The House on Cold Hill (16 page)

Moments later a man with stark raw terror in his voice howled, ‘Oh Jesus!’

Suddenly, Ollie could smell cigar smoke. Not a faint whiff carried on the night breeze from a distant dwelling, but the thick pungent smell of someone smoking a cigar inside this house. Inside this room.

The figure still stood beside the bed, moving a fraction, just enough for Ollie to be certain it was a person and not the shadow of a piece of furniture.

Then he saw a small ring of glowing red, right above him.

It was this man by the bed who was smoking a cigar.

Who are you? Who are you? WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Ollie tried to scream, but the words were trapped in his gullet.

An Arctic gust of fear ripped through him. Christ. Oh Christ.

Then the bed began to rock.

‘Ols? Ols?
Ollie?
’

Caro’s voice, gentle, anxious.

‘Ols? Ols, darling? You’re having a nightmare. You’re screaming. Ssshhh, darling, you’ll wake Jade.’

He opened his eyes, bewildered, feeling Caro’s warm breath on his face. His whole body was pounding, and he was shaking. The bedclothes felt sodden with perspiration. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I had a – horrible – horrible—’

‘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.

28

Thursday, 17 September

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.’

‘Sure, so tell me. I’m all ears.’

Twenty minutes later, showered and shaved, Ollie went downstairs and collected the papers from the letter box in the front door, then he went into the kitchen. He turned on the radio, out of habit, and began to lay out breakfast on the table, trying to think clearly and rationally. There bloody well
had
to be an explanation for what had happened last night. Could they have imagined it all? Could the bed always have been that way round?

But he remembered the conversation they’d had in bed last night, how they were looking forward to waking in the morning and staring out through the window at the lake.

Was he going insane? Were they both?

He thought about the strange voices he’d heard in the night. Had he imagined them?

Bombay walked into the room and meowed at him. Moments later, Sapphire appeared, too.

‘Hungry? Want your breakfast?’

Bombay meowed again.

He poured dried food out for them, filled their water bowl, then went over to a cupboard, took out Jade’s Cheerios pack and put it on the table, along with a bowl and milk. He was craving a coffee, and as Jade hadn’t yet appeared, he switched on the Nespresso machine, popped a Ristretto capsule in it, placed a cup underneath it, waited for the green lights to stop winking and pressed the one for a long espresso. While it was hissing, he began preparing some fruit for himself and Caro.

‘Dad!’

He turned, hearing Jade’s reproachful voice.

‘Morning, lovely!’

She stood at the entrance to the kitchen in her school uniform, her face looking pale. ‘I wanted to make it, that’s my job – why didn’t you wait?’

‘I’m going to need at least two coffees this morning – you can make the second one.’

‘Whatever.’ She sat down sulkily at the refectory table and reached for the cereal pack.

Peeling a tangerine, Ollie asked, ‘How did you sleep?’

‘Actually, not very well.’

‘Oh?’

‘Look, don’t tell Mum, right?’ She raised a finger to her lips. ‘Special secret?’

Ollie raised his own index finger to his lips. ‘Special secret! OK! Don’t tell your mum what?’

‘Well, I think I saw a ghost.’

29

Thursday, 17 September

Jade sat in the Range Rover beside Ollie in silence for much of the way to school. She had been silent at breakfast after dropping her little bombshell, and she seemed determined to remain silent now.

He was silent too, deep in his own troubled thoughts. But then, finally, he said, ‘OK, enough screen time for one car journey!’

She looked at him with a miffed expression.

‘So come on, darling, tell me more. You said you saw a ghost. What did you see?’

‘It was a little girl standing at the end of my bed.’

‘OK. Did she frighten you?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘The same as last time.’

Surprised, Ollie said, ‘You’ve seen her before?’

She nodded.

‘How many times?’

‘I don’t know. Several times.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before, or your mum?’

She shrugged. ‘I thought Mum would be spooked. You know how nervy she is.’

He smiled. ‘OK, so why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I tried to the other day. You were like – sort of a bit dismissive.’

‘OK, I’m not being dismissive now. Tell me more about her.’

‘There’s another thing, Dad. Remember I told you, when I FaceTime with Phoebe, she keeps seeing this old woman behind me.’

He halted the car at traffic lights, frowning. ‘Do you remember on our first Sunday in the house – you asked if Gran had come up to your room?’

She nodded.

‘But your gran had gone home quite a bit earlier. Did Phoebe see something then, in your room?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how does all this make you feel?’

‘I think it’s pretty cool!’

Ollie smiled. ‘You do?’

She nodded again, vigorously, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘I think it’s so cool that we’ve got a ghost!’ Then her demeanour darkened. ‘Well, except I’m not sure I like this girl who comes into my room. I don’t think she’s very nice.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, she doesn’t say very nice things.’

‘What does she say?’ Suddenly the woman in the car in front of him, a small Toyota hatchback, threw a cardboard cup out of the window. He felt a flash of rage. Why? Why did people do shit like that? He looked at his daughter with deep affection. She was a decent human being. She’d never throw litter out of a car window. Or harm an animal. She didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. Although sometimes he worried she was too trusting.

After some moments, Jade said, ‘Each time I see her she tells me not to worry and that I’ll be joining her soon. That we all will be – you, Mum and I.’

‘Joining her where?’

‘On the other side.’

‘That’s what she says to you?’

Jade nodded. ‘She says we’re already dead.’

‘What do you say to her?’

‘I just tell her she’s silly! She is.’

Her attitude cheered him up a fraction and he smiled. ‘Yes, she’s very silly.’

‘Dead people can’t hurt you, can they, Dad? You said that to me, didn’t you?’