To his detriment, he also knew that even worse prowled the nocturnal landscape in those fateful hours before dawn. He had seen things. And not just in dreams. Nothing as graphic as a salivating monster with yellow eyes and long, sharp teeth and claws. Not yet. But things every bit as disturbing. Once, he caught a glimpse of what looked like a long, tapering tail flicking in a shaft of moonlight in the corner of his bedroom. He would routinely turn off the bedside lamp and watch the shadows in his room converge and became one with the darkness, then morph and twist into monstrous shapes right before his very eyes. There were figures in there. Some hunched and distorted, others towering over him, long and slender.
At that point he would snap the light back on, feeling a small spark of triumph as the darkness and all that dwelt in it immediately receded. Sometimes he played the game all night, revelling in the small sense of control it provided. If needed, there was a handful of spare bulbs in one of the drawers of his bedside table, right next to his torch and the supply of candles, matches, and cigarette lighters he kept close at hand.
The light kept the crawling, creeping shadows at bay, but did nothing to curtail the strange cacophony of sounds, which were always more noticeable at night. He suspected the noises were there in the background all the time, going unnoticed beneath the din of daily life. But when the night settled there was no camouflage, and the muffled knocks and scrapes were plainly audible. He worried about the guests more than himself. If he saw and heard these things, maybe they did too. He didn't want to have to answer any awkward questions at breakfast. He had enough to do.
He wondered if Old Rolly saw and heard things.
That was a lie. He knew the old man saw and heard things.
What he really wondered was what Old Rolly thought when he saw and heard things. Despite his outward appearance, he was a shrewd character. He had lived a life and often gave the impression that he knew far more than he was letting on.
What brought him to Sker House? Why here? Why now?
Who cares? He pays his keep.
When the noises first began to be a problem Machen tried listening to Classic FM on his clock/radio to block them out. But the noises would only rise in volume, seemingly in direct correlation with how loudly the music was being played. Occasionally, he was tempted to crank the volume switch as high as it would go, just to see how far he could push things. Being on a different level to the guest rooms meant he wouldn't disturb anyone. Especially with walls and floors this thick. But he feared the experiment would end badly. Through a process of trial and error, he discovered that as long as he didn't try to fight them, the noises usually remained at an acceptable level.
However, tonight was different.
Tonight, the knocks and scrapes seemed somehow different. They had risen above their normal volume and were more deliberate and agitated. Almost as if they were reacting to something.
But what? He hadn't done anything wrong. He had lived up to his end of the uneasy amnesty he thought he had reached with the entities with which he shared Sker House. No more Billy Joel at ridiculous volume, he got it. If not him, something else must be troubling them. Upsetting the status quo.
Chapter 11:
A Midnight Adventure
Lucy's first thought was that she was no longer tucked up in bed. The cold seeped through her skin and into her bones, making her teeth chatter. With dawning horror, she realized that she wasn't even in their room. Strangely however, once she had fought off the initial waves of panic and disorientation, she was surprised to find another emotion lurking beneath. A faint sense of belonging. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she knew that in some way it was the right thing to be doing.
As she began to assess her whereabouts, she became aware of someone or something behind her. Heart racing, she slowly turned around. The sight of Dale standing in the corridor broke whatever spell she was under. It was the look on his face that did it; terror mixed with bewilderment. Forgetting about her own predicament, she started to ask him what was wrong, then realized she was the object of his concern. Now things made a little more sense. She immediately felt safer knowing that Dale was with her, even if he had temporarily been struck mute. His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish as she moved toward him.
“I had a crazy dream about being on a sinking ship,” Dale was saying. “Then I woke up and you were gone. I thought someone had taken you. I looked everywhere.” They were embracing now. Or, more accurately, Dale was holding her upright. They were so close, and for one fleeting moment Lucy had an overwhelming desire to raise her head and kiss his lips. Then, faced with the imminent prospect of playing tongue tennis with Dale, she suddenly came to her senses and at the last moment pushed him away.
What was that?
Dale had some decent qualities, and she had even considered pulling him once or twice after a few too many vodkas in the student bars, but until that moment Lucy hadn't really thought he was her type. Obviously, she could read the signs and knew he liked her. But she was afraid such a development would change things between them. If it didn't work out romantically, there was a good chance their friendship would be destroyed forever. She knew it was a cliché, but that was something she valued too highly to put at risk.
“Where am I?” Lucy said again.
This time, Dale answered. “You're in Wales. In a haunted guest house near Porthcawl, to be precise.”
“How did I get here?”
“I drove you. Yesterday.”
“Be serious for a minute, will you?” She was in no mood for sarcasm. Dale's way of dealing with problems was to mask them with humour, but on this occasion it wasn't appreciated. She was scared. “What the hell happened to me?”
“Like I said. I woke up and you weren't in your bed. I looked everywhere for you and was just about to deduce that you had ran off with that Old Rolly geezer, when I stumbled across you hanging out up here. Presumably, you sleepwalked your arse here all by yourself with your eyes closed. Clever girl.”
“Sleepwalked?” Lucy said the word as if it came from a foreign language.
“Yeah, sleepwalked. I can't think of a better explanation, can you?” Lucy shook her head slowly, while Dale looked her up and down. “Erm... Have you ever done anything like this before?”
“No, never. At least, I don't think so.” Lucy replied solemnly. She racked her brain for a precedent, but drew a blank. Surely, if she had a history of sleepwalking somebody would have alerted her to it by now; her parents, various room mates, friends, one of the lucky few she had chosen to share her bed with.
“Well, I guess you wouldn't know, would you? I mean, you'd still be asleep.”
“Guess so.”
“That's freaky, Lucy.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Thanks for that. Now I feel a lot better. So... what was I doing when you found me?”
“You were just standing there.”
“Standing where?”
“Right there.” Dale nodded at a space a few paces behind Lucy. She turned around and looked. The stillness of her surroundings was oppressive, and she folded her arms across her chest against the chill. Goosebumps peppered the bare skin of her arms and legs. “Which floor are we on?”
“Four. The one that's not fit for human inhabitation yet.”
She glanced up and down the silent corridor to get her bearings as Dale continued with his safety lecture. “You're damn lucky you didn't fall over something and break something, you know. There's loads of dangerous shit lying about. How did you do it, anyway? Navigate your way here, I mean. You had your eyes closed, for fuck's sake.”
“I don't know how I did it, but I do know something.”
“What's that?”
“I know that this floor is the same floor that I saw the woman watching us through the window earlier. She must have been in one of these rooms.”
Dale's eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, pretty sure.”
“Are you thinking what I'm thinking
?”
“Maybe.”
“Now we're here, we should check these rooms out.”
“Makes sense...” Most of the rooms were without doors, but the one closest to them was ajar. Lucy clung to his arm as Dale pushed it gently. It swung inwards, revealing an impenetrable wall of darkness. “Did you bring a torch?” Lucy asked.
“No. Did you?”
“Nope. I wasn't planning on coming up here, Dale.”
“Right. Well that makes this a pretty pointless exercise then, doesn't it? We can't see a thing.”
“Let's try one more.”
“It's going to be just as dark.”
“I know, but...”
“But what?”
“That one...” It was the strangest thing, but Lucy felt drawn to another door on the opposite side of the corridor. She couldn't be certain, but she sensed this was the room where she had seen the figure in the window. But it was more than that. The room was special. She couldn't explain how, so she didn't even try. Heart thudding in her chest, she swallowed hard and put a hand on the cold wooden door. Summoning all her courage, she gently pushed.
It didn't move.
She pushed again, harder. Still, the door stayed firm.
“It must be locked,” Dale whispered. “Do you want to try the rest?”
Lucy definitely didn't want to try the rest. She wanted to go back to their room, lock the door, get warm and try to wrap her head around the events of the evening. “It's useless. It's too dark to see anything.”
“Yeah, right,” Dale agreed. “No bother, we can come back another time. It's not like any of these rooms are going anywhere.”
“You know, I could just be going crazy.”
“I've been telling you that for years, Lucy. So what are we going to do about it?”
“What can we do?” replied Lucy, her frustration growing. This whole experience, this whole place, was beginning to freak her out.
“We can start by getting you back in your bed, miss Midnight Adventurer. You must be freezing.” Dale put an arm around her shoulders and guided her in the direction of a door at the end of the corridor. A sliver of light shone through it.
For once, Lucy was more than happy to be led. As they walked, she looked at Dale and said, “You won't tell anyone about this, will you?”
“Of course not,” Dale replied. “Your secret is safe with me. And besides, who is there to tell? We're in the middle of nowhere.”
Chapter 12:
The Message
Dale was still too spooked to be able to sleep. Instead, he sat upright with his fingers laced behind his head, staring over at the other bed where Lucy snored softly. She didn't seem to be adversely affected by her sleepwalking experience, but he certainly was. It had been his responsibility to look after her, keep her safe, and he had failed in his duty. It felt like he had just flunked an important exam. After the short trip down the stairs, Lucy had simply crawled back under the covers and pulled them over her head without so much as another word. She still didn't seem completely 'with it.' As they had talked upstairs in the corridor, she'd looked dazed, as if operating at half speed.
It would be light soon. Through the window, he could see the first rays of the morning sun peek over the distant mountain tops. This working weekend break was supposed to be fun, but had taken a distinctly sinister turn. Several in fact, and they'd been at Sker House less than twenty-four hours. The challenge now lay in extracting some kind of narrative from his and Lucy's misadventures and weaving it into a decent story. While it had certainly been interesting, Dale doubted they had enough thus far to warrant the four-page spread in the Solent News he had promised the editor.
Giving up on catching any more sleep, he climbed out of bed, tip-toed into the en suite and took a rare early-morning shower. As the warm water cascaded over his body and steam began to impair his vision, his mind was cast back to the drowning dream. The details were already beginning to fade, but he still remembered the emotion and intensity. The feeling of hopelessness, and the eventual surrender. He tried not to read much into it. His subconscious mind had obviously been influenced by his surroundings, not to mention the alcohol he had put away before going to bed. But now felt more of an affinity with the ocean, and those who chose to spend their lives trying to survive it.
He also thought about the awful sensation of panic he had felt at the door leading to the seafront path while he was conducting his search for Lucy. The sudden conviction that he was almost within touching distance of something so evil that it gave off putrid rays of corrupted energy, stirring his most primitive instincts and imploring him to run. He shuddered at the thought and reached for a towel to dry himself. It all seemed silly now in broad daylight, as most nocturnal escapades did. You just got caught up in the moment, he told himself. Blew everything out of proportion. The thing you heard was probably just a startled animal scampering for cover.
Yeah, right.
Still deep in thought, he brushed his teeth, dressed, and went back into the bedroom. Positioning himself at the desk where he could watch the sunrise through the window, he switched on his laptop. It immediately buzzed into life. The first thing he noticed was the new, unlabelled folder on the desktop. Lucy must have put it there. He opened it to examine the contents, feeling a momentary pang of guilt as if he were about to read his friend's diary. But whatever was contained in the folder couldn't be that sensitive, or she wouldn't have left it where he would be certain to find it, would she? On his own computer, no less.
Unless she hadn't meant to do it.
That possibility made things exciting, but the excitement quickly turned to disappointment when he saw that the folder was just full of pictures she had taken the day before. No bikini shots there, then. What was more, they appeared to be very bad pictures. Virtually every one was foggy, blurred, or out of focus. Not what you expected from a twelve-year old, let alone somebody with two years training and aspirations of becoming a professional photographer. Assuming Lucy was either having some kind of experimental phase or had simply invested in a shit camera, Dale closed the folder. Since it didn't look like Lucy would be getting up for a while, he decided to get to grips with the transcribing exercise he had started. Picking up his notebook, he began leafing through it to the part where the interview with Machen was recorded. There, he froze.
“What the fuck?”
He loved writing on the facing page much more than the first page. It was new, fresh, and unspoiled, except for a few faint ballpoint indentations. He and Lucy had talked about this before, and she had immediately deduced symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He wasn't sure about that, but he was sure Lucy knew that deliberately disfiguring one of his facing pages would bring her a world of hurt. That was how he knew that what was written there, beneath his own writing, wasn't written by her. She would never dare. He also knew he didn't do it. Though his handwriting may be unintelligible to almost everyone else, it was a thousand times better than this abomination.
So if not he nor Lucy, who?
The worst thing about it was that whoever had disfigured his notebook had done so with extreme prejudice, pushing down on the writing instrument (undoubtedly the nearby 2B pencil, to add insult to injury) with such force that they had probably marked the next fifteen pages.
The rotten bastards.
In some cases, the pencil had torn straight through the paper, making it seem more like a frenzied attack than a genuine attempt at communication.
Dale stared at the display of random scratches, lines, scrawls and semi-formed letters, trying to make sense of them all. The first letter was most likely a 'C', followed by what could be a capital 'E' or a very badly drawn lower case 'A.' Then there were two figures that looked the same. But beyond that, it was impossible to decipher. Yet, the more he stared at the notebook, the more the letters seemed to make sense. If he let his imagination run wild, he thought he could even make out actual words.
But Dale suspected this was the same k
ind of mental trickery that made you see animals in cloud formations. Matrixing. If you look hard enough, your mind will ensure that you see something. Usually, just what you wanted to see. After those first few barely-legible forms, the writing descended into indiscriminate lines and scrawls, growing steadily fainter as they stretched across the page as if whoever was writing it was running out of strength or vitriol.
Taken as an individual incident, the mysterious message, if that was what it was, didn't set off too many alarm bells. It was a crazy world, shit happened, and most of the time you don't know how or why. If Dale scrutinized every mini-mystery he encountered there wouldn't be any time left for anything else. But the discovery of the message came right after Lucy's sleepwalking adventure, and her insistence on seeing the figure at the window. You could take one strange occurrence in your stride, but three in less than a day? It was too much to be coincidence.
Maybe there's a story here after all, Dale thought as he began to type.
Chapter 13:
Daybreak
Lying in his bed, Machen was also watching the sun rise through a very deliberate gap in his curtains, basking in the blessed sense of relief it brought. The birth of a new day was an almost divine event, as if God himself was sending his vanquishing angels to quell the dark rebellion. He revelled in the euphoria of surviving another battle, though lurking beneath it was the grim certainty that there would be many more battles to face in a war that he could ultimately never win. In the end, the darkness would get him.
He lived on the third floor of Sker House, directly above the guest rooms. He and Sandra's original plan had been to convert the fourth floor into a small apartment for themselves and maybe a Honeymoon Suite. But that idea had evaporated the minute those foreign cowboys walked off the job leaving it half-finished. These days, Machen utilized one of the few finished guest rooms instead. Temporarily, he hoped. Reaching for the bottle of JD on the bedside table, he was disappointed to find it empty. Nothing got him in the mood to face the day better than a quick slug of whiskey. Unscrewing the cap, he lifted the bottle to his lips regardless, hopeful that enough of the noxious brown liquid remained to sustain him. Indeed, a few drops did remain. But not for long.
Sker House Page 10
