The House on Cold Hill (29 page)

Almost none of the past occupants reaching their fortieth birthdays.

A sudden movement caught his eye in an upstairs window.

Caro looked at him in panic. ‘Did you see that?’

‘Not clearly – what was it?’ He stared at the window. ‘What did you see?’

‘People – people up there looking at us.’ She pointed up at the tiny window just below the eaves that he’d hardly noticed before, above which was a strip of rusted, broken guttering.

‘Probably the kids.’

Her face a mask of unease, Caro pointed up at Jade’s bedroom. All three children were jumping up, arms crossed in the air, doing a crazy dance to some music. ‘They’re all in there, Ols. There’s people in the house.’

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Keep watching.’ He sprinted to the house, went in through the atrium without removing his wellingtons, then clumped up the stairs to the landing, looking wildly up and down it. He went into the blue bedroom, but it was empty, and then into the yellow bedroom and through into the bathroom.

No one.

And, he realized, the windows in both the yellow and blue room were much bigger than the one Caro had been pointing at.

So which was it?

He could see her down on the lawn, still looking up, and hurried back down to her.

‘Did you see anyone?’ she asked.

‘No. Where exactly was it you saw them?’

She pointed again at the tiny window. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I saw them there.’

‘Can you describe them?’

‘I could see faces, but not clearly, and I only saw them for a second.’

‘What faces? Male, female?’

She was still staring up, as if transfixed. Her voice sounded remote, almost trance-like. ‘It looked like a male and a female and a child. They were sort of there but not there.’

She continued to stare.

Her words resonated through him, chilling him. He looked up again at the tiny window, higher up than the sash windows on either side of it, right beneath the eaves of the roof, trying to get his bearings on where exactly it was. ‘Which room is that?’ he said. ‘I can’t work it out.’

‘Isn’t it the one next to our bathroom?’

‘No.’ He pointed with his finger, moving from left to right on the first floor. ‘That’s Jade’s room; next is the
yellow
room and next is the window of its en suite. Then next to that is the
blue
room.’ They’d named these two spare rooms, as well as Jade’s room, after the colour of their wallpaper. ‘Those two at the end are our bathroom window and then our bedroom.’

She followed his finger, concentrating hard. Then she looked back at the one below the broken guttering, where she had just seen the figures. ‘So what’s that window? Which room is that?’

‘I really don’t know. I’m not sure but—’

He froze in mid-sentence.

Both of them saw them now. It looked like a whole family, parents and a child in silhouette, peering out in turn, one after the other, through the small square of glass, before they disappeared.

‘It could be Jade, darling,’ he said. ‘Trying to spook us again.’

Her voice trembling, Caro said, ‘No, Ollie, I don’t think so. They’re all still in her room.’

‘They’ve rigged something up, the little bastards!’ He ran back to the atrium door, opened it, went inside again and sprinted up the stairs, followed by Caro. He turned left when he reached the landing, then opened the door to the room where he thought they had seen the faces. But there was no sign of anyone having been in here. Just the large, empty spare bedroom, with ancient, peeling, blue and white floral wallpaper, and a sash window. It had an old, stained washbasin, several floorboards missing and clusters of black mould on one wall. An empty light fitting dangled at the end of a brown cord from a ceiling rose. The room felt cold and smelled musty.

He shut the door then opened the next one along and peered in. It was another empty room, with yellow wallpaper curling at the edges in places. The bathroom was in a similar state of neglect, with a large sash window that did not look as if it had been opened in years.

Followed by Caro, he strode down to Jade’s room and opened the door, to be greeted by a blast of music and the sight of Jade, Ruari – with his pop-star hair and big smile – and Phoebe, each swivelling round in turn, holding up a placard on which the word
YES!
was written on one side, and
NO!
on the other.

Seeing her father, Jade stepped forward and stopped the music, then looked at him. ‘Dad!’ she said, reproachfully.

‘Were any of you just in the room next to this one?’ he asked.

‘You’re interrupting, Dad, this is really important!’ Jade said.

‘Have you been in either of the empty bedrooms in the past few minutes, Jade, Phoebe, Ruari?’ he asked, ignoring her protest.

‘Dad, this is soooo awkward. We’re busy, OK? We’ve not been anywhere.’ Phoebe and Ruari nodded in concurrence.

Ollie stared hard at the window. As he closed the door he was so preoccupied he barely heard the music start up again. Caro gave him a quizzical look.

‘It’s not them,’ he said. ‘But there’s something I can’t work out. We’ve got Jade’s room, then there’s this spare room.’ He opened the door, entered the yellow room, pointed at the window then went through into the decrepit adjacent bathroom. ‘Here’s the next window.’

Back out on the landing they opened the next door along, and peered into the blue room. ‘OK, there’s this window. Then next door along to the left is our bathroom, and on our right is the yellow bathroom, correct?’

She nodded, doing her own calculations.

‘Which mean’s we’ve got an extra window.’

‘An extra window? That’s not possible,’ she said.

He walked slowly along between the doors to the blue and yellow rooms, tapping the wall all the way, but there was no change in the sound. They both went back outside into the rear garden. Ollie took a photograph with his phone, told Caro to stay where she was, then strode back into the house and upstairs. He went through into the blue room, walked over to the window and tried to open it. But the sash cords were broken on either side and he struggled to lift it more than a few inches. He kneeled and called down to Caro through the gap. ‘OK, darling, I’m in the
blue
room and I’m now going into the
yellow
room’s bathroom, which should be the next window along.’

He went into the yellow room and through to the bathroom. It was also a sash window, smaller than the ones in both bedrooms, but equally busted. He struggled hard to lift it six inches. Below him he could see Caro looking baffled.

‘OK, darling?’ he called down. ‘Is this the next window?’

Her eyes widened in shock. She was staring up at the house, a short way to his left.

‘Darling?’ he said again, louder. ‘Darling? Is this the next window?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not, Ollie. There’s a window in between. And there’s people in there.’

49

Sunday, 20 September

Ollie raced out of the yellow room and back again into the blue room. It was deserted and icy, the temperature seeming to have dropped since he’d last been in it, only a couple of minutes ago. It was like entering a walk-in deep freeze. He went over to the window and called down. ‘Caro, are you sure? This is the next window!’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, there’s a small one in between. They’re not there any more. But they were, Ols.’

He struggled as hard as he could to lift the broken window enough to get his head out and look properly, but it would not budge. How the hell could there be an extra window, he wondered? Had there originally been another room, and the window left in place when it was knocked through? He had seen plans of the house a few months ago, before making an offer on the place, when he was discussing work that needed to be done with the surveyor. But he couldn’t remember at this moment where they were.

‘Wait there, Caro!’ he said.

He went downstairs and out of the front door, where several metal ladders belonging to the builders lay on the ground. He selected the longest, lugged it round to the rear of the house, and propped it up against the wall beneath the tiny window with the broken guttering. The ladder didn’t quite reach, but it would at least enable him to see in, he calculated. The base was resting on the mossy flagstones of the rear patio.

‘Be careful, Ols.’

‘If you hold it to stop it slipping, darling.’

She grabbed the vibrating ladder as he began to climb, jamming her feet against both legs, watching him anxiously.

Ollie climbed slowly and carefully. He’d always been scared of heights, and even a short distance above the ground made him uneasy. And as he neared the top he realized he was short of breath again. He stopped for a moment, feeling giddy, his head swimming.

‘Ols, darling, are you all right?’ Caro called out, anxiously.

‘Yes.’ The word came out as a gasp. He carried on until his hands reached the top rung, where he was still not high enough to see in the window. Another couple of feet. Very slowly, still holding the top rung, he raised his feet up one rung, then the next.

‘Ols, please be careful!’ Caro said, her voice irritating him now.

‘I am being sodding careful, OK?’

Placing his hands against the rough brick wall for balance, he slowly raised his body up, inches at a time, until he was able to grab the sill with its flaking white paint. But as his fingers gripped the wood it crumbled like papier mâché.

‘Jesus!’ he cried out, almost toppling over backwards.

‘Ollie!’ Caro screamed.

He just managed to grab the top of the ladder with one hand, and then leaned forward, steadying himself, gulping air.

‘Come down!’ she commanded. ‘Come down, we’ll get one of the builders to go up – this evening if we can.’

Ollie hesitated. But his head was swimming again, he realized. This was not smart. Slowly and very carefully, he descended. When he climbed off the last rung, relieved to have his feet back on terra firma, he was sweating heavily.

Caro looked at him, anxiously. ‘Are you feeling OK?’

‘Yes,’ he fibbed. His heart was pounding and, strangely, he had toothache. The garden seemed to be swaying in front of his eyes, as if he had just stepped off a boat and hadn’t yet got back his equilibrium. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand; his T-shirt beneath his jumper felt sodden. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You’ve gone a horrible colour.’

‘Really, I’m fine, darling. I’ll phone Bryan Barker and see if he can get someone over right now.’

With her help, he lowered the ladder then carried it back and laid it down with the other, shorter ladders. When he stood back up, he was again panting, his heart racing. He was coming down with a bug, he realized. Flu. But he had no time for that.

‘You don’t look right, Ols,’ Caro said.

‘Ley lines,’ he replied. ‘I’ll go and call Bryan and then check them out on my computer.’

‘I’ll come up and show you the sites I’ve been looking at,’ she said, still staring at him, concerned.

He climbed up the two flights of stairs to his office, hauling himself on the handrail much of the way, then had to stop for a moment when he entered the room to get his breath back.

‘You should go to bed,’ Caro said. ‘You need to be right for tomorrow evening.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, sitting down in front of his screen. ‘I’m fine. I feel like bashing that wall down, but with a houseful of kids we can’t do that. I don’t want to freak them out.’

Barker’s phone went to voicemail and he left a message, asking him to call back urgently.

They spent the next ten minutes scanning and studying segments of websites on ley lines. Then Caro looked at her watch. ‘I’d better go down and see to lunch.’ She looked at him anxiously once more. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t be in bed?’

He stood up and put his arms round her, holding her tightly. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Really. I guess I’m just all wound up about everything.’

‘That makes two of us,’ she said. ‘And we’re both going to be like this until we find out just who the hell else we’re sharing this house with.’

‘We will,’ he said. ‘And we’ll get rid of any unwanted guest we have, OK? The vicar and this Minister of Deliverance, Benedict Cutler, will sort it out tomorrow. They will, darling.’

She smiled, thinly. ‘I hope so.’

‘We
will
get this sorted out,’ he said, adamantly. ‘I promise you.’

She kissed him on the forehead then went out of the room and headed downstairs. He sat back down, turned to the computer screen, and froze. There was another message in large black letters.

IN YOUR FUCKING DREAMS.

50

Sunday, 20 September

As he stared, rooted to the spot, feeling as if his stomach had turned into a block of ice, the words faded. An instant later there was a tearing sound above him like someone ripping up a sheet of stiff paper or cardboard.

His eyes shot to the ceiling. A spider’s web of cracks was appearing, spreading out in front of his eyes. Moments later, a small chunk of plaster, accompanied by a shower of dust, fell down on his head and on to the keyboard.

He looked up again, shivers rippling through him, at the tiny area of exposed rafter.

As suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The cracks did not grow any bigger. No more dust fell.

He stared up again, shaking uncontrollably, thinking, thinking, thinking.

Jesus, what the hell was happening?

He went down to the first-floor landing, where he could smell the aroma of roasting meat from the kitchen and hear the music pounding out of Jade’s room, then walked along to the yellow room, and back into the en-suite bathroom. He looked at the old-fashioned enamel bathtub, with brown stains below the big old taps and around the plughole. Then he stared at the tiled walls. He went through into the blue room next door, and over to the wall which should adjoin the bathroom, and rapped hard on it, to see if it was hollow.

But it was solid.

What the hell was behind that tiny window? What room? Who was in there?