Don't Look Back

by Ben Cheetham

  Henry’s bedroom door was locked again. Adam tapped on it, saying softly, “I really am sorry, Henry. I was confused. I still am.”

  Silence. Then his ears caught a sound that set his heart beating fast – a faint click, like someone pressing a spring-loaded button.

  “Henry,” he said more loudly. “What are you doing in there?”

  No reply.

  “Answer me or I’ll force my way in!”

  Adam waited a few seconds before thrusting his shoulder against the door. It shuddered but held firm. He stood back and slammed a foot into the sturdy wooden panels with the same result. There was no way he was getting through the door without a crowbar. It occurred to him that there was more than one way into Henry’s bedroom. He darted into the opposite room, pressed the two-way mirror’s release mechanism and ducked into the passageways. He felt his way forwards until he saw light seeping through Henry’s bedroom mirror. The wardrobe had been moved aside yet again. The room was empty.

  “Henry!” he shouted. His voice reverberated along the passageways and found only silence. On the verge of tears, he pleaded, “Please, Henry! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  More silence. So loud it almost pummelled him to his knees. Propelled by panic, he stumbled through the darkness of the passageways. No Henry. Only dust, cobwebs and fear. After some time – he didn’t know how long – he emerged into The Lewarne Room. The room was spinning like a fairground ride. He fell to his knees, clutching his head as if to stop it from splitting apart.

  A faint gurgling found its way through his anguish. Something about the sound made him spring to his feet and run to the phone in the entrance hall. He started to dial 999, but hesitated. Twice the police had searched the house for Faith and twice they’d failed to find her. Why should it be any different with Henry? He dialled Doug instead.

  When Doug picked up, Adam blurted out. “Ella and Henry are missing. Ella fell... At least I think she fell. I don’t know… I–”

  “Slow down, Adam,” said Doug. “Take a breath and tell me what’s happened.”

  Adam drew in a shuddering breath and resumed more slowly, “Ella might have fallen into Satan’s Saucepan. The Coastguard are searching for her. And now I can’t find Henry. He went into the secret passageways.” By way of explanation, Adam added in a voice heavy with shame, “I tried to do things the way you said – with love – but it all went wrong. I don’t know what to do, Doug. I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind.”

  “Listen to me, Adam.” Doug’s voice was calm but insistent. “Here’s what I want you to do. Keep looking for Henry. Call his name. Tell him how much you love him. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You’re coming over? If word gets back to Rozen...” Adam trailed off meaningfully.

  “You want to leave Fenton House anyway, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but not without Henry and–” Ella. Adam’s voice snagged on the name. It seemed almost certain that he would be leaving without her no matter what.

  “I’m the best chance you’ve got of finding your wife and son.”

  “Are… are you saying Ella might be alive?” asked Adam, stammering at the possibility.

  “I don’t know if she’s alive. I don’t want to give you false hope, but besides Rozen no one knows more about Fenton House than I do. If anyone can get to the bottom of what’s going on there, it’s me.”

  Adam was silent for a moment, racked with uncertainty. Then he said, “OK,” and hung up quickly as if afraid he would change his mind.

  He went outside and found his way through the fog to the half-finished treehouse. No Henry. He returned to the house. His voice echoed along its hallways. “Henry, can you hear me? There’s no need to hide. I love you!”

  He’d almost shouted himself hoarse by the time the hollow thunk of the front door knocker resonated throughout the house. He ran to answer the door. Doug had shaved since Adam last saw him. A leather satchel was slung over his shoulder. His eyes were bright with anticipation and something else – not fear but something akin to it. Adam glanced uneasily into the fog beyond Doug’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” said Doug. “No one saw me coming here.”

  Adam motioned for him to come inside. Doug stepped forwards, but hesitated on the threshold like someone testing cold waters and deciding if they wanted to take the plunge. His eyes lit up as he caught sight of Winifred’s portrait. He moved in for a closer look. “I see what you mean,” he said, studying Winifred’s pale, delicate face. “So sad and beautiful.” He took a camera out of his satchel and photographed the portrait.

  “I thought you were here to help me find my son, not gather material for your book,” said Adam.

  “Sorry. Force of habit.” Doug returned the camera to his satchel. “Did you do as I said?”

  Adam nodded. “I’ve searched everywhere except the tower.”

  “Take me to its door.” Adam led Doug up to the attic. Doug ran his fingers over the ivory stars and ebony planets inlaid into the door, murmuring, “Absolutely exquisite workmanship.” He examined the lock. “There’s no way we’re opening this without a key.”

  “What if there’s another way into the tower?”

  “There might well be, but how would we find it?”

  “How would Henry have found it?”

  “Perhaps someone showed him.” Doug’s gaze moved along the walls and ceiling as if he expected to see some spectral figure floating nearby.

  “Please,” Adam’s voice was a quivering bundle of barely restrained nerves, “no more supernatural bullshit. Just help me find Henry. After that you can take all the photos you want.”

  Doug gave him a sympathetic smile. “To hell with the photos. We’re going to find your son even if it means taking this place apart brick by brick.” He placed a steadying hand on Adam’s shoulder. “OK?”

  Dredging up a faint smile of his own, Adam nodded.

  “Show me where you last saw Henry,” said Doug.

  They went to Henry’s bedroom. Doug looked under the bed and in the wardrobe, saying, “The most obvious places are often the last places we think to look.”

  When his search turned up nothing, Doug took out a torch and headed into the passageways. He made his way through them with eyes as wide as a child in their favourite toy store, occasionally pausing to listen and tap at a wall. He lingered beneath the entrance hall for several minutes, examining the mossy flagstones and rust-streaked stone blocks.

  A dull red glow trickled through The Lewarne Room’s secret panel. Doug approached the room as if he was walking on ice. He took in the paintings, the words carved above the fireplace, the glittering serpentine pedestals.

  He picked up the photo of Walter. “Any idea where this was taken?”

  “No, but the blocks in it are about the same dimensions as those under the entrance hall.”

  Doug nodded to indicate that he’d made the same observation. Dropping to his hands and knees, he pressed his ear to the tiles. He moved around the floor, feathering his fingers over the embossed fleur de lis pattern. He stopped on a line of black grouting. “There’s a gap here.”

  Adam ran a fingertip along the grouting. There was a crack as thin as his fingernail. He traced out a square four tiles by four tiles. “It could be a trapdoor.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Doug took out a penknife. He slid the tip of its blade along the gap. “I can’t feel anything that could be a release lever.” His brow puckering in thought, he looked at the words over the fireplace. “They are no more,” he murmured. He approached the fireplace and reached up to feel the letters. They were smoothly varnished with no visible joins between them and the wooden backplate. He tried pressing and twisting them. Nothing seemed to move, but suddenly there was a sound like a spring being released.

  “Look,” exclaimed Adam. One side of the four by four square had risen a centimetre or so. Adam tried to lift it further, but it was stuck fast. “Give me your knife.”

&
nbsp; Adam pushed the blade between the tiles and levered its handle downwards. The blade bent and snapped with a ping. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, springing up and running to the front door. He plunged into the fog again, found his way to the outhouses, then returned to The Lewarne Room with a hammer and chisel. He hammered the chisel into the gap, cracking the surrounding tiles.

  “It’s moving,” he said, wrenching at the chisel.

  Millimetre by millimetre the trapdoor grated upwards, until it popped jack-in-the-box style into an upright position. Its wooden underside was etched with a crucifix and criss-crossed with what appeared to be scratch marks.

  The subterranean room exhaled a breath as cold as a winter morning and as fusty as a long-sealed crypt. A steep flight of stone steps led down into darkness. A figure clothed in tatters of greyish material was huddled up at the top of them. The figure’s eye sockets were empty. Their mouth appeared to be fixed into brown-toothed smile. There was no flesh left on their bones, but a few wisps of dark hair still clung to their skull.

  Adam and Doug exchanged a wide-eyed glance. Doug shone his torch into the aperture. The orange light played on a glassy surface. “Water. Looks like it’s two or three feet deep.”

  More bones wrapped in floating tendrils of decayed clothing trailed across a flagstone floor. The torch’s beam lingered on a second skull whose jaw hung open as if emitting a silent scream, before moving on to a collapsed section of exterior wall. Clear water trickled into the room through a hole as smooth and round as a throat. Had the room’s prisoners tried to tunnel their way out? Or had the underground spring forced its way through the foundations?

  “George, Sofia and Heloise,” Adam said quietly, as if afraid of disturbing the Trehearne family’s eternal rest.

  “I only see two skulls.”

  “The other could be underneath the rubble.”

  “I think we may have just solved a twenty-two-year-old mystery,” agreed Doug. He traced his fingers along the scratches on the underside of the trapdoor. “They must have got trapped down there somehow.”

  Doing his best to avoid the skeleton, Adam lowered himself through the trapdoor. His foot nudged a bone. The material overlaying it crumbled like ancient parchment and the bone rattled down the steps and hit the shimmering surface with a splash. Adam dipped a finger into the water. It was so cold it burned. “Are you coming down?” he asked.

  Doug shook his head, glancing uneasily at the skeletons. “We don’t want the same thing that happened to them to happen to us.”

  Adam reached up to take the torch from him and swept its beam over the room. The light landed on a pair of frayed black velvet curtains dangling down into the water – surely the same curtains Walter had photographed himself in front of. The curtains swayed slowly. Was the current moving them or was it something else – something hiding behind them? Adam’s heart skipped in protest as he lowered himself into the icy water. It came up to his waist. His feet stirred up swirls of silt as he waded towards the curtains.

  He drew the sodden material apart. A face haggard with anxiety and exhaustion stared back at him from beyond the curtains – his own face reflected in a tall arched mirror.

  “Saint Jacob the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him–”

  Adam turned to Doug, frowning. “What’s that you’re saying?”

  Doug nodded at the skeletons. “I was saying a prayer for them and for us.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to hear any of that crap,” snapped Adam, making his way back to the steps and clambering up them. He slumped shivering onto the red sofa. “Where the hell is Henry?”

  “The only place left to look is the tower.”

  Adam shook his head. “There’s about as much chance of him being in the tower as there was of him being in there.” He jabbed a finger towards the trapdoor. “It’s like you said, he’s probably somewhere so obvious we haven’t–” He broke off suddenly, springing to his feet. “I think I know where he is.”

  “Where?”

  Without replying, Adam ran from the room and headed for the backdoor. The fog was as thick as ever. It clung to him like candyfloss as he descended to the cliffs and advanced recklessly along the tightrope of a path. A strip of yellow plastic tape with ‘CAUTION DANGER’ on it cordoned off the spot where the path had collapsed. A small figure was sitting on the wrong side of the tape, staring into Satan’s Saucepan.

  “Henry!” gasped Adam. He threw his arms around his son and drew him back from the cliff edge.

  “I can’t find her,” Henry said through chattering teeth, his voice hollowed out by anguish. “Are you still angry with me?”

  Adam hugged him tight. “No.” He pulled away to look in Henry’s eyes. “Honestly.” There was no lie in his voice. He felt nothing but relief. “Just don’t do that to me again. If I lose you too I… I don’t know what I’d do.” That part was a lie. If he lost Henry too, Adam had a pretty good idea what he’d do. What would he have left to live for if his entire family was gone? “Come on, you’re freezing. Let’s get you back to the house.”

  As they inched along the path, they met Doug coming the other way. Doug smiled at Henry. “Your dad’s been worried sick about you.”

  “He was looking for his mum,” explained Adam.

  Doug nodded as if to say, Yes, I’d guessed that. “Well now we can all look for her together.”

  Chapter 29

  Back at the house, Adam changed into dry clothes while Doug heated a pan of soup. Henry swallowed his soup mechanically, not seeming to taste it. Adam was too chewed up with worry to eat. Afterwards, he wrapped Henry in a blanket on the sofa and set about lighting a fire. Doug headed off, camera in hand, to make another sweep of the house for Ella.

  By the time flames were crackling in the hearth, Henry had dozed off. Adam perched at his side, staring at him as if afraid he might disappear again.

  After a while, Doug came into the room and gave an apologetic shake of his head.

  A grimace of disappointment passed over Adam’s face. “Thanks for trying.”

  “Listen, there’s a spare bed at my cottage. Why don’t you and Henry come and stay with me?”

  Adam shook his head. “How can we leave here? What if Ella didn’t fall? What if she’s just lost in the fog?”

  “Then the police will find her or she’ll find her way to help once the fog clears. Either way, you don’t need to be here. Unless, that is, you’re starting to wonder whether my bullshit’s true.”

  Adam’s gaze drifted towards the doorway where he’d last seen Ella. There had been something off about her, something more than simply her wet hair and dress. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think any more.”

  “I realise you don’t want to hear this, but everything I’ve seen here has left me more convinced than ever that Walter Lewarne brought something into this house–”

  “You’re right, I don’t want to hear it,” cut in Adam.

  Doug held his camera out to Adam. “Take it. Delete the photos. I don’t care about them. I just want you to listen to what I’ve got to say.”

  Sighing, Adam motioned for him to put the camera away. “I suppose that’s the least I can do after everything you’ve done.”

  “You believe there’s only one reality, but you’re wrong. There are alternate realities, places neither here nor there but somewhere in-between.”

  “You mean the afterlife?”

  “That word is just another label. I’m talking about other dimensions that exist parallel to our world. Dimensions where there are things that are constantly looking for a way into this world. Just as there are people in this world who are searching for a way into those other worlds.”

  “People like Walter Lewarne.”

  “Walter had an overwhelming desire to speak to the dead. That’s dangerous enough in itself. When spirits don’t pass on, it’s always for a reason. And that reason usually
isn’t good. Such spirits are angry, lost and confused. They often don’t realise they’re dead. All they know is they feel wronged and hunger for some sort of resolution. Speaking to them can provide that resolution, but I think Walter tried to go a step further. I think he was searching for a way to allow spirits to enter the physical plane. For that he would have needed a portal.”

  Adam’s eyebrows lifted in realisation. “The mirror.”

  Doug nodded. “It’s a commonly held superstition that mirrors are doorways to the spirit world. Covering a mirror would usually be enough to prevent spirits from travelling freely between this world and the next, but it might not stop something as powerful as the Entity from doing so. Not in a place like this where the energies are multiplied a hundredfold by local geology.”

  Adam’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “How would someone open such a doorway?”

  “Some would say you need to have psychic abilities. I believe that all you need is the will, the desire, the love.”

  “The love,” Adam repeated, a heart-crushing image of Ella rising into his mind. “So if Ella was…” Glancing at Henry, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “If Ella was dead I could use that mirror to contact her?”

  Doug frowned. “Theoretically, but like I said it would be extremely dangerous to try.”

  “Would I need to perform some kind of ritual?”

  “We’re getting off track. The point I was–”

  “You’re the one who started this conversation, Doug,” interrupted Adam. “So come on, tell me how it’s done.”

  “You don’t need any ritual. All you need to do is look in the mirror and call to your loved one.”

  “And what if that doesn’t work?”

  “You remember what I said about Shamans preparing meals to honour the dead? You could try cooking something Ella loves to eat.”