The Guesthouse

by Abbie Frost

  She went into the kitchen, still half-hoping she would find someone there. But it was empty, the table littered with remnants of pizza. Cups with their dregs of cold coffee, one with a trace of lipstick on the rim, and Chloe’s half-drunk orange juice. Mary Celeste, Hannah thought. No one had survived that either.

  But she was going to survive this, and she would make sure Chloe did too. Clutching her torch, she went through the hall and into the green-walled corridor. Going first up the back stairs to the bare servants’ rooms. Keeping her torch low as she crept up, trying to move silently. If someone was hiding here, the sound of her footsteps would give them enough time to get away.

  Her hand shook as she moved from room to room, playing the torch around each dusty space, finding nothing. Deep down she had known there would be no one here, that she would have to go back through the padlocked door.

  In the green corridor, she took a deep breath and hurried through the open door, moving the broken padlock aside with her foot, careful not to rattle it. She blinked as she entered the first brightly lit room. Still clean, modern, and apparently undisturbed.

  Pausing at the top of the stone steps, she took a breath and listened for a moment to the thumping of her heart. Then went down into the L-shaped cellar, alert for any signs of movement, wishing she had brought the metal poker after all. The door to the computer room was closed, but she knew she had to go in there again. Chloe might have wanted to be near her father.

  She stopped.

  Someone had been in here. The L-shaped alcove had been disturbed, all the black bin bags pushed aside. And as the light from her torch settled on a large carpet-covered box, she saw what had been hidden by the rubbish. Another door. If anyone was down here, that was where she would find them.

  That humming sound was still here, growing louder in the alcove. As she pulled the carpet off the box beside the door, she realized why. Underneath sat an old chest freezer, still working. She lifted the lid, releasing a cloud of cold air. On top, a layer of frozen food: cheap bags of fish, sausages, burgers, frozen vegetables. All budget brands, all years old.

  She lowered the lid and moved towards the door. But as she stepped over the crumpled piece of carpet, she saw something that must have fallen on the floor.

  A black oblong shape. A book.

  She stooped to pick it up and flicked it open. It was handwritten, the cover torn, several of the pages ripped out and scattered on the floor by the door. She collected them up.

  The writing was very neat – old-fashioned looking – so it could have belonged to one of the past children who’d lived in the house. Maybe the last Lady Fallon when she was a girl, or even a child from a previous generation. Each entry was written in pencil and headed with the day of the week. The writing appeared to mature as the entries went on so presumably the journal spanned some time.

  She was about to close the book and get back to her search, when she spotted a couple of references that made her pause.

  She began to read.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Tuesday

  Mummy says she won’t punish me if I promise not to do it again. I spoke to a stranger and you must never do that. It isn’t safe, because there are bad people out there. They walk in the gardens, or stand behind the trees. They walk across the hills. And sometimes they come into the house. I have to hide then, have to make sure no one can see me, have to make sure I don’t make a sound.

  We were doing lessons upstairs when Mummy went down to the kitchen. I stood at the window and breathed against the glass, wrote my name there and then wiped it out, like I always do when it’s raining outside. But then I saw a man in the garden. I watched him digging there for a while and I thought he was so wrinkly and grey he must be the oldest thing in the world. But then he looked up and saw me. He fell backwards into the mud, his face all funny, and I wanted to talk to him, wanted to play a game with him, so I tried to call out. He stared at me and said something, but I couldn’t hear him. I put my hand against the glass and tried to tell him my name, but he just went all white. I waved for him to come closer, but he just ran away into the trees.

  Then Mummy came back up and she knew what I’d done. She was so angry. She was crying too and said she ought to beat me for being so bad. If I ever did anything like that again, she would have to punish me, even though she loved me.

  ‘Is he one of the bad people?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s just Rob the gardener.’

  Then she sent me to my room and told me to stay there and to remember that she would beat me if I did anything like that again.

  But she won’t beat me. Mummy never beats me. Only he does that.

  Thursday

  Sometimes I’m allowed into the garden with Mummy. I love that, but I’ve never seen Rob the gardener out there, never had the chance to talk to him. He doesn’t come every day, but he must get lonely up here all on his own. Like me, I guess. I need to find out when he comes, so I can talk to him properly. I want to ask what he knows about the bad people. Why he can be outside, but I can’t?

  Tuesday

  I spoke to Rob! Mummy wasn’t well today, so I was looking after her. Then she fell asleep and I saw him from her bedroom window. He was digging in the garden and I ran down to the door, slipped out and went into the garden.

  He looked scared when he saw me, like Mummy does sometimes when I do something bad. He dropped his spade and I thought he was going to run away again.

  ‘Please don’t go!’ I said. ‘I’m Maddie and I just want to talk to you.’

  He didn’t want to, though, I could see that. He kept moving away from me, as if I was a bad person. Then he said that he thought I was a ghost and I laughed. That made him laugh too, but I could see that he still thought I was scary. Then Mummy came to the door in her dressing gown and she was really angry. I’ve never seen her so angry. I had to go back inside and this time I thought she would beat me. But she just kept crying and saying it was all her fault, saying that she had ruined everything. She said if I ever spoke to anyone like that again something really really bad would happen.

  But I don’t care, because Rob is my friend now. And I’ve never had a real friend.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  So this was Maddie. The name in the diaries Hannah had found in the office next to her room. Those diaries had ranged from twenty to ten ago, so this Maddie was presumably around at that time. It still wasn’t clear when these entries had been made, but she remembered Sandeep and Rob both talking about the crying child fifteen years ago.

  So Maddie was the pale little girl from the stories, the one Mo and Sandeep had talked about, but she was real.

  It changed nothing, though. The only definite thing Hannah knew was that the alcove had been cleared to let someone through this door, and they’d done it recently.

  Perhaps it was Chloe. She could have realized that the storm was too dangerous and taken her chances in the cellar. Hannah stuffed the book in her pocket and opened the door. Inside she found herself in a dark tunnel. Her torch picked out a long corridor with rough walls covered in stained white tiles. Pipes lined the ceiling, rusty streaks of liquid formed dark brown puddles on the floor. She spotted a light switch and turned it on. A row of strip lights flickered for a moment, illuminating a wide-open space at the end of the tunnel, then died.

  Her breathing sounded loud, her footsteps echoed along the corridor. And that chemical smell was almost overpowering. A memory seemed to be tugging at her mind, trying to show itself, but she shook her head and clamped it down. She needed to focus.

  On the left was a door, a space in the wall that led into what looked like a shower room. The torch flickered over a rotten wooden bench and a pool of brown liquid. More grimy white tiles, some of them smashed, others streaked with rust-coloured stains.

  At the back of the room, she could see a dark alcove – a walk-in shower. She approached cautiously, listening to the steady drip, drip of a tap somewhere nearby, and shon
e her torch into the back of the shower. On a metal shelf lay the slimy remains of a bar of green soap. An old threadbare towel hung on a hook attached to the wall. The floor was slippery, streaks of green slime making it difficult to keep her balance.

  And then she heard a sound behind her. A tiny splash as if something had fallen into a puddle of water. She twisted round and pointed her torch at the door. Nothing. She crept out into the corridor, listening hard, and shone the light left and then right. The only sounds were the drip, drip, drip of a leaking pipe, and the thump of her heart.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ‘Chloe,’ she whispered. Her voice echoed in the tunnel. All she wanted was to go back, but she had to check the space at the end of the corridor – the yawning black hole at the heart of the house. She owed it to all the others she had let down: Ben, Rob, Sandeep, even Mo and Rosa.

  There were no more rooms, but the corridor carried on to the big space at the end. The smell of chemicals grew stronger as she inched her way further along the tunnel. Her mouth felt dry, her stomach churned. It could have been her imagination, but she thought the torch might be growing dimmer.

  If only her phone was here, not back in her bedroom, completely dead. Without it she could only guess it must be sometime in the early hours of the morning. A wave of exhaustion made her stumble, her limbs heavy, as if she were trudging through mud.

  And that thought brought Mo back to mind. She prayed he was in a cosy hotel room somewhere, waiting out the storm until he could come back with the police. A hard lump rose into her throat, but she swallowed it down.

  Because she had to face the possibility that she was the only one left, last on the list.

  If only she could make sense of it, understand what had happened and who was to blame.

  At the end of the corridor, a few steps led even further down, into another much shorter tunnel, its walls covered in the same stained white tiles. More rusty pipes along the ceiling, dripping brown liquid into dark pools on the floor.

  Then she stepped out of the tunnel into a wide-open space. It seemed enormous, like stepping into an empty cathedral in the dead of night. She lifted her torch, its light even dimmer now. It reflected off tiled walls, a high ceiling, and a huge expanse of water. Of course. The horrible chemical smell that churned her stomach was chlorine – this was a swimming pool – and even as she realized it her torch sputtered. It flickered, flashed on for a second, and then died.

  She stood there in complete darkness, wanting to turn and run. Along the corridor, groping the slimy walls to find her way, back up those stairs, back through the cellar room and into the main house. Then out into the storm.

  But Chloe might be down here.

  She tried to control her breathing, shook the torch. Fumbled with the plastic case and took out the batteries, shifted them around and replaced them, clicked the case back into place. Took a deep breath and turned the torch on. It worked, the light dim, but strong enough for her to shine a beam into the yawning black space again. She stepped closer to the edge of the water. Under her feet slippery white tiles stretched away to the left and right. When she lifted her torch its light flashed against the water. Deep, green, scummy water full of dark floating bits of leaf, twigs, and mould. How had they got inside?

  She blinked and the torch slipped from her hand. It fell through the air and crashed into the floor. And the memories hit her like a wave.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Twenty-one years ago

  Hannah

  She’s at the pool with Mummy and she is so happy. Then Daddy is there too. He takes her into the deep water, even though she doesn’t want to go and her mummy says he shouldn’t. But he whispers to her, telling her she should shout back that she likes it.

  ‘We can have fun,’ he says, and he sounds just like the monster. The monster she hates, the one who comes to her bedroom at night, or when she’s in the bath.

  But it’s different this time because Mummy is near and Hannah struggles, kicking and fighting to get away. She pokes him in the eye and he lets go. But now she’s going down, down, into the blue water. She can hear shouting and screaming, but it sounds all muffled and strange. Her eyes open and all she can see are white tiles at the bottom. If only she could breathe. Mummy told her water was fun, but you had to be careful. It’s dangerous at the deep end. And she knows that word. Drowning, she’s drowning.

  But strong arms come around her and pull her up, choking and spluttering. It’s him, though, still him, and she fights and coughs and cries. Then – at last – she’s lifted out and into a warm towel and Mummy is holding her. Telling her she’s safe and calling Daddy bad names. ‘You idiot, Jack, what were you doing?’

  And Daddy touches her hair and whispers in his sweet soft voice, ‘I’m sorry, princess.’

  But that’s what the monster says at night when he frightens her, when he hurts her. And she screams and kicks him and Mummy takes her to the changing rooms.

  And when she’s dry and warm, Mummy asks why she was so scared. ‘It was just Daddy being silly. He won’t do it again.’

  Then she tells Mummy about the monster. She asks Mummy if she can tell him not to do the other things as well. The things he does to her in bed at night and in the bath.

  Chapter Fifty

  So that was it. That was what had destroyed Ruby’s marriage and eliminated Jack Roper from their lives. No wonder she had wanted him not just gone but forgotten.

  The shock of the memory washed over Hannah and she reached out for the damp wall behind her. Leaning her shoulder against it, she forced herself to breathe deeply, to ignore the taste of chlorine, to ignore the fear of falling forward into the pool.

  Eventually she moved on with unstable legs, keeping close to the walls, feeling her way along the slippery tiles, the torch still clutched to her chest. Praying and breathing in tiny sips of air. Blood pounding in her ears.

  She swung the torch across the pool, its beam catching reflections of the water on the walls and ceiling. And she saw again how green and mottled the water was, more like a stagnant pond than a swimming pool. Its surface rippling slightly, disturbed by her movement, or maybe by something living in its depths.

  Creeping onwards, one hand still on the wall, she looked across the water. And stumbled over something. She fell to her knees and gripped the torch as she went down.

  She had fallen over a wooden bench. It had shifted out of position, so she pushed it back into its alcove by the wall. She was going to be all right, it was all going to be OK. Her knee ached from where she had fallen, her mouth felt dry. This whole place was rotting away, its walls and floors eroding under layers of water and slime.

  When she reached the far end of the pool, she spotted yet another door. It must lead outside, to that flight of steps where she had sheltered from the wind. Chloe might have got out that way, but when Hannah tried the handle, it was locked and there was no sign of a key.

  She carried on down the other side of the water, groping her way along the wall, the light of her torch growing weaker by the second.

  A tiny noise like a foot stepping in a puddle. She swung the torch back to the entrance, illuminating the empty black hole of the tunnel. Pointing the light across the pool, along the way she had walked, she could only see the wooden bench in its alcove. No one there either, at least no one in sight.

  She carried on, her breath clouding around her in the cold. There was another alcove just ahead, the twin of the one on the other side. Another little sound, maybe just the echo of her own breathing. Or maybe a tiny sob barely louder than a whisper.

  It might be Chloe, terrified, hiding somewhere in the dark. Hiding from Hannah, perhaps, believing what Lucy and Rosa had said. It didn’t matter any more, everyone else was dead. Chloe needed help and she would soon remember that Hannah was her friend.

  ‘It’s me, Chloe,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Hannah. Don’t worry.’ Her voice echoed around the pool. As she spoke, she moved forward as silently as she coul
d.

  What if it wasn’t Chloe? What if it was something else entirely? What if someone else had been in the house with them this whole time?

  Cold sweat ran down her neck, a prickle of fear along her spine. She held her breath and crept closer to the alcove. As well as another wooden bench, there was a door at the back, with bolts at the top and bottom. They were on the outside, so the room must have been used for storage.

  Her hand shook as she reached out to touch the door handle. ‘I’m coming in now.’ Her voice wavered. ‘Coming to help you.’

  The room was empty.

  As she shone her torch across the bare concrete floor, a large spider scuttled away. A dingy towel or blanket lay crumpled by her foot. Kicking it sent dust motes spinning up the shaft of torchlight. She watched them for a moment as they glittered and danced. But she felt sick inside. This place reminded her of a prison cell.

  The torch flickered and she breathed a silent prayer that the battery wouldn’t give up on her now. It picked out a couple of pictures attached to the brick walls.

  She held the beam closer and realized they were photos of people. One of a man, the other, a woman and child.

  Then she noticed a grey canvas lump next to the blanket on the floor. She braced herself and reached out to pick it up, her fingers recoiling at the touch.

  It was a rucksack, threadbare with age, and inside she found a plastic bottle with an inch of green-tinged water at the bottom. Then she pulled out a few pieces of paper with childish drawings on them: a house, trees, a woman holding hands with a little girl. Hannah guessed a tramp had somehow broken into the house and been living down here. These pitiful things someone’s mementoes from a previous life.