Nyctophobia by Christopher Fowler Read Free Book Online

cough and my recent nights at the coast had passed silent and uninterrupted. I had spent two weeks there, waiting for Mateo to conclude his business in the wineries of Jerez and Cadiz, so that we could travel to the house together.
    I’m ready to start our life now, I thought, discarding my jeans and selecting the kind of simple, old-fashioned dress I would never have thought of wearing in London. Things are going to be different from here on in. I’ll make sure of that .
    As I unpacked, I took stock of the room. As in the drawing room, it was full of heavy dark fin de siècle furniture, with cushions the colour of bad meat, patterned maroon rugs, elaborate tiles and fussy cornicing, bookcases, sideboards, dropleaf tables, lots of hard, uncomfortable surfaces. Looking around, old words came to mind, words used to describe the finishes on old objects; craquelure, patina, foxing. Old school Spanish, I decided, pre-Franco, sturdy and built for generations to come. And yet there was also something paradoxically modern brought about by the pervasive light. Old buildings were usually repositories of shadows, dust and memories. This house had something I’d never seen before.
    I looked up at the windows, sensing a difference.
    What was it? Something had changed. Was it the angle of sunlight? A movement in the trees outside? Setting down my clothes, I walked to the window and looked out. A faint gust stirred the uppermost branches of the cork trees, fluttering the leaves. The window knocked slightly in its frame. I listened, and heard the smallest of movements, a shift of weight on a floorboard, a whispering displacement of air…
    The clocks rang out, startling me.
    One o’clock, time for luncheon. Not wishing to be late, I hurried from the room, my passage marked by chiming clocks. I felt like the heroine in an old novel.
    There were timepieces everywhere, a matrix of measurements that included carriages, grandfathers, mantelpiece ceramics, shepherdess figurines with delicate inset dials, monstrous fat-legged ornamentals with convex fascias and high tinging ticks. They all appeared to have been wound and kept at the correct time. They weren’t just correct but meticulous in their regularity, so that even their second hands appeared to move together. The ticking calibrated the passing seconds as if marking off life itself. The sounds followed me from one room to the next, one tick-tock being replaced by a clop-clop , that was in turn replaced by a din-din or crick-crick , each mechanism dividing the hours into quarters, minutes, half minutes, seconds, and it seemed even the sunlight had been ordered to keep time.
    Making my way down the staircase in search of the dining room, I took a wrong turn and found myself in the octagonal glass atrium, with doors that opened to an internal greenhouse. The tall ceiling led up to a turret filigreed with copper tracery, mostly stained-glass irises and poppies in the art nouveau style. It looked – wrong.
    ‘There you are,’ said Mateo, smiling at me from the door. ‘Rosita is waiting to serve. I guess the tour will have to wait until after we’ve eaten.’
    I knew he was anxious to fatten me up. My mother had been only too happy to warn him. ‘Of course you know she was terribly anorexic, and then it was – what do you call that thing where you throw up after you’ve eaten, darling? Bulimia , that’s it. She had terrible breath and the acid ate the enamel off her teeth. Those are veneers, aren’t they, sweetie?’ Thanks, mother. Mercifully, Anne was back in Vauxhall, over a thousand miles away, and she could damn well stay there.
    I looked down at the long table and saw Serrano ham and croquetas , empanadas , hake filets, clams and txangurro relleno . ‘My God,’ I said, ‘she’s cooked for a dinner party of ten.’
    ‘Just eat what you can,’ Mateo coaxed gently. ‘Let Rosita see that you’re pleased with her cooking. Show your appreciation, and then you can change her