Hellbound Hearts by Marie O'Regan, Paul Kane

did not reply.
    â€œInstructions from the headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half crushing the parchment. “You’re to return home at once. You’ve a train leaving in less than two hours, so you’d best be on your way.”
    Poison twisted in Colin’s gut. Expelled? How could it be? He’d done nothing.
    â€œBut, sir—” he began.
    Sidgwick must have read the reaction in his face, for the old man instantly waved a hand in the air as though to erase such thoughts.
    â€œIt’s not expulsion, boy. You’ve been summoned.”
    Reluctantly—as if by not doing so he might avert his fate—Colin took the note.
    â€œBut why?” he asked as he unfolded it and began to read.
    Sidgwick did not wait for him to discover it on his own. “It appears,” the professor said, “that your father has disappeared.”
    The Radford ancestral home rested on a hill in the city of Norwich, on the eastern coast of England. The seventeenth-century manse neither perched nor loomed upon its hill, and though there were many trees on the sprawling grounds, neither could it rightly be said to nestle there. Even to say the old house “stood” on that slope, with its distant view of the blue-gray waters of the English Channel, would have been a kindness. No, Colin had always thought of the house as resting there. After more than two hundred years providing hearth and shelter for the Radford family, its halls echoing with the shouts and laughter of Radford children.
    Now, as the carriage that had awaited him at the train station climbed the long drive up to the front door, Colin stared at the house and considered another interpretation for his insistence upon the lazy imagery that accompanied the house’s personification in his mind. Absent his father’s inhabitance, the house seemed a body without its soul, a still husk of a thing, awaiting burial. Whether his own arrival might breathe some new life into the stones and beams of the place he quite doubted, as he had no intention of remaining forever, or even for very long, once his father’s whereabouts had been ascertained.
    For all the golden, autumnal beauty he had cherished in Oxford,here in Norwich there was only gray. The sky, the stones, the prematurely bare trees, the pallor of its citizens, and the windchopped water of the Channel, all gray.

    The carriage came to a halt, and it was not until he had climbed down and retrieved his single case that he realized he had taken for granted the comfort afforded him by the familiar clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the road and the rattle of the conveyance itself. Without it, here on the hill, the only sound remaining was the wind, which, when it gusted through the hollows and eaves of the old house, moaned with the grief of a forlorn spirit or a heartbroken widow.
    Fortunately, Colin Radford did not believe in ghosts. Prior to university, he had lived all of his life in this house and he knew it as a lonely place, but not haunted.
    Still, he hesitated as the carriage driver snapped his reins and the carriage began to roll away. The sound that had been a comfort receded; soon not even its promise would remain and the wind would rule. Better to be inside. The timbers and stones still moaned, but sorrowful as they were—gray sounds in a gray house in a gray city—they were familiar sounds.
    As he started toward the door, it swung inward. Colin looked up, expecting Filgate or one of the other servants, but the silhouette that greeted him—stepping forward, bent and defeated—belonged to the nearest thing the estate did have to a ghost: his grandmother, Abigail.
    â€œTook your time about it, didn’t you?” she said.
    Trouble on the rails had delayed his arrival in London until after the last train had left for Norwich for the day, so he had been forced to spend the night in the