Closing the door, he tilted his head to one side, listening.

  No louder. But still there.

  He dressed quickly and hurried down the staircase. The thought crossed his mind that maybe he should be taking a weapon, but that felt faintly foolish, and the idea of wielding a weapon in his new home felt like giving in to fear.

  Between blinks, the rumbling sound became something else, initiating an assault on his senses: the steady progress of distant tanks; the stench of a town on fire, and the roasting flesh of its dead inhabitants; the terror of what was to come. The worst thing about war for Jack had been the waiting, not the fighting. Fighting, his mind was engaged, and each moment was faced down. Waiting, his fears were infinite.

  He paused on the staircase and leaned against the wall, and from the direction of the kitchen below he sensed a more steady vibration. He pushed away then placed his hand on the stone step, fingers splayed, breathing in and out through his mouth so that he could hear better.

  The secret garden, he thought, and once the idea was planted it would not go away. His memories of that place were of writhing flesh and cries of wretched pleasure, sights and sounds a young man should never have seen in his family home. These new sounds were different.

  Less known, and more terrifying.

  Passing through the kitchen he picked up a carving knife from the rack on the wall. Yes, I’m allowing in the fear, but I am afraid. There was no denying that. He had striven to build a wall between what had happened here in the past and what he and his family would bring in the future, a structure built out of the mud and chaos of the war he had just lived through. He’d done his best to believe that was in the past, and that the future could be moulded from his love and good intentions.

  Now was the time to make sure.

  He passed through the pantry to the small door leading into the secret garden, and just before he grabbed the handle he put his ear to the wood.

  It was as if whatever was happening beyond had waited for his presence to really make itself known.

  The grumbling vibrations increased. Metal clanked, and he could think only of those pulleys and chains deep in the downside. Voices muttered and mumbled, a guttural throat uttered something between pleasure and pain.

  Someone or something laughed.

  Jack gripped the knife in one hand and pressed on the door handle with the other. He eased it down gently, pushed the door open an inch, and looked out into the secret garden.

  For a few seconds he thought he was somehow seeing images on a film, so surreal was the sight. He was having a nightmare, he was imagining things, he had fallen on the way home from the village and banged his head.

  And then he saw his sister Mary and he knew that this was very real.

  He gasped in a breath that did nothing to feed his lungs. He choked on the air, as if it was thick with something his body could never accept, turning away from the door for a second and gathering himself before looking again. It was almost too much to take in with one glance, so he stared, trying to understand, trying to make any kind of mad sense of what he was seeing.

  His sister stood close to the raised stone sundial at the centre of the garden. She was not as he remembered her—much of her long hair had fallen out, her face was wrinkled and drooping as if half-melted from her skull, and her mouth hung open in a dribbling sneer—but it was unmistakably her. She held a long, thin knife in one hand, raised up above her head ready to slam down on the figure splayed on the stone surface.

  Impaled on the sundial’s brass upright, this shape writhed and mewled in animal ecstasy. Moonlight bathed the garden, but it was still difficult to make out what or who the shape was. Jack saw arms raised above its head, and legs that seemed to be raised up and back, moving like heavy plants waving in a breeze. Its skin was leathery and old, its head appeared bald, and as it emitted another high cry of pleasure he saw a head raise from between its legs, wet tongue still lapping between its thighs.

  The head belonged to his father. Even in the poor light, even though his face was changed and weathered by time and something deeper, darker, Jack recognised the man who had given him life.

  He tried not to cry out in shock. It was difficult. Breath was heavy and hot in his chest, a weight closed around his heart.

  Another movement to the left caught his eye. From behind a spread of undergrowth smothering the outer wall emerged two shapes, and between them they were hauling one of the heavy stone coffins from the downside. It was attached to ropes and chains, and they each pulled on heavy ropes to complete its journey up from far below. Pulleys squealed, chains clanked, and the coffin emerged into the moonlit garden.

  “Keep going,” a voice said. “Don’t stop, don’t ever stop.” On the sundial—in reality an altar, or perhaps something even more dangerous, like a sacrificial stone—the figure squirmed again as his father plunged his face once more between its thighs.

  Jack knew that voice. After seeing his sister and father, it was no surprise that his mother was here also.

  His sister slammed the knife down into her chest.

  She screeched, his father’s head moved more rapidly, and his mother arched her back as his sister tugged the knife free from her ribs. Blood flowed, made black in starlight. Slow and thick, it pattered onto the stone surface and flowed into the numbers and patterns carved there, painting the time in blood.

  His mother fell motionless, but only for the space of a heartbeat. She started moving again, caught in sexual delight, and his father stood before her, opening his robe and pressing his crotch hard against hers.

  His sister stabbed again, aiming the knife at her throat. More blood dribbled out from the wounds, but this time she did not even stop moving.

  Jack felt his heart hammering in his chest, pumping his own precious blood around his shocked body. He felt dizzy and nauseous.

  “It’s not enough,” his father said, thrusting into his mother and shoving her back across the altar, back, as his sister stabbed her three more times in quick successions.

  Another piece of apparatus was hauled from the depths by two ragged figures, and Jack realised that every piece of arcane equipment he’d seen in the downside was now here. The coffins, the metal framing with bottles and leather straps, and other objects and machines whose nature and uses were more nebulous in the moonlight. As well as his parents and sister there were other shapes here as well—two hunched, mutated shapes hauling at the ropes, a small child-like person wandering back and forth through the undergrowth, and standing behind his father in the shadow of the high wall, Abertha. The woman was motionless as a statue, only her fluid eyes revealing any sign of life.

  Jack felt those eyes meet his.

  He ducked back inside the door, leaving it open but crouching in the darkness of the pantry. She can’t have seen me. It’s dark out there, pitch black in here. She can’t have seen me!

  “It’s not nearly enough,” his father said again, and this time his mother replied. Stabbed, bleeding weak dark blood, wounded enough to be dead three times over, she replied to him in a voice Jack remembered so well.

  “It will be enough now that he’s home,” she said. “New blood. Young blood. It’ll help us finish what we began all those years ago.”

  New blood. Young blood.

  Still swallowed in nightmare, Jack backed away from the doorway, knife grasped in his hand. I could go out there and kill them all, he thought, but he wasn’t sure how to do that. How do you kill someone who seems immune to wounds? Their activities had been debauched, their dreams of immortality a madness he had never been a part of. It was an insanity that had led to murder and death, suicide by fire. Or so he’d believed until now.

  Young blood, his mother had said, and suddenly Jack remembered those sounds in the walls. Scratching, curious sounds so close to where his beloved son slept.

  He turned and moved quickly back through the kitchen to the staircase, careful not to make a sound lest those mad creatures in the midnight courtyard came for him.

  “Daddy!” George shouted from the darkness, and Jack leapt up the staircase, taking the stairs three at a time. If they had come for his son he would fight them to the death, and beyond. He had killed before and he would do so again, gladly this time, with no regrets and no room for nightmares.

  He burst into the bedroom and George was standing there in his pyjamas, alone and crying.

  “Where’s Mummy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she went for a wee.”

  “Where is she?” he asked, more desperate.

  “Daddy...” George said, and Jack hated the fear in his voice. Fear of him. He grabbed his son and lifted him in his left arm, keeping the knife in his right hand down by his thigh.

  “Lucy?” Jack hissed, but he didn’t want to shout.

  “What’s wrong?” George asked.

  “Nothing. We’re going for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside to see the moon and stars.”

  “Will Mummy come?”

  Jack could only nod. Fear stole his voice, and a lump formed in his throat, his vision blurring.

  From two floors below he heard the clatter of cooking implements being scattered across the flagstone kitchen floor. They were coming in.

  “Is Mummy cooking?” George asked.

  “We have to be very quiet,” Jack said. “Like hide-and-seek. Can you do that?”

  George’s eyes were still wide and watery, but he nodded and hugged himself closer, arms around Jack’s neck. That was good. It was easier to carry him that way.

  Jack heard footsteps on the stone stairs. Whispered voices. A giggle that could only have been his sister, though lower than he remembered, darker. His mother, stabbed and bleeding but still walking, still leading, said, “Remember, don’t hurt them. Not yet.”

  Jack headed for the smaller, narrower timber staircase that they never used, turning sideways to start descending the tight spiral. It emerged close to the main door of the north tower, and from there he could flee into the courtyard and beyond. Every step he took was to save George, but every step took him further away from Lucy.

  He already doubted his actions. Should he stay, try to find Lucy? There wasn’t time, but should he at least warn her with a shout before fleeing with George? It was George they wanted, with their knives and altar and sick, twisted rituals. His sister’s knife was already coated with family blood, though blood that must surely be unnatural and tainted with whatever dark magic his family had managed to summon.

  He paused halfway down, consumed by darkness. George shivered against him, eyes closed, silent. The old, rotten stairs creaked at their weight.

  Jack turned and climbed back up the stairs. He waited at the entrance to the bedroom. He could hear them beyond the bedroom door on the landing, shuffling along and pushing doors open as they came.

  There was still no sign of Lucy.

  The bedroom door swung open, and for just a second he considered staying there to negotiate with his family. But he didn’t think they were his family any more. His mother should have been dead. His father and sister had looked like dead things themselves, vessels given some form of unnatural life.

  And he knew from his time in the war that there were no bargains to be made with the dead.

  He started down again, as fast as he could in the darkness, and as silent. He held the knife ahead of him, partly to keep it from scraping against stone, partly as protection against anything that might be climbing up for him.

  He smelled it first. George did too, squirming against him, groaning, and then he sensed a deeper shadow rising around the narrow bend in the stairs.

  Jack kicked out. His foot connected with something soft, something that grunted and stumbled backwards down the staircase. He descended three more steps and swept the knife back and forth ahead of him. In the darkness, he could barely make out the shape huddled at the base of the steps, but he could smell it. He had smelled death many times before. This was old, musty, decayed death, like a body left in darkness for months.

  Yet the shape moved, and he felt its sticklike fingers clasp at his left ankle. He kicked out, leapt over the shape, and ran, leaving the tower and almost falling down its main steps. As he ran he scanned the courtyard for movement and saw none.

  Behind him, he heard his father shouting his name from the doorway.

  Jack clasped George tight to him, and with every step he took he feared he had taken the wrong course. If I’d found Lucy we could have stood and fought, he thought, but he smelled his son’s hair, his breath, and he knew that every good thing about living and life was here in his arms.

  He reached the gates and fumbled with the catch, unlocking the small door and pushing through into the outside.

  “I want Mummy,” George said.

  “So do I,” Jack said, and then he saw the figure hurrying up the lane towards the castle. It was Peggy, and she carried a heavy, sharpened stick across her chest.

  Jack froze, gripping his knife even harder.

  “Don’t fear me,” she said. “I’ve come to help.”

  “Lucy.”

  “Where is she?”

  Jack nodded back at the castle.

  “They’ve made themselves known?” Peggy asked.

  “Yes. You knew? You knew they were still here?”

  “No, boy, not at all. I feared, that’s all. I’ve been thinking on it all night, and I realised that coming to the castle with...” She nodded at George. “If anything would bring them up it’d be...”

  “Young blood,” Jack said.

  “Let me keep him safe,” she said. “I’ll take him down to the village and send help.”

  “Do you think anyone will come?”

  “Some might,” she said. “A few. A couple.”

  Jack didn’t want to let go of George. He wanted to hold him safe and tight forever, but he had left his wife behind, and however much she might fight, they would stand a better chance together.

  “George, you go with Grandma Peggy. I’ll find Mummy and we’ll follow you, okay?”

  “What’s happening?” George asked.

  “Something in the castle,” he said.

  “The scratching in the walls?” George asked.

  “Yes, the scratching. Big rats.” He put George down, and the boy took Peggy’s hand. She nodded at Jack and held out her spear. He took it, and she turned and headed down the track towards the village.

  Watching her go, he felt torn in half. But there was no way he could do what had to be done with young, innocent George by his side.

  Jack blinked away tears, and in each blink he lived a nightmare memory of dead bodies from the war. He had made some of them dead. Their faces, the sounds they’d made, the smells of them dying haunted him still.

  If Lucy had heard danger approaching she would have done everything possible to get back to George. The fact that she hadn’t been able to convinced Jack that she had been restrained.

  He could not dwell on the alternative.

  He dashed back through the gate and crossed the inner courtyard towards the north tower, checking the windows, the open front door, and the shadows on either side for movement. There was none. With so many places to search he hardly knew where to begin, but he felt more prepared with the sharpened stick resting in his hands.

  The clanking of chains made up his mind for him. Close to the wall leading from one side of the north tower, he heard sounds that could only originate from the secret garden. Beneath the ring of chains against stone he heard a low, incessant mumbling, so deep that he could almost feel rather than hear it.

  And then a single, loud cry that could only have been Lucy.

  Jack ran up the steps leading into the tower, stick held before him. The last thing he’d heard from here had been his father’s voice, but now was not the time for caution. He ran headlong into the dark interior and tripped over something lying on the hallway floor. He scrambled to his feet and saw, in moonlight penetrating from outside, Lucy’s nightgown. He snatched it up. It was still warm, and sweet with the scent of her.

  Another scream, this one louder.

  He rushed through the kitchen and into the pantry, and there at the doorway stood his mother. An oil lap had been lit and she was waiting for him, her leathery, aged skin bathed in blood from the many knife wounds in her stomach, chest and throat. She grinned at him, her mouth a toothless maw.

  “Son,” she said.

  Jack froze, not so much at the sight of his mother now, but at the memories of her from long ago. He’d lost every good memory many years before, so all he saw now were the bad things she had done, and was still doing.

  “So nice of you to come home,” she said.

  Jack swung the stick around and slammed her across the side of the head. She grunted and fell, and as he tugged the door into the courtyard open, she started to laugh.

  And laugh.

  And laugh.

  Other laughter joined hers. His sister, standing close to the circular altar bathed in fresh, gleaming blood. His father behind her, his body shrivelled and sick. Also close to the altar was Abertha, and though not laughing, she was delighting in her task. She had removed the many glass containers from the metal framework dragged up from the downside and was now placing them carefully around the altar’s circumference, using them to gather the blood dripping from its surface.

  “It’s so lovely to meet your wife,” his father said.

  Jack could not connect what he saw on the altar with his wife. There was a head, and limbs, and a torso, all of them separate, glistening stumps spewing blood. Her head was propped on her chest and turned to look past her ruined neck at him. Her eyes were still open. Her mouth was frozen in a scream.

  His own mouth fell open, but no sound emerged. Jack took a stumbling step forward. A shape reached for his arm and he knocked it aside, lashing out with the spear’s sharpened end. It slashed across the figure’s chest and sent it sprawling.

  “My wife,” he said.

  His father nodded his wizened head, and looked down at the dismembered corpse spread on the altar. “She’s very pretty,” he said, “and her blood is so, so rich.”