Let Him In by William Friend

Author:William Friend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

* * *

By four o’clock, the session’s over, and I’m heading toward my sister’s family—my sister’s life.

The weather recently has been so fine that I’m walking everywhere rather than driving, and my route from the office to Hart House takes me through some of the more scenic parts of London, including an old graveyard that I’ve always loved. When I say old, what I really mean is disused—though not, I suppose, by the people buried in it. The gates are busted from their hinges, and the graves themselves are sunken and weathered, palled by unruly grass. Most graveyards belong to the living, but no one has been buried here since the 1800s, and the people who once grieved for them are long dead too—and so, unlike most graveyards, it’s not a place of pain but a place of peace. I can walk alone among its winged stone seraphim, happily without religion; without feeling hollow.

The streets get busier as I approach Hart House. Peter’s Park is beginning to fill up with young families, and teenagers who’ve escaped from their families. One or two groups are loitering beneath the red horse chestnuts, whose blooms are beginning to flourish now in bloody splashes. The petals were only just emerging the day that Pippa died; this is the first time they’ve blossomed again since the accident.

I step out of the undergrowth into Allington Square, and the house rises suddenly before me, a tidal wave of peeling white paint. The gaping square windows, cut into the facade, let you see clearly inside, but I don’t spot Alfie or the girls. The front door is painted a vine green, also peeling. I go to ring the bell but pause when I notice something strange: the door is ajar. I push it open uneasily and step over the threshold.

“Alfie?” I freeze in the cool, dark hallway. A peculiar smell is hanging faintly in the air—the smell of incense and charring—and it makes my stomach turn. I haven’t smelled it in decades, but I recognize it instantly; another memory that’s been locked away inside my head, out of reach, yet somehow still in pristine condition.

It’s the scent that hung around Hart House for days after Dad died.

Could I be imagining it? That seems the only logical explanation. Phantosmia is unusual but not unheard of; we’ve treated cases of it before at the clinic. I touch my temples shakily. The thought that last night’s dream is still lingering inside my head, now warping my perception, disturbs me.

Voices coming from the living room refocus my attention. First, a woman’s, honeyed and smooth. Then a man’s, high-pitched and nasal.

“Just to get an idea,” the man is saying, “of how the girls are doing.”

“We haven’t noticed any tension at school—”

I turn the handle of the living-room door and gently push it open. The woman, who’s standing in the center of the room, looks up and instantly closes her mouth neatly, like she’s shutting a book. She’s tall, with dark frizzy hair, and her slim body is swaddled in a gray trench coat.

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