Jason plugged his phone into the mains charger. After a short while, a red line appeared on the screen. Seconds later it vanished, to be replaced by two digits.
60
They were static.
‘What the fuck?’ he said.
‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked, jumpily.
He stared at the screen. 60.
Sixty what?
He felt clammy, a sick feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. The sense that someone – or something – intensely malign was watching him. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
There was a distinct click. The sound of the front door opening. Someone walking in.
‘Hello? Who’s that?’ Emily called.
Jason followed her out of the kitchen. The front door was wide open and a bitterly cold wind tore through the hall. He hurried over and slammed the door shut. ‘Must have not closed it properly when we came . . .’
He stopped, realizing the wind wasn’t coming from outside. It was inside. A howling gale, as if every door and window in the house was wide open. It rippled their clothes, tore at the roots of their hair. Panic-stricken, Emily’s eyes darted in every direction.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the wind died, completely.
They stood still, staring at each other in bewilderment.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
He shook his head. He didn’t know, he really did not know. He went through into the living room to check the windows, but they were all shut. They were shut in all the other rooms he looked in. How much more, he wondered, silently, could either of them take?
‘I’ll try online, see if I can get a taxi that way,’ he said, and headed up to his studio. Emily followed close behind, her hands gripping his waist all the way up.
He sat at his desk and tried to log on. But the computer wouldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi. The curves of the black fan symbol chased up and down repeatedly, hunting for a connection. Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness.
Emily shrieked.
It had gone dark out in the street, too. Pitch dark.
Jason looked out of the window. ‘The street lights have gone off. There must be a power cut.’
‘Shit!’ Emily said. ‘No, it can’t be – what about all the food in the fridge? All my prawns will be ruined.’
‘They’ll stay cold for several hours, won’t they?’
‘For a few hours, so long as I keep the door shut. Oh shit, shit, shit.’
‘The power will be on quickly.’
‘Oh yes? We’ve not had a power cut here before. What if it’s not back on in a few hours? Do you have any idea what that would mean? We can’t even phone the electricity company to find out what’s happening. If I could start my van, I could switch the refrigeration on in that and put them there for the night, they’d be fine. But I can’t do that. We should have bought a generator – I did think about it.’
‘A bit late for that.’
‘Yes. And now we’re totally trapped.’
‘We’re not trapped. We can walk down to the village. We’ll phone for a taxi from the pub – or the RAC, get them to start your van, then we can put the prawns in.’
‘What if the power’s out there, too?’
‘I’m sure they’ll have a landline, and the landlord’s a helpful guy.’
‘Anything’s better than staying here in the dark, with a fucking ghost wandering around.’
Holding hands and using his torch, they carefully descended the spiral staircase, carried on down into the hall and out of the front door.
‘Got the key?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Jason closed the door behind them. A strong, cold wind had suddenly got up, and a gust, as ferocious as the one in the house, blasted them, as if it had followed them out. A tarpaulin in the front garden of the half-built house next door was flapping noisily. As they walked along the pavement, still guided by Jason’s torch beam, they both smelled the strong aroma of cigar smoke. A short distance along, on the other side of the road, there was a red glow.
Jason pointed the beam across and saw the silhouette of a man, standing beneath an unlit street light, smoking a cigar.
‘Hi!’ he called out.
There was no response.
He tried to step out into the road, but Emily held him back. ‘Jason, careful, who is he?’
In a lowered voice Jason answered, ‘Must be the chap Maurice Penze-Weedell was talking about, who he always sees on his evening constitutional. Hi!’ he repeated.
Again, there was no response.
‘Any idea how long this power cut is going to last?’ Jason called out, louder, to the stranger.
No response again.
He freed himself from Emily’s hand and began crossing towards the figure.
‘Jason!’ she cautioned. Then louder, ‘Jason!’
As he reached the far side, a shiver ripped through him.
There was no one there.
He looked up and down the street. No one.
No smell of a cigar.
‘Jason!’ Emily cried out.
He turned, confused and alarmed, and hurried back over to her. ‘He – he’s vanished.’
‘Please can we go? Please?’ She began striding off at a fast pace and he had to step up his own to keep up with her.
‘We have to get out of here,’ she said.
‘He just – vanished,’ he said, finally catching her up.
‘If he was ever there.’
‘We both saw him.’
She said nothing, just kept walking, staring doggedly ahead. After a few minutes they reached the entrance to the estate, and turned left, down the hill towards the village.
The lights in all the houses down the hill were also off.
‘The joys of country living,’ Jason said. ‘Eh?’
‘I’m not finding too many joys.’
The wind was blowing even stronger now, a full-scale gale, and they were having to lean into it, struggling to walk against it. Almost, Jason thought – knowing how irrational it was – as if the wind was trying to push them back to the house. His hair was being torn painfully from the roots and he wished he’d thought to wear a hat or baseball cap. Emily reached in her pocket and tied a scarf around her head. A tin can rolled along, clattering loudly, blown across the lane in front of them. Leaves scudded, twigs and small branches skittered across their path.
‘Listen, Em, it’s going to be OK, I promise. We’ll be looking back at all this one day, soon, and laughing about it.’
‘We will? It’s never going to stop, is it? The house hates us, it wants us to leave.’
‘No, it doesn’t. Trust me, Em, it wants us to stay.’
‘Trust you?’
He stopped and turned her, gently, to face him. Staring into her eyes in the darkness, with the faint glow of his torch, he said, ‘We love each other and that’s all that matters. We’re strong together. Remember our wedding vows? To have and to hold, for better, for worse . . .?’
She just stared at him.
‘Em, we’ll get through this.’
They carried on down the hill in silence, passing the large words of the sign – COLD HILL – PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH OUR VILLAGE – and suddenly Jason exclaimed, joyfully, ‘Yayyyyyy!’
They could see lights ahead. Street lights. House lights.
‘Does that mean our power might be back on?’ Emily asked.
‘Hopefully.’
‘This might be on a separate circuit or something.’
‘True.’
He turned. Lights were now back on in the houses further up the hill, behind them. ‘Look!’ he said.
‘Thank God.’
‘Want to go back?’
‘No. Let’s get to the pub, call a taxi, then we can pick up our bags and go to my parents.’
‘Sure.’
A few minutes later they reached the first of the village street lights, right across the road from the village store.
But it was no longer a village store.
There was a whole new plate-glass shopfront. The name had changed. The sign above now read, in smart, modern lettering, COLD HILL GALLERY.
Lights were blazing inside, and it was rammed. A party was in progress. Smartly dressed people, holding champagne flutes, nodding, chatting, some smiling, mostly serious, intense.
Jason and Emily looked at each other in astonishment.
‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘The village store.’ Emily shook her head in disbelief. ‘The village store’s gone.’
‘But –’ he was trying to think clearly – ‘we had our newspapers delivered this morning.’
‘They must have moved.’
‘Must have. But where? How could they? I only drove past a few days ago.’
They crossed over. As they drew nearer, Jason could see paintings hung around the walls, some with a red dot on them.
His paintings.
Then the small, discreet sign on the door.
PRIVATE VIEWING. 6.30 p.m. – 9 p.m.
BY INVITATION ONLY
He looked again at Emily. The door opened and a couple emerged. Jason and Emily slipped through and entered the mêlée. There was a heady smell of dense perfume and cologne, mingled with a fainter tinge of paints and a quiet, subdued murmur of voices. People stood, admiring the paintings, some deep in discussion, pointing out details approvingly. A waitress with a tray laden with glasses filled to the brim moved through the room. As she headed in their direction, Jason reached out for two glasses, but she glided past, as if he and Emily were invisible and the tray in her hands was just an illusion.
Someone will recognize me in a minute, he thought.
An elegantly dressed woman, with a sweep of finely coiffured fair hair, clearly the gallery owner, or director, who reminded him of the owner of the Northcote Gallery, was addressing a small group of men and women.
‘We are so lucky to have secured these quite exceptional pieces from the estate – his last works and, in my view, his very best.’
She pointed at his painting of The Skiver. Then at the one – he was certain he had not yet even done – of the miserable old couple in the pub. Next to it was another painting he had planned but not yet started, of a mechanical digger operator on the construction site.
‘Jason Danes,’ she proclaimed, ‘was the natural successor to Lowry. Had he lived, I think he would have become one of our truly great artists. There’s no question that all twenty-two of his works here will rise in value over the coming years. I see these as a must for anyone interested in twenty-first-century British art. It is so tragic he was taken from us at such a relatively early stage in his career.’
Jason stepped forward towards her. ‘Actually, I’m Jason Danes and I’m very much still here.’
Seemingly not hearing him, she went on. ‘The Skiver has such a sense of character. Danes caught this fellow quite exquisitely. Just by his very posture, you can sense the man’s lazy personality.’
‘Hello!’ Jason said.
No one took any notice of him as they all turned to look at the painting.
‘Jason, I want to go,’ Emily said.
‘This is my private view!’ he said. ‘We need to be here.’
‘They don’t want us. We’re irrelevant.’
‘Em! Babes! I’m – this – these are my pictures! We have to be—’
But she was already out in the street.
He followed her. ‘Em! We can’t just leave!’
‘They didn’t invite us,’ she replied.
Now he knew for sure he was dreaming. Had to be. ‘We don’t need an invite for my own private view, Em!’
‘We do for this one.’
They walked on a short distance, then he stopped again, staring, puzzled, at the cottage which, last time he had passed, had a sign outside saying, BED & BREAKFAST – VACANCIES.
The sign was gone.
The white-picket fence at the end of its cute front garden had gone, too, and so had the garden. It had all been paved over, and parked on it were two cars, squeezed together: a Porsche and a Mini Countryman.
‘What’s happened there?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to wake up.’
‘I am awake.’
‘No, this is all too weird,’ he said. ‘Two big changes to the high street in the past week.’ He pointed. ‘That was a B&B when we arrived here. How could it have changed so quickly? There was a garden out front. How can they have paved over the entire front garden so quickly – and over Christmas?’
As they walked on, he felt increasingly disoriented and light-headed. As if he was drunk or stoned. ‘Maybe whoever’s bought it is a builder,’ he suggested, ‘and perhaps they did do it during the Christmas break, Em? Perhaps the owners of the village store owned the B&B too, and sold both of them together?’
‘I’ve no idea – I just don’t think anything around here can surprise me any more,’ Emily replied. Then, an instant later, she stopped in her tracks and exclaimed, loudly, ‘Oh shit!’
‘What?’
‘That does.’
She pointed ahead, on the other side of the road. ‘Look! Look!’
He looked. At the pub. The Crown.
But it wasn’t the Crown now.
A large, chic, grey sign with black lettering said, prominently, BISTROT TARQUIN.
Several flash cars were parked outside.
Jason looked at Emily, bewildered.
‘We were here a week and a half ago,’ she said, dumbfounded. ‘We had Sunday lunch here. And then you had a sandwich here a couple of days later.’
‘Maybe the landlord—? Maybe he decided to spruce it up?’
‘Also in the past week? Is the whole of Cold Hill having a makeover?’
They went in through the front door. And stopped.
Stared.
The whole place had completely changed. The old wooden bar had been replaced with a steel and glass one, behind which was a wide, open hatch through to the busy kitchen. The manky old carpet was gone, and the floor was now limed wooden planks. The walls were freshly painted a soft grey, lit with modern, stainless steel fittings. The interior was filled with round glass tables and grey suede-covered chairs, with a candle burning on each table. Smart-looking diners were dotted around, eating designer food, drinking from fine crystal, while tall, impossibly chic waiting staff, all dressed in black, moved around as if they had been choreographed. Just inside the entrance, an elegant woman with sculpted hair stood behind a Perspex lectern with a built-in lamp, ready to greet diners.
She did not look up as they approached her.
‘Wow!’ Jason said. ‘This is some change!’
She still did not look up.
Jason felt the door open. A couple walked in behind them. Two very classy-looking women, one with long dark hair, the other blonde, razor-cut.
‘We’re a bit late,’ the dark-haired one said. ‘We reserved in the name of Saltmarsh.’
‘Demetra?’ the greeter looked up at her, full of smiles.
‘Yes.’
‘Follow me, please.’
Jason and Emily watched the two women being seated. Within moments, a waiter glided to their table with menus.
The greeter returned to her lectern and made a mark on her tablet; presumably, Jason thought, ticking off the reservation.
‘Is – er – is Lester Beeson around?’ Jason asked her.
She did not look up.
He turned to Emily.
She wasn’t there.