INTRODUCTION

Newhamwood Manor by moonlight proved far more seductive than by day.

Without the moon, he thought, each night would be the same as the last.

Jamie Lawson, a seventeen-year-old local, placed his palms on the brickwork of the imposing building, a sumptuous relic of the Victorian era, feeling its texture, its character. He lent in, turned his head, easing his ear to the wall and he listened to her heartbeat. All old buildings had one, he believed, you just had to listen hard enough.

He had never been this close to this grand old lady of a building before, but he had known and loved her for all of his life. As a child, from the surrounding woods. he would gaze upon the stately home and its expansive lawns and garden beds with wonder. That had been ten years ago, in her heyday. In that time she had been both infamous and inaccessible, a challenge which Jamie could no longer resist.

Rumours and legend painted her an illustrious past; she had been haunted, cursed and abandoned; her occupations were said to have included, a lunatic asylum, a borstal youth-correction facility, and a playboy mansion. None of these were true. Jamie had done his research. Since her construction, she had always been nothing more than a family home.

She lay in a dense woodland that presented her as almost picturesque. At the threshold of the property, the woodland gave way to the thick undergrowth that eventually swept into an unkempt lawn at some non-specific boundary. Thick lines of fir trees surrounding the garden enhanced grandeur and ensured seclusion and privacy, perhaps unnecessarily so due to the lack of any other premises nearby.

What made her all the more remarkable was that the house stood less than two miles from Jamie's run-down council estate of the same name, Newhamwood. The estate had a bad reputation and had long ago become known locally as 'The VoodooHood'. And yet somehow, despite its relative proximity to its notorious neighbour, the manor had remained uninfected.