Sarah Rayne - House of the Lost

And then, on the crest of this thought, as clear as lightning against a night sky, the name came scudding into his mind. Matthew.

Matthew. There was a moment when Theo thought – Matthew, yes, of course, that’s who he is, I should have realized right away! He did not think he knew any Matthews but he liked the name. Matthew. Yes, it was exactly right. He pressed the Save key at the end of the scene where Matthew was drawing master-spy faces on his troublesome arithmetic lesson, and ended the paragraph with a description of how Matthew suddenly looked up from his drawing and listened for the footsteps. Matthew’s bedroom curtains were open and for a moment Theo caught a fleeting glimpse of what lay beyond that window – there was a dark garden with an uneven brick wall, and on the horizon was the fearsome Black House which Matthew and the small school friend seemed to fear so much. But what else was beyond that wall? Was it the fields – those fields Theo himself saw from the windows of this house? Was it even possible that the Black House was St Luke’s Convent? He got up to stare through the windows, but the flickering image had already vanished, and in any case it was too dark to see anything, so he closed the curtains, and went back to the table, switching on the small lamp, grateful for the warm pool of light it cast.

He had intended to close the chapter with Matthew’s gradual realization that the footsteps were approaching, which should make for a nicely tense ending. But the paragraph did not go that way and, instead, Theo found himself describing how there was someone Matthew feared even more than the men. This was the person who gave the men their orders. It was not another man who did this, though, it was a woman.

No one Matthew knew had ever seen this woman, but everyone knew how powerful she was. She was beautiful but evil and cruel, and if people did not do what she said, she had them thrown in prison. The younger children said she was like somebody from an old fairytale – the Snow Queen or the wicked stepmother – and if she caught you she would put you in a cage or bake you in the oven and eat you up. Matthew knew this was silly because people did not eat children, but all the same, he hoped he never met her.

Theo typed all this without pausing, then broke off to read it with growing puzzlement. He had not envisaged an evil beauty as being part of this strange story, and even if he had intended to create such a character he certainly would not have added that touch about the Snow Queen or the oven – it gave a Gothic flavour to the whole thing, and Theo’s work had never been remotely Gothic. But he knew this female very well indeed; he even knew her name. She was called Annaleise.

He frowned, and returned to the footsteps. At one moment there was an ordinary quietness inside Matthew’s house – Theo thought that for all the old timber creakings and sighings it was rather a silent house for most of the time – and then the next moment the footsteps began. At first they were faint and distant like a tap dripping or a thin drum skin softly vibrating, but then they grew louder and stronger. Matthew, seated at the ramshackle little desk in his bedroom, looked up, his eyes dilating with fear…

It was at this point Theo realized the sounds were no longer solely in his story – they were real sounds and were coming from just outside. He listened intently but there was nothing. You really are taking me over, Matthew, he thought, but as he prepared to go on typing the sounds came again. Soft light crunches – exactly as if someone was walking along the gravel path that wound down to the old boathouse. There could be no mistake: someone was outside. He pressed the Save key so the Snow Queen would not be lost, reached across to switch off the table lamp, and sat absolutely still in the faint glimmer from the monitor. The footsteps had stopped. Had the walker seen the light go out and paused? Perhaps it was an animal. A fox, maybe. It was then that a new sound sent prickles of fear scudding across his skin.

Someone tapped, very lightly, on the French window. Three light measured taps. Someone must be standing just outside them. Theo waited in the darkened room, aware of his heart thumping erratically. After a moment the tapping came a second time, lightly and eerily. Tap-tap-tap. Almost as if someone was tapping out Morse code. Let-me-in. Or was it, Come-out-side.

Theo stared at the curtained window, fighting for calm, trying to decide what to do. Was someone really standing there? Mightn’t it be a branch brushing against the glass? There was even the possibility that it was a perfectly ordinary caller – it was only six p.m., for goodness’ sake, Theo had heard St Luke’s chime the hour. But there were no other houses in this lane, and would an innocent visitor really tap so furtively on a window? Wouldn’t he or she go openly up to the front door and cheerfully ply the knocker?

It might be a prowling journalist, perhaps a local reporter, an embryo paparazzo who had kept an ear to the ground and learned that Theo had inherited the house and was spending the winter here. If that was the case, he would deal very sharply indeed with the prowler.

He got up slowly from the table, and walked cautiously across to the windows. A faint draught of cold night air came in from round the frames. Theo listened for a moment, then reached up to draw the curtains back.

A face – a pale face that looked as if it was framed in some kind of dark scarf or hood – was looking in at him.

Theo gasped and felt his heart leap into his throat, but in the same instant realized he was seeing his own reflection in the window. It was the thick glass that made it look slightly ghostlike and the darkness of the gardens beyond that had twisted the eerie hood-like shape round it.

Nothing moved in the darkness. The tapping must have been a branch or an animal or even just the wind. In any case, Theo was blowed if he was going to yomp through the unlit lonely gardens in search of an intruder – especially since he was living in a house whose owner had been recently murdered, with the murderer still at large. What he would do was make a careful check of all the locks and bolts in the house to make certain no one could get in, and keep his mobile phone near. He picked up the poker from the fireplace, just in case, and, switching the lamp back on, he set off.

Fenn House had started life as a relatively modest, rather old-fashioned house, but Charmery’s parents had built on to it after buying it and the extension did not completely line up with the original structure, so there were several short, rather dim, passages linking the old to the new. The house was not entirely silent, in the way old houses never were entirely silent, but even though it was ten years since Theo had been at Fenn, its sounds were as familiar as ever. He had no idea what he would do if he really did encounter someone hiding in the house because although the poker made him feel reasonably brave, he was not sure if he could actually use it.

But Fenn’s ground floor was innocent of intruders, and feeling slightly more confident, he crossed the hall to check the first floor. The stairs were wide and shallow, uncarpeted because Charmery’s mother, Helen, had loved the mellow dark grain of the wood. They creaked loudly, as they always had, and halfway up they twisted round sharply, so there was a view through the balustrades to the upper landing. As Theo reached this twist, there was a blur of movement above him, as if someone had whisked out of sight into one of the bedrooms. He stood still, unsure whether it had been a trick of the light, his heart racing. Then he took a firmer grip on the poker and forced himself to go up the remaining stairs. When he reached the top, he looked very deliberately down the corridor.