CLICK-CLICK-CLICK!
You could hear it from two floors away: the sound of Hectoria Fullsway’s ancient typewriter. By the time Molly reached the bedroom door, the machine-gun clacks were making her blink. The curtain was drawn across the silver-rimmed porthole in the door. Molly paused before the oval wooden sign with Molly’s Room written in red calligraphy, then knocked.
“Mrs Fullsway?”
The clacking ceased.
A fear-wobbled voice within the room warbled something incoherent.
Molly knocked again. “Mrs Fullsway, it’s Molly.”
With superb drama Mrs Fullsway flung open the door and stood looming. Her colossal face glowed with terror and night cream. Her tasselled violet robe swayed. She grabbed one end of her opulent emerald shawl and flung it over her shoulder. “Oh! Yug Mommy!”
“Yug Mommy?”
Mrs Fullsway pirouetted, flowed to her bedside table, plucked her teeth from a glass of water and slotted them into her mouth. She grabbed a sheaf of papers from the desk with its window view of Howlfair New Cemetery, and beckoned Molly into the room.
“Young Molly!” she said again. Mrs Fullsway had a voice like a very heavy tomato sauce. “My favourite amateur folklorist! What a relief to see you. Couldn’t sleep, eh?”
“Sorry, Mrs Fullsway, I was just wondering…”
“Wondering if I’d made progress with the new novel?” Hectoria boomed. “Ah, Molly, this one’s literally killing me. Usually a couple of days in the peace and quiet” – she emphasized the words peace and quiet by shouting them – “of the Excelsior Guesthouse, overlooking the spot where my dear George lies buried, gets my creative juices bubbling. But I’ve barely finished the first chapter! As usual I would like your opinion – and if you could do that thing with the spelling and grammar, I would appreciate it very much. Highly creative persons like myself rarely have time to bother with spelling or grammar, and I have a very tight deadline to meet.” She thrust the pages into Molly’s hands. “Of course, you will be rewarded handsomely for your efforts.”
Molly surreptitiously sniffed the pages. They were perfumed. “Rewarded?”
“Yes – you’ll get a break from this poky bedroom! Your mother tells me that she makes up one of the honeymoon suites for you whenever I am in residence. It must be a wonderful adventure.”
“The honeymoon suites?”
“Molly, you are becoming an echo. What’s wrong with you this evening? Ah – I imagine you’re excited to get stuck into my book’s opening chapter. I’m going with the title Petals in the Stream of Love’s Longing. What do you think? Dear Molly, you’ve gone a little green.”
Molly put a hand to her stomach as she scanned the first page. “Sorry, Mrs Fullsway. I think I ate some bad … cheese. I’d better hurry back to the, um, honeymoon suite.” She scuttled over to a bookcase. Already Mrs Fullsway had piled her own files and notes on top of Molly’s library books. “I just need to find something first…”
“You appear to have half of Howlfair Library taking up my shelf space, dear.”
“Yeah…” And by tomorrow, she thought, Mum will have made me take back every last book. “I think I left my toothbrush here somewhere…”
Molly moved a potted cactus aside and her heart jolted as she saw, pencilled on the wall, a doodle of a cat. Beside it were nine vertical lines, some struck through with horizontal slashes. Miserably she took a pencil from her top pocket and crossed out another line.
“What are you doing?” Hectoria hissed. “Please don’t touch my things!”
“I won’t be a second, Mrs Fullsway.”
She grabbed a few leather notebooks and some loose leaves covered in diagrams and some important books on Egyptology, Demonology, Thanatology. She tucked them under Mrs Fullsway’s perfumed pages, then returned the cactus so that it hid her wall scribblings.
“A honeymoon suite and the first chapter of Hectoria Fullsway’s latest blockbuster – at least you shall have a pleasant time while I am toiling away, dear!” Mrs Fullsway sighed as Molly pulled tomorrow’s school clothes from her wardrobe and headed for the door. The novelist clasped her hands, spun to face Howlfair New Cemetery, and warbled at the window: “Oh, George, do you remember our bridal suite in Budapest?”
Molly bid the vast woman good night, but Mrs Fullsway was no longer aware of her. She was clutching the edge of the desk and staring at her own fearful expression reflected in the window. It was an odd, desolate sort of fear that Molly saw on Hectoria’s face; Molly had the feeling that she’d seen that exact same expression before, on someone else. But she couldn’t remember who.
Molly took the opportunity to hurry from the bedroom and head to her own sleeping quarters, wondering what on earth was spooking the lavender-laced mind of Hectoria Fullsway.