by Helen Grant
A car was coming. Veerle put her head down and did her best to walk along the verge without stumbling. Look as though you’re just out for a stroll, she told herself. The headlights swept past, and as the car dwindled in the distance she reached the castle gate.
There were panels of metal fencing across the gateway. They had been fastened together with a length of chain, but the chain was now lying on the ground. The two panels were still overlapping, and a casual glance from a passing driver would not have revealed anything amiss. There were more headlights visible in the distance, perhaps three hundred metres away. If Veerle continued to stand where she was, the headlights would wash over her; someone would notice her standing there. Now or never.
She pulled the two fence panels apart and slipped inside. She looked at the panels from the other side, glanced out at the road. I’m on the other side of the cage now, she told herself. I’m not inside, I’m outside. I’m free.
Silently she turned and began to pick her way up the drive to the castle. There were no lights on this side of the road and it was too dark to see where she was putting her feet, but she could feel grit under her boots; grit and rough spongy patches that were the dead remains of weeds. She moved slowly, allowing her eyes time to adapt to the dark. It was easier to see the terrain now that she was no longer under the strong artificial lights of the bus, but still she had to go cautiously. Once she strayed off the gravel and felt pitted mud again under her feet. She stepped back onto the firmer surface of the drive and stood for a moment, getting her bearings.
Up ahead, the castle was a grim hulk, a blacker silhouette against a black sky. It looked entirely shrouded in darkness. Had she been mistaken about the light?
Did I imagine it? she wondered. Maybe I saw a reflection of the streetlamps behind me or something. No. There it was again – a yellow light, insubstantial as marsh fire, in one of the upper windows. It flickered and then it was gone.
Veerle felt the pulse throbbing in her throat, a wild beat singing its own song of Turn round, go home, this is a seriously bad idea.
She bit her lip. ‘This is stupid,’ she said aloud, as though the sound of her own voice would reassure her. There are no such things as ghosts.
Still she stood there, not venturing any further, tugging her jacket around herself.
It’s freezing, it’s too dark to see anything properly, and whatever or whoever is in there might be dangerous.
So run on home then. That’s what she would want you to do. Do the safe thing. Run home like a good little mummy’s girl.
That did it. She began walking again, picking her way carefully up the drive.
You wanted adventure. Here it is.
There was the light again, wispy and indistinct, dancing across one of the upstairs windows. What is it?
When she was so close to the front wall of the castle that she could have put out a hand and touched the bricks, Veerle stopped again, and listened. She could hear the sighing of the wind and the occasional roar of a passing car, but she could not pick out any sound from inside. She began to move stealthily along the wall towards the front door. The door itself was lost in darkness, but the great canopy that overhung it was made of a pale stone that showed up as a lighter patch against the brickwork. She made for that, like a child daring itself to run up and slap the door of a deserted house. She thought she would check the door: assuming it was closed, she had some vague idea that she might be able to climb the stone canopy to peer in at one of the upper windows.
The space under the stone canopy was inky. Veerle felt in her pocket for her mobile phone. She pressed the button, and by the light of the little screen she was able to pick out the weathered wooden panels of the door, some scuffed and faded tiles at her feet, and a drift of dry brown leaves driven in by the wind. The light faded before she was able to take a close look at the door. She pressed the button again, holding the phone close to the wood.
My God. It’s open.
She froze, her arm outstretched, holding the lit phone towards the door. It was only open a couple of centimetres. Still, there was something horribly suggestive about that narrow strip of black.
The light faded and the open door was once more drowned in the darkness. Still Veerle kept her face turned towards it; even though it was invisible, the thought of turning her back on it was somehow unpleasant. There was nothing welcoming about the interior of the castle. The front door was open but there was no light or heat bleeding out of it, any more than the warm breath of life comes from a dead mouth. All the old castle exhaled was cold and the smell of dust and decay.
Veerle stood there silently, listening, waiting for the sound that would tell her that a live person was moving around in there. If there were nothing, if the castle, or at least this part of it, were empty of living people, she would step inside for a moment and use the light from the phone to look around.
She leaned close to the door. Nothing. Not so much as the light scurry of a mouse crossing the neglected floor. She clasped her mobile phone tightly in one hand and felt for the edge of the door with the other. She pushed; it swung open more easily than she expected, though the long groan from the hinges sounded terrifyingly loud in the dark.
Again she waited, listening for the sound of someone moving away, rapid footsteps in the upper reaches of the castle, or even a rat scuttling away from the unexpected noise. Still nothing. I dare you to step inside.
The thought made her heart beat faster and her throat constrict, but still she knew she was going to do it. She would step in, and when she was right inside the castle, her back to the door, she would turn the phone on again and see whatever there was to be seen by its short-lived light. A glimpse would be enough, a secret to be carried away into the tedium of daily life like contraband. I’ll have done something for once, something that most people would never dream of doing.
She stepped through the doorway. It was no warmer in the castle than it had been outside; if anything Veerle thought it was a degree or two colder. There was a hard floor under her feet – tiles, she suspected. She was breathing heavily, unnerved by the sense of unseen but empty space around her. She switched on her phone.
The little illuminated square of screen hung in the blackness. Its light was insufficient to show her the full dimensions of the room in which she stood. She kept pressing the on button with her thumb every time the light went out, and sweeping the phone from right to left, up and down, trying to make sense of the little glimpses of the interior that it gave her. Dusty tiles, sections of wooden panelling, a fragment of patterned wall covering. She was holding the phone up high, at head height, to examine the pattern, when she heard it. The unmistakable sound of something dropping with a brittle clink! onto a hard surface.
Veerle didn’t have time to think. Her body reacted for her, jumping as though she had come into contact with something scalding. The phone slipped from her fingers and hit the tiled floor, clattering away into the dark. The screen light went out.
Ohshitohshitohshit. Now she was fumbling for the door, her chest heaving with panic, and she knew that she ought to try to keep the noise down, she was panting like a racehorse, but she couldn’t help it because there was somebody in here with her, in the dark.
Then she heard a rasping sound, and there was light – not a great light, but the light she had seen from outside, small, yellow, dancing and flickering. And in the light she saw it. High up, impossibly high up in the inky blackness, its hollows and lines graven deep by the wavering light. A face.
4
‘STAY THERE,’ SAID the face. ‘I’m coming to you.’
No. Oh God, no. Veerle turned and groped wildly for the door. For one moment she considered trying to find her phone, but the urge to flee was too strong. She ran at the door and her shoulder connected painfully with the frame. She let out a stifled yelp.
Behind her, the light was snuffed out as suddenly as it had appeared. Veerle heard the thunder of footsteps. Stairs. Whoever it was was running do
wn stairs. He moved with the confidence of someone who knows the environment intimately, who does not need to see to know where he is going.
Run. Veerle was within arm’s length of the door, she knew that, but she couldn’t orient herself. She saw the distant yellow glow of a streetlamp and ran towards it, but found her hands beating uselessly against glass; she had come up against one of the windows instead of the door. The footsteps were approaching fast across the dusty floor. The next moment she was struggling in the grip of invisible hands.
‘Vlinder,’ someone was saying. ‘Vlinder – are you Vlinder?’
Veerle’s nails scraped across leather. She tried to twist, to kick out, but whoever it was evaded the kick easily.
‘Calm down,’ said the voice. Veerle felt its owner let her go. She heard a rustle and a click, and then there was suddenly light – light so bright that it was momentarily blinding. Instinctively she put her hands to her face.
‘Are you Vlinder?’
She shook her head.
‘Well, who the hell are you then?’
Veerle’s eyes were adjusting to the light. She could see the door now, standing open not six paces from where she stood. She would have lunged for it, but the stranger anticipated her movement and grabbed her by the arm.
The halogen torch was shining in her face. It was impossible to see anything behind it.
‘Veerle,’ she blurted out. ‘Veerle De Keyser.’
‘Veerle De Keyser,’ he said, and the surprise in his voice was unmistakable.
He knows me?
‘Are you Vlinder?’ he repeated.
‘No, I’m not bloody Vlinder,’ croaked Veerle.
Vlinder? Butterfly? What kind of name is that?
‘It’s me, Kris.’
‘I don’t know any Kris.’
Veerle dragged her arm out of his grasp. This time he didn’t try to grab her again. She didn’t try to run, either; it was useless when he had a light and she didn’t, and he knew the ground well enough to allow him to sprint downstairs in the dark.
‘You’re Veerle De Keyser, from the house in Kerkstraat?’
She didn’t reply. How do you know that? Goosebumps were rising on her arms.
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘I can’t see you.’
He flipped the torch over and handed it to her, handle first. ‘We should get away from the window.’
Kris? Veerle was thinking. I don’t know any Kris.
She could pick up nothing from his voice. It was totally unfamiliar. As soon as he stopped moving she shone the torch at him.
He was tall, lean, dressed casually: leather jacket, dark shirt, jeans. Camouflage for creeping around unlit castles at night. The torch beam moved up from the jacket to his face and she studied his features doubtfully. Unkempt dark hair. Large dark eyes, aquiline nose, a wide mouth with a sardonic pucker at the corner of it. She couldn’t place his age accurately. Shadows engraved the lines of his face very deeply; he could have been her own age or fifteen years older.
I’ve no idea who he is.
‘Kris Verstraeten,’ he said reprovingly.
Veerle stared at him, and then suddenly she saw it, saw the resemblance.
My God, she thought. It’s him. How long has it been? Ten years? Eleven years?
She remembered Kris as a thin, sharp-faced boy – that was her idea of him, not this fully grown young man. At seven or eight years of age she hadn’t considered whether he was good-looking or not; he was just Kris, just a boy from her village, and she had liked him because he was nice to her in spite of being a year or two older. All the same, she had an idea of what he looked like, and now it was as though the years had taken that idea and stretched and pulled and distorted it. His nose was too big, his mouth was too wide, his brows were too dark. Only his eyes were the same as ever, large and dark and expressive, as though the original Kris, the younger Kris, were looking out of the grown-up face as from behind a mask.
That was her first impression; the second one was that Kris was rather good-looking, when you got used to the changes.
‘Turn the light off,’ said Kris.
Veerle was still staring at him, but when he moved to take the torch from her she hastily switched it off.
Kris Verstraeten, she was thinking, still half wondering whether she should make a bolt for it, now that she had the light.
‘Too bright,’ said Kris. ‘It would be visible from the road.’ He must have sensed her moving nervously in the darkness, because he added, ‘I have candles upstairs.’
‘Why? What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask you that.’
Veerle heard the scraping sound of a match being lit, and then he was holding it up, examining her in the light of the tiny flame.
‘Why are you here?’ he said.
‘I was on the bus and I saw a light so . . .’ Veerle’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t think of a way of finishing the sentence that didn’t sound either insane or pathetic. My life is so boring that I thought I’d have an adventure.
‘ . . . you came to investigate?’ The match was burning down; he shook it out. ‘Are you always so public-spirited?’
Veerle felt her cheeks burning. She was grateful for the darkness. ‘No,’ she said shortly.
‘So . . .?’
Veerle was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘It was just a stupid idea. Next time I’ll stay on the bus. I’ll forget about this, OK?’
Forget about seeing you, she wanted to say, but that felt as though it was straying into dangerous territory. She was unable to think of a single good reason why Kris Verstraeten should be lurking in a darkened and dilapidated castle; if he had a bad reason for being there, then her position was precarious, and if she could get away before this fact occurred to him, so much the better.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Look . . .’ He reached out in the darkness and grasped her arm again. ‘Maybe you were just passing and you just decided on impulse to come in here, but I don’t think so. I think you’re here for the same reason I am.’
Veerle tried to extract her arm, but this time he simply tightened his grip, pulling her a little closer.
‘If you’re Vlinder, I need to know.’
Veerle’s heart was pounding. For one wild moment she considered saying, Yes, I am Vlinder. The impulse was so strong that it was like a taste in her mouth, acrid and nauseating. He wanted her to be Vlinder, whoever Vlinder was, she could tell that, and she was not sure which would be more dangerous, to be Vlinder or to be not Vlinder.
‘I’m not,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone called Vlinder. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
5
IF KRIS WAS unsatisfied with her answer, he didn’t say. At any rate he let go of her arm, apparently no longer concerned that she would bolt without replying. Then he went upstairs to find the candles. He refused to switch the torch back on. He took it from Veerle’s fingers and it disappeared inside his jacket, out of temptation’s way. Then he was gone. She heard his footsteps moving across the floor, and then the creak of the stairs.
Alone in the hallway, Veerle found the darkness chilling – the sense of it pressing in on her, urgent yet insubstantial. If she looked towards the window she could dimly make out the streetlamps lining the distant road, but behind her there was darkness so complete that it could have been the void of deep space.
There could be anything, anyone, waiting there in the dark. She imagined putting out her hand and touching something. A cold still face, the features waxen under her fingers. Or worse, rough hair or scales. Teeth.
She put out a hand, trying to reassure herself, groping blindly at the air. Nothing. Of course. But just because she reached out and touched nothing at all didn’t mean there wasn’t anything there. There might be a bare millimetre between my fingertips and whatever’s lurking in the dark. She drew back her hand with a shiver.
There’s nothing to stop me slipping out of the castle, making fo
r the gateway and the road.
She didn’t, though. Partly it was the fact that Kris had gone upstairs on his own. Leave if you want to, he was saying. Stay if you want to.
Partly it was the fact that he wasn’t just anybody, he was Kris Verstraeten from her village. She felt that she knew him somehow, even if the sharp-featured nearly-nine-year-old he had once been had been stretched like taffy into a craggy-looking young man.
Candlelight bloomed at the top of the stairs and Veerle saw what she had seen before: Kris’s face, underlit by the flickering flame. Waiting.
When he didn’t come down, Veerle went up. She went cautiously, testing the stairs before putting her full weight on them in case they had rotted through. Also, she was in no hurry to reach the top step where Kris was sitting. She wanted to show that she was still being careful, still making up her mind about him.
The stairs were sound enough, although they creaked under her feet. Halfway up, she trod on something that rolled under her shoe. She stopped and felt about with her fingers, trying to locate it, thinking that if she stepped on it on the way down she might fall down the whole flight. Her fingers brushed through dust and then closed over a thin metal cylinder. She ran a finger along it and found the wooden bulb at the end. A screwdriver. What’s a screwdriver doing in here? She pocketed it anyway and went on climbing.
She stopped within three steps of Kris, but he was already getting to his feet, the candle in his hand. He shielded the flame with his other hand, in a gesture so natural that Veerle guessed he was used to carrying a candle around. Is he squatting in here? she wondered. What she could see of the upstairs décor was not inviting. The castle interior must have been magnificent once – she could see that from the carved cornices and the faded remains of the wall coverings. All the same, it was as cold and comfortless as a mausoleum. There would be no heat, no light, no running water. Veerle could not imagine laying her head on the bare boards, listening to the creaks and groans of the ancient building, perhaps feeling tiny creatures crawling over her in the dark.
