The Forest of Souls. Carla Banks

      It was massive against the darkening sky. The blank windows stared back at her. The stone was patchy with white lichen, and stained where water had run down from the broken gutters and fall pipes. This wasn’t a house that was loved. Or one that loved. The thought jumped into her mind, startling her.

      The rain was a fine drizzle that chilled her skin and seeped through the protective covering of her coat. The door was solid wood, sheltered by a stone canopy. The bell push looked old. She pressed it without much expectation and waited. Nothing happened. She’d thought there would be something more…official? More organized. She tried the bell again, then hammered on the wood. Come on. Come on. Water dripped on to the stone, splashing her feet.

      She was about to knock again when the door opened. She’d heard nothing through the heavy timbers. A man, presumably the caretaker she’d been told about, stood there. He was holding a torch.

      ‘I’m Helen Kovacs,’ she said. ‘You should be expecting me.’

      ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was working. I didn’t hear you.’ He didn’t look more than twenty. She’d been expecting someone older. Her head barely came up to his shoulder as she stepped past him. Despite the icy weather, he was in his shirtsleeves. She wondered what it was about young men that made them impervious to the cold.

      The smell of the house closed round her, a smell of damp, of mildew, of rot. There was no light. The entrance hall was an echoing dimness. She could just make out a staircase that swept up in front of her to a shadowed gallery.

      ‘This way.’ He shone the torch in front of him. ‘Watch where you’re going. Something’s shorted the lights. I was just trying to fix them.’ He led her through long corridors towards the back of the house, pausing every so often to make sure she was following. In the faint light, she could see dark panelling, damaged in places and rotted away. The ceiling arched above her, and she thought about the tiny semi she shared with Hannah and Finn–that she used to share with Daniel as well–characterless, perhaps, but comfy and warm. She shivered.

      ‘How long has it been like this?’

      He paused halfway along the corridor, and pulled a bunch of keys out of his pocket. ‘Since the guy who lived here died, I suppose,’ he said as he tried a key in the lock of the double doors in front of him. It stuck, and he had to jiggle it to free it. He tried another key. ‘I don’t go in here much.’

      This kind of deterioration took years. The last owner of the house, a reclusive Russian scholar, had died just a few months before. ‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that it’s been left like this.’

      ‘He was a bit of a nutter by all accounts. Thought the KGB was after him. Shut himself away here. He lived in the back of the house, let the rest fall apart.’ The key turned and he gave a grunt of satisfaction as he pushed the doors open and stepped through. He shone his torch around. ‘You’re right. It’s a shame. It must have been beautiful once.’

      The library. She was in Gennady Litkin’s library. In the twilight, the room was filled with shadows. The high ceiling and the rows of bookcases gave an illusion of space, but as she managed to get a sense of the scale, she realized it was smaller than it seemed. There was a smell of damp and old paper. She looked up. The ceiling was ornate but the plasterwork was damaged. She could see stains and patches, places marking the incursion of water.

      She walked slowly down the aisle, looking at the high shelves and the panelled walls. The shelves were piled with boxes–box files, cardboard boxes sagging at the seams, old shoe boxes, a treasure trove of papers from the past, and one that would probably never be fully explored. As she looked round the shelves closest to her, she realized she had never understood how vast Gennady Litkin’s collection had been.

      He had died intestate. The collection–books, paintings, letters, diaries, legal documents, photographs–was being archived and would probably end up scattered among various universities and museums. The house was nearly empty now, and once the last details of the estate were sorted out, it would be sold. Even in its dilapidated state, it must be worth a fortune.

      She looked at the boxes with growing anxiety. ‘Has everything been packed up?’ She had the reference from Litkin’s eccentric filing system to help her, but if the papers had been sorted and stacked, it would be useless. It would take years to go through all of this.

      The young man looked at her and then shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just here to keep an eye on the place.’

      ‘What’s your name?’ She should have asked sooner.

      ‘Nick,’ he said.

      ‘Nick.’ She held out her hand. ‘Do you live here?’

      He touched her outstretched hand briefly. ‘Just until March. They’ll have it cleared then.’

      ‘It must be lonely.’ He looked very young to be shut away in the isolation of the old house.

      ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the van–I go down to the village. I can go into town if I want, but it’s all right here. It’s a great place for walking.’

      ‘You like that?’ she said. She used to go walking a lot before she and Daniel got married, before Finn was born.

      He nodded, looking suddenly enthusiastic. ‘I did the Pennine Way last summer.’

      ‘That’s serious walking.’

      He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. What I want to do is go to the US, do the Appalachian Trail.’

      ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That’s serious walking.’

      He grinned. ‘You said it.’

      She’d have liked to go on talking, but she had work to do. ‘I’d better get on.’ Officially, she was here to look at the records from a long dissolved mining company. ‘I’m looking for the ledgers for the Ruabon Coal Company,’ she said.

      ‘Yeah.’ He’d obviously been briefed. ‘Everyone wants to look at those. It’s about the only thing anyone knows about. They’re over here. I got them down for you.’

      She followed him down the aisle to where two sets of shelves formed a kind of nook. She looked at the boxes that filled the shelves. Some of them were labelled, but the ink had faded. She leaned in closer to try and read the words.

      Suddenly, a light came on. She turned round. Nick was balancing a desk light on an empty ledge. Its long neck was too high to fit and it stuck out awkwardly, making its position precarious. He shook his head, obviously unhappy with the arrangements. ‘That’s the best I can do. You’ll have to use this. I’m sorry. I’m working on the lights now.’

      ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I wondered how I was going to manage. Listen, before you go, there’s something else I want to have a look at–I’m not sure where to start.’ It hadn’t occurred to her that Litkin’s system might have been disrupted. ‘I’m looking for some stuff from the last war. There’ll probably be a diary, and some letters…I know they’re in this library somewhere. Maybe you’ve seen…’ Her voice trailed off as she looked round the crammed shelves.

      He steadied the light with his hand. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s all just, you know…’ He gestured around him. ‘Papers and stuff.’

      She looked back at the boxes on the shelves, wondering what to do. Then she noticed something she hadn’t seen before. In the light, faint pencil markings on the boxes had become visible. 112.33 OTE. She knelt down to get closer. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s his filing system.’ She ran her fingers along the boxes. ‘It goes up–the ones I want…’ She tried to track the numbers on to the next shelf, got lost and then picked it up again. She could feel the tension inside her releasing–the boxes hadn’t been put out of sequence or repacked. They were the way he’d left them. She moved along the shelves. What had he said? Third shelf from the top, halfway along…Here. A box file marked 120.43 PEKBM. She