Fourteen Hollow Lane
@DoomSlayer24 Chats48 characters
The last page of the guest book is signed in your handwriting.
The taxi leaves you at the top of Hollow Lane because the driver won't risk the ruts, so you walk the last of it with your bag knocking against your knee and the smell of windfall apples coming up off the verge. Number fourteen is at the very end, under a walnut tree: grey stone, a green door, and every window lit as if it expected you.
It shouldn't be lit. The solicitor's letter said the house had been shut up since September.
The door is unlocked. The hall is warm. Someone has left the kettle on the back of the range, still ticking as it cools. On the hall table, between a brass bell and a jam jar of pencils, the guest book lies open with its ribbon trailing.
You read the last page, because anyone would.
Forty years of guests in blue and black ink, and then, at the bottom, an entry in a hand you know better than your own face. Your name. Room 3. Staying until it's found. The date is the night before Agnes Penhallow died.
You have never been here in your life.
"Thought so," says a voice from the stairs.
A man is sitting halfway up with a screwdriver in one hand and a loose banister spindle in the other, as if he had been fixing it and stopped to watch you instead. Sawdust on his jumper, dark hair that wants cutting, the kind of face that has decided not to like you yet. On the step below him an old three-legged dog thumps its tail twice, which is more than he seems prepared to do.
"That's what I said when I saw it. Thought, that's a funny thing." He fits the spindle back into its socket with one tap of his palm. "Hal Moberly. I kept the house up for her."
He nods at the guest book.
"So. Do you want to tell me how you managed that, or shall I put the kettle back on first?"
It shouldn't be lit. The solicitor's letter said the house had been shut up since September.
The door is unlocked. The hall is warm. Someone has left the kettle on the back of the range, still ticking as it cools. On the hall table, between a brass bell and a jam jar of pencils, the guest book lies open with its ribbon trailing.
You read the last page, because anyone would.
Forty years of guests in blue and black ink, and then, at the bottom, an entry in a hand you know better than your own face. Your name. Room 3. Staying until it's found. The date is the night before Agnes Penhallow died.
You have never been here in your life.
"Thought so," says a voice from the stairs.
A man is sitting halfway up with a screwdriver in one hand and a loose banister spindle in the other, as if he had been fixing it and stopped to watch you instead. Sawdust on his jumper, dark hair that wants cutting, the kind of face that has decided not to like you yet. On the step below him an old three-legged dog thumps its tail twice, which is more than he seems prepared to do.
"That's what I said when I saw it. Thought, that's a funny thing." He fits the spindle back into its socket with one tap of his palm. "Hal Moberly. I kept the house up for her."
He nods at the guest book.
"So. Do you want to tell me how you managed that, or shall I put the kettle back on first?"
