Slowly, Eleanor began to abandon her campaign against the house. Once or twice, she’d rung the door of the woman at number 50, but she hadn’t been in, and Eleanor had been partly relieved – she was afraid of looking foolish or of Richard finding out. She’d seen Jamie in the street, and he’d waved cheerfully – she was on the verge of starting another conversation, seeing if she could speak to Luke, perhaps, but she always left it just a second too late and then he was gone.
There was very little left to try. Any other idea she had was too much: too outlandish, too destabilizing. She found herself thinking about exorcisms and séances. She wasn’t even sure whether she believed the house was haunted – she still didn’t know if Emily was dead or alive. She just liked the idea of a purging, a catharsis, the badness in the house leached out all at once. But it was dangerously far from her idea of herself.
There was only one thing she hadn’t done. She had turned the rest of the house upside down, but she had resisted touching the upstairs room, afraid of disturbing it. The suitcase was still in the corner. She decided she had to get rid of it. She wouldn’t open it, just throw it away as it was.
The next Saturday, when she had time alone in the house, she made her way upstairs, clutching bin bags. When she opened the door to the upstairs room, feeling it push back against her in that peculiar, familiar way, she started. Something had happened in this room. The suitcase had been opened. The objects had been taken off it and now stood on the floor next to it, in front of the pile of quilts. The lid was shut, but the buckles were loose.
Eleanor felt dizzy. The house was getting less and less stable – things continued to shift and move, but it was impossible to prove that it wasn’t the children, or Richard, or Zoe, or her. This was different. She approached the suitcase cautiously. She stared at the buckles, trying to bore the image into her mind, the way she did now when she double-locked the door or switched the oven off. She wanted to be certain what she had seen.
Eleanor lifted the lid. At the sight of the mess of paper, her stomach jolted – she thought of the notepad she’d found and imagined intimacies spilling out, whole, horrible stories, sprawled out in letters or diaries. But they were just drawings. As she leafed through, she became more disturbed by what she saw – birds and figures and faces – but also drawn in.
While they were crude in some ways, there was a sophistication to them that was admirable and unnerving. They did not quite look like children’s drawings. Although the suitcase was full, the drawings didn’t seem to show any development or span years of Emily’s life. She must have worked furiously, continuously. And someone had left them behind.
She knew that they would be easy to get rid of but it made her feel uncomfortable. The more she looked, the closer she felt to Emily. She felt a kind of sympathy for her. It was her work, and it had just been shut up in a suitcase, like she had been shut in her room. It felt cruel to throw them away. She would be putting the contents of someone’s mind in a bin bag.
Still, she knew she couldn’t keep them. The house was theirs now and so was the room; it couldn’t be Emily’s for ever. In desperation, she thought again about trying to find the previous owners – handing the suitcase back to them, letting them deal with it. But she had tried everything and they remained elusive. She’d never had a reply to the letters she’d asked the solicitor to forward. She grabbed a bin bag and shoved the paper inside it. The empty suitcase was soft and pliable; she put it into a bin bag too. She gathered up the objects and threw them in next. Then she looked at the quilts with the doll’s dress on top and hesitated, thinking about her own collection of Isobel and Rosie’s newborn clothes that she couldn’t face getting rid of. She resolved to be braver and clear them out next time; she was pleased with the work she had done today.
The rubbish wouldn’t be collected until next week and she didn’t want it anywhere near the house. She wandered the streets, carrying a bag in each hand, searching for a skip. Eventually, she found one. She lifted the bags with the drawings up and stopped, suspended for a moment. Strange, irrational thoughts spun through her mind: what if the drawings needed to stay in the house? Then she dropped them in, swung the bag with the suitcase in too and walked away.
She was unsettled for the rest of the day, unable to shake off the feeling that she had stirred something up. It would clearly upset Emily, and it felt as though a part of Emily was still in the house.
Eleanor spent the next week on edge, feeling that the house was about to turn, wondering what she had unearthed. It was impossible to speak about, so she harboured the fear alone, watching the children for signs, asking the nursery to keep a closer eye on them, looking out for any misplaced cutlery or cushions. But the house was unusually quiet. There were no more queer little messages; there weren’t even any stones on the step. As the week went on, Eleanor began to calm down, even start to feel hopeful. Perhaps she had not initiated anything. Perhaps she had, in fact, let Emily go.
It happened the weekend after she’d cleared the upstairs room. It was a Saturday afternoon; Richard had taken Rosie and Isobel to the playground. She’d heard Zoe go out earlier; she was alone in the house. She had a slight headache and small tugs of nausea, but it was manageable. Still, Eleanor didn’t want to risk a whole day indoors. She wasn’t sure where she would go – to the supermarket maybe, under the guise of doing something productive, or to walk round London Fields. She might only need half an hour. She stepped out of the front door and stopped on the top step, unable to move.
A small figure, a girl, wearing a black duffel coat, stood on the other side of the road, watching the house. She began walking round and round in frantic small circles. It seemed as if some force was compelling her to turn inwards. The movements were disjointed and uncomfortable; her feet were splayed out. She wasn’t moving because she wanted to, but because she had to. It was not a game. Then the girl suddenly dropped to the ground and started walking on all fours. She was growling – it was unnervingly realistic. Eleanor flinched.
She wondered why the girl was alone. Then she reared up and for a moment, Eleanor saw her face. The girl dashed down the road.
Eleanor was shaking. She was weak, she was vulnerable, she was exhausted – was it any wonder her mind would play tricks on her? But the child had stopped outside the house. It looked like the house was having some effect on her. Perhaps she had imagined it. Perhaps she was going mad. She didn’t know which she’d prefer.
The adrenaline was the kind that would linger, she knew, for hours. She turned round and saw another perfect line of small pebbles on the step, in size order. She cried out and picked them up clumsily, not sure what she was doing, just needing to destroy that perfect line. Tomorrow, she would start looking for mediums.