She grabbed her parka, left the house and lurched up the road with only a haze of drizzle and the moon for company. She should hate him. She should blame him. If he hadn’t run out on them, maybe none of this would be happening. Stephen wouldn’t have been arrested. Dean wouldn’t be a broken boy looking for his father. Mum would still be alive.

Phone me, if you need anything. He had sounded so genuine. So sorry.

She looked up to find that without realising it, her feet had taken her across the footbridge. That bloody thread was reeling her in again. What do you want with me? I can’t help you, can’t you see that? The shattered skeleton of Hill House loomed dark and empty at the end of the drive and her battered heart took another blow. The strands of the tangled mess of that past life and this, twisted into an impossible coil.

‘I knew it was you.’ A woman emerged from behind the abandoned mattress and bags of rubbish, her face obscured by a hood.

Lou’s muscles twitched, preparing to make a run for it. ‘I haven’t got any money, so you can piss off.’

‘I don’t want your money.’ The woman stepped into the pale light of the streetlamp and revealed herself as not a woman at all, but a slight girl. The tension in Lou’s muscles melted.

‘What do you mean you knew it was me?’ Lou said. She was in no mood for playing ridiculous games with a stranger.

The girl stared at the ground. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

‘Should I?’

The girl pulled down her hood. Lou studied her pale complexion, her eyes fixed on the ground, her finger twisting a cotton from her frayed cuff. Finally, Lou took in the hair. It was pulled back into a loose ponytail but there was no disguising the beautiful red waves.

‘Alice?’ she said. Could this really be the maid who had led the way up the stairs on that first day in Hill House?

‘How do you know my name?’ Alice asked.

‘It’s not every day a maid runs away in the middle of the night.’

‘They gossiped about me?’

‘No. All the staff spoke kindly about you. They miss you.’

Alice dug the toe of her trainer into a crack in the pavement. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, me and you standing here talking about travelling back in time?’

Lou nodded. At least it meant she didn’t have to think about her father for a while.

‘They’re real, then? I didn’t just imagine it all?’

‘No, you weren’t imagining it. They’re all very real.’

Alice let out a sigh. ‘Thank God. Because I thought I was going mad. One minute, I’m a maid scrubbing floors, and the next I’m squatting in there again, thinking it was all just a dream.’

‘You’re squatting? In Hill House.’

‘It’s as good a place as any,’ Alice said. ‘Better probably. It’s a bit out of the way, so nobody really bothers with it. I did a runner from the hostel the Council dumped me in when I left care last year. It was full of dirty creeps and perverts …’