It had occurred to me that Catherine might have faked her close encounter with a tall, dark stranger to give more substance to her spooky stories, but I didn’t think she was a good enough actor to fake that much shock. Wendy looked around, and spotted a dressing gown draped across the foot of the bed. She prised her hand out of Catherine’s, grabbed the dressing gown and draped it over Catherine’s shoulders. It seemed to help. Catherine pulled the gown around her, and sat up a little straighter.

  “I thought I wanted to see a ghost,” she said, “but it wasn’t anything like what I expected. No sense of awe and wonder, no feeling of meeting something that walked in eternity. It was just a piece of the night that had come alive, and wanted to hurt me. I felt so helpless! Like it could do anything it wanted to me, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it...”

  The tears threatened to make a comeback, but Wendy patted her comfortingly on the shoulder, and the moment passed. Catherine managed a small smile for Wendy, and then looked at me steadily, to make it clear that while she might have made a scene, she was back in control now.

  Marion and Arthur were still watching from the doorway. I walked straight at them until they had no choice but to back away, and then I joined them outside in the corridor. I started to close the door behind me, but Catherine cried out.

  “Please; don’t!”

  “Hush, Cath,” said Wendy. “I’m here.”

  “And I’ll be right here in the corridor, Catherine,” I said. “I’ll leave the door open so you can see me.”

  Penny came striding quickly down the corridor to join us. She met my gaze, and shook her head.

  “I’ve walked the whole length of the corridor,” she said bluntly. “I couldn’t find any trace of an intruder.”

  “Then it must have been a false alarm,” I said to Marion and Arthur. “And I was just jumping at shadows. That’s what comes of paying too much attention to ghost stories. But given the state we’re in, I think it might be best if we all returned to our rooms, locked the doors, and didn’t come out again till morning. We’re all too on edge right now, and ready to see anything. We don’t want anyone getting hurt, do we?”

  “What if I need to use the bathroom again?” said Arthur.

  “You’ve got one of those chamber-pots, haven’t you?” I said. “I have a feeling we’re all going to get very familiar with those before morning.”

  “Oh ick,” said Penny.

  Marion drew herself up to her full height, and stood on her dignity. “In all the time I’ve lived in this house, I have never experienced anything like this.”

  “None of us did,” said Arthur. And then he fixed me and Penny with a speculative look. “Until you people turned up.”

  “You mean: until Lucas Carr disappeared,” I said. “Good night, everyone.”

  Marion sniffed loudly, spun on her heel, and stalked back to her room. Arthur started after her, and then hesitated. He went back to Ellen’s door, knocked quietly, and announced himself.

  “I’m not coming out!” Ellen said loudly.

  “You don’t have to,” said Arthur. “We’ve decided we’re all going to stay locked in our rooms till morning. Just for everyone’s peace of mind. We’ll get together for breakfast.”

  “I don’t like it here,” said Ellen. “Please, Dad; can’t we go home?”

  “We are home, Ellen.”

  “I mean, home in London.”

  “I’m sorry, Ellen,” said Arthur. “We can’t do that.”

  He waited, but she didn’t have anything more to say. Arthur’s shoulders slumped, and he turned away and went back to his room. The door closed behind him, and I heard a key turn in the lock.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Penny said quietly.

  “I think someone wanted to make a supernatural impression,” I said.

  “Someone? Or something?” said Penny. “People don’t just appear and disappear.”

  “Lucas Carr did,” I said.

  “I really didn’t see or hear anything in the corridor,” Penny said carefully. “Not even when you went chasing off after it.”

  “What I saw, with my better than average eyes, seemed entirely real and solid,” I said. “Not even a little bit ghostly. Right up to the point when it suddenly wasn’t there anymore.”

  “It couldn’t have been anyone we knew,” said Penny, “because the whole household was present and accounted for. In a quite startling variety of bed wear. So who did you see, and where did they go?”

  “Good questions,” I said. “Maybe it went to wherever Lucas Carr is.” I looked back through Catherine’s open door. She and Wendy were still sitting together on the bed. I gave them my best encouraging smile. “How are you feeling, Catherine?”

  She managed a small but genuine smile. “I feel such a fool, screaming like that. Upsetting everyone. I think you’re right. It was just a dream.”

  She sounded like she was trying to convince herself, as much as anyone else.

  “You’ll be perfectly safe now,” I said. “Just keep your door locked. Everything will make much more sense once it’s daylight.”

  Catherine nodded. “Of course. I’m sure you’re right.”

  “And no more thinking about ghosts,” I said sternly.

  “I was fine with them, as long as they were just stories,” said Catherine. “But stories aren’t supposed to appear in your room at the dead of night.”

  Wendy patted her hand, got up off the bed, and came over to stand before me.

  “I’m going to stay with Catherine,” she said quietly. “She’s in no state to be left on her own. The last thing we need is her crying out again once we’re all settled.”

  “Keep the door locked till morning,” I said, “and you’ll be fine.”

  “Of course we will,” said Wendy.

  She shut the door in my face, and locked it. I heard her raised voice, speaking cheerfully to Catherine.

  “Pull back those covers, dear, and budge up. There’s plenty of room for both of us to get comfortable.”

  X X X

  Penny and I went back to our room. I turned on the light, and then paused in the doorway, looking back down the corridor. Whatever I’d seen had got away from me, and I wasn’t used to that. I decided I’d leave the lights on in the corridor, in case I found it necessary to sneak out again and do a little more prowling around. Just because I’d set the rules didn’t mean I had to obey them.

  I closed the door, and locked it. Penny was moving quickly around the room, checking everything was as it should be, in case someone had sneaked in while we were distracted.

  “If there was anyone in here,” I said, just a bit reproachfully, “I would know.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust your incredible senses,” said Penny. “It’s just that I don’t trust anything about this house.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, and shook her head slowly. “Part of me wants to search every room in the Hall, and not stop until I’ve found something I can hit. But if there is something here, it probably knows this house a lot better than we do. It could jump out on us from anywhere.” She stopped, and looked at me steadily. “Would you think less of me, if I asked you to leave the light on for the rest of the night?”

  “Something is definitely going on,” I said. “And a light would be helpful, so we can be sure to see anyone sneaking up on us.”

  “Well done, Ishmael,” said Penny. “A calm and sensible reason, for doing what we want to do anyway.”

  “Get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll sit beside you, and keep watch.”

  She just nodded.

  And so I sat there, all through the long marches of the night and into the morning, while Penny slumbered fitfully beside me. There were no more incidents or strange noises, and no footsteps anywhere.

  ChaPter Six

  Fighting Your Corner

  Breakfast the next morning was something of a subdued affair. It was morning and it was light, and we were all together, but that was the best you could say for it.

  Penny and I sat at our usual places, while Arthur and Marion bustled around the dining hall table, dispensing food from the ubiquitous hostess trolley. They didn’t have anything to say. I looked around the table, trying to work out why everyone still seemed so affected by the previous night’s events. I saw the crawling ghost, but they didn’t. Catherine saw a dark figure in her room, but no one else did. So why were they all so ready to lock themselves in their rooms all night? And why, now it was morning and the adventures of last night were safely over, did they still look like someone had sneaked up behind them and hit them over the head with a two-by-four?

  Marion and Arthur had turned on the electric chandelier, perhaps hoping its bright light would help cheer the place up and keep the shadows from gathering. But instead, the flat, characterless light added a stark and artificial aspect to the windowless room, as though we were all trapped in a waking nightmare, just waiting for the next awful thing to happen.

  Catherine and Wendy sat close together, chatting as cheerfully as they could manage about everything except what had made such an impression on them the night before. They argued over the Hall’s history, over who had hogged most of the blankets in the early hours, and about what they were going to do once breakfast was over. But there was a definite forced quality to their light and cheery voices. Like whistling in a graveyard, to keep the bad things at bay.

  Ellen sat stiffly in her chair, pouting sullenly at her plate and saying nothing; the picture of a teenage girl forced to be somewhere she didn’t want to be. She went out of her way to make it clear she was ignoring everyone, but they were all too taken up with their own problems to notice.

  Arthur and Marion put even more effort into bustling around, as though that would help them pretend the gloomy atmosphere in the dining hall wasn’t happening. They had prepared a generous breakfast for their guests: sausage and bacon, scrambled eggs and baked beans, and heaps of fried bread. Presumably hoping it would distract us from the unpleasantness of the night before.

  “Ah,” I said, as the plate in front of me was piled high with traditional goodness. “The Full English. For when you feel like giving your digestive system a real challenge.”

  Nobody laughed, or even smiled. They were too busy staring glumly at their plates. There didn’t seem to be much of an appetite for the fare provided, and while no one actually pushed it away and demanded a croissant, there was a lot of pushing the food around their plate before anyone actually tried anything. I just got stuck in. I’ve always said there’s nothing like mysterious experiences in the night to give you a good appetite. Penny approached her breakfast in a more ladylike manner, cutting her fried bread up into neat little squares before popping them into her mouth one at a time. Everyone else watched us eat with a mixture of shock and awe. Wendy watched me pile up the meat on my fork, and actually shuddered.

  “Animal!”

  “More than one, if I’m any judge,” I said cheerfully. “How is everyone feeling, this bright and glorious morning?”

  “It’s not natural to be so exuberant, this early in the morning,” said Catherine.

  “Oh, I quite agree,” I said. “I’m not normally a morning person.”

  “This is true,” said Penny. “Usually, all Ishmael can manage first thing is a cup of black coffee and the occasional grunt.”

  “But there’s nothing like coming face to face with the creatures of the night, to make you feel full of life in the morning,” I said happily.

  “If he’s going to be like this all day, I’m going back to bed,” said Wendy.

  “Oh hush dear, and eat your nice breakfast,” said Catherine. “Think of all the fun things we have planned for today...”

  Ellen was still refusing to engage with the whole breakfast scene. She sat stiffly in her chair with her arms defiantly folded, and scowled at her parents.

  “I can’t believe you did this to me! You know I’m a Vegan!”

  “I thought that was last week,” Marion said briskly. “You change your mind so often, dear. I can remember when you wouldn’t eat anything but pizza, even though it did terrible things to your bowel movements.”

  “Mother!” said Ellen, caught between mortification and outrage.

  “Try the fried bread,” Arthur said encouragingly. “You can’t get more Vegan than bread.”

  Ellen studied the burned slices suspiciously. “What were they fried in? Did it originally come from something that used to run around a field and make noises?”

  “Well, not for long,” said Arthur.

  “And I don’t see my herbal tea anywhere,” said Ellen, just a bit dangerously.

  “We’ve run out,” said Marion. “You’ll just have to slum it with coffee, like the rest of us.”

  “Caffeine is good for you,” said Arthur. “It’s practically a food group.”

  I had to wonder what Arthur had to be so cheerful about. Lucas Carr was still missing, seriously weird things were prowling around the Hall at night, and his business was still under threat. But the man’s smile seemed genuine enough, particularly when his gaze met Marion’s, and then she would manage a brief smile of her own. I shrugged internally, and concentrated on my breakfast. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Wendy was still staring at me disapprovingly. I chewed cheerfully in her direction, and her scowl deepened.

  “I don’t think you’re taking the situation seriously enough, Mr. Jones.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said, in my most reasonable tone.

  Penny cut in quickly, flashing Wendy her brightest smile.

  “Did you and Catherine manage to get some sleep, after we left?”

  “Eventually,” said Wendy. “We sat up talking for quite a while.”

  “What about?” I said.

  “Girl talk,” said Wendy.

  I looked to Catherine for confirmation, but she just nodded. She’d found a grilled tomato she liked, and had separated it from the rest of her breakfast so she could cut it up with surgical precision. Wendy glared at her own plate like a vampire faced with a stake smeared with garlic.

  Arthur and Marion finally finished their serving duties, and sat down together at the end of the table. They made a point of shaking out the monogrammed serviettes that the rest of us had ignored, tucked them in place, and then set about their breakfasts as though determined to prove how good they were. I looked to Penny, because she was always so much better at breaking the conversational ice than me. She smiled determinedly around the table.

  “The Hall seems so much more cheerful this morning. When I was lying in bed last night, I had trouble getting to sleep because of the wind howling around the Hall. It reminded me of how isolated we are, all the way out here. Such a spooky sound....Like something trying to find a way in, so it could get at us.”

  “It was just the wind,” Wendy said firmly.

  I looked to Catherine, who was taking small cautious bites of her tomato, as though checking whether it really was what it appeared to be.

  “Any old stories about the howling of the wind that comes to mind, Catherine?” I said. “A family banshee, perhaps?”

  Wendy couldn’t help herself. “Banshees are nothing to do with the wind. You’re thinking of wendigos.”

  “I don’t think I am,” I said.

  “My point,” said Penny, “is that we are all alone out here. No one’s going to turn up to help us. We have to sort this business out for ourselves, and that means working together.”

  She beamed encouragingly round the table, but no one had anything to say. They all kept their gazes fixed on their breakfast, whether they wanted it or not, so they wouldn’t have to look at Penny or me.

  “I do feel better, now it’s daylight,” said Catherine. Her voice and her hands were entirely steady. “The events of last night feel like they happened to someone else. Even though I know someone, or something, definitely did appear in my room.”

  “There was no intruder,” Arthur said stubbornly. “It simply wasn’t possible for anyone to have got into the house.”

  “I don’t believe anybody did,” said Catherine. “Whatever I saw, I think it was already here.”

  “Will you stop talking about ghosts as though they’re real!” said Marion, glaring around the table, and then fixing her gaze on Catherine. “We only invited you here because Arthur was so sure you’d be able to help us. But so far, you haven’t done a single thing to justify your presence.”

  “That’s a bit harsh...” said Wendy, but Catherine cut her off with a gesture, and Wendy subsided, still bristling. Catherine nodded courteously to Marion.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to contribute more,” Catherine said calmly, apparently entirely unmoved by Marion’s tone. “But there are things happening in the Hall that no one can help you with. This house knows all there is to know, about the darkest aspects of the human heart. The crimes and sins committed by the Glenbury family still linger in the Hall’s rooms and corridors; never forgotten, and never forgiven.”

  The simple certainty in her voice held everyone’s attention, but no one seemed to have anything to say in response.

  “There must be something you can do,” Arthur said finally.

  “I am an historian,” said Catherine. “So Wendy and I will take a turn around the Hall after breakfast, and see if we can dig up some fascinating facts you can use to lure in more visitors.”

  Wendy quickly cut in. “Proper historical evidence, to back up stories that have never been properly confirmed. Like...just how far into the Hall did Lord Ravensbrook get, before he vanished?”

  No one around the table seemed particularly impressed.

  “Does that really make a difference?” said Penny.