The Haunting

by Alex Bell

  “Find your own hiding place!” I grumbled. “You’re going to give us away.”

  “There’s plenty of room for both of us,” he replied, ignoring my protests and squeezing in beside me.

  “Ouch! Quit sticking your elbow into my face!”

  “Why don’t you move back a bit?”

  “I don’t want to get my clothes dirty.”

  The sound of our argument soon brought Jem’s seven-year-old sister, Shell, down to the cellar.

  “I could hear you from the top of the stairs,” she said, crouching down to peer through the scaffolding at us. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to be quiet when it’s your turn to hide?”

  “I told you you were going to ruin it,” I said, giving Jem a shove. He knocked into one of the supports and a cloud of dust rained down on us both.

  “Ew, gross!” I cried. “Are there any spiders in my hair?”

  “Loads of them,” Jem said helpfully. “Nasty little red ones. They look like biters.”

  He grinned at me and that was when I saw it over his shoulder – the green glint of glass from behind the brick hearth, winking out at me like a giant goblin’s eye.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “There’s something hidden behind the wall.”

  “Maybe you should come out of there,” Shell said nervously. “Mum always used to say that fireplaces were dangerous because they led to the sky and evil spirits could come down into the house and take you away. She said that—”

  “Mum said a lot of stuff that never made any sense,” Jem replied, before reaching his hand through the gap and trying to pull out the object. “It’s stuck.”

  I peered over his shoulder to get a closer look.

  “It’s a bottle, I think,” he said, and I heard the clink of glass as he tried to squeeze it through the gap in the bricks.

  “Maybe it’s got a secret message inside it!” I said, thrilled at the thought.

  “From pirates?” Jem asked eagerly.

  “No, from a mermaid.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Shell cried. “Don’t disturb it, Jem, it’s got something to do with witches.”

  Jem rolled his eyes. “First it’s evil spirits and now it’s witches. Make up your mind, Shell. You’ll be worried about Santa Claus coming down the chimney next.”

  “It’s a witch bottle,” she insisted. “I saw a picture in one of Mum’s books. It’s got something bad trapped in it. The book said people used to hide them behind fireplaces in the olden days to protect themselves. Not from good witches, like Mum and me, but bad ones who wanted to curse them and—”

  “It’s almost there,” Jem said, ignoring her. Shell had been going on about witches and witchcraft even more since their mum had died a couple of years ago, and we had both long since lost interest in the subject.

  “Let me do it,” I said, pushing Jem out of the way. “I’ve got smaller hands than you.”

  I reached my hand through the gap, gripped the cold neck of the bottle and tugged. There was a shattering sound as it came through, and a piece of it broke off, slicing my palm.

  “Ouch!” I cried, dropping the bottle on the ground between us.

  Then there was a blast of wind – a blast strong enough to blow the hair back from our faces and whirl the dust up into clouds that made us sneeze – and it seemed to come straight from the bottle on the floor.

  “Jem Penhale,” Shell said on the other side of the scaffolding, sounding strange and unlike herself. “Seven more years.”

  “What?” Jem peered through the supports at his sister and said, “What are you talking about?”

  She gave him a startled look. “I wasn’t the one speaking.”

  “Yes, you were.” Jem sighed. “I don’t know why you always have to lie all the time.”

  “I’ve never lied to you, ever!”

  It was an old argument and I didn’t want them falling out, so I quickly changed the subject. “It felt like something came out of the bottle.”

  “It must have been a draught from the chimney,” Jem said. “Is your hand OK, Emma?”

  “Yeah, it’s OK,” I replied. I wiped the blood off on my trousers and then picked up the bottle, which made a clinking sound as I lifted it. “There’s something inside,” I said.

  The bottle was made from green glass that was cracked and old. It had a fat body and a thin neck.

  “Hey, look, there’s a face on it,” Jem said, pointing at the neck of the bottle.

  It was no ordinary face. In fact, it wasn’t human at all. It was a snarling devil’s face, with bulbous, staring eyes, wild eyebrows and a twisting, angry mouth. The cork in the top of the bottle had been sealed with black wax that trickled down the neck in fat dribbles.

  I tilted the bottle and shook it to get at the objects that had been concealed inside. Sand poured out on to the floor, followed by several bent, rusty nails; a collection of broken seashells; tiny yellowed bones that looked like they’d come from a small animal, and a piece of plaited human hair.

  “Gross!” I wrinkled my nose.

  Jem prodded the plait with his fingertip. “Cool.”

  “There’s something else still in there,” I said, giving the bottle a final shake.

  A thin scroll of ancient yellowed paper fell out and landed on top of the pile. I snatched it up eagerly, excited to discover that there was a message hidden inside the bottle after all. But it was only two sentences long, and definitely wasn’t from mermaids.

  I looked up at the others. Jem was frowning and Shell looked like she was about to cry. Her voice was almost a whisper as she said, “It’s really, really, really bad luck to break a witch bottle, Emma.”

  “Shell, don’t tell Dad about this, OK?” Jem said quickly. “You know he hates witchcraft stuff.”

  “We’d better not tell Gran, either,” I said, gathering up the objects and stuffing them back in the bottle. “She said we’re not supposed to be down here while the builders are around.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jem said.

  He was already scrambling out of the fireplace and, in another moment, was on the other side of the scaffolding. I shoved the bottle right to the back of the hearth and made to follow him. But then my foot knocked against one of the supports and, this time, more than dust came down. The sound was deafeningly loud in the small space as the bricks rained all around me. I could hear Jem shouting at me to get out but it was too late. The rest of the fireplace collapsed and, moments later, my back went strange and tingly, like cold hands clamped all the way along my spine. Cold hands – that’s what it feels like when your spine breaks in three different places. It’s not a feeling that you ever forget…

  Chapter Five

  Emma

  My thoughts were torn away from the past when I heard a sound from the floor above. A creaking noise, like footsteps. Bailey heard it, too, looked up at the ceiling and immediately started to growl again. Perhaps there was a squatter here, after all?

  I wheeled myself across the restaurant to the opposite door. I didn’t want to go through because the door leading down to the cellar was out there and I felt a kind of horror at the thought of seeing it again – the place where it had all happened. No more normal for me after that, not ever. The witch bottle had been completely destroyed in the accident and I was glad because I never wanted to lay eyes on that horrible old thing again. But the staircase that led to the first floor was out there so I gave Bailey the command and, this time, he opened the door straight away and we went through to the shadowy corridor beyond.

  I kept my eyes firmly turned away from the cellar door and made straight for the staircase that led up to the guest rooms. It was made from wood so dark that it looked almost black, and into it had been carved the most intricate sea creatures. Jem, Shell and I always used to call it the Monster Staircase when we were small. A sea monster was one of the more dramatic theories for what might have happened to the vanished crew of the Waterwitc
h. The idea was that they had been attacked by some creature from the deep that had devoured them all, although how it managed to do this without sinking the entire ship, or at least damaging it, was something no one could really explain.

  Carved into the wood of the staircase were giant squids, sharks, whales, octopuses, kraken, serpents, sea spiders, underwater wasps and other creatures I couldn’t even identify – things with spiny barbs along their backs, or gaping gills in their flabby necks, or two heads rising up from bloated bodies. Awful, twisted monsters straight out of a feverish, crazy nightmare.

  Eyeballs stared out at me in the gloom from a mass of tails and tentacles, fins and fangs, suckers and scales. I had a vague memory that there were mermaids and sirens at the top of the staircase, but it was too dark for me to see them up there. The balustrades were encrusted with carvings of barnacles, seaweed and shells, like they were trying to trick you into believing you were at the bottom of the sea. That you had gone down with the ship. That this was some hideous afterlife you would never escape from.

  I wheeled myself forward until my wheels bumped against the bottom step with a thump.

  The Waterwitch was far too old a building to be properly accessible for disabled people. There were no ramps here, let alone lifts. I peered up the staircase, stretching away into the dusty gloom of the silent floor above.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  Nothing answered me, which wasn’t all that surprising. Either there was no one here or there was someone who wasn’t supposed to be, in which case they were hardly going to answer. God, I hated this stupid wheelchair! If only I could run up those stairs and check the rooms out for myself. The nearby squid carved into the bannister seemed like it was looking at me with its single, staring eye, mocking me for being trapped in the chair.

  I would just have to tell the estate agent about my squatter theory and let them handle it. With one last glance at the dark staircase, I turned my wheelchair around, intending to go back to the restaurant.

  But then there was the soft, soft shriek of creaking hinges in the darkness and, right in front of me, the door leading down to the cellar swung slowly open, gaping wide like a monstrous mouth that sought to swallow me up, wheelchair and all. Inch by inch, the door came all the way open until it hit the wall with a faint, gentle thud. I swallowed hard, staring at that dark rectangle, remembering the crash from years ago, the reverberation shuddering through my bones. I told myself it was just a door, that this was an old building, and there must be draughts…

  I wheeled myself slowly forwards, past the silent, watching eyes of the carved sea monsters, the weight of my chair causing the wooden floorboards beneath to creak out their protest. The thought flashed loud and clear in my mind that the Waterwitch Inn didn’t want me here, didn’t want anyone here, only wanted to be left alone in its solitude, like an oyster entombed in its shell. It was a cold feeling of hostility that I sensed out of nowhere, a feeling that told me I wasn’t welcome and should leave at once.

  I shook my head firmly. Doors swung open by themselves sometimes. It didn’t mean anything. That long draughty staircase leading down to the cellar was bound to act like a kind of wind tunnel. Or perhaps the ancient wood in the building had started to shrink or expand or rot or whatever it was that ancient old wood did when it was more than four hundred years old. There could be woodworm or shipworm. Or perhaps the wood had warped.

  Even from a little distance away, I could see that the entire door leading down to the cellar was made out of wooden planks. They were long and thin and pocked with ugly black knots, like the scars left by some kind of pox.

  I would have ignored the door and gone straight back to the restaurant if it hadn’t been for Bailey, but he trotted over in his typically curious way, always wanting to poke his snout into everything.

  When he reached the doorway he froze, his entire body completely rigid, his hackles raised, and then he was barking like I had never heard him bark before. A frantic, ferocious sound that was almost a howl, with both his wolf’s ears pressed back flat against his head.

  “Bailey,” I said. “Stop it.”

  But I doubt he even heard me over the awful din he was making. I moved my chair forwards and the stairs leading down to the cellar came into view. I shuddered at the sight of them. Surely it was just the memory of what had happened last time I was there, not helped by Bailey’s reaction, but I suddenly had the strongest sensation that there was something down there and that it was looking at us, looking at us from out of that dark, damp room, with eyes wide and teeth bared as if warning us not to come another step closer.

  I flung out my arm and slammed the door closed, making the wood shake and shudder in its hinges. I was breathing hard and my hands were trembling slightly. I definitely didn’t want to be in the Waterwitch any more. Bailey stopped barking and turned to open the door that led back to the restaurant without my even having to tell him to. I wheeled through it quickly, glad to leave that awful door behind us.

  I couldn’t help glancing back as I passed through to the restaurant and, in that moment, the wooden planks of the door looked changed somehow. Twisted up into unnatural shapes that hurt my eyes and hurt my head and made me want to get as far away from there as possible. The wood looked knotted up in all the wrong directions, curling around and around on itself like angry waves in a stormy sea, only the angles were all wrong, and just looking at them seemed to do something to my brain, put pressure on some blood vessel behind my eyes somewhere that felt like it might burst at any moment…

  I blinked quickly and, when I opened my eyes, the door looked normal once again, almost taunting me with how completely ordinary it was. I told myself that it must have been some trick of the light – and then Bailey nosed the door closed and cut it off from my view.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Bailey didn’t need telling twice. He trotted ahead of me to the door that led back to the street but, just as he lifted his paw to pull down the handle, there was a quiet, dreadful click – the unmistakeable sound of the lock turning. It was the softest of noises but I don’t think I could have been more shocked if a cannon had gone off behind my head. The lunatic thought occurred to me that the Waterwitch was trying to prevent us from leaving, and my knuckles were white as I gripped the door handle and pulled down on it. Bailey jumped up to press his front paws against the door but it didn’t budge. We were definitely locked in.

  I balled my hand into a fist and slammed it hard against the wood. “Hey!” I shouted. I don’t know who I thought I was shouting at but, the next moment, the lock clicked back and the door was suddenly thrown open. I hadn’t realized quite how dark it was inside the Waterwitch until the bright sunlight made me blink and squint like some troll that had been living in an underground cave for the past year.

  Someone stood silhouetted in the doorway before us, someone tall and slim, and then a voice spoke, a single word that was an exclamation of pure, complete surprise: “Emma?”

  I raised my hand and squinted at him. “I’m sorry, do I—?”

  “It’s Jem. Jem Penhale.”

  Chapter Six

  Emma

  For a few moments, we were both speechless. It was so weird seeing Jem as a teenager. I guess in my head he was still ten, not this tall seventeen-year-old wearing jeans and a black jacket. He was still slender, although perhaps not quite as gangly as he’d been before, and his hair was the usual mess, as if he’d only just got out of bed. But his eyes had changed, or, at least, the left one had. It was no longer the chocolate brown I remembered but sea-green instead. And he looked tired – painfully, obviously tired – with dark bags under his eyes and a sort of pale-skinned, hollow-cheeked look.

  “What happened to you?” I wanted to say. “What’s wrong? Tell me what I can do to fix it.”

  But I managed to check myself in time. He’d probably just been out clubbing last night. That was what most teenagers did on a Friday night, wasn’t it? It
was what a lot of my friends did. It’s not so easy going clubbing if you’re in a wheelchair, though. I tried it once and people kept sitting down in my lap.

  “Your eye—” I blurted like an idiot.

  Jem stared back. “You… You’re in a … a—”

  “Wheelchair?” I gave him the word, trying to be kind. Most people seemed uncomfortable saying it around me, for some reason – as if perhaps I might not have noticed I was actually in a wheelchair at all and that the mere speaking of the word in my presence might make me suddenly look down and say, “Right, stop everything! What is this?”

  So I said the word to spare Jem from having to say it himself, but my voice came out far more bitter than I’d meant it to, and the word ended up sounding more like a weapon.

  Jem flinched. “No one told me,” he said. “When I asked your gran about you, she said you were fine.”

  I wondered if she’d been trying to protect my privacy or something but I couldn’t help wishing that she’d just told Jem the truth. It would have made this conversation a lot easier if he’d known what to expect.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, crouching down in front of Bailey, who instantly offered him his paw.

  “That’s Bailey,” I said. “He’s my assistance dog.”

  Jem was close enough that I could see the chestnut glints in his hair and the unfamiliar green flecks in his left eye.

  “So what happened to your eye then?” I asked.

  “Oh.” Jem paused. “Sometimes when you injure your eye it can change colour, apparently.” He shrugged, like it was no big deal.

  I wanted to ask if his father had punched him, but I didn’t. That was the kind of blunt enquiry I could have made when we were best friends but it really wasn’t the kind of thing you could just come out with to someone you hadn’t seen in seven years. His dad had given him a black eye. We both knew it. It would have been cruel to make him say it out loud.