I remembered the time before. Near the end, out in the grounds. In the dark and the rain, when the thunder seemed all around us, the shuddering wrath of the house, and we fell on the path and I looked up.

It was then I had realised how stupid we’d been, how badly I had messed up. I remember feeling the blood collect on my fifteen-year old knees, under my wet jeans, and I felt like a child whose adventure away from his mother’s skirts has taken him into sudden, deadly danger. That was when I saw how little we understood, and how far we were from safety. And even afterwards, as I cried alone at home, I knew we had only a fraction of the true picture.

I stared up from the path with terrified eyes, and the house looked down at me for the first time. Until then it might have all been Halloween illusion, but that changed everything. It has looked at me many times since then; on street corners, through windows at dusk. But I never forgot the first time and the ragged fire which burned me there, bleeding on the path.

In the present, as we looked up the deep red stairs, I wondered how much more we really understood now. And in my heart, I knew it wasn’t much.