“Don’t trust the downside,” Peggy said. “That’s all I’m saying. Maybe your parents and sister are gone—maybe they are, maybe they are—but that doesn’t mean the stain of the downside doesn’t remain.”

  “They’re just old basements,” Jack said. “I do know what happened here, you know. I ran away before it all went bad, but I know about the murders, about my family killing themselves.”

  “They vanished,” Peggy said.

  “They burnt themselves to death, and that’s it. All over. I’m not them, and the castle isn’t theirs anymore.” He pointed at Peggy, then waved past her in the general direction of Tall Stennington. “You’d best all get used to that.”

  “I hope we will,” Peggy said.

  “And do you know the old woman who’s been visiting the castle? Leaving weird things stuck above the doors and windows?” He knew it wasn’t Peggy. The old woman he’d seen from the north tower had been taller, thinner, her clothing more ragged. Peggy carried herself with grace, and she had always been proud of her appearance. Even on the poor money his parents had paid her, she’d bought fine cloth and made her own clothes. When he was eight she’d made him a waistcoat. He wondered where it was now.

  “Don’t mind her,” Peggy said. “That’s Abertha. She lives up in the hills.” She said no more, as if that was answer enough.

  “Well I don’t want her coming around again,” he said. “The castle’s a home now, not an abandoned ruin. The gates will be locked.”

  “Not up to me whether Abertha decides to visit again or not,” Peggy said. “She makes her own mind up about things. One time, no one saw her for three years. We all thought she was dead and gone, rotting into the ground somewhere up in the hills. Then she was seen again with red hair and a tattoo all across one shoulder. Still don’t know where she’d been.”

  A silence fell between them, loaded with questions that Jack had no will to ask. He could smell the pie in the cardboard box, and it would be growing cold. Cold pie and veg held no allure for him. The warmth of his family did.

  “I’m going home,” Jack said. “Maybe one day soon, during the day, you can come and visit properly. Lucy knows all about you, Grandma.” He smiled as he spoke the name. She’d always liked him calling her Grandma when he was a child, and the word brought the ghost of a smile to her lips now.

  It didn’t last.

  As she turned to walk away he saw sadness on her face, and the glimmer of an old woman’s tears in her eyes.

  George was already asleep when he reached the north tower, exhausted by the day’s journey and the adventure of exploring his new castle home. Lucy wasn’t far behind herself, sitting huddled in blankets. She’d started a fire in the old fireplace, and Jack flustered for a while, worried about the chimney catching on fire, old birds’ nests, decades’ worth of accumulated soot clinging to internal walls. Lucy stood and held a sheet of newspaper across the small fireplace. The paper was immediately sucked inward and she let it go, swallowed by the flames, casting a momentary, dancing brightness around the room.

  “The flow’s fine,” she said. “Nothing blocking the chimney. We’ll have them all swept tomorrow. So did you have a nice visit to the village?”

  While they ate he told her about the pub, and meeting Peggy, but he toned their conversations down. He had no wish to discuss his family, or the depths of the castle, or Peggy’s comments about Abertha. They were all conversations that belonged outside in the cool darkness, not here in the warmth of the fire and good food. They chatted some more as they finished the meals, stacking plates back in the box and covering George’s food in case he woke hungry.

  Jack was suddenly exhausted, his eyes heavy and drooping. The stark heat of the fire made him more tired, but it was a calming sensation, a caress across his skin that promised warmth and comfort and peace. Sometimes when he felt direct heat on his skin his mind snapped back to Cherbourg and fallen buildings and burning tanks, but not this time. Now, he was all at home.

  Lucy crawled closer and brought her blankets with her, wrapping them both together. They shared the warmth of the fire and each other. Their love was rich and binding. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, while the fire watched them and cast shadows around them, and beyond the walls of the room the castle was as cold and empty as ever.

  Jack awoke with a start, listening for the sharp cracking noise that had brought him up from a deep slumber. Lucy muttered something and shuffled into a more comfortable position, her arm falling from across his chest. Across the room George snored softly in his blanket pile, only the tangled hair on top of his head visible. Jack glanced at the fire to gauge how much time had passed. It had burnt down to a rich glow, low flames still flickering here and there. A knot in the wood popped, sending a shower of sparks onto the slate hearth. His heart jumped. He smiled. Woken by the fire.

  As a child he had always loved the fires his mother built in the castle’s fireplaces, large and small. He would become entranced by the initial roar of flames as paper and kindling caught, then the glow of coals, and later the cavescape that he imagined to be a primeval world, lava filled and busy brewing the foundation blocks for life. He could stare into these dying fires for an hour or more, making up stories and creating worlds.

  They burnt themselves to death.

  He blinked, turning away from the fire and trying to purge the heat from his eyes. It wasn’t a nice idea. It took him back to blazing tanks and the stench of cooking flesh.

  Careful not to wake Lucy, he moved out from under the blankets and picked up the clothes he’d dropped nearby. He dressed quickly and dug around in his kit bag until he found a torch. He also pulled out a notebook and pencil, and wrote a note to Lucy in the firelight: Gone exploring.

  He didn’t need the torch until he reached the big doorway and closed the door on the warm room and his sleeping family.

  Peggy’s comments about the downside played on his mind. Darkness might not be the time to go looking, but he no longer felt tired, and it was only an hour or two until dawn. He knew the castle well, and perhaps in darkness he would subconsciously steer towards the more out-of-the-way places, nooks and crannies that he knew of but maybe hadn’t visited even as a child. If there was a basement beneath the basements, he would find it.

  It was also about confronting any fears that remained. Facing the darkness of his old family home, he would stare it down defiantly and with a confidence that would inform the rest of his time here.

  He went down into the north tower basements first. He flicked the light switches, unsurprised that the lighting down there no longer worked. The torch lit his way instead, and descending the spiral stone staircase felt like going back in time. The treads, worn from centuries of footfalls, seemed almost to fit his feet, and he descended without putting a foot wrong. The basements had vaulted brick ceilings, laden with old cobwebs and heavy with dust. The first room had a rack of timber shelving slumped against one wall, with rusted tins of paint and tools decayed into conjoined masses that he would have to remove one day. One of the tins had ruptured some time in the distance past, and a slew of hardened paint drooped to the floor like a frozen ice sculpture. He remembered this room and these shelves from when he was a child, and he suspected the tins were the same ones that had been stored here back then.

  Very little had changed.

  The next two rooms brought back the same old memories. One was almost bare apart from an old wine rack, empty of bottles and home now to spiders and mice. The second was piled with abandoned furniture, and he remembered he and his sister playing down here, fighting on the sofa and throwing tennis balls back and forth in the long, low-ceilinged room. The furniture was rotten now, the sofa’s upholstery faded and darkened with damp and decay.

  He went back through the rooms and viewed them with an adult’s eye. There were no signs of hidden openings or secret doors, no hint that there were any more levels beneath this one. He stomped on the floor and raised clouds of dust. It was solid stone. Nothing hollow down there. No downside.

  He wandered the basement rooms one more time, playing his torch along the walls and across the floor. If only Peggy’s comments had gone away, he thought. But they hadn’t. He still felt the weight of her concern, her warning, even though he’d found nothing to substantiate her claims.

  Nothing here, at least. This was only part of the castle. There were the thick walls enclosing the main courtyard, within which passages ran and small rooms were huddled and hidden away. There was the secret garden, encircled with high walls and huddled against the north tower’s outside wall. And there was the south tower, fallen to ruin and a place he’d been warned away from by his parents from a young age. That didn’t mean he had not explored there, of course, balancing on mounds of tumbled stones and staring into forbidden shadowy recesses in the same way he stared into the glowing coal landscape of hearth fires.

  Maybe now would be the time to explore these places again.

  He checked in on Lucy and George, saw they were still sleeping, and left the north tower.

  It was cool outside, and as dawn began to colour the sky over the eastern walls and mist rose above the spread of overgrown courtyard, the fallen south tower looked further away than it really was. He decided to climb onto the wall and circle the courtyard. He’d often walked up there years before, pretending to be a soldier defending his castle against invaders, stashing quivers of roughly made twig arrows and firing them down at bushes and trees with the bow his father had made for him. That was back before his parents began to change. Before his sister grew to mock and hate him too. A happy time, which he would bring to this castle again.

  I will bring happiness back! he thought, and he wondered where such vehemence had come from. It was as if he was responding to an unspoken doubt, a silent scepticism. He looked around but no one was there. Birds were beginning to serenade the dawn, but apart from that he was alone.

  Just before the main wall reached the remains of the south tower there was a set of steps built into the inner wall. He descended into the overgrown gardens, pushing his way through bushes, wincing as brambles pricked his skin and scraped his bare hands. The fallen walls were smothered with rampant plant growth as well, and the early morning light caught rose blooms and wisteria and speckled the mounds with dawning colour.

  He played his torch across the ruins, trying to probe through plants and between fallen walls. To no avail. Even the light couldn’t penetrate, and to get in there himself he’d have to perform some pretty intense cutting back of undergrowth. He had played here as a child, and though there might have been hidden basements to the old tower, he’d never found his way down to them. If they were even still standing, they would likely be buried by crumbled debris, flooded, or impassable.

  “Stupid idea,” he muttered, his voice surprisingly loud. Birdsong lessened and then began again. Maybe these birds were unused to hearing human voices in these parts.

  Glancing at the windows of the north tower, Jack saw no flicker of curtains or dance of candlelight. His wife and child were still asleep, exhausted from yesterday’s journey and the excitement of arriving at such a place. He looked around the courtyard, enjoying the silence but for the singing of birds, relishing the shadows as early morning sunlight slanted across the eastern wall, probing but not yet ready to land within the castle walls.

  There’s that room with the well, he thought, and the memory brought him up short. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? The well was old and partly filled in, but still dangerous, and his father had built a heavy wooden cover that fit the circular opening perfectly. He’d told Jack and his sister to never go playing in there, so of course they had, daring each other to run across the cover and listening to the dull echoes of their footfalls booming and fading away below.

  The room housing the well was in the wide eastern wall, halfway between north and south towers, nestled beside the internal corridor. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room without windows, and it wasn’t the well itself that sprang back into Jack’s memory now. It was the narrow spread of wooden flooring at the room’s edge, ten feet from the well. As a child he’d also jumped on this, hearing a deader, duller echo from below.

  He had never lifted it to see what lay beneath. He thought it was just a floor.

  Jack entered the eastern wall and walked quickly along the musty, dark corridor. Mice scattered out of his way, and at one point a spider web broke across his face and head. He waved the rest of it away and ran his hands through his hair, hoping he didn’t encounter the soft, writhing body of a spider.

  When he reached the door it stood half-open. It scraped across the floor as he pushed on it, and his torch revealed the capped well, wooden boarding still strong and solid. Over the years leaves had blown in from outside, rattling along the corridor and carried into the open room by secret draughts, and they mostly hid the wooden covering on the floor. He frowned, wondering if he’d misremembered. Then he moved inside and swept the leaves aside with his foot, and the timber hatch was revealed.

  Because that’s what it was. A hatch or a trapdoor, hiding unknown depths below.

  “Well bloody hell,” Jack said. He considered what he should do. The safest thing would be to leave it for later, and return here with tools and a more powerful torch. But he’d come this far, and it was still early, and if there was something down there—

  —don’t trust the downside—

  —he wanted to know and understand the risks, not leave them hidden away. The time would come when George came exploring around the castle, and although Jack would warn him to stay away from certain areas, he would do as Jack had done. A child’s curiosity was boundless. Warn him to stay away and he’d be twice as likely to come.

  He worked at the timber hatch for a while, and just as he decided it had been screwed down and would never move again without the application of a crowbar, his fingers slipped through the crumbling wood at its edge and the whole trapdoor moved. He braced himself and lifted.

  The smell that wafted up at him reminded him of war.

  Old death, he thought, and he shivered at the idea. No particular memory assaulted him, but a feeling of memories, a sense of death permeating the air and insinuating itself in his nostrils, greasy on his skin. He sneezed from the dust, wiped both hands across his cheeks and forehead, and picked up the torch.

  There was a narrow set of stone steps revealed beneath the trapdoor. He descended, watching his footing, and after just eleven steps he found himself standing on a stone floor in a small square room. There was nothing remarkable about it at all. It contained dust and cobwebs, the ceiling was arched brickwork, and he exhaled a sigh of disappointment.

  He really had expected to find something more. He’d never told Lucy, but part of the attraction of returning to Grayland Castle had been the opportunity to explore the place as an adult. As a child, it had been his playground, then later as a young adult it had quickly become a place of pain and torment, his debauched family’s antics stealing away any allure the place ever had.

  Now, he felt like a child exploring a castle again, only this time he did so with adult eyes. He understood the attractions of hidden places. He knew that any building such as this hid mysteries, and Peggy’s mention of the downside—however filled with fear and warning it was—might have scraped the dust from one such mystery.

  “Maybe not,” he muttered. “Maybe it’s time to be a grownup after...”

  He trailed off when his torch failed to illuminate one corner of the room. Shadows hung heavy there, and that was because the two walls did not meet. They stopped, and between them was the darkness of a continuing passage, so narrow that he wasn’t sure he could fit inside.

  But he would try.

  The narrow passage sloped down, down, down. Jack was worried that Lucy would wake and become worried, and he kept thinking, Just one more minute and I’ll turn around, and then he gave himself another minute, and another. He had to walk sideways because the passage was not wide enough for his shoulders. The ceiling brushed his head. The darkness was complete, but for his torch, and he experienced a moment of panic when he considered what might happen should his torch fail.

  Emerging at last into a wide deep room, he took a breath and shone the torch around.

  The breath froze in his chest.

  Here was the downside that Peggy had warned him about. Here was the place in the castle that he had never seen before, a cavern rather than an excavated or constructed room, yet with human touches that levelled the floor and gave shape and substance to what otherwise would have been a bare, uneven place.

  A dark place.

  Jack gasped, realising he had been holding his breath. Not only surprised, he also felt a strange sense of betrayal at this discovery. He’d parted himself from his family as soon as he was able, yet they had known of this downside and not told him. It was a weird emotion, akin to feeling sorry for hurting the feelings of someone he hated. He knew their secrets now, though. Depending on what he saw and found in the next couple of minutes, he hoped to lock these secrets away forever.

  The cavern was not large, yet it was packed with strange, arcane objects and equipment, and it seemed to reverberate with a ghastly held breath. His own breathing echoed softly from the damp walls, but the things he saw—the metal bed surrounded with glass bottles on wire frames, opaque tubes hanging like severed veins; the two metal coffin-shaped objects pushed against one wall, lids on both slightly askew; the slumped, crumbling remains of a wooden frame, leather straps petrified and fragile—were poised between moments, held between a dreadful past of which he only had an inkling, and whatever awful future his parents and sister had planned. This place was the stilled heart of their dark ambitions, just waiting for them to return and kick-start its terrible story.

  It was a sick, haunted place. It was a dead place, and as he swept his torch around, he vowed that when he left, it would be the last time these things were ever touched by light.

  He moved past the metal bed, skirting as far away from it as possible, and stood beside one of the metal coffins.