The House on Cold Hill

51

The green digits on Ollie’s clock radio showed 3.10 a.m. He had barely slept. Apart from just now, when he’d woken from a dream in which he’d been in the retired vicar Bob Manthorpe’s house. A gale was raging outside, rattling the windows, and a cold draught blew on his face. The Sunday papers lay on the floor by his bed, unread. He’d been unable to concentrate on anything during the evening. He just kept thinking about the figures by the stairs he had seen at lunchtime, and the ones he and Caro had seen behind the mystery window.

The window where there was no room. Or no way into it — or out.

In the dream he had been in the vicar’s sitting room, watching a rising smoke ring. They were having the same conversation they’d had on Thursday — just three days ago — three days that felt like a month.

‘He’d unearthed letters and journals and what-have-you from that time, and he used to like sitting in the pub and telling anyone who’d listen that Brangwyn’s wife had not been on the outbound ship with him. That he’d left her behind in the house.’

‘In the closed-up house?’

‘Or buried her somewhere in the grounds. I don’t think they had quite the calibre of detection work we have today. If it’s true, he went away for long enough, came home, opened up the house and started life over again with a new bride. Rumour had it, apparently, that his wife’s spirit was pretty angry... And that she didn’t like people leaving the house.’

Ollie could hear his heart pounding in his chest. A slightly uneven boomph... boomph... boomph like a boxing glove striking a punchbag. Unease shimmied through him. This room, this secret room — was Matilda De Glossope — formerly Matilda Warre-Spence — in there?

Suddenly there was a loud cracking sound. An instant later something smelling damp and musty fell on the bed, covering his face and dripping foul-smelling water on him.

He sat up, yelling, pushing it away with his hands, but it kept falling back onto him.

‘Ols, what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?’ Caro was trying to push it away, too.

It felt like paper. Sodden paper. He rolled sideways out of the bed and crashed to the floor. Caro was still wrestling with it, shouting. He stood up, found the wall light switch and pressed it. And saw the writhing mound of Caro on the bed, struggling to find her way out from under a huge sheet of red flock wallpaper that had come away from the wall behind the headboard and fallen across the bed, leaving a bare brown strip of exposed wall, like a wound.

He stepped forward, grabbed an edge of wallpaper and pulled it free.

Caro sat up, wide-eyed, shaking her head. ‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘What — what the hell?’

As she looked fearfully around there was another cracking sound. The top section of a full-length strip of wallpaper on the left side of the room suddenly detached itself from the wall. Ollie ran over to it and tried to push it back into place. It was sodden, he realized. Then as he looked around the walls, fear and confusion shimmying through him, he saw they were all glistening with damp.

Then another strip came partially free, folding over on itself.

Caro screamed and threw herself out of bed; she ran over to Ollie and clutched him. Her eyes darted about, wild with terror. ‘What’s happening, Ollie, what the hell is happening?’

‘Must be another water leak,’ he said, feeling utterly useless and helpless.

Caro looked at him in terror. ‘Another this, another that. I was nearly electrocuted by the bloody shower. Now I’m being smothered by wallpaper. This place is a sodding health hazard. What’s going to happen next?’

‘We’ll get on top of it all, darling.’

‘I can’t cope with this, Ols. I just can’t cope with this—’

She was interrupted by another loud crackle.

Ollie could not see where it came from. Christ, he wondered, were all the rest of the strips about to start peeling away from the walls, too?

‘We can’t sleep here,’ she said. ‘I’m scared more’s going to come down. God, and I’ve got such a load of meetings tomorrow...’

‘Maybe we should go downstairs, sleep on the sofas again tonight?’ Ollie said. ‘I’ve got an important day, too, we’ve got to get some sleep.’

But ten minutes later, lying under a duvet on the sofa that was a little too short for him, he was wide awake, thinking once more about the emails.

There was absolutely no way they’d sent them to the wrong recipients.

The more he turned it over in his mind, the more certain he was they’d not made a mistake. But at the same time, less certain. What kind of tricks was his mind playing on him? It seemed that since moving here someone else had taken control of it, similar to the way Chris Webb, thirty miles away, could take control of his computer through that simple bit of software, TeamViewer.

Was someone — or something — controlling his mind? Controlling it remotely? Making him see messages on the screen that weren’t there? Messing around with time inside his head? Making him see cracks on the ceiling that magically repaired themselves?

Making wallpaper fall off?

Caro sounded as if she was asleep, finally. He lay very still, not wanting to disturb her, trying to sleep too, but he was thinking, now, about tomorrow. Much to his surprise, Cholmondley had agreed to meet him — at his north London showroom. He would head off there straight after dropping Jade at school.

He had a headache. His scalp was pulling tightly round his skull, as if it was several sizes too small. He felt a vice-like grip in his chest, and his teeth were all hurting. And just like when he was a small child, he was keeping his eyes closed, scared of what he might see if he opened them.

This house, which he had thought would be paradise for the three of them, had turned into a nightmare he could not wake from.

And a nightmare that would not let him go to sleep.

It was all his fault, he was well aware. Caro would have been happy to have lived in a modest house in Brighton all her life, as her parents had. He was the one with the big ambition, the hubris, who had persuaded her to take the gamble and move here.

Now he was no longer sure about anything and, least of all, his sanity.

Shadows that moved; vicars who appeared before they had arrived; girls who were not there feeding ducks; faces in windows; cracks in ceilings that sealed themselves; a window with no room behind it.

And himself, who had always been fit, now out of breath at the slightest exercise.

That scared him more than anything. Maybe he should have a check-up. Could he have a brain tumour?

Occasionally he opened his eyes to check his clock radio. Time was passing slowly, incredibly slowly.

4.17.

4.22.

4.41.

He heard a click and stiffened.

Then Jade’s whispering, anxious voice.

‘Mum? Dad?’

‘What is it, lovely?’ he said, as quietly as he could.

‘There’s a man in my room. He keeps saying he’s my dad.’

Ollie snapped on the lamp on the side table at the end of the sofa, and saw his daughter, in a long cream T-shirt, looking gaunt.

‘Uh?’ Caro said.

‘It’s OK, darling,’ he whispered.

‘He says he’s my dad. He’s really scary. I can’t sleep, Dad.’

Ollie stood up, in his boxers and T-shirt, and hugged her. ‘Tell you what, lovely, stay down here with us — you can sleep on the sofa with your mum. Tell me about this man in your room?’

‘He comes in every night.’

‘Every night?’

She nodded. ‘But normally he doesn’t speak.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? What does he look like?’

‘Like you, Dad. I thought it was you. He said we should all have left, but it’s too late now.’

He hugged her again. ‘Is that how you feel?’

Jade shook her head. ‘I like it here now. This is where we belong.’

‘We do, don’t we?’

‘We do,’ she nodded, then moments later was fast asleep, standing up in his arms.

Gently, he eased her onto the sofa, beside Caro, who sleepily pulled the duvet over her daughter and put a protective arm round her.

Ollie lay down again on the other sofa, with the light on, listening to his wife and his daughter sleeping. Thinking again, as he had earlier. Full of guilt for bringing them into this.

What a sodding mess.

Ghosts.

Bruce Kaplan had no problem with ghosts.

Hopefully, after tomorrow, he would not either. There would be no ghosts here any more. Benedict Cutler would deal with them.

Lay Lady Matilda finally to rest.

And then they could get on with their lives.

It was going to be fine. Really it was. Exorcisms here might not have worked in the past, but hey, the past was another country, wasn’t that what they said? This was today, 2015. Peeps felt different about stuff, as Jade might say.

And this was their dream home. You had to try to live your dreams. Too many people went to their graves with their dreams still inside them. And that was not going to happen to him. Life presented you, constantly, with idiots. But, just very occasionally, if you opened yourself up to the opportunities, life presented you with magic, too.

They mustn’t lose the dream. He would make this house safe and happy for Jade and Caro. Somehow. They’d find a way. It would begin tomorrow. This house was magic. He listened to his daughter and his wife breathing. The two people who meant more to him than anything else on earth.

The two people on this planet he would die for.