House of the Lost (2 page)

The inside of Fenn House was as dingy as the outside.

The curious image that had printed itself on Theo’s vision like a dark sunburst when he entered the house was no longer so vivid, but it had not entirely left him. He supposed it had been a result of eye strain due to the long drive, probably with a degree of emotion generated by returning to this house.

The musty desolation of the house was rather daunting, but the electricity was connected which was one mercy. Although, when Theo switched on the lights, he thought he would almost have preferred oil lamps and candles which might have softened the ominous look of the peeling wallpaper and damp patches under some of the windows.

He unloaded the boxes of provisions he had bought in Norwich and carried them through to the kitchen, distributing them in the larder and fridge. After this he took his suitcases upstairs, pausing outside the bedroom Charmery always had when they were children, sometimes sharing it with their younger cousin, Lesley, who loved coming to Fenn because of being with these two nearly grown-up cousins.

Dust lay thickly in Charmery’s room and there were several faded oblongs on the walls where pictures had hung and been removed. But the old grandfather clock was still in its corner. It had originally been in the big, low-ceilinged sitting room, but as a child Charmery had fallen in love with the clock and persuaded her parents to carry it up to her bedroom. She liked to fall asleep listening to it, she said; it was like listening to Fenn’s heart beating. The clock had to be wound every seven days or it stopped, and Charmery had always made a little ceremony of the winding. Every time she came to Fenn House she would race up the stairs to start it: she always insisted the holiday could not begin properly until the clock was ticking.

No one had wound the clock recently, though. The elaborate brass hands stood at some long-ago three o’clock, and there was dust across the face and the carved door. Theo found himself wondering if three o’clock was the hour Charmery had died.

He closed the door and went along to the bedroom he had always used. There was a view towards the river from this side of the house, and in the gathering dusk he could just make out the outline of St Luke’s Convent. The convent’s land did not exactly join up with Fenn House, but parts marched alongside here and there. On a quiet day – and most days in Melbray were quiet – you could hear the chapel bell. Nancy Kendal said it was intrusive, but Theo had always rather liked hearing the soft chimes. He stared at the crouching bulk of the convent for a moment, then closed the curtains and went back downstairs.

After several unsuccessful attempts he managed to fire up the central-heating system. It clanked protestingly and the pipes juddered alarmingly, but eventually it sent out a reasonable warmth and Theo began to feel more in touch with normality. He went into the dining room which he had not looked at yet, but in which he intended to work.

It was annoying to find, when he switched on the light, that the bulb had blown. Theo swore, but although the room was dim, the curtains framing the old-fashioned French windows were open and there was enough light for him to make a cautious way to a table lamp. He was halfway along the wall, skirting the shadowy shapes of furniture, when a face, the eyes looking straight into his, suddenly swam out of the shadows. Charmery.

Theo’s heart gave a great leap and he felt as if he had been plunged into a vat of ice. For several seconds he could not move and could scarcely breathe for the sudden constriction round his chest. Charmery could not be here, she simply could
not
, not unless he was really going to accept Guff’s premise of ghosts. He forced himself to reach for the lamp’s switch and reassuring light sprang up.

It was not Charmery herself, of course, nor was it a ghost. It was a framed sketch of her, head and shoulders, almost life-size, done in a smudgy charcoal. In the uncertain light it had been disconcertingly lifelike. Theo had never seen it before and it must be fairly recent, because it was not the Charmery he had known: this was the teenage cousin finally grown-up. The tumble of copper-coloured hair did not show up in charcoal, of course, but the long narrow eyes with the thick dark lashes were there. The artist had given an impression of a low-cut gown of some kind so that the shoulders were bare and she was wearing what looked like a rather elaborate Victorian pendant, which Theo did not recognize.

The sketch did not seem to be signed, but Theo reached up to unhook it. Cobwebs floated down, ghost-strands from the past. He turned the picture over, to see if there was any signature or date on the back, but there was only a layer of dusty backing paper. Theo turned it round and studied it closely, noting the differences again. Hair and clothes were all unfamiliar, and the expression . . . The expression was the most unfamiliar thing of all. Whoever had drawn this had caught a side of Charmery Theo had never seen. A softer side. Had something happened to her in those years he had not shared? Someone who had come into her life after he left it? There had been a series of lovers – the family had reported that with gleeful disapproval, of course – but towards the end had there been someone who had wrought this extraordinary change? Or had it been someone who had been going to give her the things Theo could not? Marriage, a child . . . An old pain stirred – a pain that after ten years ought to have been safely buried under thick layers of scar tissue but which still had the power to claw painfully into his mind.

He went blindly out of the room.

After he had put together a makeshift meal and eaten it, he began to feel better. He carried his laptop into the dining room and set it down on the table. He could not decide whether to put Charmery’s portrait completely out of sight, but to shut it in a drawer or cupboard seemed like shutting her in her coffin all over again. He had dreamed about Charmery’s coffin for weeks after the funeral. It had been smothered in roses – two of the aunts had sent Charmian roses because originally she had been christened Charmian Marie, although Theo did not think anyone had ever called her that.

He surveyed the room, and thought he would work at the dining table, facing the French windows. In those long-ago summers, these windows always stood open to the gardens; now they were closed and bolted and the gardens were wreathed in river mist.

Theo stood at the window for a moment, looking towards the smoky outline of the old boathouse. Charmery’s death house. He would have to go inside it at some point, but he could not face it yet. He still had dreams of how her beautiful face must have looked when she was found there, bloated and grotesque, her hair matted with river weed. He frowned, pushed the image away with an effort, and switched on the laptop.

Reading the chapter he had been working on during the summer he was not knocked out by it, although neither was he disgusted. It was not mind-scaldingly brilliant; it would not set literary-award ceremonies alight or cause film directors to fall over their feet in their haste to offer six-figure sums for the film rights, but it was not bad. He could polish it and make it shine a bit.

He opened a new document, typed Chapter Five at the top, and plunged into the world he had been working to create. The main storyline centred on a young man trying to cope with the aftermath of his experiences in the Iraq war. Theo intended it to be modern and biting: a self-examination by the central character, with flashbacks to the war-torn Iraqi cities and a few excursions into the difficulties the character had with renewing his relationships.

‘Don’t neglect to put in a bit of bonking,’ his agent had said on reading Theo’s outline of the plot. ‘I don’t mean heaving and grunting. Classy bonking.’

‘Can you have classy bonking?’ Theo had demanded.

‘I can,’ said his agent, with the grin that made her look like a patrician cat.

It was four months since he had been able to write anything, and he had expected to find that re-entering the story with the nightmare-ridden ex-paratrooper and the searing bomb-explosion flashbacks and the classy bonking in deference to his irrepressible agent, would be difficult. What he had not expected, however, was for a whole new story to thrust its way into his mind and find its way onto the computer screen; nor had he expected to type several pages of this new and unknown story almost without realizing it.

But when he leaned back from the table-top and reached for his drink, there it was. A totally new plot, apparently told from the point of view of a child. A child who lived in a dark remote house, and who had some nameless menace threatening him. A child whose only escape was into imaginary worlds of his own creating.

If one of Matthew’s painted worlds ever did turn out to be real, he would like it to be the cool green-field one, with silvery rivers and nice houses with flower gardens. In that world, the people were rich and happy; they could go into the towns and buy whatever they wanted in the big shops. Very occasionally his father talked about a place like that, although Matthew did not know if it was somewhere Father had once lived, or just somewhere he had read about.

Occasionally Father went away for a night or two, returning with a sick white look, with dark shadows under his eyes. Wilma said it was nothing to worry about; it would be some business matter. ‘Gentlemen have to deal with business matters, and he’ll be back late tonight or early tomorrow. Best not to talk about it though, not to anyone.’ She did not look up from the stove where she was cooking supper when she said this, but when she said it was best not to talk about it, her voice changed, and Matthew instantly began to worry that the place his father went to was the Black House.

The Black House was the most frightening place in the world. If anyone ever said its name, people looked uneasy and glanced over their shoulders as if afraid of being overheard. It stood a little way out of the village – it might be about half an hour’s walk always supposing anyone had ever wanted to walk to it – and it was at the end of a narrow lane with thick old trees growing up all round it. You could not see it from the road, but Matthew could see it from his bedroom at the top of the house. The windows looked out across huge expanses of open countryside, and he could see the Black House, which was like a smudgy bruise on the horizon.

Sometimes he sat on the window seat before going to bed, resting his chin on his hand, staring at this horrid crouching silhouette, seeing the occasional light glinting in its depths, wondering what kind of people lived there and made those lights. The house got into his dreams occasionally, and he would find himself wandering through dreadful stone corridors with people locked away in cells, crying and beating on the bars to get out.

Matthew’s friend Mara knew about the Black House and she knew about the cold-eyed men as well. She sometimes talked about the men when she and Matthew walked to school, speaking quietly, partly so no one would hear but also because her small brother walked to school with them and she did not want to frighten him.

Mara thought the cold-eyed men might live in the Black House but Matthew was not so sure. It was most likely empty, he said, trying not to remember the pinpoints of light he sometimes saw from his window.

‘But there are gates,’ said Mara, stubbornly. ‘Huge gates with padlocks, and you wouldn’t have gates and padlocks unless you had secrets to hide.’

‘How do you know there are gates? I’ll bet you’ve never even been there.’

‘My grandmother said so. She’s lived here all her life and she knows everything about this place. She says there are a lot of secrets here.’

‘What kind of secrets?’

Mara glanced back at her brother and lowered her voice. ‘Things people don’t want to be known. Things about your father,’ she said, and Matthew forgot about not letting Mara’s brother hear them and stopped in the middle of the path and stared at her.

‘What things about my father? What d’you mean?’

But Mara was already looking frightened and walked on very fast. Matthew almost had to run to keep up with her.

‘It’s only that people sometimes say things,’ she said. ‘That there’s a secret. Only it’s better not to talk about it, that’s what they say.’

‘A secret about my father?’ Matthew’s heart skipped a beat. It’s about him going away and coming back looking ill and dark-eyed, he thought. That’s what she means.

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Mara, and pushed her small brother into the infants’ part of the school building, then dived into the girls’ cloakroom, banging the door.

Most of Mara’s secrets came from her grandmother’s stories and Matthew did not pay much attention to them, but he wanted to know what people said about his father so he shouted through the cloakroom door for her to come out and tell him. But she would not, and the bell went for lessons so in the end Matthew went off to his own classroom where it turned out to be the day for arithmetic which he hated.

When he got home his father was away on one of his mysterious trips. Things happened like that, Matthew had often noticed it. You talked about something or you remembered something, and there it was. But it wasn’t until he was going up to his bedroom to do his homework that he realized the house was sliding down into its frozen silence. His heart gave a thump of fear, and although he tried to tell himself it was just the dark afternoon – it was November and bitterly cold – he knew, deep down, the men were here because the house’s dark stillness was unmistakable. He ran the rest of the way up the stairs and shut his bedroom door with a bang. Through the main window he could see the crouching shape of the Black House, dark and ugly and remote, but there was a little side window that looked down into the lane that led to this house. Summoning all his courage he looked out of this window and fear closed over him.