The Wayward Girls

by Amanda Mason

  ‘No. Well, we won’t be running obs in the rooms,’ says Lewis.

  ‘But since we’ve got the gear, we thought we could leave it all recording overnight,’ says Nina. She looks up at Hal, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. ‘That won’t be a problem, will it?’

  ‘No,’ says Hal, ‘not really. But we’ll still need to retrieve the SD cards, at some point, import the rushes.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Well, it depends on the camera: with two slots, say every five hours or so. But a DSLR will only film up to thirty minutes at a time and then you’re looking at changing the cards every ninety minutes, importing the files to the laptop. It’s a lot of hassle.’

  ‘But it’s possible?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Right, well, sleeping bags in this room then. Yes?’ She doesn’t really seem to be expecting an answer from either of them. ‘You said we could monitor one of the cameras?’

  ‘On my iPad, yes, that’s not a problem.’

  ‘OK. Well, if we use that for the girls’ room – Lew, is that OK with you?’

  ‘Fine.’ Lewis opens one of the AnSoc boxes and starts to make notes on some sort of checklist.

  ‘I’ll show you what we need, then,’ says Nina.

  They start in the kitchen. Hal works quickly, setting up a small boxy camera facing the blocked-in window and the back door. He considers the dimensions of the room for a moment before selecting a lens and fitting it to the camera body. Nina watches in silence.

  ‘You happy with that?’ Hal adjusts the tripod and stands back so she can look at the image in the viewfinder. Nina bends down to look, suddenly self-conscious.

  ‘That’s great, thanks.’

  ‘OK. Two cameras upstairs?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll show you.’

  Nina leads the way. It’s not so bad, Hal thinks, the house. It’s smaller, more mundane than he’d been expecting. It’s on the chilly side though. Maybe it’s just as well they want to work through the night; he can’t imagine sleeping here. He can’t imagine that at all.

  A couple of steps ahead of him Nina stops, her fingers resting lightly on the banister. ‘That’s it,’ she says, ‘the girls’ room.’ The door is closed, the white gloss paint dingy, the brass doorknob tarnished and dull. Hal pauses, not sure if he should give her time to tune in, sense the atmosphere, or whatever it is she needs to do.

  She waits a minute or so before stepping up onto the landing, then turns to smile at him. ‘Thanks for doing this,’ she says.

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  ‘Really,’ she says, ‘it’s great.’

  Someone has torn up the carpet here; dusty floorboards give under their weight. Hal finds himself wondering about Health and Safety, about dry rot and collapsing beams. The air is stale, still. ‘It’s just us then?’ he says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘From the – from the AnSoc?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. We’re just going to focus on the most active area and next time, well, we’ll see what we come up with this weekend before we worry about that.’

  ‘Active?’

  ‘Yes. You know, the room where – where stuff happens.’

  Anomalous activity, that was one of the phrases she’d used in the bar, downplaying the whole thing really, trying to sound serious, responsible. He’d noticed her around, once or twice, but they’d never spoken before. He was in the final year of his Film and Media Production course, and she and Lewis were in their second year of Psychology. Someone must have recommended him, he supposed. It had seemed like a laugh at the time, and he knew he’d be able to scrounge up some extra gear as well as bringing along his own cameras. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘so, you want something here?’

  ‘Please. And if we could get the bedroom door in frame, that would be brilliant. And then the last camera in the bedroom itself. If that’s OK,’ she says.

  ‘Sure. Whatever you want.’

  Nina moves out of the way as Hal squats and sets to work, pulling a different type of camera from the padded bag and assembling another tripod.

  They have all filled in the usual forms prior to this trip, following established AnSoc procedure, questionnaires dealing with personal beliefs and experiences, opinions on the supernatural and anomalous phenomena, the purpose of which is to fix each team member in place on the percipient scale.

  Have you experienced paranormal activity?

  Have you ever consulted a medium?

  Do you believe in the survival of the human soul after death?

  Both Nina and Lewis have read through the results. Hal’s responses were depressingly absolute.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  She and Lewis are both inclined to believe, and they are both aware that investigation protocols are there to prevent misinterpretation or, worse, fraud. This visit, their first, is purely to collect baseline information and readings, and she knows she shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions, yet something about this part of the house bothers her, and she wonders if Hal feels it too. She could ask, but that would be against the rules.

  He assembles the tripod and attaches a small microphone to the top of the Sony, flipping out the viewfinder and making various adjustments to the lens until Nina has the coverage she wants.

  ‘OK,’ says Hal, picking up a holdall and heading towards the girls’ room. ‘In here?’

  The room is at the back of the house and there’s a single window, boarded up, a remnant of net curtain hanging underneath the window sill. Someone has tried to strip the wallpaper in this room, but only one wall is fully exposed. The others are a palimpsest of half-revealed patterns, a plain blue over a Regency stripe, over a psychedelic swirl, over a pale floral print. There’s a wardrobe, with one door missing, and a mattress, with an armful of blankets piled up at one end. It smells, that damp paper and wallpaper paste smell, and it’s dark.

  Nina flicks on the light switch. ‘Shit.’

  No bulb.

  ‘Bring one up from downstairs?’ Hal says.

  ‘Best not. I don’t want to – you know – start messing around with the rooms we’re observing. We should work with what we have. You can cope with this? The low light?’

  ‘Sure, I can fix a light on the camera, but if you want to work all night it’s something else to keep an eye on.’

  ‘OK. Well, we’ll do that. Facing the window again, I think.’

  Hal kneels down and starts unpacking his bag. The floorboards are dusty and spotted with candle wax and Nina treads carefully, as if she might disturb someone, something. She stands with her back to the boarded-up window, trying to imagine the room as it once was, the bunk beds against the wall, the dressing table to her left. The sensation she’d had before, as they were walking up the stairs, that faint fluttering anxiety, has turned to something else – anticipation, perhaps.

  ‘So, do you want to tell me what went on here?’ Hal says.

  ‘You know I’m not supposed to.’

  ‘Not even a bit of a clue?’

  ‘Not a word, not from me.’

  They’d agreed, the three of them, that they’d let Hal experience the house with no preconceptions, that his experience that weekend wouldn’t be coloured by any expectations.

  ‘You know,’ he’d pointed out, ‘both of you know what’s supposed to be going on here.’

  ‘But that’s the point,’ Lewis had said. ‘It’s brilliant for us, really. We can measure our experiences against yours – you’d be a sort of test case, a control group of one.’

  ‘You’ll keep us honest,’ said Nina. ‘We’ll be able to look for similarities in our responses, all three of us, and blind spots too – with you, if you don’t know what to expect, there’ll be no danger of you, you know, playing along? We’ll just have your first reactions to the farm, and to any – incidents.’

  It hadn’t made much sense to him, not really. But neither had it seemed like a big deal. Only now they’re actually here, inside the house, he finds that
he’d like to know more after all. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Just a hint. Just so I know what to keep an eye on.’

  She leans back against the wall, smiling, pretending to consider his argument. ‘There was this family,’ she says, ‘and they were – troubled, I suppose; dysfunctional. There was a whole bunch of kids, and the two oldest girls, Bee and Loo, shared this room.’

  Lewis takes his time unpacking. Sound recorders in each room, despite the fact they’re using cameras, because he’s happier relying on equipment he’s familiar with and, besides, it never hurts to double up. He sets up the temperature monitors and carbon monoxide loggers too, and checks over the electromagnetic field meters: all of this gear from the uni’s AnSoc, all of it temporarily his responsibility.

  Back in the dining room he pauses to take stock, going over his notes. They’d borrowed every bit of gear they could lay their hands on, but what had seemed far too much stuff when crammed into Hal’s car now seems barely adequate, and he tries to ignore the creeping sensation that maybe they’re not quite so well prepared after all. He’s still standing there, lost in thought, when they come down the stairs, the two of them, and he can hear Nina’s voice drifting along the hall.

  ‘Not a re-creation,’ she’s saying, ‘there’d be no point in that at all. But because they never came back, they weren’t able to reproduce their results. The lead investigator, Michael Warren, he died.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘God, no,’ Nina says. ‘No. Back in London, it was a road accident – nothing to do with … But what that meant was that everything just stopped.’

  Lewis reaches the doorway in a couple of strides. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘we agreed. No spoilers.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Nina leans over the banister, smiling. ‘See?’ she says to Hal. ‘He’s on to us.’

  They have timetabled their evening. They spend the first hour in the dining room, gathered around the table, leaves extended, working on their laptops, or patrolling the rooms monitoring their readings and making notes. Then they run the first series of percipient observations for an hour with Nina and Lewis in separate rooms, making notes. Nothing happens, at least nothing out of the ordinary. The house settles into itself for the night and the three of them, Nina, Lewis, and Hal, work quietly.

  At about nine o’clock they decide to run a second set of observations. Nina is in the bedroom and she chooses to sit opposite the camera underneath the boarded-up window. Lewis is in the kitchen, lit by a single light bulb, and he sits on a wooden chair in the far left-hand corner of the room, where he can see the door and the window. He spends the first thirty minutes doing a crossword in today’s paper, occasionally looking up, deep in thought, or possibly listening. Nina reads, going through one of the files she’s brought along, her bag propped against the wall beside her.

  Hal is left alone in the dining room, and he spends some time looking at the rushes from the kitchen, scanning idly through the static image of the door and window, and the speeded-up motion of himself approaching the camera, of Lewis and Nina as they enter the room to check their monitors. He doesn’t think about the house.

  He checks his watch. Half an hour exactly.

  He knows that for Nina and Lewis their thirty minutes engaged in unrelated activity, simply being present in the room, are over; for the next thirty minutes they must be active, open, concentrating on the space, making notes and observations, recording the subjective impressions which can later be read against the data their monitors and meters have gathered. They explained that to him at the start of the evening.

  One participant in the control room, the room with no history of phenomena, and one in the live room, the place that’s experienced problems. Those are the rules. The protocols state the observers go in blind, unaware which room they’ve been given, but obviously, given they both know the history of the farm, that’s not been possible here, although Hal has no idea which room is which.

  Nina had insisted she go upstairs the second time round.

  Hal has come to the conclusion that he definitely doesn’t like the house; it may only have been empty for a couple of years but he can’t shake the feeling that it has been abandoned for much longer than that. He wonders if that observation is the sort of thing Nina and Lewis are after, if this vague sensation – not unease exactly, but certainly of discomfort – is part of his role as the control observer.

  He yawns, he’s getting cold, colder, and he resists the temptation to check the time. They’ll be done soon and then maybe he can persuade Nina to take a walk down to the pub, somewhere warm and bright and noisy. It’s just an old house, he reminds himself, empty and unloved.

  He picks up his iPad and taps the icon that allows him to monitor the camera in the upstairs bedroom, the girls’ room. Nina is sitting in the far left corner, next to the boarded-up window, very quiet, very still. He can’t quite make out what’s going on in the opposite corner though; the shadows are darker there, thicker.

  It’s possible for him to control the camera via this device, he’d explained that to both Nina and Lewis, and they’d decided that this time round they were going to work with static shots. But still, there is definitely something about the shadows in that part of the bedroom that’s bothering him.

  He taps on the pad, adjusting the image on-screen, zooming in, just a little, not wanting to lose sight of Nina altogether, not wanting to leave her alone.

  At first, he thinks he can see a person, someone lying on their side, facing the wall, hunched up, cold perhaps, or sulking. He zooms in closer.

  Blankets, that’s all. Idiot.

  Nina is still in position, unaware that he’s been operating the camera, and he indulges himself for a moment, letting her face fill the screen, silent, serene, before trying to move the camera back to its original position. He taps the pad again but nothing happens. His hand cramps and he finds himself struggling, his fingers moving clumsily, cold and unwilling.

  He’s still looking at Nina’s face, puzzled by this sudden loss of control, when it begins.

  The sudden pressure in his ears is almost unbearable as the room, the air around him, fills with a buzzing, hissing white noise, enraged and alive, and the light above, a single glass bulb, seems to burn brighter, dazzling him. He’s vaguely aware that he’s dropped the pad, that he’s trying to stand.

  It’s all too bright. Too close. Too much.

  It lasts for hours, minutes, seconds, he can’t tell.

  The air crackles, and the light fades, gradually, until it’s no more than a faint blue spark.

  He can’t look away.

  The spark vanishes and he’s alone in the dark.

  The silence that follows is broken by a slow, deliberate knocking.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  It’s coming from upstairs.

  2

  Now

  When the phone rings she is dreaming about the farm. She does that sometimes. In her dreams they are all back living there again because they still have the keys and the new owners don’t care for the place and never visit. Dream logic.

  She understands that they shouldn’t be there, that someone is bound to come and find them, and one day they will have to leave all over again, but for now this is a distant possibility. They run through the rooms, Bee and Loo, and they find all their things, furniture, carpets, books, have been miraculously restored. Cathy is there and Joe has come back too. He moves silently through the house, across the first-floor landing, down the stairs and into the kitchen, standing by the sink, blocking out the bright light that streams in through the open window. Everything is exactly as it was, but it’s not right, Lucy knows that much; they shouldn’t be there.

  In her dream she’s running along the path in the heavy summer heat. Bee is leading the way, and they have to get round to the front gate before

  before

  before

  She grabs her phone, struggling to unlock the screen. It’s 6.03 a.m., and it’s her mother, Cat
hy.

  ‘Lucia?’

  ‘Mum. Yes. What’s wrong?’ She sits up in bed. The central heating hasn’t kicked in yet; she’s cold and she’s wide awake.

  ‘Where are you?’ Her mother sounds irritated, as if Lucy has wandered off without permission.

  ‘I’m at home. Mum, what’s wrong? Is something wrong?’

  For a moment or two all she can hear is her mother’s breathing, slightly laboured. When Cathy replies her voice is too loud and too close. ‘I can’t find her. She was here a moment ago, and I came straight down and now I can’t find her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She should put some shoes on, she’ll catch her death.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Bianca?’

  ‘No, Mum, it’s me, Lucy.’

  ‘I came down to let her in, but now I can’t find her.’

  ‘Down where?’

  ‘The garden. I was looking out of the window—’

  ‘You’re outside?’

  It’s still dark, and it’s freezing. It’s October, for God’s sake.

  ‘I put a coat on.’

  ‘Mum, go back in. Go back into the house, right now.’ Lucy gets out of bed and pulls back the curtains. The street below is empty, the pavement streaked with rain.

  ‘Will you come and help me? Lucia?’ Her mother’s voice is closer now. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  Lucy rests her head against the window and briefly closes her eyes. She can’t cope with this, not now. ‘Mum, this is ridiculous. You need to go back inside—’

  ‘She was here and then she was gone.’

  ‘Yes. You said.’

  ‘I tried to call you, but you never answer.’

  ‘You can leave a message. I check my messages every day.’

  ‘I don’t like those things. I can’t—’

  ‘Can we discuss this later?’ says Lucy. ‘Once you’re back inside.’

  ‘Well, there’s no point now, is there?’

  ‘Mum?’

  A minute ticks past, then another.

  ‘It would be better if you came and helped,’ says Cathy, sounding much more like her old self, much more decisive, ‘don’t you think?’