THERE WAS A chorus of distant shouts from around the building, faint and mostly tinged with amusement. Ashley and Malory backed out into the corridor, clutching at each other.
‘I knew this would happen eventually, as soon as it started to snow like that. Total white out,’ said Malory. ‘I always said to Richard that we needed to do something about the wiring in this place, but you know what he’s like.’ There was a brittle edge to her voice, as though her casual words were costing her a great deal of effort. ‘Here, there will be some torches in this side cabinet.’
The corridor was lined with windows that looked out across the gardens, and now that Ashley’s eyes had adjusted to the lack of electric light, she realised that they were bathed in the eerie half-light of the snow. Owl light, she thought, although she couldn’t have said why. While Malory was rummageing around in the low wooden cabinet, Ashley looked down the corridor to see Heedful Ones, so crowded they were standing shoulder to shoulder, and every one of them was looking at her and Malory, their snub faces somehow filled with something she hadn’t seen before – anger. She took an involuntary step backward.
‘Fucking hell.’
Malory glanced up. ‘What?’
‘I … nothing. It’s just that this place is spooky enough already without all the lights going out.’
‘Ha.’
Ashley hadn’t seen this many Heedful Ones since they led her to Robbie Metcalfe’s body or since the night the east wing burned down. She had the sudden awful idea that there were always this many. It was simply that in the dark, with only the uncanny glow of the frozen world outside, she could finally see all of them.
What do you want from me?
‘Here you go.’ Malory stood and gave her a bulky plastic torch, the casing slightly cracked. Ashley switched it on, a beam of yellow light piercing the corridor. The Heedful Ones vanished. Malory turned her own torch on, and they made their way carefully back downstairs.
A number of people had gathered in the foyer, and a member of staff was handing out pen-sized torches from a big box.
‘If you’d just bear with us,’ he was saying, ‘these blackouts don’t usually last very long. We have a backup generator, which should get us back on track shortly.’
‘What about the heating?’ someone asked. ‘When’s that coming back on? This old house is bloody freezing.’
Ashley looked around for Freddie or Aidan, but couldn’t see either of them. Geoff Cousins wasn’t in sight either, thankfully. Malory led her through the throng and downstairs, past the kitchens, and then down another corridor that looked very bare in comparison to the rest of the house – no paintings on the walls, cold grey flagstones underfoot. From there, they went down another set of stairs, and the dark and the cold seemed to become a solid thing. When they had brought her in from outside, Melva had given her an oversized jumper to wear, cornflower blue; Ashley pulled the sleeves over her hands. In the torchlight, she could see her own breath as a white vapour.
At the bottom of the stairs, they came to another door, and beyond that was a wide room with a low ceiling. It was filled with freestanding shelves, which contained a variety of cardboard boxes, some labelled paperwork, others sealed with thick brown parcel tape. There was an old bicycle down there, and some large Tupperware boxes that were labelled M, R, and B.
‘Storage,’ said Malory, flicking her torchlight over them. ‘When Mummy died, I brought her clothes and paintings down here. I just wasn’t sure what to do with them.’
The far side of the room contained furniture covered with huge white sheets, almost silvery with dust. Malory led them right up to the wall.
‘Well, I guess he’s not down here,’ said Ashley, swinging her torchlight around. ‘And Penny isn’t either.’
‘Wait.’
Malory went to a portion of the wall, pressed her hand to it, and a door popped open, just like the one in the hall where Ashley had had her show.
‘There are loads of the bloody things,’ said Malory. Ashley couldn’t make out her face in the shadows, but she could sense the bitter smile she was wearing. ‘Whoever built the house had a thing for hidden rooms.’
‘Don’t you know? Who built it?’
‘Not the Lyndon-Smiths, at least,’ said Malory. ‘It’s likely Mummy knew – one of those boxes is probably full of the history of the place.’
‘You never looked it up yourself?’
‘I’ve had more than enough of the history of this place, believe me.’
Beyond the door was a wide corridor with an even lower ceiling. As they walked down it, they came to more of the tall storage shelves, with more boxes of various sizes. Ashley paused by one of them and shone her torch over it. The boxes here were different, less uniform, more colourful.
‘This is a box of drumstick lollies,’ said Ashley. ‘And here’s a box of Snickers bars.’
‘Left over from last Halloween,’ said Malory. ‘We had a charity ball for underprivileged kids. You were invited but didn’t attend, of course.’
‘Yes, what an idiot I was, as I’m having a lovely time now that I’m here.’
Malory gave her a sharp look, and Ashley winced.
‘Sorry, but, you know. Exposed as a fraud by my boyfriend, missing child, worst storm in decades, power out, nearly froze to death outside …’
‘He’s your boyfriend, is he? Were you two sleeping together?’
In the dark, Ashley felt her cheeks grow hot.
‘“Boyfriend” is probably too strong a word.’ Saying it out loud, she realised how much she had been hoping for it though. Clever, funny, handsome, tall, from a world very far from the rainy Lakes and her clingy family – Freddie had been pretty much perfect. Until he had helped Cousins humiliate her. ‘We were having fun. I thought it meant something.’
‘Were you in love with him, Ashie?’
‘Piss off.’
Some of Malory’s natural cheer had returned, and if they had been sitting in Green Beck’s single pub drinking white wine, they would have had a rueful giggle over it all. As it was, standing in a cold, dark corridor, the whole thing felt wrong, like lines of cocaine at a children’s birthday party.
The wide corridor ended in another row of freestanding storage shelves. These contained boxes of fruit: bananas, apples, oranges, peaches. Ashley put her hand in one wooden crate and pulled out a nectarine. She frowned.
‘These are fresh,’ she said.
‘We always need fruit.’
‘But why keep fruit all the way down here? Why wouldn’t it be in the kitchens?’
Malory shrugged. ‘Like I said, this is where Richard creeps around. I’ve never understood half of what he does. Like when he dumped you.’
Ashley snorted. ‘He didn’t dump me, Malory. We had a blazing row because he’s an insufferable prick. Besides, I was a teenager. He was a mistake from start to finish.’ She sighed. ‘Let’s go back up. I want to check in with Melva and Aidan, see if they’ve seen Penny.’
‘No, wait. Look.’ Malory slid her boot across the floor, then pushed a box out of the way. Underneath it was a wooden portion of floor.
‘Is that … is that a trapdoor, Malory?’
‘Yep.’
‘This place is ridiculous.’
‘Yep.’
There was a simple loop of rope on one side of the wooden square. Malory pulled it up, and it swung away to reveal a square of deeper darkness and a ladder leading away, out of sight.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Ashley. She wanted to be out of there; she wanted to be at home in her parents’ garish cottage, being fed tea by her mother with all the lights on in the living room and the TV blaring away in the background. The hole in the ground was old, and there was nothing good beyond it. Ashley knew this. ‘We really need to call the police.’
‘We can’t,’ Malory said simply. ‘We’ll get the light and heat back way before we get the phones and internet, believe me. If Richard is down here, if Penny is down here … We need to find them, don’t we?’
Malory’s face was lit from beneath, her dark eyes very wide. She knows that Richard is bad, thought Ashley. She’s only just beginning to admit it to herself.
‘Fine. You go first, and I’ll hold the torches.’
Malory lowered the bottom half of her body into the hole, her heeled boots clicking against the metal ladder, and then she began to make her way down. Ashley had the uneasy impression that her friend was being eaten inch by inch by some stone monster. Eventually, she vanished inside, and Ashley kept the beam of the torch trained on the top of her glossy head.
‘How deep is it?’
‘About ten feet or so. Not so deep. I’m at the bottom now.’
‘I’ll drop your torch down to you.’
When that was done, Ashley put her own torch into one of the big, sagging pockets on Melva’s jumper and began to climb down herself. The bars of the ladder were cold but clean; someone clearly used this passage regularly. When she got to the bottom, she found herself in a tunnel with rough stone walls.
‘Fucking hell. I had no idea this was all down here.’
‘It’s like the mines of Moria, isn’t it?’ said Malory.
‘The what?’
‘You know. From The Lord of the Rings.’
Despite herself, Ashley smiled.
‘I forgot you love those old movies.’
‘Old?’ Malory tutted. ‘If you’re not careful, I’ll leave you down here.’
The tunnel led one way, so they followed it. Ashley cleared her throat and shouted for Penny, only to be rewarded with a warped, uncertain echo of her own voice. The further they walked, the older the place felt. There was the sound of water trickling somewhere, and Ashley felt afraid; she felt closed in, trapped. The weight of all the stone and earth above them felt like an actively dangerous thing, as though it might decide to collapse on them at any moment. And over all of it, she kept thinking about Penny, about the vision of Penny she had seen through the Heedful One. Blood. Darkness. Terror.
‘Shit. Look at that.’
Malory had stopped. Ahead of them, the darkness of the tunnel had become diffused and full of movement. There was a tall white candle sitting in a sconce screwed into the wall, and it was alight. Wax dripped and ran down the sides, a spatter of drips on the uneven floor.
‘Someone lit that recently,’ said Ashley. Her fingers tightened on the torch. ‘Fucking hell, Mal, they are down here. I know it. Penny! Penny, are you there?’
Malory grabbed her arm. ‘Ashie, we probably shouldn’t let him know we’re coming. What if we set him off or something?’
They continued along the corridor in silence. Every twenty feet or so, there was another candle, and after a while, they came across another tunnel intersecting their own, but this one appeared to be in total darkness.
‘I think we should stay with the candles,’ said Ashley, and Malory nodded her agreement.
They walked for longer than Ashley thought possible, and after a while, it seemed difficult to gauge how long they had been gone, or how far they had travelled. The tunnel felt as though it existed outside of time, just beyond their normal reality.
‘We can’t be under the house any more,’ she whispered. ‘We must be under the gardens.’
‘Further than that,’ Malory said quietly.
Eventually, they came to a set of shallow steps, and beyond that, a round room with three tunnels leading off into the dark. None of them appeared to be lit.
‘Now what? We could go on moving around these tunnels for weeks and not find them. We could get lost ourselves.’
Ashley rubbed a hand over her forehead. Despite everything, she wished that Freddie was with them.
‘I’m not going back,’ she said. ‘Not until I’ve found Penny.’
There was the tiniest noise, the scrape of a shoe against stone. Ashley spun around to find Richard behind them. With a sinking feeling, Ashley thought of the corridors of stone that had led off the one they had followed; he had simply hidden down one of those and waited for them to pass. His hair had come loose from its top knot and fell in dark straggling tails to either side of his face, and there were deep red scratches on his cheek. At the sight of them, Ashley felt a great boiling anger flow into her chest.
‘Richard, you fucker, where is she? Where’s Penny?’
There was a shout from somewhere behind him, undoubtedly a teenage girl’s voice. Ashley stepped forward, preparing to shove past Richard and go to her. That was when he brought his fist up and showed them the knife.
‘I’m ending it.’ His voice was ragged and his eyes were red, as though he’d been drinking heavily, or crying. ‘God damn it, I’m ending it all, Malory. It can’t go on. It can’t!’
‘It’s all right, Richard.’ Malory sounded older than Ashley had ever heard her. She sounded tired. ‘You can let Penny go.’
‘All of it!’ Richard brandished the knife, and Ashley watched the yellow candlelight move along it like heated butter. It looked very sharp. ‘All of it has to end, do you understand me, Mal? All these years, all this blood.’ He bit down on a sob, and Ashley saw that tears were streaming from his eyes. ‘I won’t have it.’
‘Penny can go, Richard.’
Ashley heard Malory take a step forward behind her, and she wondered if she was going to try and wrestle the knife from her brother. It seemed like a terrifyingly risky move, and she felt a great wave of love for her friend. Malory the saint, Malory the kind, Malory the brave.
‘I had to get her away,’ Richard said. ‘I couldn’t think what to do, but she wouldn’t come with me.’ He reached up and touched the scratches on his face with his free hand.
‘Let the girl go,’ Malory said again. ‘I finally have everything I need.’
Ashley turned towards her friend, not understanding what she had said, and caught a glimpse of the heavy black torch just before it connected with her temple. There was a flash of brilliant pain, like a firework going off in her face, and the strength dropped out of her legs. She fell, the cold ground coming up to meet her.