My father sits heavily in the chair and puts his beer can on my mother’s medicine cabinet. He smiles and blinks at me, and through a haze of alcohol, I catch a glimpse of the man I love. ‘I’m sure. Now go to sleep, it’s late.’

I climb the stairs, brush my teeth and get into bed. I’m tired and I want to shut out the world, but as soon as I close my eyes, I can’t stop thinking about my mother and Maureen Connolly, and the fate of the Carter sisters.

I can still see the expression of fear and capitulation on Shannon’s face when, finally, sleep pulls me under.

39

Hilltop House is in silence but it is not asleep.

Rain is drumming on the roof and spilling over the gutters, thrown, like loose gravel, against the brickwork and windows. The rivulets running down the glass doors that open into the garden glint like eyes in the darkness.

The moon has moved again, but now she is behind the clouds. It is later. These are the hollow hours, when sleep makes vulnerable even the cruellest men and women.

The house is waiting for something to happen. Its walls are swollen with expectation. The clocks count down. The floors shift and settle, preparing themselves. Every house has a history that creeps into its cracks and contaminates the atmosphere, but this is different.

The house knows.

40

Sara opened her eyes.

She felt around for Raggedy Ann, but the sheet was cold and empty. A tear trickled out of one eye.

When they were younger, Dr Carter had taken Shannon’s favourite teddy bear outside to the shed as punishment and cut off its arms and legs with a pair of shears. She hoped, with the fervent ardour of a ten-year-old, that Raggedy Ann would not meet the same fate.

She sat up in bed. Rain was pounding against her window. Sara leaned over to her bedside table and checked her wristwatch. 3.59 a.m.

She began to count, but not as a way of finding her safe place. This was for a different reason. When she reached sixty and the house was still quiet, she slipped out of bed.

She pulled on a clean pair of pyjamas, shivering in the dark eye of the night, but the monsters under her bed were less frightening than the ones asleep in the bedroom across the landing.

With light, careful steps, Sara crossed the carpet and turned her doorknob as quietly as she could manage.

The creak of the opening door sounded to her like a shriek in the darkness, and she paused, the blood pumping too loudly in her ears.

The landing was in the shape of a horseshoe, a balustraded gallery overlooking the hall below. Sara’s bedroom was next to Shannon’s, and Dr and Mrs Carter slept on the opposite side of the horseshoe, away from the girls.

Shannon’s door was ajar.