WARNING. DANGEROUS BUILDING. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! to stop Lou squeezing into her favourite hiding place.

She crouches closer to the wall, cups her hands around her mouth, blows warm breath through her gloves.

‘27, 28, 29, 30. Ready or not, here I come!’

Footsteps thump outside. Lou covers her mouth so that her brother won’t hear her breathing. She waits, and when the footsteps disappear away, she grins. Stephen won’t like it when he loses. He’s eleven – only one year older than her – but thinks he should beat her at everything. Winning at hide-and-seek is her only way of getting revenge for all the times Stephen has hung her My Little Pony by its neck from the loft hatch. He’s only playing with her now because Mum wants them out from under her feet so she can bathe their baby brother. Stephen would much rather be at home watching cartoons or hanging out with the big boys in the car park of The Hill House Arms.

When Lou is sure the coast is clear, she picks her way over the broken cobbles and burnt wood, and squeezes back through the gap between the wall and the metal.

It’s getting dark outside. She wanders into the walled garden where gardeners once grew flowers and vegetables for the kitchens inside the house. They learned that at school. They learn a lot about the history of Hill House at Hill House Primary. But Lou can’t remember a time when there were walls around the garden or glass in the long row of greenhouses. In her whole life, she has only ever seen the garden and greenhouses full of weeds as tall as men.

She skips down the side of the main house. Puffing out clouds of warm breath, she drags her hand over the boards covering all of the doors and windows and picks at the moss between the bricks. In the spring, it was spongy and green; now, it’s brown and crispy and dead.

She reaches the front of the house and peeks around the columns holding up the roof above the front door. But Stephen’s not there. She wraps her arms around one of the columns and tries to make her fingers meet on the other side. She can’t. The column is as tall and as wide as a tree trunk. She presses her cheek to the stone. It’s cold and hard.

‘Oi! What are you hugging that for? You’re such a freak!’

Lou spins around. Stephen is running away down the long drive. When he reaches the end, he climbs the high gates and drops to the ground on the other side.

‘Look out!’ he shouts. ‘There’s a ghost behind you!’ He’s still laughing when he runs up the steps of the footbridge that crosses over the top of the motorway, linking their estate with what’s left of Hill House.

Lou doesn’t run. She takes her time to get to the end of the drive. She is still small enough to squeeze through the gap between the padlocked gates, dodging the branches of overgrown trees that reach out like arms to snag her coat.