She heard movement from inside, and then the door opened a few seconds later.
Sometimes you create a character simply because you need them. In this case, the story required Amanda to talk to a computer expert, and because my imagination often heads off in slightly disturbing directions, I decided to go with the idea of the dark room.
As I wrote this sentence about the door opening, I had no real idea who was going to be on the other side of it. They were only a minor character, after all – a walk-on part at most. But as it turned out, Theo surprised me a little. I suppose a subconscious part of me must have been imagining an unlikely person to find working there, but I’ve found myself thinking about him since. Who is he? Why was he drawn to this kind of work, and how might it affect him?
And so, despite my original intentions, he appears briefly in my next novel (The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK), and I’m not ruling out returning to him again. For now, he’s working behind a closed door in his basement room. But I do wonder if, at some point in the future, he might have a story of his own to tell.
