“It’s good,” he replied, believing me to be referring to the lemonade. “Just what the doctor ordered on a day like today.”

I corrected him. “No, I meant the folly.”

Morris shifted his feet slightly and lowered his head. “Not really for me to say, now, Mr. Merriman,” he said. “I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters.”

“Expert or not, you must have an opinion on it.”

“Well, frankly sir, I don’t much care for it. Never have.”

“You sound like you’ve been exposed to it on more than one occasion,” I said.

“It’s been a while,” he said, a little warily. “Mr. Ellis…”

He trailed off. I waited. I was anxious to question him further, but I did not want him to think I was engaged merely in idle prying.

“I heard,” I said at last, “that his wife disappeared, and that the poor man took his own life soon after.”

Morris took another drink of lemonade and looked at me closely. It was easy to underestimate such a man, I thought: His awkwardness, his weight, his struggles with his bicycle, all were rather comical at first appearance. But Constable Morris was a shrewd man, and his lack of progress through the ranks was due not to any deficiencies in his character or his work, but to his own desire to remain at Ebbingdon and tend to those in his care. Now it was my turn to shift beneath his gaze.

“That’s the story,” said Morris. “I was going to say that Mr. Ellis didn’t care much for the folly either. He wanted to demolish it, but then events took a turn for the worst and, well, you know the rest.”

But, of course, I didn’t. I knew only what I had heard through local gossip, and even that was meted out to me, as a new arrival, in carefully measured amounts. I told Morris that this was the case, and he smiled.

“Gossips with discretion,” he said. “I never heard the like.”

“I’m aware of how things stand in small villages,” I said. “I expect that I could leave grandchildren behind me who would still be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion.”

“You have any children then, sir?”

“No,” I replied, unable to keep a twinge of regret from my voice. My wife was not particularly maternal, and nature appeared to have concurred in that assessment.

“It’s an odd thing,” said Morris, giving no indication that he had noticed the alteration in my tone. “It’s been many years since children were heard in Norton Hall, not since before Mr. Gray’s time. Mr Ellis, he was childless too.”

It was not a topic I wished to pursue, but the mention of Ellis allowed me to steer the conversation into more interesting waters, and I jumped at the opportunity a little too eagerly.

“They say, well, they say that Mr. Ellis might have killed his wife.”

I immediately felt embarrassed at speaking so bluntly, but Morris did not appear to mind. In fact, he seemed to appreciate my honesty at broaching the subject so openly.

“There was that suspicion,” he admitted. “We questioned him, and two detectives came up from London to look into it, but it was as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth. We searched the property here, and all the fields and lands around, but we found nothing. There were rumors that she had a fancy man in Brighton, so we tracked him down and questioned him as well. He told us that he hadn’t seen her in weeks, for all the trust you can put in the word of a man who would sleep with another man’s wife. Eventually, we had to let the whole matter rest. There was no body, and without a body there was no crime. Then Mr. Ellis shot himself, and people came to their own conclusions about what might have happened to his wife.”

He drained the last of his lemonade, then handed me the empty glass.

“Thank you,” he said. “That was very refreshing.”

I told him that he was most welcome, and watched as he prepared to mount his bicycle once again.

“Constable?”

He paused in his preparations.

“What do you think happened to Mrs. Ellis?”

Morris shook his head. “I don’t know, sir, but I do know this. Susan Ellis doesn’t walk this earth anymore. She lies beneath it.”

And with that, he cycled away.

The following week I had business in London that could not be put off. I took the train down and spent most of a frustrating day discussing financial affairs, a frustration aggravated by a growing sense of disquiet, so that my time in London was spent with only a fraction of my attention concentrated on my finances and the remainder devoted to the nature of the evil that appeared to have tainted Norton Hall. Although not a superstitious man, I had grown increasingly uneasy about the history of our new home. The dreams had been coming to me with increasing regularity, accompanied always by the sound of talons tapping and jaws clicking and, sometimes, by the sight of Eleanor leaning over me when at last I awoke, her eyes bright and knowing, her cheekbones threatening to erupt like knife blades through the taut skin of her face. Gray’s account of his travels had also unaccountably gone missing, and when I questioned Eleanor about it I sensed that she was lying to me when she denied any knowledge of its whereabouts. Both the attic and the cellar were a jumble of upturned boxes and discarded papers, the mess belying my wife’s claims that she was merely “reorganizing” our surroundings.

Finally, there had been disturbing changes in the more intimate aspects of our married life. Such matters should remain between a man and his wife, but suffice it to say that our relations were of a greater frequency-and, at least on my wife’s part, of a greater ferocity-than we had ever before known. It had now reached a point where I rather feared turning off the light, and I had taken to staying away from our bedroom until late into the night in the hope that Eleanor might be sleeping when at last I took my place beside her.

But Eleanor was rarely asleep, and her appetites were fearful in their insatiability.

It was dark when I got home that evening, but I could still see the marks of the vehicle tracks upon the lawn, and a gaping hole where the folly had once been. The remains of the construct itself lay in a jumble of concrete and lead on the gravel by the house, left there by the men responsible for its demolition, the paucity of its foundations now clearly revealed, for the structure itself was merely a feint, a means of covering up the pit that lay beneath. A figure stood at the lip of the hole, a lamp in her hand. As she turned to me, she smiled, a ghastly smile filled, it seemed to me, with both pity and malice.

“Eleanor!” I cried. “No!”

But it was too late. She turned and began to descend a ladder, the light quickly disappearing from view. I dropped my briefcase and dashed across the lawn, my chest heaving and a growing panic clawing at my gut, until I reached the lip of the hole. Below me, Eleanor was scraping at the dirt with her bare hands, slowly revealing the curled, skeletal figure of a woman, the remains still covered in a tattered pink dress, and I knew instinctively that this was Mrs. Ellis and that Constable Morris was right in his suspicions. She had not run away from her husband. Rather, she had been interred here by him, after she had dug her way beneath the folly and he had killed her, then himself, in a fit of horror and remorse. Mrs. Ellis’s skull was slightly elongated around the nose and mouth, as though some dreadful transformation had been arrested by her sudden death.

By now, Eleanor’s scratching had revealed a small coffin, dark and ornamented. I started down the ladder after her as she took a crowbar and tore at the great lock that Gray had placed on the casket before he buried it. I was on the final steps of the ladder when a wrenching sound came and, with a cry of triumph, Eleanor threw open the lid. There, just as Gray had described, lay the curled-up remains topped by a strange, elongated skull. Already, the dust was rising and a thin red trail of vapor seeped from Eleanor’s mouth. Her body convulsed, as if it were being shaken by unseen hands. Her eyes bulged whitely in their sockets and her cheeks appeared to collapse into her open mouth, the lineaments of her skull clearly visible beneath the skin. The crowbar fell from her fingers and I grabbed it. Pushing her away, I raised the bar above my head and stood above the casket. A gray-black face with large, dark green eyes and hollows for ears looked up at me, and its sharp beaked jaws clicked as it rose toward me. Talons gripped the sides of its prison as it struggled to rise, and its body was a mockery of all that was beautiful in a woman.