Joshua sleeps soundly. Molly does not. She rests little when guests are in that house.
There are few secrets between the couple. After an age together, there is no need. Insomnia, however, Molly keeps to herself. So, too, the sleeping pills she takes every Thursday when that house is empty and the thought of a long, sleepless night is too unbearable to fathom.
Sleeplessness is less of a problem when she has something to do, a way to exhaust herself sufficiently to rest. So she slips out from the covers of the bed, unconcerned about disturbing her husband, who sleeps like the dead. She pulls on socks, wraps a fleecy dressing gown around her shoulders. She hears the rain, knows that that house will be cold.
Old houses are wont to be cold. They are draughty. Old buildings creak, they groan at the rafters, have doors that don’t stay closed. Their cavities are a mausoleum to dirt and dried insects. They harbour smells that take Molly by surprise and have no cause, no culprit, that make her nose sting and disperse as quickly as they arrive. Joshua has spent hours searching the attic for rotten mice, the chimney for decaying birds’ nests, the cupboards and furniture for turned food. He has never found a thing.
Tonight it is just the cold that bothers Molly. So she will begin upstairs, where it’s warmest. Where earlier Blue thought she saw something. Where that door won’t stay closed. Never stays closed. Where the two poor girls sleep alone, when rooms that would ordinarily be filled stand empty, with no one to watch over them. If Jago hadn’t ruined everything, Molly would feel better. If she could get the image of her husband cradling the boy’s limp body out of her head, she would feel better. They had been so lucky; had it happened any earlier, the other guests may have seen. Any later, and the weather would have made it impossible to get the boy out.
The kitchen floor chills the soles of her feet. The broken glass has been swept up. She does not worry about being heard; her socks are silent, every door hinge is well oiled, the draw of her lungs soft and regular. There are no longer dogs to bark, to sniff at her, to skitter their claws across the flagstones and give her away. Poor Jupiter, poor Milo. Joshua was terribly sad when they died.
That house breathes around her. She feels every cursed brick of it; every window is an eye, every doorway a rude mouth, every space a reminder of past hope. Some fulfilled, some not. Here, the therapy room where her dreams of healing were realised, where she consoled Adrian Buckley, and her counselling gave him strength. There is the art room where she taught Eleanor to paint the stream and trees, tried to teach her to love through art.
She walks upstairs, the way lit gently by the clouded moonlight.
But it takes more than a week to teach someone to love. Much more. Some people can never be taught, however hard Molly may try. However much time, patience, adoration, guidance, mothering she pours into them. She suspects the German woman will be like this.
Molly is in the bedroom now and looks down at her. Sabina is asleep. Molly regrets letting them have wine; her rules on alcohol are there for a reason. Show Molly a person who can drink in moderation, limit themselves to one glass of wine when there are five tempting bottles on the table, and Molly will herald that soul as a rarity. Molly’s alcohol fog wore off hours ago; it certainly didn’t help her sleep. But then, Molly didn’t drink the cocoa.
Alcohol makes the sleeping draught stronger.
She doubts Sabina will be up before ten. She looks peaceful, lying on her back in her cream satin pyjamas, one hand above her head, one on her belly. The exact position in which she slept last night. The duvet is crumpled on the floor, and Molly reaches for it, drapes it back over Sabina. She notices something on the dresser, a distraction that Sabina is better off without, so Molly picks it up and slips it into the cushioned pocket of her dressing gown. With nothing else amiss in the room, Molly takes out her phone, opens the camera and captures one close-up photo of Sabina’s sleeping face.
The image is saved to the SD card, never the cloud. It joins hundreds of others, pictures she looks at and thinks, these are the people I have cared for, the people I have helped, the people who will remember me, exalt me as their comforter, their confidante and saviour. They will never forget me. These photographs and thoughts will console Molly on Thursday evening when that house is quiet, if not empty, and she needs something positive to focus on before the sleeping pills pull her under.
She has deleted Jago’s image.
The key turns silently in Sabina’s lock, turns silently again in Blue’s, and Molly performs the same routine – neatens the duvet, removes the little distraction – but she does not take a photograph. Beads of sweat cling to Blue’s brow; her forehead is furrowed, her mouth tense, her eyes flit left and right beneath her lids with such rapidity that Molly is unnerved. It must be a nightmare.
A pair of jeans lie on the floor. A pill packet pokes its nose from the pocket. Molly doesn’t know how she could have missed this yesterday; she was so thorough. But there it is: a small prescription of anti-anxiety medication that Blue failed to mention on her form. Molly specifically asks all guests if they are taking any medicine, prescription or not; other drugs can interfere with Molly’s cocktails. She is meticulous about it – she manages the dosages accordingly, relies on her guests’ honesty, and now she discovers that Blue has not been honest at all. She has lied to Molly.
Molly returns the pack to the pocket. Tomorrow she will take the medication and carefully remove each pill and replace it with a placebo, as she has had to do before when guests have been naughty. She will make a small incision in the white, plastic casing around each pill, slide out and replace every one, then thinly glue over the cut. The foil will remain intact. Otherwise, all sorts of nastiness can occur: headaches, hallucinations, mood swings, heart palpitations, fevers, disorientation, paranoia, all sorts. Medications should never be mixed blindly. They should be controlled. No wonder Blue is having a nightmare.
A sound makes Molly flinch. It is subtle, from the depths of the house. A footstep, she thinks, though everyone else is asleep. Cold air creeps around her neck, and Molly no longer wants to be in this part of that house. She wants to be in her bed beside her husband in the newer extension that has never had anyone else sleep in it – no guests, no previous owners or long-dead people from bygone times. No Eleanor.
Molly locks Blue’s bedroom door, hurries down the stairs, through the passageway towards the kitchen.
She stops. She hears the measured scrape of a drawer creep open.
The passageway is cold, dark; the layout is known by heart in her muscles and mind, yet she feels she has been swallowed into another world, that if she reached out her fingers to the left, she would feel a void where the wall should be. The noise repeats.
There is something in the therapy room.
The feeling of being at sea sweeps through her. Molly could walk to that room, open the door, and confront what’s there, but she knows she will lose her head if she does. She needs her husband. The urge to feel his weighty, sleeping body beside her is keener than anything else.
There is nothing there, she tells herself. There is nothing there.
Accustomed to the dark, Molly sees the outline of the door to that room. As if in response to her gaze, the door shifts, moves, soundlessly inches open until a gap appears, and she sees the shape in the gloom, sees the terrible sight of a pale figure, and from the depths of her belly, horror rises. Nightmares spin through her mind, draw on her fears, drain her hope.
A faint voice inside her head tells her to enter the room, flood it with light, raise her voice, stamp her feet, banish and berate. She can’t. All she can do is repeat the thought: there is nothing there, there is nothing there.
Goosebumps climb from her ankles to her neck. She feels blindly, silently, for the kitchen door and escapes the passageway, the sound of the papers and drawer, the sight of that room, that figure. The feeling does not leave her. Dread has settled in her bones.