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  Her heart stopped.

  Not the old man this time, but Silas.

  He saw her, grinned that hideous Weddup grin, and lifted a large knife to his throat.

  23

  So this is insanity, Silas thought as he slashed the tires on his own car.

  If he really stepped outside of himself and thought about it, then yes, seeing dead people when they weren’t actually there was pretty crazy, and he should have seen this coming. Plenty of people believed in ghosts, sure, but only madmen saw them sitting right there in front of them.

  At least he was no longer on the fence. In the am I crazy, or do ghosts really exist debate, he had finally chosen a side.

  He was a raving loon.

  It was the nature of his insanity that most surprised him. He had always thought madness was all-encompassing, that those who had lost their minds were not aware of it. But he was, as far as he could tell, entirely present and correct in the marbles department, locked inside his own mind, witnessing everything from a sane perspective.

  Burning the phones, barricading the door, hitting his wife - it was if he was watching a virtual reality movie, and he had no control over his actions. Someone else was telling this story, and he didn’t have a clue how it was going to end.

  He found himself in the bedroom, peering down at his wife on the driveway below. He wanted to open the window and order her to leave, to get away from him to safety. I’ve got a knife, he wanted to scream, and I don’t know what I propose to do with it.

  To his horror, he found out moments later, as his traitorous hand brought the knife to his throat and his mouth curved upward into a grin.

  No, please, his mind panicked. He didn’t want to die, not like this, not in front of his wife.

  Leave, Oona. Just go. You don’t want to see this.

  But she didn’t go. She ran into the cottage instead.

  You stupid woman! What are you doing?

  He heard her pounding up the staircase.

  Don’t run, he thought preposterously. Those steps are dangerous. You’ll do yourself an injury.

  The door burst open and he turned to face her, the knife still at his throat.

  The momentum propelling her forward almost toppled Oona in the doorway, but she regained her footing, and when she straightened up it wasn’t Oona in front of him at all. It was Aggie.

  Why Aggie the landlady should appear before him he had no idea. It was almost amusingly random, and if he’d had any control over his body he might have laughed.

  Aggie was ten years younger, maybe, slimmer and less gray, but it was her, there was no doubt about it, and she was looking at him in wide-eyed horror.

  And then in the blink of an eye Aggie was gone, and it was his wife there again, but her face wore the same expression, the same terror glinting in her eyes. She was frozen in position, her jaw slack, her limbs trembling.

  She tried to speak, gulped, wet her lips, and tried again. “Silas. Silas. For God’s sake, don’t do it.”

  I’m not planning on it, Oons, he thought. Believe me.

  He tried to speak, but it was no use. He was helpless to act as his grin widened, and the cold blade pressed down on his hot throat, breaking the skin.

  “No!” Oona screamed, thrusting her hands out, palms up, motioning for him to stop. “Put the knife down, do you hear me? Just put the knife down.”

  This time, much to Silas’s surprise, he did speak. But although the voice was his own, the words were not.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I will. If you make me leave, I’ll do it. I will never leave this place.”

  As Silas watched on, the most terrible thing happened: the light went out of Oona’s eyes, and her face dropped, as if she knew that battling him was futile. As if she had realized there was nothing left that she could do.

  Don’t give up on me, Oona, please! I’m right here! Help me!

  But it was too late. The knife blade moved to the side of his neck and the tip dug into his flesh, his hand poised, ready to slash across the length of his throat.

  He could sense this was it. The end. Time to accept his fate. If he’d had any control over his own eyes, he would have closed them to prepare for his execution.

  Oona changed back to Aggie for a flash, and he saw the old man in his mind, slitting his own throat, an arterial spray of blood gushing across the window pane.

  Oona came closer, and as he looked upon her he almost wished she had stayed back, because the fear in her eyes was so real and terrible that it made him want to cry.

  “Silas,” she said softly. “I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me.”

  I hear you.

  “You were right, Silas. You were right all along. Everything you thought you saw was real. I saw it, too. And I know that might sound terrifying, but it’s good, Silas. It’s good. Because it means you’re not crazy. Do you hear me? You are not crazy.”

  And with that, there was a rush of insight. He suddenly realized what had been happening to him. He was not trapped inside his own deteriorating mind.

  There was another force at work here.

  Suddenly he felt a burst of pure anger at his predicament, as if someone had flicked a switch and finally allowed his emotions through. He concentrated his fury on the knife handle, channeling his thoughts, trying to make his fingers move. But the blade only dug deeper into the sensitive flesh of his throat.

  Is this the end? He thought about dying, right there, right then, at the hands of that thing. He thought about losing Oona forever.

  No. He couldn’t have that.

  He concentrated on the blade again. The fingers of his left hand twitched.

  He stared at his hand as it raised, ordering it to grip the handle, and slowly his fingers curled, his hand moving up, grabbing the knife.

  With a scream of rage he threw it across the room.

  The blade crashed to the ground and at the same time Silas felt himself falling, as if an energy force had zapped from him. He no longer had the strength to stand, the floor hurtling towards him, and with a thud everything went dark.

  He opened his eyes some time later to find Oona cradling his head, her terror softening when she saw that he was awake.

  “Silas, is that you?”

  He cleared his throat, swallowed, and found his voice. “It’s me, Oons. Now let’s get the hell out of this place.”

  24

  Adrenalin surged through Oona’s body, causing her limbs to shake as she helped her husband to his feet. At the same time, panic flooded her mind. Getting them both out of the cottage alive was the immediate plan, but then what?

  They had no way of getting home, and walking to Aggie’s was a struggle at the best of times; with Silas injured it was going to be almost impossible. That’s if they even managed to reach the farmhouse before succumbing to the elements…

  (Think positive thoughts, Oona. Chill your boots.)

  Positive thoughts? She almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it.

  Silas yelped in pain. Oona opened the bottom half of his shirt and discovered that she had got him good with the poker, creating what looked remarkably like a second belly button, two inches south of the original. This new one was an innie, though, and oozing blood.

  She remembered a time when she used to moan at him about his little pot belly, warning him of the dangers of middle-aged spread, but that belly had, as far as she could tell, protected his vital organs from any damage, and now she loved it.

  She wrapped his arm around her shoulders and supported all two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of him to the door. She flipped the light switch, plunging the room into darkness -an act of triumphant finality that was sealed as she closed the door behind them.

  The staircase was too narrow for them to navigate together, so Oona went first, taking each step slowly and carefully as she guided Silas down. He groaned in agony on each of the stairs, looming over her at such an alarming angle that it made her think he would topple forward at any mom
ent, taking her with him as he fell.

  Remarkably, Silas kept his balance all the way down, and Oona felt a real thrill of achievement as they made it off the final step. Never again would she have to risk her life on that infernal staircase.

  She helped Silas with his coat and unlocked the front door. She took one last look around out of instinct, the nagging worry of the departing vacationer (have we forgotten anything?) running through her mind despite no longer wanting anything she had brought with her. This place had claimed their belongings, and it could bloody well keep them.

  “Well, you got what you wanted, Mr Weddup,” Oona said as they stepped outside. “We’re leaving.”

  They pushed forward into the night, a ferocious wind attacking them as they moved slowly along the trail.

  “Darn,” Oona said. “We forgot something.”

  “Oh?”

  “We never left a message in the guest book.”

  Silas snorted, then yelled out in pain. “Please, Oons - try not to make me laugh.”

  “Wait a minute - I made you laugh? That’s a first.”

  “Tonight,” he said, struggling for breath, “was full of firsts. The first time you stabbed me.”

  “The first time you punched me in the face.”

  “Ah,” Silas said. “The joys of married life.”

  Oona smiled. She knew then that they would be all right. That they would make it through the storm. She turned back to see how far they had come, and a shiver snaked its way down her back.

  The cottage was silhouetted against the night sky, a solitary structure in the swirling landscape, and her view matched the composition of the painting almost exactly. Weddup must have set up his easel somewhere around this spot.

  There was something else - something that stopped her heart. A square of yellow light on the upper floor. She had turned off the bedroom light, she knew that for certain. She remembered the room plunging into darkness as she closed the door.

  Was this Weddup’s doing? Would he appear at the window now, to wave a final goodbye?

  As she considered for a moment how ridiculous that was, Oona had a dizzying thought: had her own fears and overactive imagination, influenced by Silas’s terror, made her, too, believe that she had seen a ghost where none existed?

  Was his madness catching?

  “Come on,” Silas said. “We need to go.”

  Oona realized with a sinking feeling in her stomach that everything she experienced could be explained away rationally.

  The person in the bed with her? A waking dream. She had been half asleep, groggy with stress and fear.

  The cat’s name? A coincidence. Maybe it really did look like a Maude.

  And Oona’s visions of the old man had been just that: visions. She had been driven insane by that place.

  The mind does strange things when it can’t cope.

  Her thought process was broken as a hand shot out and grabbed her arm, squeezing tight.

  She jumped, her eyes remaining fixed on the cottage. “Silas, will you please stop doing that?”

  She stood there for a few seconds longer, hoping that the figure of the old man would appear at the window, to confirm for her, one way or another, if she really had lost her mind.

  As if in response, the hand on her arm drummed its fingers in a peculiar rhythm.

  Tap-tappety, tap-tappety, tap.

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