The Stranger House by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Cumbria (England), Psychological fiction, Spaniards, Australians, Horror, Villages, Supernatural, Fiction, Psychological, Thrillers, Suspense, Historians, Immigrant children, Australians - England, Suspense fiction, Occult & Supernatural, Spaniards - England
ISBN: 9780060821425
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-08-29T05:17:22+00:00

14

a real live woman

Whose spirit Madero felt the presence of Sam was saved from discovering.

At that moment the torch battery gave up its ghost and the light, already diminished to a pinprick, went out.

She screamed.

She didn’t want to but she knew no way not to.

Then she felt his arms being wrapped around her and he drew her close, almost on to his lap.

‘It’s OK,’ he murmured. ‘It’s OK. We’ll soon be out of here. There, there. Be calm. Be calm.’

He was talking to her like a child again, but she didn’t mind it. Like a child, what she wanted in this predicament was adult comfort and reassurance.

Madero, on the other hand, as he hugged her close and felt the warmth of that lithe body reach him through the thin cloth of her skimpy T-shirt, found to his dismay that, however his eyes might have deceived him as to her age, after a few moments his own frail flesh was telling him he had a real live woman in his arms. He tried to twist away to conceal his arousal but if anything the movement only drew attention to it. He sent his mind in search of all the antaphrodisiac stratagems he’d developed in the seminary only to discover that, effective though they’d once been against the fancy’s images, they had no potency against the physical reality.

‘I’m sorry,’ he began to say, but Sam interrupted him.

‘Listen!’ she said.

He listened.

There was noise above them. A footfall. Then an exclamation.

With one accord they began to cry, ‘Help!’

It took another fifteen minutes for Edie Appledore to round up the three strong men necessary to raise the heavy table and release the entrance slab.

The three strong men in question turned out to be the Gowders and Thor Winander, whom she’d flagged down as they drove past from St Ylf’s.

Pushed from behind by Mig and pulled from above by Winander, Sam scrambled out into the light of the kitchen which fell on her like a glorious dawn.

‘Nice to see you again, Miss Flood,’ boomed Thor. ‘Trying to find a shortcut home, were you?’

‘Ignore him, dear,’ said Mrs Appledore. ‘Drink this. You look a bit shook up.’

She handed Sam a glass of brandy which she downed in one and did not resist when offered a refill.

The Gowders had propped the table up with cast-iron chairs brought in from the beer garden. Winander now offered his hand to Madero, who was standing with his head appearing through the gap in the kitchen floor.

‘No. Thank you, all the same,’ he said with a formality that set Sam, still light-headed with relief, giggling. ‘Mrs Appledore, do you have such a thing as a flashlight?’

Shaking her head at the stupidity of men, the landlady found one. Winander took it from her but instead of handing it down, he dropped into the underground chamber himself, provoking more head-shaking from Mrs Appledore. Now the two men vanished, presumably to continue the exploration which the collapse of the slab had interrupted.

The reason why the table had fallen back to the floor was clear.

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