After a moment, driven by a reckless impulse I couldn’t understand, I dashed after Mother. I froze in my bedroom doorway and watched her stop in the centre of the landing. She reached up and pulled the bronze knob that was attached to the door in the ceiling. The trapdoor dropped open and she reached up again and pulled down a metal ladder. The silver rungs squealed as she climbed. She disappeared into the attic and I heard the creak of her weight as she walked across the ceiling above me.

I sighed, disappointed, my tongue sizzling with questions, but then an idea popped into my head. I looked up at hole in the ceiling and began to think. I had never been in the attic before so I didn’t know what secret treasures lay up there, no doubt hidden beneath dust and cobwebs and other gross, disturbing things, but a tingling feeling in my chest made me feel that at least one answer lay above my head, cloaked in darkness, waiting to be uncovered.

The thought gave me hope and I latched onto it like a leech.

I returned to my bedroom with a plan forming in my head. If I was going to die soon, I wanted answers before that happened and I wasn’t going to get them from Mother.

I sat down at my desk and smiled nervously.

Mother had never said I couldn’t go up into the attic.

Chapter 6

The front door banged shut and the key crunched in the lock, signalling Mother’s departure from the cottage and unlocking the rising hysteria that was gurgling inside me. Mother was gone. Gone shopping for groceries and maybe a few more books and another pop or psychedelic piece of art. Gone for how long, I did not know.

The little gold clock on my desk helped me to track the seconds and minutes and hours that made up a day. I could never be certain, but on average Mother’s trips into the outside lasted two hours. On occasion, of course, they hovered around the six-hour mark, but these lengthier trips were few and far between, so I could not bank on her being out for anywhere near that long.