The Retreat(90)

I moved slowly through the passageway. It was around eighteen feet long. As I got closer to the end, I slowed, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.

I turned to look at Julia, to make sure she could see it, that I wasn’t hallucinating. She could clearly see it too.

It was a door. A solid steel door.





Chapter 44

I placed my hands against the cold metal and pushed. The door didn’t budge. I examined it using my phone’s flashlight. There was no handle, no keyhole. It had to be bolted on the other side.

‘Maybe there’s another way in,’ I said, keeping my voice low.

Julia was about to bang on the door but I caught her wrist.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The person who’s been inside your house could be in there now. If there’s another exit, we don’t want to alert her. She’ll get away.’

‘She?’

I put my finger to my lips and squeezed past Julia, leading her back up the steps and into the little room behind the bookcases. We took turns to squeeze through into the dining room. I dusted myself off and did what I always do when I’m trying to think through a problem. I paced.

‘It has to be a woman,’ I said. ‘Ursula’s guide’s voice was female. The voice I heard singing was female.’

Julia nodded. ‘And Heledd was convinced the woman who stopped her last night was the Red Widow.’

‘Come on,’ I said, hurrying from the room. I thought I knew who she was, the woman who had been haunting Nyth Bran, the uninvited guest, but wanted to be sure before I shared it with Julia. ‘The secret room is beyond that door. And I think I know where the other entrance is.’



On the way out, I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen. It was raining, a light drizzle, but I hardly felt it as I jogged along the path towards the woods, Julia at my heels. I phoned the police station and was told DI Snaith and DC Hawkins were busy. Interviewing Rhodri, I assumed. I left a message, asking them to call me back urgently.

Julia and I passed the clearing with the hut and entered the second set of woods. It was my fourth time here and I was becoming familiar with the landscape.

‘Remember I thought I saw Ursula here, wearing her red coat? Well . . . whoever it is who’s been in your house, it must have been her,’ I said. ‘I guess she took a fancy to it. She can’t have known I would see her go into the woods and follow her.’

I stopped.

‘She vanished somewhere around here. Just before the fork in the path.’

Last time I came here, the branches had been bare, everything frozen in suspended animation, waiting for spring. Now buds sprouted, wild daffodils peeked through the grass, and the undergrowth was even thicker. I stopped and scanned the ground, turning around slowly. Beyond a thick tangle of brambles, twenty feet from where I stood, was an ancient-looking oak tree. I headed over, stomping on nettles and stepping over fallen logs until I reached the tree.

Julia caught up with me. I looked around, searching for the spot where I thought I’d seen the woman in the red coat vanish.

‘The entrance . . . It has to be around here somewhere.’

‘The entrance to what?’

‘To the—’ I began, stepping forward, and then I was falling, the ground giving way beneath me.

Julia snatched at my arm, and I twisted, grabbing hold of the ground. Along with damp earth, I got two handfuls of brambles which ripped into my palm. My legs hung in the air beneath me and I kicked out, convinced I was about to fall.

‘Pull!’ Julia urged, holding on to me with all her strength.

My foot found something beneath it. A protruding tree root. By pushing against it, I was able to drag myself back onto solid earth. I lay on the ground, waiting for my heartbeat to slow down.

‘Looks like we found the entrance you were looking for,’ Julia said.

I sat up. ‘Yeah. I did that deliberately.’

She laughed, and for a wonderful moment the tension dissipated.

I checked my phone. We’d reached the point where my signal was fading, but neither DI Snaith nor DC Hawkins had tried to call me back.

‘Do you want to wait for the police?’ I asked.

Julia shook her head. ‘No. I need to see.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ I lay on my belly and peered down into the hole, using the flashlight to see beneath me. ‘Just as I thought, there’s a tunnel. Let me help you down, then I’ll follow.’

I lay on my front and Julia lowered herself into the hole, grasping my wrists.

‘You ready?’ I asked.

She grunted and let go. It was only an eight-foot drop, and she landed on her feet, bending her legs and rolling onto her side like a parachute jumper.

‘Right, my turn.’

‘Wait, there’s a ladder,’ she said. She lifted it until its tip emerged beside me, and I climbed down, leaving it where it was. This was obviously how Julia’s uninvited guest entered and exited the woods – like on that day she’d vanished before my eyes, when I thought I was following Ursula. The fact the ladder had been lying on the ground surely meant she was inside now. It was hard for me not to think of it as her lair, and as I thought that an image from my book hit me. The creature, hiding beneath ground, fat and happy from the souls it had consumed. In Sweetmeat’s final scenes, my hero trudged through a filthy, sewage-caked tunnel to confront the beast. It sent a chill through me. Life imitating art, again.