The Woman in Black

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

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 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 soldiers 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.

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.