There was a poem about them it told how on some nights the bad old wizard woke up and parted the branches, and peered into the room to see if there were any little children he could snatch up and carry away.

She had said to Simone that if you looked at them for long enough you saw horrid, evil faces in the trunk, that looked as if they were a thousand years old, and that stared at you out of withered eyes. She even knew about the old trees that grew around the house, because the little girl had told her about them. There was no mistake she knew exactly what the house looked like she knew about the door at the centre like a square grinning mouth, and the straggly little bits at the back which were called sculleries and the underground rooms where people were sometimes shut away. Simone twisted round in the front of the car, watching the black house get smaller and smaller as they drove away from it. The place where you ate your meals at long scrubbed-top tables, and where there were sour smells of despair and loneliness, and where the rooms smelled of sick and dirt. The place of clanging doors that were locked every night at exactly the same time, and of angry despairing screams.

The black stone house where the little girl lived.

Simone glanced up at it, and instantly felt as if somebody had punched her stomach. But across the fields, set a bit above the road and frowning down at the cars, was an old, old house. Here and there was a farmhouse or a little group of cottages or a church spire. They turned off the main road and went down a wind-y little lane, and that was when Simone looked across at the fields on their left.

As Harry delves into the violent and terrible history of Mortmain, in an attempt to uncover what happened to Simone and Sonia, and, one hundred years before them, to Viola and Sorrel Quinton, he finds himself drawn into a number of interlocking mysteries, each one more puzzling – and sinister – than the last. Just what did happen to Simone’s twin sister who disappeared without trace several years before? And what is the Anderson sisters’ connection to another set of twin girls, Viola and Sorrel Quinton, born in London on 1st January 1900?Īll Harry’s lines of enquiry seem to lead to the small Shropshire village of Weston Fferna and the imposing ruin of Mortmain House, standing grim and forbidding on the Welsh borders. But once he’s met the enigmatic Simone, Harry is intrigued. United by a chilling secretĪt first, journalist Harry Fizglen is sceptical when his editor asks him to investigate the background of Simone Anderson, a new Bloomsbury artist.

A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne