*The following is an excerpt from HeartStar: The Key Made of Air

Chapter One: Presage

The doorway to the chapel shivered; the wood splintered, and with a mighty crash, the door blew inwards. Her friends had told her to run. They were expendable. She was not.

When the screaming began, she was already running in terror through the cobweb-festooned archway and down the dank torch-lit staircase. At the edge of the catacombs, she paused and listened, her ears primed to catch every tiny sound.

Above her in the church, she could hear the terrified squeals and shrieks of her companions. She wanted to scream too from the horror of their pursuit but knew instinctively that her only hope of escape depended on her silence. Taking a shallow breath of the lifeless air, she looked into the shadowy catacombs with a sense of dread.

The ceiling quivered and groaned, and small stones showered down upon her head, shaken loose by some ponderous weight moving above her. The stinging sensation jerked her from stupor, and wrenching a firebrand from its holder on the wall, she fled into the necropolis. The walls began to vibrate with a low, ugly sound and the floor humped and rolled beneath her feet, but she kept running.

Skulls poured from the walls, blocking her path, and skeletons fell from recesses, reaching for her with outstretched arms. A bone knocked the torch from her hand, and she was alone in the dark. Losing her footing, she fell head first into the waiting bone pile.

Emma Cameron woke up screaming. A cold wind blew in her face, and she was drenched with a film of perspiration. Gathering her senses, she looked up at the open window banging on its hinges. Switching on the bedside light, she got up and closed the window.

She turned back towards the bed and glanced at the clock. It was half past five. She’d better get a move on. Jim Lynch, her partner in the market-stall business, would be picking her up at six. Grabbing her bathrobe from the back of the door, she made her way to the shower.

The hot water made her feel better but did nothing to dispel the terror of her dream. The nightmare had filled her with dread, and returning to her bedroom, she sensed an aura of menace still lingering in the room. She peered nervously in the dressing-table mirror. Her emerald eyes were swollen, surrounded with shadows, and her heart-shaped face was drawn and pale. “You look like shit,” she said to her reflection and dabbed make-up on her cheeks to hide the freckles that looked more like age spots than Celtic heritage and thirty years of sun exposure. She brushed back her long red hair and tied it in a ponytail and then put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

When she got downstairs, the cats were crying and scratching at the door, so she let them out and watched uneasily as they fled into the misty hollows of the garden. Were they running from her nightmare too?

She felt a strange reluctance to go back inside. Her house felt alien, as if another power had taken up residence there without her knowledge. Telling herself she was imagining things, she went back to the kitchen to make a strong cup of tea to calm her nerves and sat listlessly down at the table.

Her father had died nine months ago, leaving her The Goblins in his will. Emma had mixed feelings about moving back into her childhood home; the eighteenth-century thatched cottage had always held a hint of terror for her as a child, but being on the verge of homelessness after her divorce, it had come as a godsend.

The house had been unoccupied since her father’s death, and the two-acre garden had been neglected and overgrown. When she had moved in at the end of September, she asked her neighbours Dave and Maggie Forbes if they knew of anyone to help her get the place in order. They suggested their friend Jim Lynch, and she used the small sum of money she had received with the house to hire Jim and pay for the repairs. He had fixed the plumbing and restored the greenhouses and grounds in under a month, but the supplies were so expensive, even in the DIY stores, that they had almost drained her cash. Needing an income and seeing Jim also was out of work, she had suggested that they utilise the glasshouses and go into the market-garden business together. He had jumped at the chance, and things had started well, but the government’s new austerity measures took a lot of money out of people’s pockets, and their business had suffered as a consequence.

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