by Amanda Mason
‘We?’
‘Me and Bee.’
‘Do you spend a lot of time together?’
‘We share a room.’
‘What about school?’
‘We don’t go,’ said Loo, ‘and we don’t care.’ The dry grass scratched their bare legs as they made their way up the hill towards Simon’s tent, bright orange and sagging a little underneath the late afternoon sun.
‘Do you live in London?’ Loo asked.
‘Yes.’
‘With Michael?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Near him, then?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Bee wants to live in London.’
‘Does she? And what about you?’
Loo stopped and squinted up at Olivia, beads of sweat sticking strands of her uneven fringe to her face. Her frock hung limply on her thin frame. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Back in the garden, Bee let Simon look through the sketchpad and smiled, pretending she hadn’t noticed what they’d done, pretending she wasn’t furious. He’d fooled her at first. She’d been so sure they’d take the woman to meet Cathy, she hadn’t thought she’d just go off with Loo like that. And Loo shouldn’t have gone.
‘I like this one.’ Simon was holding up a sketch she’d done of the valley, but it wasn’t very good. She’d overworked it; sometimes she just drew in order to have something to do with her hands, to stop her scratching and nipping and pinching. And sometimes she didn’t know when to stop.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and smiled. If she had thought he meant it, she’d have given it to him, but she didn’t offer. He was sitting very close to her, which would have been a treat if Loo hadn’t gone off like that, and if Issy wasn’t hanging around, getting in the way. He smelt nice today: soap and suntan lotion and underneath that, very faintly, cigarettes.
He turned a page in the book. He was good-looking, Simon, almost like a pop star, or an actor, and she wondered if she’d ever dare ask him to sit still and let her draw him. She’d done a few sketches, from memory, hidden away, sketches even Loo didn’t know about. Glimpses of him pottering around by the tent or sunbathing shirtless in the field. They were private.
They played a game sometimes, she and Loo, seeing how close they could get to him without him realising. Close enough to count his eyelashes, to see where he’d scraped himself shaving, close enough to wonder—
Loo was just a baby, really, and he was never going to notice her. But more and more Bee had begun to think that maybe one day, Simon would look at her the way she’d seen him look at Isobel; if she had nicer clothes, perhaps, and if Loo wasn’t in the way all the time. But Loo wasn’t there now and although Simon wasn’t really interested in the drawings, he wasn’t really interested in Bee either.
It wasn’t fair.
They had made it as far as the tent, where they stopped and looked at the view. She seemed nice, this woman, and the odd tense sensation Loo had been carrying around all summer, especially when she and Bee were around the grown-ups, had begun to fade. She flopped down on the grass, pretending to feel more tired than she did.
‘It’s hot,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ Olivia sat down next to her.
‘Are you going to stay in the village? With Michael?’
‘I’m going to stay at the pub for a few days, if that’s all right with you.’
Loo stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Did Michael tell you about me? About what I do?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Would you like me to show you?’ Olivia wasn’t looking at her; she was gazing out over the valley. Loo tried to recall what it was that Michael had said, about mediums and contact and the ‘survival of the spirit’.
‘All right.’
‘Right.’ The woman sat upright and crossed her legs, resting her hands gently on her knees. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
‘Your name is Lucia Corvino,’ she said, making her voice a bit deeper. ‘You have brown hair and brown eyes, you live on a farm and – and – you bite your nails.’
She opened her eyes. ‘How am I doing?’
Loo smiled.
‘Not impressed?’
‘You’re just saying stuff you can see.’
‘Yes. Yes I am.’ Olivia nodded as if Loo had been particularly clever. ‘Because that’s all I do, really. I just say what I see – well, in my case, what I hear. There are things in the world anyone can see, if they care to look, and the rest …’ She reached out and took hold of Loo’s hand. ‘The rest only a few people can see.’
‘Or hear.’
‘Or hear. But it’s there, all the same.’
Loo wanted to take her hand away. She felt a little flicker of unease and now she regretted coming with this stranger, or at least not bringing Bee along too. Olivia looked into her eyes for a few moments, still holding her hand lightly. It took a lot of effort not to look away.
‘You went into the barn. You’re not supposed to, are you? But you went in, you and Bee and—’ She dropped Loo’s hand. ‘Is that what’s bothering you?’ she said softly. ‘Is that it?’
Bee was lying on her bed, the top bunk, staring at the ceiling when Loo got back. The bedroom window was open and the lace curtains framing it wilted in the late afternoon heat. Loo picked up a book and lay on her own bunk.
‘What’s she like, then?’ Bee was pretending she didn’t care.
‘She’s OK,’ said Loo.
‘She’s old,’ said Bee.
‘Yes.’
Bee launched herself off the top bunk and landed with a thud, squatting down next to her sister, grabbing the book and throwing it across the room.
‘Is she nice?’
This was a trick question.
‘I don’t know,’ said Loo. ‘I couldn’t tell.’
Bee reached up and grabbed hold of the top of the bunk beds, testing them, trying to pull them away from the wall.
‘Don’t,’ said Loo.
‘Don’t,’ said Bee, in a little-girl voice, pulling harder, rattling the bed frame.
‘Bee.’
‘Bee.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She’s a medium,’ said Loo. ‘She says she can sense things, she can receive messages.’
Bee let go of the bed and sat down on the floor with a thump. ‘Can she?’
‘I don’t know.’ Loo tried to think back to the conversation on the hill. Olivia had asked lots of questions and she’d listened carefully, but she’d told her stuff too. Private stuff about when she was a kid, before she met Michael, when she’d been able to hear voices that told her stuff she wasn’t supposed to know, when she’d thought she was going mad. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘She knew we’d been in the barn.’
‘You told her.’
‘No I didn’t.’ She was sure of that.
‘Will she tell?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Bee ran her fingers through her hair, lifting it up and back from her face; she looked older momentarily, grown-up. ‘What else did she say?’
‘She said she’d like to talk to Tib,’ Loo said.
‘And did she?’
‘No. It was just me and her. She’s going to watch the next time Michael talks to us.’
‘And?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Hmm,’ said Bee, turning away again, leaning her head against Loo’s mattress and stretching out her long legs in front of her. ‘That’s not what he told Cathy.’
‘What happened? What did he say?’
‘Michael wants her to do a séance,’ Bee said. ‘They’re going to sit us in the dark, around a table, and they’re going to prod you and poke you until Tib comes along.’
They’d read all about séances in one of Simon’s books one afternoon when they’d gone up to the tent, only to find he’d gone off with Issy somewhere. It had sounded a bit scary, really. Loo wanted to get out of bed, but Bee w
as in the way and she was trapped.
‘And then when she does …’ Bee let her voice trail away.
She doesn’t know, Loo decided. She doesn’t really know what they’re planning. They wouldn’t talk about it in front of her. They think she’s a little kid, like me.
Michael escorted Olivia to her room in the Red Lion, or at least that’s what it felt like. They had known each other for over twenty years now and still Olivia couldn’t quite get past the slightly formal, old-fashioned facade that Professor Michael Warren preferred to present to the world. She, usually so confident in reading people and situations, was never quite sure of him – it was one of the reasons she liked him so much.
‘You’re very quiet,’ he said, as they reached her door.
‘I have a lot to think about.’
‘What did you make of her?’
‘Loo? She’s an odd little thing, isn’t she?’
‘Odd how?’ That was the Michael she knew, always pressing for clarification, never giving his own thoughts away until he was quite sure of himself.
‘Well, she appears to be very close to her sister.’
‘Not unusual in such a remote situation, surely?’
‘There’s quite an age gap, though. I can’t really see what they’d have in common.’
‘Bee is very much the stronger personality, I’d say. She seems to need to dominate, to establish precedence.’
‘So she needs Loo as a follower? But then …’ Olivia smiled apologetically. ‘As I said, there’s a lot to think about. I’ll unpack and we can catch up in a little while. We can discuss how you’d like to run things over dinner, perhaps.’
‘Of course.’ He turned to his room, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his key. ‘I do appreciate it, you know,’ he said as he unlocked his door, not looking at her, ‘that you came such a long way with so little preparation.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘and I think you were right to call me. It’s a very interesting situation.’
‘Take as long as you need,’ he said, opening his door. ‘You know where I am when you’re ready to talk.’
19
Now
Lucy doesn’t sleep. She curls up in the armchair, wrapped in the sleeping bag she bought in town, and she even closes her eyes from time to time, but she doesn’t sleep.
The other three settle into their routine, one occasionally leaving the room to deal with their cameras as the others make notes or read. After a while, they turn off the overhead light and the room is lit by the dull glow of the monitors and a couple of battery-powered lanterns.
Two, three hours pass and she can see them relaxing, lowering their guard, and gradually, all is silent. She, listens, waits. Then someone’s alarm goes, a soft, insistent buzzing.
Nina sighs, finds her phone, silences it.
No one else moves.
‘Lew? Lewis?’ It’s their turn to check the cameras, change the little memory cards, upload the still and silent images of the empty rooms. Lewis doesn’t stir.
Lucy watches the young woman peel away her sleeping bag and pull on her boots.
Upstairs, directly above their heads, a door bangs shut.
‘Shit.’ Nina gets to her feet, listening. ‘Lewis?’
Another dull thud shudders through the ceiling and Nina doesn’t hesitate. She grabs one of their little cameras and without bothering to wake anyone else, she’s out of the door.
Lucy could leave her, of course. To face whatever it is all alone. It’s noise, nothing more, air in the pipes, an old house creaking and settling, she’d like to believe that. But there is something sickeningly familiar about it, even after all these years. Something deliberate.
Careful not to wake the others, Lucy stands and makes her way to the door.
Nina follows the sound to the top of the house, to the attic. The stairs are bare and dusty and they lead to a small landing with only a single door. The door is open.
Did we do that? Did we come up here?
Nina knows that she didn’t, but then one of the others might have. She didn’t really keep track as they were setting up, that’s more Lewis’s area. Anyway, the door is open – perhaps someone did it earlier – but that doesn’t explain the noise, the dull thudding she can feel in her bones – and it’s cold up here, freezing.
They haven’t much bothered with the top floor – it had been occupied by Dan Corvino and no phenomena had ever been reported there. Dan is a distant figure in the book, a teenager with a job that took him away from the house; he seems to have escaped the worst of the haunting. Which isn’t to say that nothing had ever happened, of course.
The ceiling slopes and its beans are exposed. It feels cramped.She can smell … cigarettes. Cigarettes and dope. The room is empty.
‘Hello?’
She has to do something, say something.
‘I heard a knocking,’ Nina says, lifting up the GoPro and sweeping it around the room, ‘but there’s nothing here.’
It’s cold, though. Freezing.
She doesn’t know much about Dan Corvino, although she’d tried to find him. When she started her research, she hadn’t realised he’d left the country. She’s pleased that Lucy and he are in touch though; that could be very helpful.
‘There’s no one here,’ she says. She’ll go back downstairs and deal with the SD cards and she’ll wake Lewis up too, make him take his turn. ‘Nothing.’
The room doesn’t feel empty, though; it feels as though there’s someone there, just out of sight. Her skin prickles in the cold. Goose bumps. She forces herself to stand still and just behind her, she could almost swear to it—
Breath.
Someone takes a breath.
Moves closer.
The hairs on the back of her neck lift.
This is it.
This is—
Her.
And then, something sharp, on the soft flesh inside her elbow, once, twice, three times. She flinches and rolls up her sweater sleeve. Blood is blossoming under the skin, forming little bruises.
‘Nina?’ Lucy’s voice drifts upstairs. The landing light flicks on. ‘Are you OK? Nina?’
She shivers, waits to see what will happen next, but the room is empty. She rubs at her arm, but the marks don’t fade. ‘Yeah,’ she says, crossing to the door. ‘I’m here.’
Lewis finds them both on the first floor landing. He looks sleepy, sleepy and cross. ‘I woke up,’ he says, ‘and you were gone. Did you hear it? The knocking? There was something knocking again, right?’
‘Yes. I thought – I just wanted to check upstairs.’
‘And?’
Nina rolls up her sweater sleeve. The bruises are still there, a constellation of them, scattered across her skin.
Lucy’s arm tingles. She can feel them again, the pinching fingers that would wake her in the dark.
‘I went up into the attic,’ Nina says. ‘I couldn’t see anyone, but there was a – presence, you know? Just for a moment or two. And this … happened.’
‘Are you all right?’ asks Lucy, stepping closer, taking hold of Nina’s hand, running her fingers gently over her skin.
‘Yes, I mean …’ Nina’s expression changes; she looks uncertain for a moment. She pulls away from Lucy and pushes her sleeve down. ‘We should take some photos – of my arm, I mean. And we should change the cards over. Did you bring them, Lew?’
Hal is awake too when they get back downstairs and Lucy lets Lewis fill him in as the two of them open one of the laptops and start uploading files. Nina goes into the living room and Lucy follows her.
‘Would you?’ Nina is holding out her phone.
‘Sorry?’
‘Photos? If you don’t mind?’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Lucy takes the pictures as required, the camera flash bouncing off the girl’s white skin. ‘That’s it?’ she asks when she’s done. ‘You’re not hurt anywhere else?’
Nina inspects her arm, rubbing gently at the bruises. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘Well, here you are.’ Lucy hands back the phone and sits next to Nina on the sofa. Sleep seems impossible now and she wonders if this latest incident could be enough, if she could manage to persuade them all out of the house tomorrow. Maybe if she agreed to an interview, back at Blue Jacket House.
‘Did you hear it too?’ Nina asks. ‘Just now? The knocking in the walls?’
‘Yes. I heard it.’
Nina can’t help herself. She leans forward. ‘Was it the same? Like before? When you were a kid, I mean—’
But Lucy isn’t listening. ‘Wait.’ She looks around the room, puzzled. ‘Wait,’ she says.
In the dining room Hal has taken the iPad to the table and is keeping an eye on Lucy and Nina as he deals with the memory cards. Lewis has been dispatched back upstairs with a torch and new cards and Hal tries to concentrate on the task in hand. His head aches; he’d been asleep and then he’d woken suddenly, the odd booming sound that had filled his dreams had turned out to be real. Someone – Lewis, he thinks – had turned on the overhead light and there were voices upstairs. It had taken him a moment or two to realise it was the others. By the time he’d caught up with them, it was all over. The knocking, whatever it was, had stopped.
The files are imported, ready to play. Before he clicks on the icon, he picks up the iPad again, just to check, just to be sure.
Lucy and Nina are sitting upright, rigid, looking around the room. Nina flinches, both women do, and Hal picks up the iPad and goes to the door.
He can hear it now, the sharp cracking sound coming from the living room, like hailstones hitting a window. The next crack is so loud he half-expects to see the screen in his hand break apart.
Nina has been counting aloud, for the record. She can’t possibly know what it is she’s counting, though. To her it’s just an odd sound, a sharp crack, loud enough to make you jump; she hasn’t made the connection. But Lucy has heard it before.
They’re coming faster now.
The rapid spit and fire of marbles, flying through the air and smacking into wood and glass and tile, bouncing onto the carpet with dull thuds. It sounds just as it did then. If she closed her eyes, she’d be back there and if she reached out, instead of Nina, it would be her sister sitting there.
