While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine!
A PACY, CHILLING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO STOP READING!‘Intensely atmospheric’ Mail on SundayA house full of secrets…The McBride house lies on a remote Scottish island, isolated and abandoned. A century ago, a young widow and her son died mysteriously there. Last year a local boy, visiting for a dare, disappeared without a trace.A woman alone at night…For Zoe Adams, the house offers an escape from her failing marriage. But when night falls, her peaceful retreat is disrupted—scratches at the door, strange voices—and Zoe is convinced she is being watched.A threat that lurks in the shadows…The locals tell Zoe the incidents are merely echoes of the house’s dark past. Zoe is sure the danger is all too real—but can she uncover the truth before she is silenced?
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Stephanie Merritt 2018
Excerpt from A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland © Sara Maitland 2008
Reproduced by kind permission of Granta Books
Cover design Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photograph © Jan Bickerton / Trevillion Images
Stephanie Merritt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008248208
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008248222
Version: 2018-06-11
‘When those are the very things one is hoping to escape from through silence, it is not at all surprising that one starts to see one’s longings as “works of the devil” and this sense of the demonic is itself intensified by the silence.’
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence
Table of Contents
It begins, they say, with a woman screaming.
You can’t tell at first if it’s pleasure or pain, or that tricky place where the two meet; you’re almost embarrassed to hear it, but if you listen closer it comes to sound more like anguish, a lament torn from the heart: like an animal cry of loss, or defiance, or fury, carried across the cove from cliff to cliff on the salt wind.
If you stand on the beach with your back to the sea, they’ll tell you, looking up at the McBride house, you might catch, behind tall windows on the first floor, the fleetest shift of a shadow. All the rooms dark through glass; not even the flicker of a candle, only the shape that shivers at that same window and vanishes, quick as breath, under the broken reflections of clouds and moon. They’ll say the woman’s keening grows louder as the gale seeks unprotected corners of the house, swirls around the pointed gables, shakes the weathervane on the turret and rattles the attic windows in their frames. But listen again; when the wind drops, there is nothing but the wild sea, and the occasional drawn-out moans of the seals beyond the headland.
Only on certain nights, the islanders will tell incomers; when the moon is high and the air whipped up like the white-peaked waves in the bay. Be patient and you might hear her. Plenty will swear to it.
The two boys crouch by a ridge of rocks at the foot of the cliff, watching the house. It is still half a ruin; naked beams poke into the moonlit sky like the ribs of some great flayed beast. They hesitate, each waiting for the other to move. They have come this far to test the old stories, they can’t lose face now. The summer night is mild and clear; too balmy for ghosts. They are girding themselves when the screaming starts. They turn to one another in astonishment; fear makes them giggle.
‘Let’s go,’ whispers the nimble, ginger boy. He has his phone in his hand, ready to capture it on film.
But his companion has frozen to the spot, stricken, his eyes stretched wide and fixed on the house.
‘Come on, we’ll miss it.’
The heavier boy retreats a few paces, shaking his head.
The ginger one hesitates, his lip curling with scorn. ‘Pussy.’
He sets off over the sand and marram grass to the half-open door, his phone held out at arm’s length. Left behind on the beach, his friend watches him disappear into the shadows.
The waves break and retreat, over and over, dragging layers of shingle into the restless water. A new scream echoes across the beach, a child’s cry this time. The last traces of light ebb from the sky and behind the windows of the McBride house there is nothing but solid darkness.
The island appeared first as an inky smudge on the horizon, beaded with pinholes of light against the greying sky. As the ferry ploughed on, carving its path through the waves, the land took form and seemed to rise out of the sea like the hump of a great creature yet to raise its head. Bright points arranged themselves into clusters, huddled into the bay at the foot of the cliff, though the intermittent sweep of the lighthouse remained separate at the furthest reach of the harbour wall.
