‘You can wait outside if you like,’ Liam answers without even a glance in my direction.

There’s no way I’m waiting outside by myself, so I follow him, feeling my way like a deep-sea diver into the murky depths. There’s two of us, I tell myself, trying to feel brave, and probably only one of him. Nothing bad can happen. Can it?

Chapter Twelve

Liam holds the phone up high, though the flashlight does little beyond illuminating a circle of a few feet in front of us. We’re in what appears to be a cellar; it’s damp and smells of rot or mildew. I cough in the stale air and Liam holds his hand out for me to take as we pick our way across the uneven ground.

I grip it tightly, not wanting to fall or twist my ankle; in places the roof beams have collapsed, and piles of rubble and masonry clog up the space. I worry about the roof caving in completely and trapping us down here. How long would it take before we were found? Too long, that’s for sure.

Finally, we reach the far wall and Liam locates a door, but there’s a rock wedged in front of it. Did someone place it there? It seems somehow deliberate. He hefts it out the way and pulls the door open; it leads into a stone-walled passage, windowless and airless, which we pick our way along. There are several rooms off the corridor and by the looks of things they were once used as storage or perhaps were even servants’ quarters.

There’s furniture in some; one looks like a tack room, and another has shelves and several hooks embedded into the ceiling – maybe it was used to hang game. A third has cracked stone sinks and rusting plumbing, and I assume it was once a laundry room. Finally, we find our way into what clearly used to be a kitchen. There’s a flagstone floor and an oven so old it looks like an antique. On the shelves of a wooden dresser we see grimy crockery and dishes, and on the old, dusty oak table sits a rolling pin beside an enamel bowl, as though awaiting pastry to roll out. It’s as though the clock has struck midnight in a fairytale and everything has been frozen in time. I want to turn back. There’s something terrible about the place; haunted or cursed, just like the men in the pub warned. But Liam seems immune to the dark atmosphere; he either doesn’t feel it, or he isn’t afraid of it like me. Probably the latter.

Off the kitchen we find another stairwell, this one leading up, and Liam starts to climb. Reluctantly I follow behind, almost bumping into him when he pauses halfway up, noting a footprint in the dust.

‘He’s been here,’ Liam whispers. ‘I bet this is where he’s staying.’