Shiverton Hall, the Creeper by Emerald Fennell Page A

signing tatty paperbacks for old ladies on trains.
    As he kicked down the dusty Majorcan street for the last time, there was a rumble in the sky, and soon he was in the thick of a deluge of biblical proportions. He ran for cover and found himself in a cluttered antiques shop that smelled thickly of untreated leather. The shop mostly seemed to be selling broken junk: puppets with their strings cut, chessboards with missing pieces, a doll’s house that looked as though a terrible massacre had occurred inside it. Richmond noticed a small, portly woman watching him from the back of the shop.
    ‘ Hola ,’ Richmond said, tipping his hat to her. The lady shrank back further into the shadows. Richmond looked outside; the rain showed no sign of abating. He wondered how long he could politely stay in the shop without being obliged to buy something. The woman glared at him from behind a broken chandelier.
    He sighed and looked around for some small knick-knack that he could buy as a token. He had just picked up a hideous, decorative owl when something caught his eye. Just behind the doll’s house was a cobwebbed, filthy typewriter. Richmond considered himself something of an aficionado of the machines and had quite a collection of them at home. Even in its obviously poor condition, Richmond could tell that this one was a beauty. He had not seen the make before – Zezia , it read, in curling silver letters above the keyboard. The body of the typewriter seemed to be carved out of some black onyx-like stone and the keys were mother-of-pearl. Richmond blew the cobwebs from it and marvelled for a moment. He felt the collector’s thrill, the clammy palms, the racing pulse. He knew that he must have it, and he was determined to get it at a good price. This local woman clearly had no idea what a treasure she was sitting on, and from the way this masterpiece had been left to rot she clearly didn’t deserve to know.
    Richmond beckoned to her. ‘Excuse me,’ he said as calmly as he could. ‘I’ll give you one hundred pesetas for it.’
    The woman looked blankly at him.
    ‘This –’ he pointed at the typewriter – ‘for this.’ He showed her the money.
    The lady shook her head vigorously.
    ‘All right, two hundred,’ he said, knowing it would still be a steal at a thousand.
    ‘No,’ the lady said.
    ‘Fine,’ Richmond replied. ‘What do you want for it?’
    ‘Not for sale,’ the woman said, in hesitant English.
    ‘Not for sale?’ Richmond said incredulously. ‘Then why the devil is it on display in your shop?’
    At that moment Richmond had never wanted to own anything so much in his life. The feeling gripped him like a fever. He was sure that if this woman would not let him buy it from her, he would bash her over the head with it and run.
    The woman seemed to notice the change in Richmond and shrugged.
    ‘Five hundred,’ she said.
    ‘All right,’ Richmond said, shakily removing the notes from his wallet, glad that the episode hadn’t come to violence after all.
    The rain had passed, and Richmond left the shop as quickly as he could, gripping the typewriter tightly and feeling dizzy with adrenalin. He ran up to his villa, stepped over his packed bags and put the typewriter on the desk.
    Richmond typed the rest of that afternoon, all night and all of the following day. He missed his boat back to England. He wrote until his fingertips were numb and he was faint from exhaustion. Finally, a week later, with the first few chapters done, he fell into bed and into a heavy, black sleep.
    He awoke in the middle of the night, to the sound of tapping keys. He lurched out of bed and over to his desk.
    His typewriter was typing quite unaided.
    Richmond picked it up, turned it over and peered underneath. It must be some sort of trick, he thought. A joke typewriter that typed nonsense as a party trick. He tore out the page and read it. It was his voice – there was no question of that; the turn of phrase, the imagery, all exactly