Page 58 of High Season

FORTY-FIVE

When she first hears the footsteps, Nina is dreaming.

She is dreaming about green, open fields.

About people who are not quite human. Faces with a strange, uncanny gloss that marks them apart.

When Nina tries to speak to them, their eyes widen.

Their throats bloat, like words are trapped inside them.

Their features begin to rearrange, until they are terrible, unreal creatures. Demons created before her eyes.

At first, the footsteps are within her dream. They are the sound of these monsters nearing her. They are the sound of her own shoes, pounding against the ground as she tries to escape from them.

Then, slowly, the dream slips away. She is confused, at first, about where she is. Why she is sleeping, when it seems to be the middle of the day.

Then she remembers the sleeping pills. Sliding into the blissful, thoughtless, unconscious state that they promised. Last night, perhaps. Or yesterday afternoon. She isn’t sure. Time slopes away from her, a river flowing too fast. Her mind is quiet. Her bones are heavy.

Then, as if carried from the mist of her dream, she hears a noise.

She listens, her mouth cotton-wool dry, her mind fogged.

There it is again. A distant tap of footsteps.

Not from the corridor that runs on the right side of her room, but on the left.

Nina lifts up her hand, the stone of the wall cool against her fingertips.

Through the haze of her thoughts, the impossibility of anyone walking on the left side of her room is clear.

That wall is shared with Tamara’s bedroom.

A room that has stayed empty and locked for the last twenty years.

Briefly she is struck with the image of her sister. Tamara, captured in a thousand photographs. Defiant, even in death. The straight, unsmiling way she had of looking at the camera. Spikily beautiful. A girl that Nina barely knew.

But then, between the fog of drugs, she sees an image of Tamara that makes her breath catch in her chest. Not Tamara as Nina knows her from photographs, but a girl laid out on the side of a pool. Her skin almost translucent. Her body bent at unnatural angles. Her head bloodied. Her eyes closed.

Nina imagines, on the other side of the wall, the ghost of her sister opening her eyes. Raising her blood-streaked head, her face distorted by the terrible concave wound at her right temple. The silent gape of her mouth. The plea in her eyes. Asking Nina, after all this time, to save her.

This is when Nina remembers something else, summoned from the depths of her childhood.

That, although the door next to hers belongs to Tamara’s room, there is a space between the two walls.

A hollow carved out by the crazed geometry of her grandfather’s architectural imaginings.

The secret structure that weaves between the walls of the house.

Passageways and corridors designed for staff to navigate the house unseen.

They haven’t been used for years, not since Nina was a child.

Most of them were blocked off long ago. Nobody would even know that they were there.

Only the people who had existed here long ago. Who knew the secrets of the pink house. Who were accustomed to existing unseen alongside the Draytons.

Nina scrabbles to her feet now. She runs her hands along the wall, trying to remember: a time when she was tiny, when Josie Jackson had promised her an adventure, and had taken Nina into the servants’ tunnels.

Nina had been stunned to learn that there was an entirely hidden world within the walls of the house where she had spent much of her childhood.

Her mind feels sharper now. She opens her bedroom door, out into the corridor. She remembers standing here; Josie Jackson taking her hand, and her own whispered promise not to tell Evelyn.

There is a thud from the end of the landing, like wood striking wood. A woman’s voice.

“ Fuck. ”

There was a door; Nina remembers it now. Wooden, discreet. Exactly where a large cabinet has stood for years. She had forgotten what hid behind it.

She hurries down the hallway, toward the cabinet.

As she pushes against it with her shoulder, her fingers scrabbling for something to grip on to, she feels a pressure from the other side.

Without thinking of any potential danger—without really considering who the woman’s voice belongs to—she finds that they are working together.

But then, perhaps she already knows. She already realizes that there are only a handful of people who know this house like she does. Who understand its secrets.

With one hard push, the cabinet finally eases away. The door swings fully open, and standing there, in the empty space it leaves, is Josie Jackson.

She holds one finger up to her mouth. One more secret. One more hidden thing.