The Stone House Read online

  Miss Quill considers this, then shakes her head. ‘We all have our own Rift,’ she says. ‘He’ll find his in time.’

  Tanya watches her, still not sure if Miss Quill is joking.

  TWENTY

  THE FIRST VISIT TO CONSTANTINE OLIVER

  ‘He won’t be much longer, I’m sure,’ says Matteusz. ‘Can I get you anything, Miss Quill?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Miss Quill says, folding her arms. She’s in the lounge, waiting for Charlie to get home. Why do people in this country call it the living room when they just sit in it, watch television, and wait for death?

  ‘Then I’ll go upstairs,’ Matteusz says, backing out.

  ‘Seeing as you refuse to tell me where Charlie is, I think that wise. I wouldn’t want to enact my coercion techniques.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want that either,’ Matteusz says. He runs up the stairs much quicker than normal.

  A key turns in the lock. Charlie comes in whistling.

  Miss Quill turns off a show in which people try to guess what other people haven’t guessed, which must be a war training programme of some kind. Those who win are most likely enlisted by the government as military strategists.

  ‘Come in here, Charlie.’

  Charlie walks in, eating a burger. ‘I couldn’t wait till dinner,’ he says. ‘I was starving.’

  ‘You’re always “starving”,’ Miss Quill says.

  ‘You’ll know why when you hear where I’ve been.’ He sits down on the chair opposite.

  ‘I cannot wait,’ Miss Quill says.

  Charlie leans forward. ‘I went to Highgate, to Constantine Oliver’s offices, the stone house developers.’ He shows her the advert.

  ‘And why would you do that?’ she asks.

  ‘Let me tell you what happened, first.’

  She leans back on the sofa. ‘Do you have to?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The whole place looked exactly like an office someone called Constantine Oliver would have, all polished and shiny and nothing on any of the surfaces, apart from a coffee machine. You’d have liked it. I felt like I shouldn’t even be walking on the floor, it was so clean.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Miss Quill says.

  ‘I was shown into a side room and waited. It took so long that I worried they’d worked out that I’d completely made up the CV and references, but Oliver came in, eventually. He didn’t even bother looking at me, all he said was that he was surprised that I had applied for the job, given my age and that no one from the reputable firms had gone anywhere near. I didn’t need to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. I asked him why I wouldn’t want the job.’

  ‘Not the interview technique Coal Hill careers officers usually recommend,’ Miss Quill says. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “Let’s get this straight, I’ve had men, supposedly grown men, try to do the nightwatch onsite and run away screaming. I’m looking for people not easily spooked.” I told him that I was his man and asked what I should be looking out for.

  ‘Oliver then told me this story. Apparently, anyone who’s been there after midnight, any time really between twelve and three a.m., sees monsters. Really hideous monsters that seem to crawl out of the walls.’ Charlie nods. ‘Others have seen creatures made out of bones. The worst part—’

  ‘As if that wasn’t bad,’ Miss Quill says. Bones do useful things like stop a body from flopping on the floor; bones by themselves is a sign that something’s amiss. Combine bones and monsters and you’re in nightmare territory.

  ‘The worst part,’ Oliver said, ‘is that webs wrap themselves around whoever is inside. They wake up as if coming out of a trance and find they are cocooned in sticky cobwebs that have to be sliced through with a knife.’

  ‘Knives are required. You see, that’s why I’m always right,’ Miss Quill says.

  ‘I’m hoping that’ll come across on the phone,’ Charlie says, grinning. ‘Because in about five minutes, Constantine Oliver is going to call you for my reference. He’s all but promised me the job. The last bit is down to you.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to tell him what a fine, upright citizen you are?’ she says.

  ‘Tell him that you wouldn’t be where you are right now without me,’ Charlie says.

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Miss Quill says. Her phone goes.

  ‘That’ll be him,’ Charlie says, expectantly.

  ‘I don’t like you assuming that I’ll help you. Or that I want to.’

  ‘Please?’

  She presses OK. ‘Mr Oliver,’ she says. ‘I’ve been expecting your call.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  A TOUCH OF WIST

  Tanya settles on her bed, pillows behind her, textbooks laid out in front. Nothing too taxing before bed, she’s just relaxing with some hot chocolate, three-dimensional trigonometry, and a touch of Bragg scattering for fun.

  Her phone goes. It’s Charlie on FaceTime. His slightly pixelated face appears. ‘Nice pyjamas,’ he says. ‘Are those unicorns?’

  ‘At least I’m wearing pyjamas,’ Tanya says. Charlie rolls his eyes, grabs a T-shirt from his bed, and slips it on. ‘You’re home then. Miss Quill is not happy with you.’

  ‘We’d have been no use going off to Elephant and Castle with you, so we used our initiative instead. I say our, it was mainly my idea.’

  ‘I am here, you know,’ Matteusz says, out of frame.

  ‘That’s why I said it,’ Charlie says, smiling across to the other side of the room. Matteusz appears from the left and kisses Charlie on the neck.

  ‘I wish people would say if they’re in the same room,’ Tanya says. ‘I might’ve said something rude about you.’ She pretends to think for a moment. ‘Thinking about it, I’d say it to your face as well so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’d expect nothing more,’ Matteusz says. He then kisses Charlie again and moves away. She can hear him on the far side of the room. His shirt is thrown over the bed, covering Charlie’s head and the phone.

  ‘So where’ve you been, then?’ she asks, when Charlie emerges, laughing.

  ‘Nosy, aren’t you?’

  ‘You called me, remember? I was looking forward to having some time not looking at your faces.’

  ‘Fine. If you don’t want to know what we found out about the stone house, we’ll go.’

  ‘Tell me now or I’m going to turn you off and go straight back to my homework.’

  ‘There’s no better way to turn me on, but okay. Well, Matteusz had the great idea—’

  ‘And it really was great,’ Matteusz says.

  ‘Matteusz had the OK idea to find out more about the developer.’

  ‘That is such a good idea,’ Tanya says, ‘that I did the same thing earlier. You needn’t have called after all.’

  ‘Ah, but did you go down there after class and have an interview, pretending to apply for a job on the site?’

  Tanya shakes her head. ‘Can’t say I did. Mainly ’cos I can’t be in two places at once.’

  ‘Charlie can,’ Matteusz says, looming into view and winking.

  Charlie punches him lightly on the shoulder. ‘No, it just feels like I can.’ He’s smiling. He looks so happy.

  ‘I have no idea what that means,’ Tanya says. ‘And I don’t want to.’ She wouldn’t say she was wistful at the sight of the two of them, but definitely wist-ish. A touch of wist, perhaps. She picks skin off the top of her hot chocolate and drapes it over the other side of the cup. ‘So what happened?’ she asks.

  Charlie repeats what he told Miss Quill, adding some insults for good measure.

  ‘What did you say to him when he talked about the house being haunted?’ Tanya asks.

  ‘This is the best bit,’ Matteusz says from off screen.

  ‘I made suitably sceptical scoffing noises,’ Charlie continues.

  ‘Do the noises,’ Matteusz shouts. ‘I’ve been making him do the noises all evening.’
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br />   Charlie demonstrates the scoffing—he sounds posh and incredulous.

  ‘When really you were scared witless when you were there,’ Tanya says. ‘I saw your face.’ She takes a slurp of hot chocolate and grimaces. She drank from the wrong side of the cup and now has a milk-skin mouth.

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ Charlie says. ‘I don’t want to see any more. I wish we’d never gone but it’s in my head now. When I go to sleep I’ve got images of our war in my head, and someone else’s. I’ve caught someone else’s nightmares.’

  ‘Maybe the nightmares are viral,’ Matteusz says.

  ‘Whatever they are, I think the only way to get rid of it is to face it.’

  Tanya doesn’t know what to say to that other than, ‘It’s true.’ It’s the only way she’ll free the girl from the window and from her head.

  ‘If what Oliver says is right, you’d think there’d be lots of mummified bodies gift wrapped in webs,’ Tanya says. ‘I mean, there were a lot of webs in the house, you’d expect them in a place like that, without anyone living there, or a cat to eat the spiders.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Charlie says. He pauses. ‘Unless there is somewhere in the house that we haven’t explored. We were pretty much chased out of there.’

  ‘You’re right. We should go again,’ Tanya says, jumping up. Her books slide off the bed onto the floor.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ Matteusz echoes Charlie, appearing on screen in a dressing gown.

  ‘Let’s go right now—Miss Quill has some of those EMF readers they have on Most Haunted—and prove, well, something at least.’ She’s carrying the laptop around the room, holding it up while trying to find warm clothes.

  Matteusz and Charlie haven’t moved. They’re staring at her through the screen.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get dressed?’ she says.

  ‘You’re basically saying you want us to be ghostbusters,’ Charlie says.

  ‘I’ll be Kate McKinnon,’ Matteusz replies. ‘She has the best hair.’

  ‘Charlie, what are you waiting for?’ Tanya asks.

  ‘I’m waiting till it starts,’ Charlie says. He swallows. He looks nervous. Matteusz’s hand appears and holds on to Charlie’s.

  ‘When what starts?’ Tanya asks.

  ‘I got the job as nightwatcher at the stone house. Starting tomorrow.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  DREAMWEAVING AGAIN

  Tanya knows she’s dreaming. She’ll wake up now, right?

  If she’s having a really great dream and realises she’s asleep, she always wakes up. Consciousness steps in like the party police and switches off the sound system. But now, when she’s dreaming of ivy crawling out of the walls of the stone house and wrapping itself around her and pinning her hands behind her back, she can’t wake up at all. She pinches the skin of her other hand. Hard. Nope, still dreaming.

  Don’t panic. It’s only a dream. A dream that is making her heart beat so hard it feels like it’s reverberating through the stone walls.

  She’s read about how to wake up from nightmares:

  1. Concentrate

  Concentrating on specifics should shift her brain waves from theta to gamma and beta and jolt her awake. Right. Let’s try this. She looks down and focuses on the vine grabbing her arm. It’s as muscular as a snake and squeezes her as tightly as the python she held at the aquarium when she was five. Fine wires spike out of the dark green flesh. They latch onto her skin, making her itch and bleed. But they don’t make her wake up.

  2. Observe

  Look for things that aren’t part of ordinary life. This should, in theory, alert her brain to the fact that she’s not in an everyday situation, but if ten-metre strands of ivy strangling her don’t appear unrealistic to her brain, then not much will.

  3. Scream

  Asking for help stimulates the amygdala and sends the body into survival mode, causing adrenaline to flow and the eyes to fly open to assess the threat. Tanya concentrates on opening her mouth as wide as she can and screams, ‘HELP’. The sound that comes out seems muffled. Any second now, though, she’ll be awake. Any second.

  4. Blink

  She tries really hard to blink. Closing your eyes and opening them in the dream can cause the body to do it in real life, letting light in on the dreams, like opening the curtains. It’s impossible. Her eyelids won’t move. It’s as if they’ve been sewn shut with steel thread.

  5. Run

  It’s hard to run when a plant is squeezing you like a green corset. There’s no way her actual body is going to kick out and wake up if her dream body can’t twitch.

  6. Listen

  She hasn’t read this anywhere, but she’s got a theory. Tanya waggles her hands to try to get more leeway, just enough to touch the wall behind her. It is cold and slightly slimy. Forming her hand into a fist, she strains to knock her knuckles against the wall. Her brain is in REM and has a certain rhythm, if she switches it to the bass-heavy beat of alpha then she might wake up. She hits out a steady beat against the walls. THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD . . . The house responds, wrapping her hands in vines until they cannot move at all.

  Tanya’s all out of strategies. The ivy loops itself about her neck, tightening its grip. She rasps, raking in each breath.

  Can you die in real life if you die in a dream? Has that actually been proven? Now wouldn’t be a good time for Tanya to test it. Not for Tanya, anyway.

  The edges of her vision blacken like an X-Pro II filter. Around her, sounds of scratching. Tendrils slither across her mouth, gagging her. She bites, it squeezes tighter. The dream turns grey.

  Soft footsteps cross the floorboards. A hand reaches out, touching the coil around Tanya’s neck. ‘It’s alright, Tanya,’ the girl’s voice says. The ivy strands slacken. ‘It’s Amira.’

  Tanya’s eyes jolt open.

  She’s in her bedroom. Tanya gulps down air like water. She waits for her heartbeat to slow to sprinting pace, then picks up her tablet, types in ‘MISSING PERSONS CALLED AMIRA’. Google is her friend.

  So, it seems, is Amira.

  TWENTY-THREE

  RUNNING BY THE RIVER

  I wake up, not screaming for once. I was dreaming of Tanya.

  She was helping me clear the garden of all the overgrown ivy. My cheeks hurt from smiling in my sleep.

  I slip out of bed and look out of the window. Bright sunshine already, even though it can only be nine in the morning. Men are laughing in the garden. My hands ball into fists. They’re sitting on the wall that they’ve half torn down. Others are erecting a cabin under the trees. A tent has been put up next to it. I do not want to see another tent. Why would people live in them if they didn’t have to—when they have houses and loved ones who aren’t dead inside them?

  I hear people laughing and wonder who will get hurt.

  We were at the last camp, in Calais, and the worst. We’d travelled through ten countries and now that we were so close to England, it looked like we’d never get there. There was little or no water in the camp. We couldn’t clean ourselves, so we couldn’t pray. Yana and I slept on one board with a thin blanket over us both, in a tent shared with twelve members of a family from Homs. I can’t even say their name. It makes my throat close up.

  The tent was partitioned into different areas and we had our own two-metre-by-two-metre tarpaulined space. It wasn’t real privacy, though. One night we were sleeping and two of the sons came into our area of the tent. I woke up with a hand over my mouth. They were laughing, pulling at my nightclothes. Yana curled up in a ball. I kicked at them and they laughed more, grabbing my feet. The tarpaulin rustled aside and their father appeared. He shouted at them and they left, still laughing. I held Yana to me and we both rocked backwards and forwards. Next morning, we were told to leave the tent.

  I used to love making people laugh—Father called me his ‘little clown’. So much about me has changed. One time, I was really good at running and jumping and playing. Yana and I used to race each othe
r by the river. We went from one bridge to the next, which is a very long way, especially for someone as young as she was. But she always managed, and sometimes even had time to stop to pick a flower on the way. She shouted at me for letting her win, but she was so fast that she won all by herself. I should have told her. If she visits me tonight, I will tell her. And I’ll say sorry. For that and other things.

  The digging has started outside. They’re churning up the lawn and its beautiful overgrown roses and dandelions. Seeds bob outside the window, then get caught up in the wind and taken away.

  The house is unhappy. It creaks and moans. Doors cry shut and walls shudder. I tell it that everything will be okay. I used to tell my sister that. It wasn’t okay. The house knows this and sheds autumn leaves from the ceiling.

  I remember autumn in Damascus. Yana used to love holding hands with me and Baba, scuffing at the leaves. I even have vague memories of doing it myself, very small, wearing a raincoat. Memories are one way to keep off the rain. I curl up back on the bed, hoping to be covered in leaves.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PHENOMENA

  Tanya is waiting at the gates again. For Miss Quill, this time. At least she won’t be late.

  It’s slightly cooler today, although maybe she’s just getting used to it. The headlines in the corner shop still shout ‘HOTTEST EVER!’, showing packed British beaches and close-ups of smiling white girls.

  She didn’t fancy eating before she left home this morning so bought something that claims to be ‘breakfast in a can’. She takes a swig. Tastes more like freshly squeezed dirt in a can.

  ‘I sincerely hope you’re not waiting for me,’ Miss Quill says, striding towards her.

  ‘Bad luck,’ Tanya says.

  ‘Then my hope is misplaced,’ Miss Quill says. ‘Such is the way of visionaries.’

  ‘You’re my hero, Miss Quill,’ Tanya says.

  ‘I’m glad you recognise it,’ Miss Quill replies.

  ‘Have you got the results yet on those samples?’ Tanya says, stalling for time.