The Figure in Green

I pulled my camera bag higher on my shoulder as Callum Price's car crunched to a halt on the gravel turning circle. Two hours of narrow Somerset lanes, wooded combes and open moorland had brought us to what should have been a crumbling ruin. Instead, Harcourt House rose before us like something from a postcard, every detail sharp and intact.

'This can't be right,' Priya Shah said from the passenger seat, checking her mobile against the coordinates I'd given her weeks ago.

But it was right. I'd cross-referenced three urban-exploration forums and spent countless nights researching the place. The late-Victorian country house stood exactly where it should, near Exmoor in rural Somerset. Its deep timber verandah was pristine, its windows perfectly aligned, and not a single slate was missing from the roof.

Rhys Morgan gave a low whistle from beside me in the back. 'Ali, are you sure this place is abandoned?'

I stepped out of the car, my boots finding solid gravel instead of the weeds I'd expected. The grounds stretched away in manicured perfection: clipped hedges, weed-free flowerbeds and grass cut to an even height.

My stomach twisted. Abandoned properties did not maintain themselves.

'The forums all said the same thing,' I said, taking my camera from its bag. 'Something happened here in 1987. The factory closed, the family withdrew, and the house has been empty for decades.'

Callum switched off the engine, and the silence struck us at once. It was not the ordinary quiet of the countryside but something deeper. I'd photographed dozens of abandoned buildings, and they always had sounds: settling timber, wind through broken glass, birds nesting in the eaves.

Here, there was nothing. Even the trees around the property seemed to be holding their breath.

'All right, that's strange,' Callum muttered, scanning the tree line. 'Where are all the birds?'

I raised my camera and began photographing the exterior. Through the viewfinder, the house looked even more impossible. The pale paint gleamed as though it had been applied yesterday. Every piece of decorative timberwork was intact, and every verandah rail stood straight and unbowed.

The stained-glass panels in the front door caught the afternoon light without a crack between them. Priya walked slowly around the car, her notebook already open.

'The Harcourt family owned a manufacturing company,' she said. 'They made high-end mannequins for British department stores and theatrical costumiers.'

'Rich people's things,' Rhys said, pulling a lock-picking kit from his jacket. 'That explains the grand house.'

He jogged up the verandah steps and examined the front-door furniture. I kept taking pictures, trying to capture the wrongness I felt but could not name. The house was beautiful, perfectly preserved, exactly what an urban explorer dreamt of finding. So why did my hands tremble whenever I adjusted the camera settings?

'Got it,' Rhys called.

The mortice lock yielded with scarcely any effort.

'Strange,' he said. 'That was far too easy for a lock this old.'

The front door swung inwards on silent hinges, revealing an entrance hall that stopped all four of us in our tracks. The polished wooden floor gleamed without a scuff. A crystal chandelier hung overhead, every drop intact and free of dust. An ornate staircase curved towards the first floor, its banister polished to a mirror shine.

'This is impossible,' Priya whispered.

I stepped inside, forgetting my camera for a moment. The air felt wrong - too clean, too still, like a museum after closing time. Fresh-looking wallpaper covered the walls in deep burgundy and gold. There were no peeling edges, no water marks and no sign that thirty-seven years had passed.

Callum hesitated on the threshold. 'Maybe we should-'

'Look at this,' Rhys interrupted, pointing to a side table near the staircase.

Priya reached it first, and the colour drained from her face. 'This newspaper is from October 1987.'

She held up a copy of the Somerset County Gazette. Its pages were crisp and white, as though it had been delivered that morning. The headline read, 'Search Begins for Missing Manufacturer's Daughter'.

I moved closer and photographed it over her shoulder. 'Check the date.'

'15 October 1987,' Priya said, barely above a whisper. She scanned the opening paragraph. 'Eleanor Harcourt was last seen on the evening of 14 October and reported missing early the next morning.' She looked up. 'This paper should be yellow and falling apart.'

Rhys moved deeper into the house, his footsteps echoing through the unnatural silence.

We followed him into a formal dining room, where places had been laid for dinner, crystal glasses positioned precisely beside the plates. There was no dust and not a cobweb in any corner. It looked as if someone had stepped out for a moment and might return at any second.

I raised my camera again and documented everything. Through the lens, the preservation became more disturbing. Every surface was clean, every object in its proper place. A grandfather clock in the corner showed the correct time.

'The wallpaper isn't even faded,' Priya said, running one finger along it. 'It should be bleached by the sun and peeling away.'

Callum remained near the doorway, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. 'This feels wrong. Properly wrong.'

I could not disagree. The house felt like a held breath, like something waiting. Afternoon sunlight streamed through windows that should have been grimy or broken, illuminating rooms that should have been thick with dust and debris. Instead, everything appeared ready for immediate occupation.

Rhys's voice carried from the drawing room. 'You need to see this.'

We found him standing before a mantelpiece lined with family photographs. They showed a well-dressed couple and a young woman with a black bob and grey eyes, all smiling at family gatherings and formal occasions. In one picture they stood together at a regional manufacturers' dinner.

'The Harcourts,' I said, photographing each frame. 'They look so ordinary.'

'Ordinary families don't end up like this,' Priya said, studying their faces.

I moved through the drawing room, photographing everything. A book lay open on a side table with a pair of folded reading glasses beside it. A teacup rested on a coaster as though somebody had just taken a sip. Personal possessions throughout the room suggested a daily life interrupted, yet everything remained perfectly preserved.

The grandfather clock chimed the hour, making us all jump. Its hands had shown the right time, and now, impossibly, its mechanism was sounding it after decades in an abandoned house.

Callum backed towards the door. 'That's enough. An abandoned clock should not be keeping time.'

But I could not stop taking pictures. Every image revealed another impossible detail: fresh flowers in a vase that should have decayed decades ago, magazines fanned across low tables without a yellowed page, even carpet that bore the neat lines of a recent vacuuming.

'We need to explore upstairs,' I said, lowering the camera.

Priya nodded, although she looked as unsettled as Callum. 'If we're going to document the place, we should be thorough.'

Rhys was already approaching the staircase. 'Whatever happened, someone left in a hurry. Look around. Dinner laid out, personal things everywhere. Something drove them out.'

I took one last photograph of the drawing room, trying to capture the afternoon light falling across surfaces that should have carried thirty-seven years of dust and decay.

The house felt as if it were watching us, waiting to see what we would do next. Every instinct told me to leave, but curiosity was still stronger than fear.

For the moment.

My boots met the polished wooden steps of the main staircase as Rhys led the way up, his footfalls echoing through the house's unnatural quiet. Half an hour exploring the ground floor had left all of us rattled, although Rhys still maintained his studied casualness about the impossibly preserved building.

'We should split up so we can cover more ground,' he said when we reached the first-floor landing. 'Priya, you and Callum take the bedrooms on the left. Ali and I will check this passage.'

The first floor extended ahead of us in the same unsettling perfection. Burgundy carpet runners lined the corridors without a single worn patch, and brass fittings gleamed as though they had been polished the day before.

I raised my camera and recorded the pristine condition of everything we passed. Priya nodded and set off towards the bedrooms with Callum, who kept glancing back as if he did not want us to separate. I could not blame him. The house seemed to be listening to every movement we made.

Rhys strode ahead of me, trying door handles as he went. Most opened easily, revealing bedrooms with neatly made beds, clothes hanging in wardrobes and personal belongings arranged across dressing tables, all frozen in 1987. I photographed each room quickly, trying to capture the eerie preservation while the knot in my stomach tightened.

'Have a look at this,' Rhys called from the end of the corridor.

He stood before a door unlike the others, heavier and surrounded by more elaborate carving. When he turned the handle, it opened with a soft click that sounded too loud in the silence.

I followed him through and stopped dead.

The chamber was easily the largest on the first floor, and it contained forty-three mannequins arranged in different poses, like guests at a frozen party.

My camera hung forgotten around my neck while I stared. These were not ordinary department-store mannequins. Each had been constructed from painted resin and wood with a level of detail that made my skin crawl. Their skin showed pores, subtle variations of colour and tiny imperfections that made them appear human. Glass eyes shone beneath individually shaped lashes. Human-quality wigs had been styled separately, some in elaborate arrangements and others hanging loose, all looking freshly brushed.

Their clothes ranged from formal gowns to casual outfits and spanned several decades, but every garment was expensive and perfectly fitted.

'Holy hell,' Rhys said as he walked between the figures. 'It's like a deeply unpleasant museum.'

I forced myself farther into the room and raised my camera again. Through the viewfinder, the figures were even more disturbing. Their glass eyes appeared to follow the camera's movements, though I told myself it was an optical illusion.

It had to be.

The craftsmanship was extraordinary and wrong at the same time. A male figure near the window wore a perfectly tailored suit, his painted resin hands positioned as though he had been caught in the middle of a gesture. A woman in a 1960s cocktail dress stood with one hip tilted, her painted lips curved into a slight smile that looked too real.

Every face was unique. These were not generic commercial features but individual expressions suggesting real personalities.

'Look at the workmanship,' I said, focusing on a mannequin in riding clothes. 'Someone spent a serious amount of time on every one of them.'

Rhys was examining a group arranged around a mock dinner-party scene. 'Rich people and their strange hobbies, I suppose. Though I have to admit, these are impressive.'

He joked about inviting them downstairs for dinner, but I scarcely heard him. My attention had fixed on a figure near the centre of the room.

A female mannequin with a black bob stood slightly apart from the others, dressed in bottle-green velvet of a style that belonged to the 1980s. Her pose was different too. While the other figures appeared caught in natural moments, she stood perfectly straight, arms at her sides, facing the door as though she were greeting visitors.

The temperature seemed to fall as I stared at her.

The bottle-green dress was beautiful, its velvet drinking in the light, but something about the way she wore it tightened my chest. Her black hair framed her face in a precise bob, both dated and strangely timeless. Yet it was her face that made me step back.

Her features were more finely rendered than those of any other figure. Every line was exact, from the arches of her brows to the shape of her lips. Her grey glass eyes seemed to stare directly at me wherever I moved. It was not the blank gaze of a mannequin. It felt deliberate. Focused.

I lifted my camera to photograph her, but my hand shook so violently that I had to lower it.

Dread radiated from the figure like cold from an open grave. Every instinct urged me to look away, but I could not.

'Ali, are you all right?'

Rhys's voice seemed to come from far away.

'Yes,' I managed, though my voice sounded strange. 'The detail on this one is incredible.'

Rhys came over to inspect the black-haired mannequin. 'She does look different. More personal, somehow. As if someone cared very much about getting her exactly right.'

Before I could answer, footsteps in the corridor announced Priya and Callum. They appeared in the doorway and stopped dead.

'What the hell?' Priya breathed.

Callum remained on the threshold, his face pale. 'This is seriously twisted. Why would anyone keep this many mannequins in their house?'

'The family business,' I said, finally managing to raise my camera again. 'Harcourt Bespoke Figures. They manufactured mannequins for department stores. Perhaps this was a showroom.'

Priya moved cautiously amongst the figures, holding her notebook open but forgetting to write. 'These aren't normal shop mannequins. Look at their faces. They're all different. Individual.'

Callum did not move from the doorway. 'I don't care what they are. This room makes me want to crawl out of my skin. Can we finish and get out?'

I understood his reaction completely. The mannequins created an atmosphere that felt fundamentally wrong. They were too lifelike, too detailed, too much like people who could neither move nor speak but were somehow still present.

The silence here was heavier than elsewhere in the house, as though forty-three artificial sets of lungs had stopped breathing at once.

Yet I could not stop photographing. Each figure displayed a level of craft and artistry far beyond commercial mannequin production. Someone had poured immense skill and attention into making them, and despite my deepening unease, I needed to document it.

The black-haired mannequin in bottle-green velvet remained my main focus. Whenever I turned to photograph another figure, I felt myself drawn back to her. She stood like the centrepiece, the others arranged in a loose circle around her.

The queen of a frozen court.

'We should go back downstairs,' Callum said, his voice tight. 'This place is getting to me.'

Priya was examining the clothes on several figures. 'These outfits are museum quality. Hand-tailored, expensive fabrics. Whoever owned this collection had a great deal of money.'

Rhys moved to the windows and looked out over the grounds. 'At least we know why the house is so large. You'd need a lot of room to keep forty-three of these things.'

I took one final photograph of the bottle-green figure, forcing myself to meet her grey gaze through the camera lens. The image felt important, like evidence I might need later.

When I lowered the camera, she seemed to be looking directly at me with an expression that was no longer welcoming.

It was possessive.

I continued through the room in systematic rows, photographing every mannequin from several angles. Twenty minutes passed after our arrival, and although the others became restless, I could not stop. The craftsmanship demanded proper documentation, even if every exposure made my skin crawl a little more.

Callum retreated to the passage, claiming he needed fresh air, although the whole house felt suffocating. Priya walked amongst the figures with her notebook, recording observations about their clothes, construction and materials. Rhys wandered around the perimeter, examining the walls and skirting boards with the concentration he normally reserved for hidden entrances.

'The detail is remarkable,' Priya said, studying the wig on a mannequin dressed for a formal event in the 1970s. 'It looks as if every strand was positioned by hand.'

I lowered my camera to check the shot count. Roughly 160 photographs of this room alone. Through the viewfinder, the mannequins had appeared frozen in conversation. Looking at them directly, however, created the unsettling impression that they had been caught in motion and had all stopped at the same instant.

Rhys's voice came from the panelled passage immediately outside the room. 'Come and see this.'

We joined him beside the wall adjoining the main staircase. He crouched near the first-floor landing and ran his hands along the skirting board. What I had taken for decorative panelling shifted when he pressed one particular section.

A soft click sounded, and part of the wall swung inwards.

'Hidden door,' he announced, grinning as if he had won a prize. 'I knew something was wrong with the proportions.'

Beyond the panel, a narrow service staircase ran down behind the main staircase, descending past the ground floor into darkness. Cool air drifted up from below, carrying the scents of wood polish and an unidentified chemical.

Rhys took out his mobile and switched on its torch. The beam reached down the steps.

'Should we inspect it?' he asked, although his tone suggested he had already decided.

Callum came closer, saw the opening and immediately shook his head. 'Absolutely not. This house is strange enough without us exploring secret basements.'

Priya was already approaching the stair. 'If we're documenting the place, we need to see everything.'

I peered into the opening. The wooden steps looked solid and matched the quality of the rest of the house. My camera hung against my chest, and despite the tightening knot in my stomach, I wanted to photograph whatever waited below.

'Ten minutes,' I said. 'Just long enough to inspect the workshop, if that's what it is.'

Rhys descended first, his mobile's light revealing stone walls and a larger space at the bottom. Priya followed, then me, with Callum reluctantly bringing up the rear.

The temperature fell noticeably as we went underground, and the chemical smell intensified. The basement opened before us like a workshop frozen in time.

Workbenches lined the walls, covered in unfamiliar tools, bottles of liquids in different colours and moulds for producing body parts. Mannequin torsos hung from ceiling hooks in various stages of completion. Some were rough wooden and resin forms, while others had been painted and detailed to lifelike perfection. Glass eyes waited in compartmentalised trays, and human-quality wigs rested on wooden stands beside lengths of fabric.

'It's a manufacturing workshop,' I said, raising my camera. 'The family didn't only sell the figures. They made them here.'

The basement explained the size of Harcourt House and the quality of the mannequins upstairs. This had not been a hobby or a small sideline but a serious operation capable of producing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bespoke figures.

Workstations held specialised equipment for moulding faces, setting glass eyes, styling wigs and cutting clothing patterns. Even after thirty-seven years, the orderliness suggested highly skilled craftspeople who had taken pride in their work.

Rhys moved between the benches, examining tools and materials. 'This is professional equipment. It must have cost a fortune.'

'Look at this,' Priya called from the far corner.

We moved towards her, navigating around hanging torsos and unfinished mannequins. Priya stood motionless beside a workbench where a completed figure sat upright, as though awaiting final inspection.

My breath caught.

The mannequin looked exactly like me.

It had the same shoulder-length red hair, styled just as I wore mine that day. The same facial structure, from the shape of my nose to the curve of my jaw. The same hazel eyes staring at me with an unnerving intensity. A small scar cut through its left eyebrow, matching the mark I'd carried since childhood.

The figure wore dark green corduroy trousers and a charcoal jumper identical to my own. Even the jumper's right cuff was frayed in precisely the same place. At its collar was a silver moth brooch exactly like the one I had bought the previous month.

I stepped backwards. My camera hung forgotten as I stared at my own face rendered in painted resin, wood, glass and hair.

The resemblance was not approximate. It was exact, as if someone had studied me for weeks and captured every detail.

'What the hell?' Callum said, panic sharpening his voice. 'Why is there a mannequin that looks exactly like Alice?'

Rhys moved closer, searching for a maker's mark or identification.

'Harcourt Bespoke Figures,' he read from a small label fixed to the base. 'Custom order. Completed October 1987.'

'That makes no sense,' Priya said, checking her notebook. 'Alice wasn't even born in 1987.'

Yet there it sat, my face staring back at me through glass eyes that seemed to track me wherever I stood. The clothes were not merely similar. They were identical, down to damage that had happened recently and jewellery I had owned for only a month.

Callum found a filing cabinet and pulled out a company brochure with trembling hands.

'Listen to this. Harcourt Bespoke Figures specialised in custom mannequins for wealthy clients who wanted figures resembling particular people, for private collections, theatre productions or memorial purposes.'

'Memorial purposes?' Priya repeated. 'That's disturbing.'

I forced myself to raise the camera and photograph the mannequin bearing my face. It felt like recording evidence of my own death, but I needed proof of what we had found.

Through the viewfinder, the resemblance was worse. Every feature matched, as though whoever had made it possessed detailed photographs of me or had observed me in person.

The basement felt colder than the floors above. As I moved around the workshop taking pictures, I began to think the other figures had changed position since our arrival. Torsos that had faced the benches now appeared turned towards us. Wooden and resin arms that had hung at their sides seemed to reach out slightly.

The changes were subtle enough for doubt, but the arrangement felt different.

'We need to leave,' I said, backing towards the staircase. 'Now.'

Callum was already halfway up. 'Finally. Someone is making sense.'

But I could not stop looking at my replica. Its hazel glass eyes followed my retreat, and I had the distinct impression that it wanted to speak. Its painted lips seemed poised in the middle of a sentence, frozen in whatever conversation it had been conducting before we disturbed it.

Priya gathered her notebook and started up the stairs. Rhys took one last look around the workshop before following, but I remained rooted for several seconds, unable to break eye contact with my painted double.

Every figure in the basement watched us leave. I felt their artificial gazes tracking us, dozens of glass eyes following our retreat up the narrow service staircase. The mannequin with my face held my attention longest, its expression seeming to shift from welcome to something almost possessive.

We emerged onto the first-floor landing, but the basement's chill followed us. Rhys pressed the hidden panel closed. Even with the door sealed, I could feel the workshop below our feet, filled with watching figures that knew we had uncovered their secret.

The house felt different now. What had seemed like impossible preservation had revealed itself as something more deliberate.

The Harcourt family had not simply vanished. Eleanor had disappeared on 15 October 1987, the factory had closed immediately afterwards, and her parents had withdrawn from public life before eventually leaving the house for good. Yet they had left behind a collection that defied explanation, including a figure that should not exist, wearing my face and my clothes.

I needed to leave before I understood what any of it meant.

I packed my camera equipment with hands that still trembled from the basement discovery. An hour passed after we climbed out of the workshop. Rhys resealed the hidden door, Priya closed her notebook and Callum practically sprinted towards the main entrance, but I needed to document the exterior once more before we left.

The afternoon light had shifted since our arrival, throwing longer shadows across the pristine grounds. I walked towards the house again and raised my camera, photographing the deep timber verandah, the perfect decorative woodwork and the stained-glass door panels, still catching the light without a single crack.

'Ali, come on,' Callum called from beside his car. 'We should go before it gets dark.'

I lowered my camera and looked towards the first-floor windows. Something made me pause. The main window of the mannequin room faced the front of the house, and through the glass I could see figures silhouetted against the interior light.

'Rhys,' I said, walking closer to the car while keeping my eyes on the windows. 'Look at the first floor.'

He glanced up and shaded his eyes. 'What about it?'

'The mannequins. They're facing the windows now.'

When we had left the room, most had been arranged in conversation groups or positioned to display their clothes. Now several stood directly behind the glass, turned outwards as though watching the front garden.

The mannequin in the bottle-green velvet dress occupied the centre window, perfectly framed. Her black bob outlined her pale face.

Priya followed my gaze and made an impatient noise. 'You're frightened and overtired. Mannequins don't move by themselves.'

But I knew what I'd seen. I raised my camera and used the zoom lens to inspect the windows. Through the magnified image, the details were unmistakable. At least six figures now faced outwards, their glass eyes directed towards us.

The woman in bottle-green velvet stood at the centre, her grey gaze aimed straight into my lens.

'They moved,' I said, lowering the camera. 'I'm not imagining it.'

Rhys narrowed his eyes at the windows. 'You might be right. The red-haired one in the blue dress was definitely facing the other way when we were in there.'

Callum was already getting behind the wheel. 'I don't care if they're dancing the cha-cha. Can we please leave?'

I took several more pictures of the windows, bracing the camera against the car because my hands were shaking. Every photograph captured the same arrangement: mannequins positioned like an audience watching a performance, with the black-haired figure as their focal point.

The drive back to Bristol stretched ahead like an escape route. I climbed into the front passenger seat while Priya and Rhys settled in the back, already discussing the history of the house and what we had found in the workshop.

Callum started the engine. Some of the tension left my shoulders as we pulled away around the gravel turning circle.

I still checked the side mirror when we reached the lane.

Harcourt House remained visible through the trees, its windows shining in the late-afternoon light. The first-floor display had not changed. The figures stood at the glass as if watching us depart.

Callum guided the car back along the twisting Somerset lanes. I tried to concentrate on the conversation behind me. Priya was reading notes about the Harcourt family's manufacturing company while Rhys speculated about the specialised equipment in the workshop. Their voices sounded distant, as if they were speaking underwater.

I kept checking the mirrors. Not for the house, which we had left far behind, but for something I could not name. Wooded combes pressed close to the lane before giving way to open moorland, and my peripheral vision caught movements that became nothing more than swaying branches or sliding shadows whenever I turned my head.

'The craftsmanship really was remarkable,' Priya said. 'Those weren't mass-produced shop figures. Every one was individually made.'

'Including the one that looked exactly like Alice,' Rhys added. 'That's the part I can't understand. How does anyone make a perfect replica of someone who wasn't born yet?'

I did not want to think about my mannequin. The memory of its hazel glass eyes tightened my stomach, and I forced myself to watch the road ahead rather than the mirrors.

Callum drove steadily through the winding route, and the wooded landscape gradually opened into farmland. The two-hour journey felt longer than the morning drive. Perhaps we were all trying to process what we had seen, or perhaps the lengthening shadows made every familiar shape look strange.

I found myself studying every building we passed, every person on the roadside and every vehicle approaching in the opposite lane.

By the time we reached the outer edges of Bristol, the sun was low enough for Callum to lower his visor. Familiar sights should have reassured me: petrol stations I recognised, retail parks I'd photographed for client work, the spreading suburbs that meant civilisation and normality.

We stopped at a red light near the city boundary, and I saw her.

A woman in a bottle-green velvet dress stood at a bus stop on the corner, her black bob visible at the edge of my vision.

I turned at once. Only an elderly man in a grey jacket waited there, checking his watch.

The light changed, and Callum drove on. I twisted in my seat to look back, but the bus stop was empty. The elderly man had vanished as well, though no bus had arrived.

'Are you all right?' Callum asked, noticing my movement.

'Yes,' I said, facing forwards again. 'I thought I saw someone I knew.'

But my chest felt tight, and I could not dismiss the image of the bottle-green dress and black hair. The same colour, the same cut, the same figure as the mannequin at Harcourt House.

I told myself it was stress. We had spent hours in an impossible house, discovered a workshop full of unnervingly lifelike figures and found a mannequin wearing my face. Of course my mind was playing tricks on me. Anyone might see things after an experience like that.

Callum dropped Rhys and Priya at their respective flats before taking me home to my converted warehouse flat in Bristol's Old City. Familiar streets offered some comfort after the isolation of Harcourt House. People walked along the pavements, restaurants glowed with warm light, and everything looked as it should in an ordinary city on an ordinary Saturday evening.

'Thanks for driving,' I said when Callum stopped outside my building.

'No problem. But Ali, perhaps don't look at those pictures tonight. Give yourself a rest from that place.'

It was good advice, and I knew I would ignore it.

I needed to see what my camera had captured. I needed to document everything properly. That was what I did. I found interesting places and photographed them. Harcourt House was simply more interesting than most.

My flat felt smaller than usual when I climbed the stairs. Its exposed brick walls and tall windows should have reassured me, but something was wrong. The air seemed too still, as if the rooms had been undisturbed for far longer than the eight hours I'd been away.

I put my camera bag on the kitchen worktop and began transferring the day's photographs to my laptop. There were just over 350 images from the visit, including those taken during our approach and departure. Enough to occupy me for hours.

The transfer took fifteen minutes. While I waited, I filled the kettle and made coffee. They were ordinary actions in an ordinary kitchen, yet I kept glancing around as if I had forgotten something important.

My reflection in the dark microwave door looked pale and tired, which was hardly surprising after the day we'd had.

When the photographs finished transferring, I sat at my desk and reviewed them in chronological order. First came the exterior shots: the impossible perfection of the grounds, the pristine surfaces and complete absence of decay or neglect.

Then came the interior. The entrance hall with its gleaming chandelier, the dining room laid for guests who would never arrive, and the drawing room with its Harcourt family photographs and fresh flowers. Every detail was exactly as I remembered, captured in sharp focus that emphasised how wrong it was.

The first-floor images made me pause.

They showed room after room filled with personal possessions, beds made with military precision and clothes hanging in wardrobes as though their owners had just stepped out. But while I moved through photographs of the corridors, I noticed something strange.

Mannequins appeared in the backgrounds of several shots.

They were not confined to the main display room. Individual figures stood in bedroom doorways or near windows. I remembered photographing empty passages, but the camera had captured figures I did not recall seeing.

The physical mannequins of Harcourt House appeared perfectly clearly in every image.

I went back to the photographs of the display room. All forty-three figures stood throughout the chamber, yet their positions differed from my memory and from one image to the next. The black-haired mannequin in the bottle-green dress occupied several places across the series. Sometimes she stood near the centre, sometimes closer to the windows, and sometimes almost outside the frame.

That was impossible. I had taken the photographs within twenty minutes. Mannequins did not move between exposures, particularly heavy figures made of wood and resin that would have required deliberate effort to reposition.

I opened the files in my editing software and examined them more closely. The metadata gave exact timestamps, confirming that the pictures had been taken in sequence over a short period. Yet Eleanor's bottle-green figure appeared in different positions throughout, always facing the camera wherever she stood.

My coffee went cold while I worked.

The basement photographs came next. They showed the workshop, its tools and materials, the hanging torsos in various stages of completion, and finally the mannequin bearing my face.

Seeing it again made my hands shake. The likeness was exact in every detail: my shoulder-length red hair, hazel eyes, facial structure and the small scar through my left eyebrow. Someone had recreated features most people would never notice. The charcoal jumper, dark green corduroy trousers, frayed right cuff and silver moth brooch were all present in crisp photographic detail.

Then I examined the exterior pictures taken as we left. Harcourt House looked unchanged, perfectly preserved and impossibly maintained. The first-floor windows showed precisely what I had seen through the zoom lens: mannequins arranged behind the glass, facing outwards like an audience.

The woman in bottle-green velvet stood in the centre window in every shot, her black bob framing her face and her grey eyes seeming to track the camera's movement.

In the final photograph, taken just before we drove away, both her hands appeared pressed against the glass.

I closed the laptop and pushed myself away from the desk. My flat felt too quiet. The photographs had left me more unsettled than the visit itself. Seeing the evidence in digital form made everything real and permanent.

The mannequin resembling me existed.

The figures had changed position between photographs.

The bottle-green woman had watched us leave.

And I could not shake the memory of the figure at the Bristol bus stop, glimpsed in green at the edge of my vision and gone when I looked directly at her.

On Sunday, 13 October 2024, I woke to the sound of my flat's heating running at full power. Yet the air around me felt as though I'd left every window open overnight. My breath formed faint clouds as I sat up and checked the thermostat through the app on my mobile.

It read 22 degrees Celsius, as always.

But the cold seemed to be coming from inside the walls.

My laptop remained open on the desk where I'd left it after reviewing the photographs until nearly three in the morning. Its screen had gone dark, but the memory of the mannequins changing position remained painfully clear.

I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and shuffled into the kitchen, hoping coffee would drive away both the chill and the lingering dread of what we had discovered the day before.

The microwave's digital clock showed 8.47 am as I filled the kettle on Sunday morning. It was 13 October 2024, and I was following the ordinary routine of an ordinary morning in my converted warehouse flat in Bristol's Old City, except for the persistent cold that kept a blanket wrapped tightly around my shoulders. I switched on the kettle and turned towards the cupboard above the microwave to fetch a mug.

Bottle-green velvet caught my eye in the microwave's dark reflection.

A dress. A black bob. The suggestion of a figure standing directly behind me in my small kitchen.

I spun round so quickly that the blanket fell to the floor.

The kitchen was empty. There was only the growing murmur of the kettle, morning light streaming through the windows and the lingering cold that made no sense when the heating was working.

My hands shook as I picked up the blanket. The microwave door now showed only my reflection, pale and tired against the kitchen behind me. Shoulder-length red hair, hazel eyes, no bottle-green dress and no black-haired figure.

Nothing but the ordinary details of my flat.

I needed to get out.

An hour later, I sat in the Copper Kettle cafe on Corn Street with my laptop open and a large flat white growing cold beside me. The Old City cafe was busy enough for me to disappear amongst freelancers, students and people working remotely.

I was just another person with a computer trying to meet a deadline.

My current project involved designing promotional material for a local art gallery, the sort of straightforward freelance work that usually kept my hands occupied and my mind focused. That morning, however, I kept looking up from the screen.

Every few minutes, something at the edge of my vision made me turn towards the till, the entrance or the windows overlooking Corn Street. A flash of bottle-green fabric, a glimpse of black hair, the suggestion of someone watching from just beyond my direct line of sight.

Whenever I looked properly, I saw ordinary customers. A university student in a green hoodie reading a textbook. A woman with a black bob typing on her mobile. A man in a tan coat checking his watch beside the window.

All perfectly normal people going about perfectly normal business.

I forced myself to concentrate on the gallery project, adjusting fonts and colours for an exhibition announcement. The work required careful attention, and normally I could lose myself in the process of making the visual elements fit together. Instead, I saved the file every few minutes as though I might have to leave without warning.

My mobile buzzed with a message from the gallery owner asking when the final files would be ready. I replied that I would send everything by the following day, although concentrating long enough to finish anything felt increasingly impossible.

Every movement at the edge of my sight drew my attention away from the screen. The student in the green hoodie packed her books and left. A few minutes later, another woman wearing a dark green cardigan took a table near the back corner.

When I looked directly at her, she appeared to be reading a magazine, but something about her posture was too still and too deliberate.

I rang Rhys, hoping that talking about the previous day's visit to Harcourt House might calm me.

'Hi, Ali. How are you feeling after our little adventure?'

'Not brilliant, actually. I keep seeing things that aren't there.'

Rhys laughed easily down the line. 'That place definitely got under everyone's skin. Callum messaged me this morning to say he'd had strange dreams all night.'

'This isn't a dream, Rhys. I'm seeing the mannequin from the house. The one in the bottle-green dress.'

There was a pause.

'Do you mean you're thinking about it, or that you're actually seeing it?'

'I'm seeing it in reflections and across the road from the cafe where I'm working. But when I look directly, it turns into an ordinary person wearing green.'

'Ali, listen to yourself. You spent hours trespassing in a creepy old house full of mannequins, then stayed up late going through the photographs. Your brain is processing what happened. It's completely normal to feel unsettled after something like that.'

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that the sightings felt more real than anything else around me, and that each glimpse of bottle-green velvet sent ice through my chest in a way that had nothing to do with the inexplicable cold in my flat.

'Maybe you're right,' I said instead.

'Give it a few days. Do some normal work, see some normal people and let your head clear. Harcourt House was intense, but it's behind us now.'

After Rhys rang off, I tried to follow his advice.

Normal work. A normal cafe. A normal Sunday in central Bristol.

I opened a new project file and began sketching layout ideas for a restaurant's redesigned menu. It was simple client work with no connection to abandoned country houses or impossibly preserved figures made from resin, wood, glass eyes, human-quality wigs and fabric.

The sightings continued.

By 3.00 pm, I had counted at least a dozen flashes of bottle-green fabric or black hair in my peripheral vision. A woman passing the window. A customer joining the queue at the till. Someone sitting at a corner table just beyond my direct field of view.

Each time I looked properly, the figure became a different person engaged in an ordinary activity. The woman outside was checking her mobile. The customer in the queue was ordering a complicated drink. The person at the corner table was working on a laptop.

Yet the feeling of being watched grew stronger with each sighting. It was not the casual awareness of sharing a public place with strangers. It was the concentrated attention of someone studying every movement I made.

I checked the cafe mirrors, my reflection in the laptop screen and even the surface of my flat white for glimpses of bottle-green velvet. My hands began to shake so badly that typing became difficult.

I saved my files and packed away my laptop. I told myself I would finish the work at home, where I would not be surrounded by so many people and reflective surfaces.

As I approached the exit, I saw a figure standing across Corn Street.

A black bob. A bottle-green velvet dress. A woman standing perfectly still amongst the shoppers and tourists moving along the pavement.

Unlike the earlier sightings, she did not disappear or become someone else when I looked straight at her.

The mannequin from Harcourt House stood in Bristol's Old City wearing the same dress I had photographed the day before. Her grey glass eyes seemed to follow me as I stopped just inside the cafe doorway.

I pulled out my mobile and aimed its camera across the road.

Through the screen, I saw ordinary pedestrians and the old buildings lining Corn Street. There was no bottle-green dress, no black-haired figure and nothing unusual at all.

When I lowered the mobile, she was still there.

Still watching. Still perfectly motionless while everyone around her moved.

I pushed through the cafe door and stepped on to the pavement, keeping my eyes fixed upon her. A delivery van passed between us and blocked my view for perhaps three seconds.

When it had gone, the place where she had stood was empty.

The walk back to my flat took twenty minutes. On every street, I checked shop windows, doorways and side roads for another glimpse of bottle-green velvet.

Nothing appeared, but the sensation of being observed never left me. It felt as though someone were following just beyond the limits of my sight, matching my pace and remaining carefully concealed.

Back at the flat, I made dinner and tried to occupy myself with the ordinary rituals of an evening at home. I rang Mum and Dad in Clevedon, watched half an episode of a cookery programme and answered work emails.

They were mundane tasks that should have restored some sense of normality. The flat remained cold, however, and I could not forget the figure across from the cafe. She had been too still, too perfectly positioned and too aware of me to be anything ordinary.

By 9.00 pm, I had abandoned any attempt at productive work and opened my laptop to research the Harcourt family.

The first search results were sparse. Eventually, through the Somerset archive catalogue and digitised holdings of the Somerset County Gazette, I found several reports from 1987.

One headline read, 'Harcourt Bespoke Figures Closes Permanently'.

The brief article explained that the family firm had ceased trading after thirty years because of personal circumstances. The closure had taken effect immediately after Eleanor Harcourt, the owners' daughter, had been reported missing on 15 October 1987.

A later article carried the headline, 'Search for Missing Woman Continues'.

Eleanor had last been seen at Harcourt House on 14 October and had been formally reported missing early the following morning. Police found no evidence of a struggle, no note and no indication of where she might have gone. After several weeks without a reliable lead, the active search had been scaled back.

I found another article published a month later: 'Harcourt House Inquiry Concluded'.

Police believed Eleanor might have left voluntarily because of personal difficulties the family refused to discuss in public. The investigation remained a missing-person case, with no evidence of foul play. Mr and Mrs Harcourt had withdrawn from public life after their daughter's disappearance and the closure of the company. They later left Harcourt House permanently, rather than vanishing with her as local rumours claimed.

What held my attention was the photograph accompanying the final article. It showed the Harcourt family at a regional manufacturers' dinner.

Their daughter had a black bob and grey eyes. She wore a bottle-green velvet dress identical to the one on the figure in the display room.

Eleanor Harcourt had disappeared in October 1987, the same month as the newspapers we had found in the entrance hall. It was also the month stamped on the label attached to the mannequin with my face in the basement workshop.

I closed the laptop and checked the mortice lock and every window latch twice before switching off the lights.

I told myself that on Monday I would concentrate on work, avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces, and prove Rhys right about the lingering effects of our exploration.

But I could not escape the feeling that Eleanor Harcourt had found a way to leave Harcourt House after all.

By Wednesday, 16 October, two days of worsening sightings had left me barely able to function. I sat at my kitchen table with my third coffee of the morning, my hands clasped around the mug in search of warmth that never came, and watched Corn Street through the flat's tall windows.

Eleanor had appeared four times since I had got up at 6.30 am. Once beside the postbox across the road, once in the doorway of an antiques shop, once reflected in a car window and once standing at a bus stop as if she belonged there.

The black-haired mannequin in the bottle-green dress had become a constant presence in my life. What had begun as occasional glimpses now happened several times a day, and each sighting lasted longer than the one before it.

Instead of vanishing when I looked directly at her, she remained visible for several seconds, sometimes longer, her grey eyes fixed upon mine before she faded.

I had cancelled three client appointments on Tuesday and turned down a potential project that morning. Work was impossible when I spent every few minutes checking windows, doorways and corners for bottle-green velvet. My review with the gallery had been postponed indefinitely after I excused myself twice during an online meeting to see whether someone was standing behind me.

Sleep had abandoned me altogether.

Even with every light burning and the mortice lock secured, I could feel her presence in the dark corners where the lamps did not quite reach. The previous night I had made it until three in the morning before giving up and spending the remaining hours until dawn in a kitchen chair, watching the empty sitting room for movement.

My mobile buzzed with another concerned message from Rhys, asking whether I felt any better.

I had stopped trying to explain after Callum suggested that I speak to a therapist and Priya began using the careful tone people adopted when they believed someone was having a breakdown.

Perhaps I was.

Eleanor appeared again while I was reading Rhys's message. She stood directly outside the cafe across the road. This time she faced my building rather than standing in profile, and the position was deliberate. She wanted me to see her clearly.

I put down my mobile and moved closer to the window, pressing my face to the glass.

She stood motionless amongst the morning foot traffic, the bottle-green velvet dark and rich against the grey pavement. Pedestrians moved around her without seeming to notice her. With growing dread, I realised I might be the only person able to see her at all.

I seized my camera from the worktop and aimed it through the window.

The viewfinder showed ordinary street activity outside the cafe. There was no bottle-green dress and no black-haired figure, only commuters heading to work and visitors beginning their day.

I lowered the camera. Eleanor was still there, watching my window.

My hands shook as I tried again with the camera on my mobile. Its screen showed the same empty stretch of pavement, while my unaided eyes saw her standing perfectly still in the morning crowd.

The contradiction made my stomach turn.

Harcourt House and the physical mannequins inside it had appeared normally in every photograph we took. Eleanor's manifestations outside the estate did not appear on a screen at all.

She remained visible for nearly ten minutes before she finally faded, longer than any previous sighting. The sustained encounter frightened me more than all the brief glimpses combined.

It felt as though she were testing how long she could hold herself here, gathering strength for something more substantial.

I avoided the bathroom mirror while I dressed and kept my gaze straight ahead whenever I passed a reflective surface. On Tuesday I had seen her behind my shoulder in the microwave door. On Monday she had appeared in my laptop's black screen when it went into sleep mode.

Mirrors and reflections had become traps in which she could materialise without warning.

By noon, my nerves were in ruins. I jumped at every unexpected sound, examined every shadow twice and held my breath whenever I turned a corner or entered another room. The vigilance was exhausting, but lowering my guard felt dangerous in a way I could not explain.

The doorbell rang just after 1.00 pm, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Through the spyhole, I saw Priya standing in the corridor with a paper carrier bag that smelt of sandwiches.

'You look awful,' she said when I opened the door, studying my face with open concern. 'When did you last sleep?'

'Monday night, perhaps.'

I stepped aside to let her enter, although company felt strange after so long spent watching for supernatural intrusions.

'Thanks for bringing lunch.'

Priya unpacked sandwiches and packets of crisps on the kitchen table while I poured two glasses of water. It was an ordinary domestic activity in an ordinary flat, except for the persistent cold that kept me in a jumper although the heating was running constantly.

'Ali, I'm worried about you. Rhys said you've been cancelling work and behaving as though something followed you from Harcourt House.'

I sat opposite her and unwrapped my sandwich, although my appetite had disappeared with my ability to sleep.

'I'm not imagining it. I'm being watched.'

'By whom?'

Before I could answer, Eleanor appeared in the hall, visible through the kitchen doorway.

She stood between the bathroom and bedroom doors in the same bottle-green velvet dress, her black bob framing her face as she watched us eat.

My breath caught. I pointed towards her.

'By her. She's standing right there.'

Priya turned to look where I was pointing.

'Ali, there's nothing in your hall.'

'You can't see her? Black bob, green dress, standing by the bathroom door?'

Priya rose and walked into the hall, passing directly through the place where Eleanor stood.

'There's nobody here. It's empty.'

I could still see the figure clearly as Priya moved through the same space. Eleanor did not respond to her presence. She remained perfectly still while my friend checked the bathroom and bedroom, then returned to the kitchen.

'You're frightening me,' Priya said as she sat down again. 'Whatever happened in that house has affected you badly.'

I opened my laptop and brought up the photographs from Saturday's visit, then scrolled to the images of the display room.

'Look at these. Look at the background of each photograph.'

Priya leant closer while I moved through the sequence, showing the black-haired figure occupying different positions amongst the forty-three mannequins.

'See how she changes places between photographs? She's somewhere different in each one.'

'Ali, they were mannequins arranged throughout a display room.'

'But she's facing the camera in every image. Look at her eyes.'

Priya examined the photographs more carefully, but her expression remained doubtful.

'It's a mannequin with glass eyes and painted resin features. You're reading intention into a manufactured face.'

I opened the pictures from the hidden workshop and showed her the figure made in my likeness.

'What about this one? How do you explain a mannequin that looks exactly like me, down to the scar through my left eyebrow, wearing my charcoal jumper and dark green corduroy trousers? It even has the frayed right cuff and the silver moth brooch I bought last month, yet its label says it was completed in October 1987.'

'That is strange,' Priya admitted. 'Very strange. But there must be some rational explanation. Someone might have used photographs of you from social media as a reference, or perhaps the clothes were added recently. The resemblance could be coincidence.'

Her explanations might have been reasonable if not for the impossible date and the recent damage copied exactly from my clothes. None of them accounted for what I saw every day.

I glanced into the hall. Eleanor still stood there, watching us, entirely invisible to my best friend.

'I think you should speak to someone,' Priya continued gently. 'A therapist, or your GP. Spending hours in that house and then finding a figure that looked exactly like you must have been traumatic. It makes sense that your mind is still processing it.'

After Priya left, promising to check on me the following day, I settled at my desk to research Eleanor Harcourt more thoroughly. The newspaper reports offered only the outline. I needed to understand who she had been and why she had disappeared.

Through a local genealogy collection, I found a secondary-school leavers' photograph. Eleanor's black bob, grey eyes and formal smile looked more manufactured than genuine. Her resemblance to the mannequin in the bottle-green dress was unmistakable: the same bone structure, the same hair and even the same slight tilt of the head.

School records showed that Eleanor had left sixth form in 1985 and joined Harcourt Bespoke Figures instead of going to university.

Company filings and surviving staff records indicated that she worked in design and finishing. She created facial features, fitted glass eyes and human-quality wigs, and selected clothing for bespoke figures commissioned by British department stores, theatrical costumiers and private clients.

An archived trade interview with her father from 1986 revealed something more disturbing.

'Eleanor has always been artistic,' Mr Harcourt had said, 'but lately she has become particularly interested in the psychological aspects of our work. She believes a figure can capture more than physical appearance. In her view, it can preserve personality and memory.'

The article described Eleanor's experiments in making the company's figures more lifelike. She studied photographs, clothing and personal possessions belonging to the people being replicated. She had developed techniques for reproducing facial expression and body language with a degree of realism that unsettled even experienced clients.

The most disturbing information came from redacted Avon and Somerset Constabulary case papers released decades later and indexed through the Somerset archives.

A nearby resident had contacted police roughly two weeks before Eleanor disappeared. The witness reported seeing lights in the workshop at all hours, hearing machinery during the night and watching Eleanor speak to the mannequins in the display rooms.

Officers had interviewed Mr and Mrs Harcourt. They admitted that their daughter had been working obsessively but insisted she was simply committed to perfecting her craft. They declined a request for officers to speak with Eleanor, claiming she was occupied with important commissions and could not be disturbed.

The case notes established that Eleanor was last seen on 14 October and reported missing early on 15 October. Harcourt Bespoke Figures closed immediately afterwards.

The final police assessment suggested that she might have suffered a psychological crisis and left voluntarily to escape the pressures of the family firm. Her parents withdrew from public life, remained at the house for a time and eventually moved away.

I was beginning to suspect Eleanor had never truly left Harcourt House.

The mannequin in the bottle-green velvet dress did not merely resemble her. It was the original vessel into which she had placed some part of herself, the anchor that allowed her consciousness to endure after her body disappeared.

Callum rang just as I closed the files. Rhys's face appeared beside his when they started a group video call. Both looked worried, and I knew Priya had told them what had happened during lunch.

'Hi, Ali,' Callum said carefully. 'How are you holding up?'

'Not well,' I admitted.

There was no point pretending when I looked as exhausted as I felt.

Rhys leant closer to his camera. 'Priya told us you're still having problems connected to the house. It might be time to speak to a professional.'

'You think I'm having a breakdown.'

'We think you went through something frightening and you're struggling to process it,' Callum said. 'There's nothing wrong with asking for help.'

I wanted to argue that what I was experiencing was real. But how could I explain supernatural harassment to friends who had seen nothing unusual? From their point of view, I had trespassed in a sinister old house and then begun claiming to see things that were not there.

'I'll think about it,' I said.

That satisfied them enough to end the call without pressing me further.

But I knew therapy could not solve a problem that existed beyond the ordinary world.

Eleanor Harcourt had found a way to preserve herself through the original figure in the display room. During our visit, she had formed some kind of connection with me. Her appearances were growing more frequent and lasting longer because she was becoming stronger, increasingly able to project herself away from Harcourt House.

She appeared in the sitting room while I made dinner, standing beside the sofa as though she had been watching television.

This time she remained visible for more than twenty minutes, long enough for me to become almost accustomed to her presence as a permanent fixture in my flat. I tried to ignore her and concentrated on cooking pasta and warming sauce, but her grey eyes followed every movement I made in the kitchen.

Eventually, I found the courage to speak.

'What do you want from me?'

She vanished at once.

I was left with the distinct certainty that she had heard every word.

As darkness gathered beyond the windows, I prepared for another sleepless night of watching shadows and listening for sounds that should not exist. The extra security I had fitted offered no protection from something that could appear and disappear at will, and leaving the lights on did nothing to prevent her manifestations.

Eleanor had been obsessed with preserving personality and memory in artificial forms. I was beginning to understand what that meant.

She had not merely made figures that looked like people. She had discovered a way to preserve consciousness inside one.

The mannequin with my face in the basement was not another anchor and it was not yet alive. It was preparation: a possession vessel made to establish a connection with my identity, ready for Eleanor to use as a bridge into my living body.

On Thursday, 17 October, I fumbled with my keys at the front door, bags of groceries balanced against my hip. Buying food had taken two hours because I kept looking over my shoulder in every aisle, expecting to see bottle-green velvet amongst the cereal boxes or a black bob reflected in the freezer doors.

Still, the errand had given me a few hours of comparatively normal activity, and I felt marginally calmer as I turned the key in the mortice lock.

The sitting room stopped me in the doorway.

Eleanor stood beside the sofa, exactly where I had seen her the previous evening, but she looked different now.

Solid. Real.

The bottle-green velvet dress seemed to have weight and texture instead of the faint, insubstantial quality of her earlier manifestations. Her black hair moved slightly as if stirred by a draught that did not exist in my sealed flat.

Most disturbing of all, her grey eyes followed me as I stepped inside. The painted features looked alive and aware.

The grocery bags fell from my hands. Tins struck the wooden floor and rolled across it. I had grown accustomed to glimpses and reflections that vanished when confronted, but this figure remained fully visible and appeared as substantial as any physical object in the room.

She looked exactly like Eleanor's original mannequin at Harcourt House, down to the bottle-green velvet and carefully fitted black wig, yet she stood in my flat as if she belonged there.

I backed towards the door without taking my eyes off her.

She did not speak or step forwards. Her head turned to follow my retreat, however, the movement smooth and deliberate. Her painted lips curved into something that might have been a smile, or might merely have been the fixed expression moulded into the resin. Either way, it was wrong in my familiar sitting room.

My keys were still in my hand and my bag remained over my shoulder. I reached behind me for the handle, found it and stepped backwards into the corridor.

Eleanor stayed beside the sofa, watching through the open doorway as I pulled the door shut and locked it.

I left the fallen groceries and rolling tins where they were. I did not go back inside.

The drive to Mum and Dad's house in Clevedon took approximately thirty-five minutes in the evening traffic. I rang them from the car to say that I needed to stay the night.

I did not tell them the whole truth. I could not explain a supernatural intruder over the telephone. I said enough for them to know that I was coming and that I needed help.

'Of course, love,' Mum said. 'Is everything all right?'

'I'm having trouble at the flat. Someone was inside. I'd feel safer staying somewhere else tonight.'

'Have you called the police?'

'Not yet. I just got out.'

'Come straight here. We'll make up your old room. Drive carefully.'

My childhood home looked exactly as it always had: a 1930s semi-detached house with pebble-dash walls, bay windows and a neatly kept front garden.

The porch light was on, and I could see Mum and Dad through the front window, probably watching for my car. The ordinary domestic scene felt like safety after what had happened in the flat.

Dad opened the front door before I reached it.

'Ali, what's wrong? You sounded shaken.'

'Someone got into my flat,' I said, which was technically true. 'I came home and found them standing inside.'

Mum appeared behind him, immediately alert.

'Did you call the police? Are you hurt?'

'I'm not hurt. I left at once and drove here.'

They led me into the familiar sitting room, with its comfortable furniture and family photographs.

'I was hoping I could stay tonight,' I said. 'Perhaps tomorrow as well.'

'Of course you can,' Dad said. 'Did they take anything?'

I sat on the sofa where I had spent countless hours as a teenager, surrounded by the accumulated comfort of twenty years of family life.

'Nothing was missing. They were just standing there.'

My parents exchanged the look I remembered from childhood, the silent communication they had perfected over decades of marriage.

'Standing there?' Mum asked as she sat beside me. 'As though they were waiting for you?'

'Exactly like that.'

The answer was more accurate than they could possibly understand.

'That's deeply worrying,' Dad said. 'Someone who breaks in to steal is one thing. Someone who enters merely to wait for you may be unstable. You did the right thing by leaving.'

They urged me to call the police, have the lock changed and improve the flat's security. Their concern was practical, grounded in the assumption that the intruder was an ordinary person.

I let them discuss sensible solutions while I picked at the leftover chicken and rice Mum warmed in the microwave. Their kitchen felt solid and safe, insulated from whatever now occupied my flat. I did not tell them that the groceries still lay scattered across my sitting-room floor, or that I had no intention of returning to collect them.

After dinner, I asked to sleep in my old bedroom instead of the spare room. Returning to the place where I had felt safest as a teenager seemed important.

Mum found fresh sheets for the single bed while Dad checked the doors and windows twice, his own way of ensuring his daughter's safety. My childhood bedroom had become Mum's craft room years earlier, but the bed remained, along with some of my old furniture and books.

I changed into pyjamas borrowed from Mum and settled beneath blankets that smelt of fabric conditioner and safety. The room seemed smaller than I remembered, but its familiarity comforted me.

I left the overhead light on and the door slightly open. I needed to see the landing and hear any movement in the house. My parents' bedroom was directly opposite, close enough for me to hear Dad's occasional snoring and the sounds of them settling for the night.

They were ordinary household noises that should have helped me relax.

Even there, surrounded by family and childhood memories, I could not shake the sensation of being watched.

It was not the simple awareness that other people were asleep nearby. It was the concentrated attention I had come to recognise over the preceding days. Something waited in the shadows beyond the door, listening for the household to become still.

I tried to read one of my old books, but the words would not remain in my mind. Every few minutes I checked the doorway, listened for footsteps and scanned the room for movement. The overhead light cast harsh shadows into corners that seemed deeper than they should have been, while the narrow opening at the door showed only darkness beyond.

At three in the morning, thirst finally drove me out of bed.

I had resisted leaving the room, but my mouth felt like cotton and I needed water. The landing was dark except for the light spilling from my doorway. My parents' room was silent.

I felt along the wall for the switch and illuminated the landing before going downstairs.

The automatic kitchen light, triggered by a movement sensor, flickered on as I entered. I filled a glass from the tap and drank at the sink while looking through the window into the back garden.

The familiar space seemed altered in the middle of the night. Shadows from the large oak tree spread in tangled patterns across the grass.

When I turned round, Eleanor was standing in the kitchen doorway.

The same bottle-green velvet dress. The same black bob. The same grey eyes and painted features I had seen in my flat.

Her presence in my parents' kitchen felt worse than anything that had happened before. This was where I had eaten countless family meals, done homework at the worktop and argued about what time I had to be home. Eleanor's presence violated something sacred about the safety of childhood.

She stood motionless in the doorway, apparently blocking the way back to the stairs. Her grey glass eyes reflected the kitchen light, giving the impression of genuine sight as they followed me. The bottle-green velvet looked almost black against the unlit hall.

I dropped the glass.

It shattered on the tiled floor. The crack echoed through the house, followed by movement upstairs as my parents woke.

Eleanor remained still, undisturbed by the noise or the approaching footsteps.

'Ali?' Dad called from the top of the stairs. 'Is everything all right?'

'There's someone in the kitchen,' I called back, keeping my eyes fixed upon Eleanor.

Dad ran down the stairs, with Mum following more carefully. They reached the kitchen within seconds. Dad carried the heavy walking stick he kept beside the bedroom door.

When they looked towards the doorway, their expressions showed only confusion.

'Where?' Dad asked, scanning the hall.

'She was standing there. She's still there. Black hair, bottle-green dress. She's blocking the doorway.'

Mum moved towards me, stepping carefully around the broken glass.

'Love, there's nobody there. The doorway is empty.'

I pointed directly at the place where Eleanor stood, still perfectly visible to me despite my parents' inability to see her.

'She's right there.'

Dad walked through the exact space Eleanor appeared to occupy. His body passed through her without resistance.

Eleanor did not react. However solid she looked to me, this was still a projection rather than a physical body. She remained perfectly still while Dad examined the hall and checked the front door.

'Everything is locked,' he said. 'There's no sign anyone has entered.'

Eleanor was still there. Still watching. Still seeming to block the route back to my childhood bedroom.

Mum put an arm around my shoulders and guided me around the glass towards the hall.

'Come upstairs. You can sleep in our room tonight. You've been under a great deal of stress.'

I allowed them to lead me away, although I could not resist looking back.

Eleanor remained in the kitchen doorway until we reached the first floor. She vanished only as we entered my parents' bedroom.

Dad insisted that I take his side of the bed while he settled into the reading chair beside the window. Mum arranged extra pillows and made certain I was comfortable before switching off the overhead light. She left the bedside lamp burning.

'Try to sleep,' she said gently. 'We'll work out what's happening in the morning. We can ring the police, speak to your landlord and arrange to have the lock changed.'

Sleep was impossible.

I stared at the ceiling while my parents eventually drifted off, listening to the house settle around us. Every creak in the old wooden frame, every breath of wind against the windows and every ordinary night-time sound seemed potentially threatening.

More than that, I could feel Eleanor somewhere in the house.

She was no longer visible, but she was close, waiting for another chance to appear. The feeling of being watched had followed me from the flat to the cafe and now to my childhood home. Distance and location meant nothing to whatever pursued me.

As the first light of Friday, 18 October 2024 filtered through the curtains, I understood with absolute certainty that running had achieved nothing.

Eleanor could appear anywhere, at any time. Physical distance offered no protection from something operating beyond ordinary rules.

She had formed a connection with me during our visit to Harcourt House, and that link could not be broken simply by leaving Bristol or staying with my family in Clevedon. She had followed me to my flat, through the Old City and into my parents' house. Nowhere was beyond her attention.

I was trapped in a relationship I had never chosen and could not escape, bound to something that had once been human and had transformed itself through obsession and artificial preservation.

The sightings would continue. They would grow longer, clearer and more convincing until Eleanor achieved whatever purpose had led her to prepare my replica thirty-seven years before I found it.

My normal life had ended when we discovered the hidden workshop beneath Harcourt House. Everything since then had been borrowed time, and the grace period was over.

Eleanor would follow wherever I went, appear whenever she chose and continue her patient pursuit until I submitted to what she wanted or found a way to sever the connection.

From everything I had learnt about her obsessive nature, submission seemed far more likely than escape.

I no longer inhabited the ordinary world. I existed within Eleanor's reality, where consciousness could be anchored inside painted resin, wood, glass eyes, a human-quality wig and bottle-green velvet, and where the dead could reach towards the living through a carefully prepared vessel.

Mum and Dad left for work that morning with obvious reluctance. Dad kissed my forehead and promised to come home early, while Mum packed an extra sandwich in case I became hungry during the day.

They had accepted my explanation about stress and the intruder I claimed had been standing inside my flat, though they had also suggested calling the police, changing the lock and improving the security. I could see the worry in their eyes whenever they thought I was not looking. It was ordinary parental concern about their daughter's state of mind, which felt both comforting and hopelessly inadequate beside what I was actually facing.

On Friday, 18 October 2024, I waited until Mum and Dad's cars had disappeared from the road before settling at Mum's computer in the living room. The familiar hum of the desktop starting up reassured me. I positioned the chair so that I could see both the front window and the hallway while I worked.

If Eleanor's figure appeared again, I wanted advance warning and more than one escape route.

My search for Eleanor Harcourt produced more results once I moved beyond the digitised local newspaper holdings. The Somerset archive catalogue, company filings and estate documents revealed a family more troubled than the first reports had suggested. Harcourt Bespoke Figures had been struggling financially for months before Eleanor's disappearance, with several bespoke orders cancelled and complaints from British department stores and theatrical costumiers about delayed deliveries.

The most revealing material came from redacted Avon and Somerset Constabulary case papers, released decades later and indexed through the Somerset archives. I downloaded the files, noting that the investigators had been far more thorough than the brief reports in the Somerset County Gazette implied.

Eleanor's mother had told the police that her daughter had become obsessively focused on a private project during the weeks before her disappearance. She had been working eighteen-hour days in the basement workshop, refusing proper meals and seldom sleeping in her bedroom.

When pressed for details, Mrs Harcourt had explained that Eleanor was making a figure in her own likeness, supposedly for a special exhibition. Mr Harcourt's interview contained something worse. Eleanor had begun talking to the mannequins in the display rooms, holding long conversations with figures she had created. She had told her parents that the figures retained the memories and personalities of their subjects, and that her own replica would allow her to continue existing after death.

'She kept saying the figures were more permanent than human bodies,' Mr Harcourt had told investigators. 'She would spend hours arranging them in different positions, as though she were directing a play. Sometimes we heard her laughing or arguing with them late at night.'

I found myself checking the windows and doorway more often as I read.

The house felt different in daylight, emptier and more vulnerable without Mum and Dad there. Every shadow seemed deeper. Every ordinary creak or settling noise felt potentially significant.

The most chilling discovery had been made during the search of Eleanor's bedroom. Police had found journals filled with detailed notes on consciousness transfer and artificial preservation. She had written extensively about her belief that a personality could be embedded in a crafted figure through exact physical detail and an intense emotional connection maintained throughout its creation.

One entry, dated two weeks before her disappearance, read: 'The figures remember everything about their subjects. Touch, voice, memories, fears - all preserved in the crafted form. Death becomes irrelevant when consciousness can inhabit a perfect replica. The human body is temporary, but art endures for ever.'

Another had been written only days before she vanished: 'I have perfected the process. My own figure is ready, crafted with absolute precision. Every detail of my physical form has been captured and preserved. When the transfer is complete, I shall be free from the limitations of flesh, permanent and unchanging like all true art.'

The final entry was dated 14 October 1987, the day Eleanor was last seen and the night before she was formally reported missing.

'The workshop is prepared. Tomorrow I begin the final phase. The transition from temporary to eternal, from human to permanent. The others watch and wait. They understand what I am attempting. Soon I shall join them in their perfect preservation.'

I sat back in the computer chair, my hands trembling.

Eleanor had not simply disappeared. She had deliberately attempted to transfer her consciousness into the figure she had made in her own likeness. Whether her human body had died during the attempt or been disposed of afterwards, something had survived. The woman stalking me was not merely based on Eleanor Harcourt. She was Eleanor Harcourt, somehow preserved through the obsessive precision of her family's craft.

The closing pages of the police report contained an inventory of everything found at Harcourt House. Eleanor's personal figure was listed among the items missing from the basement workshop, along with several tools and lengths of bottle-green velvet. Investigators had assumed she had taken the mannequin with her, perhaps as a treasured artistic achievement.

But I had seen what the police had not.

Eleanor's original figure had not vanished from the estate. At some point after the search, it had been placed among the forty-three mannequins in the display room, wearing its bottle-green velvet dress, its black bob framing its painted face and its grey glass eyes fixed upon the world. That was the figure we had photographed. It was the original vessel into which Eleanor had transferred herself, the physical anchor holding her consciousness in place.

She had not taken the mannequin when she left. She had become it.

That realisation led me back to the figure we had found in the basement workshop: the mannequin with my face, my shoulder-length red hair and hazel eyes, dressed in my charcoal jumper and dark green corduroy trousers. It even had the frayed right cuff and the silver moth brooch I had bought only the previous month, yet its label said it had been completed in October 1987.

It was not Eleanor's anchor. It had another purpose.

It was preparation.

Eleanor had somehow known that I would visit Harcourt House thirty-seven years later. She had created my likeness as a possession vessel, a bridge between her preserved consciousness and a living body. The exact replica established the connection she needed to reach me beyond the estate.

The sightings made sense now. Eleanor was testing that connection and growing stronger each time she appeared. The apparently solid figure in my flat, the presence in Mum and Dad's kitchen - these were rehearsals for something more substantial. Her projected appearances outside Harcourt House did not register on cameras or mobile screens because there was no physical mannequin there to photograph. The estate figures were real objects made from painted resin, wood, glass eyes, human-quality wigs and fabric. Eleanor's remote manifestations were something else: images forced into the world through me.

She was learning how to enter my reality, using me as the point of focus.

I spent the afternoon reading every available document about the case, searching for any mention of how to stop or reverse what Eleanor had done. There was nothing. The police had investigated her disappearance as a missing-person case, not a supernatural transformation. No one had understood what she had attempted in the basement workshop, let alone what she had achieved.

By 5.00 pm, Mum and Dad were still out and the late-afternoon light had begun to fade. I had been alone in the house for eight hours, constantly checking windows and doorways, but had seen no sign of the woman in the bottle-green dress.

Her absence felt almost worse than her presence, as though she were gathering strength for something greater.

I made a sandwich from Mum's leftovers and ate it standing at the kitchen worktop, unwilling to sit with my back to a doorway. The broken glass from the previous night's encounter had been cleared away, but I could still see the place where Eleanor had stood, blocking my path. The memory drove me into the living room, where the wider view offered better sightlines and more ways to escape.

Just as the sun sank behind the large oak tree in the back garden, I saw her.

She stood beside Mum's flower bed, perfectly motionless amongst the marigolds and petunias. Her bottle-green velvet dress was distinct against the gathering shadows, and the last sunlight caught the smooth curve of her black bob. Unlike the earlier sightings, however, she was not positioned to watch the house.

She faced the back fence as though studying the boundary of Mum and Dad's property.

I watched her through the kitchen window for several minutes, waiting for her to vanish as she always had when I looked directly at her. She remained in place. To my eyes she seemed solid and present, more substantial than ever before. The fading light appeared to fall across her properly, and shadows gathered around her feet as though she truly occupied the grass.

Something in her posture suggested invitation rather than immediate threat. She was not hiding or lurking. She had placed herself in plain sight and was waiting for me to notice.

When I moved from the window towards the back door, her head turned slightly to follow me. She knew I was there.

I unlocked the door and stepped outside. The October air was cool against my skin, carrying the earthy smell of fallen leaves and Mum's late-season flowers. They were ordinary back-garden scents, absurdly comforting beside the impossible woman standing amongst the flower beds.

'What do you want?' I called.

The figure gave no verbal answer, but turned to face me fully. Even from the doorway I could see the painted details of her face, the carefully modelled features that had once belonged to Eleanor Harcourt and now formed her permanent vessel. Her grey glass eyes seemed to focus upon mine with an intensity that caught my breath.

I crossed the grass and stopped about three metres from her.

Up close, the craftsmanship was even more impressive and more disturbing. Her painted resin face held every minute contour, from the faint curve of her lips to the fine shaping around her eyes. Individual strands of the human-quality black wig lay against her forehead. Beneath the velvet and fabric, the careful structure of wood and resin gave her the proportions and posture of a living woman. She looked like someone paused between breaths, frozen and yet somehow alert.

'You're Eleanor,' I said. 'You found a way to transfer yourself into the figure you created.'

She remained motionless, but something in her painted expression appeared to acknowledge my words. It was not a smile, exactly, but a subtle alteration in her features that suggested satisfaction.

'The figure in the basement with my face - you made it for me, didn't you? You mean to use it to get inside me.'

Her head tilted to one side. The movement was smooth and deliberate, almost human, but the absolute stillness that followed reminded me that I was speaking to an artificial form driven by an obsessive will.

I understood what she wanted.

The sightings, the constant sense of her presence and the increasing strength of her manifestations were all preparation for possession. Eleanor had achieved a kind of immortality through artificial preservation, but her consciousness remained anchored to the bottle-green figure at Harcourt House. Away from it, she could appear and observe, perhaps influence small things, but she could not fully inhabit the physical world.

She needed a living person she could occupy and control.

The mannequin with my face was the bridge between her crafted existence and my living body. By creating a perfect representation of my physical form, including details that had not existed until decades later, she had established a connection through which her consciousness could reach me. Her stalking was strengthening that link, preparing for the moment when she could claim my identity permanently.

'I won't let you possess me,' I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

Eleanor's painted lips seemed to curve, as though my resistance amused her. She held my gaze for another moment, then began to fade. The apparent solidity thinned into translucence. The velvet dress, the black hair and the pale painted face dissolved into the darkening garden until nothing remained.

Yet the impression of her presence lingered, as if some part of her had been left in the air between the flower beds.

I stood alone amongst Mum's marigolds as darkness settled over Clevedon. Streetlights flickered on beyond the garden fences. I could hear the distant sounds of families settling in for the evening - television programmes, dinner conversations, children being called indoors. Ordinary suburban life continued around me while I faced a supernatural pursuit that no one else could see or understand.

Eleanor's disappearance had been successful, though not in the way the police had imagined. She had not run away, and she had not merely suffered a breakdown. She had accomplished precisely what she intended.

Her consciousness existed independently of human flesh, preserved within the bottle-green figure she had crafted with obsessive care. But her achievement had limits. Outside Harcourt House she could project herself into my surroundings, growing more convincing each time, yet she could not become truly physical.

That was why she needed me.

The mannequin in my likeness had been her solution, created thirty-seven years before I entered the estate, as though she had somehow seen me waiting in her future. Through that vessel, she had forged a supernatural connection which strengthened with every sighting, every manifestation and every moment I spent thinking about her.

Distance meant nothing to a consciousness no longer bound by ordinary physical laws. Time meant even less to something that had made itself artificially immortal.

I was trapped inside Eleanor Harcourt's reality now, a place where the boundary between art and life had dissolved. The normal world still existed around me. Mum and Dad would come home. Neighbours would walk their dogs. People would go to work and complain about traffic and queue for coffee.

Life would continue as it always had.

But I now occupied the overlap between that normality and Eleanor's transformed existence, where consciousness could inhabit a mannequin and the dead could pursue the living through a carefully prepared vessel.

As I walked back towards the house, I understood that I had only two choices. I could submit and allow Eleanor's consciousness to claim my body, or I could return to Harcourt House and destroy the original bottle-green figure anchoring her to the physical world.

The anchor was not hidden. It stood in the display room amongst the other mannequins, exactly where we had seen and photographed it. My own replica remained below ground in the basement workshop, waiting to complete the bridge between Eleanor and me.

The manifestations would continue. They would probably become more frequent and more convincing as the connection strengthened. Eleanor would appear in my flat, though I had not dared return there since dropping the shopping and fleeing with the tins still rolling across the floor. She would find me in cafes, in Bristol's Old City, in Mum and Dad's house, or anywhere else I sought safety and normality.

She would persist until I surrendered or found the courage to go back to Somerset and confront the source of her power.

When I reached the back door, I could already feel her watching from somewhere in the gathering darkness. She was not visible, but she was there, patient and relentless as only something artificially preserved could be.

Eleanor Harcourt had waited thirty-seven years for me to enter Harcourt House. She could wait as long as necessary for me to accept the role she had chosen.

I lived in a world where reality and nightmare had merged, where the impossible was simply another form of art and where obsession could survive death through perfect craftsmanship. The ordinary life I had known before visiting Harcourt House was over, replaced by something far stranger and more dangerous.

But I was not ready to surrender yet.