The Manor House, 1979
Debbie Grainger would never have given the floor-length, black velvet curtain a second glance if her three-year-old daughter hadn’t run on ahead and hidden behind it, leaving just the toes of her scarlet, patent leather shoes peeping out like two tiny pools of blood in the dust.
“Come find me, Mummy!”
“One, two, three…”
Debbie scribbled a description of a cobwebby mahogany whatnot.
“Four, five, six…”
Next, she catalogued the gleaming ebony-framed photograph displayed on it.
Photograph: Five blurred boys, dressed up in dark sailor-collar jackets, posed around a white-clad little girl with ringlets whose propped-up posture, painted-on eyes, and unnaturally sharp focus proclaimed her deceased state.
Debbie wrinkled her nose. Poor kids. What a ghoulish memento mori.
“Seven, eight…”
She snapped her notepad shut and slid it into her bag. “Mummy’s all finished now, princess. Time to go home.” She wiped her hands on her hanky.
She’d done it, proved herself their equal. Now Father would have to let her join the family business. No more cooking and cleaning for her. She’d be a Grainger & Sons Senior Valuations Expert one day.
The curtain billowed out. It swallowed up Poppy’s shoes, and smothered her high-pitched cry of delight, before deflating again.
“…Nine, ten. Ready or not, here comes Mummy.”
Debbie pulled the musty velvet aside and discovered no Poppy, only a closed door. Muffled giggles reverberated through it.
She’d nearly missed a whole room? Father’s spittle would have blasted his desk into a wasteland. Laid low with flu, he’d only let her catalog the Manor’s contents for its forthcoming auction because her half-brothers had feigned having his symptoms, too, to dodge the task. Even then, he’d given her a list of instructions and demanded she catch up on her chores the moment she returned.
“You won’t stick five minutes in that creepy place,” James had said out of Father’s earshot, whilst Andrew, his lip curling, had mimicked slashing his throat. “We’re not nursemaiding your brat. Take her with you.”
Debbie’s skin tingled with sweat. Thank goodness she had.
She turned the black doorknob and pushed. The door creaked but didn’t budge. She shoved her shoulder against it. Still, it resisted. She pressed her ear to the wooden panel.
“Here’s your milk. I want fizzy pop.” Poppy’s cadence exuded enthusiasm.
“Unlock the door, princess. Now.”
“One fairy cake for you, one for me.”
Debbie fished in her bag for the housekeeper’s ring and selected a dull brass skeleton key. She slid it into the lock. It met no obstruction from the other side, but only turned a quarter before stalling. Anticlockwise, however, it turned full circle. She clicked it back. The door wasn’t locked. Why wouldn’t it open? She rattled the knob.
The door gave way, catapulting her into a gloomy room full of turn-of-the-century toys. The nursery was spotless, with not a cobweb or speck of dust anywhere. Except for the cheerless grate, and the rivulets of condensation running down the outside of the bay window’s ivy-enmeshed panes, the nanny and her charges might have just stepped out for an afternoon’s walk in the autumnal grounds. Goose pimples peppered Debbie’s arms.
“Look, Mummy!” Poppy sat cross-legged on the rug, cuddling a large apricot-colored teddy bear against her pink, daisy-print dress. She’d set two little china cups, saucers, and plates with realistic fairy cakes out in front of her.
“I told you not to touch anything without asking. Give me the bear, please.”
Poppy’s lip trembled, but she obeyed.
Soft, silky mohair with shoe-button eyes and an elephant-embossed metal button piercing its ear, it was a rare 1904 Steiff. Debbie’s stomach fluttered. She turned the bear over to examine its hump and discovered a huge black spider squatting there on hairy pipe cleaner legs. She dropped the bear, stifling a cry.
The spider flopped off, crinkling its front legs together. Debbie stomped her platform shoe on it, but it scuttled away, squeezed into a crack beneath the dado rail and disappeared. Debbie retrieved the bear. Holding it gingerly by one paw, she sat it on the window seat.
Poppy wailed in protest.
Debbie pulled out her Polaroid camera. She activated its flash unit, retreating until she’d filled the viewfinder with the room’s contents.
“Come here, Poppy.” When her daughter had trudged across to her, Debbie depressed the button. She put the photograph that emerged on the circular table to develop. “Good girl. Now you may play, carefully. But not with that.” She whisked the bear up onto the top of a freestanding cabinet, out of reach.
Poppy cast it a wistful glance but settled down with a Noah’s Ark instead. She paired up the animals, marched them across the rug to a wooden train and loaded them into its trucks.
Debbie cataloged the ark, train, and a dappled rocking horse before checking the photograph. The blue protective film covering had hardly faded. She frowned. The other rooms’ photos had developed within fifteen minutes. Holding it by one corner, she shook it.
She turned her attention to the bookshelf and discovered a first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The original version, filled with stories of murder, decapitation, and cannibalism. She tugged her cowl-necked jumper out of her bag and pulled it on over her head, relishing the sudden warmth.
Engrossed in her game, Poppy shook her head when Debbie offered her cardigan, saying she wasn’t cold. She chuffed the train over to the rocking horse. Having unloaded Noah’s animals into make-believe fields, she clambered onto the hoof rail of the rocking horse’s swing stand. She bounced up and down but wasn’t tall enough to pull herself any further up.
“Help me?” she asked.
“In a minute, princess.” Debbie flicked through a bulging scrapbook, pausing to note down a chromolithograph illustration of “Little Polly Flinders.” When the rocking horse creaked, she looked up in alarm. Poppy sat astride the horse holding its reins. “How did you get up there?”
“Becca help.” Poppy stroked the flowing mane.
Debbie hurried over to show her how to make the horse move.
“No, Mummy. Becca do it.” The horse jerked forward on cue and its hoof rail struck Debbie’s shin bone so hard she yelped. The horse galloped, tail streaming out behind it. “Faster, faster.” Poppy’s beribboned pigtails flapped, and her eyes sparkled.
“Don’t rock too hard, or you might fall off.” Debbie limped to the table. A greenish tint, dark as the yew trees outside, had replaced much of the Poloroid’s blue layer, but little of the nursery was visible even after half an hour. She pulled out the camera’s instruction manual. The troubleshooting page suggested the image was too cold and recommended putting it in an inside pocket to warm up. But her blouse didn’t have one and it might get bent in the back pocket of her flares. With a sudden brainwave, she slid it inside her bra. It would soon warm up there, if it wasn’t too late to save the image. Best to take another photo, though, to be on the safe side. But the camera’s frame counter read zero and she’d used up all her film cartridges. She’d have to be accurate in her cataloging then.
“I’m coming.” Poppy’s feet whumped onto the floor. Giggling, she scampered over to the cabinet on which Debbie had sat the Steiff bear. The doors swung open before she reached it, to reveal a three-story doll’s house interior.
They can’t have been fully shut. Debbie hobbled across to look over Poppy’s shoulder. The twelve rooms of various sizes bore a striking resemblance—in both décor and contents—to ones in the manor, right down to the wicker bath chair in the conservatory, and the pair of floor-standing terrestrial and celestial globes in the library. A narrow staircase connected each story and miniature dolls in various poses inhabited every room.
“The mummy and daddy are still asleep.” Poppy pointed to two figures—a man with a top hat and umbrella, and a woman in a nanny’s uniform—lying together on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom.
Not exactly. Debbie stifled a smile. Easy to see who the most maternal figure in the nursery occupants’ lives had been.
The mother doll was receiving guests in the drawing room. A sailor-suited boy lay at the bottom of the lower staircase as if he’d been sliding down the banister and had fallen off. In the nursery, a girl was propped on the window seat looking out as if waiting for someone. Debbie took a smaller girl from the music room’s piano and balanced her on the miniature rocking horse’s back.
“There. That’s like you and Becca,” she said.
Poppy beamed. “Play here forever?”
“Not forever, princess. It’ll be time to go home as soon as Mummy’s finished her work. But you can play until then.” Maybe, if Father let her join the business, she’d have the money for toys like those one day.
Debbie cataloged the doll’s house, a pull-along elephant on wheels, and a boxed game of spellicans with carved ivory strips. In the background, she heard Poppy pretending the girl dolls were taking turns to play hide and seek in the nursery.
Debbie lifted a framed needlework sampler down onto the table. Who’d make a child use nothing but black thread on pale linen? It must have taken her months to work that border of alternating cone-shaped yew trees and spider’s web motifs before she even started on that central, stylized manor with its Gothic turrets and shuttered windows. She read the verse below the house, the hairs lifting on the back of her neck:
When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten
For this you sea remember Me
That I are not forgotten.
Rebecca Staveley made me.
Aged Five.
In the Year of Our Lord 1905.
How could that ever have been considered a suitable text for a child to stitch day after day and then have hanging on her nursery wall, further demoralizing her spirits? 1905, that would make Rebecca almost eighty now. She’d stitched her name and age with real hair, and a reddish-brown spot on the linen suggested she’d pricked her finger on her needle at one point. Maybe she was the person selling the property? If only Father had entrusted Debbie with the manor’s paperwork, she’d have known.
Ivy tendrils tapped on the windowpanes making her jump. The sound echoed in the silent room.
Silent? She swung round to the cabinet. Poppy wasn’t there. Nor was the teddy bear. How had she managed to reach it?
“Bring it back, now, Poppy. I told you not to touch it.”
Nothing stirred, except for her breath drifting white in the deepening gloom. She hadn’t realized how late it was. She’d have to abandon cataloging the rest of the nursery for today. Poppy must be starving.
She softened her tone. “Time to go home, princess.”
“Come find us, Mummy.”
“One last game then.” She speed-counted to ten. “Ready or not, here I come.” She made a show of looking behind the nursing chair. “Where are you?” she called in a sing-song voice. She looked behind the toy pram, and fireguard. Then—pouncing behind the obvious sofa—she called, “Found you.” But there was no Poppy and no bear. She’d done a good job of hiding this time.
When Debbie peered into the emptiness under the circular table, a sharp point dug into her breast. She pulled the Poloroid out of her bra, straightened its bent corner, and massaged her bruised flesh. She turned the snapshot over.
The nursery’s image had finally emerged. Everything—walls, toys, furniture—was tinted in shades of dark green. Everything, except for an eerie, verdigris-colored little girl with ringlets who sat cross-legged on the rug next to two China teacups, saucers, and plates with fairy cakes.
Becca. Not a cute name for a rocking horse, but for a child—Rebecca—who’d finished stitching her sampler over seventy years ago. And whose death had been commemorated in the macabre memento mori photograph of her with her brothers, taken not long afterwards.
Debbie’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the Polaroid. She swung round and stared at the floor. No ghostly figure sat there. Just a grubby tea set arranged on a dusty rug and two charcoal-grey lumps of desiccated mold that had once been fairy cakes. Poppy’s cake, sprinkled with tiny, fossilized maggots, had had a bite taken out of it.
Debbie’s skin crawled. She looked at the rest of the room as the nursery decayed around her.
She croaked Poppy’s name. As she searched again in all the places she’d already searched before, a cobweb strand caught on her hair. Its end pulled free from the ceiling and drifted down to stroke her cheek. She dashed it away, but it stuck to her hand. She wiped it off on the nursing chair’s cushion and the rotten fabric split down the middle.
Why were the cabinet’s doors shut? She yanked them open and scanned the dollhouse rooms inside. Poppy hadn’t moved anything, except in the nursery where she’d left both girl dolls sitting on the window seat, half hidden by the curtains, with the rocking horse angled to watch them. Debbie picked the dolls up and studied them. She’d been pretending they were playing hide and seek—what if she’d also been pretending they were her and the ghostly Becca?
Debbie shot over to the bay window, but Poppy wasn’t hiding behind either of the curtains. She slumped on the seat cushion. The dolls fell from her limp fingers onto the floor. She made no attempt to retrieve them.
If Poppy wasn’t there, she must have left the nursery to find a better hiding place. She’d be waiting to jump out and shout ‘boo’. Giddy with relief, Debbie leapt up. As she did so, her heel struck the window seat’s base with the resounding thud of a hollow storage space.
Debbie yanked the striped cushion aside and wrenched open the heavy lid. Two little girls lay curled inside. The larger one, in a yellowing white lace dress, had her bony arm draped across the smaller one’s daisy-printed Peter Pan collar, with the apricot teddy bear cuddled between them. Their empty eye sockets and grotesque, double-row sets of milk-and-adult teeth grinned up at her from one ringleted and one pigtailed skull.
Debbie recoiled, her stomach heaving. Her heel crunched on one of the miniature dolls.
Poppy’s skeleton shattered, its shards scratching Debbie’s face like a toddler’s jagged fingernails. The teddy bear slumped into the hollow where Poppy’s ribs had been. A large, black, hairy-legged spider scuttled out of the debris and climbed into her one remaining eye socket.
Beads of blood ran down Debbie’s cheeks. She was still screaming when the police broke down the nursery door to reach her.
