The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“Russ and I will bring Flynn down for a visit next weekend.

See if you’re settled all right, look around. Russ says to make a list of any jobs that need doing.”

“I won’t have it that he’s dead,” Penny said. “You know that.”

“Mum, it’s been over seven years. He’s been declared—”

“I don’t care what some strangers declare about my husband. I’d know if he was dead, and I say he isn’t. He’s. gone somewhere, that’s all.”

“What, for a long walk?”

“Belinda.”

“Sorry, Mum. But don’t talk as if you and Dad had some kind of special bond. We both know that isn’t really true, is it?”

“It’ll be lovely to see Flynn,” Penny said. “The garden’s big enough to kick his football around. And can you ask Russ to bring some stuff for cleaning windows?”

“I will, Mum.” Belinda’s voice was heavy with concern and frustration, but Penny was here now. She had made the break. Left her own home, bought somewhere unusual, twelve miles from the nearest town and without bringing her TV with her. The furniture was coming the following day, but she had brought with her everything she would need for her new life — walking boots, coat, and a map.

“It’s not much, dear,” Penny said. “I know that. It’s not Cancun, or China, or an Antarctic cruise, or the Northern Lights, or any of those things he always wanted to do with me. But it’s something. It’s a small step on a longer journey. He’d be very surprised of me and. proud, I think.”

She glanced up at Mr Gough, listening and trying to appear distracted. And then she looked around the large hallway, three doors leading off into new rooms, timber floor scuffed, ceiling lined with old beams. “He’ll love it here.”

“Okay, Mum. Just. call me if you need anything. Will you do that?”

“Of course. Give my love to Russ and little Flynn.”

“Love you, Mum. Really.”

Belinda hung up first, and Penny could tell that her daughter had been starting to cry.

“Would you like a tour?” Mr Gough said.

Penny shook her head. “Just the keys, please.”

“But you really should look at the tower, it’s a remarkable feature, makes the house—”

“Really, I’m fine. Very tired.” Penny stood, wincing at the pain in her hips from the long drive.

“Okay, then,” the solicitor said. Smile painted on, now. He handed her a set of keys, then a smaller set. “Spares.” He glanced around. “Lovely old place. You’re very lucky, Mrs Summers.”

As he turned to leave, a sense of such profound terror and isolation struck Penny that she slumped back against the stair banister, grabbing hold as the house swam around her. She tried to call out, but her mouth was too dry. Help me! she thought, feeling a great weight of foreboding bearing down upon her. Up there, there’s something above, a terrible thing that is pressing down on me now I’m inside. Dusty windows, a trick of the light, but I can hear it up there, I can almost smell it, and I wish I was back in my garden with the roses and rhododendrons.

Then the feeling started to filter away, and she knew that this was an important moment. She could give in to the terror and run. Or she could remain in her new home.

There, there, Peter says, his rough working-man’s fingers stroking her cheek with infinite care and softness. Come on, my little rose. Don’t be afraid. You never have to be afraid when you’re with me. He has not spoken to her like this since they were in their twenties, madly in love and obsessed only with each other. I’ll never let anyone or anything hurt you.

“Thank you, Mr Gough,” she whispered. The departing solicitor waved a hand without turning around, indicating that he must have heard.

As he climbed into his Jeep, he glanced back at the house just once. Not at Penny. At the tower. His constant smile had vanished.

She gave herself a tour of the house and wondered what she had done.

The fear had settled ever since she had reached a decision to sell the family home and move here. Belinda and Russ had been stunned, but increasingly supportive, as Penny had stuck to her guns and insisted that this was just what she wanted.

“Maybe your father is right and I am just stuck in my ways,” she said, and the worry niggled at her that this was hardly a big step. Moving from the home she had shared with Peter for forty years, out into the country, into a hamlet where there were fewer than a hundred people living, the house Grade II listed and an architectural oddity that occasionally attracted visitors. it was nothing, really. The sort of change some people welcomed every couple of years of their lives.

But to Penny, it was the world.

The house was incredibly quiet. So much so that as she strolled through its corridors and rooms, she heard a high, lonely aircraft passing over the landscape outside. You’ll never get me on one of those, she’d said to Peter when he suggested a simple flight to the Channel Islands to get her used to flying.

Penny opened the back door and paused, head tilted. She smiled. “One step at a time,” she said.

The garden was wild and overgrown, awaiting her attention. The rooms inside were not decorated to her taste, but neither were they worn enough to require immediate redecoration. There was wooden flooring throughout — it would take her some time to get used to that, as she was more at home with patterned carpets. The house smelled unusual, and the sounds were strange — creaks, groans, taps — and she had no real sense of its shape and the space it occupied. It was nowhere near home, and she felt something like an intruder.

When the furniture and boxes arrive tomorrow everything will change, she thought. But the idea of seeing her belongings transported here and dropped in place by sweaty removal men suddenly hit home. Everything she had ever owned was packed in a lorry somewhere right now, ready to be transported across the country and deposited in this strange place.

Home is where you are, she’d said to Peter once, but he’d scoffed and gone into a quiet sulk. Later, he’d said, You’re rarely where I am.

“Everything I have will be here, apart from him,” Penny said. Her voice was loud. A bird sang somewhere in the garden, as if in response.

A steady tap, tap, tap came from somewhere that did not feel like part of the house.

Penny walked from the kitchen to the hallway, unconsciously matching the rhythm with her own footsteps. She paused at the staircase, one hand on the banister, looking up. The sound was more distant than the bedrooms or bathroom on the first floor. More hollow, and sadder. She knew the sound.

Peter, sat in his armchair with a glass of whiskey in one hand and his eyes distant, while she sat on the sofa and watched the next episode of some TV series she was already losing interest in, and his foot would tap against the wooden leg of his chair. Just a gentle impact, as if he were ticking away the seconds of his life. She would hear, but had never, ever said anything. He was always like this after an argument — a screwed up travel brochure beside his chair, and a dead dream floating in his glass.

He would usually go anyway, but never with his wife.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Peter,” Penny breathed. The noise ceased. She held her breath.

Keys in hand, Penny walked slowly upstairs. Each tread had its own feel and sound, and probably its own memories as well. This one, a child sitting playing with toy cars. This one, a man tripping and spilling a tray of breakfast he’d been carrying for his wife. And this, someone kneeling and crying, perhaps in dread, perhaps ecstasy.

Spooking yourself, Peter says. You always worry too much, my rose.

Penny reached the landing and stood before the doorway that led to the tower. She had not looked inside on her first walk around the house. Had passed it by, truth be told, because it had felt like the last place she wanted to see. Too dusty up there, she’d thought, and she decided that was the one place she’d send Russ when he and Belinda came over the following weekend. Up into the tower, to clean those windows and