“Bloody place.”

The door to the loft was a barely glimpsed shape on the ceiling. As Heather came to a stop underneath it, the scuffling and flapping noises stopped abruptly, as if they had been listening for her. Still curious, and much more awake than she had been, she stood for a time underneath it, just listening and occasionally rubbing the tops of her arms. It was cold enough, and she was half convinced she could see her own breath.

The house was utterly silent; even the thumps and creaks of a building settling seemed to have stopped.

Heather turned to go and caught sight of the window down the far end of the landing. Just for an instant, she saw movement out there, as though something was watching from the thick line of the trees. Eyes, wide and bright and utterly inhuman, peered in through the darkened glass.

“What—”

A second later a gust of wind blew through the trees and whatever had been causing the illusion was scattered into nothing. Because that’s what it had to be, she told herself, your eyes playing tricks on you. You idiot. Even so, she went over to the window and peered out. There was nothing but the street lights filtering through the branches of trees, the moonlight creating strange shapes and half glimpsed forms.

Annoyed with herself, she went back to bed. The lamp light stayed on until morning. And although she didn’t hear the noises again that night, her mind kept returning to them, and when she did sleep, she dreamt of feathers, downy and brown, and her dad’s round face, scarlet with rage.

CHAPTER

5

THE NEXT MORNING was not a pleasant one for Heather.

She had known that staying in her mother’s house would summon a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and so it was with no great surprise that she felt a shroud of misery settle over her when she woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Once this room had been her dad’s box room, full of his random junk—old car manuals, big plastic buckets for home brewing beer, and a massive chest freezer, which mum had filled with frozen ready meals and tubs of Neapolitan ice cream. As a kid, Heather had loved the room, convinced it contained all her dad’s secrets. Now, the guest room was small, and neat, and entirely without personality, but even so Heather couldn’t help but feel her mother there still—in the pile of towels on the footstool, on the doily on the windowsill, the empty vase. It was too quiet, and too cold, so she got up and put the heating on as high as it would go, and put on both the television and radio. Once there was a comforting level of noise, she made herself a strong cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table, and began making a list of things that needed doing.

To her surprise, she found her mother’s address book almost straight away—it was sitting in a wooden magazine rack in the living room, half forgotten—and as quickly as possible, she called everyone who needed to be called, passing out bad news, and taking in condolences. When that ugly business was done, she found herself wandering back upstairs, her hand resting on the doorknob of her old room. Holding in a sigh, she stepped inside. It was still possible to recognize it as hers; the duvet cover on the bed, neatly turned down and clean, of a color only a teenager would choose, and the wallpaper that still had a series of tiny bald patches from old Blue Tack, to hold posters in place—the posters her mother had taken down and rolled into tubes not long after she’d left home. During her visits over the years, Heather had gotten used to the fact that this wasn’t her room anymore, but for the first time she noticed that her mother had apparently started using it for other things—there was a small card table in the corner, covered with crafting materials.