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of trouble to keep it away from prying eyes. And now we’d unburied it, opened its blackened pages, and read the words hidden and silent for so long. I had the strong feeling of meddling with something we shouldn’t.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. The fire flared up, casting tall wavering shadows on the walls and ceiling, and the flames reflected back at me from the window panes and the polished surface of the furniture, until it seemed as if Wicker House itself were burning.
    ‘Oh come oooooooooon ,’ begged June in an exaggerated tone of pleading. ‘I thought you said you weren’t superstitious?’
    I had said that. And it did seem stupid to be afraid of a few words on a bit of charred paper. It wasn’t like I was being asked to drink eye of newt. I looked around the ring of faces, their glittering eyes all urging me on, and that strange, tense feeling welled up inside me again. It felt like some creature inside me trying to get out, trying to escape.
    ‘Scared?’ Prue said, and her voice was taunting. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to be the prissy cry-baby from London either. The trapped thing rose inside me, suffocating me. There was no way out.
    ‘Oh … OK,’ I said. My voice sounded strange and hard in my ears and my face was hot.
    ‘Hooray!’ said June. ‘I think we should join hands; circle of power and all that, you know.’ We knelt on the hearth and joined hands in the flickering light of the fire. I was opposite Prue, her hair sticking up and tousled around her face. In the dim, shifting light she looked positively witchy, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a crack of thunder or the screech of an owl break across the quiet night.
    ‘OK, can everyone see the page?’ June asked. Everyone nodded.
    ‘We’re to hold in our minds the image of our beloved and say the incantation. Ready?’
    I wasn’t intending to think of anyone in particular. But as the strange, rolling words bubbled from my mouth an image came into my mind involuntarily. It was the face of Seth Waters.
    After we all finished speaking there was a deep silence, broken only by the moan of the wind outside the window and the shift and crack of the logs in the grate. We loosed our sticky hands, and June bent and picked up the book.
    ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said, and shut it with a clap. Something shaped like a leaf fluttered out and we all bent down simultaneously to pick it up.
    It wasn’t a leaf. It was a hand – the skin of the palm and fingers, dried and pressed flat between the pages of the book like a cruel, misshapen flower.
    ‘Oh yuck, yuck!’ shrieked June and kicked it violently towards the fire in a sickened panic. She caught a log with the toe of her boot and the whole mass shifted and crashed into the centre of the grate with a shower of sparks that flew out into the room. We beat them out with our hands and feet – and when the flames subsided the thing, whatever it was, had gone.
    There was silence for a second then Prue vomited loudly into the coal scuttle, and the lights came on with a shocking suddenness.
    I felt very glad not to be sleeping alone that night. The house creaked and groaned as if there was a strong wind outside, though the night was still. I listened to the slow rhythm of Prue’s snores and tried not to hear the shrieks from the wood, or the rattling scratch of the things that stalked the attic.
    Instead I lay in the darkness and tried to think of ‘lovely things’, just as Dad had told me when I was small and had a nightmare. I thought of Dad, Suzie, Lauren. I thought of seeing all my friends, having them to visit. Summer in the big garden … swimming in the sea …
    My breathing slowed. I was almost asleep when my ear caught another sound, something fluttering against the window pane. The noise was stealthy, soft, persistent. I shut my eyes tighter and pulled the sheets to my chin, pushing away the vision of a dry, dead hand, pressed paper-thin, scrabbling against the