The Forgotten Room: a gripping, chilling thriller that will have you hooked

Cheryl had said that parts of the place were dangerous, and Maura had assumed rotten boards and woodworm-savaged beams, but as she lay beneath the pungent sheets she began to wonder if the danger wasn’t from something else entirely – the bad that Gordon had been so eager to tell her about. The look of the place made it feel as if no Henderson, in the history of Hendersons, had brought a good intention to the place. It seemed to have been pieced together with menace and meanness – no one period predominated, no one style. Just a building stitched together by time, passing fashions and a family who had been custodians out of habit and grudging obligation rather than pride and heritage. All speculation on Maura’s part, of course, but Gordon was hemmed in a single room full of filth and clutter, and she had to contend with a mothball-sodden bed and a ceiling that was so creaky it seemed as if it would cave in at any moment. It was as if the house was trying to corner them both.

Why on earth hadn’t they sold up and left? Why stay in a place that exuded such misery?

They were good questions, ones she could apply to herself – why had she stayed with Richard when it had been patently clear he was a self-serving, booze-dependent dickhead? Why hadn’t she thrown him out the moment she’d caught him in bed with her sister? Why, after she finally had thrown him out, had she pitied him, looked after him and cried when he finally drank himself to death?

Sometimes there were no answers, or none she wanted to face. Maybe it was the same for Gordon Henderson and Estelle Hall; there were just things they didn’t want to deal with.

Annoyed with herself for being maudlin, she threw off the sheets and moved towards the window to watch the storm play out. The lights of the estate surrounded the Grange, but at a distance, like the lit torches of an angry mob encamped and holding the house under siege. It felt so lonely and she wondered if that was another reason Gordon had taken to his clutter and his room, like children did when they built pillow forts to keep the adult world at bay. Would she wake him if she crept downstairs and made herself a drink? It seemed unlikely. She had given him a hefty dose of Zopiclone, enough to fell an elephant for the night, let alone a frail old man. Too much in her opinion, but she’d always found Dr Moss a bit heavy-handed with the meds. They had butted heads many times over his prescribing at the hospital, and bitter experience had shown her he didn’t like to be questioned – especially by nurses. Nurses were a lowly sort in Philip Moss’s eyes.

Despite Gordon’s drug-fuelled repose, she felt the need to creep through the house, pausing once to glance out at the storm as it crackled across the sky and howled around the house.

The essence of a figure glimpsed through the landing window caught her eye. A dark, human shape standing under the trees, a shape that made her freeze, made her breath catch in her throat and caused her to clutch her dressing gown to her throat as if a handful of fleece could protect her.

Her instinct argued that only a madman would be out in the storm.

A madman in the middle of nowhere, staring at a house containing only a feeble old man and a lone female.

A madman lurking in the dead of night with no innocent reason to be there.

The builders had gone home, the houses near to the Grange were far from finished, and it was hard to believe anyone would be lost around here when the house was the only thing they could be looking for. If it had been Bob, the handyman, surely he would have called, or at least come to the back of the house? If it was Cheryl, or even Dr Moss, they would have just come in or knocked – they’d have no reason to lurk outside.

The clock in the hallway below chimed midnight, scaring the bejesus out of her and diverting her attention from the window. When she looked again, the figure was gone, and she had to question whether it had ever been there at all – though her heart still pounded with a violence that argued it had. She peered out, trying to pick up movement, but there was nothing. Just the storm and the wind forcing the trees into a frenzied ballet of whipping branches and whirling leaves. Whatever. Whoever had been there was gone, leaving no trace other than the mild panic of a woman who was to all intents and purposes alone in a house that appeared to be straight from the pages of some Gothic horror novel.

Pulling herself away, she made her way down the stairs, trying to recall if she had locked the house as per Cheryl’s instructions. Her memory was playing tricks on her. She knew for a fact that she had locked up properly, but a midnight maggot of irrational fear wriggled and writhed, making her doubt her recall. She stamped on the little bugger and forced herself to snap out of it and think like a functional adult. There had been no figure under the tree – just a shadow or an illusion conjured by lack of sleep and unfamiliar surroundings. The house was creeping her out and hooking shadows from the dark corners of her imagination. She had come to the Grange to escape all that, not to bring it with her and have it enhanced by noisy floorboards and a high wind. Coffee and a flick through one of Cheryl’s magazines would banish such thoughts and entrench some good sense. There was nothing like perusing pictures of airbrushed women wearing clothes you could never afford (or get away with wearing in public) to slam a person back into the realms of insignificance. To Maura it was the mental equivalent of a strong black coffee after a drinking binge – it might make you sick and keep you awake, but it did you good. With resignation and as much composure as she could muster, she defied the house and its air of doom and strode through the passage into the kitchen, where she filled the room with light, filled the battered old kettle and settled down with a magazine.

When the rock hurtled through the window it didn’t just shatter the glass, it shattered every shred of equilibrium that Maura had managed to cling on to.

Breath froze in her throat as the glass exploded inwards, shards of it hurtling towards her like a thousand shining knife blades, the rock landing on the table like an unexploded bomb of dread.

Instinct took over and she dropped to the floor, covering her head as glass glittered her hair and clung to the fleece of her dressing gown. Tiny slivers found their way inside her sleeves and down the back of her neck, nicking her skin, biting deeper and drawing small beads of blood.

The boom was fading, but the shock hadn’t – adrenaline had coursed through her, making her heart lurch and her limbs shake. She knew she had to move, yet she couldn’t. She knew she had screamed – it had emerged as a deep bellow, and now that she tried to call out, it felt as if her entire voice had been emitted with it and was rattling around the room, unable to find its way back.

There had been a figure, and it had meant her harm. It had done her harm and there was a good chance it wanted more.

The kitchen phone was attached to the wall, too close to the door and window to be safe to run to. The only other she had seen was in another room, back beyond the passage and the door and located in the heart of the house.

She ran through the route in her mind, begging her limbs to comply and help her to move. Her own phone was locked in her car where she had thrown it in disgust, so as not to have to see her sister’s name flashing up and demanding her attention every five minutes. But what did that matter now? She had to get out of the kitchen and away from the broken window, and the rock that had damned near taken her head off.

Pressing her shaking hands to the floor, knowing they would be cut on the fallen glass but having no choice, she pushed backwards, scooting towards the door that led to the corridor beyond the kitchen. She dared not try and stand – not only did she doubt her legs would take it, but while she was on the floor, with the table in front of her, she felt she had some kind of shield from what might be coming after the rock. With her senses ratcheting up and beyond red alert she shuffled through the door, ignoring the glass that grazed her hands. Once into the shade of the passageway she shuffled onto her knees and slammed the door shut, groping with bloodied and shaking fingers for the bolt she knew must be there and ramming it home before she dared to take a breath.

In a film she might have leaned against the door, caught that breath and thought she was safe. But Maura had watched dramas where that kind of stupidity had cost people dearly – she was no fool and immediately launched herself towards the morning room where she had spied a phone earlier on. Panic still engulfed her and, as she lurched, dripping blood, shedding glass and looking half drunk and half crazed, she became convinced that the assailant would have cut the phone lines and that she’d be trapped in the house with a maniac who could burst through locked doors, or worse still – axe their way through them yelling “Here’s Johnny!”.

Once at the morning room door she dropped to her knees again and crawled towards the low table that held the phone, not even daring to look towards the long windows, not daring to imagine a face pressed against the panes and the hot breath of the intruder blooming on the glass…

There was a dial tone.

The buttons didn’t stick, even though they always did in her nightmares.

She bashed 999 into the keypad.

Someone answered and Maura finally found her voice, though it was greatly diminished by the experience and wobbled as if it had no legs. ‘Police, please. Someone just threw a rock through my window and I think they’re still outside,’ she babbled to the dispatcher.

Then she hid behind the sofa, keeping low and staying quiet until the police pounded on the door twenty minutes later. Each one of those minutes in horrified silence, waiting and listening for every creak, every groan and every shift in the building, and convinced she could hear the steps of the intruder – convinced Gordon would be murdered in his bed and that she would be the coward who let it happen.

I could see her through the kitchen window. Sipping her coffee, flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine, dreaming about how life could be if only she were thinner, or taller, or had bigger breasts, more money and less stress. That’s what those magazines did – taught you how to be dissatisfied with your lot. I know all about that, about settling for what life gives you – and hating it.

For a moment, when the upstairs light had flicked on, I thought the nurse might have spotted something, but if she had she didn’t seem to care. She hadn’t seen me, hadn’t noticed. She was warm in there with her hot drink and cosy dressing gown, while I was weathering the storm just to get a glimpse of her through the window. Like some poor relation swallowing my pride and begging for scraps at the back door.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be – I shouldn’t be some midnight stalker skulking in the shadows and seething with anger. I deserve better, after all I’ve done for them, I deserve better.

Anger and resentment moved my hand to a chunk of stone that had fallen from the rockery, forced my hand to pick it up, made my hand hurl it at the glass of the kitchen window. I paused for a second as the glass shattered in a beautiful shower of wanton destruction – a shock to wake the dead but not enough to kill the living.

Not yet.

Shocks take time to kill.

It was inherent cowardice that made me run and I hate my weakness more than I hate them. And I hate that I made my move too soon, I have a treat in store for the nurse. I shouldn’t drive her out just yet.

And they forget.

I have a key.

Chapter Four

A grizzled Bob picked up the stone, stared at it and shook his head again. He’d done it at least ten times and Maura was using the rhythm of his bemusement like a metronome; it was the only way she could get her heart rate to slow down. Despite the police checking the grounds, despite the presence of Bob, and even though Gordon hadn’t heard a thing, Maura’s senses were still on high alert and she was jumping at shadows. In a house that was riddled with them, it was doing little to calm her down.

Every time she thought she’d cleared the last of the glass, another tiny shard would glisten like a minute jewel and drag her attention towards it. ‘I keep trying to believe that the wind blew it through the window, but that’s bollocks, isn’t it? It would have to be a tornado to do that, and somehow I think we’re still very much in bloody Kansas, Toto.’

Bob switched his bemusement to her and placed the rock back on the table, into the neat dent it had made when it landed. ‘Wind didn’t do that, love. No way it could, is there? So, this man you said you saw?’

‘I don’t even know if I did see someone – it might have been a shadow. There was so much blowing about out there it might even have been my mind playing tricks on me – but I suppose someone lobbed that through the window. The question is, who and why?’

Bob picked the rock up again, as if it would tell him who’d thrown it by some form of psychometry. It hadn’t told the police much; fingerprints didn’t stick to wet, mossy stone. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. That copper asked you if you’d upset anyone lately. You said no – that true?’

‘I’ve probably upset a great many people lately, but none of them know I’m here, so I don’t think it has anything to do with me personally. What about the Hendersons, have they upset anyone?’ Either way, she was ringing the agency the minute they opened and giving them a piece of her mind for not vetting the job properly. No amount of money or desire to escape a dismal home life could compensate for being scared shitless in the dead of night by a rock-wielding maniac and being forced to stay in Essen’s answer to the House of Usher.

Bob shrugged. ‘No more than usual, I don’t suppose. They’ve never been well-liked, but no one’s ever thrown rocks at them before. They’re a funny bunch and keep themselves to themselves. They like their privacy, see?’

Maura sighed. ‘That copper, as you call him, wasn’t very helpful, was he? I guess they’re not that interested in petty vandals having a pop at the people in the big house, eh?’ she said with a weak smile, thinking that if she minimized it verbally, the incident would become smaller in reality.

‘Prob’ly not, no. Anyway, this won’t get that hole mended. Stick the kettle on and I’ll get that boarded up. I’ll get a bit of glass tomorrow and do a proper job.’

It was 4 a.m. and Maura had plied Bob with more cups of tea than a man with apparently hollow legs could possibly want to consume. She was on her fourth herself, hot and sweet and entirely useless for managing shock, but a good alternative to sitting and dwelling on who might want to launch rocks at her. Sarah had sprung to mind, but it couldn’t be – and, given the circumstances, it should be Maura casting the first stone at her. Richard was long gone; besides, he’d already done her as much harm as it was possible to do and even he couldn’t rise from the dead. Whatever this was, it didn’t have anything to do with her. As she faffed with the tea things, she hoped it was a one-off, a chancy kid letting off steam or a stroppy drunk who’d taken a wrong turn on the way home and decided to have a pop at the posh folk. Thank God for Bob and his willingness to turn out in the dead of night and come to the rescue. He was hardly a knight in shining armour, more a dishevelled old codger with a five o’clock shadow, a missing ear that she was dying to ask about but didn’t feel she should, and a distinct lack of wit, but he was there and Maura was glad of him. ‘Tea’s on the table. I’d better go and check on Himself.’

Gordon Henderson had slept through it all, or so it appeared. He didn’t even stir when she let herself into the room and allowed the light from the hallway to stray onto his face. Not that she wanted to wake him; she just needed to check he was still breathing. Any man who could sleep through windows breaking, nurses screaming, police banging on the door and Bob hammering was either drugged or dead. Maura was relieved to see that it was the former – Mr Henderson had been well and truly smacked with the chemical cosh. Under the circumstances it was probably a good thing, but Maura couldn’t help thinking she’d given an awful lot of drugs to a very frail man. It occurred to her that she’d have to talk to Dr Moss about what had been prescribed for Gordon; there were enough pills in his medicine reminder to restock a branch of Boots and it was only a week’s supply. Moss wasn’t going to like being questioned, but his ego came second to her duty of care.

Satisfied the old man was still in the land of the living (and that she wouldn’t have to report she’d not only allowed an assault on the house, but had also allowed her charge to die on her first evening), she gently closed the door and replaced the chain. The adrenaline rush that had fuelled the aftermath of the incident had long worn off and she was exhausted. There would be little chance of sleep with Bob hammering away in the kitchen, and she didn’t relish the thought of him going back to his own cosy bed and leaving her on her own either. Sleep deprivation and Bob’s noisy presence were preferable to even a few hours alone in a house that was giving her the distinct impression it didn’t like her.

Tiredness was making her irrational and making her doubt her decision to take the job, let alone whether she was willing to stay. It was just a house – a big, old, ugly house that made horrible noises, but just a house – and it had a resident incapable of caring for himself. Maybe if Bob was willing to stay she could get a few hours’ sleep and wake up with her sensible head on?

Bob did stay, on a sofa in one of the downstairs rooms, his snores punching their way through the early morning and drowning out the birdsong to the point where Maura gave up on any thought of sleep and made her way back downstairs. She was battling Gordon over the state of his porridge when Cheryl’s less than dulcet tones broke the uneasy peace.

‘What in hell’s name happened to my kitchen?’ Cheryl demanded. ‘And why is Bob Silver asleep on the morning-room sofa?’

Maura had anticipated Cheryl’s anger, but not the thread of panic that wound through her voice, tightening the shrill voice to a screech.

At that moment Gordon decided to tip the contents of his breakfast bowl onto the tray. ‘Porridge should be a solid thing, not this slop. Look at it!’

Maura did look, staring with exhaustion and exasperation at the mess he was prodding with a bony finger. ‘I’ll make some more, Mr Henderson.’

‘Too late, too late. I eat at the right time, no later. I cannot eat past my time.’

Maura was operating on nerves as taut as catgut and a level of sleep deprivation that a KGB torturer would have been proud of. ‘I’m very sorry, I’ll take it away,’ she said, aware that Cheryl stood behind her bristling with impatience. This whole scenario was turning into something surreal and faintly ridiculous. Maura felt herself about to snap, pack her bags and leave.

In the hallway Cheryl gave the tray a snide look. ‘Well?’

‘Someone threw a rock through the kitchen window last night. Bob came here to fix it, but we had to wait for the police, so by the time they’d come and he’d boarded it up, it was getting pretty late. I asked him to stay because, to be quite frank with you, Cheryl, I was cacking myself. It was my first night, someone lobbed a rock at me, and I didn’t want to be here on my own. As for the porridge, I’ve never made it from scratch in my life. I’m a nurse, not a cook, so forgive me if it’s not up to anyone’s cordon bleu standards.’

Cheryl’s untidy eyebrows rose, almost meeting her frizzy fringe. ‘All right, keep your hair on! There’s bigger things to worry about than bloody porridge.’

Maura gave her the filthiest look she could muster and stalked towards the baize door. What the hell was she doing in a house that had a bloody baize door for Christ’s sake? As she strode towards the kitchen she felt as though she’d been badly cast in the Mark Gatiss version of Upstairs Downstairs. Life in the Grange was like being an unwilling participant in some demonic episode of a B-grade dystopian time slip farce. Any minute now, some weirdo in a blue police box would turn up and rescue them all if she was lucky.

Cheryl took her time joining her and, by the time she arrived, Maura was scrubbing the last of the congealed porridge from the pan, wincing as the cuts on her hands sang with soreness inside the rubber gloves.

‘Look, I’m sorry, all right? I think we got off on the wrong foot. My mouth runs away with me and I speak before I think sometimes. I don’t mean to be nasty, it’s just my way. I’ve seen to his nibs and had a chat with Bob, so, why don’t you go and lie down for a bit, get some sleep, eh?’ She nodded at the washing-up. ‘I’ll see to that.’

Maura hadn’t been expecting that, and to her shame tears started to prickle at the corners of her eyes – her anger was so easily replaced by upset these days. What she wanted to do was hurl the dirty pan across the kitchen, pack her bag and leave, but she was dropping with tiredness and it wasn’t an option at that moment. Instead she set the pan on the draining board and turned to Cheryl, finding that the woman’s face looked more menacing with its mask of empathy than it did with the more familiar scowl.

‘Thank you. I’ll take a couple of hours if you don’t mind,’ Maura said before walking from the room with limbs that were stiff with self-consciousness. The prospect of festering at home, alone with her brooding bitterness, was increasingly feeling like a more appealing alternative to being stuck with Gordon and his porridge issues, or Cheryl and her mercurial temperament.

Sleeping on the decision and letting it ferment seemed the wise thing to do. If the current occupants and outside assailants would allow her to sleep – what with Cheryl clomping along the landing outside her door and more doors banging in the bowels of the house.

Finally, she heard Bob and Cheryl in the courtyard below, Cheryl telling Bob she was off to get some fresh air, him saying he was going to the sheds to find a glazier’s hammer. Maura was beyond caring what either of them did.

A squirt of deodorant on the sheets had masked the smell of camphor and sheer exhaustion created the illusion of a comfortable mattress. With bones as weary as her spirit Maura finally drifted into a dreamless, heavy sleep.

Chapter Five

It took fifteen minutes for everyone who was working on phase three of Essen Fields to down tools and join the throng. They gathered around the JCB, which had been moving earth from one part of the plot to another, close to the border of Essen Grange. Very little time passed before they all agreed in a series of horrified mutters that, yes, that was human skull caught on one of the metal teeth, and yes, someone ought to call the police.

The foreman was observed to grit his jaw and reach for his phone somewhat reluctantly. The consensus was that Eric Perlman, CEO of the development consortium, would not be pleased. A few even muttered that the grabbing bastard would have had them cover up the body and cover it with concrete rather than bring proceedings to a halt like this. A small number hesitantly agreed with that, a mixture of survival instinct and morality hedging their opinions. They were contractors, and no work meant no pay.

The insalubrious opinions of some were masked by mentions of “poor bugger”, “I wonder who it was?” and “I’ll bet it’s ancient, there’s that burial ground around here somewhere…”, together with one “It’s a wonder the archaeology survey didn’t find it, would have been a mercy if they had.” The foreman listened to it all with a look on his face that suggested he’d like to kick the arse of the person who hadn’t done the due diligence on this. He was sure they were digging closer to the boundary than they should have been.

The foreman punched Eric Perlman’s number into his phone and muttered caustically ‘Heads are going to roll over this’ before making the call to his boss.