Mrs Elwood hummed cheerily as she bustled around the kitchen, stirring and flipping and buttering. She used a small stepladder to reach things down from the high cupboards, scurrying up the steps with practised ease. On the stove a pan of baked beans was bubbling away, and the air was heavy with the smell of fried bacon. In the background the radio was playing a pop song that had been a massive hit a few years ago. The morning had dawned bright and cold, and the room was filled with pale light.
At the kitchen table Jonathan blew on his cup of tea and took a cautious sip. It was hot and sweet – perfect. Lots of things seemed right about this morning, which made it all the more difficult not to feel a bit stupid about what had happened the night before. He felt less sure about what had been real and what hadn’t. OK, something had happened to the study door, but had there really been an intruder? Mrs Elwood hadn’t seen anyone. Maybe it was just something to do with the wind. Maybe he had dreamed the whole thing up. Those terrified patients at the hospital must have got his imagination working overtime.
Mrs Elwood brought over a plate of fried breakfast and sat down opposite him. Jonathan didn’t usually bother eating breakfast, but today he attacked the food voraciously.
“Careful. You’ll give yourself indigestion.”
Jonathan ignored her, and tore himself another mouthful of toast.
“So I phoned the school this morning, and explained the situation to them. I have to say, they weren’t very understanding. They asked a lot of questions, almost as if they didn’t believe me. Do you know why that would be?”
He took a quick, guilty sip of tea. With his attendance record, he wasn’t surprised no one believed her. “Dunno. Teachers are like that.”
“Well, eventually they listened to me, and they said that you don’t need to worry about coming in for the rest of the week. What are you going to do with yourself? You can’t sit with Alain all day long.”
“Not sure yet. I want to go back to the house this morning. It’s a bit of a mess, and I kind of want to sort it out. You know, if he gets better quickly and everything is a state. . .”
Mrs Elwood nodded. She hadn’t mentioned last night once, for which Jonathan was immensely grateful. “Of course. I’ve got to go into town later this morning, but I could come with you before then, if you wanted.”
“Nah. I’ll be all right.”
She smiled, and left him alone to finish his breakfast.
At ten o’clock Jonathan made the short trip home. He hadn’t been entirely honest with Mrs Elwood. He did want to tidy up the house, but the real prize was his dad’s study. After all these years, this was his chance to explore it properly. His heart rate pulsed faster just thinking about it. The house looked as decrepit as ever, but a little less foreboding than it had done during the night. There’s no way that an intruder would dare to return here in daylight, its windows seemed to wink at Jonathan, burglars are cowards like that. Still, he double-checked the road as he walked up the driveway. At this time of the morning, everything was quiet, and the only visible people were an elderly couple, presumably on their way to the shops, and an au pair pushing a baby along in a pram.
Jonathan let himself in, and this time he made doubly sure the front door was locked behind him. He put one of his favourite CDs on in his bedroom to keep himself company, and turned the volume right up. Trying to keep calm, he busied himself with simple tasks: taking the rubbish out, doing the washing up. Then, before he knew it, Jonathan was standing in front of the study, trying to ignore the raking scars that still marked the door. He took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and went inside.
It was dark in the study. The blinds had been pulled down over the window, so only the faintest chinks of light could shine through. There was a dank smell to the room, as if it hadn’t been aired for years. Jonathan walked across the room, pulled up the blinds and opened a window. Sunlight and biting fresh air streamed into the room. Immediately he felt better.
To all intents and purposes, the study had been Alain’s world for the past few years. He worked here, ate his meals, often fell asleep here. While Alain sat quietly, leafing through books, Jonathan drifted through the rest of the house like a ghost. If he wanted to speak to his dad, he had to knock three times on the door. If Alain had to leave the room he would swiftly lock it behind him, to prevent his son from catching a glimpse of what was going on inside. If Alain left the room of his own accord – to go to the toilet or make himself a drink – and bumped into Jonathan, he would give him a brisk nod of recognition.
“Hello son. Everything all right?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Keep it up.”
And with that, he would slip back inside and lock the door.
Jonathan had come to terms with his unusual family situation. He wasn’t a great talker himself, and if there were any practical problems, there was always Mrs Elwood. He would have been lying if he’d said that things were perfect, and that he didn’t wish that his mother was still around, or that Alain was more of a normal dad. But that was just the way things were. He coped.
But now he was here, here in his dad’s private sanctum, and it was difficult to resist the urge to trash the room that had kept his dad away from him for so long. In actual fact, it was an unremarkable space. Bookshelves lined every wall, and were stuffed with the sort of old, weighty books that had colonized the rest of the house. Yellowed newspaper clippings had been stuck on the walls, with lurid headlines that screamed “TWO DIE IN COLLAPSED BUILDING HORROR”, “GRUESOME BLOODBANK ROBBERY” and “LONDON WOLFMAN: AMAZING NEW SIGHTING!”. To Jonathan’s left there was the heavy wooden desk that he had forced across the door last night. He tried to push it back to its original place, but without the panic and the adrenalin pumping through his veins he could barely move it an inch. In the chaos pieces of paper had been scattered all over the floor, and there were pencils and biros everywhere. Whatever Jonathan had been expecting – some sort of mad dungeon perhaps, with chains hanging from the wall and a rack in the centre of the room – this certainly wasn’t it.
As he looked round the shelves a framed photograph caught his eye. He lifted it up and inspected it. It was a picture of a young couple, their arms wrapped around each other. They were standing in the rain in front of a grimy building with the sign “Bartlemas Timepieces” daubed in white paint across it, but they were smiling and happy. Jonathan stared at for a few seconds before realizing that the man in the photograph was Alain. Well, it wasn’t the Alain that Jonathan knew. This man had blonde hair, not grey, and he was standing upright, not hunched over. He didn’t just look younger – he looked like a different person. Jonathan wondered what sort of man he had been back then, whether he had fooled around and told jokes.
The woman he didn’t recognize. She was young, with thick black hair that fell down to her shoulders. Two large gold, hooped earrings poked out through the dark curls. She was wearing a strange gypsy outfit, with a white blouse and voluminous red patterned skirt. Must have been the fashion in those days, he guessed. There was a sense of mischief in her smile, and her eyes were grey and defiant.
Grey eyes. With a jolt Jonathan realized that he was looking at a picture of his mum. He had never seen a picture of her before. Alain had always said that there weren’t any. He had been lying all this time. At once all the resentment, the bitter anger that Jonathan had spent so many years keeping trampled down rose to the surface. He threw the photo against the wall, and sank to his knees as the frame shattered. For the first time in his life, he began to cry.
Feeling a bit embarrassed, Jonathan blew his nose on a ragged tissue and tried to pull himself together. This wasn’t achieving anything, although, in a strange way, he felt better for having cried. He went over to the photograph. The frame was ruined but the photograph was untouched. Carefully, he extracted it from the frame and placed it on the writing desk.
Why had his dad lied to him? Jonathan could understand why Alain had not wanted to talk about his wife’s disappearance, but lying about a photograph? It didn’t make any sense. It just seemed pointlessly cruel. He looked around at the books and the scraps of paper. Maybe the answer lay in here somewhere. At random Jonathan picked up a book and began to read.
Two long hours later he had learnt nothing. There didn’t seem to be any common theme to the books in Alain’s study. It was as if he’d gathered a hundred random volumes and put them on his shelves. Old history books, political textbooks, poetry books and even a selection of personal diaries. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were deathly boring. In some of them Alain had placed bookmarks at certain pages, and circled or underlined specific passages. For example, in Eminence: My Life with Professor Carl von Hagen, a diary by a serving maid called Lily Lamont, the following section had been highlighted:
19th October, 1925: After the hubbub and excitement of the past few days, my master was quiet today. He spent the day locked up in his laboratory, refusing all my offers of food and drink. Towards the evening he appeared, with a wild and ferocious look in his eyes. He mentioned something about the “darkest side” underneath his breath, before picking up his hat and greatcoat and stepping out into the night. I was not to see him for several days afterwards.
Which was slightly more interesting, but Jonathan didn’t have the foggiest what it meant. Nor could he decipher the importance of a slender book called The Criminal Underbelly of Victorian Britain, which was crammed with bookmarks. According to the date on its inside cover, it was written by a man called Jacob Entwistle way back in 1891, making him wonder what the point was in reading it. Nevertheless, on page seventy-nine Alain had marked the following passage:
In the foul depths of Pentonville Gaol I came across a particularly wretched specimen called Robert Torbury, a pickpocket and petty thief. He had been languishing behind bars for many years, and his mind had wasted away as a consequence. When he laid his eyes upon me he grabbed at my clothing, imploring me to help him. He was being sent away, he gabbled nonsensically at me, he had been sentenced to live in the darkness. As he sobbed I wondered what sane man could listen to him and still maintain that the legal system of the British Empire remains the fairest in the civilized world. . .
Jonathan closed the book with a thump, raising a cloud of dust. This was getting him nowhere. He turned his attention to the scraps of paper on the floor. They were covered in the scrambled thoughts that Alain had managed to scribble down. Luckily most of them were dated, so in about ten minutes Jonathan was able to put them in some sort of chronological order. The most recent entry had been made the day before his dad had suffered a darkening. It read simply: “A crossing? Surely I must be close now”.
Beneath it there was the name of a book – The Darkest Descent – and a page number, with a code after it that he realized was a library reference number. Jonathan felt a little tremor of excitement. Could this book have something to do with whatever dark secret had been haunting Alain for all these years? He couldn’t be sure, but he knew one thing – he had to get his hands on that book. And there was only one place in London where he would be able to find it.