THE GHOST-TOUR GUIDES HAD GIVEN UP after another day without customers, the awnings were coming down outside the tourist office on Zaleska Street, and gently, cheep by cheep, the summer starlings sang the sun to sleep. The Ethelhael Valley, shadow-dappled, grew drowsy, and the strange town it cradled blinked with lamplight. Here and there a stray car yawned homeward along a street. A heavy gate snored shut. Soon the children of Howlfair, the naughty and the good, were grumbling their nightly ways to bed – all except Molly Thompson, who was climbing the extra flight of stairs to the attic of the Excelsior Guesthouse to catch a vampire bat.
The moon gaped through the window as the small, serious local historian came into view. First the froth of her badly behaved brown curls. Then her face, tense with anticipation. With the long slender nose, the little round mouth, the left eyebrow inquisitively cocked, her face resembled a question mark. Which was appropriate, really, because Molly Thompson was full of questions. Questions like: Is my Aunt Carol an undead fiend who drinks the blood of the living?
And: Is she secretly living in my attic?
The moonlight made her squint. She halted. There was definitely something moving in the attic. She could hear it scratching around.
Molly was certain she knew what it was. She’d seen it circling above the garden last week.
With a fishing net in one hand, she took another steep step up the staircase. Her foot wobbled. She grimaced as the stair voiced a musical croak beneath her foot.
“Molly!”
There were copper pipes snaking at floor level along the stark white walls of the Excelsior Guesthouse – down the corridors, up the stairs and along the skirting boards in certain rooms, such as the lounge and dining room and lobby – and from these pipes, every few feet, there sprouted an open valve. Through these pipes, Molly’s mother could hear what was going on throughout the building. It was through one of the valves that Mum’s voice now hissed, and like a gorgon’s glare it turned Molly to stone. Her camera swung from her neck on its strap.
“Molly! Where are you? You’d better be getting ready for bed!”
No, Mum, she might have said into the open valve. I’m just investigating the possibility that Aunt Carol is a shape-shifting vampire who haunts the attic in the form of a winged mammal.
But she didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead she blurted, without thinking:
“Yes, Mum! G’night, Mum!”
Then she winced at her blunder – for now, of course, she had given herself away.
The vampire would have heard her.
The familial fiend in the attic would know that she was halfway up the towering, narrow flight of stairs.
The scratching noises stopped, and with a tingle of terror Molly realized that Aunt Carol was waiting for her.
The Excelsior Guesthouse, impossibly ancient and dizzyingly tall, had always reminded Molly of a haunted galleon, with its low-ceilinged white corridors braced with timber beams, the portholes set in the doors of the cabin-like rooms, the front gable like a ship’s prow. The burnt-orange exterior with tar-blackened timbers over which knots of ivy hung like rigging. The square windows just big enough to fire a cannon through. But Molly had never before experienced the odd phenomenon of which so many guests had complained: the sensation of the house pitching and swaying as though lurching into a storm on high seas. She felt it now. Or was it just fear making her stomach flop like a freshly netted fish?
Molly Thompson steadied herself, reached inside her hair, rummaged around in the curls and found a stray bobble. Then, from her pocket, she pulled a small flimsy notepad with MYSTERIES written on the front. Her hands, she noticed, were trembling. The notepad fell open to reveal pages covered with scribblings: recorded bat sightings with times and dates; doodles of ghosts. Underlined red-penned questions about Aunt Carol, about the mysterious symbols on the Howlfair flag, about mad Mr Wetherill who owned the gift shop that sold stakes and silver bullets. Questions about Dad.
Molly folded the notepad over the mouth of the open valve and secured it with the bobble. Then, carefully, she climbed the remaining steps and took hold of the handle of the attic door, her net raised.
She’d always known in her bones that the Excelsior Guesthouse had a sinister secret. And now – at last! – she was going to come face to face with it.
She took a breath and shoved the door open.