And that is how Lampie’s days at the Black House begin. Two, three, four days crawl by, more slow and dull than nasty and terrifying.
In the morning, after Lampie has washed up, Martha gives her a bucket, a brush and a mop and shows her where to start. Lampie brushes and mops the tiles in the long, draughty corridors.
The house is big and dirty, the wind blows through all the gaps, it is mouldy and smelly, and her cleaning does little to help. She can only mop a small area at a time before the dogs go traipsing over the clean tiles again with their grubby paws. She is still a bit frightened of them and so she quickly gets to her feet until they have lumbered past into the garden, where they hunt rats. Later, with even dirtier paws, they walk back to the kitchen, to chew on bits of rat and to fall asleep.
Sometimes Lenny lurches out of the kitchen to watch Lampie and get in her way. At first he stood still in the corner, but he is no longer as shy and so he comes to sit beside her, with his bottom on the wet tiles, watching everything she does. She does not understand him when he speaks, but that does not matter. He splashes in the water and sometimes knocks the bucket over, but that does not really matter either. After a while, Martha comes to fetch him and takes him back to the kitchen table. He spends the whole day there, cutting up old newspapers. He snips them into pieces, going neatly around the columns, making a pile of letters and black-and-white photographs and, when he has finished, he puts them all back together again, like a jigsaw puzzle, to make a newspaper. Whenever a piece blows away or gets lost, he cries. Lampie helps him to look. She is good at looking, finding even the tiniest pieces in the dusty cracks between the floorboards.
In the afternoon, the girl is given another bucket and a clean cloth, and she wipes very old dust from lamps, ledges and windows. Cheeky spiders crawl over the duster and up her arm, to take a rest before beginning a new web. Lampie usually lets them do as they please, and all afternoon she feels an occasional tickle by her ear or in her hair.
They had spiders at home too, in the lighthouse, and their soft touch comforts her. She sings spider songs for them and releases them into the garden in the evenings.
Then she searches for a while to see if she can find a gap among the branches and the bushes, a place where she can see the sea, and the lighthouse. But she does not find one: the bushes are growing in all directions and the trees have branches right up into the sky. The deeper she goes into the garden, the more impenetrable it becomes. The garden stings her with its nettles and scratches her with its brambles, and soon she bumps into the fence.
I’ll never be able to climb over that, thinks Lampie. If I want to leave, how am I ever going to get out? The bars are slippery and high and impossible to climb. But after looking for a while, she finds a tree with a thick branch that reaches just under the tops of the bars. If she is very careful, maybe she can climb over to the other side, drop down onto the ground, hoping she does not land awkwardly, and…
She jumps as a bunch of seagulls suddenly flies up behind her, shrieking. Lampie turns around and walks back, across what used to be the lawn and is now the weed patch, past the pond in the middle, where a thick layer of rotting leaves covers the water. The windows of the Black House are all dark. But up there, right at the top, where there is a kind of tower, she can see something moving. Or is she just imagining it?
Lampie stands still for a moment and looks, but she doesn’t see any more movement. It must have been something like a curtain blowing in the breeze, or…
That tower, she suddenly thinks. Would that be high enough? Would she be able to look out over the trees and see the sea from up there?
Maybe. And if she asks, Martha is sure to let her go and look. Why wouldn’t she?
Feeling a bit lighter, she walks back towards the house.
Down in the kitchen, the light goes on. Martha must be starting dinner. Probably porridge again – she hardly ever cooks anything else. Lampie sighs.
From his room in the tower, the monster watches her walk, a patch of white against the dark grass. He watches her until she enters the house and then he slides back down onto the floor. He does not know who that was, and he does not care either. The monster is hungry.