Dark Peak

by Adam J. Wright

  The rain lightened to a drizzle but black clouds rolled over the peaks of the high hills in the distance, threatening another downpour. The hills closer to the road were gentler slopes, cultivated into farmland. Dry stone walls divided viridian pastures and bright yellow rapeseed fields. Mitch knew that under different circumstances, he would have appreciated the view but right now, he only felt a knot of anxiety, knowing that each second of passing time brought them closer to the house.

  “You okay, Dad?” Leigh had been playing on her iPad for most of the journey but the sight of the high, distant hills had made her sit up and take notice of her surroundings. She’d probably seen something in Mitch’s face that worried her because there was a look of concern in her eyes.

  “I’m fine,” he assured her.

  “You don’t look fine. You look like you’re scared of something.”

  He forced a grin onto his face. “It just feels weird returning here after all these years. Imagine if you were as old as me and you went back to a place you can barely remember.” He was downplaying his real feelings, he knew, but how could he explain to Leigh that he was actually scared to see Edge House again? That he felt the sight of the place would trigger some long-forgotten memory, something that should remain hidden in the shadows of the past where it couldn’t hurt him?

  “I think I’d like it,” she said. “It’d be fun.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re adventurous,” he told her.

  Leigh nodded in agreement and then said, “I think you’re sad because being here reminds you of your sister.”

  Where had that come from? He and Jess had only mentioned Sarah a couple of times in front of Leigh. She hadn’t seemed too interested in the subject at the time but she’d obviously filed the information away somewhere in her head and was now putting two and two together.

  “Well that’s probably part of it too,” he said. “When my sister disappeared, it tore my family apart. My mum and I moved away and I never saw my dad again.”

  “That’s sad,” she said, turning to look out of her window at the distant landscape.

  Mitch wondered if she was thinking about the rift in her own family. A mum with a new boyfriend, and a dad she only saw on weekends. He tried to be there for her as much as possible, on the phone and on video calls as well as seeing her as often as he could, but he knew Leigh had been affected by the split between him and Jess, probably deeper than either of them realised.

  “Hey, you know you can see me whenever you like, right?” he asked her lightly.

  “Yes, I know.” She didn’t turn to look at him, keeping her attention on the view beyond her window or the rain streaking down the glass, Mitch wasn’t sure which.

  It had been more than a year now since he and Jess had split up and he knew that time would never heal the wounds that had been dealt to both him and Leigh by the breakup. He remembered the moment he’d found out about Jess’s affair as if it had happened yesterday. It had been a hot summer evening and he’d been out on the drive in front of the open garage, taking the lawnmower apart and cleaning the blades and internal workings. As he was wiping dead grass off the lawnmower blades, a phone began to ring. At first, he didn’t recognise it as Jess’s phone because it wasn’t her ringtone. Usually, her phone blared out a Scissor Sisters song when someone was calling it. But the song Mitch heard now was “Stay” by Rhianna.

  He stood up from where he’d been crouched over the mower and turned his attention to the garage where Jess’s silver-coloured BMW was parked. The song was definitely coming from inside the car.

  Jess was inside the house, taking a shower after her day at work. The architects firm where she worked often called her outside of office hours to talk about some project or other and sometimes Jess had to go back to the office to sort out a problem, so Mitch went to the car, opened it, reached in and grabbed the phone from where Jess had forgotten it in the cup holder between the seats. If it was important, he would go up to the bathroom and tell her she needed to call the office.

  Rhianna was still singing. The name displayed on the screen was Andrew. Jess had mentioned Andrew in passing on a few occasions. Andrew Tomkins. He was some high-up at the firm. Not Jess’s boss as far as Mitch knew but definitely one of the managers and probably someone whose call Jess wouldn’t want to miss. Deciding to take a message for her, he slid his thumb across the screen to answer the call.

  The voice on the other end of the line was smooth, overly-friendly. “Hey, babe, where are you?”

  Mitch tightened his grip on the phone as if by doing so he could strangle off the words coming from it. Babe? Mitch sometimes addressed Jess as babe but only as a joke because she’d once told him how much she hated it.

  “You there, Jess?” the voice asked.

  Mitch cleared his throat, suddenly realising that he’d been holding his breath. “Who is this?”

  “Shit.” The man hung up.

  Andrew Tomkins had sounded like a man who’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t when he’d spoken his final word and ended the call but it wasn’t Tomkins’ words, not even the “babe,” that made Mitch’s heart drop into his stomach. When he’d first spoken, when he’d thought he was speaking to Jess, Tomkins had spoken in that tone reserved for lovers and confidants.

  With the phone still gripped tightly in his shaking hand, Mitch went into the house to find Jess. He had no idea what he was going to say to her. He found her in the bedroom, wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet from the shower.

  She turned to face him, smiling. Mitch tried to remember how long she’d been taking a shower after coming home from work. She never used to do that; it was a recent habit. Was she coming home and washing Andrew Tomkins away before she spent time with him and Leigh?

  “Andrew Tomkins called,” Mitch said, holding the phone out to her.

  His voice was flat, not accusatory in the least, but Jess must have seen something in his face because after she took the phone, her eyes fell to the floor and she took a deep breath before asking, “What did he tell you?”

  The hollow feeling Mitch had felt in his gut while ascending the stairs to the bedroom was slowly turning into anger. “He didn’t tell me anything. He wanted to speak to you…babe.”

  She flinched at the word. Then she sat on the bed, threw the phone on the pillow, put her face in her hands, and began to weep.

  Mitch stood there dumbly, watching her. He wanted to ask her why, needed to know what it was about her life with him and Leigh that wasn’t good enough for her. But he didn’t ask those things. Instead, he simply turned around and left the room.

  Later, Jess found him sitting on the sofa in front of the TV. But the TV was turned off. Mitch was staring at the blank screen. She told him then that she wanted a divorce. She wasn’t happy anymore. She wanted more from life than she was getting from their marriage. He didn’t need to worry about seeing Leigh; she’d let him see his daughter whenever he wanted.

  Mitch sat there staring at the blank screen, listening to her words but not really focusing on them, as if they were irritating flies buzzing at the periphery of his awareness. He was thinking about Leigh, who was at her friend’s house down the street for a sleepover. Who was going to break the news to her? Would she understand what was happening or would she blame Jess, or him, or both of them? How was this going to affect her life, not only now but when she was older and in a relationship herself?

  “Dad, isn’t this where you used to live?” Leigh asked from the passenger seat, bringing Mitch’s thoughts to the present again. She was pointing at a white sign ahead that said Relby.

  “This is the village,” he said.

  “Awesome,” she said, sitting up in her seat, “I can’t wait to see the house.”

  Mitch didn’t share her enthusiasm. He was looking forward to spending the weekend with Leigh and hiking on the hills and moors with her but as far as the house was concerned, he could live the rest of his life without ever seeing it again and he wouldn
’t miss it. They were only staying there this weekend because it was free accommodation.

  He pressed his foot on the brake as the Jeep trundled over a stone bridge. The bridge spanned a wide, dark river that seemed to mark the village boundary. Beyond the bridge, the main road was lined with two-storey stone houses, a Post Office, a couple of shops, and a large church watching over the village from a slight slope. A large white building served as the local pub. A wooden sign high on its wall showed a painting of a mermaid brushing her long golden hair as she sat on a rock at sea. Beneath the painting, the pub’s name, The Mermaid, was painted in black on the white wall.

  “Maybe we can eat there,” Leigh said. “There’s a sign outside that says they serve food.”

  “We’ll see,” Mitch said. When he’d suggested to Leigh earlier that they might eat at a pub, he’d meant the pubs in the surrounding area, not the local in Relby. There would probably be patrons in there who knew his father and remembered Sarah. This was a small village and things like a young girl’s disappearance weren’t soon forgotten, sometimes even after thirty years had passed. Mitch didn’t want to be recognised by a villager and have to listen to them tell him what a tragedy Sarah’s disappearance was. He knew better than anyone the full impact of that tragedy.

  The drizzle of rain became a torrential downpour, drumming on the Jeep’s roof and misting the windscreen. Mitch turned the wipers on.

  “So where’s your house?” Leigh asked, looking at the houses on both sides of the road.

  “It isn’t in the village,” he said, checking the GPS because he wasn’t exactly sure himself where Edge House was in relation to Relby. The digital map on the dashboard seemed to suggest the house was a couple of miles north of here.

  They left the village behind and drove for another mile before the GPS announced a left turn ahead. Mitch scanned the road but couldn’t see the turn, despite the voice’s assertion that it was only two hundred yards in front of them. Mitch applied the brakes, checking the map on the dash and the left-hand side of the road. There was nothing there but impenetrable woods.

  Then the GPS said, “Turn left,” and Mitch saw a narrow track barely as wide as the Jeep leading into the woods. The entrance to the track was flanked by two grey stone pillars that were topped by statues of sleeping lions. Carved on the left-hand pillar, beneath the lion, was the word EDGE. The right-hand pillar bore the word HOUSE. A small white sign tied to the trunk of a fir tree read PRIVATE ROAD.

  “This is it, Dad,” Leigh said excitedly.

  “Yeah, this is it.” Mitch took a breath and turned left, guiding the Jeep between the pillars and sleeping guardians. The trees on either side of the track formed a canopy that blocked out the light, keeping the track in deep shade.

  A half-formed memory returned to Mitch, a memory of running along this track at night. He was sure he’d been wearing pyjamas at the time, the soles of his bare feet scratched and cut by twigs and stones. He’d been running towards the road, away from the house. And when he’d looked back over his shoulder, he’d seen a single light burning in one of the windows and he’d feared whoever was in that lit room.

  He tried to remember more details but the memory was hazy, like a dream that flees as soon as the dreamer awakens.

  Ahead, the track snaked left and then right again and the trees gave way to a large semi-circular lawn and the house that lay beyond.

  Mitch felt the knot in his gut tighten slightly.

  There were no trees behind the house. Beyond the walls that contained the garden, the land fell away sharply. This feature of the terrain was obviously what gave the house its name. It also meant that to anyone approaching the house, the imposing structure was framed against the sky. Mitch guessed that such an effect would make the house appear pleasant on sunny summer days but at the moment, the dark storm clouds rolling over the distant moorland lent the house an ominous air.

  Edge House had been designed in Victorian times by an architect in love with the Gothic Revival style. It stood three-storeys high with arched and leaded windows that reflected the dark clouds on their rain-streaked panes. The house’s gables faced the lawn and were high-peaked, making the dark slate roof slope steeply. At the rear of the house, the conical roof of a tower could be seen. Mitch couldn’t remember a tower from his childhood and wondered if it had been added after he and his mother had left in 1987.

  Among the arched windows, Mitch recognised the one that had featured in his dream-memory, a large window on the top floor with stone tracery patterned to resemble interlocking vines. He tried to remember who had been in that room, whom he had feared when he was fleeing along the track towards the road, but nothing came to him. The memory remained dark. Had the room’s occupant been his father? And why had Mitch been running away towards the road?

  Unable to find an answer to that question, he drove up to the house, tyres crunching on the gravel that surrounded the lawn, and killed the engine.

  He looked over at Leigh, who’d been strangely quiet since seeing the house. She was staring wide-eyed at the building, seemingly stunned into silence.

  “Well, what do you think?” Mitch asked.

  “It’s awesome,” she said, then added, “but also a bit creepy.”

  “Creepy, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s like something out of Dracula.”

  Mitch laughed and said, “I’m sure it won’t be as creepy inside. Come on, let’s have a look.” He got out of the Jeep and ran over to the front door to avoid getting too wet. Leigh joined him.

  The arched front door was made of heavy wood with a black iron handle and ornate lock. A brass lion’s head knocker stared at them, snarling. Mitch fished the key out of his jeans pocket and pushed it into the lock. There was a loud click when he turned it. Steeling himself, he pushed the door open. Beyond the archway a gloomy foyer awaited.

  “You first,” Leigh said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Mitch steeled himself again and stepped over the threshold and into the gloom. He found a light switch on the wall and clicked it on. Overhead, an ornate iron chandelier whose arms were fashioned to look like tendrils of ivy flickered to life. The walls of the foyer were dark and wood-panelled, with paintings of hunting scenes here and there. A wide flight of stairs led up to the next floor, the wooden banister highly-polished from the touch of many hands over the years. A Persian rug, predominantly coloured red and gold, lay at the foot of the stairs on the dark wooden floorboards. Mitch wondered why the rug was positioned there and not in the centre of the room where it seemed to belong. He realised he had no idea about his father’s taste in interior decoration other than the fact that the man had obviously liked hunting scenes and thought an ornate carving belonged on everything.

  There were closed, heavy wooden doors on either side of the foyer as well an open door straight ahead. Through the opening, Mitch could see a short passageway that led to the kitchen at the back of the house.

  At the top of the stairs, a huge window framed the dark sky and cast a dull light onto the landing above.

  Mitch felt Leigh’s arm snake around his. She pressed herself close to him.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “It’s just a big old creepy house.” He realised he was whispering.

  “I told you it was creepy,” she said.

  “If you don’t want to stay here, we can find a B and B or a—“

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s like being in a ghost story. I can’t wait to tell Jasmine and Laura at school. They’ll be so jealous when I tell them I stayed in a haunted house.”

  “It isn’t haunted,” Mitch said. But then he wondered if that was true. He didn’t believe the house was infested with ghosts or spirits or anything like that, but memories could come back to haunt people, couldn’t they? Wasn’t it possible that being in a place where a bad thing had happened could make an unremembered past claw its way to the surface from the deep grave of lost memory? Where a bad thing had happened? Where had that
come from? Sarah’s disappearance was bad, of course, but it hadn’t happened in the house. He supposed he was connecting the house to the disappearance because this was where he’d been living at the time.

  “Well, I’ll still tell them it was. They won’t know any different.” Leigh released her grip on Mitch’s arm and indicated the closed doors. “Which way are we going to go exploring first?”

  “Let’s try the kitchen,” he suggested. It looked bright and airy back there, a welcome relief to the dark walls and floor of the foyer. At the end of the short passageway, he and Leigh found themselves in a kitchen that was long and wide, with modern strip lights that seemed to defy the Gothic design of the rest of the house. The walls were painted in a light grey colour, the cupboards slightly lighter. One wall was almost entirely made up of a row of large arched windows that overlooked the walled garden behind the house. The windows let in copious amounts of light despite the bad weather, lending the kitchen an air of breeziness.

  Mitch went to the windows and looked out at the garden. It was overgrown and wild, the moss-covered walls festooned with ivy and other creepers. Weeds ran rampant in the flowerbeds, choking to death the few remaining flowers as they had already done to their brothers and sisters.

  “Dad,” Leigh said, “I think we’ve been burgled.” She was pointing at the back door, which was slightly ajar, letting in a light drizzle of rain that spattered onto the chessboard-patterned black and white floor tiles.

  Without touching anything, Mitch checked the door. The wood around the lock was splintered, as if the door had been forced open. Using his elbow, he opened the door and checked its exterior. There was a shallow indentation where something had been used as a battering ram to gain entry.

  Taking Leigh’s hand, he led her back through the house to the front door and out to the Jeep. He had no idea when the house had been broken into and for all he knew, someone could still be inside. Once they were inside the Jeep, he called the police. After being put through to a desk sergeant at Buxton police station and explaining that he was the owner of Edge House and he’d found the place broken into, he was told to wait for an officer to arrive and not to go back into the house.