I was making the kid’s tea, fish fingers I think it was, when I heard the thunder of Chloe’s feet as she hurtled down the stairs, followed swiftly by a cry from Charlie. With noise levels instantly raised to Defcon Level One and my skull shattered by the piercing shrieks that only children can reach (seriously, they should record it and give it to our troops on the battlefield) I went and stood in the living room doorway, hands on hips, rearranging my face into its best ‘you’d better have a good excuse’ look.

 

Chloe was red and wild-eyed, she had Charlie by his hair, his small hands on hers trying to release them from his white-blond locks. “I didn’t do it,” wailed Charlie, his cheeks wet with tears, Scooby Doo still chasing monsters on the TV screen behind.

 

I marched in and separated them. This was not what I’d had in mind when broodiness had hit.

 

Chloe reached into her pocket and hand outstretched, showed me the minute cause of the row. It was a tiny grandfather clock, its face smashed, its pendulum stilled. I reached to take it from her. “What happened?” I asked.

 

“I went to play tea parties but the clock had fallen over,” sniffed Chloe. “And when I picked it up, it was broken. Charlie smashed it.”

 

“No I never!” denied Charlie, a looked of shocked indignance crossing his face.

 

I looked between my two children, not knowing who to believe. “Are you sure it wasn’t Claude?” I asked, wondering if carnage had been wrought by our kitten squeezing through the miniature rooms of the dolls house.

 

I took the smashed clock and brought the children in for tea, thinking no more of it than childish mishaps and squabbles.

 

The dolls house had been left to Chloe by my Great Aunt Jocasta. A solitary, spindly figure with remarkable posture, she’d been a constant yet shadowy figure throughout my own childhood. She had lived in the comfortable gatehouse of Ravenhurst, a ruined gothic manor house in a remote part of Suffolk, surrounded by pig farms and quintessentially English villages.

 

The gatehouse had been home ever since a fierce and terrible fire raged through the main house, some time between the wars. Almost every room had been destroyed, portraits burnt and wrinkled, collections fused together by heat, Jocasta’s parents and three servants reduced to cinders. Only Jocasta and her nanny had survived, the nursery, being in one of the towers, relatively unscathed.

 

And there they’d stayed, Jocasta being educated by a succession of governesses paid for by the estate left in trust, Nanny and her charge living according to strict routines and Edwardian comforts, until the time came for Jocasta to care for her nanny in her twilight years.

 

I’d always been aware of Aunt Jocasta, memories of tea and hot buttered crumpets in her spartan parlour peppered my memories of occasional visits during half term holidays. The dolls house had always been slightly out of reach, kept pristine on top of a chest, yet I was always fascinated by it.  Jocasta enjoyed telling me how it was modelled on Ravenshurst in all its glory, a fact my childish mind found hard to comprehend when I looked out of the window to the blackened ruins that lay beyond the willows. Sometimes, Jocasta would open the house, each wing on hinges and she’d reverently show me the tiny furniture and miniature figures in starched, old-fashioned dress. I was never allowed to touch them or play with the little dolls.

 

Which is why, when Jocasta died and she unexpectedly left the house to my own daughter, I vowed that it would have life breathed back into it, that it should be played with as toys ought to be.

 

A few days after the clock incident and taking advantage of the blessed quiet after the children had gone to bed, I was sorting out old family photos, finally getting around to the task of emptying the scruffy shoeboxes they were contained in and putting them in some photo albums. I was just remarking on the similarities between the stiff little girl in sepia and high collars, a young Jocasta, to my fiery little Chloe, when a scream shot like an arrow into my head.

 

Charlie was in Chloe’s doorway, one leg of his Postman Pat pyjamas ridden up to his knee, little hands rubbing his sleepy eyes. Chloe sat in the middle of the bed, her hair tousled, her skin a strange ivory thanks to the light of the full moon. In each hand she clutched a broken figure, a decapitated servant girl and a limbless cook.

 

“Oh Chloe, you have to be more careful,” I chastened. “These dolls are very old and you mustn’t be rough.”

 

“I found them like this,” said Chloe. “I had a bad dream about a dark house and arguments and galloping horses and I woke up with Milly and Cook in my hands.”

 

I raised an eyebrow, removed the forlorn figures from my daughter and tucked her in, vowing to stop giving the children cheese before bedtime.

 

But that wasn’t the end of it. The nightmares continued, the violence towards the dolls house escalated. A crushed set of tiny porcelain, shattered wheels on a carriage and most disturbingly, increasing numbers of the household missing or murdered punctuated the next few darkening Autumnal evenings. It was when I found a little boy doll hanging by his neck from the bathroom light cord that I took action and removed the dolls house from her room, putting in on top of the sideboard in the dining room and hoping that Fred the goldfish wouldn’t mind his new position on the telephone table.

 

I asked Chloe’s teachers to keep an eye on her and when they showed me the graphic pictures of fire and blood she’d drawn in art class, I agreed to a session or two with the school psychiatrist. We’d sat in a circle in a bright room, filled with primary colours and soft dolls.

 

I was perched awkwardly on a beanbag, wondering how I was going to get up when one of the doctor’s probing questions caused my head to spin. Chloe was quite matter-of-factly telling a story of Ravenshurst, affairs between Aunt Jocasta’s mother and the footman, red-faced beatings from Jocasta’s bearded father and finally, she started coughing, as if in a trance. “It’s too smoky mama,” she wheezed. “The fire is coming.”

 

The psychiatrist stopped me from shaking her into the present, away from seedy stories of sex and scandal and vitriol that she could never have known about. “Where did you hear these stories, Chloe?” I asked, my nails digging into my palms.

 

“Auntie Jocasta, Auntie Jocasta, Auntie Jocasta. She was a very naughty little girl, so they locked her in a tower far away. Far away.” A sing-song voice, not quite her own. Chloe picked up a teddy and rocked it gently, before quite out of the blue asking what we were having for tea. I murmured something non-committal as I caught the eye of the nurse. “I’ll be in touch,” she said, as I took my little girl’s hand and left.

 

At the dinner table that night, I let Charlie’s innocent chatter wash over me as he told me about dinosaurs and the latest adventures of SpongeBob Squarepants. Chloe was muted, pushing her broccoli around the plate. Not like her at all. She normally loved ‘little trees’ as we called it. Instead, she scowled, her sweet features twisted.

 

I tossed and turned as I tried to sleep that night.  I couldn’t understand how Chloe could possibly know about the Ravenshurst scandal. We hardly ever mentioned the place these days, especially ‘the tragedy’ s it was referred to and she couldn’t possibly remember Aunt Jocasta. I simply couldn’t understand it. I coughed and turned onto my tummy, trying to stop the whirring in my mind, wondering what the simple explanation was – for there must be one- behind my daughter’s odd behaviour in recent weeks. It was as I speculated that the violence on the dolls house may not have been childish heavy handedness but deliberate violence at the hands of my child that I coughed again and suddenly leapt out of bed as smoke filled my nostrils.

 

I grabbed Charlie, still sleeping and ran into Chloe’s room. She wasn’t there. “Chloe!”  I yelled, spluttering, almost falling down the stairs with Charlie in my arms. Smoke billowed from the dining room and there she was. Standing in front of the dolls house, her back to me, watching the flames crackle and fizz as they raced through the dolls house. She sang very quietly, what sounded like an old fashioned nursery rhyme. ‘Chloe, Chloe, get away!” She stood stock still, as seconds passed like millennia, the distant sound of fire engines approaching.

 

And as she turned, slowly, her floor length nightie making it seem like she was floating, I saw her face. Or rather, I saw where her face used to be – instead there was just pale, blank skin.  No eyes, no nose, no mouth and for a split second, before I passed out, I could have sworn I saw my little girl and the young Aunt Jocasta side by side in the mirror, holding hands, sharing their gleeful malevolence.