Thieving Fear

THIRTY-SEVEN

As Charlotte backed away from the impossible aperture in the earth, a mass of blackness reared up in pursuit. It was a shadow dragged out of the depths by the flashlight beam, but she couldn't be reassured while she was so aware of walking over a roof. She was still gripping the handle of the spade, and as her retreat pulled it out of the earth, the unsteadily illuminated patch of ground around the skylight and the entire dim common stirred as if the buried house were preparing to slough its concealment. She mustn't think she'd roused the house or anything within it. All she was seeing was wind in the grass, but the knowledge didn't help much. She could hardly think for yearning to be off the hidden roof and as far as an uninterrupted run would take her from the house.

She believed at last, which made her realise how desperately she'd been hoping not to have to do so. The possibility of different explanations for her cousins' states and her own had fled as she wished she could. So the house was indeed beneath Thurstaston Mound, but not in the sense they'd assumed. Had the mound collapsed simply from erosion, or could it have been somehow encouraged to collapse? Certainly it appeared to have trapped the occupant of the house in his own worst nightmare. Charlotte had no doubt that he'd been buried along with the house.

The idea was enough to send her several paces backwards. What had she imagined she could do here? For that matter, what had Hugh and Ellen done? She ought to try to locate them, but the prospect of calling out so close to the open skylight didn't appeal to her. Using her mobile was a problem too, even once she'd dealt with the spade by leaning it against her rather than risk digging it into the earth that covered the roof. She hung her bag on the handle and trained the flashlight beam on the hole in the ground, and then she peered at the mobile to key the call one-handed. All at once she was afraid to hear Hugh's or Ellen's ringtone in the depths below the skylight, and she re-called the hospital instead.

'Putting you through,' the receptionist said as the edges of the hole grew restless. In a few seconds Charlotte heard not just her own unquiet heart but the sister on the ward. 'Sorry to bother you,' Charlotte said, which seemed grotesquely remote from her situation. 'I was wondering if there's been any change with Rory Lucas.'

'Rory Lucas?' Presumably the sister was questioning a nurse, but the audible reply came from Annie, who called 'He's not moved since she left him.'

'Nothing yet, I'm afraid. We've got your number, haven't we?'

'You have, thanks,' Charlotte said, already envisaging a situation where she might prefer it not to ring. She ended the call, and her finger wavered over the keys until she became furiously impatient with herself. She jabbed the key to display the list of names and selected Hugh's. A breathless silence followed, and a heartbeat, and then an imitation bell began to shrill in her ear. Her heart had time to thump again before the call belatedly triggered the theme from Sesame Street. While it was muffled, she couldn't doubt that it was somewhere beneath her.

She felt as if she wouldn't be able to move until it was answered, and quite possibly not then. It might depend who spoke. As the jolly theme jingled on, it sounded increasingly like a mockery of childhood. The melody fell silent halfway through a jaunty rising phrase, and a voice spoke in Charlotte's ear.

She had to take a disoriented moment to recognise why it wasn't audible beyond the skylight as well. It was the automated message, responding from somewhere that seemed hardly to exist. 'Hugh, are you there?' Charlotte pleaded. 'Can you hear me? Answer me, Hugh.'

Nobody did. She terminated the call and managed not to yield to the temptation to repeat some or all of the words at the top of her voice. She brought up the list again and thumbed Ellen's number. 'Be somewhere up here,' she prayed under her breath. She hadn't finished whispering when the title song from Oklahoma commenced its crescendo in the depths of the house.

Like Hugh's tune, it sounded several floors deep. The protracted cry suggested an attempt to rise above a nightmare. When it arrived at the rest of the verse, Charlotte was assailed by an image of Ellen prancing helplessly at the behest of the music in the dark. Ellen might be too frail or too distressed to offer much resistance. The unwelcome fancy made Charlotte shout her cousin's name before the song was cut off by the familiar message. 'What are you both doing down there?' she could hardly wait to plead. 'Can't either of you answer?'

The question seemed to grow more ominous as it left her mouth. 'Someone speak to me,' she called loud enough to be heard without the phone, an appeal that raised nobody as far as she could tell. She dropped the mobile in her bag and clenched her fist on the handle of the spade. She knew where she had to go now if she could.

The mouth of the house worked, eager to swallow her, as the grass around the hole trembled in the wind while the flashlight beam magnified her nervousness. She did her best to lose her temper with that and to hold onto her anger as she followed the shivering beam to the hole, which was far too reminiscent of an open grave. The resemblance wasn't entirely dispelled when the beam plunged into the dark.

It crept across the floorboards and spilled over the brink of the trapdoor to grow dimmer on the stairs. 'Hugh,' Charlotte called down. 'Ellen.' She didn't know whether she was more afraid to find out why they didn't answer or to descend into the house. She succeeded in recapturing some of her anger as she clung to the spade, which she wasn't about to leave behind when it was the nearest thing she had to a weapon. She lowered it through the skylight at arm's length and let it fall with a thud that resounded through more levels of the house than she could judge. Without going after it she wouldn't have a weapon. She slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and nestled the bag under her arm, and turned to set foot on the ladder.

Beyond the cliff and the foreshortened river the Welsh coast glittered as if to communicate a message she had neither the time nor the ability to decipher. Perhaps it was simply reminding her how much light she was leaving behind. Under her foot the topmost rung felt treacherous with rust. She mustn't take these as excuses not to proceed, and a flare of anger was enough to send her onto the next crumbling rung and the ones beneath, taking her up to her waist in the lightless house. The flashlight beam shrank from the edge of the cliff as she groped for the next rung with a foot, and she was aware of the gaping space beneath her and closing in at her back. She gripped the highest rung with her free hand, and as scales of rust scraped together under her fingers she brought the flashlight to waist level. Darkness flooded across the common, blotching her vision, so that when the flashlight beam jerked downwards with her uncertain descent she wasn't sure how many shadows were fluttering around her among the rafters. She planted both feet on a rung and closed her fist on another while she aimed the light at the floor. The beam wobbled across the boards until it encountered a shape that had been lying low. The light seemed to rouse the thin twisted limbs as the object glared at her with its solitary orb.

It was a telescope. Either its stand had collapsed or, to judge by its position, it had been toppled from blocking the trapdoor. Suppose it had been dislodged from beneath? Charlotte clutched at the ladder and swung the light around the space under the roof. Shadows started out of the corners and sank back, but apart from the telescope and the spade and a scattering of earth, the attic was bare. Nevertheless she was feeling more than reluctant to step down into it, never mind the rest of the house, when she heard a noise beyond the trapdoor.

Despite its faintness, she couldn't mistake it. It was a groan, and although it was muffled by distance or some other cause, she recognised the voice. 'Ellen,' she called, scrambling so hastily down the ladder that the shadows of the rafters appeared to collapse the roof. She must be too concerned for Ellen to have time for claustrophobia, but she retrieved the spade in a bid to feel less vulnerable on her way to the trapdoor. 'Ellen,' she called down into the house.

There was no reply, and no movement apart from the uncontrollable roving of the flashlight beam, which had found the second ladder. It was wedged between the frame of the trapdoor and the verge of the stairs, and looked all the more precarious for the unstable light. Other than the stairs that led down from a landing to an enclosed windowless bend, nothing else met her eye. How many of her burdens was she going to cart through the house? She transferred the mobile to a hip pocket and dropped her handbag through the opening, followed by the spade. She was certainly announcing her presence, but what might it sound like? 'Ellen, it's me,' she felt forced to call as she turned to descend the ladder.

It wasn't just the sight of the telescope that halted her, although for a moment she thought it was crawling with insects. They were symbols etched on the barrel. The wavering beam had lent them movement, and she shouldn't linger to examine them. She was more concerned with the tracks that led from the trapdoor, tracing how the heavy telescope had been dragged or shoved across the loft to clear the way down. Ellen must have shifted it, but if she'd managed that in her condition, how desperate had she been to hide? The thought sent Charlotte downwards as fast as she dared clamber, into the house that smelled oppressively of earth.

The wooden ladder wasn't staggering towards the edge of the stairs. She couldn't really feel the movement – at least, not as much as the antics of the flashlight beam encouraged her to see. All the same, the vibrations came close to paralysing her until she sprinted down the last few rungs to sidle none too confidently onto the floor. She was glad to let go of the ladder, which had felt surreptitiously moist, but the carpet yielded like soft earth, as if the floor it covered were no more solid. That wasn't as unsettling as the sight ahead.

She was facing a bedroom. The door was wide open, framing the dim bulk of a capacious four-poster bed. She grabbed the spade before she sent the flashlight beam into the room. A dark ill-defined shape scrambled backwards across the discoloured quilt and obese greyish pillows to its lair beneath the sagging canopy, but it was just the shadow of the humped bedclothes. Although they were rumpled enough to be outlining worse than uneasy sleep, the bed was empty. None of this was why she found it hard to breathe. With the heavy velvet curtains open, as they were now, the occupant of the bed would have seen a panorama of the Welsh coast and mountains beyond the large window, but the view consisted of brownish clay packed against the glass.

She felt as if her claustrophobia were poised to engulf her. Indeed, she didn't understand why it was holding back. Glancing up in search of reassurance, she saw a fitful star beyond the portion of skylight visible through the trapdoor. What else had she glimpsed? She lifted the flashlight and was managing to ignore the blackness that rushed at her out of the bedroom when she saw the marks around the trapdoor.

They were scratches. However old they were, age hadn't faded their desperation. The small dull oval object lodged in the deepest scratch might very well be a fingernail. Only its shadow made it appear to be trying to work free of the ceiling. Charlotte was drawing a breath to prove she still could when it almost blotted out another sound. It was Ellen, distressed beyond words.

Was she further down the house or in one of the rooms off the landing? There was another open door to Charlotte's right and two of them shut at her back. 'Ellen,' she repeated.

At first she wasn't sure that the response was a word, if it was even a response. She was so anxious to locate it, still more when she failed, that she only belatedly recognised it. 'No,' Ellen had said – groaned, rather.

Did she want to keep Charlotte away or to deny her own identity? 'Yes, I'm here,' Charlotte told her. 'I've come to help. Don't make me wander about in here. Say where you are. And where's Hugh?'

She was talking so much in the hope of provoking an answer, but she hushed for fear of covering one up. There was no sound other than the abortive flattened echo of her voice in the open rooms and down the staircase. 'Ellen,' she persisted as she crossed the spongy carpet to the second room.

It was crowded with objects standing still in the dark. She saw the shadows of their heads first, swelling across the carpet towards another buried window. They were orreries, six of them, and it took her some moments to realise why there needed to be more than one: they didn't represent the familiar solar system. Two of the stars orbited by planets were so black that the flashlight seemed unable to illuminate them, while another was encircled by nothing more than jagged fragments of itself. Quite a few of the planets were misshapen to a degree that Charlotte could hardly believe was cosmically possible. The orrery closest to the window suggested not just a diagram of a planetary system but, in the relationships of its thirteen globes and less globular bodies, some larger and more ominous meaning. She imagined the owner of the house gazing from the window at night or through the telescope until he discerned all these vagaries of the universe, and then she had the disconcerting notion that he'd constructed them as a means of sending forth the visions they portrayed. 'Ellen,' she urged, struggling to disengage her mind from the thoughts that had invaded it, and sent the flashlight beam around the room. There was nowhere for Ellen to hide among the sluggish dance of shadows, and she hadn't made another sound. Charlotte swung around to stride across the landing and, before her apprehension could prevent her, grasped the icy scalloped brass doorknob to open the third room.

It was empty, which should have been all that she needed to see. Nevertheless as her gaze was drawn to the circle of marks on the floor, the flashlight beam sank away from the heavy black curtains that covered the window. The circle encompassed perhaps half the square floor, and she suspected that its centre was precisely at the midpoint of the square. It consisted of symbols and ideograms that looked unnervingly alive, as if besides trembling on the edge of growing comprehensible they only awaited a signal to start crawling after one another. Indeed, the restless light seemed capable of rousing them. They were carved out of the floorboards, whereas the marks that filled the circle were less defined, though not too faint to suggest a series of frantic attempts to escape. Charlotte was forming the impression that the prisoner had been large and very leggy; in fact, she could think that it had been scrabbling at the limits of its prison with an unnecessary number of legs. Was the circle entirely deserted? Was that a stain on the floor in the middle, or a small dark lump? Perhaps it wasn't even as small as it had seemed at first glance, but her uncertainty about its size might be due to the tendrils it was extending across the boards. Surely only the movement of the light made it appear to flex them – and then she wondered if her own attention could be letting it take shape. The thought was enough to drive her out of the room with a slam of the door. 'Ellen,' she repeated to no avail, and so she had to twist the greenish brass knob to push the next door wide.

The room was almost as bare as its neighbour. A single item occupied the carpetless floor in front of the secretively curtained window. Until she succeeded in steadying the flashlight Charlotte took it for a cage; it had bars on all sides and across the top. As their shadowy antics subsided she began to distinguish what the bars enclosed: a pillow, a small tangled blanket incongruously printed with fairies emerging from flowers, a contorted shape under the blanket. Just the upper portion of the withered head was visible, which was more than enough. The eyes peering at her across the pillow were far too large. Even if they were empty sockets they were twice the size they ought to be in proportion with the small head, and wasn't there movement in their depths? Perhaps only the light was troubling their shrunken contents; perhaps shadows were making the shrivelled form appear to be struggling feebly to raise its head and writhe out from under the blanket. All the same, Charlotte backed out of that room faster still and ensured the door was shut tight, however unlikely it seemed that anything could escape the cage that was a cot.

Had its tenant been bred for some arcane purpose? Its deformity seemed too extreme to be accidental. She refrained from thinking how it might have been used or intended to be; there was enough to dread in the prospect of exploring further. 'Ellen,' she appealed. Any sound from her cousin might have helped her feel less alone, but she heard none.

She was retrieving her handbag from beside the ladder when she realised that she didn't want to be encumbered on the stairs, the corner of which was entirely too blind. Her anger at having to leave the bag lent her the courage to venture downwards. As she reached the bend she lifted the spade like an axe, but below her were only more stairs. They or the carpet brown as clay yielded underfoot as she paced down to the middle floor.

It contained another four rooms. Those that would have faced the river and Wales were open. Clay appeared to press itself more heavily against the window of the first room as the flashlight beam glared on the panes. Otherwise the room was walled with bookshelves, and piles of old books squatted on the floor, while a fat tome sprawled open on a reading stand in front of a leathery chair at the window. Charlotte might have fancied that the reader was about to return, and neither the impression nor the illustration on the left-hand page – a diabolically gleeful face whose eyes weren't opening so much as forming out of the pallid flesh – encouraged her to linger once she'd seen that Ellen could be nowhere in the room.

There was more sense of a presence in the adjoining room. A desk that looked too bulky to have been carried upstairs stood in front of the window. Another black chair, its leather sagging like senile flesh, was turned half to the doorway as if its occupant had heard Charlotte and leaped to ambush her. She made herself step forwards to check that Ellen wasn't hiding out of sight from the doorway. There were only shelves as tall as the ceiling. They and the ones on the other walls were heaped with papers inscribed, she guessed from the one that was pricking up its corners on the desk, in a spidery introverted hand. Even more than its neighbour, the room smelled of old paper as well as damp earth, so thickly that she choked. The clay at the window was reminding her how much deeper she was buried. 'Ellen,' she called, which didn't save her from having to open the door opposite. At once she was blinded by the light shone into her eyes by the figure in the room.

Instinctively she raised the flashlight and her weapon, and so did the imitator. She had to let the beam sink to be mimicked, by which time she'd identified her own reflection. What about the crowds of dimmer silhouettes brandishing feebler lights on either side? They were Charlotte too. All four walls of the room were mirrors, and she suspected that the back of the door was one, which would turn the entire room into a mirror once it was shut. She had the sudden terrible notion that Ellen was cowering in a corner, trapped by her aversion to seeing herself. Charlotte had to take several increasingly reluctant paces forwards to be certain Ellen wasn't there. It wasn't just that the multiplied dazzle made it hard to see; her first step had revealed that the floor and ceiling were also mirrors. Advancing into the room felt like setting out across a void peopled with a multitude of reproductions of herself, and she thought the inventor might have imagined he was creating a universe in his own image. Or was there more to it? Although she'd halted, she seemed to glimpse movement that couldn't be wholly ascribed to the nervous swaying of the countless lights. In the black distance beyond her most minuscule images, had something grown restless? She could imagine that it was attracted by the light or by her arrival. It appeared to be taking vast dark shape in the process of closing around her from every side, as if she were already in its mouth or paw or some monstrously unidentifiable part of it. All at once she was terrified that the door was about to shut behind her, rendering the void complete. Wasn't it inching towards its frame? Even if this was an illusion produced by the wavering of all the lights, she headed for the doorway so fast that she almost slipped on the glass floor and fell into the arms of her inverted self. The swollen carpet gave her back some equilibrium, and she slammed the door with such force that she might have hoped to hear the mirrors shatter. Before the episode could discourage her from proceeding, she hurried to the next room and shoved the door wide.

Her first impression was that the room was packed with soil, but the flashlight showed that the darkness wasn't quite so solid, although sufficiently thick to absorb much of the beam. The light grew dimmer as it crossed the threshold and petered out towards the middle of the room. The thought that Ellen could be submerged in the depths of the blackness was so dismaying that Charlotte was hardly aware of leaning through the doorway. 'Ellen,' she shouted as if her voice had to penetrate the medium that filled the room.

In a moment, as she swung the flashlight beam from side to side in an attempt to illuminate the limits of the room, she felt the blackness settle on her face and hands. Even though it was less substantial than cobwebs laden with soot, those were the sensations it resembled, and it was as cold as water too deep for the sun to reach. These weren't the only reasons why Charlotte almost dropped the flashlight and the spade. She'd heard Ellen moan, but not in the room. Otherwise she would have been unable to judge whether Ellen was lost in the blackness, which was absorbing the flashlight beam so fast that it had shrunk to the length of her arm.

The medium seemed greedy to engulf not just the light but her. She slashed at it with the spade while she backed out of the room, and almost let the spade slip out of her grasp as she clutched at the doorknob. Having dragged the door shut, which took more effort than she'd used to open it, she dashed for the stairs. Her retreat was so instinctive that she'd reached the next bend before she remembered why she was descending. 'Ellen, I'm coming,' she promised.

While her cousin didn't answer, perhaps noises did. They were beyond the stairs and the shakily illuminated section of the ground-floor hall the staircase framed. Although they were barely audible, whether by intention or because there was so little to them, they were footsteps. They sounded disconcertingly uncertain of themselves, but they were approaching. In a moment Charlotte felt less sure of this, though she couldn't judge whether they had turned aside or were employing more stealth. 'Ellen?' she hoped aloud.

The footsteps halted, and she imagined someone waiting for her just around the corner in the dark. She was no longer convinced it was Ellen, not least because an aspect of the house had at last become apparent to her: she hadn't seen a single light or even a fitting for one. Who could have lived in so much darkness? Who still could? Ellen was somewhere below, and Charlotte ran down the last flight of stairs to have done with any other confrontation. As she left them she jerked the flashlight up as if the beam rather than the spade were her defence.

The hall was deserted except for shadows that fled in all directions to lurk wherever there was concealment. Of the six doors leading off the hall, the broad front entrance seized her attention first, if only because the thought of opening it to let in a landslide reminded her how thoroughly she was buried. The door under the stairs must belong to a cellar, which she very much hoped she wouldn't have to enter; the whole house felt far too reminiscent of a basement, and smelled like one too. Instead she made for the closer of the open doors, the one at the front of the building. As the light found it she saw that it wasn't simply open; it was held that way by the mass that filled the doorway if not the entire room.

Perhaps the room had been a conservatory, unless some kind of underground growth had broken through the window. The tangle of vegetation was so convoluted that its elements were beyond separating. She could easily imagine that different varieties of withered leaves and shrivelled flowers were sprouting from the same plant. Had the owner of the house tried to create a new species for some purpose? Whatever had grown in the room was dead now, possibly of uncontrolled luxuriance, and no insects were swarming in the mass of sunless pullulation, just shadows. At least she could be certain Ellen wasn't in the room. She wished she could have closed it before crossing the hall to the other open room.

It was just a room, she did her best to think as the light ranged around it, but its very emptiness seemed ominous. It was so bare that it didn't even have a window, let alone a carpet, and she was unable to determine the colour of the walls. She only had to lean through the doorway in case Ellen was hiding just inside, and she didn't know why she should hope so fervently that Ellen wasn't. 'Ellen,' she called, though it felt more like a prayer. Having heard no answer, she ducked into the room.

The shapeless hulk that lurched at her was yet more darkness, brought down from the ceiling by the movement of the light. That wasn't why she gasped with all her breath. She saw at once that Ellen was elsewhere, but the instant gave whatever was in the room the chance to touch her. Her skin began to crawl as if insects were hatching under her clothes, or perhaps not even as if, since she felt the twitching of feelers and the fumbling of many legs. Instinctively she knew that these were the least of the delights the room had in store. Now that she'd been seized she could only stumble forwards to discover what else was waiting, and she wasn't surprised to hear Ellen groaning on her behalf.

But it wasn't on her behalf, because it was in another room. Ellen was still alone and in distress. The thought jerked Charlotte's head up, back into the hall. If the sensation of being infested didn't entirely vanish, at least it felt like someone else's nightmare that was trying to invade her. It had to be less important than her cousin, and she managed to leave it behind as she hurried to the room beyond the entrance to the cellar. Surely Ellen needn't be down there. Surely Charlotte would find her by opening the next door.

It led to a dining-room. Paintings that she preferred not to examine, having glimpsed that they were portraits or self-portraits of a gaunt man with unpleasantly prominent eyes, watched over both sides of a long black wooden table, at the far end of which stood a solitary chair. Someone was sitting on it or, more accurately, perched. Charlotte sucked in a breath that emerged as a word while the flashlight beam steadied. 'Ellen.'

She was lying face down at the table, arms outstretched, hands splayed on the wood. She didn't stir in response to Charlotte's voice, and only a feeble movement of her blouse proved she was breathing. None of the portraits widened their eyes to watch Charlotte venture along the room; that was just an effect of the light, which caught the unnaturally rounded eyes and made them glisten like ice. 'It's me, Ellen. I'm here now,' Charlotte said and, having propped the spade against the table well within reach, took her cousin's right hand.

At least, she tried. It was pressed flat against the wood. If anything, Ellen flattened it harder, and Charlotte was afraid that her cousin was doing the same to her face, as if she wanted to erase it and all sense of herself. Charlotte opened her mouth, but the sound she uttered was wordless and by no means comforting. A portrait had thrust its head forwards to peer at them.

All of its companions on the left-hand wall appeared to widen their bulging whitish eyes in glee as Charlotte swung the beam towards them, so wildly that the flashlight almost flew out of her hand. She'd grabbed the spade before she realised that the frame out of which the face had peered was lower on the wall than the portraits to either side. In another moment she saw it was a service hatch. Beyond it were a kitchen and a revival of the footsteps she'd heard from the stairs. As she made herself advance around the table and past Ellen to look through the hatch, a dark bulk crept out of hiding behind a massive iron kitchen range while the light glared back from a window walled up with clay. A figure was wandering around another table attended by a single chair. He was dodging back and forth as if led by his frantic shadow. 'Hugh,' Charlotte said.

He didn't react, and she had to wait until he strayed towards the hatch again before she could see his face. It looked pinched around a desperate obsession. His eyes were fixed beyond recognising her, perhaps even beyond sensing anyone was there. Perhaps he was conscious only of the light that was showing him his way or rather demonstrating that he couldn't find it – and then another thought appalled Charlotte. How had he and Ellen found their way down the lightless house? There was no sign of a flashlight except for hers.

They must have been shown the route or led through it, and she couldn't doubt who their guide had been. 'Where is he?' she blurted.

Hugh might not have heard. He didn't falter in his wandering, which had begun to remind her of the kind of mechanical toy that recoiled whenever it encountered an obstacle. She repeated the question to Ellen, hardly expecting an answer. When her cousin stayed prone and mute Charlotte saw she was as locked into her obsession as Hugh. They were out of her reach, and she'd spoken in a last pitiful attempt to make contact. She already knew the answer.

As she turned towards the hall she saw the light leave her cousins behind and heard Hugh's footsteps falter to a stop. At least he mightn't injure himself in the dark where she was abandoning him and Ellen. While that distressed her, she was afraid she would be facing much worse. 'This is for you,' she told them and realised she was talking to herself. She walked almost steadily out of the room and didn't break her stride until she was at the cellar. Taking hold of the doorknob, which looked and felt fungoid with verdigris, she eased the door open.

Darkness wobbled away from the flashlight beam, not far enough. As she leaned forwards the beam illuminated steps that led down into a room perhaps half as extensive as a floor of the house. The floor and walls were composed of bare brick, but had she glimpsed something that distracted her from any claustrophobia? Had there been the faintest glow through the gaps between the steps – a glow that had made them look coated with lichen? The appearance had vanished, and she couldn't revive it however she moved the beam. Perhaps it would become visible again if she were to switch the flashlight off, but the mere thought had her struggling to breathe. The cellar was sufficiently daunting, and she had to recall the state in which she'd left her cousins before she was able to set foot on the top step.

Possibly the steps were overgrown even if she couldn't see it. They felt slimy, so that she clutched at the single banister and nearly lost her grip on the spade as the shadows in the corners of the basement performed a gleeful dance. Was there a better way to support herself? Planting the spade on the next step, she leaned on it as her foot joined it. The steps no longer felt slippery, and she wondered if the impression could somehow have been produced to deter intruders. The idea scarcely had a chance to form, because stepping down resembled sinking into thin chill mud.

No, despite the lack of substance, it felt worse. Even shining the light on the steps couldn't dispel the sense of treading in an essence of darkness, of an utter absence of illumination rendered tangible. It was just a trick to ward off trespassers, she did her best to think. It had seized her imagination but not her body, even if she shivered from head to foot as she took another step down, helped by the spade. An ordinary cellar was bound to be cold, and how much colder would it be under an entire buried house? She was managing to tame the latest shiver with that argument when she began to distinguish exactly where the steps led.

The floor wasn't as bare as it had looked from the hall. It was inscribed with signs, an arc of them that lay closer to the walls than to the steps. As she trained the flashlight on the characters, releasing formless shadows from the corners of the room, Charlotte saw that they formed rather more than a semicircle; indeed, it seemed very possible that they encircled the steps. Perhaps the years had faded them, unless they were meant to be nearly invisible. They were easy to mistake for a ring of black lichen, the negative image of a fairy ring in a field, until they fastened on the imagination, when their nature became more evident if not entirely clear. If they were runes, they could well be depicting a pack of misshapen creatures, their jaws gaping in terror of the pursuit or to close on their prey ahead of them, unless both meanings were intended. Charlotte thought of nightmares that grew worse in order to devour their victims, and her skin crawled with the memory of infestation. That was just a nightmare, not even her own, but suppose it was only a hint of the horrors that might be lying in wait? As if to confirm her fear, she heard Ellen groan like someone desperate to wake.

She was expressing her own plight, not suggesting that Charlotte was in someone else's nightmare. Her voice sounded more muffled, so that Charlotte imagined Ellen's face crushed against the wood, while Hugh was no longer able to move for disorientation if not for the darkness in which she'd left him. Nobody except Charlotte could release them. 'I'm going,' she promised, perhaps too low to be heard by anyone outside the cellar, and took the deepest breath she could. Although it tasted subterranean, she vowed to make it last until she was standing in the cellar. It was the nearest she seemed able to come to a prayer.

The flashlight beam swayed, spilling across the bricks. Each step she descended showed her more of the characters whose meaning and purpose she might very well prefer not to learn. She felt as if they were closing around her like a noose. Was it only because of their undefined threat that she gripped the flashlight harder, and the spade? She was growing fearful that as she lowered the spade for support it would be snatched through a gap between the steps. She tried not to let it make a sound as it encountered each step, but her timidity aggravated her nervousness, and the light was already betraying her presence. She slammed the blade against the wood, and once more. Then it struck bricks with a clang that resounded like some kind of bell in her ears as she leaned on the spade and set foot on the floor of the cellar.

A shiver climbed her body and seemed to lodge deep in her brain. It was only the chill of the bricks, she tried to think, although they felt not quite solid enough, as if they might give way beneath her. When she turned to peer past the steps the light danced so wildly that she could have fancied it was as anxious to escape the noose of runes as she was struggling not to feel. They did indeed form an endless chain, though the tottering shadow of the steps obscured a few. The shadow disguised something against the back wall – a crouched shape to which it was surely lending movement. Charlotte dodged around the steps, no less desperate than afraid to see, and the shadow lurched away, exposing the shape.

Her first impression was that it resembled a dead spider – long dead – and she tried to find it as unthreatening, despite its size. It looked not merely withered but drawn into itself. Its arms were hugging its raised knees, its fleshless head buried among all its scrawny limbs, as if it had been trying to rescind its own birth. What had it been so frantic to hide from? She needn't wonder so long as it had been rendered immobile. Surely it was just a husk, and the last of its lingering influence had seized on her and her cousins only because they'd spent too long above its house or slept there. It was so decayed that she couldn't judge whether the discoloured material through which its bones showed was all that remained of its skin or of its clothes or both. A few blows with the spade ought to scatter it and any remnants of its powers beyond reconstitution, and Charlotte did her best to feel encouraged by the incongruous pathetic spectacle of socks drooping on the shrivelled ankles. Or were they the remains of blackened rotten skin? Either ought to mean that the former owner of the house was incapable of any action. Charlotte stepped forwards, lifting the spade, only to realise that she would need both hands to wield it. She was making to leave the circle and place the flashlight on the floor outside it – she was attempting to decide which to do first, because it seemed somehow important – when she heard movement above her in the hall.

She was able to hope it was one of her cousins – Hugh, since she recognised the footsteps as a man's. Perhaps they were so heavy and deliberate because he was relearning how to find his way. She managed to believe this until the newcomer blocked the doorway and began to descend the steps, so deliberately that it seemed not so much careful as gloating. He didn't bother to hold onto the banister with the hand that wasn't flourishing a knife half the length of Charlotte's arm.

He was dressed in hobnailed boots and a butcher's apron: nothing else. His arms and legs and torso were grotesquely muscular beneath a thick simian pelt, which was as black as his ropes of greasy hair. His tread sounded like blows of a hatchet on the trembling steps. Charlotte was striving not to panic but to think whether she should stand her ground and defend herself or try to elude him until she could flee up the steps – she was attempting to overcome the shudder that had reawakened in her brain, shaking her thoughts apart – when he turned away from the steps, and she saw his face.

It was swollen and purple with many veins. Its width made his cracked eyeballs look even smaller. It bore a clown's wide fixed idiotic grin, and the thick lips and malformed nose were drooling. As the man stalked towards her, raising the knife, the hem of the striped apron rose in sympathy, hoisted by an erection sprouting from a bed of matted hair. Charlotte jerked the flashlight up in the hope that it would blind him. While it made his eyes redder still, he didn't falter. The light showed her that his pelt was swarming with parasites, and it revealed another aspect of him. He'd forgotten to bring his shadow, or his creator had overlooked the need.

Either detail might have proved too much for Charlotte. He was an amalgam of nightmares, an overload of them. The fears that constituted him – collected, she thought, in the dreadful bare room overhead – were reduced to nothing but themselves, far less than the victims who'd been forced to suffer them. They had no personality, no substance. They were no better than stale horror stories hollow with clichés, mechanical devices void of any function other than to terrorise. They had nothing to do with Charlotte; how could they have been dredged from her own mind? 'Unbelievable,' she protested in a voice that barely shook, and stepped out of the circle. The instant both her feet were outside, the figure vanished like a bubble that had been pretending it was flesh.

She gazed at the floor where it had stood or seemed to stand, and listened to her heartbeat insisting that she was in more of a panic than she could afford to acknowledge. The bricks within the circle looked even barer for the disappearance – bare enough to be assuring her that the house had finished playing tricks. Perhaps whatever power it had accumulated was spent, having done its worst. The shape that was cowering behind the steps hadn't altered its position; if it appeared to have moved, that was only because the light had.

Charlotte made to lay down the flashlight, and blackness dropped towards her as silently as a spider. It felt as if the ceiling had sagged, and she could do without inviting any threat of claustrophobia. On the floor the flashlight would bring down too much darkness without providing sufficient illumination, she saw now. It would be best left on a step, and she was about to return to the circle when she heard another movement somewhere in the house.

It was a scurrying or scuttling, which suggested rats if not a creature excessively provided with legs. Though her heartbeat was rehearsing her panic again, Charlotte was determined not to be impressed by another vanishing trick. The menace seemed banal, a conjurer's cheapest illusion, too uninspired to be magical. 'No imagination,' she tried to scoff, 'don't put yourself to any trouble' – and then she recognised the sound. The intruder wasn't animal or insect. Earth was trickling into the house.

As she strained her ears to reach beyond the pounding of her heart she was able to locate the sound. It was at the top of the building. Earth must be falling through the skylight, because she heard it strike the attic floor on the way to becoming more muffled as it spilled onto the carpet below. It wasn't simply trickling, it was piling into the house as if somebody were shovelling it in. Its fall didn't quite cover up another noise – a series of creaks that grew louder and more numerous. Was a floor about to collapse? The noise seemed too shrill to be wooden. Just as Charlotte identified the sound of glass under pressure, the highest windows gave way with a clangour that was followed by the thunder of earth filling the rooms. It hadn't lessened when the windows on the middle floor began to creak.

This was too much, Charlotte wanted to believe: not just the windows caving in but the amount of earth that was falling through the skylight. It wasn't her nightmare, it was a version of the terror that had turned upon the occupant of the house. It must have driven him into the cellar once he'd abandoned clawing at the trapdoor to the attic. 'It's all yours,' she cried over the uproar, of which perhaps only her heartbeat was real. The cowering figure shivered, or its shadow did as the beam of the flashlight enacted her nervousness. The movement suggested that the light was capable of threatening the figure, quelling any last remnants of its power. She thrust the beam at the shrivelled crown of the head, and the bony shape reared up to its full height to knock the flashlight out of her hand.

She thought jaws were gaping wide until she saw the entire face was. The beam just had time to exhibit this, and how the denizen of the cellar was beginning to stoop as if to mock her height or to bring its lack of a face level with her eyes, before the flashlight hit the wall. It emitted a flicker that seemed almost taunting and then died for good.

Perhaps the utter darkness was even worse than being buried. It clung like soil to her eyes and seemed to fill her nostrils. Certainly the smell of burial did – thick clay and a staler odour. The sounds of weakened glass and falling earth had ceased as if they'd never been, only to isolate the sound of shuffling in the dark. She'd backed towards the flashlight, but how far? The advance of the footsteps seemed too rapid, not nearly blind enough. She wanted to believe this was yet another trick, but no mere nightmare could have dislodged the flashlight from her grasp. She would never be able to find it before the occupant of the cellar found her, and in any case there was little chance that she could make it work. She would have thrust out the spade to defend herself, but suppose the enlivened remains snatched it from her? She was retreating further when she realised that she didn't even know which way: back into the circle, perhaps. She didn't know why this should aggravate her dread, unless it was stressing her blind disorientation – and then she remembered that she still had light, however meagre. She was almost too terrified to keep hold of the spade with just her right hand while she groped in her hip pocket. She heard the bony shuffling close in on her before she managed to catch hold of her mobile. As she dragged it out, it emitted a pallid glow. Dim though this was, it didn't need to reach far. Her pursuer was within arm's length.

It raised its tattered scrawny arms and ducked its collapsed head towards her face. This was almost enough to send her backwards, which would indeed drive her into the circle. A last flare of instinct made her dodge towards the wall. The figure shuffled swiftly after her, dropping into a crouch from which it might spring on her, throwing her to the floor, where it would begin by lowering its jagged hollow absence of a face towards her. Was this a nightmare it was sending her? She sensed dreadful glee at the prospect of unimaginably worse, and her loathing made her lash out. She hardly knew what she'd done until she felt the spade hack through bone or gristle and saw a shoe and its withered contents left behind.

The lopsided figure hobbled at her with blind determination. When she drove the spade through the other ankle, reducing her pursuer to her own height, it kept coming on its stumps. As it jerked out its shrivelled hands to grapple with the spade she jabbed at its ribs with all her strength, splintering them. The instant it toppled backwards she was on it, tramping on the blade to sever the arms. As the torso struggled like a segment of a worm to elude her, she smashed the skull like a hatched egg. Too much of the body continued to move, not only because of the wild antics of the dim light, even after she'd leaned all her weight on the spade to chop the crawling fragments smaller.

In the end it was disgust with the process that made her give up. As she turned towards the steps she heard a restless scrabbling at the bricks. Surely she'd done as much as she could by herself. 'Ellen,' she called in a voice that hardly seemed capable of escaping the cellar. 'Hugh.' She'd retrieved the flashlight, but it didn't work. Only the muffled glow of the phone lit her way as she stepped into the circle, and the steps weren't visible at all.