Ghost Song by Sarah Rayne

the house creaking tonight. It was someone walking about. Yes, there it went again. Someone had walked along the short corridor outside her room and was going downstairs. There was the creak of the fourth stair which was always quite loud if you did not remember to skip over it, and now she could hear a door being opened and closed. She sat up in bed, shivering a bit in the cool air. Who was walking round downstairs? The clock had moved to half past two, which was surely very late for Mother or Grandfather to be around. It was to be hoped neither of them was ill. Or might it be a burglar? This was a very scary idea indeed; Shona did not want to stay in her room on her own in case the burglar came in. She would get up and creep along the passage to her mother’s bedroom, but she would be very quiet about it and if she saw a burglar she would run as fast as she could and once in Mother’s room they would bolt the door and telephone the police from the phone by the bed.
    She put on her dark blue dressing gown which would look like part of the shadows and went cautiously out. But when she got to the head of the staircase she saw lights downstairs. Burglars did not put lights on: they had torches and moved around in the dark. Shona crept part way down the stairs until she reached the half-landing where she could look down into the hall. She sank down onto the stairs and peered through the banisters.
    This was becoming odder and odder. The little door in a corner of the hall—the door to the cellar that was hardly ever opened—was propped wide by a chair. It was not the main lights that were on, but the two table lamps. In the dim glow from them she could see that the door leading through to the kitchen was propped open by another chair. Shona stayed where she was and waited to see what happened.
    What happened was that Mother, wearing her gardening things, came in from the kitchen—she must have been outside because there was a spattering of rain across her shoulders—Shona could see the little drops in the lamplight. She was trundling a large wheel-barrow piled with bricks—the bricks and the barrow were leaving a trail of dust all over the nice oak floor—Edna Cheesewright was not going to like that when she came in on Wednesday!—but Mother did not seem to care about the brick dust or even notice it. She stopped just inside the propped-open door, and a man came up from the cellar below. At first Shona shrank back in panic because it was a burglar after all—it was certainly a stranger—and then she saw with a shock that the man was wearing Grandfather’s old tweed jacket and the chewed-up hat he kept for bad weather. Mother always said the jacket and the hat were a disgrace and Father should think shame to be seen in them and she would put them on a bonfire one of these days.
    It was Grandfather, it really was , but his eyes were like little black pits and his expression was so dour and grim that Shona began to be frightened in a different way. It was as if something else had put on the old jacket and the battered hat and was pretending to be her grandfather, like when the wolf dressed up in frilly nightclothes and lay in wait for Red Riding Hood. Would Grandfather suddenly snarl and pounce and slaver, as the wolf had done in the woodland cottage?
    But he seemed intent on helping her mother get the wheelbarrow with its heap of bricks down the steps inside the door. Shona could not see them but she could hear the wheelbarrow bumping and scraping as it went down. She heard her mother say, ‘The last load, I think,’ and her grandfather reply, ‘Yes, we’ve enough now, but it’s taken longer than I expected.’
    What had taken longer than expected? What was this about? Greatly daring, Shona crept down the stairs, and crossed the hall.
    A dull light came up from the cellar and, as she peeped down, Shona saw they had lit the storm-lanterns that were kept for power