The moment they shut the door behind them they saw her. She was walking away from them, quite slowly, but as light as a fairy, a little girl of about five in a long white nightgown, holding a candle. She had long, straight hair – silvery fair. She walked down the hall to the left of the staircase, turned the corner, and disappeared from view.

They both stared after her. Gal collected himself. There was a memory, a picture in his mind he could not quite retrieve – he felt as if he had just relived a scene from his past. But he was too distracted to make sense of it.

‘Who was that?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ Deirdre whispered back.

‘We have to follow her,’ said Gal. But Deirdre hesitated. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘We don’t think?’ she repeated. ‘We don’t try to remember? We just start exploring?’

Gal nodded.

‘It’s going to be horrible,’ she said.

Gal nodded again.

‘My grandmother – my grandmother will show us things . . .’

‘I know.’

‘She’ll show us her life, Gal. She’ll show us her memories.’

‘I know. I know. But we can’t let her use them to stop us. We have to face them, and push through to what’s ours. Don’t you see?’

But Deirdre didn’t seem to hear him. ‘You know,’ she said softly, ‘Corbenic isn’t just a block of flats.’ She paused for a moment, searching for words. ‘Corbenic,’ she said, ‘is my grandmother’s mind.’

Gal stared at her.

What she had said reminded him of something, although at first he could not work out what. Then he saw the castle of his nightmare, ruined, infinite, with the keening little girl trapped inside it.

It came to him suddenly that if Corbenic was her grandmother’s mind, Deirdre was trapped inside of it.

Then he began to wonder if he was too.

Deirdre gazed at him silently. Then, reluctantly, she turned and started walking up the hall. There was no choice. Gal followed.

They had expected to catch up with the little girl in the white nightgown. At the pace she was walking, in the confined space, it shouldn’t have been hard. But when they turned the corner as she had, she was nowhere to be seen. Instead they came upon something so shocking, and so uncanny, they both stumbled backwards as if pushed.

They had been in the original part of Corbenic; they should have turned into one of the old halls they knew so well. The extension Deirdre’s grandmother had still been building when she died had been constructed around the core of the old building. They should have had to cross through it – the original Corbenic – to get to those new, unfamiliar halls; those new rooms; those new stairs and cupboards and storerooms, in which they had no interest. But instead, all at once, that’s where they were.

It felt as if the extension had somehow been thrust in their path.

It felt as if Mrs Dark was somehow using the new part of the building to prevent them from gaining access to the old.

‘It’s not possible . . .’ whispered Gal.

But at the same time he realised that they had entered a dimension where anything was possible.

They were unfamiliar with the new part of the building, never having explored it as children. And the incongruity of the extensions being where they should not have been was strangely menacing – even more menacing than the letters, NO, in the ceiling.

Frozen, confused, they stared around them. They were standing at the far end of one of the new halls. Although it had been designed to tone with the old building it was very different: immediately recognisable as something that had been tacked on years later. The ceilings were lower and without the ornate plasterwork; the painting was lighter and newer – in fact, the scent of new paint was still discernible. Even the wood was lighter, less sturdy – it seemed like plastic or some synthetic material constructed to look like wood.

And it was unfinished. The doors had no handles on them, the hall was uncarpeted, the light fittings had loose wires and were unconnected. There were even traces of the builders – a box of nails on the floor, a tray with a paint roller left in it and the paint dried up, some canvas folded roughly nearby.

But more than this, unlike the original building, it seemed artificial, fake. It had the air of something built without the builder having any intention of using it for an honest purpose. It had the air of something built to hide something else.

And there was another difference. Gal had never come upon a hall in Corbenic in which all of the doors were not shut. But each door along the length of this hall was ajar, and each had a separate light spilling out of it. These triangles of light were each slightly different in colour and strength. The variation gave Gal a peculiar feeling. He knew it meant something, but he didn’t know what.

Later, he understood that he had been looking, simultaneously, at light from different times.

But there was also a sound. It was the sound of weeping.

At first it was difficult to divide the sound into its separate parts. There was a baby crying. But there was also a woman, terrified, agitated, pleading. Then they realised that they weren’t hearing just one baby. There were several, four or five maybe, it was difficult to tell. And there were several women too, their voices rising and falling in a gabble of anguish. And yet there was a sense in which they all sounded like the one baby, the one woman.

Gal stared down the hallway. It was horrible already, just as Deirdre promised. It would have been easy to give up right there, despite his fine intentions. Only –

Gal was still angry. He was so angry that fear could not really touch him; and the more he felt Deirdre’s grandmother trying to frighten him, the angrier he became.

‘She’s a despot,’ he muttered. ‘But I won’t be crushed by her. I won’t. Come on,’ he said to Deirdre.

And so they approached the first doorway.

Just when they thought they knew the score – however impossible, however incongruous – just when they thought they were not in the old building as they should have been, but in the new one, they found themselves in a room that should not have been there. Not a new room, not a room that belonged in the extensions, but an old one – older, even, than Corbenic itself.

It was a bedroom with a young woman laid up, feverish, in the large, ornamental bed, and a cradle beside her. Her hair was damp with perspiration and sitting back hectically from her forehead. She was holding a very new baby, perhaps only hours old, while another woman, who had her back turned to them, was trying to coax it from her.

‘Please don’t take my baby!’ she kept saying. ‘Please don’t take my baby! Please don’t take my baby!’

She was shrinking further and further back into her pillows, and holding the baby closer and closer to her chest. The other woman, who was older and had an air of patient, professional detachment, kept making calming noises and trying, gently but firmly, to take the baby from her. The baby was crying.

‘Just for a little while, pet. You’re too weak to hold her. We’ll put her down and you can both go to sleep.’

‘No!’ said the young woman frantically. ‘I can’t fall asleep!’

‘Of course you can. Sleep is what you need. You’re exhausted. Having a baby is hard work. If anyone deserves a good rest –’

‘You don’t understand. I don’t mean I won’t. I mean I mustn’t!’

‘You mustn’t fall asleep? Why ever not?’

‘Because,’ said the young woman desperately, ‘if I fall asleep I’ll die!’

‘Nonsense. What in the world gave you that idea?’

‘It’s true! I know it’s true! That’s why you’re taking her from me!’

‘You have to rest and grow strong, pet. I want you to sleep. The baby will be right beside you. There’ll be no talk of such things in my nursery. And you were so brave! You don’t have to be brave any more. It’s time to rest. Let me take her, there’s a good girl.’

‘But I have to keep awake. I have to stay alive. I can feel it, I can feel death coming, and if I fall asleep I won’t be able to fight it. And if I die, she’ll be alone! Poor little baby. Poor little baby. Don’t take her from me. Please, please, please –’

Then suddenly a shrill little laugh rang out from above them. They looked up.

A blonde little girl dressed all in black, her hair cut in a short bob with a fringe, hovered as if suspended somehow from the opposite corner of the ceiling.

‘You both look so sad!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s so funny!’

For a moment, Gal’s vision faded into black. That’s how much she had shocked him. But then the colours came back, he saw the little girl again, and knew who she was.

It was Deirdre’s grandmother. As a child. Anyone would have known her from the photographs in her flat. But even if he had never seen the photographs, he would have known her anyway. The venom was unmistakeable.

It was as if their minds were being stretched, distorted somehow, pulled out of shape. It was as if time itself was being contorted into something unnatural.

Deirdre stared up at her, as if at a malevolent god to whom she was utterly in thrall. Even death had not broken the spell.

Gal looked up too. He knew what he was looking at. He knew he was facing his enemy. He even knew that she was probably more powerful than he was. But again he felt the anger, so intense that he was elated with it.

It wasn’t a question of overcoming fear. It was a question of controlling anger. If he was afraid, he was afraid only of what he could do if he let go of it.

His calm was sublime, because the anger fuelled it.

‘Why is it funny?’ he asked the child, the ghost of Deirdre’s grandmother.

‘Because that’s me!’ the ghost child shrieked back at him. ‘The baby is me!’

So this, the scene they were watching, was the beginning of Deirdre’s grandmother’s life.

They should perhaps have recognised her mother from the photograph of her in the flat. But a calm, stiff studio portrait of a woman in a high-necked dress and upswept hair was no representation of that woman in the most extreme exhaustion and distress.

It was as Deirdre had warned. Her grandmother was showing them the story of her life. She was showing them her memories.

They had set out to explore, to search for what was their own; instead she had made herself their guide. They were seeing only what she wanted them to see. Not their story: hers.

She was pulling the power back from them already.

At that moment the nurse succeeded in getting the baby out of the young woman’s arms. She wrapped it more snugly in its blanket, and put it down in the cradle. But the baby kept crying, and the woman kept making a noise between a sob and a moan, which got weaker every time she made it.

‘Just rest, dear,’ said the nurse. ‘We will all still be here in the morning.’

‘Ha!’ cried the wild little girl – the spirit of Deirdre’s grandmother – in the corner of the ceiling. ‘Liar! She died!’

Then, as quick as an evil thing in a nightmare, she whipped down from the ceiling and landed in front of them. Her little face was as piquant and alien as it was in the photo, and she was wearing the same calf-length black dress, drop waisted with long black tight-fitting sleeves and black stockings and shoes. She looked about six, but here was where she was different from her photographed image – she also looked much older.

Her face was like a kaleidoscope: one minute the pattern fell into a picture of a child’s face; on the next turn she was an old woman. And, unlike in her photo, there was no ambiguity about her expression. She had so much energy, it was as if she was made of electricity. She seemed fraught, not with any kind of vulnerability, but with the most intense hostility, a hostility too intense to be human.

And it was all directed at Gal. She stared up at him, and he felt that he had never in his life been looked at with such absolute hatred.

‘Well, come on,’ she said, slipping her cold little hand into Deirdre’s without taking her eyes off Gal. ‘You’ve come back to explore, haven’t you? And there’s so much you haven’t seen!’

For now, of course, they were exploring, not Corbenic itself, but the halls of the old woman’s memory.

She pulled Deirdre out of the room that should not have been there and away from the dying woman and her new baby, down the fake, unfinished hall, and into the next room. Against his will, but powerless to choose otherwise, Gal followed behind them, walking as if on the still, icy surface of the turbulent arctic sea of his anger.

It was another room that should not have been there. But it was not as old as the first one. This was a room of a style that belonged in the original Corbenic, as they remembered it, although they had never been inside this particular room before. There before them, a young woman, slim and stylish with large dark eyes, was sitting on a made-up bed fully dressed in a suit and a hat and gloves, nursing a baby and crying softly. The baby, also, was crying. An older woman hovered close by, her arms held out patiently to take it.

‘This won’t do,’ she was saying. ‘He knows you’re upset. You should put a brave face on it, for him. It’s for the best, Elaine,’ she added soothingly. ‘He’ll do well on the farm. He’ll want for nothing; your gentleman friend has seen to that. And you can’t keep him. You’ve no choice. You want to stay on at Corbenic, don’t you? Gentlemen like Mr Dark may want female companionship but they don’t want babies. If he did he’d marry you. Or someone more suitable. Anyway, he already has the young master and the little girl. And you were never one for the domestic life, not really, not like your sisters. Be thankful for what you’ve got. There’s many a girl who’d give their eyeteeth for such an easy life.’

The young woman bowed her head, hesitated, then kissed the baby, and handed him sadly across. The older woman, who could only have been her mother, took him carefully.

‘That’s a good girl,’ she said briskly. ‘You can always come and visit him. But he mustn’t know who you are. You can be his aunty, and he’ll grow up thinking you’re the best aunty in the world. Think of the presents you’ll be able to give him!’

Then she said, with a harsh kind of weariness, ‘You can’t take a baby to Paris, Lainey.’

Suddenly the impish venomous little girl, the spirit of Deirdre’s grandmother, darted too quickly, too swiftly to be human, over to the young woman and began to dance around her gleefully, mocking her and taunting her.

‘You had to give up your baby too, didn’t you? Good! Good! I’m glad! Serves you right!’

But the woman could not see her. Deirdre and Gal and the little girl were invisible to her. Like Mrs Dark’s young mother, laid up in the bed in the other room, she did not know that she was being observed by ghosts from the future.

Which was fortunate, as the ghost child began to grimace and poke her tongue out at her in a frenzy of malice, within inches of her face.

Gal began to feel uneasy, rattled by a sense that there might be more secrets to come.

And, as if she had felt him faltering, the little ghost girl turned suddenly and grinned at him. She had an air of triumph, as if she was about to produce a weapon he had never known existed. She pointed at Elaine, and looked at Gal as if she thought he was so slow he was barely worth bothering about.

‘My father’s mistress,’ she said.

He knew that. But then she pointed at the baby.

‘My half-brother.’

Of course, thought Gal. Mrs Dark’s father was the father of this baby, too.

Then she grinned more intensely at Gal, and said something that caught him off guard.

‘See that baby, Galahad? My little half-brother? He’s your relative too. Can you guess who he is? Go on, guess! You ought to know, but I bet you’ll never get it in a million years . . .’

She waited, staring at him. Gal stared back at her, confused. He didn’t know what she was driving at.

‘Well, go on!’ she said sharply.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Gal muttered.

‘Oh, come now. He’s the reason I chose you. For my revenge.’

Gal was startled. Something stirred in him, something so far back it seemed to come from the beginning of the world. He remembered her talking to him about revenge years ago, when he was only five. He had never forgotten it. He had always thought she meant her treatment of him through the years: his banishment; the forbidding of his friendship with Deirdre. But for the first time he felt as if she was talking about – not general persecution – but one particular act of revenge, something she had already done, without him having discovered it.

His mind began to race, wondering in panic what she could be talking about.

But before either Gal or Deirdre had time to grasp the significance of what she had said, the ghost child pointed at Deirdre, and added in an old woman’s voice, ‘Never let anyone tell you there’s enough love to go around, Deirdre. There isn’t. When Father took up with Lainey he forgot me, and I lost him forever. I was abandoned so completely, he may as well have put me out on the street. I wish he had.

‘Men have no feelings. They give women babies, and having the babies kills them. And then the men abandon the babies! And women – women are stupid – like you, Deirdre. They always fall for it. They always believe men love them. But men love no one. Not women. Not children. You’ll see.’

Suddenly they were in a third room, and there were a man and a woman and two children: a boy of about twelve and a girl of five. They recognised all of them from the photos: Mrs Dark’s father, middle-aged, handsome, distinguished in suit and hat; dark-eyed Elaine, perhaps half his age, dressed smartly for travel; Mrs Dark’s older brother, a bright-looking boy, anxious to please; and of course Mrs Dark as a child, easy to recognise from her photograph, but oblivious to her ghost-self observing her. There were suitcases around them. Every so often a man who was much more humbly dressed came in to take two or three of them away. The adults seemed just about to leave for somewhere and were in the act of saying goodbye to the children.

But although Deirdre and Gal absorbed all this, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was the overwhelming grief and distress of the little girl, Deirdre’s grandmother as a child. She was clinging to her father’s knees and making a sound Gal had heard in only one other place.

His nightmares.

She wasn’t just sobbing – it was more than that; it was a kind of keening, a mourning, a wailing from a place so deep that she seemed to have tapped into some vast, underground river that contained all the suffering of all the people in all the world.

‘Why doesn’t he pick her up?’ Gal burst out, for the man was ignoring the child, in so far as he could, and his face was like thunder.

‘Come along, Elaine,’ he said in a lordly manner. ‘If there is no little girl here who is capable of controlling herself and saying goodbye to us then we shall have to leave.’

Poor Elaine looked anguished. Timidly, she reached out to touch the little girl. At that point the child turned with such ferocity that she looked like a small and vicious dog.

‘Don’t you touch me! You’re not my mother! I hate you! I hate you!’ she cried, and her father’s mistress withdrew as if bitten. Mrs Dark’s father did not hit her. Instead, he coldly detached her from his knees – though it took all his strength to do so – and placed her on the floor, where she lay face down, prostrate with grief and fear. Then, although she continued to utter that unbearable sound – to wail, to keen, from that place of abject abandonment and forsakenness – he walked out.

Mrs Dark’s elder brother looked stricken. He gathered her up somehow and she sobbed into his neck.

‘Goodbye, Father,’ he called thinly after them. ‘Goodbye Aunty Lainey!’

But they were halfway down the stairs and probably couldn’t hear him above the sound of the little girl’s voice.

Gal felt dizzy with emotion. For a moment, he felt his anger forsaking him. For a moment he began to feel the beginnings of an appalled kind of pity.

But he knew that he couldn’t give in to it. He knew he had to hold onto his anger, for without it he would be lost and Deirdre’s grandmother would win.

Desperately he tried to regain his own side of the story: This is not the point, he felt like saying. I don’t care what happened to you. It didn’t give you the right to destroy Deirdre. It didn’t mean Deirdre had to spend her life making it up to you. She was manipulating them, he knew. She was trying to rob from them the sense that they had a right to fight her.

He turned his eyes towards where he thought Deirdre was standing, only to have the terrifying little girl who was the ghost of Deirdre’s grandmother shove her face into his. She was floating in midair with her eyes at the same level as his.

‘So I’m a bully, am I?’ she said to him. ‘A despot?’

And he realised, with a shock, something that he should have known – she had been listening to everything he and Deirdre had said to one another since he entered the building.

He tried to look past her at Deirdre but instead found himself looking into a fourth room. When he saw what was in it he felt a sick dread, like none he had ever known before.

It was another bedroom, but the person who was lying in the bed was not a woman. It was a child, a little boy of about two or three, and he wasn’t sleeping. He was dead.

He had very dark hair and pale, waxen skin. His black lashes lay like beautiful sleeping spiders just above his cheekbones. There were purple half-moon shadows beneath his closed eyes. He didn’t look peaceful. He looked troubled.

There was a young woman sitting by the bed. She was staring at him as if he might wake at any moment.

Then the men came, subdued, professional-looking men in old-fashioned suits.

‘May we bring the coffin in now, ma’am?’ the older man said in a hushed voice.

The young woman said nothing. She continued to look expectantly at the dead child. Deirdre felt the ghost child’s nails digging further into her hand. But she didn’t need to be told what she was watching. She knew this was her grandmother as a young woman. She knew this was the son she had lost.

‘Ma’am?’ said the undertaker.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Deirdre’s grandmother. ‘He’s not dead. He’ll wake up in a minute.’

‘It’s a pretty little coffin,’ the undertaker went on soothingly. ‘White. Like a cradle. With white quilted satin inside. You’ll like it, ma’am.’

‘You’re not bringing that thing in here,’ said Deirdre’s grandmother. She sounded perfectly sane. ‘You’re being ridiculous. Where is my husband?’

‘He’s downstairs, waiting,’ said the undertaker. ‘We’ll take good care of him, ma’am, don’t you worry about that. There’s nothing more you can do now. You have to give him to us.’

Gal didn’t know how much more he could stand. But then a strange thing happened, even stranger than the scene they were watching.

‘That’s enough!’ Deirdre said to the wild little girl in sudden fury. ‘I am not seeing this memory again! I’ve seen it a thousand times before, and you never let it heal! You just live it over and over! And you make me live it over and over too!’

The ghost child looked up at her uncomprehendingly. It was as if she didn’t understand that the memory was a painful one, or that sharing it might cause pain to the onlooker. Then she shrieked with laughter.

‘Well, see this one then –’ And the wild little girl who was Deirdre’s grandmother seized Gal’s hand too and dragged them both to the next room.

There, a fair-haired, dark-eyed girl who could not have been more than sixteen sat on a sofa, her face flushed with shame, her eyes lowered.

‘But she’s my baby,’ the girl was saying in the softest voice, with the most heart-rending sadness imaginable.

‘You may be capable of conceiving a baby,’ said an older woman drily, ‘but you are certainly not capable of looking after one.’

And Deirdre and Gal recognised her at once. It was Deirdre’s grandmother, middle-aged, perhaps twenty years ago.

Suddenly the wild little girl, the ghost-child grandmother, gripped their hands and swung madly on their arms. The unexpectedness of this might have pulled them over. But the child had no weight. She kept swinging carelessly as her older self lectured the young shamefaced girl.

‘And I can tell you are not listening,’ pursued Deirdre’s grandmother twenty years ago. ‘That, my dear, is how you got yourself into this mess. Lord knows I warned you. Now, God help me, you will listen and you will obey, or believe me, you will find the world out there a very cold place indeed.’

The young girl began to cry.

‘Oh, stop it. I’m sick of the sound of you. If you had behaved responsibly this would never have happened in the first place. You have no one but yourself, and that fool you call your boyfriend, to blame, and you are lucky, because you are going to get out of this scot-free. Now, are you going to listen, or are you going to sit there crying over spilt milk?’

The girl fell silent, and bowed her head further.

‘Tomorrow you will pack your bags and go and stay in the country with your aunt. You will wait there until the baby is born. Then you will leave the baby with her and start your senior year at a new school – a boarding school. You will forget all about your boyfriend, and the baby, and you will never attempt to see either of them again. And you will never tell a soul that this happened. Whenever you need to explain your break from school you will say you had rheumatic fever. After a while it will feel like the truth. You will work hard, and get into university. And I will pay. You threw your life away – I am giving it back to you. One day, I assure you, you will thank me.’

The young girl stared up at her, stunned, trying to digest this sudden bleak map of her future.

‘But what will happen to my baby?’

Deirdre’s grandmother hesitated for only a moment. Then she smiled an ecstatic, triumphant smile. This seemed to make the girl panic.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked again frantically.

‘If I tell, you must promise never to come back here. You have failed me, and for that I will never forgive you – but I am setting you free to live your own life. You may choose your own profession. You may visit your aunt. I will support you financially. But I never want to see you in Corbenic again.’

‘I promise. I promise. What are you going to do with my baby?’

‘I shall adopt her myself,’ said Deirdre’s grandmother simply.

The young girl stared at her as the colour seemed to drain from her face. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

Then suddenly the ghost-child grandmother shrieked with laughter again, and pulled Gal and Deirdre down the hall and into the next room.

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Deirdre. ‘Who was that girl? Where is the baby now?’

‘Oh, Deirdre,’ said the little girl with glee. ‘Have you really not guessed?’

And in the next room they saw Deirdre’s grandmother with another woman of about the same age. The other woman held a new baby, and there was a bassinet and a suitcase on the carpet nearby.

‘Here she is,’ she said.

She gave the baby gently into Deirdre’s grandmother’s hungry outstretched arms.

And as Gal and Deirdre looked on, there was a sudden soft glow of light around the action, around the giving of the baby into her arms, as if someone had lit a thousand lanterns. It was like looking at an icon surrounded by a bank of candles, or a scene lit up on stage. It was as if they were seeing how beautiful the memory was to the one remembering it.

Deirdre’s grandmother gazed down at the baby adoringly.

‘My baby!’ she said. ‘My Deirdre!’

‘Deirdre!’ said the other woman, surprised. ‘You’re calling her after her mother?’

‘I’m calling her after myself,’ Mrs Dark murmured. ‘I was named after Deirdre of the Sorrows – you know the legend? – and my daughter was named after me. We’re all Deirdres.’ She sighed. ‘But this Deirdre will never leave me,’ she said. ‘She won’t be interested in boys – she won’t be such a fool. We will be everything to each other – always. It will be as if her mother never existed. I will start again with my granddaughter . . .’

And then, for Gal and Deirdre, the other woman seemed to fade into obscurity. There was just Deirdre’s grandmother and the little baby, and she was cradling it and murmuring, ‘We’ll get them back. We’ll get them back, for what they did to me. Not just Father, but all men. Or one, it doesn’t really matter. And her, especially her. Elaine. It may take a while, but someone will pay, you’ll see. I’ll find a way. And you’ll be my helper. My special helper. You’ll never betray me.

‘I won’t let you.’

And suddenly they saw Deirdre’s grandmother as a little girl again. She was alone in a room in the semi-dark, the door shut and voices rising and falling outside it. It was easy to see that for some reason she had been sent to her room as a punishment; she was sitting on the floor, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth, her face tear-stained. And she was chanting to herself, over and over, ‘I’ll get them back. I’ll get them back. I’ll get them back. I’ll get them back . . .’

‘But I thought my mother ran away and left me,’ said Deirdre in a tiny, abandoned voice.

For now she realised that the fair-haired, dark-eyed, shamefaced sixteen year old had been her mother. And now she knew why there had never been any photographs of her on display.

Her ghost-child grandmother laughed. ‘I must have lied to you, then!’ she said heartlessly. But then she grew thoughtful. ‘She wasn’t wicked, your mother. Just stupid. Like all women. And she did abandon you. She just needed a little pushing. You need not have known. That your mother was a silly little slut, I mean. Ignorance is bliss, you know, especially where one’s parents are concerned. But you would bring him here. You would act just like her. You brought it on yourself.’ And she stared again with pure hatred at Gal.

‘Well, don’t stand around gawping!’ she added gaily, grabbing their hands. ‘I have so much more to show you! Seeing as you’re here . . .’

And with a terrifying strength, she managed to pull them out of the room, down the hall, and round the next corner . . .

Until Gal came to his senses, stopped and simply pulled his hand free. Swiftly he grabbed Deirdre’s other hand. Her head span round and her eyes searched his face wildly and for a terrible moment he thought that between them, he and her little ghost-child grandmother were going to tear Deirdre apart.

And he knew that this tug-of-war had been going on for all their lives.

But then Deirdre fell back towards him and he reached out and grabbed her as if he had rescued her from death itself.

‘You don’t have to follow her!’ he said. ‘This has got to stop. She’s just torturing you, Deirdre!’

Deirdre was holding her head, as if it was aching.

‘My poor mother,’ she was whispering.

‘She’s torturing both of us,’ Gal said, thinking uneasily about the baby he had seen Elaine give away – his relative, the ghost child had said. Then, mentally, he shook himself free. Or tried to. ‘None of this matters. She’s just using it to hold on to her power. We’re not here to relive her life. We have to keep searching for our own.’

But Deirdre was staring down at her hand. There was an injury on it, four livid parallel scratches.

She had felt the little hand around her own, colder than the hand of any human child, gripping, pulling harder and harder, as Gal had pulled her from the other side. The ghost child’s hand had been desperate with need, with fear, with loneliness, and Deirdre had known that all of the little creature’s strength was being poured into that grip. And although she felt Gal pulling her other hand, she could not deny the child what she wanted, she could not find it in her heart to pull away from her.

But Gal was stronger. And so as their hands had finally slipped apart, Deirdre had felt the sudden sting of the child’s four fingernails along the length of her palm, and worse, felt the anguish of her defeat.

She wanted to feel happy that Gal had won. She wanted to feel happy that she was with him, that she belonged to life, not death. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t. Not while the ghost-child grandmother still wandered Corbenic.

She had not really let go at all.