Fiona had trouble sleeping, and the voices in her head didn't help.
'You're crazy: face it.'
'I'm not crazy. Something is wrong with the new home. I can feel it.' Fiona thought, trying to discourage the voices in her head from thinking she was crazy.
Yet, the voices wouldn't let up.
'Why didn't Steven notice the writing on the mirror when you showed him? Think about it. You know the reason. Want me to spell it out for you?
'C-r-a-z-y.'
Fiona tried to push those thoughts away, but they clung to her like a spider weaving its web.
'Steven, you awake?' She asked, her voice a whisper in the darkness.
'No, I'm sleeping.'
'I saw something today. Something you have to know.'
'Not this again: can't it wait until tomorrow morning? I got work in a few hours.'
'I know you have, but I need to tell you what I saw.'
Steven knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, not until he asked Fiona what she had seen.
'If this has anything to do with the mirror, I told you before. I didn't see any writing.'
'It isn't that. It's what I saw before the writing.'
'What?' Steven asked.
Fiona didn't know where to begin, and silence spun in the bedroom for a few seconds. Steven grew impatient.
'God's sake, spit it out. Will you? I'm tired.'
'Well, if you're tired, go back to sleep; no one's forcing you to stay awake.'
Steven leaned up, using his elbow to support his body.
'You've already woken me up. So, you might as well tell me; what's bugging you?'
'But that's the point. I don't know how to.'
'The beginning would be nice.'
'If only it were that simple.' Fiona said, staring up at the ceiling, her hand tucked underneath her head.
Because even she couldn't believe what she had seen in the kitchen, it had to be a waking dream, something like that.
At last, she told Steven.
'The doctor. What did he say when you went to see him?'
'He said I wasn't crazy if that's what you're getting at.'
'I never said you were.'
'No. But, you thought it?'
'Look.' Steven said. 'This shadow you saw was probably your imagination playing tricks on you. The same thing happened to me a few weeks back.'
'Something happened to you?'
'It's not worth mentioning. It happened late at night; I was tired.'
'What?'
'I thought somebody had spoken my name.'
Again, silence loomed in the room, and Steven felt as though he had opened a can of worms.
'See, this is why I didn't tell you; I knew you get worried.'
'And do you blame me? I wish you had told me.'
'Well, I didn't because I knew you start worrying, and besides, it was probably nothing. Now, please, let's get some sleep.'
Fiona liked the sound of the idea. Yet, she couldn't help - but worry.
And as her testimony reveals, (just one of many; given by those involved with The Richmond Case). She was starting to believe something might be wrong with the new home.
The noises at night were becoming more frequent. Fiona would be asleep, and the next minute, she would suddenly wake up to hear a chair in the kitchen falling over onto the floor as though someone had kicked it over.
The noise would startle her, and before she could do anything to act, they would start up in the front room: furniture moving, someone walking across the floorboards.
Sometimes when the noises became too much, Fiona would have no choice; but to investigate.
And when she did, she would see in the front room, cushions lying on the floor. The curtains, tied up in knots. The coffee table turned upside down.
Yet, despite all this, Fiona still tried to find a reason — why all this was happening?
The same as she did when she would hear the bathroom taps running when she was alone in the house: the TV coming on when it was unplugged from the wall.
Even Steven began to notice the strange behaviour around the house when one night, he came downstairs for a glass of water. The chairs he noticed were underneath the table - nobody in the kitchen, only him. Yet, a second later, the chairs were pulled away from the table.
He couldn't grasp how that happened, as he was the only person in the kitchen. Yet, what struck him as odd was how he didn't hear a single chair moving.
And now these incidents were affecting Harmony.
The child began to claim she could hear voices outside her bedroom window.
Terrified, she would run at top speed to her mum and dad's bedroom, telling them, what she could hear.
Steven would go to his daughter's bedroom and try to hear the voices for himself, but he wouldn't hear anything.
After a few minutes of hearing nothing, he would put the incident to his daughter's imagination and leave the room, only for his daughter to hear the voices again.
'We're going to kill your parents, slit their throats, and you're going to burn in hell.' They would whisper.
'Oh, hell is real. It's waiting for you, bitch.'
Terrified by these ghostly voices, Harmony also claimed to see faces looking at her through the bedroom window: someone tickling her feet at night.
She even woke up one morning to find her bed in the middle of the room, and jumpy nerves began to show in her.
She began to drop things, would quiver at the slightest sound, and was scared to go upstairs unless someone went with her.
She also began picking fights even more with her sister, and her schoolwork, thanks to the sleepless nights, began to suffer, as did the place where she slept because one morning. Fiona woke up to find Harmony in the same bed as her.
The last time this happened when she was five.
She had slept in her parents' bed because of a picture she had painted in school.
A painting of three snowmen, and like any five-year-old, she had brought the drawing home.
As Fiona recalled, she and Steven had woken up to hear Harmony crying in her sleep.
Wondering why they could hear her crying, they went to her bedroom.
There, they found Harmony thrashing on her bed, her eyes; wide open. The face drained to a floury white, resembling a clown having a nervous breakdown.
Onto the next day, Fiona asked Harmony if she remembered anything about the bad dream she had.
'The snowmen were trying to drag me into the picture. They wanted me to live with them in the cold forever.'
'It sounds like you had a night terror?'
'A what?' Harmony asked.
'A night terror. It's a bit like a nightmare, but much scarier.' Fiona had explained.
Since then, Harmony had been one of those children before moving to Richmond Street. If she did have a bad dream, she would switch on the bedroom light and deal with it.
Yet the conversation was now this.
'Why didn't you sleep in your own bed last night?'
'I don't know,' Harmony said, trying to avoid the question, but her mum's lingering stare wouldn't let her.
'I started to hear things?' She finally said.
'Like the last time?' Fiona asked.
'I don't know, maybe.'
'Maybe?'
'I don't know how to explain it. It's just that every time I put my head on the pillow. I would start to hear something scratching.'
'Scratching, what did it sound like?'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, did it sound like fingernails rubbing against the pillow or something a mouse would make?'
'No, it came from the pillow.'
'It might have been your eardrum twitching.' Fiona pointed out.
'No, it was definitely coming from the pillow.'
'How do you know?'
'Because whenever I pulled my head away from the pillow, it stopped, just like that.' Harmony said, clicking her fingers.
'Then, it must have been your eardrum twitching.'
Harmony shook her head.
'You don't understand. Every time I would lift my head away from the pillow. The scratching would start again; only this time, I would hear it outside the bedroom door. And when I tried to see what it might be, it stopped like the ones I told you from ages ago.'
'Maybe it was a bad dream.' Fiona said. Really hoping for the best; something wasn't wrong with the house. Because if there was, it was now affecting Harmony.
'No, mum, something was making the noise, and there's something else.'
'What, tell me? I'm not going to laugh at you.' Fiona said, now beginning to notice the fear in her daughter's eyes.
She hadn't noticed it before, but now, she did, especially with the way Harmony kept looking around the kitchen.
'You're keeping something back, aren't you?' Fiona said, taking her daughter's hands.
The mother knew something was wrong. She could see it in her daughter's eyes. She looked terrified.
Harmony said there was.
'Do you want to tell me?'
'I don't want to sleep in my bedroom anymore.' She whispered.
'Why?'
'Because of the old man who keeps coming into my room?'
'Old man?' Fiona said, looking at her daughter in a way she had never looked at her children before.
'She can't mean the same old man I keep dreaming about.' Fiona thought, and now she was the one that was afraid.
'What does this old man do - when he comes into your room?'
Harmony gulped in hard and looked around the kitchen, making sure it was safe.
'He floats near my bed and tells me.'
'What?' Fiona asked.
'That he's going to kill us.'