Sarah Rayne - House of the Lost

When he got home his father was away on one of his mysterious trips. Things happened like that, Matthew had often noticed it. You talked about something or you remembered something, and there it was. But it wasn’t until he was going up to his bedroom to do his homework that he realized the house was sliding down into its frozen silence. His heart gave a thump of fear, and although he tried to tell himself it was just the dark afternoon – it was November and bitterly cold – he knew, deep down, the men were here because the house’s dark stillness was unmistakable. He ran the rest of the way up the stairs and shut his bedroom door with a bang. Through the main window he could see the crouching shape of the Black House, dark and ugly and remote, but there was a little side window that looked down into the lane that led to this house. Summoning all his courage he looked out of this window and fear closed over him.

The men were here. They had driven along the lane and parked their big noisy car, and they were sitting in it looking at the house. The car had bulbous headlights like frog’s eyes that would be able to swivel round and find you no matter where you hid. There were three men – they never came singly, there were usually three of them and quite often four. Matthew had the feeling they were talking to one another about what they would do and say when they got inside the house. As he watched, they got out and walked up to the door, their shoes rapping out on the ground like claws. They were always very smartly dressed. Wilma once said it was as well not to ask where they got the money to dress so smartly, then clapped a fat hand over her mouth as if to push the words back in before anyone could hear them.

The men hardly ever knocked because Wilma always heard their car pull up and panted up from the kitchen to let them in so they would not be kept waiting. Once she had not heard them and they had just walked in and gone across the hall and opened the study door without waiting to be invited. Matthew hated this. In the world he would one day escape to it would be possible to lock doors and not open them if you did not want to, no matter who knocked.

The men did not go into the study today, as if they knew Matthew’s father was not there. They came up the stairs – up the first set of stairs and then up the little twisty stair that led to Matthew’s own room. This had never happened before and Matthew turned to his bedroom door in panic, listening to the cloppety-clopping steps on the bare oak. It sounded as if there were two of them. They would not come in here of course: they would not even know he was in the house… They would know, though. They knew everything that went on and they would know what time school ended and how long it took the children to get back to their various homes.

He glanced round the room then darted across to the cupboard behind his bed and squeezed inside it. If the men opened the door they would just see a dark room with no one there and they might go away. It was not a proper cupboard, more a gap between the wall and the roof, and it was hot with a stuffy smell from the old wood. Matthew would normally be worried about spiders or beetles, but at the moment he would rather face a hundred spiders than the men. Would they come in here – would they? And if they did, what would they do?

The footsteps were coming along the landing and fear came up all over again. Matthew huddled as far back as possible, trying not to make any sound. Mara said if you prayed really hard God always helped you; Sister Teresa at school had told them that. So Matthew tried to pray in his head but the words jumbled themselves up and God could not have heard or not have understood, because the bedroom door was opening and the men were stepping inside.

They switched on the light – it came into the cupboard through the cracks in the cupboard door – and moved round the room. Matthew, hardly daring to breathe, thought they were looking at his books which were stacked on the windowsill and leafing through the drawings he had left on the table. Through the terror he was aware of a sudden surge of anger because how dared they look at his things, his most private paintings he did not show anyone, not even his father or Mara.

Without any warning the cupboard door was pulled open and one of the men stood looking down at him, starting to smile. This was the most frightening thing yet: Mara always said the men’s smiles would be the worst part – they would have teeth like the jagged-edged saws Wilma’s cousin used when he mended people’s windowsills or roofs. The man’s teeth were not like the jagged saw, but the smile was still frightening.

He said, ‘Matthew.’ He did not make it a question, he made it a statement as if he knew quite well who Matthew was. ‘Come out of there. There’s no need to hide. We aren’t going to hurt you. We just want to talk to you.’

They stood in the centre of the room and although there were only two of them they seemed to fill up all the space.

They gestured to him to sit on the edge of the bed and talked to him. They did not shout or make their voices sharp in the way grown-ups and teachers at school sometimes did, but their voices were so cold that if you had been able to see their words, they would have looked like icicles, white and cold, with horrid sneering faces in the ice and long, dripping-icicle fingernails like pictures of Jack Frost.

At first Matthew did not understand what they wanted. Then he thought he sort of understood but he could not see the point. It sounded as if they wanted him to listen and watch everything that went on in the village and tell them about it every time they came to this house.

‘Nothing much happens here,’ he said. ‘Hardly ever. Nothing worth telling. It’s—’ He had been going to say it was a boring place, but that might sound rude so he said, ‘It’s very quiet.’ Greatly daring, he added, ‘It’s why my father likes living here. He likes to be quiet for his work.’

The men glanced at one another, then the one Matthew thought of as the leader said, ‘We like quiet places as well, Matthew. But we need to know about the people who live here, you see. That’s the law.’

Matthew did not really understand about laws, but he knew the men could march into houses without being asked and that they could rap out questions in their icicle-voices and people had to answer them.

‘Most of all,’ said the man, and now there was a tiny change in his voice, so tiny that Matthew thought if he had not been listening extra-specially hard he would not have noticed it, ‘most of all we need to know about your father.’

When the man said this, Matthew realized they were not really interested in the village at all: they were only interested in his father. This was starting to be very scary indeed. Trying hard to keep his voice smooth and ordinary, he said, ‘What do you mean? What do you need to know about him?’

‘Oh, about his writing.’

‘He writes books,’ said Matthew, feeling on safer ground. ‘He always says there isn’t much to say about it. You just sit down and do it, that’s what he says.’

‘We know about the books. But he writes other things as well, doesn’t he?’ said the man and moved nearer. ‘Things he sends to other countries.’

‘Articles,’ said the other one. ‘You know what articles are, don’t you, Matthew?’

‘Um, things in newspapers. Yes, he writes stuff for newspapers sometimes.’ It surely could not hurt to say this. It was something his father occasionally joked about, saying the newspaper work did not provide their bread and butter, but did provide a bit of jam to spread on the bread.

‘It’s the newspaper articles we’re interested in,’ said the first man.

‘But you could read them, couldn’t you?’ said Matthew, puzzled. ‘You’d just have to buy a newspaper. None of it’s secret or anything.’