Sarah Rayne - House of the Lost

He went blindly out of the room.

After he had put together a makeshift meal and eaten it, he began to feel better. He carried his laptop into the dining room and set it down on the table. He could not decide whether to put Charmery’s portrait completely out of sight, but to shut it in a drawer or cupboard seemed like shutting her in her coffin all over again. He had dreamed about Charmery’s coffin for weeks after the funeral. It had been smothered in roses – two of the aunts had sent Charmian roses because originally she had been christened Charmian Marie, although Theo did not think anyone had ever called her that.

He surveyed the room, and thought he would work at the dining table, facing the French windows. In those long-ago summers, these windows always stood open to the gardens; now they were closed and bolted and the gardens were wreathed in river mist.

Theo stood at the window for a moment, looking towards the smoky outline of the old boathouse. Charmery’s death house. He would have to go inside it at some point, but he could not face it yet. He still had dreams of how her beautiful face must have looked when she was found there, bloated and grotesque, her hair matted with river weed. He frowned, pushed the image away with an effort, and switched on the laptop.

Reading the chapter he had been working on during the summer he was not knocked out by it, although neither was he disgusted. It was not mind-scaldingly brilliant; it would not set literary-award ceremonies alight or cause film directors to fall over their feet in their haste to offer six-figure sums for the film rights, but it was not bad. He could polish it and make it shine a bit.

He opened a new document, typed Chapter Five at the top, and plunged into the world he had been working to create. The main storyline centred on a young man trying to cope with the aftermath of his experiences in the Iraq war. Theo intended it to be modern and biting: a self-examination by the central character, with flashbacks to the war-torn Iraqi cities and a few excursions into the difficulties the character had with renewing his relationships.

‘Don’t neglect to put in a bit of bonking,’ his agent had said on reading Theo’s outline of the plot. ‘I don’t mean heaving and grunting. Classy bonking.’

‘Can you have classy bonking?’ Theo had demanded.

‘I can,’ said his agent, with the grin that made her look like a patrician cat.

It was four months since he had been able to write anything, and he had expected to find that re-entering the story with the nightmare-ridden ex-paratrooper and the searing bomb-explosion flashbacks and the classy bonking in deference to his irrepressible agent, would be difficult. What he had not expected, however, was for a whole new story to thrust its way into his mind and find its way onto the computer screen; nor had he expected to type several pages of this new and unknown story almost without realizing it.

But when he leaned back from the table-top and reached for his drink, there it was. A totally new plot, apparently told from the point of view of a child. A child who lived in a dark remote house, and who had some nameless menace threatening him. A child whose only escape was into imaginary worlds of his own creating.

If one of Matthew’s painted worlds ever did turn out to be real, he would like it to be the cool green-field one, with silvery rivers and nice houses with flower gardens. In that world, the people were rich and happy; they could go into the towns and buy whatever they wanted in the big shops. Very occasionally his father talked about a place like that, although Matthew did not know if it was somewhere Father had once lived, or just somewhere he had read about.

Occasionally Father went away for a night or two, returning with a sick white look, with dark shadows under his eyes. Wilma said it was nothing to worry about; it would be some business matter. ‘Gentlemen have to deal with business matters, and he’ll be back late tonight or early tomorrow. Best not to talk about it though, not to anyone.’ She did not look up from the stove where she was cooking supper when she said this, but when she said it was best not to talk about it, her voice changed, and Matthew instantly began to worry that the place his father went to was the Black House.

The Black House was the most frightening place in the world. If anyone ever said its name, people looked uneasy and glanced over their shoulders as if afraid of being overheard. It stood a little way out of the village – it might be about half an hour’s walk always supposing anyone had ever wanted to walk to it – and it was at the end of a narrow lane with thick old trees growing up all round it. You could not see it from the road, but Matthew could see it from his bedroom at the top of the house. The windows looked out across huge expanses of open countryside, and he could see the Black House, which was like a smudgy bruise on the horizon.

Sometimes he sat on the window seat before going to bed, resting his chin on his hand, staring at this horrid crouching silhouette, seeing the occasional light glinting in its depths, wondering what kind of people lived there and made those lights. The house got into his dreams occasionally, and he would find himself wandering through dreadful stone corridors with people locked away in cells, crying and beating on the bars to get out.

Matthew’s friend Mara knew about the Black House and she knew about the cold-eyed men as well. She sometimes talked about the men when she and Matthew walked to school, speaking quietly, partly so no one would hear but also because her small brother walked to school with them and she did not want to frighten him.

Mara thought the cold-eyed men might live in the Black House but Matthew was not so sure. It was most likely empty, he said, trying not to remember the pinpoints of light he sometimes saw from his window.

‘But there are gates,’ said Mara, stubbornly. ‘Huge gates with padlocks, and you wouldn’t have gates and padlocks unless you had secrets to hide.’

‘How do you know there are gates? I’ll bet you’ve never even been there.’

‘My grandmother said so. She’s lived here all her life and she knows everything about this place. She says there are a lot of secrets here.’

‘What kind of secrets?’

Mara glanced back at her brother and lowered her voice. ‘Things people don’t want to be known. Things about your father,’ she said, and Matthew forgot about not letting Mara’s brother hear them and stopped in the middle of the path and stared at her.

‘What things about my father? What d’you mean?’

But Mara was already looking frightened and walked on very fast. Matthew almost had to run to keep up with her.

‘It’s only that people sometimes say things,’ she said. ‘That there’s a secret. Only it’s better not to talk about it, that’s what they say.’

‘A secret about my father?’ Matthew’s heart skipped a beat. It’s about him going away and coming back looking ill and dark-eyed, he thought. That’s what she means.

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Mara, and pushed her small brother into the infants’ part of the school building, then dived into the girls’ cloakroom, banging the door.

Most of Mara’s secrets came from her grandmother’s stories and Matthew did not pay much attention to them, but he wanted to know what people said about his father so he shouted through the cloakroom door for her to come out and tell him. But she would not, and the bell went for lessons so in the end Matthew went off to his own classroom where it turned out to be the day for arithmetic which he hated.