Twins were part of the Trelawny legend and tradition, along with a certain arrogance, considerable wealth, and a rambling New England mansion, Trelawny’s Fell, that was both their pride and their refuge.

Kit Trelawny, a distant cousin, had suffered the family’s arrogance as a child. But when Nicholas and Giles Trelawny, the last twins and heirs, died in combat action in Southeast Asia, Kit inherited the great Maine house. In a spirit of revenge against the departed family that had once snubbed and humiliated her, Kit moved up from Boston with her few belongings and began turning the mansion’s huge collection of wings, rooms, cellars, and crannies into the beginnings of what one day might become a New England artists’ colony.

But as days lengthened into weeks, Kit learned with growing unease that the great house was not to be that easily conquered. Rambling and vast, a bewildering maze of corridors, stairs, crawlspaces, and hidden attics, it seemed to possess a mind, a will, and some secrets of its own. Kit, the intruder, felt the palpable presence of something or someone other—the sense that the very dead might still be alive—near, elusive, and yet beyond her reach.

And with that knowledge came an even more disturbing realization: by penetrating the secrets of Trelawny’s Fell she had placed herself in mortal danger.