No; he must sit tight. Play dumb, the way the enemy had come to expect him to be.
The time would come for action.
At 3.15 a.m. on Christmas morning the Yattering opened hostilities by throwing Amanda out of bed. A paltry performance at best, but it had the intended effect. Sleepily rubbing her bruised head, she climbed back into bed, only to have the bed buck and shake and fling her off again like an unbroken colt.
The noise woke the rest of the house. Gina was first in her sister’s room.
‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s somebody under the bed.’
‘What?’
Gina picked up a paperweight from the dresser and demanded the assailant come out. The Yattering, invisible, sat on the window seat and made obscene gestures at the women, tying knots in its genitalia.
Gina peered under the bed. The Yattering was clinging to the light fixture now, persuading it to swing backwards and forwards, making the room reel.
‘There’s nothing there —‘
‘There is.’
Amanda knew. Oh yes, she knew.
‘There’s something here, Gina,’ she said. ‘Something in the room with us, I’m sure of it.’
‘No.’ Gina was absolute. ‘It’s empty.’
Amanda was searching behind the wardrobe when Polo came in.
‘What’s all the din?’
‘There’s something in the house Daddy. I was thrown out of bed.’
Jack looked at the crumpled sheets, the dislodged mattress, then at Amanda. This was the first test: he must lie as casually as possible.
‘Looks like you’ve been having nightmares, beauty,’ he said, affecting an innocent smile.
‘There was something under the bed,’ Amanda insisted.
‘There’s nobody here now.’
‘But I felt it.’
‘Well, I’ll check the rest of the house,’ he offered, without enthusiasm for the task. ‘You two stay here, just in case.’
As Polo left the room, the Yattering rocked the light a little more.
‘Subsidence,’ said Gina.
It was cold downstairs, and Polo could have done without padding around barefoot on the kitchen tiles, but he was quietly satisfied that the battle had been joined in such a petty manner. He’d half-feared that the enemy would turn savage with such tender victims at hand. But no: he’d judged the mind of the creature quite accurately. It was one of the lower orders. Powerful, but slow. Capable of being inveigled beyond the limits of its control. Carefully does it, he told himself, carefully does
it.
He traipsed through the entire house, dutifully opening cupboards and peering behind the furniture, then returned to his daughters, who were sitting at the top of the stairs. Amanda looked small and pale, not the twenty-two-year-old woman she was, but a child again.
‘Nothing doing,’ he told her with a smile. ‘It’s Christmas morning and all through the house —‘
Gina finished the rhyme.
‘Nothing is stirring; not even a mouse.’
‘Not even a mouse, beauty.’
At that moment the Yattering took its cue to fling a vase off the lounge mantelpiece.
Even Jack jumped.
‘Shit,’ he said. He needed some sleep, but quite clearly the Yattering had no intention of letting them alone just yet.
‘Che sera, sera,’ he murmured, scooping up the pieces of the Chinese vase, and putting them in a piece of newspaper. ‘The house is sinking a little on the left side, you know,’ he said more loudly. ‘It has been for years.’
‘Subsidence,’ said Amanda with quiet certainty, ‘would not throw me out of my bed.’
Gina said nothing. The options were limited. The alternatives unattractive.
‘Well, maybe it was Santa Claus,’ said Polo, attempting levity.
He parcelled up the pieces of the vase and wandered through into the kitchen, certain that he was being shadowed every step of the way. ‘What else can it be?’ He threw the question over his shoulder as he stuffed the newspaper into the waste bin. ‘The only other explanation—’ here he became almost elated by his skimming so close to the truth, ‘the only other possible explanation is too preposterous for words.’
It was an exquisite irony, denying the existence of the invisible world in the full knowledge that even now it breathed vengefully down his neck.
‘You mean poltergeists?’ said Gina.
‘I mean anything that goes bang in the night. But, we’re grown-up people aren’t we? We don’t believe in Bogeymen.’