Page 99 of Breaking the Dark

There’s a pause and then the voice returns. “Of course. Yes. Just give me a minute.”

She waits, her eyes casting up and down the lane. And then there is a buzz and click, and she heads through the gate and onto the driveway, gravel crunching beneath her feet. The owner greets her on the drawbridge, a smallish man with a broad forehead, in jeans, a T-shirt, a plaid shirt open over it, paint-spattered trainers.

“Sebastian Randall,” he says, holding out a hand. “Nice to meet you. Rebecca?”

“Brown. Yes.” She takes his hand in hers. “Lovely to meet you too.”

He appears to have no intention of inviting her in, so she peers fondly at the front door and begins the spiel she’s practiced. “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this, but full transparency, I’m a Jacobean geek, it’s my favorite period of architecture and I was driving past the other day and I saw your house and I could not stop thinking about it. How long have you been here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

He looks at her thoughtfully and she can see that he wants to show it to her, his new toy. “Oh, just a couple of months. Starting to wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” He cocks his head and says, “Want a tour?”

She gasps. “Oh, my goodness, yes please. If you’re sure?”

“Yes. It would be a pleasure. And it would be fantastic to hear your ideas. I’m just trying to stop it falling down right now, but at some point I’m hoping to make it look pretty too.”

“Well, that I can definitely help you with.”

He peers at her business card. “Do you have a website or something?”

“Not yet. Just setting it up. I only just graduated.”

“Oh, what were you doing before?”

“Beauty,” she says. “I still do beauty. But now I have two skill sets.”

He regards her with admiration. “Good for you,” he says. “Good for you.”

And as he says it, she feels it, strongly, his attraction to her, and she puts this realization away for safekeeping.

He shows her the house, and she can feel how proud he is. According to her research he’s a divorcé, father of two, has tried and failed to launch half a dozen careers while waiting for a huge inheritance from his parents. And he is apparently very much single.

But she is not meant to know any of this, so she smiles and says, “Do you have family here?”

“No, sadly not. My ex-wife lives with my children in New York. I don’t get to see enough of them.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. I didn’t see much of my father growing up either, he moved away with a new wife, new kids. It’s tough.”

They are in the kitchen now and Sebastian is talking through his plans for opening it up, installing a modern range to replace the old Aga, putting in an island, maybe some banquette seating, and she feigns fascination, makes all the right noises, but she’s not really listening and she finally cuts into his monologue by pointing at a staircase through an arched doorway and saying, “What’s down there?”

“Oh.” He shudders slightly. “That’s the cellar. I haven’t been down there.”

“Why not?”

“It gives me the heebie-jeebies. I think it might be haunted.”

She smiles at him playfully. “Really?”

“Yes. In fact I know it is. And also: spiders. I have a terrible phobia.” He shrugs and smiles again.

“May I?”

“Be my guest! You’re a braver woman than me!”

She turns on the torch on her phone and heads down the narrow spiral stairs and as her feet touch the floor, she feels it: thick, black, intoxicating, just like she knew it would be.

It’s there. She knows it’s there. Tons of it. It chills her, but it also excites her.

“Apparently,” Sebastian calls down, “this house was built on cursed ground. Something to do with a tragedy over five hundred years ago.”

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