The New Beginning Nobody Asked For

Moving to a new town in the middle of the school year was, in Priya Sharma's expert opinion, the single worst thing a parent could do to their child. She had compiled a mental list of reasons why, and the list was now fourteen points long, with sub-points.

"You'll love it," her mum had said, somewhere around the third motorway junction. "Ashford is a lovely town. Quiet. Peaceful."

Priya had pressed her forehead against the cold car window and watched the city skyline disappear behind a hill. Quiet and peaceful were not qualities she valued. She valued her friends, her school, her Saturday football team, and the corner shop that sold the specific brand of mango juice she liked. None of those things were in Ashford.

Her younger brother, Dev, who was nine and therefore immune to the concept of suffering, had spent the entire journey playing a game on his tablet and eating crisps. He hadn't once looked out of the window. Priya found this deeply irritating.

The house on Elm Close appeared around a bend in the road, and Priya sat up slightly despite herself. It was old. Not falling-apart old, but the kind of old that meant it had been standing long before anyone currently alive had been born. Three storeys tall, with wide bay windows that caught the grey November light and bounced it back in odd angles. A garden that had gone slightly wild around the edges, with an oak tree in the front that was so large its roots had lifted the garden path in two places. Ivy crept up the left side of the building, dark and glossy in the damp afternoon.

"There she is," her dad said from the driver's seat, with the voice of someone announcing something magnificent.

"It's enormous," Dev said, finally looking up from his tablet.

"It's old," Priya said.

"Old means character," her mum replied.

"Old means draughts and dodgy plumbing," Priya muttered, but she was already peering up at the top floor windows. One of them, the one at the far left corner of the house, had the curtains drawn. All the others were bare. She wondered, briefly, why someone would leave curtains in an empty house, and then the removal lorry pulled up behind them and everyone started moving boxes and she forgot about it entirely.

For about three hours.

It was late afternoon by the time Priya finally made it upstairs to claim her bedroom. Her parents had already designated the rooms, and hers was on the second floor, large and square with a window that looked out over the back garden. It smelled of old wood and something faintly floral, like dried lavender left too long in a drawer. She dropped her rucksack on the bare mattress and looked around.

Not terrible, she decided. She could work with this.

She was standing in the hallway, trying to remember which box had her bedding in it, when she noticed the stairs leading up to the third floor. There was a door at the top, painted white, with a small brass handle. Her parents had mentioned the third floor briefly , storage, they'd said. Nothing interesting.

She glanced back down the main staircase. She could hear her mum directing the removal men and her dad trying to build a flat-pack shelf using what sounded like the wrong tools. Dev was singing to himself in the room next to hers. Nobody needed her.

She went up.

The door at the top opened with a creak that was almost musical, a long low groan that the old wood seemed to produce with a certain amount of pride. Beyond it was a short corridor with two doors on the right and one on the left. The one on the left was where the drawn curtains were, she realised. She tried the handle. Locked.

She tried the other two doors. One was a small bathroom, old-fashioned, with black and white tiles and a claw-footed bathtub. The other was a large, mostly empty room with bare floorboards and a single bookshelf still standing against the far wall. Someone had left books on it. Actual books, a dozen of them at least, with cracked spines and faded titles.

Priya crossed the room and crouched to read the spines. Most were novels she didn't recognise. Two were local history books about Ashford. One was a journal of some kind, dark green, with no title on the spine at all.

She pulled that one out.

It wasn't a published book. It was handwritten, in small, careful letters, black ink on slightly yellowed paper. The first page said, in the same careful hand:

Property of Elara Voss. Private. This means you.

Priya almost put it back. Then she turned to the second page.

If you're reading this, you've moved into Willow House. I'm sorry. Not because of the house , the house is actually brilliant, mostly. I'm sorry because of what comes with it. You'll hear it tonight, probably. The whispering. Don't be scared. Well, be a bit scared. But not too scared. It hasn't hurt anyone yet.

Yet was underlined three times.

Priya sat down on the dusty floor and kept reading.