Nyctophobia (12 page)

‘Senora Delgadillo, who did you work for before we arrived?’ I asked the housekeeper when I went to return the keys to the cigar box.

‘I was employed by various members of the Condemaine family,’ she said, ‘until the last one had to leave and the property was sold to Senor Torres.’

‘So it always remained in the same hands?’

‘Yes, until there were none of them left.’

‘Did they die in the house?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Have there been – tragedies – here?’

‘No. Never. This is a happy house. It always was.’

‘No-one else can get into the other side, can they?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So we are alone.’

Rosita turned to me with her customary impatience. ‘Senora Torres, if you wish to ask me something, please be clear and say it.’

‘It’s just that I thought I heard someone moving about in one of the other rooms.’

‘I told you. Hyperion is an unusual house. You must expect unusual things. The cliff behind it heats up during the day and cools at night. There are bound to be noises.’

Which was entirely unhelpful, and pretty much what I had expected her to say. The wood was old and expanded in the warmth, so it cracked and popped. What else could there be, the suffering ghosts of those who had lived here before? I wasn’t living out some movie in which the heroine finds that the previous owner was a mass murderer, or that his wife was a witch who’d placed a curse on all future residents. It was embarrassing to even think about such things.

‘But the room that connects to the drawing room has a chest of drawers wedging it shut. Who put it there?’

‘I never go back there, Senora, so I would not know.’

‘Nevertheless, someone has put it in place for a reason. Can you think what that might be?’

Rosita sighed. ‘I think perhaps that lock does not work. It is to stop the door opening by itself.’

‘By itself?’

‘There are breezes in the house when we open the windows – sometimes the doors slam.’

She would not give any further answers, and I could think of nothing else to ask her that would settle the matter, so there it ended.

The sun continued to pass across Hyperion House, centimetre by centimetre, the flowers feeding from the light and blossoming, smelling ever sweeter, the warmth spreading over the floors and walls, the dust motes dancing in the light as radiant as crystals.

I went back to my drawings, went back to helping Bobbie with her studies, or to the computer where I had started compiling my history of the house and its precedents, anything to take my mind off the idea of someone – or something – living beside us in the part of the house that lay in permanent darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Thread

M
ATEO CAME HOME
and the three of us went down to the coast, enjoying the last of the summer sea. I felt as if I had been blessed with a new chance in life – an opportunity to get back on my feet and bring an end to my rootless existence. With my problems behind me, I was suddenly happy and untroubled. We swam and ate and lazed around. Mateo was solicitous and charming. His old-fashioned ways made me laugh; he ushered me through doors, dusted off a beach bench, paid for the ice creams with exaggerated courtesy. We took candy and seashells back for Julieta, and Mateo had bought duty-free cigarillos for Celestia, and life went on.

But on the last evening of that week, I took the bunch of keys from the cigar box again, and substituted a big rusty ring of old keys I had found in the summerhouse, carefully folding the originals inside my sweaters in the bedroom wardrobe. I felt like a traitor to the house, but I was entirely within my rights.

During that happy time, there was only one further incident that bothered me.

Early on Saturday morning I was sure I heard the crying again, this time coming from behind the locked connecting door in the kitchen. I managed to get to the keys and open the door while the lament was still in progress, but when sunlight entered the room it stopped at once, as if ashamed of public exposure.

As I was coming back out I heard Rosita enter the kitchen, and froze. For some illogical reason I did not want her to find out that I was entering the rooms, so I waited while she set down the lunch dishes and went back out.

Bobbie had been playing in the next room, and said she’d heard nothing at all. As a committed atheist I believed in science, not ghosts, but I couldn’t explain what I thought I was hearing. There were days when I felt like removing the Catholic icons that dotted the sideboards and taking down the paintings of weeping virgins that covered the walls, but I knew it would upset Mateo. I decided not to mention my experiences. It would only make me appear weak and prone to excessive imagination. And besides, my days were filled with the project and the house. And Bobbie, who was always drawing or painting or making bread with Rosita, or cutting out bits of cardboard to construct marionettes, a throwback child uninterested in television or the iPad Mateo had bought her. The sun that made us all so happy was also slowing me down, just as Celestia had predicted. I took siestas, and began working late at night when the house was cooler.

Mateo finally managed to move the chest of drawers with help from one of the truck-drivers who ran vegetables to Gaucia, and they cleaned the room behind the drawing room, fitting it with a new key, so that all of the servants’ area was now accessible, although we conformed to the rules and kept the doors locked. Mateo installed the cabinet and had his wines brought down from Madrid. The temperature in the back of the house was perfect for them.

With my husband walking behind me as reassurance, I paced my way through the servants’ rooms. There were four, three of which roughly corresponded to rooms on our side, and I mentally named them the Half-Dining Room, the Half-Kitchen and the Half-Bedroom. The fourth, at the end of the first floor corridor, had a more irregular shape than the others, but I was sure we could find a purpose for it. Above was the Half-Attic, with a low sloping ceiling and tiny square windows that looked out onto the dark rocky outcrops of the cliff, which was no more than six inches away at this height. A stale smell wafted up from the narrow space between the house and the wall, as if something had crawled in there and died.

There were other spaces, too, cramped corridors and what appeared to be a tiny bathroom, but it had no windows and I decided to tackle it at a later date, when I felt up to clearing the grime from a hundred-year-old sink and toilet.

We made very few changes to the main part of the house. Every time we moved a clock or a painting or lifted a rug, the room seemed to be thrown out of balance and we guiltily shifted everything back into its rightful place. On the rare occasions that we did make an alteration, Senora Delgadillo noticed and her face froze.

If there were any hairline cracks in this perfect world, they were too fine to show. It was true that Mateo was more frequently absent than I had expected him to be, travelling between Southern Spanish vineyards and cold Northern cities on business, and that he was often so wrapped up in his work that he seemed distant and uncommunicative. It was also true that sometimes I felt isolated, only catching up with my friends on a laptop screen. Mateo’s mother remained antagonistic toward me, and his ex-wife simply hung up when I answered the house phone. I had intended to accept Jordi’s offer of Spanish tutoring, but so far I hadn’t been able to set aside the time. I spoke to Mateo’s publisher friend and the book started to look as if it might become a reality. I began to make career plans once more.

Then everything started to change, and I came to look back on this as a golden time, when all was well with us.

The second Thursday in October was Bobbie’s ninth birthday. ‘What would you like to do?’ I asked her as we sat together in the reading room one afternoon, sorting through old magazines.

Her face lit up. ‘Could we have a party?’

The sun was a little lower in the sky now, but it was still warm. Only the shadows had started to chill down, so I thought we could have it outside. ‘That’s a great idea,’ I told her. ‘Who do you want to invite?’ Bobbie had made friends in Gaucia, and although they had asked her over, they had never come here.

‘I can make a list and we can paint cards to send them.’

‘Okay, let’s get started right now.’ We found boxes of coloured pencils, glue, glitter and cotton reels, and made cards the old-fashioned way instead of typing them in online.

‘Why don’t we ever open up the other rooms?’ she asked as she sketched out her design.

‘Because it’s always dark in there, and there’s no electricity,’ I explained. ‘And the wines are very valuable and can’t be disturbed, so we can’t have you playing in there, in case all the sediment gets shaken up. Sediment is –’

‘Dust in the bottles. I know. Don’t you get fed up with sunshine?’

‘No, because I don’t like the dark.’

‘Why not? It’s dark when you go to bed.’

‘Yes, but when Daddy’s not here I sleep with a nightlight on. And Rosita keeps all the clocks wound up, so she always knows when to turn on all the lights.’

‘I don’t mind the dark. The room behind your bedroom is one of the dark ones, isn’t it?’

‘There’s a tiny room there, yes.’

‘I know because I can hear it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can hear water dripping. Rosita says there’s standing water in the servants’ bathroom, and that means leeches. She says I can’t go in there.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sure she didn’t say there were
leeches
.’

‘Yes, she did. They suck your blood.’

‘I really don’t think she meant that.’

‘Yes she did,’ Bobbie insisted. ‘We need envelopes and stamps.’ With the subject of blood-sucking leeches smartly written off, it was clearly no longer on her roster of interesting topics.

‘I’ll go and see if Rosita has any.’ I headed off to the kitchen, where the housekeeper stored the stationery supplies. I was going to tell her off for filling Bobbie’s head with images of ghoulish creatures living in stagnant pools, but she wasn’t there.

I stood in the kitchen, listening. It seemed to me in that instant that the birds had all stopped singing. When I returned, Bobbie was still sitting on the floor of the drawing room gluing tinsel onto cards. Her sheet of silver stars glittered in the afternoon sunlight. A faint draught blew from under the door that connected to the matching room on the other side.

‘I can’t do this.’ Bobbie was trying to thread some red sparkly cotton through a piece of cardboard cut into a star.

‘Here, let me.’ I held out my hand and she gave me the thin spindle of cotton.

‘Can I get some lemonade?’

‘Of course.’ I watched her go, and began threading the card.

I didn’t want Bobbie running in the hall – the floor had just been polished and was slippery – and turned to admonish her when the spindle slipped between my fingers and bounced onto the wooden floor. Before I could grab it, it rolled away, unspooling. A door slammed. Bobbie was still in the hall, heading for the kitchen. I looked up in time to see the spool disappearing under the gap beneath the connecting door, leaving behind the strand of cotton.

Rising from my chair, I picked up the end of the thread and absently pulled it back toward me, but it started coming undone because a moment later I had several feet of thread in my hand, so I kept pulling.

Quite suddenly, the thread stopped and tightened. Dropping to my knees, I tried to see under the door, but there was only blackness. I pulled again.

Something pulled back. I rose with a start.

Wrapping the thread around my fingers I pulled hard, but whatever was on the other end pulled harder still. The stinging thread sliced into my fingers, but I could not let go. I hung on, but finally it snapped and I fell back, watching as the crimson cotton snaked under the door and disappeared from sight.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Birthday

Y
OU FIND RATIONAL
reasons for unexplained events. I told myself that a rat had got caught in the cotton. The thread had snagged on some piece of furniture, and the rodent had run, tightening it. What else could it be? I always thought I had a logical mind, despite my mother telling people I had ‘too much imagination’. I never wanted to be the imaginative type. I need rational explanations and I seek practical solutions to problems. It was one of the things that first drew me to architecture.

But the explanation for this – although not the scientific one I sought – was already lodged in my mind like a burning needle:

There is someone living in the other side of the house, in those cramped little rooms full of cheap furniture. Someone who hides when I enter, but who wants to be let out. Someone with a desire, a thirst – for revenge or forgiveness or just to be heard. That’s why the chest of drawers was in place – to keep them in.

After I cleaned my cut index and middle fingers and put on a pair of plasters, I went upstairs for the keys. My plan was to explore the rooms once more. I unlocked the door in the kitchen and went round, keeping close to the entrance.

I failed to find the cotton reel. It had vanished. But a faint tracery of scarlet could be discerned, snaking its way across the floorboards. The chiming clocks reminded me that darkness had settled all around us now, and I suddenly needed to get back to the safety of the brightly lit side.

As she climbed into bed later, Bobbie watched me in puzzlement. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, sounding very grown-up.

‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I followed her eyes to my hand. ‘This – it was nothing, a silly accident. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

She didn’t look as if she believed me, but gave me a kiss and slid down into bed.

‘Does your mother usually read you a bedtime story?’

‘No, I’m too old for that,’ Bobbie said, pulling a face. ‘I prefer to read my own books.’

I saw the Kindle on her bedside table. ‘What have you got on that?’