Property of a Lady

All ideas of using the camera fled, and I began to back away. As if the movement was a cue for which he had been waiting, he began to descend the stairs. He came slowly and warily, lifting one hand aloft, in the way people used to lift an oil lamp aloft. But it was not a lamp he carried.

Dear God, I can’t believe I’m writing this, and I certainly don’t expect many people to believe it, but—

In his hand he clutched a second hand – a dreadful, misshapen dead hand, with glimmers of light oozing greasily from each fingertip.

The hand taken at the midnight hour from the gallows tree.

For the second time that night I ran away. This time I didn’t run into the library though – I wasn’t going to risk being trapped in there – I ran along the passage leading to the kitchens. My feet rang out eerily on the stone-flagged floor, but I reached the main scullery safely and tumbled inside, dragging the door shut. It was dark, but it was not absolutely pitch black: moonlight trickled in from the small, grimed windows.

Where now? Opening off this room was a smaller one, with a deep, old sink and an ancient copper boiler. A door opened off that room to the side gardens of the house. I had locked that door earlier, and the key was in my bag in the library. But had he got in by this door? He had caused a door somewhere to open – fly bolt, and bar, and band – but which door had opened to his words? And would it have stayed unlocked?

The singing was suddenly nearer, and I dived across the floor and into the old scullery, which was at a lower level than the rest of the house and had three worn stone steps leading down into it. The stench of clogged drains and damp reared up to meet me like a solid wall, and black beetles and spiders scuttled away from my footsteps, but if the room provided an escape route I would not have cared if it smelt of a charnel house or if the Pied Piper’s battalion of rats inhabited it.

The garden door was directly ahead – a solid, old door with a tiny, glazed panel at the top. I don’t remember crossing the scullery, but I do remember how I felt when my hand closed round the handle. Because I knew at once the stubborn old lock was still in place, exactly as I had left it.

I tried to dislodge it, of course. I threw my entire weight into forcing that door open, but nothing short of a battering ram and four men would have opened it. Or, of course, the key. But the key was in my bag in the library on the ring with the others.

Behind me the door to the main kitchen opened, and the greasy light I had seen earlier cut through the darkness.

I shrank back, then darted behind the old copper. It was thick with cobwebs and verdigris had eaten into it in places. The smell of mould and dirt was almost overwhelming.

He stood in the doorway, still singing softly, and it seemed that the words and the cadences of the song floated across the air in filaments of light, turning the cobwebs into spun gold and scattering tiny specks of soft light everywhere.

“Sleep all who sleep . . . Be as the dead for the dead man’s sake.”

And here’s the most frightening thing yet. I felt my eyelids becoming so heavy that the compulsion to let them close – to slide down into sleep – was impossible to ignore. His voice and the light he carried with him are the last things I remember . . .

When I woke it was to find myself on the attic floor, half lying against a wall. Of the macabre figure, there was no sign, and the house was silent, save for the maddening ticking of the clock downstairs.

I lay where I was, memory unrolling in front of me like a ribbon of road at night. Had he brought me up here, that figure? Why?

It was at that point I realized it was not the ticking of the clock I was hearing. It was the tapping I had heard earlier on. It was up here. Someone was behind the wall.