by Amanda Mason
A Haunting at Iron Sike Farm, by Simon Leigh
Lewis tries to make polite conversation as Lucy turns the hire car off the main road and drives slowly through Longdale. He finds it hard to imagine this woman is the little girl he has read about: Loo, with her matted gypsy hair and her hand-me-down clothes. She is, he reckons, about the same age as his mum. Not that she looks or sounds like anyone’s mum. Away from Cathy she’s a lot more imposing and he’s struck with a sudden need to impress her.
‘Do you know what happened to the house after your family left?’ he asks.
‘No.’ Lucy looks straight ahead, concentrating on the road. She hadn’t made it back to London in the end; she’d stayed on at Blue Jacket House, entertaining her mother with walks and day trips along the coast. She’d tried to supervise the exhibition at the gallery from a distance, relying on Eloise and the team, communicating by email and Skype. If she’s detected a chill in the more recent emails, a note of disapproval in the tone the Board of Directors are taking with her, she’s found it increasingly hard to care.
She’d spent most evenings watching over her mother as she slept, keeping the bedroom curtains firmly closed and very definitely not looking into the garden. Waiting. Listening.
A week has passed since her mother first called her.
‘Well,’ Lewis leans forward, pulling a notebook from his bag, checking the details, ‘the owner, Peter Eglon, tried to find some other tenants and when that proved … difficult, he put it on the market. It took a while but eventually he sold it to a family – the Trents – who sold it on within the year.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s passed through several owners since then. And no one, no one else that we can find anyway, has ever managed to make a permanent home there.’
‘Really?’ A fine rain has started to fall and outside the car the landscape is fading to monochrome, the road taking on a greasy sheen.
‘Yes,’ he skims through his notes. ‘It’s passed from one owner to another fairly regularly, but always as a second home, occasionally as an investment. You know, a holiday let.’
‘I see.’
‘No one else claims to have experienced – well, what you experienced. But that might be because no one ever bothered to ask them, or it could be that the house remains inactive unless there’s, well, a sort of conduit, I suppose. Someone sensitive who can make contact.’
‘A medium.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now?’ says Lucy. ‘Who might have made contact now?’
‘There are tests, you know, that measure psychic ability. Nina and I both score quite highly on them. Well, higher than average anyway. That might be it.’
‘I see. What about Hal?’
‘He wouldn’t take the psi tests. He said there was no point.’
‘Ah. Well, that’s no help, is it?’
He can’t tell if she’s making fun of him, nor can he find the courage to ask if she has ever taken a psi test herself. They fall silent.
‘Maybe they exorcised it, in the end,’ she says after a mile or so. ‘That was what they wanted, really, what Cathy wanted anyway. To get rid of it. It scared her.’
‘It?’
‘The voice. It was just a voice at first. Not a person. Michael asked the questions and the voice answered and the more they asked the more real it became.’ She takes the turn without bothering to indicate, despite Nina and Hal following behind in Hal’s car, and the house looms up suddenly, set in the fields that huddle underneath the moors. Iron Sike Farm. She parks the car high up on the grass verge, switches off the engine.
‘But if they did get rid of it,’ says Lewis, without thinking, ‘does that mean we’ve brought it back?’
‘I hope not,’ says Lucy.
Behind them, Hal and Nina watch Lucy get out of her car and walk up the garden path, pulling her long dark coat close as her bright blue scarf, borrowed from Cathy, flutters in the damp breeze.
‘Thank you,’ says Nina, ‘for doing this. I know you’re … busy.’
‘That’s OK,’ Hal says. ‘I brought a couple more cameras, to give us better coverage this time.’ It’s the most they’ve said to each other for the whole journey.
Maybe it’s that word, us, that wins him a brief smile from Nina. ‘Thanks,’ she says.
Lucy stops and looks up at the house. The windows are opaque, paint is peeling away from the front door and the chain that holds it shut is rusty. She turns and says something to Lewis, who shakes his head and points back towards Hal’s car.
‘Keys,’ says Hal. ‘She wants to get in.’
Nina unlocks the door and then stands back, watching closely as Lucy steps into the kitchen. She’s very still for a moment, almost holding her breath. She switches on the light. ‘There’s nothing left,’ she says.
Nina can’t tell if she’s saddened or relieved. She follows her inside. ‘Do you want to take a look around?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Thanks.’
They walk down the hall. Nina follows Lucy up the stairs.
‘Cathy and Joe were in there,’ Lucy says, pausing on the landing.
The larger of the front bedrooms.
‘And Florian in here?’ asks Nina, pointing to the second front bedroom, as if she didn’t already know.
‘Yes. And we were at the back, next to the bathroom,’ says Lucy. Nina wishes she’d brought a camera up, or even had the nerve to get her phone out, but that would likely scare Lucy off, close her down.
The door to her old room is shut. Lucy pushes it open. The windows here are boarded up, the room is dark and Lucy tries the light.
‘The bulb’s gone,’ says Nina.
‘We never used it anyway. We used to read by candlelight, we liked that,’ says Lucy. She walks into the middle of the room. ‘We thought it was … romantic.’
‘It must have been cold here in the winter.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Lucy. ‘We never got to find out.’
The floorboards, smeared and scuffed with a jumble of footprints, give slightly under their feet. Lucy looks around carefully, her hands jammed in her coat pockets. ‘We should go down and help the others,’ she says.
It doesn’t take long to get everything inside. Nina and Lewis take their laptops into the dining room and start setting them up on the table.
Hal follows them, dropping a couple of camera bags onto the floor. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘I’ve managed to borrow another EX1, which means we won’t be messing about quite so much with SD cards tonight. And I thought we could use these too.’
He pulls out three cameras from a holdall, black and silver boxes, so small they might be children’s toys, and Lucy is reminded of the little camera Issy used to have, the one with the name that used to amuse them so. A Trip.
‘GoPros?’ Lewis doesn’t sound impressed.
‘They’re not brilliant in terms of battery life,’ says Hal, ‘but they’re pretty much idiot-proof and you can either leave them in the other rooms or carry them on you.’
Nina picks one up, weighing it in the palm of her hand. ‘Great,’ she says. ‘That’s brilliant, thanks.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Hal picks up the larger of the two bags. ‘I assume you want everything else set up as before?’
‘Yes,’ says Lewis.
‘Thanks,’ says Nina.
Hal starts in the kitchen. He doesn’t really need any help, but Lucy goes with him anyway, listening politely as he explains about the cameras he’s brought along, how they allow him to take extended shots of both the kitchen and the bedroom this time, and about the Wi-Fi system which allows him to monitor one of them.
‘But there’s no internet connection here, surely?’ asks Lucy.
‘The signal is transmitted by the camera itself,’ says Hal. ‘We don’t need broadband. So I can keep an eye on you with my iPad when you’re running your observations.’
‘I see,’ says Lucy. She supposes she ought to find that comforting. ‘So, how does it work? The A
nSoc?’ she asks as Hal begins fitting a tripod together. ‘Are there very many of you?’
‘Sorry, you’re asking the wrong person. Nina needed a cameraman – and cameras – so she asked me. A friend of a friend sort of thing. I’m in my final year and … It was a bit short notice, I suppose. We had a talk and a drink, I filled in all of Lewis’s forms and that was that.’
‘You’re not a believer, then? Like the others?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Until?’
‘Until we got here.’ He stops what he’s doing altogether, there’s something odd in his expression, anxiety coupled with distaste. ‘This house is—’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. There was something, and I felt it. A sort of something that’s not on film, I mean. Sorry, I don’t really know – I didn’t know what to make of it.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I have more cameras.’
‘Ah.’ Lucy lets him get on, making a slow circuit of the room, which seems smaller now, diminished by years of neglect. She can barely imagine the whole family in here, eating together, her mother at the sink, Florian playing with his cars. She runs her fingertips gently over the damp walls. It all seems so long ago.
‘I wasn’t going to come back,’ Hal says, fitting a SD card into a slot and checking the viewfinder, ‘not after last time. I thought they’d pissed me about a bit, to be honest.’
‘In what way?’
‘They didn’t really tell me about what went on when you were a kid.’ He looks embarrassed. ‘I didn’t know about your sister.’
‘All that happened after they’d gone back to London, when it was just us again,’ says Lucy, ‘and I’d really prefer that you didn’t bring it up with Cathy.’
‘Yes. But still – I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, looking through the viewfinder. The kitchen seems bare and unremarkable, safe.
‘What about you?’ Hal asks. ‘Why did you come back?’
She smiles at him sadly. ‘Well, it was me or my mother, I’m afraid. And she really isn’t up to it. This seemed like the lesser of two evils.’ It seems like a reasonable answer: she hopes it sounds reasonable. ‘And you? Surely you’ve got better things to do with your weekends.’
‘Well, I suppose I thought I couldn’t let Nina down,’ he says.
‘Oh. I didn’t realise.’
‘There’s nothing to realise. Not really. We’re sort of—’ But he stops; a definition of their relationship is beyond him. Once he’d texted her to let her know he could come back this weekend after all, they hadn’t been in touch again. She’d been busy, according to Lewis: research. And apart from that brief moment in the car, she’d barely spoken to him, barely even looked at him. ‘We don’t know each other very well.’ He looks around the room. ‘Plus I had a very long email from Lewis on the importance of duplicating procedures and personnel on this sort of investigation,’ he says, trying to smile.
‘Right. But it’s not the same personnel, is it? There’s me,’ says Lucy.
Hal’s been thinking about that in the car on the way up. For all Lewis’s talk of protocols and procedure, he’s sure they are breaking the rules by bringing Lucy with them this time. And as far as he can work out, Nina and Lewis aren’t so much interested in investigating the farm this weekend as they are in seeing what happens when they bring Lucy into the house. He wonders if she realises that.
‘Can’t start a fire without a spark,’ says Lucy, softly.
‘Sorry?’
He’d missed what she’d been saying, most of it anyway.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I was being flippant.’
He picks up a camera bag and leads the way out of the room, trying to ignore the faint buzzing sensation that has begun to crowd in on him once again.
Lewis has made it his business to check the monitoring gear, to organise the observation rotas and to collate the information they have gathered so far. He’s aware that this makes him a figure of fun as far as Hal’s concerned, but he tries not to care. Someone has to keep proper records, otherwise it will have all been a …
Vanity project.
That had been the verdict of the others at their last AnSoc meeting. Nina had given in, in the end, or at least she’d appeared to but she’d borrowed the gear anyway, just taken it, really, helping herself to the equipment Lewis looked after in his shared house, setting things in motion without worrying about the consequences and dragging him along in her wake. No one else at the AnSoc knows they were here last weekend, no one knows that they’ve come back – neither he nor Nina have said a word about the investigation. They both know they’re on to something, and if the AnSoc don’t want to get involved – well, it’s their loss.
Hal knows there’s something not quite right with the whole setup, he’s not stupid, but he doesn’t seem to care, and whatever happened to him last time – because Lewis is pretty sure Hal is hiding something – it was enough to ensure he came back this weekend, looking for answers. Just like Lewis, just like Nina. Just like Lucy.
He checks the list on his clipboard. They’ll get the second round of observations done and then go back to the Society. Once they’ve seen their results, then he and Nina will get the resources, the manpower. They’ll be able to set up a long-term project, if they can persuade the owners. They might even get to write their own book. The thought makes him smile.
When they’re done here, they’re going to have an immaculate set of data, baselines and tests. He still can’t believe they got Lucia Corvino – Lucy Frankland – to come back. He’s not sure that Nina has explained everything to her, and he wonders if he should have gone into more detail in the car, done some groundwork. Talked a little more about the importance of the connection they need to make – about the work some investigators have done with mediums. He and Nina have discussed this, wondering what Lucy might say, how they should approach her.
‘You all right?’ Nina says as she walks into the room. She drops her bag on the sofa, and rummages in it before pulling out a notepad and pen.
‘Fine.’
‘Aren’t you cold? We could put the heater on for a bit.’
‘No. I’m fine. We’re still going to monitor the camera in the bedroom? Hal knows that, right?’
‘Yeah, he’s setting that up.’ Nina starts checking the EMF monitors and making notes as Lewis watches her, unable to stop himself wondering when exactly she and Hal have been discussing this weekend, what other plans they might have made.
She looks up from table, catches him staring and smiles. ‘Lew?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been thinking about the obs.’
They begin, as usual, with the distraction activity. Only this time, Lewis goes into the living room with his crossword. There had been an intense debate about this, well out of Lucy’s earshot – stuff Hal could only half-follow about procedure and rules – and Lewis had been pretty annoyed, but Nina had got her way in the end.
They’d put observers in the bedroom and the living room this time, the active rooms, rooms where the girls had been the focus of paranormal activity, and there was little doubt in Hal’s mind what Nina might be after there. They had left the camera running in the kitchen though, as a control, despite Nina’s assertion it was a waste of time; Lewis had at least got his own way on that.
Hal has set up the spare DSLR on a chair in the corner, and Lewis sits on the sofa with a GoPro close to hand. He leaves the living-room door open.
Lucy goes upstairs with Nina. They each have a torch and a book, although it’s apparent to Hal, who is watching them on his iPad, that neither is actually reading. They sit with their heads bowed, occasionally turning a page. Listening.
Hal remains in the dining room watching them on the monitor, observing the observers. The odd car passes by and a bird calls – it’s probably an owl, he writes ‘owl’ in his notes anyway, as Lewis has asked if he too will keep a record of his observations this weekend. He checks the time as he writes:
five o’clock, fully dark. He tries to resist the temptation to look around the room, tries to focus on the screen in front of him.
It’s cold, cold and draughty. He stretches his fingers, then shoves his hands in his pockets. Hal very much hopes that nothing is going to happen in here, not while he’s on his own, not again. He tries to ignore the faint buzzing of the light bulb above him. Maybe he should turn the lights off himself, that way he’ll beat her to it.
Stupid.
It’s just an empty house.
Lucy leans back against the wall, trying to find a comfortable position. She can’t concentrate. Odd, that, after all the hours she must have spent in here when she was a girl, reading, shutting the world out. She sneaks a glance at Nina, Simon’s girl, more at home here than any of them.
She’s so like him, that’s the trouble, and the last time Lucy had seen Simon – photos and television programmes aside – he’d have been more or less the same age. She starts to do the maths in her head. ‘Are you an only child?’ she asks and the question surprises both of them.
‘Yes,’ says Nina. ‘I think they’d have liked more. My mum, she was a lot younger than my dad. But it never happened.’
‘I see.’ Lucy goes back to her book, the words blurring on the page.
‘He was still at uni when you knew him, wasn’t he?’ says Nina.
‘That’s right.’ Lucy’s heart is thudding painfully. She can’t tell if it’s the house, or the girl. She shouldn’t have asked, she shouldn’t have said anything.
‘He lived here for a while, didn’t he?’
‘In a tent in the back field.’
A bright patch of orange in the pale gold grass.
‘What was he like, back then?’
‘He was—’ Lucy’s mouth is dry, and she shakes her head. Tries to find the words, any word – something to get her through this endless moment and on to the next. ‘Kind. He was very kind, patient – we were quite horrible kids, I think – sometimes, anyway. Michael Warren tried, but he seemed terribly grown-up, a bit – remote. Simon was more relaxed, we liked him best.’
