Peter James - The House on Cold Hill

‘Go back to sleep.’ She stroked his face tenderly.

He lay for some moments breathing deeply, too scared to close his eyes in case he returned to the dream. His whole body felt heavy, as if gravity was pulling him down deep into the mattress.

Slowly he felt himself drifting away. Lying on a raft on an ocean with Caro beside him, beneath clear blue sky and the yellow disc of the sun. ‘So many windows, so many.’

‘Lots.’

She was pointing up at the sky. ‘So many to count.’

The raft began to rock in the gentle swell. Then the sky darkened and the swell deepened, pitching them up and down, rocking the raft so much they were struggling to cling to it.

Peep... peep... peep...

The alarm was sounding. He opened his eyes, sleepily, blinking. The room was filled with early-morning light. But something was wrong. Where was he? Of course, it was coming back to him now. Of course, in the attic bedroom. But even so, something else was wrong.

Peep... peep... peep...

He suddenly remembered that there had been a power cut in the night, hadn’t there? Zeroing the dials on the clock? Shit, what was the time? He reached a hand down to the clock to hit the snooze button, to give him another ten minutes of sleep, but all it hit was the wall. Frowning, he realized he was lying right beside the wall. The concentric circle pattern of the stained Anaglypta wallpaper was inches in front of his eyes.

Where the hell was his clock radio?

Still befuddled by sleep, he remembered the figure standing by the bed, in his dream. Smoking a cigar.

Had they been burgled in their sleep?

Then he heard Caro’s voice, sounding very disturbed.

‘Ollie?’

‘Yurrr.’

‘Ollie. What — what — what the hell’s happened?’

‘Wasshappened?’ he said.

‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ She dug a finger hard into his back.

‘What?’

‘Look!’ There was real terror in her voice.

‘Look at what?’

‘Look out of the sodding window!’

He stared at the end of the bed, where the window was. Except there was no window.

Slowly, dimly, his memory put things into order. They were up in the attic because their bedroom ceiling had collapsed from the flooding. The window, which had no curtains, had been just beyond the foot of the bed when they had gone to sleep.

Now all he could see instead was the wall to the landing, and the closed door beside it.

He frowned.

The memory was returning. They’d made love with a crazy, urgent passion, last night. Had they slept at the wrong end of the bed?

He sat up with a start and cracked his head against two upright bars of the iron bedstead.

‘Ollie,’ Caro said, her voice trembling. ‘Ollie, what the hell’s happened?’

Clarity was returning. A terrible clarity. And with it the realization.

The bed.

The bed had moved during the night.

It had rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

Shaking, Ollie and Caro stood, naked, beside the bed.

‘Are we going mad?’ she said.

He lifted each corner of the mattress in turn and stared down at the corroded nuts securing the frame to the legs. He tried to turn each one with his fingers but none of the four of them would budge.

‘It’s just not possible, Ollie,’ she said. ‘It’s not possible.’

He could hear the tremor of terror in her voice. He looked up at the ceiling, around at the walls, then up again, his brain a vortex of confused thoughts. ‘Are we sodding dreaming?’

‘No, no, we are very definitely not dreaming.’

The clock radio was on the floor, where he had left it last night. The dial said 6.42 a.m. Somehow it had reset itself. The room seemed to tilt sideways, suddenly, and he had to steady himself against the side of the bed to prevent himself from falling over. He looked at his wife, her eyes wide, her face pale with confusion and fear, then he pulled on his jeans and T-shirt.

‘I’ll be back in a sec.’

He opened the door.

‘I’m not staying in this room alone, wait for me.’ She tugged on her jeans and sweatshirt, and followed him as he padded, barefoot, down the narrow wooden treads of the steep staircase.

‘Go and make sure Jade’s awake, darling,’ he said, as they reached the first-floor landing.

She nodded and headed, as if in a trance, along towards Jade’s room.

Ollie went down into the atrium and hurried through the kitchen to the scullery, where he kept his toolbox. Then he lugged it back up to the attic, took out an adjustable spanner, lifted up a corner of the mattress, and tried to move the corroded nut with the tool. It would not budge.

He put all his strength into it and levered the spanner again. With a protesting groan, the nut moved a fraction of an inch.

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ Caro asked, suddenly by his side again. ‘Is it?’

Ollie tried again. He tried with each of the four nuts in turn. ‘No. No, it’s not.’

‘A bed can’t rotate, Ollie. What’s going on, tell me? Is this some kind of a fucking joke? Tell me if it is because I’m really not finding it funny. Is this your idea of some stupid game to try to spook me out?’

He looked up at her. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? Oh sure, I got up in the middle of the night, unscrewed our bed without waking you up and reassembled it in the opposite direction. You really think that, Caro?’

‘Do you have a better explanation?’

‘There has to be one.’ He looked up at the ceiling. Then at the walls, then down at the bed, trying to do the maths. The geometry.

Tears began trickling down Caro’s cheeks. He stood up and held her tightly in his arms. ‘Look, let’s think about this rationally.’

‘That’s what I’m doing, Ollie, I’m thinking about this rationally.’ She was breathing in deep, sobbing gulps. ‘I’m thinking fucking rationally. I’m thinking this whole fucking house is cursed.’

‘I don’t believe in curses.’

‘No? Well maybe you’d better start.’

He held her tightly again. ‘Come on, let’s get showered and have breakfast and we’ll try to think this through.’

‘It’s that bloody woman!’ she blurted.

‘What woman?’

She calmed down a little, and was silent for some moments. Then she said, ‘I think we have a ghost.’

‘A ghost?’

‘I didn’t want to say anything, in case you thought I was going nuts. But I’ve seen something.’

‘What have you seen?’

‘The morning after we moved in, you’d gone downstairs and I was sitting at my dressing table putting on my make-up. I saw a woman — a sort of old woman with a pinched face — standing right behind me. I turned round and there was nothing there. I thought it was my imagination. Then I saw her again a few days later. Then on Sunday I saw her in the atrium, sort of gliding across it.’

‘Can you describe her?’

Caro described the woman. Ollie realized it was exactly the same description her mother had given him.

‘I’ve seen her too, darling,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything to you, because I didn’t want to spook you out.’

‘How fucking great is this? We’ve moved into our dream home and it has a sodding ghost.’

‘There was an article I read in the paper about ghosts, which said that sometimes, when people move into an old house, it activates something there. Some memory of a past resident. But it all settles down after a while.’

‘I don’t call turning our bed round in the middle of the night settling down, do you?’

‘There has to be a rational explanation for what happened last night,’ he said. ‘There has to be.’