John Harwood: The Ghost Writer

She didn't even come to Iris's funeral. I had the locks changed so she couldn't get in. I was staying with friends in Highgate, coming back here to pack when I could face it. I was afraid of her, I even made a will yesterday, hut I didn't tell

The pencil just broke again. Seven matches left.

Nobody knows I'm here. Except Filly. I hid this and my diary in the study where I thought she wouldn't find them again-I wanted to leave them behind but I couldn't. I came out of the study and saw her coming up the stairs with a carving knife in her hand. She smiled when she saw me.

I threw the diary at her and ran, but she didn't follow. If only I'd kept going. Instead I stopped to listen, and got caught in the most terrifying game of hide-and-seek. I slipped the story down the front of my blouse to protect me from the knife. The floorboards kept giving me away, but Filly never made a sound. I knew she was lying in wait. In the end I went down the front stairs to the first floor, making sure I trod on the boards that creak, and then crept through to the back stairs and dawn to the courtyard door. I managed the bolts quietly but the lock

Hours later-I've tried everything I can think of and I can't get out. It's so cold down here. I could burn the rest of Grandmama's story but it would only last a minute or two. I'll hide the pages I've written on in case

The last of the candle's going

Dear God help me

Anne had been braver than me. Far braver. I still had the last of the torch, and a full box of matches. My second candle was more than half gone, and I hadn't once dared sit in the dark. It would swallow me soon enough. Like Anne I had given up scraping at the granite-hard timber; I wondered whether she had sat where I was sitting, huddled on the top step with her back against the door. I was shivering in August; she must have frozen to the bone. Perhaps she had died of cold. It was supposed to be painless at the end. Better than radiation poisoning. You felt warmth stealing over you, and a great desire to sleep, and in the last moments of consciousness you might see brightly coloured visions, blossom and hedgerow and birds singing when you were actually freezing to death on the ice. One of the Antarctic explorers had written about it. Though he couldn't have died that time. I thought of the bottle of sleeping tablets beside my bed in the hotel room and wished I'd brought them with me. I wished they had caught Phyllis May Hatherley and hanged her. Though she was already pregnant by then; they would have had to wait until Gerard Hugh Montfort was born. He at least might have survived if they had.

I thought of Phyllis coming back to dispose of Anne's body. If I was going to die here I wanted to die before the last candle dripped away to nothing and the whispering began again.

I had set the candle about half-way down the steps. The flame burned steadily, motionless except for the faint pulsing of the shadow around the wick. Darkness lurked behind the wreckage of the shelves, biding its time.

I could burn the shelves, I thought. Pull the rest off the wall, build a fire in the middle of the floor and burn them one at a time. It would hold off the darkness for at least another hour, maybe several. If I kept it low there should be enough air to breathe. And if enough smoke got past the door, there was a very faint chance that someone might see it and call the fire brigade.

The door was made of wood too. I could build my fire at the top of the steps… but if it got into the floorboards directly above the door, the whole house could go up, and me with it. Horrible but quick; I'd probably suffocate before I burned. No water to control the fire… but I could empty those damp sandbags and use them as beaters.

Breaking up the shelves and building a pyramid of fragments at the base of the door was easy enough; the hard part was getting it to burn. The wood was too damp to catch. After twenty matches had yielded only faint yellow flames that crawled and turned blue and died, I was beginning to panic again. Two sheets of newspaper would have set the whole lot blazing, but I had no paper to burn.

Except ten sheets of typescript, proof-the only decisive proof-that my mother had murdered her sister.

The second candle was almost gone. It had burned much faster while I was trampling pieces of shelving. If I get out of here, I promised Anne, the whole world will know what happened to you, proof or no proof. I arranged five sheets, loosely crumpled, at the centre of the pyramid and got the other five ready to feed in.

The whole cellar lit up for a few seconds; the heaped wood caught and hissed and died with the blazing paper. I added another sheet, then two more in quick succession. The wood flared again and dwindled; now the flames had a small hold, but they were turning ominously blue as I fed in the last two sheets of typescript. The fire blazed and dimmed for a third time, but now the wood was crackling and catching and licking at the scarred planking. Fragments of Anne's last message floated around me, glowing and fading and sinking to the stones below.

For a couple of minutes, the fire seemed docile enough. The burning patch on the back of the door crept upwards. I was beginning to cough, but the draught was clearing the smoke and bringing up fresh air for me to breathe. Small tongues of flame began to lick over the edge of the stone lintel at the joist and floorboards above. I beat at them with the sack, and the fire leapt back at me. Smoke burned my throat. I turned to retreat, missed my footing and fell in a burst of pure white light that exploded inside my head and went sailing away into the dark.

THE PAIN CAME FIRST, THEN THE HEAD IT WAS POUNDING in. Throat and lungs, a shoulder, an elbow and a hip materialised, burning, throbbing and stinging in chorus. Somebody was moaning in the darkness nearby. Me. I began to cough instead. Slow dripping sounds; a sour, acrid reek of ash. I was lying in a pool of water.

The fire brigade had arrived in time. But where were they? Apart from the drip drip drip of water, the cellar was deathly still. At least I hoped it was water I was lying in, and not my own blood. I discovered I could move, and then prop myself in the angle between two walls. I coughed for several agonising minutes. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.

How long had I been unconscious? Had thé firemen simply not seen me lying below the steps? I felt in my trouser pocket for the matches, and remembered putting the box down on the top step, along with the torch. I stood up, wincing, and felt along the wall to my left until I found the edge of the steps.

As I began to feel my way upward, it seemed to me that a rectangular patch of the darkness above was fractionally paler, an impression that strengthened step by step until a gleam of silvery light appeared in the distance. Moonlight at the top of the basement stairs. The door must have burned right through.

I felt around for the torch, but couldn't find it. There was surprisingly little debris on the steps; the floorboards overhead seemed quite intact. I stepped into the tunnel, put out a hand to steady myself, and the door rattled against its hook. My foot struck something metal that went clanging and clattering across the flagstones. A bucket. There was water on the tunnel floor.

Definitely not the fire brigade. Someone had opened the cellar door within seconds of my fall and flung a bucket of water over the blaze on the steps. Someone who was already in the tunnel when I lit the fire. Listening-for how long?-to my frenzied efforts to escape.

Beneath the distant gleam from the landing, the tunnel was in darkness. Whoever-or whatever-had let me out could be waiting in the black cavern of the laundry. Where perhaps it had been waiting when I first came down here. I backed against the end wall and crouched down. If anything moved, I should see it against the band of moonlight.