“Ah, what?” I said anxiously, trying to peer past him, but his big frame filled the doorway, and all I could see was darkness.

“Have a look,” he said, stepping back. “See for yourself. You were right.”

And there it was. Just as I had imagined. The wooden treads. The swags of cobwebs. The staircase winding up into darkness.

I found my mouth was dry, and my throat clicked as I swallowed.

“Do you have a torch?” Jack asked, and I shook my head, feeling suddenly unable to speak. He shrugged.

“Nor me, we’ll have to make do with phones. Mind your feet on those nails.” And he stepped forward into the blackness.

For a moment I was completely frozen, watching him disappear up the narrow stairs, the beam of his phone a thin glimmer in the black, his footsteps echoing . . . creak . . . creak . . .

The sound was so close to the noise of last night, and yet, there was something different about it too. It was more . . . solid. More real, faster, and mixed with the crunch of plasterboard.

“Holy shit,” I heard from above, and then, “Rowan, get up here, you’ve got to see this.”

There was a lump in my throat as if I was about to cry, though I knew that I wasn’t; it was pure fear that had lodged there, silencing me, making me unable to ask Jack what was up there, what he had found, what he needed me to see so urgently.

Instead, I switched on my phone torch with fingers that shook, and followed him into the darkness.

Jack was standing in the middle of the attic, staring openmouthed at his surroundings. He had switched off his phone, and there was light coming from somewhere, a thin, gray light that I couldn’t immediately locate. There must be a window somewhere, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. What I was looking at were the walls, the furniture, the feathers.

They were everywhere.

Strewn across the broken rocking chair in the corner, in the dusty, cobwebbed crib, over the rickety doll’s house and the dusty chalkboard, across the pile of smashed china dolls piled up against the wall. Feathers, feathers, and not down from a burst pillow either. These were thick and black—flight feathers from a crow, or a raven I thought. And there was a stench of death too.

But that wasn’t all of it. It wasn’t even the worst of it.

The strangest thing was the walls—or rather, what was written on them.

Scribbled on all of them, in childish crayon letters, some small, some huge and scrawled, were words. It took me a minute or two to make them out, for the letters were misshapen and the words badly spelled. But the one right in front of me, the one staring me in the face over the small fireplace in the center of the room, was unmistakable. WE HATE YOU.

It was exactly the same as the phrase Maddie had spelled out in her Alphabetti Spaghetti, and seeing it here, in a locked, boarded-up room she could not possibly have entered, gave me a jolt to the stomach as if I had been punched. It was with a kind of sick dread that I held up my phone torch to some of the other phrases.

The goasts donet like you.

They hate yu.

We want you too go awa.

The gosts are angrie.

They haite you.

Get out.

There angry

Wee hate you.

We hite u.

GO AWAY.

We hate you.

Again and again, small and large, from tiny letters etched with concentrated hate in a corner by the door, to the giant sprawling scrawl above the fireplace that I had seen when I first entered.

We hate you. The words had been bad enough, sliding in slimy orange juice across a plate. But here, scrawled in a demented hand across every inch of plaster, they were nothing short of malevolent. And in my head I heard Maddie’s little sobbing voice again, as though she had gasped the words in my ear—the ghosts wouldn’t like it.

It was too close to be coincidence. But at the same time, it was totally impossible. This room was not just locked, it was boarded up, and the only entrance was through my own bedroom. And without question, someone else had been up here, and it had not been Maddie. I had heard those relentless, pacing footsteps just moments after staring down at Maddie’s sleeping form.

Maddie had not written those words. But she had repeated them to me. Which meant . . . was she repeating what someone had whispered to her . . . ?

“Rowan.” The voice seemed to be coming from a great distance, hard to hear beneath a shrill buzzing coming from inside my own skull. Through the ringing I felt a hand on my arm. “Rowan. Rowan, are you okay? You look a bit strange.”

“I’m—I’m okay—” I managed, though my voice was strange in my ears. “I’m all right. It’s just—oh God, who wrote that?”

“Kids messing about, don’t you think? And, well, there’s your explanation for the noise.”

He nudged with his foot at something in the corner, and I looked to see a pile of moldering feathers and bones, held together by little more than dust.

“Poor wee bastard must have got in through that window and couldn’t get out, battered himself half to death trying to escape.”

He pointed to the opposite wall, to a minute window, only a little bigger than a sheet of paper. It was gray with dirt, and partway open. Letting go of my arm, Jack strode over and slammed it shut.

“Oh—oh my God,” I found I couldn’t catch my breath. The ringing in my ears intensified. Was I having some kind of panic attack? I groped for something to hold on to, and my fingers crunched against dead insects, and I let out a strangled sob.

“Look,” Jack said practically, seeming to make up his mind, “let’s get out of here, get you a drink. I’ll come back in a bit, clear up the bird.”

Taking my hand, he led me firmly towards the stairs. The feel of his large, warm hand in mine was unspeakably reassuring, and for a moment I let myself be pulled towards the door and the stairs, back towards the main house. But then something inside me rebelled. Whatever the truth of this attic, Jack was not my white knight. And I was not some terrified child who needed protecting from the reality of what lay behind this locked door.

As Jack turned sideways to edge between a pile of teetering chairs and a dried-up paint box, I took the opportunity to pull my hand out of his.

Part of me felt I was being ungrateful. He was only trying to be reassuring, after all. But the other part of me knew that if I fell into this role, I might never escape it, and I could not allow Jack to see me that way—as yet another hysterical, superstitious woman, hyperventilating over a pile of feathers and some childish scribbles.

And so, as Jack disappeared down the stairs towards the floor below, I made myself stop and turn, taking a last, long look back at that dust-shrouded room, filled with smashed dolls and toys, broken furniture and the spoiled debris of a lost childhood.

“Rowan?” Jack’s voice came from down the stairs, hollow and echoing up the narrow corridor. “Are you coming?”

“Yes!” I said. My voice was cracked and I coughed, feeling my chest tighten. “I’m coming!”

I moved quickly to follow him, filled with a sudden dread of the door shutting, being trapped up here with the dust and the dolls and the stench of death. But my foot must have caught on something, for as I reached the top of the stairs, there was a sudden rushing clatter and the pile of dolls shifted and collapsed in on itself, china limbs cracking against one another with ominous chinks, dust rising up from threadbare moth-eaten dresses.