“It was my uncle’s,” Elliot said. He leaned against the metal railing of the third Abandoned House from the end, his elbows resting on the dulled spikes.

A gentle breeze caressed their faces and blew whispers of mist about here and there as if playing tag. Florence didn’t say anything. She was waiting.

“I found out two years ago. There was a photo – I found it shoved down the side of the bookcase – and there was a man I didn’t recognise. I thought he was an Outsider at first, or someone else from the village,” he smiled – the kind of smile that was more painful than crying, “but everyone’s names were written on the back. Ollie Rider: my dad’s brother. I showed it to everyone – mum, dad... You.”

Florence remembered: he’d come pelting up their front path and barged in without knocking to shove a crinkled photo under her nose demanding to know what she could see.

“Nobody noticed him. Then I began to spot other stuff, and eventually I pieced it together and found out this was his house.” Elliot lowered his head, resting his forehead on the railing; she couldn’t see his expression.

The house, with its tottering chimney, ivy that was eating away at the limestone and cracked windows, silently observed them. The front door still looked solid, but some of the lower windows could probably be pried open – the glass was already smashed anyway.

“Have you been inside?”

“Inside?” Elliot’s head snapped up, then he gave a bitter laugh, “No. I came here every week, but I was the only one who could see him. I believed he existed, that he was a real person, but for all I knew, I could be mad! I didn’t want to confirm it.”

Florence understood. The feeling of your whole world imploding really was not one she wanted to experience again. If she hadn’t seen Benjamin’s room, she would probably have thought she was crazy herself. And she had the Outsider to confirm things (it was a weird thought to be relying on an Outsider for the Truth; she pushed it to the back of her mind).

“Well, do you want to go inside now? How much do you know about him anyway?”

“Not much,” Elliot said, shifting his shoulders and picking at the flakes of peeling rust on the railing. “He supported Tottenham Hotspurs. He probably drank Lapsang Souchong tea. I think he was into science because his name’s written in our – his – copy of A Short History of Time, but apart from that... Nothing.”

“So, we should go in – you might find out more.” Florence prodded him with her elbow. Finding out more about Elliot’s uncle was a noble goal, and it also offered a distraction from questions she'd rather not think about.

Elliot looked up at the house, his fringe shifting slightly in the breeze. The expression on his face tightened and his hand clenched around the railing before he let go. “Okay.”

Rust had welded the gate shut and it took them ten minutes of pushing and pulling to open it enough for them to slip through. Elliot still struggled to fit with his many layers of coats.

The front lawn had turned into a meadow – not the cute ones you saw in movies, but the ones overgrown with scratchy thorns and plants that had thatched together in a mess of stalks and leaves. The barren tips of grasses scraped Florence’s hand as she walked up the mossy path.

There was no explicit rule in the village against going to the Abandoned Houses, but the feeling of being somewhere she shouldn’t stalked Florence. Her eyes scanned the surroundings like a criminal on the lookout for the police. But the rolling grassy slopes were empty except for a few sheep.

Heart settling down a little, she stopped in front of the front door. “I’ll try it?”

She waited until Elliot nodded before giving the door a half-hearted shove, but the brass handle – cold to the touch and rough from lichen – caught on the lock. “No good. Let’s try the windows.”

A patio extended a metre or so from the house on both sides of the door giving them easy access to the windows. Elliot moved to the one on the right. A jagged crack tore through the lower pane and at the bottom a triangle of glass had fallen out. Little fragments of smashed glass glittered on the tiles. A kitchen counter was just visible through the gap. Elliot reached a hand in and fumbled with the latch, an old-fashioned screw lock.

“Try the other way,” Florence said as he strained to undo it, his body twisting like a pretzel to get leverage.

He grunted in acknowledgement.

Whether she was right, or he had just been able to break the grime gluing it in place, the lock gave a second later. Spinning the bolt off, he dropped it on the counter and flicked the catch upright.

“It’s not going to lift easily. Grab a hold,” Elliot ran a nail across the painted-over gap between the window frame and the ledge.

Florence limbered up, digging in her fingernails as she clutched the frame.

“One, two-”

They heaved on three.

The white paint cracked. The window shifted. The frame groaned. Florence’s fingers stung from the friction. With a huge effort, they slid it upwards by an inch.

Then something gave.

Stolen novel; please report.

The sash smashed upwards under their combined force and the glass shattered with an ear wrenching splintering. Florence and Elliot ducked away as shards rained down. The crashing sent birds in the nearby holly screeching.

After everything fell silent, Florence looked up.

A two-foot wide, one-and-a-half-foot tall gap opened into the house.

“Do you want to go first? Or shall I?”

“I’ll go.” Elliot squared his shoulders.

The window being small, and Elliot’s coats being bulky, he only made it through after stripping them off and handing them to Florence. Even then it was awkward as he belly-flopped onto the counter, coughing through a cloud of dust, and squirmed through.

Florence laughed, but soon regretted it: when it was her turn, she got stuck half-way through the window. The edge of the counter cut into her stomach and her feet scrabbled on the ground but she couldn't move forwards. “Help me!”

“No, you laughed at me.” Elliot crossed his arms in the dim kitchen, watching her struggle.

Gritting her teeth, she said, “I'm sorry, okay? Now help me?”

Elliot grinned and grabbed her hands. He hauled her through and let her drop to the floor.

“You could’ve stopped me from falling,” She picked herself up, dusting the grime off her jeans and looking around.

Bright light flooded in from the window they’d smashed, but as the upper pane was so encrusted with dirt it didn't need curtains to keep out the light, it didn't do much to alleviate the murk. Checkerboard tiles covered the floor, almost impossible to see under the muck coating them. Detritus blown in from the window blocked the sink and there were animal droppings on the counters, but the place wasn’t as old-fashioned as Florence had expected.

“Hey, do you know when your uncle... You know?”

Disappeared.

Florence quickly redirected her thoughts.

Elliot shook his head. “I think it must have been a long time ago – the photo is from before I was born, and I haven’t found him in any of the other photos we have.”

“Maybe we’ll find something here that’ll tell us.” Florence said.

They didn’t spend very long in the kitchen, opening the cupboards half-heartedly (they found a dozen boxes of nibbled Lapsang Souchong and mouse droppings), glancing in the fridge (thankfully there was nothing – Elliot’s uncle must have cleared it out) and even looking in the oven (more droppings and a live mouse that streaked out and under the dresser). It wasn’t surprising: how many people would store important information in the kitchen?

From there, they moved through the downstairs, searching the living room, dining room and toilet. Apart from a large amount of mould, an empty bird’s nest in the corner of the living room and accompanying disgusting amount of droppings that coated the wall in a knobbly white film, a brief return of the mouse, and a plate of something that had rotted into green dust, they also found some useful things.

In the kindling bucket by the fireplace in the living room, there was a newsletter where the ink hadn’t faded away entirely: it was dated to October 2004. Elliot also spotted a ring under the sofa and after much scrabbling Florence managed to get it out. It was a thin gold band set with a single diamond. A woman’s ring, Florence thought.

There wasn’t much else, so they headed upstairs.

There was another bathroom, which yielded a stack of half-eaten faded horse racing magazines by the toilet and a startled jackdaw that squawked in panic and rammed into each wall before finally locating the exit and flying out of the shattered pane.

“Alas, this is what the dinosaurs have come to.” Elliot said.

They left the bathroom and headed down the corridor to the end where two doors faced each other. The open on the right led to a building site. Plasticky foam padding covered the floor, with the carpet that would have been laid atop it rolled in a fat slug against the far wall. Three swatches of paint – an eye-popping pink, mint green and peacock blue – stood out against the plaster and below them were two tins of unopened paint.

“Let’s check the other room?” She turned away from the colour scheme abomination.

“Why do you think he was renovating it?” Elliot asked as he pulled the door to.

Florence shrugged. “Maybe it just needed a face lift. Mum keeps going on about re-doing the living room.”

“Hmm...”

She opened the opposite door.

The first thing Florence noticed was the fuchsia curtains. Despite being at least fourteen years old, they still induced eye watering. They were as one with the paint in the other room, but looking around, they clashed with the rest of the subdued furniture. The bedspread, stained and dusty, was a plain ‘white’ and the wardrobe, chest of drawers and armchair by the window were all simple.

They took different sides of the room and went through everything, but found little. The wardrobe and chest of drawers were completely empty and the bedside tables had nothing in them besides men’s handkerchiefs, and a scrap of paper with the odds for the Royal Ascot.

“Was your uncle afraid of being tracked down by MI5 or something?” Florence wiped the sweat off her forehead as she stood up from looking under the bed. “There’s nothing here.”

Elliot didn’t answer, pushing his sleeves up. He staggered to the armchair and sank into it, his face flushed.

Florence perched herself on the corner of the bed.

Silence settled over them.

Her eyes moved over the soulless furniture. She had been wrong. This house was not at all like her brother’s bedroom: there was nothing here that told them about the owner or his life. In fact, it was like everything about Elliot’s uncle had been stripped from the space, leaving a shapeless void full of questions. The same questions she had been trying not to think about since opening the locked door.

“Say,” Florence broke the silence, toying with the frayed edge of a hole in the duvet cover, “What do you think happened – to your uncle?”

Elliot’s eyes, which had drifted closed, flew open. He tensed, then relaxed back into the armchair. After five torturous seconds, he said, “I don’t… know.” He sunk further down, “After I found out about him, I went to the graveyard and there was no grave with his name on. I checked the obituaries in the newsletter and there was nothing. Some days I even wondered if he didn’t exist in the first place. But generally, I think he just left.”

“Left?”

Elliot nodded.

“But,” she said, squeezing her hands together until it hurt, “Why did he leave? And why does nobody remember him? Why can nobody see him in the photos?” The questions tumbled out of her mouth, and she was no longer talking about Elliot’s uncle.

“I don’t know.” Elliot matched her fevered gaze with steady, serious eyes that calmed her down. Somehow, he was always reliable when it counted.

She took a deep breath. Elliot didn’t know for sure what had happened to his uncle because he had not investigated. There had to be some clues, some trail that would tell them what had happened. As for why she – and everyone else – had forgotten, Florence had no idea how to investigate something like that.

Her hands unclenched. The joints hurt.

“I’m going to find out what happened to my brother.”

She had to. He was her brother.

“I’m with you, Flower.” Elliot said.