Deadlight Hall (Nell West/Michael Flint #5)(32)

‘No. So the figure we saw didn’t come up here. But why hasn’t he – or she – come out to challenge us? We haven’t been particularly noisy, but we haven’t tiptoed around.’

‘He might be hiding,’ I said. ‘There could be all kinds of perfectly innocent reasons for that, though.’

We looked into all the first-floor rooms, then we went up to the second floor ones, which were smaller. All the rooms were empty – some had a few pieces of furniture, and some of them were draped in dust sheets, making strange ghostly outlines in the dimness. Sch?nbrunn pulled the dust sheets away, but nothing lurked or crouched beneath any of them.

‘There’s nothing,’ I said. ‘In fact—’ I broke off as Sch?nbrunn grabbed my arm. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, instinctively lowering my voice.

‘Listen,’ he said.

At first I could not hear anything, then, between one heartbeat and the next, came a soft voice.

‘Children, are you here?’

There was silence, and I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I was aware of Sch?nbrunn listening intently. The voice came again.

‘Children, where are you?’

It’s difficult to convey in a letter how extremely disturbing that soft voice and those words were. There was almost a fairy-tale quality – a grim echo of all those wicked stepmothers and witches in gingerbread cottages – all the hungering ogres who hunted little children, and carried them off to dark castles. I remembered again Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who stalked children and carried them off to his own dark castle: the fortress called Auschwitz, where he performed his experiments. Experiments that included amputations, chemicals injected into eyes to change their colour, the attempts to create conjoined twins by sewing sections of their bodies together … Twins.

‘It’s coming from above,’ said Sch?nbrunn.

‘Attics?’

‘There’s nowhere else it could be.’ He was already going towards a small, narrow flight of stairs. I followed slowly. I will not use the word reluctant.

The attic stairs were steep, and I was slightly out of breath when we reached the top, but Sch?nbrunn was already exploring. Those attics were dark and dingy, oppressive from the closeness of the roof directly above, and thick with a dreadful despairing loneliness. I must have flinched, because Sch?nbrunn said softly, ‘Whatever happened here, happened a long time ago.’

‘I hope it did. I can’t make out very much anywhere, can you? Unless – is that a door in that corner?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Take the torch, while I try to open it.’

The door resisted at first, but it eventually yielded, and swung inwards.

I cannot quite say that something was in that room, for we did not actually see anything, but there was the strong sense that it was not empty. I moved the torchlight slowly over the cobwebbed walls, seeing an old bed frame and a marble washstand. But for a moment my heart bumped with fear, because surely there was someone standing at the far end, immediately where the wall met the roof slope – someone wearing pale draperies, the head turned to watch us …

‘Children, are you here? If you’re here I’ll find you …’

The whisper came again, as faint and insubstantial as the drifting cobwebs, and we both spun round. But there was no one there, and when we turned back to the room the outline had gone, and there was only a fall of tattered curtain, moving slightly in the ingress of air from our opening of the door.

‘There’s nothing here,’ said Sch?nbrunn after a moment, but for the first time ever I heard a note of concern and puzzlement in his voice. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, more loudly, and closed the door, turning the handle so firmly I think it probably jammed. ‘Let’s go back downstairs and see where else to look.’

‘There was a door under the stairs,’ I offered. ‘Probably it leads to a scullery and store rooms. Places where a child – two children – might have hidden and left more clues.’

‘Indeed so.’ He sent me an approving glance.

The door, which was set well back in the hall, opened with a scratch of sound – it was not a particularly loud noise, but it was enough in that old house to make me look nervously over my shoulder. But nothing moved – or did it? For a moment I thought I saw the figure in the window recess again, but when I shone the torch it was only the silhouette of an old tree immediately outside, dipping its branches towards the window.

‘There’s a flight of steps,’ said Sch?nbrunn, peering through the door. ‘I can’t see much else. There’s a disgusting smell, though. Where’s the torch?’

The torch’s beam cut a triangle of cold light through the darkness, and Sch?nbrunn began to descend the steps without hesitation. There was no indication that this would lead to sculleries, or that it would lead anywhere at all, but we had to make sure.

At the foot of the steps was a narrow passageway, and Sch?nbrunn pointed to the ground again.

‘Still no footprints,’ he said, then stopped and turned to look back along the dark passage.

‘Something there?’ I said, but even as I spoke I could hear it.

Footsteps. And the sound of someone breathing – doing so with difficulty, like a sufferer from asthma might.

‘Whoever it is,’ said Sch?nbrunn, very softly, ‘is in this passage with us. Between us and the door leading to the hall.’