portraits widened their eyes to watch Charlotte venture along the room; that was just an effect of the light, which caught the unnaturally rounded eyes and made them glisten like ice. 'It's me, Ellen. I'm here now,' Charlotte said and, having propped the spade against the table well within reach, took her cousin's right hand.
At least, she tried. It was pressed flat against the wood. If anything, Ellen flattened it harder, and Charlotte was afraid that her cousin was doing the same to her face, as if she wanted to erase it and all sense of herself. Charlotte opened her mouth, but the sound she uttered was wordless and by no means comforting. A portrait had thrust its head forwards to peer at them.
All of its companions on the left-hand wall appeared to widen their bulging whitish eyes in glee as Charlotte swung the beam towards them, so wildly that the flashlight almost flew out of her hand. She'd grabbed the spade before she realised that the frame out of which the face had peered was lower on the wall than the portraits to either side. In another moment she saw it was a service hatch. Beyond it were a kitchen and a revival of the footsteps she'd heard from the stairs. As she made herself advance around the table and past Ellen to look through the hatch, a dark bulk crept out of hiding behind a massive iron kitchen range while the light glared back from a window walled up with clay. A figure was wandering around another table attended by a single chair. He was dodging back and forth as if led by his frantic shadow. 'Hugh,' Charlotte said.
He didn't react, and she had to wait until he strayed towards the hatch again before she could see his face. It looked pinched around a desperate obsession. His eyes were fixed beyond recognising her, perhaps even beyond sensing anyone was there. Perhaps he was conscious only of the light that was showing him his way or rather demonstrating that he couldn't find it – and then another thought appalled Charlotte. How had he and Ellen found their way down the lightless house? There was no sign of a flashlight except for hers.
They must have been shown the route or led through it, and she couldn't doubt who their guide had been. 'Where is he?' she blurted.
Hugh might not have heard. He didn't falter in his wandering, which had begun to remind her of the kind of mechanical toy that recoiled whenever it encountered an obstacle. She repeated the question to Ellen, hardly expecting an answer. When her cousin stayed prone and mute Charlotte saw she was as locked into her obsession as Hugh. They were out of her reach, and she'd spoken in a last pitiful attempt to make contact. She already knew the answer.
As she turned towards the hall she saw the light leave her cousins behind and heard Hugh's footsteps falter to a stop. At least he mightn't injure himself in the dark where she was abandoning him and Ellen. While that distressed her, she was afraid she would be facing much worse. 'This is for you,' she told them and realised she was talking to herself. She walked almost steadily out of the room and didn't break her stride until she was at the cellar. Taking hold of the doorknob, which looked and felt fungoid with verdigris, she eased the door open.
Darkness wobbled away from the flashlight beam, not far enough. As she leaned forwards the beam illuminated steps that led down into a room perhaps half as extensive as a floor of the house. The floor and walls were composed of bare brick, but had she glimpsed something that distracted her from any claustrophobia? Had there been the faintest glow through the gaps between the steps – a glow that had made them look coated with lichen? The appearance had vanished, and she couldn't revive it however she moved the beam. Perhaps it would become visible again if she were to switch the flashlight off, but the mere thought had her struggling to breathe. The cellar was sufficiently daunting, and she had to recall the state in which she'd left her cousins before she was able to set foot on the top step.
Possibly the steps were overgrown even if she couldn't see it. They felt slimy, so that she clutched at the single banister and nearly lost her grip on the spade as the shadows in the corners of the basement performed a gleeful dance. Was there a better way to support herself? Planting the spade on the next step, she leaned on it as her foot joined it. The steps no longer felt slippery, and she wondered if the impression could somehow have been produced to deter intruders. The idea scarcely had a chance to form, because stepping down resembled sinking into thin chill mud.
No, despite the lack of substance, it felt worse. Even shining the light on the steps couldn't dispel the sense of treading in an essence of darkness, of an utter absence of illumination rendered tangible. It was just a trick to ward off trespassers, she did her best to think. It had seized her imagination but not her body, even if she shivered from head to foot as she took another step down, helped by the spade. An ordinary cellar was bound to be cold, and how much colder would it be under an entire buried house? She was managing to tame the latest shiver with that argument when she began to distinguish exactly where the steps led.
The floor wasn't as bare as it had looked from the hall. It was inscribed with signs, an arc of them that lay closer to the walls than to the steps. As she trained the flashlight on the characters, releasing formless shadows from the corners of the room, Charlotte saw that they formed rather more than a semicircle; indeed, it seemed very possible that they encircled the steps. Perhaps the years had faded them, unless they were meant to be nearly invisible. They were easy to mistake for a ring of black lichen, the negative image of a fairy ring in a field, until they fastened on the imagination, when their nature became more evident if not entirely clear. If they were runes, they could well be depicting a pack of misshapen creatures, their jaws gaping in terror of the pursuit or to close on their prey ahead of them, unless both meanings were intended. Charlotte thought of nightmares that grew worse in order to devour their victims, and her skin crawled with the memory of infestation. That was just a nightmare, not even her own, but suppose it was only a hint of the horrors that might be lying in wait? As if to confirm her fear, she heard Ellen groan like someone desperate to wake.
She was expressing her own plight, not suggesting that Charlotte was in someone else's nightmare. Her voice sounded more muffled, so that Charlotte imagined Ellen's face crushed against the wood, while Hugh was no longer able to move for disorientation if not for the darkness in which she'd left him. Nobody except Charlotte could release them. 'I'm going,' she promised, perhaps too low to be heard by anyone outside the cellar, and took the deepest breath she could. Although it tasted subterranean, she vowed to make it last until she was standing in the cellar. It was the nearest she seemed able to come to a prayer.
The flashlight beam swayed, spilling across the bricks. Each step she descended showed her more of the characters whose meaning and purpose she might very well prefer not to learn. She felt as if they were closing around her like a noose. Was it only because of their undefined threat that she gripped the flashlight harder, and the spade? She was growing fearful that as she lowered the spade for support it would be snatched through a gap between the steps. She tried not to let it make a sound as it encountered each step, but her timidity aggravated her nervousness, and the light was already betraying her presence. She slammed the blade against the wood, and once more. Then it struck bricks with a clang that resounded like some kind of bell in her ears as she leaned on the spade and set foot on the floor of the cellar.
A shiver climbed her body and seemed to lodge deep in her brain. It was only the chill of the bricks, she tried to think, although they felt not quite solid enough, as if they might give way beneath her. When she turned to peer past the steps the light danced so wildly that she could have fancied it was as anxious to escape the noose of runes as she was struggling not to feel. They did indeed form an endless chain, though the tottering shadow of the steps obscured a few. The shadow disguised something against the back wall – a crouched shape to which it was surely lending movement. Charlotte dodged around the steps, no less desperate than afraid to see, and the shadow lurched away, exposing the shape.
Her first impression was that it resembled a dead spider – long dead – and she tried to find it as unthreatening, despite its size. It looked not merely withered but drawn into itself. Its arms were hugging its raised knees, its fleshless head buried among all its scrawny limbs, as if it had been trying to rescind its own birth. What had it been so frantic to hide from? She needn't wonder so long as it had been rendered immobile. Surely it was just a husk, and the last of its lingering influence had seized on her and her cousins only because they'd spent too long above its house or slept there. It was so decayed that she couldn't judge whether the discoloured material through which its bones showed was all that remained of its skin or of its clothes or both. A few blows with the spade ought to scatter it and any remnants of its powers beyond reconstitution, and Charlotte did her best to feel encouraged by the incongruous pathetic spectacle of socks drooping on the shrivelled ankles. Or were they the remains of blackened rotten skin? Either ought to mean that the former owner of the house was incapable of any action. Charlotte stepped forwards, lifting the spade, only to realise that she would need both hands to wield it. She was making to leave the circle and place the flashlight on the floor outside it – she was attempting to decide which to do first, because it seemed somehow important – when she heard movement above her in the hall.
She was able to hope it was one of her cousins – Hugh, since she recognised the footsteps as a man's. Perhaps they were so heavy and deliberate because he was relearning how to find his way. She managed to believe
