Catherine Chong stood in the middle
of the road on Puncak Bukit Mutiara and stared at the house in front of her. It
was a squat, blocky thing that didn’t look like much from the outside—standing
at road level, it appeared to be a very small single-storey house with a tiny
front porch.
She frowned at it, then checked the
address again.
It was the right house…
But it wasn’t what she’d expected to
see, not with the vague memories she still held of this place. It was supposed
to be huge, palatial. Three-storeys high, a wonderland she and Julia had
roamed, going from room to ever larger room, conquering balconies that
overlooked the sea, snuggling in the white wicker swing.
Maybe it’s bigger on the inside. Catherine snorted as she stepped off the road
and approached carefully. It’s not a Tardis.
Walls spread out on both sides,
blocking the rest of the house and its grounds from sight. That, at least, felt
right.
She knocked on the door. A minute
later, Catherine slapped her forehead. Obviously, no one was going to answer
because no one was currently living there. She had the keys in her pocket.
Still, her school friends had once told her it was courtesy to knock anyway, to
let any spirits living in there know you were entering. Catherine wasn’t sure
if she believed in spirits, or if that rule applied to anything other than
hotel rooms. She dug in her pockets and pulled out the keys.
A soft “hello” still slipped off her
tongue as the door creaked open to a mid-sized room with sagging racks and
shelves. For a moment, she was transported back into the past, a seven-year-old
clinging to her mother’s hand as she visited a new school friend for the first
time. Julia had been sitting in the wicker swing, her twin, James, perched
somehow on its rounded back, both staring with identical large, brown eyes.
She blinked.
The swing now lay on the floor, the
sad, rusty chain dangling from the ceiling.
Catherine stepped in without taking
off her shoes or closing the door. Despite the still-bright daylight, the
interior of the house was rather dark. She fumbled along the wall until she
found the light switch. There was a faint fizzle and then nothing. With a sigh,
she pulled out her phone from her pocket and turned on the torch.
The room didn’t open out to a bigger
living room; it led instead to a circular stairway heading downwards.
Of course, you dummy.
She’d remembered the three floors
right, just not the direction. The house went downwards, not up.
Catherine hesitated at the top of
the stairs, looking down into the dark hole that gaped before her. She glanced
at her phone. It was already six in the evening. If the house was already this
dark now, she didn’t want to be inside when the sun set without a proper torch,
or working lights. She made her way back out of the house, turned off the phone
torch, then locked up.
“I’ll be back,” she said aloud,
though she wasn’t sure who she was speaking to—herself or the house. Maybe
both.
---
Check out our NutMag blog tomorrow for another excerpt!
Want to get your hands on a copy? PREORDER NOW for special rates and packages!
You Knew the Price by Susan Kaye Quinn
