.

'Right then, we'll ring the sweeties first, shall we? Then little missy can start on them right away.'

Eve returned the smile as the shopkeeper registered the purchase and handed the tube back over the counter to Cally, who took them gratefully.

'What's yer name, if yer don't mind me askin?' The shopkeeper took a moment to look directly at Eve.

'Oh. Caleigh. Eve Caleigh, and this is my daughter Cally.'

'An' the other pretty girl with yer on Saturday, the older one…?'

'That was Loren. She's at school today.'

'Charmin' girls,' the shopkeeper remarked. 'An' everything's okay up at Crickley Hall, is it?'

Eve hesitated before answering, wondering why the woman had asked. 'Yes, everything's fine.'

The shopkeeper never took her eyes from the foodstuff she was taking out of the basket and ringing up on the till. 'That's all right, then,' she murmured absently.

Soon, everything was accounted for and Eve, checking the green-lit figures on the machine's cash window, delved into her purse. When she had passed over the money and was waiting for change, she said: 'I was, uh, I was wondering what happened to the cards that were in the display cabinet outside.'

The shopkeeper ignored the question while she counted out the correct change into Eve's outstretched hand.

'Now, then, what's that you was askin'?' she said, leaning her stomach against her side of the counter.

'The, the cards outside. Some seem to be missing.'

'Oh them. Lots of them've been there two years or more. My husband had a good clearout over the weekend. Was there one in particular you was lookin' for?' The woman's eyebrows rose above the top of her glasses.

Eve reddened a little, but decided to come straight out with it. 'Yes, there was. The one advertising a psychic. Psychic readings, I think it said.'

'Ah.' The shopkeeper straightened. 'That one. Yers, that was in the window a couple of years or more. Young lady paid for it to be put in, if I remember right, an' I haven't seen hide nor hair of her since. Should've taken it out a year ago, that card. Long past its rent date.'

'You've thrown it away?' Eve hid her frustration.

'Well, that may not necessarily be so. Bin men don't come 'til Tuesday, so the card yer want will be with the other rubbish out back. Here, let me jus' go an' ask Mr Longmarsh. He'll know what he's done with it.'

The shopkeeper went to the far end of the counter where there was a closed door that probably led to the back storeroom or living quarters. She opened the door and put her perm-hard head through the gap. 'Ted, you got a minute? Customer here's got a query 'bout one of them cards you took out of the window yesterday.'

The woman—Mrs Longmarsh, Eve assumed—came back, her expression a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. 'He won't be a minute, dear, he's jus' puttin' his shoes on.' From behind thick lenses, her eyes bored into Eve's. 'So it's a psychic—one of them clairvoyants—you'll be needin', is it?' Her voice had lowered itself with the question as if any reply would be in confidence.

'No, no, nothing like that,' Eve quickly insisted. She could imagine rumours about Crickley Hall and problems with the new folk being passed around the village. 'It's just that I'm a freelance writer, you see. I've been commissioned to do an article on mediums, mind reading, that sort of thing. I thought the person who placed the ad might be willing to be interviewed.'

Mrs Longmarsh squinted at her for a few moments, suspicion now dominant in her narrowed eyes.

A gruff voice came from the other end of the counter and Eve turned her head to see a portly man had emerged from the back room. 'What's that yer sayin', May? What blessed card you on about?'

He was short as well as portly and wore a brown sleeveless cardigan over a plain white shirt. Oddly, his hair was full and crinkly on the top of his head, but straight at the sides over his ears. He had heavy, thread-veined cheeks and jowls, and his eyes were small, deep-set over an equally small podgy nose.

'Ted, this is Mrs Caleigh, moved into Crickley Hall for a while. D'yer know what yer did with them out-of-date cards from the shopfront?'

The West Country burr of his accent matched the woman's perfectly, except his voice had a harsher, no-nonsense ring to it, a brusqueness that made him sound cross, although Eve couldn't think why. Perhaps he was irritated at being disturbed while he toasted his feet by the fire; Mrs Longmarsh had said he was putting his shoes on.

'What card are you lookin' fer exactly, missus?' he growled.

By now Cally had opened the Smarties and was dropping them one at a time into Chester's open and appreciative mouth, feeding herself at the same time.

Eve ignored her for the moment. 'I think it was a yellow card, quite old,' she told Longmarsh.

'Well, that don't tell us much, do it?'

'No, of course. It was for psychic readings; I can't remember the name now.'

'Yers, I know the one. Looked at it myself only yesterday. Don't know if the woman will still be in business after all this time. Peel, her name is. I know 'cause I noticed when I took the card down. Lillian, or just plain Lili, I think it was. Yers, spelt funny L-I-L-I. Remember thinkin' it were a nice name. Lili Peel, that's right.'

He rocked back on his heels and scrutinized Eve in a way that made her uncomfortable.

'As a matter of fact,' he went on after a pause, 'I think yer in luck. I put all the old cards in a plastic bag, then into the wheely-bin with the other rubbish. Luckily, the bag was the last thing in so it's at the top. I could get it fer yer.'

Again he paused, studying her, and Eve wondered if she was supposed to offer him a bribe for the effort.

'Now you go an' fetch it, Ted,' said his wife, 'while I'm puttin' Mrs Caleigh's shopping in the bags.'

Longmarsh frowned at her as if about to argue, but Mrs Longmarsh had already turned away and was bringing out two plastic bags from under the counter. Her husband gave a long-suffering sigh and ambled back to the open door, through which Eve could now see a blazing fire in the hearth, a comfortable-looking armchair in front of it. Yes, Eve thought, Ted Longmarsh had obviously been toasting his feet.

•

The long wet hike up the hill was naturally more tiring than the downward trip and Cally was complaining about her 'sleepy' legs well before they reached the short bridge to Crickley Hall; even Chester had his head down and his tongue hanging out as he panted. Eve, carrying the shopping, did not feel much better: the walk back somehow seemed a mile longer. Yet it wasn't so on their first trip to the harbour village and back again, but perhaps that was because they'd broken their return journey visiting the church and chatting to the vicar, Trevellick, and his wife; or perhaps the interrupted nights recently had taken more out of them than she'd realized. Then again, it could be just that they were 'townies', worn down by strenuous exercise.

Eve waited by the bridge for Cally and Chester to catch up. They weren't very far behind—Eve was too wary of passing traffic to leave her daughter out of grasping distance, even though Cally knew her road drill.

'Come on, slowcoaches,' she called out, but now saw that Chester was dragging at his leash, holding Cally back. The dog seemed agitated, almost desperate to get away. Was it because they were close to Crickley Hall? Chester certainly didn't like the house, he made that clear enough. But then, neither did she. That is, not until now for, although she still had reservations about the place, she was drawn to its mystery—and the small hope it had given her.

She heard Cally chastising the dog: 'Chester, you're being a very bad boy.'

Eve put the shopping bags on the bridge and strode back to them, taking the leash from Cally's hand. She wrapped it round her knuckles a few times to shorten its length. 'You behave, Chester,' she warned the dog. 'We're nearly home and we're tired, so let's get inside and then we can all flake out.'

The dog whimpered and tried to pull away from Eve, who tugged impatiently, bringing him to heel. She half dragged him towards the bridge, his haunches inches from the ground, front paws digging in. It took some effort, but she finally got him to the beginning of the bridge. Eve was tired and frustrated, and just a little angry. What was wrong with Chester? She bent down to stroke him, to calm him, because by now he was shivering. His eyes were bulging, staring across the river, and he strained against his leash, front paws hopping off the ground, head pulled to one side as he tried to escape.

'Chester, will you please stop it!' Eve had become really exasperated. She jerked the leash harder, but it only made the dog more desperate.

'Mummy, look!'

Eve, too busy with her struggle to control Chester, ignored her daughter.

But Cally tugged at her mother's free arm and insisted. 'Mummy, look at the children!'

Startled, Eve immediately straightened and swung round towards Cally, who was pointing across the bridge up at Crickley Hall's dormer windows. A smile was on her daughter's upturned face.

Eve's eyes followed the direction of Cally's finger and she saw the pale blurs that could only be faces at three of the rooftop's four small grimy windows.

'The children, Mummy!' Cally repeated and Eve felt her jaw drop.

Chester used this moment of distraction to make his break. The leash in Eve's hand loosened, unwound, and with a final yank the dog was free. He scooted up the hill, the leash dragging along the ground before Eve realized he was gone.

'Chester, no!' she called sharply. 'Stop!'

But the dog took no notice and continued his bid for freedom, racing up the hill as if there was a wind behind him.

Confused, angry, perplexed, Eve turned back to Crickley Hall.

The pale blurs at the rooftop windows were gone.

23: DECISIONS

Eve's hand hovered over the phone—the digital phone that must have been one of the first of its kind: heavy and solid-looking, with big numbered press-keys—but something stopped her from picking it up.

She had been about to ring Gabe at the Ilfracombe office, the number of which he'd written down for her and left beside the phone on the chiffonier, but now realized it would be foolish to do so: what could he do about a missing dog when he was miles away and probably trying to make some kind of impression on his new colleagues?

Chester had vanished somewhere along the winding lane that followed the river and even though Eve and Cally had spent more than an hour searching for him, calling his name over and over, it looked as if this time he was gone for good.

Oddly, Cally, who was in the kitchen finishing her lunch, had not taken it as badly as Eve would have expected. Certainly she'd bawled her eyes out for the first five minutes after Chester had broken free and disappeared into the distance, but then, after the initial excitement of the search, she got tired and hungry (not to mention wet), and complained to Eve about her state of hunger. Eve took her back to Crickley Hall, keeping an eye out for their errant dog along the way.

As she stood by the phone, undecided, the receiver still in her hand, a deep disquieting physical chill crept up her spine and seeped under her hair to cool the flesh at the back of her neck. She shivered and slowly—slowly because she suspected someone was standing behind her and she really did not want to see who it was—turned round.

She exhaled a breath when she saw the partially open cellar door. It was obvious that the draught of cold air had come from there. Because the door was only half open with very little light entering, the shadows within were peculiarly deep, as black as jet, and there was something strangely inviting about them, tantalizing almost. In some way it was like standing on top of a high cliff or building, when the space you're looking down on seems to be inviting you to jump. Eve gave a small shake of her head—it might have been a shudder—and, phone still clutched in one hand, took a bold step towards the door and slammed it shut. Its key fell from the lock to the stone floor with a heavy clink.

The coiled telephone cord was stretched to its limit as Eve bent to pick up the long key. When she replaced it in the lock and turned it she felt relieved. She would have to get Gabe to fix the lock or fit a new one, perhaps even add a bolt high enough to be out of Cally's reach. Eve looked at the receiver in her hand and, decision made, returned it to its cradle. No, she wouldn't worry Gabe about the missing dog, nor anything else for the moment. But now she vacillated over another number she should ring.

For Eve, it was a difficult decision to make. That same morning she had set out determined to contact the psychic whose address and phone number were on the card she'd obtained from the village shop. She remembered the tingle in her hand when she had taken it from Ted Longmarsh, the anticipation she felt when she slipped the faded card into her pocket. Now she was unsure.

What good could a psychic do; what could she tell such a person? That she thought she was living in a haunted house? That her own missing son's psyche had been drawn to the place because there were unknown forces at work in Crickley Hall, things that were supernatural, things that were hard to understand for normal people? What would a psychic make of noises in the night that could not properly be explained, of mysterious footsteps, of Cameron coming to Eve in a dream, filling her with hope? What would Lili Peel think when she was told of the dust ghosts playing ring-a-ring-o'-roses here in the hall, of little pale faces looking down from roof windows? Would she think Eve insane, or a neurotic woman driven mad by grief? Or would the psychic humour Eve, go along with her 'visions' as some charlatans might just to fleece her of money? What was the use? Eve asked herself. But then, what did she have to lose by contacting Lili Peel? At worst it might help Eve just to talk about it to a perfect stranger. Gabe couldn't help her, although he had tried, had tried desperately; his sympathy was limited, worn by time and his own early life. He already thought she was heading for a breakdown; she suspected he expected it. Why else had he brought her to this 'sanctuary' so many miles from their proper home at such a significant time? The new location was to help her forget.

Even though he had himself heard the strange night noises and discovered unexplainable puddles in the hall and on the stairs, and even though he knew how afraid Chester was of the place, he still would not believe Crickley Hall was haunted. His life had no room for such preternatural ideologies. She was not sure he even believed in God; he had always walked away from or changed the subject whenever she brought up the idea of a Supreme Being or religious inclinations. It didn't mean he lacked imagination; it only meant he was averse to such things. No, there would be no point in telling Gabe that she had sensed the presence of their missing son right here in Crickley Hall and that she had also witnessed ghostly apparitions in the house. Perhaps there was something special about this place that engendered supernatural activity, a peculiarity that enhanced or was a catalyst to certain psychic energies. If she told him this he might finally lose patience with her and dismiss it all as 'horseshit'. She loved him and trusted him with her very life, but she didn't need that kind of negativity right now: she wanted so much to believe. Eve doubted he would be convinced that she had seen little faces watching her from Crickley Hall's roof windows on her return from the harbour village, even though Cally had observed them too.

When they had come back after their fruitless hunt for Chester, Eve and Cally had gone up to the attic room together—she couldn't have left her daughter alone downstairs in the big house, and besides, Cally showed not an ounce of trepidation at the prospect of meeting the 'phantom' children—to find the long-disused dormitory completely empty without an ethereal body in sight. 'What did you expect?' would be Gabe's reaction. 'The dormer windows are filthy with grime, rain was on them, you could have seen anything you wanted—whatever you expected—in them.'

No, only a genuine psychic or clairvoyant would understand and Eve had almost decided on Sunday after her 'contact' with Cam that she would seek out the one advertised in the village shop's display cabinet. This morning's events had strengthened her intention.

Nevertheless, Eve still hesitated.