Stephanie Merritt - While You Sleep - A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine!

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © Stephanie Merritt 2018

Excerpt from A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland © Sara Maitland 2008

Reproduced by kind permission of Granta Books

Cover design Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Jan Bickerton / Trevillion Images

Stephanie Merritt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008248208

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008248222

Version: 2018-06-11

‘When those are the very things one is hoping to escape from through silence, it is not at all surprising that one starts to see one’s longings as “works of the devil” and this sense of the demonic is itself intensified by the silence.’

Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Also by Stephanie Merritt (Writing as S. J. Parris)

About the Author

About the Publisher

It begins, they say, with a woman screaming.

You can’t tell at first if it’s pleasure or pain, or that tricky place where the two meet; you’re almost embarrassed to hear it, but if you listen closer it comes to sound more like anguish, a lament torn from the heart: like an animal cry of loss, or defiance, or fury, carried across the cove from cliff to cliff on the salt wind.

If you stand on the beach with your back to the sea, they’ll tell you, looking up at the McBride house, you might catch, behind tall windows on the first floor, the fleetest shift of a shadow. All the rooms dark through glass; not even the flicker of a candle, only the shape that shivers at that same window and vanishes, quick as breath, under the broken reflections of clouds and moon. They’ll say the woman’s keening grows louder as the gale seeks unprotected corners of the house, swirls around the pointed gables, shakes the weathervane on the turret and rattles the attic windows in their frames. But listen again; when the wind drops, there is nothing but the wild sea, and the occasional drawn-out moans of the seals beyond the headland.

Only on certain nights, the islanders will tell incomers; when the moon is high and the air whipped up like the white-peaked waves in the bay. Be patient and you might hear her. Plenty will swear to it.

The two boys crouch by a ridge of rocks at the foot of the cliff, watching the house. It is still half a ruin; naked beams poke into the moonlit sky like the ribs of some great flayed beast. They hesitate, each waiting for the other to move. They have come this far to test the old stories, they can’t lose face now. The summer night is mild and clear; too balmy for ghosts. They are girding themselves when the screaming starts. They turn to one another in astonishment; fear makes them giggle.

‘Let’s go,’ whispers the nimble, ginger boy. He has his phone in his hand, ready to capture it on film.

But his companion has frozen to the spot, stricken, his eyes stretched wide and fixed on the house.

‘Come on , we’ll miss it.’

The heavier boy retreats a few paces, shaking his head.

The ginger one hesitates, his lip curling with scorn. ‘Pussy.’

He sets off over the sand and marram grass to the half-open door, his phone held out at arm’s length. Left behind on the beach, his friend watches him disappear into the shadows.

The waves break and retreat, over and over, dragging layers of shingle into the restless water. A new scream echoes across the beach, a child’s cry this time. The last traces of light ebb from the sky and behind the windows of the McBride house there is nothing but solid darkness.

The island appeared first as an inky smudge on the horizon, beaded with pinholes of light against the greying sky. As the ferry ploughed on, carving its path through the waves, the land took form and seemed to rise out of the sea like the hump of a great creature yet to raise its head. Bright points arranged themselves into clusters, huddled into the bay at the foot of the cliff, though the intermittent sweep of the lighthouse remained separate at the furthest reach of the harbour wall.

The only passenger on the deck leaned out, gripping the rail tighter with both hands, anchored by the smooth grain of the wood beneath her fingers. Doggedly the ferry rose and fell, hurling up a cascade of spray each time it crested a wave and dropped away. Wind whipped her hair into salt strands that stung her lips; she wore a battered flying jacket and pulled up the collar against the damp as she planted her feet, swaying with the motion of the boat, determined to take it all in from here as they docked and not through the smeared window of the passenger lounge downstairs, with its fug of wet coats and stewed tea. Outside, the wind tasted of petrol and brine. She pushed her fringe out of her face and almost laughed in disbelief when the noise of the engines fell away and the men in orange waterproofs began throwing their coils of rope and shouting orders at one another as the boat nosed a furrow through oily water to bump alongside the pier. Two days of travelling and it was almost over. She tried not to think about the old saying that the journey mattered more than the arrival. She tried not to think about what she had left behind, thousands of miles away.

The ferry terminus hardly warranted the name; there was a car park and one low, pebble-dashed building, the word ‘Café’ flaking off a sign above the door. She edged down the gangplank, pushing her wheeled art case in front of her and yanking the large suitcase behind like two unwilling toddlers, a travel easel in its holder unwieldy under her arm. Each time it hit the rail as she turned to wrestle with one bag or other, she was grateful that now, in mid-October, the ferry was not crowded, so that at least she did not have to worry about how many of her fellow passengers she had maimed in the process of herding her luggage ashore.