"Thomas...."

The singsong voices rang out, long and playful, calling to him through the inky darkness.

"Come back Thomas, we miss you."

"Come play with us, we're lonely."

The steep stone steps led away from him, deep into the darkness below. They were down there; lost somewhere in the darkness they were waiting for him. He had to go to them.

The passage was narrow and there was not a rail to hold onto to aid his descent so Thomas braced his shoulder against the wall and began to make his way down. Feeling for each step with his wooden crutch he was moving faster than he should, growing careless and hurried with each step. Their keening calls ringing in his ears.

A desperate need was growing inside of him to find the source of those voices that called out to him. It felt strange and uncontrollable, they needed him, and Thomas felt powerless to resist their pleas.

The darkness surrounded him now. A brief look back behind him found the top of the stairs long out of sight, he'd walked down far deeper than should have been possible in any normal house. Surely the end of the staircase could not be much further down.

"Thomas please, we need you!"

"I know," Thomas called back, breathing hard at the exertion of making his awkward way down the steps. Hurrying down another two, three and still feeling no end to them. "I am coming. I'm..."

There was no next step. His words were cut of mid-sentence and replaced with a cry of fear as the crutch found only empty air and Thomas found himself falling. He threw out his hands, dropping the crutch away from him as he sought purchase on anything that might save him, but there was nothing there.

The rough walls of the tight passage were gone, there was nothing but thick, choking blackness all around. Thomas fell, swallowed by the dark and spinning through the air as he cried out in desperate fear for help, knowing no one would be there to save him

*

Thomas awoke with a shout. His heart was still pounding loudly in his ears and the bedsheets were stuck to the cold sweat that coated his body.

"Not again," he muttered, taking deep breaths to try and calm his body. He lay slowly back against the pillows, his heartbeat gradually slowing back to a normal rhythm. It was just a dream; a hideous, recurring dream that had plagued him for the past week, ever since they had visited the house.

Just a dream. At least that is what Thomas should have believed, but as his heartbeat slowed back to a regular rhythm, he could have sworn he heard laughter fading away into the distance. Those same voices that had called to him in his dream joyous at having caused him such terror as he slept. The same voices that he had heard inside of Marchwood Hall and that had almost really tempted him down those stairs he continued to revisit night after night.

That house had more stories to tell that those that lay on the surface, Thomas was certain. Perhaps the war had addled his brain because never would he usually have believed in ghost stories, but something lingered in that house; a darkness that had found and fixated upon him. Perhaps it saw him as a kindred spirit, or maybe an easy target.

Whatever the reality was he was even less than keen to physically return to that house than before, but he also somehow knew that those voices he continued to dream of were not about to leave him alone. If he really had to go back to that place he was going to go in armed with information, and if that failed him as Thomas was unfortunately afraid that it would, he would undertake his own mission in search of answers.

Thomas sat up higher in his bed, the room was still cast in darkness, but he was firmly awake and certain any chance of further sleep would elude him. It must be early morning, too early to rise perhaps but he could not just sit in bed and do nothing but wait for daylight to filter through the curtains.

He did not particularly wish to wake Nash at this hour. The man would never ask him questions personally about what had him up and about at such a time, but it would surely create talk amongst the other servants and Thomas did not wish to make himself the subject of downstairs gossip. Manoeuvring himself to the edge of the bed, Thomas placed his foot down on the floor and pulled himself slowly upwards holding tight to the bed post until he found his balance and could reach for the wooden crutch he kept propped at his bedside.

A deep red dressing gown lay draped over the foot board of the bed and Thomas wrapped it around his shoulders against the January cold. It would be sometime before the maid carried out her rounds to tend the fireplaces and Thomas shivered in the chill air. A part of him was tempted to return to bed, sleep or not it would be warm, but the cold air had the added bonus of making him feel more awake and alert. Now would be as good a time as any to start looking through the papers Mr Elsworth had messengered to London for him. A few good, uninterrupted hours to concentrate and he would be able to address the issues of the house with his mother with a much better grasp of exactly what was facing them. And maybe a better idea of why it seemed to haunt him so.

The further Thomas moved away from sleep the less spooked he felt by the whole experience. The dream really was nothing more than just a dream, what else could it be? It was likely nothing more than the mammoth task of organising the repairs on the house, not to mention what other secret disasters it could be hiding beneath the years of dust and crumbling paint work. Surely once plans were in place and the work had finally begun it would stop occupying so much space in Thomas' mind, and the dreams might leave him to sleep in peace.

Taking a seat at the dark wooden desk, Thomas switched on the small electric light above it and pulled out the packet of files wrapped in brown paper. They had paid yet another visit to the offices of Mr Geoffrey Elsworth before leaving the village to head home and made arrangements for another meeting mid-February when they could return to the house and begin work on some of the renovations. Thomas had also put in a request for the lawyer to dig up some more information for him on the previous occupants of the house. The little knowledge he had brought with him to their dinner meeting had been a start, but there had to be more and from the weight of the package he had not disappointed.

Hours passed as Thomas engrossed himself in reading the packet. Some of the pages were very old and discoloured, the small curling handwritten print faded and difficult to make out in places, but he could read most of it, or make an educated guess at what it was intended to say. A lot of it was fairly generic information, not at all what Thomas was really looking for. Deeds for land purchased expanding the estate, invoices for repairs or building work carried out. Interesting to learn more about how the estate was formed into the place that he had inherited but it was telling him little about the mystery of exactly how it had come to be in his hands in the first place.

His father didn't have much in the way of family genealogy records. Medical texts, books on human anatomy in abundance but a family tree? Thomas had no such luck when searching his Father's study for anything that might give him a clue. It was a promising discovery when at last Thomas turned aside yet another page and found a death certificate laying beneath it. Thomas had requested that the old village lawyer send him absolutely anything remotely related to the house and its former occupants, he even offered to pay him above the mans usual consultation fee for the trouble of digging up whatever he could find. This record of death was obviously the most relevant information he had been able to access.

He slid aside the certificate to reveal yet another, in fact there were numerous dating further and further back to many years before the war. Even for an old house there seemed to have seen an alarming number of deaths within its walls. Those that Mr Elsworth had told them about seemed to barely scratch the surface of the full story.

Shaking his head Thomas ordered the certificates by the date of death, from the most recent – being this distant uncle of his father's – to the oldest, and as he started to sort through the macabre record a pattern of sorts began to emerge. It was unclear to begin with but as each piece of paper was set in its place the formula of what he was seeing looked more and more familiar until he could almost predict what the next certificate would read. It was disconcerting and didn't do anything to alleviate his fears that something was wrong with the house, and if anything, it created yet more questions than it answered.

Light had started to filter in through the heavy drawn curtains and still Thomas poured over the pile of papers that now littered both the top of the desk and the floor surrounding it. So engrossed was he in trying to pull together some threads of this mystery he had been handed that he hadn't realised how much time had passed since he'd been awoken by that awful dream. The last three death certificates lay beneath his hands, the oldest and most faded of them all and Thomas poured over the details that were written on them.

Me Elsworth had already told them about these three deaths, the two children and their au pair. That tragic story of the murdered children and the woman who had killed them and then died herself before she could be brought to justice, but something about that story wasn't correct. The dates on the death certificates didn't makes sense. If the au pair had killed the children, then how on earth had she died a full two days before the both of them?