Nyctophobia Read Free

who still seats a woman at a table before settling himself. I used to think that kind of behaviour was cheesy, but Mateo made it seem respectful.
    After Julia dropped me off, I found him in the bar of the Hermosa and told him all about Hyperion House, explaining that the bank wanted to make a quick sale. He warned me that it was already too late, and my heart sank.
    ‘What can we do?’ I asked.
    ‘You really liked the look of this place?’
    ‘It’s the one, Mateo. It’s perfect. And the agent says we can get it cheap because they’re desperate to get it off their books.’
    ‘There’s no such thing as a cheap house, even in the recession. Sabinillas has terraces and a sea view – I thought that was what you wanted.’
    ‘I thought so too, before I saw this.’
    Later we sat on the bed going through the papers. He studied the prospectus on his laptop and considered the problem. ‘Maybe we could break the contract. It could end up costing money. Basically, it would be a bribe.’
    Looking back, I must have been incredibly naïve. I said, ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘What usually happens is that the accountant makes a discreet exit from the room while business is concluded, and then cash changes hands. Welcome to Spain’s famous grey market.’
    ‘Let’s go back and see it together,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll get the keys from the agent. I know you’ll love it.’
    So, the very next day, that was what we did.
    As we approached from the potholed road leading off the A-377, I remember being struck by the same sensation as before. At first glance the house didn’t seem to be there at all. It was because of the cliff. It looked as if the rock-face had swallowed it.
    Mateo opened the BMW’s window and tried to catch glimpses of it between flashing firs and cork oaks. When he did, he saw what I saw – green wooden window frames set in pale stone, every pane of glass appearing to catch the sunlight perfectly, reflecting tall panels of gold. The frontage was like a stage flat, revealing no depth at all. Before either of us could understand what we had seen, it had gone again.
    The radio station was playing Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’, and the song seemed disrespectfully loud in the stark, silent countryside, so I turned it off. I followed Mateo’s gaze and looked once more. There was another break in the tree-line, again revealing the high stone walls inset with glittering windows, but it didn’t seem possible that they could be the same walls, because the drive had curved around now and we were heading upwards, directly toward the house.
    It didn’t look quite so isolated from the rest of the world this time around. After leaving the motorway we had coasted along a dozen miles of undulating, deserted road, not the graceful lanes of Southern England that provided endless views, the stuff of childhood holidays, but bare blacktop causeways laid down across the land to link villages by the only routes that could cut through stubborn rock. You didn’t alter the land here; you worked around it.
    We hardly saw another vehicle, and this was the end of the peak tourist season. I wondered what it would be like in winter. Earlier we had stopped in a village so deserted that the only indication of life was the clatter of cutlery being used inside houses. Hyperion House didn’t even have the benefit of being attached to a hamlet. The only houses within sight were derelict barns that looked as if they had been abandoned fifty years ago.
    It wasn’t surprising. The countryside had been slowly decanting itself into the cities as each new generation turned down rural life in favour of finding urban work. Who wanted to be a farmer and get paid peanuts by supermarkets when you could find a job in a city company, and hang out in the cool barrios of Madrid or Malaga?
    I had done something similar in London, and had burned my fingers badly enough to know that I would never go back. It was a new start, and this time it would work