Ann Troup - The Forgotten Room - a gripping, chilling thriller that will have you hooked

She pondered this a while as she re-explored the house, taking her time on this occasion, not prying where she’d been told not to but soaking the whole place up and making peace with it in her mind. Weeks of being afraid of a building were not an item on her agenda and she refused to allow the atmosphere of the place to get any further under her skin. She had suffered enough cowed defeat lately; there was no way she was going to let a pile of bricks and mortar rattle her, no way on earth. If she and the house were going to engage in a battle of wills over whose personality was going to win, Maura was going in all guns blazing. Its shadows were just shadows, its creaks and moans just its twisted old bones settling, its air of impending menace just her imagination running away with her. Its residents? Just an elderly, frail man in need of her help and a slightly bonkers housekeeper who seemed to have learned her people skills from the Mrs Danvers school of charm. Despite that, Maura had quite taken to Cheryl, even if it was with the utmost caution.

‘Get a grip, Maura,’ she said to the empty kitchen. ‘You’re getting far too cynical and curmudgeonly. Make yourself a cup of decent tea and crack on with it, kid. You’re moving on, remember?’

The statement was as hollow as the echo in the empty room and, despite her bravado, Maura couldn’t stand it. There was a radio standing on the kitchen counter – old and grubby, but functional. She switched it on and cranked up the volume a couple of notches, smiling at the irony of the song that was playing. “I Put a Spell on You…”

And now you’re mine…

Chapter Three

Maura lay in her bed clutching the camphor- and lavender-scented sheets to her chin and listened – it was a beautifully clichéd dark and stormy night, one that rattled the windows in their frames and caused draughts to lick across the skin in unseen malevolent caresses. For fear he’d go on a midnight wander, get outside and blow away like some pyjama-wearing woebegone Mary Poppins, she had even resorted to putting the chain on Gordon’s door. She’d hated doing it – she was supposed to be his nurse, not his keeper.

The only thing in the house that hadn’t felt it necessary to make its presence felt that night by rattling, creaking, clanking (or bizarrely pinging) was the chain on Gordon’s door. He seemed to be sleeping soundly, which wasn’t surprising given the heap of pills she’d been obliged to pile into him. In fact, he’d been unexpectedly compliant when she’d taken in his cocoa, sat with him and helped him to prepare for bed. He hadn’t even flinched when she’d cleaned the rug with white vinegar to neutralise the smell of pee, or batted an eyelid when she’d found the major source of the stench – the several vases that had been used as impromptu receptacles for Gordon’s urinary urges. Maura was sure that Moorcroft, Crown Derby and Minton had not intended their delicate and beautiful wares to be used for such purposes. Had they not been worth a small fortune she might have thrown them in the bin, but instead she’d borrowed Cheryl’s rubber gloves and had scoured them clean while praying she wouldn’t ruin them.

Sleep proved elusive and all she had done was toss and turn on the lumpy mattress, trying to find the sweet spot. The camphor was intrusive too, a particularly vile smell reminiscent of frugal old ladies and the bad old days. It reminded her of staying with her grandmother when she was little, of secondhand shoes and hand-me-down clothes, of having her face washed with carbolic soap and being expected to clear her plate because people were starving in Africa. It reminded her of the instruction to make do and mend, a philosophy she felt she was being forced to live by. How did you make do with nothing and mend a broken spirit? More to the point, how did you begin in a house that was so depressing it seemed to suck the joy out of everything?

Cheryl had said that parts of the place were dangerous, and Maura had assumed rotten boards and woodworm-savaged beams, but as she lay beneath the pungent sheets she began to wonder if the danger wasn’t from something else entirely – the bad that Gordon had been so eager to tell her about. The look of the place made it feel as if no Henderson, in the history of Hendersons, had brought a good intention to the place. It seemed to have been pieced together with menace and meanness – no one period predominated, no one style. Just a building stitched together by time, passing fashions and a family who had been custodians out of habit and grudging obligation rather than pride and heritage. All speculation on Maura’s part, of course, but Gordon was hemmed in a single room full of filth and clutter, and she had to contend with a mothball-sodden bed and a ceiling that was so creaky it seemed as if it would cave in at any moment. It was as if the house was trying to corner them both.

Why on earth hadn’t they sold up and left? Why stay in a place that exuded such misery?

They were good questions, ones she could apply to herself – why had she stayed with Richard when it had been patently clear he was a self-serving, booze-dependent dickhead? Why hadn’t she thrown him out the moment she’d caught him in bed with her sister? Why, after she finally had thrown him out, had she pitied him, looked after him and cried when he finally drank himself to death?

Sometimes there were no answers, or none she wanted to face. Maybe it was the same for Gordon Henderson and Estelle Hall; there were just things they didn’t want to deal with.

Annoyed with herself for being maudlin, she threw off the sheets and moved towards the window to watch the storm play out. The lights of the estate surrounded the Grange, but at a distance, like the lit torches of an angry mob encamped and holding the house under siege. It felt so lonely and she wondered if that was another reason Gordon had taken to his clutter and his room, like children did when they built pillow forts to keep the adult world at bay. Would she wake him if she crept downstairs and made herself a drink? It seemed unlikely. She had given him a hefty dose of Zopiclone, enough to fell an elephant for the night, let alone a frail old man. Too much in her opinion, but she’d always found Dr Moss a bit heavy-handed with the meds. They had butted heads many times over his prescribing at the hospital, and bitter experience had shown her he didn’t like to be questioned – especially by nurses. Nurses were a lowly sort in Philip Moss’s eyes.

Despite Gordon’s drug-fuelled repose, she felt the need to creep through the house, pausing once to glance out at the storm as it crackled across the sky and howled around the house.

The essence of a figure glimpsed through the landing window caught her eye. A dark, human shape standing under the trees, a shape that made her freeze, made her breath catch in her throat and caused her to clutch her dressing gown to her throat as if a handful of fleece could protect her.

Her instinct argued that only a madman would be out in the storm.

A madman in the middle of nowhere, staring at a house containing only a feeble old man and a lone female.

A madman lurking in the dead of night with no innocent reason to be there.

The builders had gone home, the houses near to the Grange were far from finished, and it was hard to believe anyone would be lost around here when the house was the only thing they could be looking for. If it had been Bob, the handyman, surely he would have called, or at least come to the back of the house? If it was Cheryl, or even Dr Moss, they would have just come in or knocked – they’d have no reason to lurk outside.

The clock in the hallway below chimed midnight, scaring the bejesus out of her and diverting her attention from the window. When she looked again, the figure was gone, and she had to question whether it had ever been there at all – though her heart still pounded with a violence that argued it had. She peered out, trying to pick up movement, but there was nothing. Just the storm and the wind forcing the trees into a frenzied ballet of whipping branches and whirling leaves. Whatever. Whoever had been there was gone, leaving no trace other than the mild panic of a woman who was to all intents and purposes alone in a house that appeared to be straight from the pages of some Gothic horror novel.