House of the Lost (4 page)

‘Oh God, figures,’ said his father. ‘I hated them at school, as well. I used to make up stories about how the figures were in a conspiracy – that’s a plot – to confuse me. How the eight times table was in league with the fractions, and how the multiplication hid inside the square roots, waiting to pounce.’ He laid his hand over his son’s in a brief gesture of affection or sympathy, Matthew was not sure which. ‘Boring arithmetic,’ he said.

‘Flummery and moonshine?’ suggested Matthew hopefully, because this was one of his father’s expressions, and he liked saying it.

His father’s smile broadened, but he said, ‘Well, not exactly that, because you need to know about some of it. But there are other things in life as well as maths. Just do the best you can and I’ll help you with your homework. Remember, figures aren’t everyone’s strength and you’ve got a lot of other strengths.’ He withdrew his hand, as if embarrassed by his own display of emotion. ‘Let’s have some lunch,’ he said. ‘I see they’ve got chocolate pudding today.’

Matthew did not write stories about arithmetic like his father had done, but he drew pictures of all the figures laying plots, giving them secret faces and swirly cloaks like villains in stories, making them seem to be dodging in and out of the columns. He showed them to his father who laughed and said Matthew was a genius, and how about them trying to write a comic-cartoon strip together – like you saw in newspapers? He would write the stories and Matthew could illustrate them. They might try to sell the whole thing to a newspaper or a children’s comic. This was a wonderful plan and what was even better was that his father thought Matthew’s sketches were good enough.

‘It will probably help the arithmetic as well,’ said his father, smiling.

It helped with arithmetic, but it did not help with the cold-eyed men when they came to the house. Each evening, as Matthew drew his pictures or did homework or read a book, he waited for the house to plunge into its frozen state of fear that meant the bulbous-eyed car had driven up the lane. He listened almost all the time for the sounds of their footsteps outside the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it a bad thing to be, a tart?’

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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