Later that same evening a cold hand brushed the collective necks of those who called Oldfield Street home.

7.00pm:

Sanjay Mistry was, perhaps, the first to feel something amiss. He stood on a small step in front of the bathroom basin (all the better to see into the mirror, he was only small) while Mummy supervised his tooth-brushing routine. As far as Sanjay was concerned, brushing his teeth was just about the most tedious task of the day (although he was well aware that tooth decay was Bad). Anita had once suggested that he looked at grandma Kalpna as a good example of what happens when you don’t brush twice a day.

In truth, Anita was paying scant attention to her son while she considered allowing him to dress up and go out this Halloween for the first time in his young life. Although she found the whole celebration fairly objectionable, she didn’t want Sanjay to feel like he was missing out and a number of other young families in the street made a big deal out of it. Her train of thought led in two directions, firstly whether she should use the few days to make a costume or simply buy one and, secondly, if she could entrust her son’s Halloween to one of the street’s other young mums for the evening while she battened down the hatches at home with Chetan and a bottle of wine.

While lost in her woolgathering Anita totally failed to recognise that her son had entirely stopped preparing for bed. Sanjay had squeezed toothpaste onto the brush and thought ’Crest’. Staring fixedly at the brand name on the tube he found himself mesmerised by the word. Crest, Crest, Crest. Suddenly he felt himself and his world slip sideways.

’Jesus Christ!’ exclaimed Anita as Sanjay toppled from his stool. Amazingly she managed to catch hold of her little boy before he crashed, unconscious, onto the tiled floor. Grim images of what had been avoided, chief among them a cracked skull, fast-forwarded through her mind momentarily as she fought back tears.

Sanjay began to stir as Anita carried him to his small bedroom, made cramped by the multitude of soft toys. ’You gave me a shock Sanj’, Anita fought to keep the tremor from her voice, ’You had a bit of a moment back there, huh?’ She scanned her son’s face and plastered a smile on her own. She’d decided to settle him down here for the time being so she could call the surgery from the kitchen, away from prying ears. She’d speak to Chetan as soon as he got home from his five-a-side football game.

Sanjay gazed up at her and she felt the love roll over her, overwhelming her for a moment. She held a hand to his forehead, no sign of a temperature. ’How do you feel kiddo?’, she asked.

A frown flashed across his face, quickly changed by an expression of pure serenity. ’Can we change toothpaste from now on?’ he asked.

7.30pm:

Tim Waverly had been feeling out of sorts all evening. He’d spent his day inwardly chiding himself about his overreaction to the mysterious ’handprint’ which had appeared on the living room wall. In the cold light of day, surrounded by his colleagues and students he had wondered at his behaviour, actually trying to scrub it away of all things! After all, he told himself, what did a handprint matter at all - it might be that someone just had dirty hands, it may be a trick of the light, perception trying to fill some kind of blank.

It had got clearer.

He had felt compelled to take a look the moment he’d arrived home, seconds after scaring poor Lucy Warwick half to death. He’d fought the compulsion for some minutes as he brewed a cup of tea and responded to a couple of emails. But now, here he was.

It had got clearer. He was sure it. For all the world the handprint looked like it was pressing itself through the wall and into Tim’s faded parlour. Once again he told himself it was simply an illusion in the dim electric light and that his mind was creating an image of something simply because of a passing resemblance, rather like those people who see the face of the Devil in the bark of a tree. He’d tried various cleaning materials the previous evening, scrubbing away with no discernible difference. Whatever the mark was it looked like it had penetrated deep into the paintwork, almost ’burned-in’, he thought.

While his teaching specialism was religious studies, Tim considered himself an entirely rational sort of person. He was, as it happened, agnostic - so much so that he was bordering on atheist - and was not disposed to flights of fancy. He presumed that scrubbing at the wall had removed more recent dirt, hence the mark had itself become more noticeable. Nonetheless, the mysterious image gave him a profound sense of dread. There was a wrongness about it that caused him to fixate, like a cancer symptom a person is determined to ignore. He walked back into the kitchen and returned with his phone. After taking a closeup photograph of the handprint he sent it to some of his mates ’Creepy handprint alert! Does this look kind of weird to you?’.

Deciding the decorating needed to move up the to-do list, he’d wallpaper over the damn thing, Tim returned to the kitchen to choose a microwave meal out of his small freezer. The oven he’d inherited from the previous owner looked like a health-hazard.

7.40pm:

Number 14, the home Michael Bromwich, he of the antisocial hard drive and peppercorn rent.

If a cold hand, emanating from the new home of Tim Waverly, tickled at the necks of other inhabitants of the street, it had Mike’s in a vice.

He sat back fatly in his armchair, the living room lit only by the blue light of his laptop. Michael, wrongly, didn’t consider himself a bad man, rather a good man with bad appetites.

Of his many issues, Mike was all too aware that eating had been a problem throughout his life. Mike the son of a feeder. His late mother, Angela, herself thin as a whip, had been overwhelmed with love for her only child and had shown this in a number of ways, chief among which was food. By secondary school Michael had been moving beyond podgy to seriously large. This being an era before body-positivity Mike hadn’t been advised to love himself as he was but had instead been relentlessly taunted by his classmates, presenting a larger than life target for their physical as well as verbal aggression. Throughout all this, and failing to see how deeply miserable her son was, Ange continued to feed him up like a turkey being fattened ready for the Christmas table.

As an older teenager Mike supposed he could’ve made different choices, cutting down the calories and hitting the gym rather than surrendering to a life of bad knees, yeast infections and muscle soreness. At 42 his life had become a wasteland. He didn’t know anybody, not really. Those colleagues from his old job who promised to keep in touch when he left had long gone an, having gone freelance, he had no cause to meet anyone new.

He’d certainly never known love - not even to touch or be touched. He was living dead, flickering to life only when touring the blackest corners of the Dark Web.

Mike gazed blurrily at his laptop screen which was showing an image which, to him, was as stimulating as it would have been depraved in the minds of most others. Next to the laptop were a number of empty blister packs and a razor blade.

That he’d contemplated suicide in the past wasn’t in doubt. Mike knew what he was, what he’d always been, even though he could never bring himself to describe it. Tonight was different. Tonight was no longer about contemplation, it was about letting go. The voice had been chattering in his head for several weeks. Initially it had been fleeting, a quick intrusive thought ’dead would be better than this’. Lately the voice had become louder, inescapable, ’END IT! END IT TODAY!’ it has roared at him when he first awoke late that morning.

Mike didn’t know much about mental health, it wasn’t something he considered although he was self-aware enough to realise he was depressed. This particular evening, 21 October, things had changed. The voice had stopped shouting and fallen to a near whisper which he found even more insidious. The voice had spoken to him chattily while he mindlessly ate his way through a stuffed-crust pizza (family sized), garlic bread and side of coleslaw.

The voice had set out that he, Mike, had run out of road. That there was nothing left, that’s all she wrote, time to check out. Upon finishing his meal he’d filled a pint class with tepid tap water and slowly swallowed his way through the paracetamol he’d been stockpiling since the voice had first spoken to him. He’d kept a running total and knew he’d ingested 86 tablets. He had more in the kitchen but didn’t want to risk gagging and bringing the whole lot up.

Now the voice told him the razor blade would serve as the ultimate belt and braces guarantee that is life would be over. Sure, the paracetamol would do the job but it wasn’t going to be quick - if he was found they might pump his stomach and send him back to this place. Mike realised the voice was no longer in his head but coming from just behind his shoulder.

’Go on, you great nonce,’ it urged, ’get it over and done with. Just a vertical slice down each arm Mikey-boy.’ It paused, ’Thinking about it you’d better strike hard to get through that lot you fat bastard, you’re going to look like a stuck pig.’

Tears rolling down his ample cheeks, Michael Bromwich complied. The end came more quickly than he deserved.

10.42pm:

Lucy sat at the laptop in her room where her parents imagined she was assiduously revising for her upcoming exams. They were delighted with this development, having worried that she was being too laid back about the whole thing, not least as the fees at St Isaac’s were crippling them.

In reality, Lucy had been engaged in a lengthy discussion with Pig via her laptop’s instant messenger. Pig, for his part, had been spending time learning more about the Langham Hotel, sending Lucy a number of documents he said gave further credence to the various hauntings documented in the place. Lucy, by way of encouragement had suggested to Pig that he pitched a feature to Fortean times.

LW: Cld b gr8. U so need 2 do it. Tell them ur teen gstbstr :)

PIG: I so am gonna do it. But prob need to concentrate on exams 1st??

LW: FML when u get so uptight??!!

Logging off after saying their goodbyes (2 b ct tmrow @ St I x) Lucy smiled to herself. Pig wasn’t simply her best friend, he was the kindest and most interesting person she knew outside of her own family. Her feelings about him were both warm and complex. There was a soft knock at her door, mum’s voice through the wood.

’Baby, revision’s important I know, but so is sleep! It’s a school night’.

’Yes mum. Night, love you!’, Lucy called back rolling her eyes. She felt momentary guilt as she readied herself for bed, having done no studying at all. Oh well, she told herself, tomorrow is another day!

A little later in bed, her father also having reminded her it was school tomorrow, she was drifting into sleep when she heard a shout from the street. ’LUCY! LUCY WARWICK!’. She started, dazed. Must’ve dreamt it. Silence apart from the dim 24/7 hum of traffic on the A-road. After a few minutes staring at the ceiling she realised she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, not easily.

She got out of bed and padded over to the window. Pulling apart the curtains just a crack she gave a small start. Standing in the street, on the other side of the Warwicks’ front fence, was a shadow which resolved itself into one of the largest people Lucy had ever seen. Like others of her generation she wasn’t one to judge people but, even so, this man (she felt sure it was a man) was unhealthily big. She could barely make out any facial features in the dim street lighting but she could see rings of flab around his neck disappearing into his shirt collar. She dimly noted he wasn’t wearing a coat, despite the coldness of the October night.

He looked directly at her. Surely that couldn’t be right, could he see her from down there in the darkness when she had no light on in her room? The fat man raised his hand and gave a fey little wave. ’Hello Lucy Warwick’ he said. ’I feel like I need a friend, I’ve never had a friend before. I’ve never even been touched, would you be the one to touch me Lucy Warwick?’. Lucy became aware that, as he spoke, the man’s hand had travelled to his groin, mercifully hidden by the low front wall.

She gasped and, as she stepped back, the curtains fell into place. It was a long time before she mustered the courage to look outside again. It was as if nobody had ever been there.

01.30am:

Mary MacDonald woke from a fitful sleep. She felt sure she needed to speak to her new neighbour with a degree of urgency and had been mulling the best way to go about things, different options twisting in her mind like entwined snakes.

Sitting up, Mary stifled a gasp upon seeing her husband, Iain, framed in the doorway of the bedroom they’d once shared. Despite the darkness enough artificial light from the street came through the curtain, so she was able to see the swollen outline of Iain’s engorged penis.

’Hello love,’ the apparition whispered with a leer, ’fancy a bunk-up?’.

Mary shoved a corner of the duvet into her mouth to drown her screams.

04.00am:

Sanjay Mistry gave up trying to sleep. He usually winked out and enjoyed the happiest dreams but tonight had been the exception that proved the rule. He’d lain in bed, tossing, turning and alternating between hot and cold and experiencing a feeling entirely alien to him - dread. Something Bad was coming, he could feel it. He ran his tongue around the ridges of his teeth, ’Crest’, he thought.

04.10am

At number 19 Oldfield Street Molly, the spaniel, woke and began to howl like she’d never howled before.