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

We’d probably have gone home early if we could, but the boat ticket couldn’t be transferred. And, besides, there was so little time remaining. The weather held good, but we stuck around the house killing time as if on the rainiest of rainy days.

On the last day we packed almost in silence, and the Minx went for one last froggie-hunt while I loaded up the car. Sally stayed in the house. When I went inside to bring out the last few items—the boots, the overcoats, the radio ... all the stuff that didn’t belong in any particular box or bag—I found her at the big table in the sitting room. The Visitors’ Book was open on the table before her. She looked up, and she seemed almost defensive.

“We’ve got to write something,” she said. “It’s not the house’s fault. Not to put anything at all would be rude.”

I shrugged, and didn’t say anything. We hadn’t been saying much of anything to each other since the accident, at least not directly. I picked up the stuff that I’d come for and went out to the car.

Half an hour later, with everything loaded away and the house locked up for the last time behind us, we rolled down the driveway and out through the open gate.

“Say Goodbye, house,” Sally told the Minx, and the Minx turned and waved through the back window and said, “Bye!”

I stopped the car.

“I just realised, I left my sunglasses,” I said.

“I checked everywhere before we locked up,” Sally said. “Are you sure?”

“I only meant to put them down for a second,” I said. “I know where they are. Let me have the keys. ”

The keys were to be dropped off at the agents’ office in the nearest town as we drove on by to the ferry. Sally got them out of the big envelope and passed them forward to me, and I got out of the car and walked back up the drive. I left the engine running. This wasn’t going to take very long.

Already the house seemed different. No longer ours, it was a place of strangers again. I felt out-of-place, almost observed, as I walked up the steps with the door key in my hand. I could hear the car’s engine running at the end of the driveway, over on the far side of the bushes.

I entered the newly regained silence of the place. There was no sign of my sunglasses but then, I’d known there wouldn’t be; they were in their case, safe inside my jacket.

I didn’t have much time. I crossed the room to the chest of drawers and crouched, pulling open the one which I knew held the Visitors’ Book. It was uppermost on all the brochures, and I took it out and laid it on top of the chest before feeling around at the back of the drawer. Then I straightened, and opened the book to the latest entry.

I didn’t want to read it. In fact I’d turned the book around so that all of the entries were upside-down to me, on purpose. I didn’t know whether Sally had mentioned anything about how the visit had ended, and I didn’t want to. I spread the pages flat and I took a grip on the little cutter and I ran it, firmly and neatly, down the final page as close to the spine as I could get.

A firm tug, and it came out cleanly. I screwed it up and stuffed it into my pocket, for quiet disposal at a stopover point somewhere on the journey ahead.

And then I closed the book, returned it to the drawer, locked up the house, and walked away.

Forever.