REGGIE CAMPION drove her ten-year-old dented Smart Car City-Coupé from her flat in London past Leavesden to the north and continued on for a few more kilometers. After meandering through narrow country roads she turned off onto a one-car-wide dirt lane, eventually passing through lichen-covered stone columns that bore the name “Harrowsfield,” which was the property she was now on. Her gaze then carried, as it usually did, up the twisty crushed gravel drive toward the old crumbling mansion.

Some claimed Rudyard Kipling had once leased the estate. Reggie doubted that, although she believed it would have appealed to an author who had created such marvelous, intrigue-laden adventure stories. It was a vast place, jury-rigged in parts, with secret doors and passages, stone turrets with cold chambers, an enormous library, corridors that ended in solid walls, an attic filled with equal parts museum-quality artifacts and junk, a rabbit warren of a cellar with musty bottles of mostly undrinkable wine, an antiquated kitchen with a leaky roof and exposed, sparking wiring, and enough outbuildings to house several army battalions on over a hundred hectares of neglected grounds. It was ancient, falling apart, smelly, mostly uninhabitable, and she loved it. If she’d had the money she would have purchased it. But Reggie would never have enough money for that.

She often stayed overnight here. A hopeless insomniac, she would wander the dark mansion for hours. It was then that she thought she could feel the presence of others who also called Harrowsfield home though they were no longer among the living. She would have preferred to stay out here full-time. Her flat was small, basic, in an undesirable part of the city, and was still more than she could afford. She had cut back on luxuries such as food and clothing in order to get by. She had certainly not chosen this career path for the income potential.