How does Hill present fear in the novel? Then from somewhere, out of that howling darkness, a cry came to my
ears, catapulting me back into the present and banishing all tranquillity. I
listened hard. Nothing. The tumult of the wind, like a banshee, and the
banging and rattling of the window in its old, ill-fitting frame. Then yes,
again, a cry, that familiar cry of desperation and anguish, a cry for help
from a child somewhere out on the marsh. There was no child. I knew
that. How could there be? Yet how could I lie here and ignore even the
crying of some long-dead ghost? "Rest in peace," I thought, but this
poor one did not could not. After a few moments I got up. I would go
down into the kitchen and make myself a drink, stir up the fire a little
and sit beside it trying, trying to shut out that calling voice for which I
could do nothing, and no one had been able to do anything for ... how
many years? As I went out onto the landing, Spider the dog following me
at once, two things happened together. I had the impression of someone
who had just that very second before gone past me on their way from
the top of the stairs to one of the other rooms, and, as a tremendous
blast of wind hit the house so that it all but seemed to rock at the
impact, the lights went out. I had not bothered to pick up my torch from
the bedside table and now I stood in the pitch blackness, unsure for a
moment of my bearings. And the person who had gone by, and who was
now in this house with me? I had seen no one, felt nothing. There had
been no movement, no brush of a sleeve against mine, no disturbance of
the air, I had not even heard a footstep. I had simply the absolutely
certain sense of someone just having passed close to me and gone away
down the corridor. Down the short narrow corridor that led to the
nursery whose door had been so firmly locked and then, inexplicably,
opened