1
The cottage looked as though it had been constructed from scraps of Halloween and leftover ghost stories. Every one of the deeply set windows at the front was either broken or boarded over, with tatters of fabric remaining where curtains had once hung. Ivy clambered the walls like a besotted swain and the roof was more hinted at than actual. Even Scooby Doo would have given it a swerve for being ‘too spooky.’ Actually, Dracula would have taken one look and decided to find a Premier Inn.
But I’d fought my way here through bramble and hogweed to the detriment of my only good trousers and a smart, if impractical, pair of heels, and I wasn’t about to be put off by appearances. I marched up the trodden grass path to the front door and knocked officiously.
The house echoed. Behind me a stick cracked, and I turned around suddenly, half expecting a leg-dragging corpse to be about to put a ponderous hand on my shoulder, but there was nothing there. Nothing except my car, about a hundred metres away, visible as a sunlight glint on metalwork, reassuring me that the twenty-first century still existed back through the network of trees and necrotic undergrowth.
I knocked again and called this time. ‘Hello? I’ve been sent by the council to give you notice to leave!’
This was a bit of a lie. This wasn’t a council job, although I had been directed towards it by the employment centre andtheywere council, weren’t they? Government department at least. Although I couldn’t say I’d been sent by the government; that was too hyperbolic for a semi-ruin in a forgotten wood. I’d really been employed by the new owner of the house and land to evict the squatters who had, apparently, taken possession of the place – although, looking at it, any squatters had probably already dissolved. Or, horrible thought, died. Or, even worse thought,died but not realised it…
‘Oh, shut up, Libby,’ I told myself firmly. ‘It’s just a house. Houses can’t hurt you. Unless the roof falls on your head, of course.’
I raised my hand to knock again, and the front door – which was little more than a series of planks nailed together and didn’t even seem to fit the frame – swung inwards to reveal a long dark hallway, dusty-floored and painted a sepulchrous brown. At the end of the hallway stood another door, closed and ominous, and in front of me a staircase rose to the heights of a shadow-obscured first floor.
The orchestra was already playing the portentous strings of foreboding in my head as I tiptoed cautiously over the threshold, pausing to wedge the front door open with a handy brick as I went. I’d seen those films where the heroine goes into the haunted house and never comes out, and that was not going to be me.
‘Hello?’ I tried again, but not quite so loudly this time. ‘My name is Libby Douthwaite, and I’ve come…’
The words fell flat into the decayed silence. No, not quite silence. Behind the closed door at the end of the hallway, there came a soft sound as though the wood was being swept by something. A touch, subtle and yet unignorable, followed by a hoarse roughness, lapsing back into that awful stillness again.
I looked back over my shoulder to check that the door was still propped open and that beyond it the sun continued to shine through the golden-tinted leaves, innocent and bland. My car was still there, in the form of a hint of white paintwork and the dazzle of reflection on chrome. The path that I’d taken through the woodland seemed to have grown over since I’d been in here – there was no sign of my forced entry between the bushes – but the reassuringly quotidian sight of the Skoda steadied my breathing. Nobody, I told myself, had ever mysteriously vanished leaving behind a five-year-old Skoda containing, among other detritus, a Wallace and Gromit backpack, two spare pull-up nappy pants and a half-eaten packet of Cheez-Its. Those were not the things of which mystery was constructed.
This was ridiculous. All I had to do was check the place out, give any squatters notice that the house was going to be demolished in a few weeks, and go. I was not going to get brownie points for thwarting any janitors in rubber masks in their plans to smuggle stolen gold bars. I was mostdefinitelynot here to confront any grey, white or green ladies who might be wafting about, moaning or searching for their lost loves and attempting to cast themselves from heights or into long-gone ponds. I walked down the hallway, my footsteps echoing slightly out of synch with my movements in a further nod to every horror film ever made.
I squared my shoulders, shook my hair back and put a hand on the doorknob. Turned it and, fired by a sudden rush of adrenaline, flung the door open.
Then screamed, turned and ran out of the front door, all the way back to my car.
2
I had never met the architect who’d recruited me for the job; everything had been done via email. So his appearance, youngish and distracted and not at all fitting my mental image of an architect, gave me pause.
‘You’ll have to find someone else.’ I looked around the office. It was a converted garden shed at the bottom of a glorious few acres studded with late-flowering marigolds. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Sorry?’ The distracted man hadn’t looked away from the computer screen for a second even when I’d stumbled to a stop through his doorway, amazed at the screens, lighting and sketches which made the shed look like a portal to the twenty-fifth century. ‘Who are you, again?’
‘Libby Douthwaite,’ I said, impatient at his lack of memory.
Now he looked up, blinked a few times and rubbed his hand over his face. He was unshaven I noticed, his eyes were underlined with tiredness and it looked as though he’d bitten his lip until it bled. ‘Oh. Right.’
‘I went to Elm Cottage to check for squatters and…’ I trailed off, my mind still full of that horror. The memory made my back prickle and my skin shrink down onto my bones. ‘It was full ofbirds,’ I finished, in a crackling whisper that made the word sound as though it came straight from a video nasty.
‘Birds,’ he repeated.
‘Yes.’
The man sighed and swivelled his chair away from the computer screen. ‘They must have got into the house. I expect a window was broken,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Look,every singlewindow was broken. Doesn’t explain that one room full of…’ I shuddered. Even the memory of the fear was like putting on a frozen coat.
‘You have a problem with birds?’ He was blinking fast, as though his eyes were very tired, or as though my face were strobing.
‘No.’
‘Well then…’
‘I don’t have aproblemwith birds, I have aphobiaof birds,’ I said, wanting to tell him to stop the rapid twitching of his eyelids. I’d begun to blink too now in sympathy, and the pair of us were fluttering away like a pair of flirting courtesans.
