lurch, and my pulse sped up so fast that for a moment I thought I would faint, but then anger took over. I jumped out of bed and ran to the locked door in the corner of the room, where I knelt, peering through the keyhole, my heart like a drum in my chest.
I felt absurdly vulnerable, kneeling there in my nightclothes with one eye wide open and pressed to a dark hole, and for a moment I had a sick, jolting fantasy of someone shoving something through the hole, a toothpick perhaps, or a sharpened pencil, roughly piercing my cornea, and I fell back, blinking, my eye watering with the dusty draft.
But there was nothing there. No toothpick maliciously blinding me. Nothing to see either. Just the unending blackness, and the cool, dust-laden breeze of stale attic air. Even if there was a turn in the stair, or a closed door at the top, with a light on in the attic itself, some light would have escaped to pollute the inky dark of the stairs. But there was nothing. Not even the smallest glimmer. If there was someone up there, whatever they were doing, they were doing it in the dark.
Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . it came again, unbearable in its regularity. Then a pause, and then again, creak . . . creak . . . creak . . .
“I can hear you!” I shouted at last, unable to sit there listening in silence and fear any longer. I put my mouth to the keyhole, my voice shaking with a mix of angry terror. “I can hear you! What the fuck are you doing up there, you sicko? How dare you? I’m calling the police so you’d better get the fuck out of there!”
But the steps didn’t even falter. My voice died away as if I had shouted into an empty void. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And then, just as before, a little pause, and they resumed without the slightest loss of rhythm. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And I knew in truth that of course I wouldn’t call the police. What the fuck could I say? “Oh, please, Constable, there’s a creaking sound coming from my attic”? There was no police station closer than Inverness, and they would hardly be taking routine calls in the middle of the night. My only option was 999—and even in my shaking state of fear, I had a pretty good idea what the operator would say if a hysterical woman rang the emergency number in the middle of the night claiming spooky sounds were coming from her attic.
If only Jack were here, if only someone were here, apart from three little girls I was paid to protect, not scare even further.
Oh God. Suddenly I could not bear it any longer, and I understood what dark terrors had driven those four previous nannies out of their post and away. To lie here, night after night, listening, waiting, staring into the darkness at that locked door, that open keyhole gaping into blackness . . .
There was nothing I could do. I could go and sleep in the living room, but if the noises started down there as well, I thought I might lose it completely, and there was something almost worse about the idea of those sounds continuing up in the attic while I, ignorant, slept down below. At least if I was here, watching, listening, whatever was up there could not . . .
I swallowed in the darkness, my throat dry. My palms were sweating, and I could not finish the thought.
I would not sleep again tonight, I knew that now.
Instead, I wrapped myself in the duvet, shivering hard, turned on the light, and sat, with my phone still in my hand, listening to the steady, rhythmic sound of the feet pacing above me. And I thought of Dr. Grant, the old man who had lived here before, the man Sandra and Bill had done their very best to get rid of, painting and scouring and remodeling until there was barely a trace of him left, except for that horrible poison garden, behind its locked gate.
And except, perhaps, whatever paced that attic in the night.
I heard the words again, in Maddie’s cold little matter-of-fact voice, as if she were beside me, whispering in my ear. After a while he stopped sleeping.