The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

“Someone’s torn a page out of this,” she said, turning the book toward me. “Look, you can see.”

She was almost right. The page hadn’t been torn, it had been cut; taken out with a blade that had been run down the middle of the book as close to the centre as it was possible to get. It was the kind of cut you make when you don’t want your handiwork to be noticed. The only thing that gave it away was that when the book was closed, a slight gap appeared as if a bookmark had been lost in there somewhere. It made me faintly curious, but no more than that. I really didn’t think that it was any big deal.

“So it has,” I said, and tried to look more interested than I was.

Some time later, I remember getting it out of the drawer to look at it again. It was a big book, album-sized, and it was two-thirds filled with handwritten entries by many of the families who’d stayed in the summerhouse before us. Only one or two of them were in a language I could understand, and they gave a few hints about the place—how to puzzle out how the circuit breakers worked, where to get English newspapers two days out of date—as well as the standard, had-a-lovely-time kinds of sentiments. There were some people from Newcastle, others who’d come over from Dorset. Many of the others were Germans, a few French. Sally hadn’t come across the book until we’d been in the place for three days already, and then she’d found it while rummaging around in the sitting-room furniture for maps and brochures. When I eventually went back and brought it out again, I turned to the place where the missing page had been and looked at the entries before and after. I couldn’t remember anything of what had been written, but by then I was only interested in the dates. The gap seemed to correspond to a two-week period exactly one year before.

No, I remember thinking. It cant have any significance. All that it probably meant was that someone had messed up their entry and had taken the leaf out to try it again. The paper-cutter they’d used was still there at the back of the drawer, a little plastic block with just the corner of a razor blade showing.

When I turned the paper to the light, I could see that some of the missing writing had pressed through onto the next page. Not to the extent that I could make out any words, but enough to get an idea of the overall style. It was neat, it was rounded. A feminine hand.

And it didn’t match with any of the entries that came before or after.

But that was later. Back on that third day, there was no reason for the Visitors’ Book to bother me at all. I left Sally looking through the remaining pages, and went out onto the covered terrace on the front of the summerhouse.

“Watcha doing, Minx?” I said.

The Minx looked up at me from the table. On her birth certificate and by her grandparents she was called Victoria, but to us she’d been the Minx for so long that we had to make an effort to remember that she had any other name. She was four years old that autumn, and was due to start at school the following spring. She’d have her own books, nametabs, a uniform, everything. We’d always told ourselves that we could look forward to this—like all children she’d hit our lives like a hurricane, leaving us dazed and off-kilter and somehow feeling that we’d never quite be able to make up the ground again to become the people we’d once been—but I found that I wasn’t quite anticipating the event in the way that I’d imagined. I suppose I was just beginning to realise how closely the growing and the going away were entwined, and would ever be so.

“I’m colouring,” she said.

She was, too. She’d coloured the page in her book and a good piece of the old vinyl tablecloth around it. She’d coloured a cow blue, and the sky behind it black.

I said, “That looks really good. Are you going to do another?”

“I’ll do another next Tuesday,” she said, Next Tuesday being her way of indicating some undetermined time in the future. “Let’s go and look for froggies.”

“Clear your lunch away first,” I said, “or you’ll bring in all kinds of creepy-crawlies.”

She climbed down from the bench to the wooden planking of the terrace, and surprised me by doing what I’d asked of her. Then we set off down the steps and into the grounds to find some froggies.

It was a pretty good house. I’d felt a twinge of disappointment when we’d first rolled up the grassy drive after a long haul by road and ferry, but within a few hours of unpacking and beginning to unwind it had started to grow on me. It was bigger than we needed, but I liked the sense of space. So what if it was a little shabby round the edges and the shower arrangements were kind of spartan and the beds were dropped in the middle in a way that would have suited a hunchback perfectly and nobody else at all; after a while this only seemed to add to the atmosphere.