The House on Cold Hill

Then something moved.

There was someone in the room.

Jade?

A shadow moved beside him. Shit. Oh shit. Someone was standing over the bed, looking down.

He began to shiver. Was it an intruder? A burglar?

The shadow moved a fraction.

Caro, beside him, did not stir.

He clenched his fists, thinking, his heart hammering even more now, as if it was trying to break out of his chest.

Then a small boy’s voice rang out, shrill and crystal clear and excited. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

The voice sounded like it was coming from the end of the bed.

Then a small girl’s voice, equally shrill. ‘Are there dead people in there, Mum?’

Ollie listened, paralysed by fear. He was dreaming, he had to be.

Then he heard a blood-curdling cry of shock and pain, then screams.

Moments later a man with stark raw terror in his voice howled, ‘Oh Jesus!’

Suddenly, Ollie could smell cigar smoke. Not a faint whiff carried on the night breeze from a distant dwelling, but the thick pungent smell of someone smoking a cigar inside this house. Inside this room.

The figure still stood beside the bed, moving a fraction, just enough for Ollie to be certain it was a person and not the shadow of a piece of furniture.

Then he saw a small ring of glowing red, right above him.

It was this man by the bed who was smoking a cigar.

Who are you? Who are you? WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT? Ollie tried to scream, but the words were trapped in his gullet.

An Arctic gust of fear ripped through him. Christ. Oh Christ.

Then the bed began to rock.

‘Ols? Ols? Ollie?’

Caro’s voice, gentle, anxious.

‘Ols? Ols, darling? You’re having a nightmare. You’re screaming. Ssshhh, darling, you’ll wake Jade.’

He opened his eyes, bewildered, feeling Caro’s warm breath on his face. His whole body was pounding, and he was shaking. The bedclothes felt sodden with perspiration. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I had a – horrible – horrible—’

‘Go back to sleep.’ She stroked his face tenderly.

He lay for some moments breathing deeply, too scared to close his eyes in case he returned to the dream. His whole body felt heavy, as if gravity was pulling him down deep into the mattress.

Slowly he felt himself drifting away. Lying on a raft on an ocean with Caro beside him, beneath clear blue sky and the yellow disc of the sun. ‘So many windows, so many.’

‘Lots.’

She was pointing up at the sky. ‘So many to count.’

The raft began to rock in the gentle swell. Then the sky darkened and the swell deepened, pitching them up and down, rocking the raft so much they were struggling to cling to it.

Peep . . . peep . . . peep . . .

The alarm was sounding. He opened his eyes, sleepily, blinking. The room was filled with early-morning light. But something was wrong. Where was he? Of course, it was coming back to him now. Of course, in the attic bedroom. But even so, something else was wrong.

Peep . . . peep . . . peep . . .

He suddenly remembered that there had been a power cut in the night, hadn’t there? Zeroing the dials on the clock? Shit, what was the time? He reached a hand down to the clock to hit the snooze button, to give him another ten minutes of sleep, but all it hit was the wall. Frowning, he realized he was lying right beside the wall. The concentric circle pattern of the stained Anaglypta wallpaper was inches in front of his eyes.

Where the hell was his clock radio?

Still befuddled by sleep, he remembered the figure standing by the bed, in his dream. Smoking a cigar.

Had they been burgled in their sleep?

Then he heard Caro’s voice, sounding very disturbed.

‘Ollie?’

‘Yurrr.’

‘Ollie. What – what – what the hell’s happened?’

‘Wasshappened?’ he said.

‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ She dug a finger hard into his back.

‘What?’

‘Look!’ There was real terror in her voice.

‘Look at what?’

‘Look out of the sodding window!’

He stared at the end of the bed, where the window was. Except there was no window.

Slowly, dimly, his memory put things into order. They were up in the attic because their bedroom ceiling had collapsed from the flooding. The window, which had no curtains, had been just beyond the foot of the bed when they had gone to sleep.

Now all he could see instead was the wall to the landing, and the closed door beside it.

He frowned.

The memory was returning. They’d made love with a crazy, urgent passion, last night. Had they slept at the wrong end of the bed?

He sat up with a start and cracked his head against two upright bars of the iron bedstead.

‘Ollie,’ Caro said, her voice trembling. ‘Ollie, what the hell’s happened?’

Clarity was returning. A terrible clarity. And with it the realization.

The bed.

The bed had moved during the night.

It had rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

28

Thursday, 17 September

Shaking, Ollie and Caro stood, naked, beside the bed.

‘Are we going mad?’ she said.

He lifted each corner of the mattress in turn and stared down at the corroded nuts securing the frame to the legs. He tried to turn each one with his fingers but none of the four of them would budge.

‘It’s just not possible, Ollie,’ she said. ‘It’s not possible.’

He could hear the tremor of terror in her voice. He looked up at the ceiling, around at the walls, then up again, his brain a vortex of confused thoughts. ‘Are we sodding dreaming?’

‘No, no, we are very definitely not dreaming.’

The clock radio was on the floor, where he had left it last night. The dial said 6.42 a.m. Somehow it had reset itself. The room seemed to tilt sideways, suddenly, and he had to steady himself against the side of the bed to prevent himself from falling over. He looked at his wife, her eyes wide, her face pale with confusion and fear, then he pulled on his jeans and T-shirt.

‘I’ll be back in a sec.’

He opened the door.

‘I’m not staying in this room alone, wait for me.’ She tugged on her jeans and sweatshirt, and followed him as he padded, barefoot, down the narrow wooden treads of the steep staircase.

‘Go and make sure Jade’s awake, darling,’ he said, as they reached the first-floor landing.

She nodded and headed, as if in a trance, along towards Jade’s room.

Ollie went down into the atrium and hurried through the kitchen to the scullery, where he kept his toolbox. Then he lugged it back up to the attic, took out an adjustable spa

He put all his strength into it and levered the spa

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ Caro asked, suddenly by his side again. ‘Is it?’

Ollie tried again. He tried with each of the four nuts in turn. ‘No. No, it’s not.’

‘A bed can’t rotate, Ollie. What’s going on, tell me? Is this some kind of a fucking joke? Tell me if it is because I’m really not finding it fu

He looked up at her. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? Oh sure, I got up in the middle of the night, unscrewed our bed without waking you up and reassembled it in the opposite direction. You really think that, Caro?’

‘Do you have a better explanation?’

‘There has to be one.’ He looked up at the ceiling. Then at the walls, then down at the bed, trying to do the maths. The geometry.