I was then assailed with a strange discomfort and the room swam in something dark. ‘Mary.’ My voice was a little louder but I followed her gaze. It was not the window itself she was fixed on but something half hidden in the rafters, something barely distinguishable from its surroundings. When I finally made sense of what I saw, I shuddered. A breeze seeped in from the frame and it swung a little in the draft, eliciting the faintest of notes. A widows’ whistle. My skin crept with disgust and I turned to Mary, but instead of her fugue-like trance, her face had thawed. She looked me full in the eye and gripped my wrist so hard that I nearly dropped the candle. She was struggling with something.

‘What is it? Tell me. What is it?’

She opened her mouth and I waited, but then her lips clamped together, forcing the silence. Through the quiet another creak sounded on the floorboards. Mary too had heard it and her gaze swung to the landing.

I walked Mary to the stair top and cast the candle to the treads below. The steps fell ahead, a slight turn halfway down with a rail on one side – smooth as glass. And then, through the silence, the widows’ whistle began to whine and a shape emerged, one that seemed cut out of something blacker than the night itself. It could not be, it could not, and yet there it was, but even as I stared into the dark heart of it, my feet frozen to the boards, it had gone, leaving on the air the press of its unnaturalness. Behind me, the widows’ whistle fell to silence.

It was Mary who took the steps first, breaking the spell and leading us to the landing where I followed on trembling legs. We walked the passageway through the smudged darkness, my breath quick in my lungs. I fixed my eyes ahead on the goal of the exit, swallowing the horror of what I had seen and felt.

In Mary’s room, I lit candles and got her into bed, where her shivering continued. I wrapped my arms about her, aware that as much as I gave comfort, I needed it for myself. I recalled the moment she had been about to speak, felt the urgency of her desire to communicate. My hands shook. From the table I picked up a notebook and pencil.

‘What is it you want to say? Trust me,’ I said. ‘Trust me.’

Her eyes blinked wider with fear, but she took the pencil and with a trembling hand wrote:

I am going to die.

24

I slept more deeply than expected, coming awake to a sense of unreality. A dream had taken me to Gulls Cry, where I had stood in front of a mirror but it was not my face I saw there – it was Hettie’s.