I don’t know when Andrew vanished.

There was a kind of fog, time missing from my memory. Kirsten and I were sitting on the house’s top stair, and neither of us could remember how we had got there. As my thoughts cleared, I recalled that Andrew had been with us, but he was nowhere to be seen. We called his name, but there was no answer. We wandered the corridors awhile.

He was gone.

As his disappearance sunk in, I found I had a subtle, lingering feeling; a revulsion, an after-impression of something dark and wriggling, just out of sight, slithering past … my spine leaped in a pent-up shiver.

I looked at Kirsten and there was fear in her eyes. We linked arms, grateful just for the physical contact. Rain battered against those windows which still held. We found ourself pulled two ways. A breeze came from the gap underneath a black door; through there we saw stairs leading up higher than the first floor.

But downstairs it was the parlour that called Kirsten. “Something down there has power,” she whispered, “can’t you feel it? I don’t think it belongs to the house.”

I couldn’t feel anything.