Page 20 of We Live Here Now

On the third time, in the pause between the door opening and closing, the scratching starts. The scratching I heard before.Scraaatch scraaaatch. Like nails dragging on wood.

As if something is trying to crawl out and is being pulled back into the room.

26

Emily

I do not go back to bed. Instead, I scurry as fast as I can down to the ground floor, convinced something awful is following me, and head straight to the sitting room, closing the door and pushing the old accent chair under the door handle. I pant, sweating and terrified, my heart pumping so hard I think it will burst, but the handle doesn’t move.

Still, I don’t take my eyes off it as I eventually curl up on the sofa, a blanket around me, and put the TV on loud on some old comedy channel to save myself from the terrible silence. I don’t watch the show; I watch the door and try not to think about the darkness of the night and the mist outside that’s suffocating the house. At some point, my mobile phone, still upstairs, rings, Freddie calling to say good night, but I let it ring till it stops. Then finally, after hours of staring at the door, my eyes grow heavier than my fear and I drift into a disturbed sleep full of vivid nightmares.

In my dream I’m asleep on my bed and I wake with a start. Something’s woken me. A noise.Aheartbeat.It’s coming from under my bed, pulsing the mattress as if it’s made of skin.

I sit up and the first thing I see is that there’s ice covering the bedroom window and icicles on the furniture, but I’m still warm. The heartbeat gets louder; what was a gentle pulse now shakes the entire bed, thumping at it from underneath, demanding attention until the whole room vibrates and I have to cling on as if on a raft in a storm. Suddenly it stops, quieting back down to a steady gentle prod from underneath, and dream-me plucks up the courage to peer under the bed.

Freddie’s there, clinging to the bedsprings like a mountain climber,fingers hooked in around the metal. He looks my way and smiles, his grin stretching too wide, cutting across his face ear to ear, and his eyes shine in the gloom.

Don’t touch the floorboards. They’ll suck you in.He shivers.I told you it was cold in here, didn’t I? I told you. Why do you keep opening the windows?

He opens his mouth wide and the gaping yawn takes on the shape of the third-floor window, and I look into the void and am terrified it’s going to swallow me up and then—

I wake up for real, gasping and sweating on the sofa, my body screaming in pain. To my relief, as my surroundings settle into place, I see it’s morning, sunlight streaming in around the corners of the curtains, and the house is quiet and calm.

When I carefully open the sitting room door, everything is normal in the hallway and there are no strange sounds coming from the third floor. Still, I don’t want to linger here today alone if I don’t have to, and after I’ve texted Freddie to say I’d slept through his call and all is well, I have a quick shower, take some pills, and then head out. There’s one more person I can ask about this house. I just hope she’ll speak to me.

27

Emily

Willow Lane House could easily pass for a quiet spa hotel with its long drive, manicured lawns, and ivy-covered Cotswold stone wall. Whatever else happened in Mrs. Carmichael’s life after Larkin Lodge, she definitely didn’t go broke, because this is not a beleaguered NHS residential home. I rang ahead and explained that I’d bought a house Mrs. Carmichael had lived in and was now exploring the history of the building and would love to meet her as she used to be a friend of my grandmother’s. The receptionist didn’t give me much in terms of response but told me to ask for Mrs. Marshall when I arrived, which I duly do and smile at the young woman at the desk, whose voice tells me she’s the one I spoke to on the phone barely thirty minutes earlier. She doesn’t smile back.

I wait in the reception area, a beautiful open space with bright, light windows, and hear laughter as two nurses walk by wheeling chairs into the garden. No, definitely no poverty here.

“Emily Bennett?”

I turn to see a woman maybe in her fifties in a trim trouser suit, clearly a manager or administrator, coming toward me.

“Mrs. Marshall?”

I lean on my stick, and I see her instant shift to sympathy. I may hate this stick and everything it represents, but it brings out the best in other people.

“Thank you so much for letting me visit. I know it’s probably unusual for someone to want to spend time with a stranger.”

“You’d be surprised.” She smiles and nods at me to follow her.“Since the boom in thoseWho Do You Think You Are?–style programs, people are finding relatives they’ve never heard of before in homes across the country.” She leans in slightly as she waits for me to catch up. “I expect most of them are hoping for some lost inheritance.”

“Well, I’m certainly not after anything like that.”

“So I gather. You said your mother was a friend of hers?”

“My grandmother actually. They worked in the same theater for a while. And now my husband and I have bought the house Fortuna lived in when she was in Devon.”

“Oh, how wonderful. The circle of life. And yet it happens often, I guess. So many people travel away and then return home, don’t they? Even after all those years in London, Fortuna and her beloved Gerald moved back to the southwest when he was sick.”

“I saw his gravestone in the local church.”

“Cancer, sadly. Left it too late to get checked out. You know how men are. Always stick their head in the sand. Fortuna was brokenhearted, poor thing, when she moved in here.” She slows her pace down to let me hobble alongside her more easily. “Anyway, she doesn’t get any visitors these days apart from staff. We try to keep her in good spirits, but she’s very elderly and starting to have some muddled moments and gets anxiety attacks very easily. So don’t expect too much. And probably twenty or thirty minutes will be enough. She gets tired quickly.”

We come to a stop outside a room, and Mrs. Marshall pushes the door open and sweeps in, introducing me loudly to the neatly dressed elderly woman seated in an armchair by a set of patio doors.

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