Lou dropped the newspaper, turned out the light, and ran up the stairs. Passing the door of her own room, she fell into the bed in the room at the front of the house. She crawled beneath the duvet, placed her head on the pillow, and breathed in. There was still just a trace of L’Air du Temps. The tears she had been holding back all day finally came. She wept for the hopelessness of the loss that gnawed her stomach raw. There was nothing she could do to make this better. She couldn’t turn back the hands of time to alter the moment she’d decided to stay at the pub to get drunk, rather than coming home for a soggy pie and an evening of crap telly. If she hadn’t let her mum go to the chippy in her place, then none of this would be happening. Sobbing into the darkness, she repeated her now nightly chant – ‘It’s my fault, it’s all my fault’ – until she slipped into a shallow, restless sleep.

Up on the hill, beyond the spire of St Mary’s and the motorway, behind the walls and tangle of overgrown trees, at the end of the long drive, the heart of Hill House reached out to a little lost girl. In the darkness behind the great doors, with rats scratching at the skirting, pigeons huddled on perches in the broken rafters, the ovens and fireplaces cold, the house sighed, feeling the pain of the soul in the near distance. Like her, it was broken, shattered. Where once had been life and joy and happiness was now decay and rot and sadness; a heart ripped out. ‘Come to me’, it would have said, if only it had a voice. ‘I need you, as you need me.’ As a child, that lost girl had shown love to this abandoned place. And now, it was time to open its doors to her. For a hundred years, it had waited. It could wait one more day. To bring her home.

3

18 December 2013

Lou woke to the sound of children laughing and shrieking on the street outside. For a single, perfect moment, everything was right with the world. And then, reality crashed through, like a sledgehammer smashing down a wall with no foundations. Lou peered out from the safety of the duvet and watched dust swirl on the shafts of winter sunlight breaking through the gaping curtains. The dust settled on trinkets crowding almost every inch of the dressing table; the jewellery box Stephen had made in woodwork class, the yoghurt pot Dean had smeared with finger-paints at nursery, and the photo frame Lou had painstakingly decorated with pasta bows at Brownies. It held Mum’s favourite photograph, taken on their one and only family holiday. Was it really possible that those three kids sitting in the saddles of Daisy, Dobbin and Daphne on the glittering sands of the Golden Mile in Blackpool, and smiling for Mum’s old Kodak, were the same people who now shared this house? The same people who just a few days ago had clung to each other on the front pew of St Mary’s, their shared, raw grief binding them together in a way that the fact they were siblings never had. Now, they were strangers again. Numb and facing a future where the glue that had held them together was gone.