She felt as if her claustrophobia were poised to engulf her. Indeed, she didn't understand why it was holding back. Glancing up in search of reassurance, she saw a fitful star beyond the portion of skylight visible through the trapdoor. What else had she glimpsed? She lifted the flashlight and was managing to ignore the blackness that rushed at her out of the bedroom when she saw the marks around the trapdoor.
They were scratches. However old they were, age hadn't faded their desperation. The small dull oval object lodged in the deepest scratch might very well be a fingernail. Only its shadow made it appear to be trying to work free of the ceiling. Charlotte was drawing a breath to prove she still could when it almost blotted out another sound. It was Ellen, distressed beyond words.
Was she further down the house or in one of the rooms off the landing? There was another open door to Charlotte's right and two of them shut at her back. 'Ellen,' she repeated.
At first she wasn't sure that the response was a word, if it was even a response. She was so anxious to locate it, still more when she failed, that she only belatedly recognised it. 'No,' Ellen had said – groaned, rather.
Did she want to keep Charlotte away or to deny her own identity? 'Yes, I'm here,' Charlotte told her. 'I've come to help. Don't make me wander about in here. Say where you are. And where's Hugh?'
She was talking so much in the hope of provoking an answer, but she hushed for fear of covering one up. There was no sound other than the abortive flattened echo of her voice in the open rooms and down the staircase. 'Ellen,' she persisted as she crossed the spongy carpet to the second room.
It was crowded with objects standing still in the dark. She saw the shadows of their heads first, swelling across the carpet towards another buried window. They were orreries, six of them, and it took her some moments to realise why there needed to be more than one: they didn't represent the familiar solar system. Two of the stars orbited by planets were so black that the flashlight seemed unable to illuminate them, while another was encircled by nothing more than jagged fragments of itself. Quite a few of the planets were misshapen to a degree that Charlotte could hardly believe was cosmically possible. The orrery closest to the window suggested not just a diagram of a planetary system but, in the relationships of its thirteen globes and less globular bodies, some larger and more ominous meaning. She imagined the owner of the house gazing from the window at night or through the telescope until he discerned all these vagaries of the universe, and then she had the disconcerting notion that he'd constructed them as a means of sending forth the visions they portrayed. 'Ellen,' she urged, struggling to disengage her mind from the thoughts that had invaded it, and sent the flashlight beam around the room. There was nowhere for Ellen to hide among the sluggish dance of shadows, and she hadn't made another sound. Charlotte swung around to stride across the landing and, before her apprehension could prevent her, grasped the icy scalloped brass doorknob to open the third room.
It was empty, which should have been all that she needed to see. Nevertheless as her gaze was drawn to the circle of marks on the floor, the flashlight beam sank away from the heavy black curtains that covered the window. The circle encompassed perhaps half the square floor, and she suspected that its centre was precisely at the midpoint of the square. It consisted of symbols and ideograms that looked unnervingly alive, as if besides trembling on the edge of growing comprehensible they only awaited a signal to start crawling after one another. Indeed, the restless light seemed capable of rousing them. They were carved out of the floorboards, whereas the marks that filled the circle were less defined, though not too faint to suggest a series of frantic attempts to escape. Charlotte was forming the impression that the prisoner had been large and very leggy; in fact, she could think that it had been scrabbling at the limits of its prison with an unnecessary number of legs. Was the circle entirely deserted? Was that a stain on the floor in the middle, or a small dark lump? Perhaps it wasn't even as small as it had seemed at first glance, but her uncertainty about its size might be due to the tendrils it was extending across the boards. Surely only the movement of the light made it appear to flex them – and then she wondered if her own attention could be letting it take shape. The thought was enough to drive her out of the room with a slam of the door. 'Ellen,' she repeated to no avail, and so she had to twist the greenish brass knob to push the next door wide.
The room was almost as bare as its neighbour. A single item occupied the carpetless floor in front of the secretively curtained window. Until she succeeded in steadying the flashlight Charlotte took it for a cage; it had bars on all sides and across the top. As their shadowy antics subsided she began to distinguish what the bars enclosed: a pillow, a small tangled blanket incongruously printed with fairies emerging from flowers, a contorted shape under the blanket. Just the upper portion of the withered head was visible, which was more than enough. The eyes peering at her across the pillow were far too large. Even if they were empty sockets they were twice the size they ought to be in proportion with the small head, and wasn't there movement in their depths? Perhaps only the light was troubling their shrunken contents; perhaps shadows were making the shrivelled form appear to be struggling feebly to raise its head and writhe out from under the blanket. All the same, Charlotte backed out of that room faster still and ensured the door was shut tight, however unlikely it seemed that anything could escape the cage that was a cot.
Had its tenant been bred for some arcane purpose? Its deformity seemed too extreme to be accidental. She refrained from thinking how it might have been used or intended to be; there was enough to dread in the prospect of exploring further. 'Ellen,' she appealed. Any sound from her cousin might have helped her feel less alone, but she heard none.
She was retrieving her handbag from beside the ladder when she realised that she didn't want to be encumbered on the stairs, the corner of which was entirely too blind. Her anger at having to leave the bag lent her the courage to venture downwards. As she reached the bend she lifted the spade like an axe, but below her were only more stairs. They or the carpet brown as clay yielded underfoot as she paced down to the middle floor.
It contained another four rooms. Those that would have faced the river and Wales were open. Clay appeared to press itself more heavily against the window of the first room as the flashlight beam glared on the panes. Otherwise the room was walled with bookshelves, and piles of old books squatted on the floor, while a fat tome sprawled open on a reading stand in front of a leathery chair at the window. Charlotte might have fancied that the reader was about to return, and neither the impression nor the illustration on the left-hand page – a diabolically gleeful face whose eyes weren't opening so much as forming out of the pallid flesh – encouraged her to linger once she'd seen that Ellen could be nowhere in the room.
There was more sense of a presence in the adjoining room. A desk that looked too bulky to have been carried upstairs stood in front of the window. Another black chair, its leather sagging like senile flesh, was turned half to the doorway as if its occupant had heard Charlotte and leaped to ambush her. She made herself step forwards to check that Ellen wasn't hiding out of sight from the doorway. There were only shelves as tall as the ceiling. They and the ones on the other walls were heaped with papers inscribed, she guessed from the one that was pricking up its corners on the desk, in a spidery introverted hand. Even more than its neighbour, the room smelled of old paper as well as damp earth, so thickly that she choked. The clay at the window was reminding her how much deeper she was buried. 'Ellen,' she called, which didn't save her from having to open the door opposite. At once she was blinded by the light shone into her eyes by the figure in the room.