Kitchens lead into pantries and storerooms and laundries and other empty, echoing rooms. Just when I feel like I’m never going to find my way out of the basement, there’s another staircase leading up and up again and out onto a bright landing and a series of bedrooms. Some of them are made up with four-poster beds. I surreptitiously give the mattress of one a prod as I pass. It creaks alarmingly – Mrs Tilney would not be impressed. Finally, there’s a nursery with two little beds and a cot, and a narrow single bed in the corner for a nanny. The cot has a threadbare old-fashioned teddy bear lying on the mattress – he’s obviously meant to be propped up in the corner, but he’s fallen over, and my heart twists because he used to belong to someone. Someone who would have cared that he had fallen down; who would have picked him up and put him right.
“Mum?” I sit up in bed, head splitting, pulse racing, sweat trickling down the back of my neck. “Mum!”
“Flora?” She pushes my bedroom door open, silhouetted against the light from the landing. “What’s wrong?”
“There was a fire, and people were screaming. They couldn’t get out, and I was supposed to help them but I couldn’t, and they wouldn’t stop screaming, and…and…” My voice chokes out as she sits on the end of my bed and pats my hand.
“It was just a dream. The doctor did warn you.”
“It was so real. It was so real. I can’t go back to sleep. Please don’t make me.”
“You need to sleep.”
“But…”
“It’s just a dream. The things in your head can’t hurt you, remember? Now, come on. Back to sleep.”
She closes the door behind her, cutting off the light.
I reach into the cot to sit the teddy bear up again – but a sudden stern cough from the doorway makes me stop. A middle-aged lady in a cardigan is standing there, scowling at me.
“Please don’t touch,” she says, still frowning.
I shuffle past her, head down.
Something about the next section of the house feels different. It’s a study and a couple of…I don’t know, dressing rooms? Rooms for sitting in while you’re waiting until it’s time to go sit in the downstairs rooms? But there are bars on some of the windows – or the ghosts of them, in places. The doors are thicker too, and carry the scars of extra locks and heavy bolts.
I turn back to the scowling cardigan woman and point to the nearest window. “What are the bars for?”
She nods, looking at the sturdy metal bars bolted to the frame on the other side of the glass. “The house was used as an asylum for a while in the Victorian era, and then again just after the First World War. Shell-shocked soldiers mostly, the ones who were never expected to recover. It’s in the guidebook…”
The air curdles and clots around me, suddenly soupy. Menacing. I have a sudden vision of every door slamming, every key turning in every single lock; of bars sprouting from every window sill and trapping me here for ever. I may not have a ton of GCSEs, but even I know that’s what happened to people like me once upon a time – to people with “conditions” like mine. This. Locked doors and barred windows. Being kept away from the world, not so much so it couldn’t damage us, but so we couldn’t damage it. Like a broken brain is somehow contagious.
I think perhaps I’ve had enough of Fallowmill House. I thought coming here would exorcize my ghosts…but now I think it might have given me more.
The library is the only room left. It’s twice the size of the one at Hopwood and, like everything else here, it’s chilly and deserted. I’ve done a full loop of the house (or at least the parts I’m allowed to see) and beyond it I can see the hallway where I started. There are no bars on the windows here, just wide open views out onto the drive and the trees. But it doesn’t feel like Hopwood at all, and a sudden stab of longing for the woods and the maze and Charlie’s borders full of flowers overwhelms me. It’s not just that I feel like I belong at Hopwood – I know its rhythms, its routines, its shifts and its timetables – or that it’s where my friends are, my family. Hopwood makes me feel protected, makes me feel safe. There are no surprises – not like here, where without warning a bedroom becomes a prison cell and there are bolts on the doors ready to trap you. Hopwood feels like a sanctuary, but the world is full of Fallowmills. Even the books in the library here are kept behind locked mesh doors – what, to keep them safe? But who decides what is safe and what isn’t?
What would it take for these doors to slam, for these locks to be turned against me?
No. I keep my own keys. My doors, my locks. My head.
Out in the entrance hall, a door closes and soft footsteps squeak across the floor. A familiar head pokes around the other door to the library – looking the wrong way first, and then turning towards me with a smile. I wipe away everything I was thinking – the bars, the bolts, all of it – before he can see.
So that he won’t know.
“Hey!” He lopes over, his face glowing with excitement. My heart skips again.
“How did it go?”
“The archive here is amazing. Really amazing. There’s so much – things about the house, about the history of it, everyone who lived here…It’s—”
“Amazing?” I finish for him, trying not to laugh.
“Amazing. Exactly. Anyway, I think I found something.”
“You did?”
“Come and look.”
And he stretches out a hand – almost as though he’s about to take mine – before suddenly snatching his fingers back at the last instant, a fraction of a second before they touch me, so close I can actually feel the warmth from his skin before he pulls away. Instead, he tugs his fingers through his hair. “So, umm, yeah. Come on – you have to see it!”
Beyond the small wooden PRIVATE door, the archive is exactly as cluttered as it looked from my first glimpse of it. Filing cabinets and stacks of old wooden drawers line the walls, and the whole place smells of dust and stale coffee. A window at the back of the room has been covered with a milky-white film to keep the sun out – and, judging by the stuffy feel of the place, the air too. Not that Hal seems to notice any of that, because he makes a beeline straight for the cluttered old desk in the middle of it all, where the curator is hovering like an exam invigilator.
Footsteps walking, slow and measured, up and down the aisles between the desks…
The steady, endless tick-tick-tick of the clock…
Dozens of pairs of eyes wide, all turned towards me…
The whispering, the sound of papers falling, shuffling…
“This is it.” Hal points at a single page, centred in the middle of an old-fashioned desk blotter. I go to pick it up, but the curator makes a squawky disapproving sound in the back of her throat, and Hal ducks around me, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Apparently, we’ve been doing it all wrong. You have to keep them flat. I never knew that.”
“Oh. Right.” I peer at the sheet. It looks grubby, surrounded by the pristine white blotting paper, and old. “So how do we turn it over?”
The curator snorts. “You don’t. I will.”
Hal flashes me a look that’s somewhere between an eye-roll and a grin. It’s conspiratorial – the kind of look shared between friends.