Night One: The Wall of Rules

The taxi would not go past the gate, so Wren Calloway walked the last quarter mile with her bag bumping against her hip and the Bellwether House growing out of the fog ahead of her like something that had been waiting a long time to be looked at.

It had been built in 1891. The letter from the Bellwether Trust had said so, in the same flat tone it used for the salary and the start date. Five nights of residency for the invited guests. One Caretaker, resident for the duration. Report to the Warden on arrival.

The woman who opened the door was small, grey, and dressed as if the century had not moved. "You are the Caretaker," she said. It was not a question. "I am Mrs. Ilse Varga. I am the Warden of this House, and I have been the Warden for thirty-one years. You will call me Mrs. Varga or the Warden, whichever you can remember when you are frightened."

"Wren," Wren said. "Calloway."

"Yes. Come in. Wipe your feet. The Ground Floor is the only part of the House that forgives mud."

The hall was high and brown and smelled of beeswax and something underneath the beeswax, something cold. On the wall beside the door hung a slate the size of a tea tray, with a stub of chalk on a string. Beside the slate, framed under glass, was a sheet of paper that had been printed on a press that no longer existed.

"The Rules of the House," Mrs. Varga said. "Read them now. You will hear them again tonight, in front of the guests, and you will not be excused from knowing them because you only arrived this afternoon."

Wren read.

Rule One. Do not leave the House between dusk and dawn.

Rule Two. Keep the Tally. At midnight, make one mark on the slate for each guest who is still present in the House. Never make a mark for anyone else.

Rule Three. Do not answer a knock from the Cellar.

Rule Four. During the Hour of Silence, no one speaks and no one opens a door.

Rule Five. The warden in the Gallery must never be left uncovered after dark.

Rule Six. If you hear a guest who is not in the House, do not reply.

Rule Seven. The Caretaker does not read the previous Caretaker's journal.

"The Hour of Silence," Mrs. Varga said, before Wren could ask, "runs from one in the morning until two. You will know it by the clock in the hall, which has never once been wrong. The Tally is the slate. The slate is yours now. That is what the Caretaker is for."

She took a ring of keys from her own belt and held it out. "Eleven keys. Brass for the Ground Floor rooms. Iron for the Gallery. The long silver one is the Attic. The black one is the Cellar, and you will carry it and you will not use it. I am giving these to you because you are hired, and the Caretaker holds the keys. When you leave, you give them back to me."

The ring was heavier than it looked. Wren put it in her coat pocket and felt it pull the coat crooked.

"Rule Seven," she said. "The previous Caretaker. Is he..."

"Edmund Hale," Mrs. Varga said. "He was the Caretaker from 1990 until 1997. In the autumn of 1997 he walked up the stairs on the fourth night of a residency and did not come down. That was twenty-seven years ago. His journal was never found. If it had been found, Rule Seven would not need to exist." She turned away. "The guests are in the drawing room. Come and be looked at."

There were eight of them, and Wren made herself learn them the way she had once learned the names of difficult children on the first day of a school year.

Howard Dunne stood by the fire with his hand on the small of his wife's back. "Mireille," he said, introducing her, "my wife. She's the one who found the invitation. I'm only here to carry the cases." Mireille Dunne was tall and pale and laughed at this without smiling, and her husband's hand did not leave her back the whole time Wren was in the room.

Agatha Pell sat in the deep chair nearest the lamp with her knitting in her lap and her son beside her on a hard stool, as if he had been placed there. "Simon," Agatha said. "My son. He's thirty-four and he still lets his mother drag him to haunted houses." Simon Pell, who was broad and quiet and had his mother's eyebrows, said that he had not been dragged, and Agatha patted his knee as though he had.

"And this is Nora," said a red-haired woman with a camera round her neck, and then, "no, wait, sorry, I'm Nora. Nora Finch. That's my brother, Callum. Callum Finch. He's the one who reads the fine print." Callum Finch, lanky and freckled and plainly her younger brother, raised a hand and did not look up from the folded sheet of Trust paperwork in his lap.

"And I am also Nora," said a small woman with cropped grey hair, from the window seat. "Nora Fitch. With a T. I taught primary school for thirty years and I am used to being confused with other people. Miss Finch takes photographs. I do not." She said it kindly. Nora Finch grinned at her. They could not have looked less alike, and Wren fixed that in her mind: Finch, red, camera; Fitch, grey, window.

The last guest did not rise. He was a thin man of sixty with a doctor's bag at his feet and a trustee's pin on his lapel. "Dr. Anselm Roux," he said. "I sit on the Bellwether Trust. I am here as a guest, Miss Calloway, and I am not the Warden, whatever the pin suggests. Mrs. Varga is the Warden. Mrs. Varga leads the Trust. I merely vote the way she tells me."

"He flatters me," said Mrs. Varga, who did not look flattered.

"Is the Loft open?" Callum asked, still reading. "The paperwork says the Loft is closed to guests."

"We call it the Attic now," Mrs. Varga said. "The old staff called it the Loft. It is closed to guests. That is not a Rule. It is only sense." She moved to the hearth and waited until the room was quiet.

"The House has four parts, and four degrees of danger, and you will learn them in order," she said. "The Ground Floor, where we are standing, is the first degree. Nothing in the first degree has ever hurt anyone who followed the Rules. The Gallery, up the main stair, is the second degree. The Attic, above the Gallery, is the third degree. The Cellar, under everything, is the fourth degree, and nobody goes to the fourth degree. Not the guests, not the Caretaker, not the Warden. If you remember nothing else, remember that the danger goes up as you go away from this hall in either direction, and that down is worse than up."

"Four degrees, seven Rules, five nights," said Nora Finch, lifting her camera. "I'm going to need a chart."

"You will need a clock," said Mrs. Varga.

She recited the Rules then, all seven, in the same words that hung on the wall, and when she said Rule Five Wren saw Dr. Roux glance toward the stairs. When she said Rule Six, Mireille Dunne's hand found her husband's.

Dinner was cold meat and bread. At eleven Mrs. Varga went up to the Gallery alone and came back down and said, "The warden is covered." At a quarter to midnight she stood Wren in front of the slate.

"Count them," she said. "Not me. Not you. The guests."

Wren counted. Howard and Mireille, Agatha and Simon, Nora Finch and Callum, Nora Fitch, Dr. Roux. "Eight."

"Then make eight marks, and not one more."

The chalk squeaked. Eight white strokes on the black slate. Wren stepped back and looked at them and felt, absurdly, that she had signed something.

"Good," said Mrs. Varga. "Now go to bed, and lock your door, and if you hear anything at all before two o'clock, lie still and let it be heard by someone else."

Wren did not sleep. At twenty past one, with the hall clock ticking through the Hour of Silence beneath her floor, she heard it: three knocks, slow, from somewhere far down and to the left. The Cellar. Rule Three. She lay with her hand on the keyring in her coat and counted her own breathing until the knocks stopped, and then, because she was the Caretaker and could not help it, she lay awake and wondered where Edmund Hale had gone on the fourth night in 1997, and why no one in twenty-seven years had found so much as a page of what he had written down.