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Jo’s butt as she walked by, delighted at her giggle, already wondering how he could get away on his own for a few hours.
     
    * * *
     
    After unloading the car they had a look around the cottage together. It was small, cosy and very countrified, with plates lining walls, dried twigs stacked on windowsills and arranged in an old china pot, and dozens of landscape prints by local artists gracing the walls upstairs. The bath was an old, cast-iron freestanding type, great chunky pipes standing proud off the floor at one end like the exposed arteries of the house. The toilet would not have looked out of place in a museum. The air was musty with age, and although Tom spotted air fresheners secreted in several places upstairs and down, he thought they were fighting a losing battle. This house was old – maybe three hundred years – and it would take more than a few modern chemicals to purge the tang of its history from the air. It had stood for a long time, and it had a right to project its age. He breathed in deeply and enjoyed the aroma, smiling at Jo when she gave him a quizzical look.
    From the kitchen a low door revealed an impossibly narrow staircase that led down to the cold room. Jo declined Tom’s offer to investigate, but he had always been one for exploring hidden places. It was that idea of never quite knowing what he would find: an old painting in the attic, a forgotten master; a half-buried chest in a seaside cave, the padlock a rusted remnant from centuries before. He never had found anything of value, but that did not deter him. In fact, it encouraged him to explore further, because really it was the mystery that lured him on. If he ever did find something other than darkness and empty spaces, the mystery would dissipate, and perhaps he would change.
    The staircase was narrow and twisted in a tight half-spiral, so that even moving down sideways Tom’s shoulders and gut touched the walls. He would be filthy when he came back up, but the cool, damp darkness below was irresistible.
    “What’s down there?” Jo called. She was standing aside from the doorway, allowing as much light as possible to enter.
    “Spiders,” Tom called. “Big ones. Huge. huge! Oh my Unnaturally God!”
    “What?”
    Tom chuckled and the sound carried up and down. Above it elicited a muttered curse from Jo, and below it echoed for a second, overlapping itself and turning into a groan. Tom took out his car keys and pressed the button on the tiny torch that hung on the key ring. Its maker’s claim that its light could reach nearly a mile was instantly vaporised when the beam barely managed to fight back the dark more than a couple of feet.
    Thick dark, Tom thought, like it hasn’t been disturbed for ages.
    At the bottom of the narrow stairs he found himself in a tiny room, with a low ceiling and bare stone walls. The walls had been whitewashed at some time in the distant past, but moisture had bled through and shed the paint to the floor. His torch lit the room just enough for him to see that there was nothing down here, other than a few shelves and a damp floor that looked prone to flooding. No sign of an electric light, and no indication that the room had been used for decades.
    It was cold. Bitterly cold. He wondered if everywhere underground was like this.
    “Anything?” Jo called. Her voice was muffled, even though the staircase only took a half-turn.
    “It’s horrible!” Tom called back, putting on his best Hammer Horror voice.
    “Well, retreat from the horror and help me in the bedroom.”
    “That’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
    Jo laughed. “Maybe after dinner if you’re lucky.”
    “If lucky!” you’re
    He started up the staircase, knees straining from the unnatural angle at which he had to climb. He thought of the people who had actually used this place to store their meat and perishables and wondered how they had lived, whether they had shared the same banter as he and Jo. Perhaps the cottage was haunted. At