were kept in the first aid box. She had seen his clothes hanging on the line and heard his radio, his footsteps, his walking stick, but, otherwise, he was featureless, formless. Now, she could no longer ignore him. She used the flashlight app on her phone to light the way towards Fear Zone. She took one step, then two and three. After that it was easier to move upwards until she reached the curve of the stairs. The small alcove window framed a full moon. How close it looked as it rolled serenely above the trees.
The first room she entered was full of tall, pale figures with wide, sloping shoulders. She stifled a scream and was about to flee when she realised the shapes were just furniture covered in dust sheets. Feeling braver now, she adjusted the exposure on her camera phone and made horrified faces as she took selfies of herself standing in the midst of ‘ghosts’. She wouldn’t write any captions on her photographs when she posted them on Instagram. Let Sarah and Joanne think she had moved into a haunted house. That should worry them enough to respond to her posts.
The Recluse’s bathroom door was open. A candle flickered inside a glass lantern and threw shadows over an old-fashioned bath on claw legs. Three steps led upwards towards a magnificent toilet. It reminded Isobel of a throne. She immediately felt the urge to use it. She climbed the steps and pulled down her pyjama bottoms. Peeing in Fear Zone was scary and at the same time exciting. She yanked the steel chain hanging from the cistern and straightaway realised her mistake. The water gushed and the pipes groaned loud enough to awaken the dead.
A door opened. Too late to run, she listened to his footsteps and the familiar thud of his walking stick. How could she have been so stupid? She grabbed her phone from the floor and searched desperately for somewhere to hide. She pulled open a door in the wall which revealed a set of rusty pipes and a boiler. This must have been a hot press once. Holding her breath, she squeezed in beside the boiler and crouched down. A broken pipe pressed against her ankle but there was no space to move her feet. She switched off the flashlight just in time before The Recluse entered the bathroom. The plumbing was quietening down but Hyland Hall was still full of night sounds. Just as well or he would hear her heart pounding. Caesar sniffed the hot press door. She scrunched even tighter into the small space and hid her face in her knees. Even when The Recluse called Caesar to heel and they left the bathroom, she stayed where she was, terrified to move in case they returned.
Just when she believed it was safe to emerge from hiding, she heard him speaking. ‘Some music, Caesar? What do you think?’ His voice appeared to rise from under her feet. Using her flashlight, she could see where the broken pipe was digging into her ankle. It had once been attached to the boiler and must be connected in some way to a pipe in his room. This was allowing his voice to travel. He turned on his radio. Music, haunting and lonely, like night trains whistling through dark tunnels, reached her. When the music stopped, she heard another sound, faint and rustling. He was either reading or writing. This time it was her ears, not her eyes, that were doing the work for her. He coughed a few times, a rasping, breathless gasp.
‘My thoughts can wait for another night.’ Again, his disembodied voice travelled along the pipe. ‘Caesar, come here, boy. Time to rest.’ A book was slammed closed. He shouldn’t be playing music or wandering around Fear Zone at night but she’d never be able to tell her mother what he got up to when they were sleeping.
A door was opened, another closed. She moved silently across the bathroom floor. The landing was empty. She entered his living room. It was smaller than the den and would have been a bedroom in the olden days, according to Charlie. He said the rooms had been changed around before they arrived so that upstairs and downstairs could become two apartments. Apart from a fold-up table that served as a tray, everything else in the room – the two winged armchairs, his desk, an enormous trunk with a curved lid that matched the one in the hall,