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 this until the newcomer blocked the doorway and began to descend the steps, so deliberately that it seemed not so much careful as gloating. He didn't bother to hold onto the banister with the hand that wasn't flourishing a knife half the length of Charlotte's arm.
He was dressed in hobnailed boots and a butcher's apron: nothing else. His arms and legs and torso were grotesquely muscular beneath a thick simian pelt, which was as black as his ropes of greasy hair. His tread sounded like blows of a hatchet on the trembling steps. Charlotte was striving not to panic but to think whether she should stand her ground and defend herself or try to elude him until she could flee up the steps – she was attempting to overcome the shudder that had reawakened in her brain, shaking her thoughts apart – when he turned away from the steps, and she saw his face.
It was swollen and purple with many veins. Its width made his cracked eyeballs look even smaller. It bore a clown's wide fixed idiotic grin, and the thick lips and malformed nose were drooling. As the man stalked towards her, raising the knife, the hem of the striped apron rose in sympathy, hoisted by an erection sprouting from a bed of matted hair. Charlotte jerked the flashlight up in the hope that it would blind him. While it made his eyes redder still, he didn't falter. The light showed her that his pelt was swarming with parasites, and it revealed another aspect of him. He'd forgotten to bring his shadow, or his creator had overlooked the need.
Either detail might have proved too much for Charlotte. He was an amalgam of nightmares, an overload of them. The fears that constituted him – collected, she thought, in the dreadful bare room overhead – were reduced to nothing but themselves, far less than the victims who'd been forced to suffer them. They had no personality, no substance. They were no better than stale horror stories hollow with clichés, mechanical devices void of any function other than to terrorise. They had nothing to do with Charlotte; how could they have been dredged from her own mind? 'Unbelievable,' she protested in a voice that barely shook, and stepped out of the circle. The instant both her feet were outside, the figure vanished like a bubble that had been pretending it was flesh.
She gazed at the floor where it had stood or seemed to stand, and listened to her heartbeat insisting that she was in more of a panic than she could afford to acknowledge. The bricks within the circle looked even barer for the disappearance – bare enough to be assuring her that the house had finished playing tricks. Perhaps whatever power it had accumulated was spent, having done its worst. The shape that was cowering behind the steps hadn't altered its position; if it appeared to have moved, that was only because the light had.
Charlotte made to lay down the flashlight, and blackness dropped towards her as silently as a spider. It felt as if the ceiling had sagged, and she could do without inviting any threat of claustrophobia. On the floor the flashlight would bring down too much darkness without providing sufficient illumination, she saw now. It would be best left on a step, and she was about to return to the circle when she heard another movement somewhere in the house.
It was a scurrying or scuttling, which suggested rats if not a creature excessively provided with legs. Though her heartbeat was rehearsing her panic again, Charlotte was determined not to be impressed by another vanishing trick. The menace seemed banal, a conjurer's cheapest illusion, too uninspired to be magical. 'No imagination,' she tried to scoff, 'don't put yourself to any trouble' – and then she recognised the sound. The intruder wasn't animal or insect. Earth was trickling into the house.
As she strained her ears to reach beyond the pounding of her heart she was able to locate the sound. It was at the top of the building. Earth must be falling through the skylight, because she heard it strike the attic floor on the way to becoming more muffled as it spilled onto the carpet below. It wasn't simply trickling, it was piling into the house as if somebody were shovelling it in. Its fall didn't quite cover up another noise – a series of creaks that grew louder and more numerous. Was a floor about to collapse? The noise seemed too shrill to be wooden. Just as Charlotte identified the sound of glass under pressure, the highest windows gave way with a clangour that was followed by the thunder of earth filling the rooms. It hadn't lessened when the windows on the middle floor began to creak.
This was too much, Charlotte wanted to believe: not just the windows caving in but the amount of earth that was falling through the skylight. It wasn't her nightmare, it was a version of the terror that had turned upon the occupant of the house. It must have driven him into the cellar once he'd abandoned clawing at the trapdoor to the attic. 'It's all yours,' she cried over the uproar, of which perhaps only her heartbeat was real. The cowering figure shivered, or its shadow did as the beam of the flashlight enacted her nervousness. The movement suggested that the light was capable of threatening the figure, quelling any last remnants of its power. She thrust the beam at the shrivelled crown of the head, and the bony shape reared up to its full height to knock the flashlight out of her hand.