The agent was sitting at her desk, his heavy shape bent over her computer, staring avidly at the screen.
‘Chester, do you mind? That’s my private—’
‘Shhh,’ he said, waving an arm at her, not taking his eyes off what he was hungrily reading.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘This is unbelievable,’ he muttered.
She strode over to the computer and saw with stupefaction that he had in front of him the work she’d done that morning. How could it be? ‘Jesus, you’re not supposed to see this. I thought I’d deleted it.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ he said, almost laughing with pleasure. ‘How long have you been working on this? It’s mind-blowing.’
‘Just since this morning,’ she said sheepishly.
‘There’s nearly ten thousand words here. You telling me you wrote all that today?’
‘Look, it’s rubbish, Chester. I don’t know why it’s even still there. I was positive I’d binned it. Now I will for sure.’
‘Uh — uh. I don’t want you to bin it. I want you to go on with it.’
‘What?’
‘Have you any idea how big a market there is for this kind of schlocky stuff?’ he asked. ‘You write me another ten k like this and I can sell it on a partial. I already know who to go to. Believe me, I’ll have a bidding war going before you know it.’
‘I don’t know if I can.’
‘It’s in you. It’ll come out. Trust me.’ He drained his mug at a single huge gulp. ‘Hmm. Great coffee. Now I guess I’ll be on my way. Don’t want to stem the creative flow, and all that jazz. I was going to tell you about this proposal—’
‘What was it?’
‘Just a co-writing project with another author,’ he said dismissively.
‘Who?’
‘Jenny.’ Jenny Stickle was one of Chester’s stable of clients, a writer so overpaid and jaded that she now barely contributed a word to her own novels. “Co-authoring” with her basically meant doing all the donkey work under her haughty eye, and was regarded as a step up for flagging mid-listers.
‘I’m not that desperate,’ Mandy said.
‘Forget I mentioned it. You’re too good for the old bitch anyway. Especially now that this has come up.’ He stood. ‘Back to the desk, kiddo. Enjoy the vino. Don’t forget to put the flowers in water.’
Before she could say anything or try to stop him, he was striding out of the front door and back to his Porsche.
SEVEN
It was with a lot of trepidation that Mandy returned to the manuscript that afternoon. She couldn’t understand why it had remained on her computer. She knew she’d deleted the file before Chester had turned up. Killed it, obliterated it.
But it had come back. As if it didn’t want to die. As if it wanted to be written, and had chosen her to be its channel.
She was so disgusted by what she’d written that she could hardly bear to read it, let alone consciously come up with more of it. And yet, as she put her fingers to the keys, out of nowhere the flood resumed. Locking her mind into itself, making it impossible to stop.
Mandy wrote until the study windows were in darkness and the only light in the room was the glow of her screen. Only then did she feel as if she’d been released. The word count now read 19,758, almost a quarter of a full length manuscript. It took her breath away to think she’d done this.
Wearily, her eyes burning, she staggered to the kitchen and ate a sandwich that barely seemed to taste of anything. She dragged herself upstairs for a shower, then pulled on jeans and a sweater. In the entrance hall she grabbed the torch, stepped into her pair of Wellingtons and called Buster out into the cold evening for his walk. The dog seemed unusually glad to escape the confines of Summer Cottage.
Crossing the dark meadow behind the house and listening to the whisper of the trees that lined its edges, Mandy shivered and flicked torchlight here and there into shadows that looked alive and moving, only to see bushes and dying leaves rustling in the wind. ‘You’re scaring yourself,’ she said with a nervous chuckle. After a few minutes she called Buster back, and had to coax him to return to the house.
She’d willed herself not to go straight back to the computer, but there it sat, calling her. She wrote until midnight and then trudged upstairs to bed, too exhausted even to think. The moment her head touched the pillow she was ready to fall into a deep and instant sleep.
But when she did, the nightmares quickly returned. Horrific nebulous figures that seemed to swirl and swim around her, taunting her with whispering voices. The creeping certainty that there was something, someone, in the room with her, breathing on her and running icy cold fingers down her face.
Then she was wandering through the darkness of Summer Cottage, walking the passage that led from the hallway past the kitchen and her study and onwards through the house. Her bare feet shambled forwards as if in trance as a strange greenish-yellow glow led her through the winding passage, seeming to lure her on step by step. Shadows flitting all around her. Perspectives distorted as if through a lens. Deeper and deeper into the house, the passageway narrowing until the walls, now dank and dripping and mottled with black mould, brushed her shoulders as she walked.
Ahead of her, the yellowish glow seemed to emanate from a half-open doorway. She knew the source of the light lay beyond. The voices were calling for her to join them there.
She saw her hand reach out to the door, but before her fingers touched it, it swung open as if of its own accord. The light was brighter down there, drifting like a thick mist. The whispers spoke more loudly inside her head.
Then, a low, chittering cackle. Frightened, she tried to pull away from the light, but found it drawing her towards it like a magnetic field of invisible power. She didn’t want to go there. The voice filled her head until it felt it could split apart. Her mouth gaped open in a silent scream.
Crash.
Mandy’s eyes snapped open. She was covered in sweat. Her bedcovers were thrown back. She’d been thrashing about in the throes of her nightmare and knocked over her bedside table lamp.
Breathing hard, she swung her legs out of the bed, picked up the fallen lamp and tried the switch. It was working, and she was deeply grateful for the light. She left it on and crawled back into bed, afraid to close her eyes. Too tired and drained to go downstairs the way she’d done the night before, she just lay there staring at the ceiling until dawn.
The first thing she did the next morning, before she’d brewed her coffee or even let Buster out into the garden, was to revisit the passage downstairs. She paced its length, trying to remember the way it had been in her dreams. It was all so different now, sunlight streaming in through the small leaded window-panes and dappling on the walls, which were far enough apart for her to extend both arms full-length without her stretched-out fingers touching them. Where in the dream the passage had led to a door, there was only a solid wall. She tapped it with her knuckles, listening for any kind of hollow resonance. Nothing but thick stone. Foolish to imagine it would have been anything else.
Pull yourself together, girl. You’re losing it. It was just a stupid nightmare. Writing all this horror shit is getting to you.
Fighting to shake the memory from her mind, she returned to the kitchen to make her coffee, attend to Buster and face up to the day ahead. In a water-filled jug on the kitchen worktop were the flowers Chester had brought her, now all curled up and brown, looking as if they’d been left neglected there for weeks. ‘Wonder what filling station you bought those in, Chester.’
She thought about the white roses that Sarah Grace had left her as a welcoming gift, and how fast they’d seemed to die, too. Strange. Maybe the cottage, with its thick walls and small windows, just wasn’t suited to flowers.