The life flickered back into his eyes. He shook his head, blinked, and then once again knelt on the rug. He began to rearrange the furniture in the dolls’ house, seemingly oblivious to what had just passed. Taking up the doll of the finely dressed lady, he placed her in the ballroom and positioned the hands of a man around her in a stiff sort of dance. He returned the maid to the box, but this time, he didn’t close the lid.

‘Aren’t you going to play?’ he asked, looking up at Lou.

‘No … I … you carry on without me. I need some air.’

19

Out in the hall, Lou rubbed her hand across her forehead. It was clammy. She touched her face; warm. Ran her fingers through her hair; soft. She breathed in deeply, filling her lungs with air and her nostrils with the scent of pine, oily floor polish, and beeswax. She stared at one of the tiny candles in the branches of the Christmas tree until the flame flashed before her eyes each time she blinked. Hitching up her skirt, she felt the breeze sneaking beneath the front door whistle around her ankles. How could this be? How could any of this be? She spun around beneath the glass dome high up in the ceiling. In the pale winter sunlight, she gave in to the overwhelming urge to laugh.

A maid appeared from the dining room, dustpan and brush in hand. When she saw Lou, she took a step back.

‘It’s all right,’ Lou laughed. ‘I’m not mad. At least, I don’t think I am. You can see me, can’t you? So, I must be real!’

The maid curtseyed. ‘Yes, Miss. Very good, Miss.’ She hurried to the basement door, rushing to get away from the crazy woman.

But Lou didn’t care. She circled the hall, running her fingers along the walls, moving from statue to vase, pillar to sculpture; wanting to feel everything. Lou Arnold – Time Traveller – at the behest of a building, for god’s sake! Hill House had brought her here. Hill House had a spirit, an unknowable force all of its own – it was mad, crazy, unbelievable, and yet, this most ridiculous, far-fetched, impossible explanation for her presence here was the only one that made any sense. Giddy and dizzy from circling the hall, she came to a sudden halt. But as she stopped, she caught sight of a pair of eyes watching her every move. Eyes that looked inside her and rummaged around in her thoughts.

If her time here was real, then that man in the portrait was no longer a shadow, a ghost summoned up from the crumbs of knowledge she had collected at school. He was a living, breathing man. Flesh and blood. But not for much longer. In less than eight months … ashes to ashes, dust-to-dust …

Tom’s death and her mum’s death, tangled into a single knot of grief. She remembered the police cordon, the officers who had seemed so big and as out of place in their living room as the memory of them did now in this fine hallway. But scouring the corners of her brain, she could find no image to align to Tom’s death. With no specific knowledge of the circumstances, her brain summoned up the most horrific images of war it could find – carnage, shrill whistles, screeching, red-hot lead, mud, explosions – until she couldn’t bear it.