He saw the light first.

The soft blue light and the yellow sparkles that floated within it.

The whole room was suffused with it.

Hobbes felt dizzy. He was standing in a large room that stretched away, supported by pillars and beams: the cellar of the building, inside the foundations. He walked on.

The blue light came from no obvious source, no lamps or bulbs.

Objects were floating in mid-air, just before him. He couldn’t understand it.

His eyes ached, and closed.

There was a singular tone in his head. It wasn’t unpleasant, a gentle hum.

He opened his eyes again and tried to be sure of where he was. The objects danced and fluttered, each one tied to a cotton thread or a piece of string, hanging down from the beams above. There were hundreds of them, more even. Too many to count.

He walked among them.

He saw bus tickets, toy cars, a football programme, balloons, photographs, pages torn from books, newspaper clippings, a single shoe, a dead sparrow, an unsigned cheque, more than a dozen vinyl records, items of jewellery – rings, necklaces, bracelets; he saw birthday cards; dice, chessmen, shards of mirrored glass, toffee wrappers, pieces of bone, a teacup, a pair of spectacles, medicine bottles, beads, buttons, baubles, in fact every kind of household or personal item that could be strung from a thread or wire. The floor all around held certain larger items – a radio set, a guitar, a jacket, and so on. Hobbes stepped carefully through the maze, his body setting the nearest items swinging back and forth. It was an art exhibition of a kind, he saw that now, curated by the inhabitants of Cromwell House: a show of treasures, borrowed, stolen or given freely.

There were other people in the room, at the far end, and a second door was visible in the gloom, another way into the exhibition hall. This one was open.

Hobbes approached the other visitors. They were of differing ages and races, and some looked to be from the outside.

No one spoke. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. No music played.

It was eerie. Hobbes didn’t know what to do. He turned and saw that Esme was still with him. She whispered in a breathy voice, ‘We have to bring things here, in homage to Fabian. He demands it of us.’

Hobbes pointed to the side of his brow. ‘You mean in here, a voice telling you?’

She nodded. ‘It starts off quietly, asking for one thing only, then grows louder, the more we visit. Until Fabian is shouting in our heads. And then the gathering takes place, more and more. I have stolen things.’ Her eyes showed her shame. ‘Stolen. I would never have done so before coming here.’

‘No, I can see that.’

And he did, remembering again the strange urge that had caused him to steal the dress from Adeline’s bedroom at the Graves family home. The need to possess it.