The Woman in Black Read online

  The Woman in Black: Angel of Death

  Martyn Waites

  Martyn Waites was born and raised in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has written nine novels under his own name and five under the name Tania Carver alongside his wife, Linda. He has been nominated for every major British crime fiction award and is an international bestseller.

  www.martynwaites.com

  Susan Hill

  Originally published in 1983, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black has sold over a half a million copies. As a play, it has been showing to packed theaters around the world since 1989, and was made into a successful feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe in 2012. She is married with two adult daughters and lives in North Norfolk.

  www.susan-hill.com

  Also by Martyn Waites

  Mary’s Prayer

  Little Triggers

  Candleland

  Born Under Punches

  The White Room

  The Mercy Seat

  Bone Machine

  White Riot

  Speak No Evil

  By Martyn Waites writing as Tania Carver

  (with Linda Waites)

  The Surrogate

  The Creeper

  Cage of Bones

  The Black Road

  The Doll’s House

  Also by Susan Hill

  The Woman in Black

  The Mist in the Mirror

  The Small Hand

  Dolly

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2014

  Copyright © 2013 by Martyn Waites

  Based on an original idea by Susan Hill and an original script by Jon Croker

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Arrow Books in association with Hammer Random House, London, in 2013.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-6998-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-6999-8

  Motion Picture © Angelfish Films Limited 2014.

  Movie Artwork © 2014 Relativity Media.

  All Rights Reserved.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The House

  The Boy

  Hope in Their Eyes

  Safer in the Country

  Out of London

  Edward

  Transit

  The Empty Village

  The Old Man

  Nine Lives Causeway

  Eel Marsh House

  In the Nursery

  The Night

  Prayers

  The Outhouse

  The Cherub

  Creak … Crack …

  The Next Day

  Tom

  The Poker

  Hide-and-Seek

  A Visitor

  Psychic Powers

  Harry

  The Face Beneath the Floorboards

  Fire in the Sky

  Another Presence

  Discovery

  Aftermath

  The Angel of Death

  Spilt Milk

  Faith and Belief

  Faith and Action

  Ghosts of the Past

  The Key

  Survivors

  Edward’s Conversation

  No Goodbyes

  HJ

  James

  Hunt at Night …

  She Gets Inside Your Head …

  Never Go Back …

  Nathaniel

  Night Falls

  The Raid

  Tears in the Dark

  Mother and Child

  A Good Girl

  Evacuees

  The Phantom Airfield

  Friends Again?

  In the Bunker

  The Circle

  Pandemonium

  The Shadow of a Child

  The Fire Basket

  This Is Your Fault …

  Back to the Old House

  The House Diseased

  The Nursery Regained

  Demons of the Mind

  Jennet Triumphant

  The Ghost Choir

  The Fall

  Many Happy Returns

  The House

  Eel Marsh House. Dank, dilapidated, unloved and unlived in.

  It has stood alone on Eel Marsh Island for the best part of a century. Surrounded by swirling, damp mist that paints it darker and greyer, and by clammy, cold drizzle that renders it indistinct, it looms out of the fog. Empty. But not silent.

  The water swirls and susurrates around the island the house has been built on. It laps the edges of the marsh that surrounds it. It permeates through the softer ground, turning it to quicksand, ready to claim the lives of travellers who have strayed, pull them under and close above them once more, swallow them whole, leave the surface undisturbed, as if no one has ever been there. Beneath the surface, the water churns with the eels’ constant slithering and writhing; snakes with angry faces, they feed on whatever living matter makes its way down to them.

  The house has been undisturbed for decades. An ancient pile of heavy stone, it has weathered but endured, crumbling but still upright. But there is movement on the island, in the house. Recent. Unwelcome.

  The front door is pushed open. It throws light on darkness, causes dust to rise, small animals to scurry for the shadows. Paintings have been taken from walls, old photographs, documents, papers, ornaments have all been thrown in boxes, stored away.

  In their place different things come into the house. Unfamiliar things. Alien things. Heavy, black curtains have been put up at the windows, creating a new world within. Wrought-iron beds have been carried up the stairs, arranged in the bedrooms and mattresses placed on top. The house is to have new occupants.

  Now, thick black cable snakes through the house, taking on twisted, serpentine shapes, a dark mirror of the eels writhing in the water below and around it. The one cable connects to a generator that casts a hum down the halls and through the rooms. Gas masks hang from hooks, their blank, round-eyed stares the first welcome newcomers will receive.

  The overgrown grounds outside the house have also been cleared. Slowly, a garden, long since subsumed by wilderness, is beginning to emerge. And with it the rest of the island. Even the stones in the graveyard have had ivy and moss cleared from them, making their names legible once more.

  The house is ready.

  The house is waiting.

  The Boy

  The British Spitfire banked high then turned, and, engines screeching, swooped down low over the platoon of soldiers, its two front-mounted machine guns belching rapid-fire death.

  The soldiers screamed, ‘Achtung! Schnell! Heil Hitler!’ They were dressed in the khaki uniforms of English infantrymen, but they spoke with German comic-strip voices. They fell on to their backs and sides, lying heavy and unmoving, legs in the air, arms still holding rifles, still raised.

  The Spitfire banked upwards once more and came round again, screaming as it did so. The pilot spoke into his communicator in smooth, calm RAF tones, his valedictory speech overlaid by static. The plane was poised, ready to swoop down again, to kill the few German sol
diers who remained standing. The throttle was open, the screaming of the engines increased—

  The plane stopped. Completely still. It hovered in mid-air.

  The boy holding it put his head up, cocked on one side, listening.

  He had heard something. A voice. Calling for him. And only him.

  He turned and walked towards the window, drawn to the voice. His game forgotten, he was oblivious to the tin soldiers on the floor. His feet came down, crushing them, snapping them, bending them out of shape.

  He was playing in an upstairs room of what was left of a bomb-damaged house. His own house was on the other side of the street, the only street in the area still left standing. All the rest had been demolished by German bombs.

  The voice was insistent, drawing him on. He reached the window, stopped before the broken glass. He leaned forward, pushing his head slowly through the empty square, his neck close to the razored edges.

  A dark silhouette of a woman stood in a doorway on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘Edward! Edward!’

  It was His mother.

  ‘Get here, now. Quick …’

  The boy blinked behind his thick glasses. He could hear the noise of a plane, not the plane from his previous game, but a real one. He listened again. A whole squadron of planes approaching, and, above that, the depressingly familiar whine of the air-raid siren.

  He looked down at the doorway once more. His mother was gesturing to him, telling him to hurry, get out of the building, get down to the shelter. She was dressed in her black wool coat, her weddings and funerals and church coat, the one she always wore in an air raid.

  ‘My only good coat,’ he had heard her say often. ‘They’ll have to bury me in this.’

  The boy looked at the toy plane, still in his hand, then up at the sky. Real planes were approaching, none of them Spitfires. He let the plane fall to the floor, and a small cloud of dust rose from the bare floorboards as it landed. He turned away from the window, anxious now, ready to run downstairs.

  Time stopped, held its breath, then sped up, and the boy heard the end of the world in his head as he was thrown backwards across the shaking floor, the remaining glass in the windows shattering, flying after him.

  When Edward opened his eyes he thought he must be in Heaven.

  He blinked. Sat up. No. He was still in the upstairs room, still where he had fallen. He checked himself over, found that he could still move. His body hurt, but he didn’t seem to have broken anything. He let out a small, rough laugh. He was alive. He had survived.

  His face was itchy and wet, stinging. He rubbed it. It felt like sandpaper, rough and sore. He took his hand away, studied it. Blood. He had been cut by flying glass.

  He ran over to what was left of the window, ready to call out, to give his mother the good news, tell her not to worry.

  But his mother wasn’t there.

  There was just a pile of rubble where the house had been, out of which was poking the hem of a black coat.

  Edward stared, unable to move, as he began to understand what had happened. Tears formed in his eyes, started to roll down his cheeks, mixing with the blood.

  His mother was gone. Dead.

  Grief welled up inside him then, bubbling, dark and toxic. He screamed and sobbed and screamed some more, screaming his pain at the world as if he would never stop.

  Hope in Their Eyes

  Eve Parkins knew there were worse things to fear than the dark. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed it. Or that she ever would.

  The Tube station was becoming more familiar to her than her own bedroom. It had been the same routine for over a month now. Lying shivering on the platform, night after night, wrapped up in blankets and huddled next to complete strangers on the flagged floor and against the cold porcelain wall tiles, like shrouded, slabbed corpses in a mortuary. Each one of them praying that tonight would be the night that the Luftwaffe would miss, that the anti-aircraft guns would get lucky, that the RAF had managed some daytime bombing of their own over the Channel to deplete the German numbers.

  That no one would die, at least not any of them. That there would still be a city left for them in the morning.

  She looked along the row of people. All of life was here, she thought, on the platform with her. Young, old, fat, thin, and everything in between. All different, yet all the same, their faces displaying the same tiredness, the same desolation.

  Some were attempting to sing. A few choruses of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ to keep morale up. After the first chorus most of the voices petered out.

  ‘I’ll never forget the people I met …’

  A lone voice sang on, wavering, echoing round the cold walls and away down the tunnel.

  ‘Braving those angry skies …’

  Others joined in once more, their voices stirring, trying to rise. But it still sounded hollow, haunted.

  ‘I remember well as the shadows fell, the light of hope in their eyes …’

  The voices died away. No one moved.

  The drone of engines could be heard from outside, from above. Everyone knew what that meant. The staccato bursts of anti-aircraft fire that answered the drone just confirmed it.

  The bombers were back.

  There was another whine, different to the engine drone. Then another. And another.

  Everyone held their breath. The oil lamps strung along the walls illuminated trembling bodies, fearful eyes.

  Then the bombs hit. The walls shuddered and shivered. Plaster and dust fell. People flinched, jumped. A few let out moans and screams, then tried to regain control of themselves. It didn’t do to break down in front of others.

  Eve closed her eyes, tried to take herself somewhere else, somewhere warm and sunny and safe.

  Another explosion. Another drizzle of dust and plaster.

  Eve opened her eyes once more. It was no good. She was here. Now. The bombs wouldn’t go away by wishing them to, so she just had to deal with the situation.

  She looked across the row of faces, her gaze settling on a little boy. He was dressed in his pyjamas, his hair sticking out at all angles. In his hands he clutched a threadbare teddy, clinging to it like his life depended on it. With every distant explosion his eyes darted about in terror, another tear threatening to fall from them.

  Eve felt something inside her break and moved to sit beside him. She smiled. It was a warm smile and it illuminated her face, giving it a certain radiance, even in the oil-lit darkness.

  ‘What’s his name?’ she asked, looking down at the teddy.

  The boy stared at her, barely able to speak. ‘Bear,’ he said eventually, his voice as small and threadbare as his toy.

  ‘And are you looking after him?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘So will you make sure he doesn’t get scared?’

  The boy thought for a moment, looked at his bear, then back at Eve. He nodded again.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Eve. ‘We need brave boys like you.’

  Her smile deepened, fixed on him, and the boy gradually smiled back. Safe now, reassured.

  ‘How do you do it?’

  A woman was huddled against the wall in a blanket alongside her. She was older than Eve, only by a few years, but the worry and exhaustion in her features made her seem even older still. Eve turned towards her, frowning slightly.

  ‘Night after night of this,’ said the woman, ‘and you’re still smiling …’

  Before answering, Eve glanced down the tunnel once more. It was dark, empty, seemingly endless.

  ‘You’ve got to, haven’t you?’ she said, her voice as cheerful as she could make it.

  The woman didn’t seem so sure. It looked like the fatigue and strain would get her before the bombs did. She frowned at Eve, clearly not believing her words.

  Under the woman’s gaze, Eve’s smile faltered and she looked away, down into the tunnel once more.

  The next morning was dull and grey, depressing and wintery, as Eve emerged from the Tub
e station brushing the dust from her clothes. She had survived another night.

  She looked round. The city was even more shattered and scarred than the night before. The bombed-out remains of shops, pubs and houses were everywhere. A broken mannequin dangled from a shattered shop window, swaying like a hanged looter. All that remained of the floor above was a wall with an intact fireplace, but no floor, no hearth. Next to it was a cupboard, the door creaking in the breeze, a stack of Cornishware bowls teeter-tottering on the shelf. They fell, smashing, adding to the rubble. Someone’s family photographs blew down the street; smiling, happy children borne away, memories, markers of a life, lost for ever.

  Eve was alive. But the city seemed dead.

  She checked her watch as she hurried home. She had to pack. She was leaving.

  Safer in the Country

  Eve was only slightly out of breath as, smartly dressed and suitcase in hand, she walked into King’s Cross station. She needed to make a fresh start, she thought. And today would be the day to do it. She was leaving the city. Going somewhere safe.

  Soot covered the ceiling glass inside the station, as steam from the trains drifted above their heads. The place was alive with comings and goings, the clang and clatter of the trains and the passengers. Joyful reunions and tearful goodbyes were all around her. The air was filled with a frantic, nervous energy as hope and despair turned routine departures and arrivals into matters of life and death.

  Posters covered all the walls of the station. Several variations of ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ were dotted about, as were invocations to ‘Dig for Victory’. A stern, red-faced and angry-looking man dressed in full John Bull regalia standing in front of a line of infantrymen pointed an accusing finger at all who walked past, and asked, ‘WHO’S ABSENT? Is it YOU?’

  The poster made Eve notice the soldiers all the more. The young, fresh-faced, optimistic ones, eager to engage the Hun in battle, contrasted with the wounded, broken men who were returning. Heads were turned, eyes downcast as they made their way through the concourse. The young soldiers making a point of not looking at the returnees, ignoring them in case their bad luck turned into an airborne infection.