The Haunt Read Online Free

had shouted, panicking for Nina who didn’t have a biscuit-tin to protect her. The Merc disappeared round a bend.
    Charlie was no hero but he knew what he must do. If he didn’t do it he would have to answer to himself ever afterwards and the answer would be a big minus. He looked for a weapon to use in Nina’s defence and his own, if need be. All he carried in the car in the way of tools was a jack. He had never changed a wheel in his life, the jack was rusted solid. There was nothing else to hand to ward off a pit-bull.
    He was running along the track when Nina reappeared, trailing her bag through dandelions and cow-parsley in an idle way unlike her.
    ‘Are you all right?’ cried Charlie.
    ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
    ‘What about the dog?’
    ‘Dog?’
    ‘In the car.’
    ‘Car?’
    ‘It just went along the drive, there was a dog—’
    ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’
    ‘A jack.’
    ‘Have we got a puncture?’
    ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Charlie took her arm to hurry her.
    She hung back, brushing a head of ragwort with her fingertips. ‘I saw no car.’
    ‘It passed you, a two-tone Merc, with a dog driving.’
    ‘You’re crazy.’ She dusted pollen off her fingers. ‘I think I am too. We’re both crazy.’
    ‘I shan’t feel happy until we’re away from this place.’
    ‘I shan’t feel happy when we are.’
    ‘Nina, please.’
    ‘I’ve fallen in love,’ she said. ‘Deeply, passionately, hopelessly. But it needn’t be hopeless.’
    ‘Of course it needn’t.’ Charlie tried to pull her along. ‘We’ll talk about it over lunch.’
    She shook off his hand. ‘I can do something about it. I must, or I shall never be happy again.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.’
    ‘Who are you talking about?’
    ‘The Rottweiler.’ Out of patience, Charlie seized both her elbows and ran her through the gate.
    It seemed she had fallen in love with a house: at the end of the drive, she said, was a ‘heavenly, darling place, out of a dream, set among cedars of Lebanon and daisied lawns’– she actually said the lawns were daisied – overlooking a pool and old statues representing the rape of the Sabines. They were covered in lichen and had no heads.
    ‘How do you know they were Sabines if they had no heads?’
    You didn’t need faces to know what was going on, she said coldly. She had wanted Charlie to go back with her to look at them. He flatly refused. ‘I’m not going near that dog, it’s a killer.’
    ‘There is no dog. You went to sleep and dreamed it.’
    No use arguing at that juncture. He had hauled her into the car and driven away without waiting to belt up. She twisted in her seat to look back. ‘I intend to have that house.’
    ‘We can’t afford it.’
    ‘I’ll marry into it.’
    *
    In fact that was what she had done, and Charlie, married to her for ten years, could well imagine how she had done it, although he was not privy to the details. When she had ascertained that Crawford, the owner of the house, was a widower, she divorced Charlie. He prophesied disaster if she wed the house and not the man. She said real estate was an investment. She was cool and businesslike. Charlie supposed that emanated from her prospective bridegroom whom she referred to succinctly as ‘J.T.’ Charlie was not asked to the wedding, but a woman who was told him that J.T. reminded her of Oscar Wilde. It was, she said, a passing resemblance and did not survive conversation with him.
    Searching now for Mellilot, Charlie took several wrong turnings before he found the lane which led to what had become Nina’s drive. He wouldn’t have recognised it wereit not for the yews and beeches. Those she could not change. But the wild look was gone – the yellow ragwort and purple loosestrife; the surface had been Tarmacadamed, the chiaroscuro was just black shadow. ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley’ – and tidied it up.
    He turned his car in at the gate and drove on. No need