MOLLY SAW THAT LOWRY WAS HOLDING A small piece of paper. An unfolded letter.
“What is it?”
“It was stuck to one of your maps,” Lowry said. “It’s addressed to Mrs Fullsway. Looks like it was written by her housekeeper.”
“What does it say?”
Lowry read the letter out loud:
Dear Mrs Fullsway,
It is with much regret that I must give notice, and although I will of course keep to the terms of our contract if necessary, I would prefer to quit immediately.
I have found these last fifteen years of service extremely character-building, but recent events have left me scared witless and I am afraid that you are in mortal danger. With great respect I must confess that I do not think you are telling me the whole truth. I do not think you were shouting about “gulls” in your sleep during your nap-time last Wednesday. Even though I was downstairs, I most definitely heard you shout, four or five times, “The ghouls are coming for me!”
I saw that gravedigger boy hanging around again and I think he knows something too, but when I tried to question him he ran away like a rat.
Please do everything you can to get out of whatever trouble you are in, Mrs Fullsway. I can tell that you are frightened. If you would only confide in me I might be able to help you, but as things stand I feel I must get away from whatever nightmare is coming before I get engulfed too.
Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Quincy (Mrs)
A haunted hush fell when Lowry finished reading.
“What does it mean?” Molly whispered.
Lowry shook her head. “I don’t know. We should start looking into it straight away.”
Molly tutted. “If Mrs Quincy is anything like Mrs Fullsway, she’s probably just got an overactive imagination…”
“That’s what everyone says about you,” observed Lowry, arching an eyebrow.
“My mum’s serious this time, Lowry. If she catches me investigating a letter by a mad housekeeper…”
“Molly Thompson, didn’t you hear what I just read?” Lowry sat up in the tub. “There’s danger afoot! Peril! Here in our town! Mrs Quincy said that a nightmare is coming!”
“But my mum…”
“Leave your mum to me,” said Lowry. “We’ve just got to make sure you survive the last day of school – and after that, I promise you I’ll come up with a plan to deal with your mother.” She checked her watch. “I have to get back.”
Lowry climbed out of the bathtub, put her mask back on, and headed for the window. She was startled by Gabriel, who had ascended the oak tree with the intention of joining Molly in the bathroom.
“Naughty little vampire,” Lowry said to Gabriel, lifting him from the windowsill and handing him to Molly. “Tell Thompson here to stop being such a scaredy-cat.”
The skeleton climbed through the window and into the tree. She saluted Molly and was gone.
Gabriel looked at Molly and licked his paw.
“Stop giving me that You-need-to-investigate-Mrs-Fullsway look,” said Molly, and she got back into the bath-bed. “That weird scared look on her face, though … I wish I could remember where else I’ve seen it.”
With Gabriel settled on her knees, she read and re-read the mysterious letter until she knew it by heart.
While Lowry Evans was sneaking back home through the silent town, Hectoria Fullsway was sitting at her desk hammering honeyed words onto sheets of vellum, ripping the pages from her typewriter, scrunching them up, and chucking them on the floor.
She babbled desperately as she typed. Occasionally she rose from her chair and wiped the sweat from her face with a corner of her shawl and glared out at the graveyard. It was during one such vertical moment, while she was cursing her departed husband for the ghastly mess he’d left her to deal with alone, that Mrs Fullsway noticed somebody walking among the tombstones.
She squinted. She gasped. She swayed like the mast of a storm-struck ship, her eyes fixed on the man who was heading towards the Excelsior Guesthouse.
It was George. Her late husband, dead for the past six years.
Dead – but now sauntering towards the Excelsior Guesthouse, dressed in his funeral suit, thick-haired, tanned as though back from an Italian jaunt, weaving between the graves through the night mist.
The dead man looked up. His eyes met Hectoria’s and he smiled. But there was something loveless about his smile. And one eye was glowing.
Hectoria clutched at her breathless gullet as her impossible visitor made his way to the ivy-wracked wall of the Excelsior. Now he was directly underneath Hectoria’s window, far below – though she could no longer see him.
By the time he had floated into view – floated right up the side of the guesthouse like a helium balloon – he had already started to transform. His clothes had turned white and become a shroud. Things glinted on his torso. Mrs Fullsway realized that George was weighed down with jewellery. And his face—
It was not George’s face.
It was bony and pallid. The forehead had shrunk away to almost nothing; the hair on top of it had turned to jaundice-yellow fluff, a stark mockery of George’s superb silver curls. One of the eyes, enlarged, glowed bright blue. There were no lower teeth, only upper fangs. The thing lifted its waxy face and grinned at Hectoria through the window. And when it stretched out a claw-like hand, its long index finger pointing towards the moon, poor Hectoria Fullsway’s heart stopped.
The moon ran into an ambush of clouds as Mrs Fullsway fell. The sky went black. By the time the moon had struggled free, the thing in the window had flown and Hectoria lay frozen-eyed on the carpet.
Across town, the awnings were down outside the tourist office. The silly cardboard ghoul and the silly cardboard phantom that flanked the office’s doorway had been stored indoors. The Ethelhael Valley, night-sodden, slept, and the strange town pulsed with mysteries unsolved. The children of the town, whether naughty or good, were dreaming of summer holidays – all except Molly Thompson, who was woken in the small hours by a sudden nightmare. A nightmare in which she was falling, and the haunted town of Howlfair was falling too, and the whole world was falling with it.
She woke with a gasp, jolting upright. Gabriel, annoyed, meowed. Molly sat frowning in the dark for some minutes, her head singing with unnamed fear. She thought of the look she’d seen on Hectoria’s face, so unnervingly familiar. And of Mrs Quincy’s ominous words about a horror that was on its way. Then she climbed from the bath, turned the flickery light on, took a pencil and her investigator’s notepad, and wrote on a clean page:
The Strange Case of Mrs Fullsway
“Sorry, Mum,” she muttered. “Just one more investigation.”