The Lost Ones

by Ben Cheetham

  Jake looked at Lauren narrowly. She’d been pestering him for months to go with her to the house and perform a seance to contact the spirits of the Inghams. As fascinated as he was by the occult – and as eager as he was to please her – he had no intention of messing with that shit.

  ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ Lauren pouted. ‘I’m not suggesting this because I want to go to the house. I really do think Erin could be there. I read this article about a little boy who went missing in London. Turned out he’d found his way into an empty house and got trapped in there. They didn’t find him until a fortnight later, by which time he’d starved to death.’

  ‘Erin wouldn’t do something like that.’

  ‘How do you know? No one knows why the boy did it. Maybe he just thought it would be a laugh. Or maybe someone forced him to go.’

  The cold feeling in Jake’s stomach intensified. What if some sicko had Erin? The Ingham house would be a good place to hide her. He couldn’t really bring himself to believe that would ever happen. Not in Middlebury, which had to be just about the safest – or in other words most boring – town in the entire country. But still, he’d snuck out because he had to do something, and right then he didn’t have any better ideas. ‘OK, but we’re only going to look around. We’re not having a seance or anything.’

  Pulling her as if I’d do something like that face, Lauren flicked the cigarette away and peered out of the wooden house. ‘All clear. Follow me. I know the best way to get there without being seen.’

  They darted across a playing field, hopped over a wall and slunk along an alley behind a row of terraced houses. Some worn stone steps led them down to a footpath that meandered through trees on the southern bank of the River Font. The river gurgled gently by on its way to the town centre. On the far bank, sheep and an occasional horse grazed daisy-freckled meadows. Through the trees on their left, widely spaced big old houses were visible.

  Lauren pointed out a path that branched off the main one and climbed towards an overgrown hawthorn hedge. Beyond the hedge was a house almost completely swallowed up by ivy. Windows pocked with broken panes peered out through the foliage. A gaping hole exposed the fire-blackened bones of the roof. Birds’ nests squatted on tall chimneys at each end of the dilapidated structure. More nests dotted a gnarled, strangely human-looking old oak that overshadowed its right-hand side. Rooks wheeled and cawed in the sky above. Jake felt a slight prickling of his skin. Even in the bright sunshine, the house looked creepy as anything.

  Dodging nettles and brambles, they approached the hedge. The path ended at an arched, solid wood gate secured with a chain and padlock. A coil of rusty barbed wire crowned the arch. Curls of green paint clung to the wood. The gate was embossed with a carving of a crucifix with flared ends. Someone had attempted to scratch it out and crudely etched an inverted pentagram over it.

  Lauren traced the pentagram’s hornlike upright points. ‘I bet this was done by Satanists.’

  ‘What Satanists?’

  ‘The ones who broke in here.’

  ‘They were ghost hunters.’

  Lauren treated Jake to one of her patented don’t be so naive looks. ‘That’s just what they want us to believe. I mean, yeah, ghost hunters did come here. They’ve got a website full of stuff about glowing orbs and weird noises. But they weren’t the only ones.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘Katie Pattison lives across the street from here. And she said the people the police took out of this place a few weeks ago were butt naked. That doesn’t sound like ghost hunters to me. More like Satanists performing a Black Mass.’

  ‘Pfft. Katie’s full of shit. Even if they were naked, they were probably wasted and having an orgy or something.’

  ‘Believe what you like.’ Lauren squinted through the gate’s keyhole. ‘But something truly evil once happened in there. This is consecrated ground for Satanists.’

  Jake frowned at the quiver of excitement he heard. ‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’

  Lauren returned his frown. ‘No. I like Erin a lot. She’s a cool little kid and I don’t want anything bad to happen to her.’

  Her voice was sincere and a little hurt. Jake blinked apologetically. He gestured at the gate. ‘How are we going to get through that?’

  ‘We’re not.’ Lauren motioned for him to follow. They skirted along the hedge to a spot where it thinned out. The gap had been filled in with wire fencing, which someone had pulled up at the bottom. They dropped to their stomachs and crawled into a large garden choked with tangles of grass and splotched with dandelions shimmering in the midday sun. A half-collapsed wooden summer house had been mostly reclaimed by nature in one corner. Butterflies and bees drowsily fluttered and hummed around shaggy purple buddleia bushes that partially screened the neighbouring gardens from view. Jake and Lauren pushed their way through the grass and weeds, staying low in case a neighbour happened to be looking out of an upstairs window.

  At the centre of the Ingham house, crumbling steps led to patio doors boarded up with steel plates. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs were pasted to each plate. Some joker had spray-painted a grinning devil on one alongside, ‘Welcome to Hell’.

  Jake rapped his knuckles against a plate, producing a hollow sound. ‘What now?’

  ‘Shh,’ hissed Lauren. ‘What if Erin really is in there? What if someone’s in there with her? They’ll hear you.’

  ‘If we can’t get in, how could Erin or anyone else?’

  Lauren pushed her fingers under the steel plate’s edge and prised it free.

  ‘Hey, how did you know that was loose?’ asked Jake.

  ‘The same way I knew about the Satanists.’

  ‘No way would Katie go in there.’

  ‘Not everyone’s as much of a pussy as you.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  Lauren pulled the steel plate further away from the wall, exposing a mouldy French-door frame edged with jagged glass teeth. ‘Coming?’ she asked, sliding halfway through the narrow aperture.

  ‘Hang on a second.’ Jake stooped to grab a chunk of paving stone heavy enough to bash someone’s skull in. ‘Just in case,’ he said, hefting it meaningfully.

  Lauren arched an eyebrow as if to say, Yeah, right.

  She disappeared from view. Jake squeezed after her, grimacing as a blade of glass scratched his wrist. The plate clattered back into place and for a moment he was blind. As his vision adjusted to the gloom, he saw that they were in a big, high-ceilinged room. Pinpricks of light pierced ventilation holes in the steel plates, dimly illuminating mildewed plaster that had peeled off – or perhaps been chipped away by souvenir hunters – in many places. The walls were scrawled with graffiti that ranged from the usual ‘Gaz Woz Ere’ to imitations of the long since faded symbols that had been drawn with Elijah and Joanna Ingham’s blood. Dry leaves, empty beer cans and cider bottles were strewn over the floorboards. The air was thick with the smell of dust and rot.

  Lauren pointed to a rubble-filled fireplace surrounded by a ragged brick outline where someone had torn out the hearth and mantelpiece. ‘Elijah Ingham was sitting right there in his armchair,’ she said in a voice of hushed awe. ‘His killer crept up behind him and blam! They smashed his skull in. The police reckoned he died instantly, but the killer kept on hitting him until his brains were splattered all over.’

  ‘Nice,’ Jake muttered.

  Lauren nodded, seemingly not catching the sarcasm. ‘His wife, Joanna, was found beside him.’ The floorboards creaked as she padded towards a doorless doorway. ‘But that’s not where she was first attacked. A trail of her blood led from the kitchen where she’d been making cocoa.’

  Jake followed Lauren into a long hallway that ran alongside a flight of stairs missing its banister. Hazy sunlight filtered through holes in the ceiling, lighting up chandeliers of cobwebs. Tattered furls of wallpaper dangled like streamers at an Addams’ family party. There were holes in the plaster where pipes,
radiators and light fittings had been unceremoniously removed. Leaves crackled underfoot as they peered into more deserted rooms. Lauren paused at a room with a fireplace big enough to walk into. ‘This was the kitchen. Joanna must have seen her murderer because she was killed by repeated blows to her face and the front of her skull.’

  ‘I wonder why she was moved to the other room?’ said Jake.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve always wondered about that, too. Maybe she didn’t die straight away and crawled there by herself.’

  ‘Or maybe the killer thought she’d like to be with her husband.’

  Lauren pushed her lips out contemplatively. ‘You could be on to something there. They might have wanted her to see her husband one last time, although not for the reason you think.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Who do you think? The Satanists.’

  ‘The police thought it was a robbery gone wrong.’

  ‘Don’t start with the naive thing again, Jake.’

  ‘I’m not. If it was Satanists, why didn’t they kill the two daughters?’

  ‘The same reason they wanted Joanna to see her dead husband. The more pain they can cause, the more their master will reward them. If they’d killed them, Rachel and Mary’s suffering would have been over in a moment. By letting them live, it carries on for the rest of their lives. Just think about Crazy Mary.’

  Crazy Mary was the local kids’ nickname for Mary Ingham. She lived on the small council estate across the other side of Middlebury. Jake had only seen her twice. The first time had been from the back seat of his dad’s car. She’d been picking berries from a hedge. She’d looked like some kind of tramp, with her long frayed skirt, tatty army-surplus coat, scraggly grey-brown hair and grubby, gaunt face. ‘Who’s that, Dad?’ he’d asked.

  ‘That’s Crazy Mary,’ his dad had replied.

  ‘You shouldn’t call her that,’ his mum had reproached. ‘God only knows what that poor woman must have gone through.’

  Jake had asked his mum what she meant, but she’d diverted the conversation to some other topic. His dad had given him a we’ll-talk-later look. They hadn’t talked about it later, though. And Jake had forgotten about Crazy Mary until Lauren’s obsession with the Ingham murders kicked in. Even then, he hadn’t made the connection between Crazy Mary and Mary Ingham until Lauren and he had seen her pulling a two-wheeled shopping cart through the town centre early one morning.

  ‘That’s her,’ Lauren had whispered. ‘Mary Ingham. They say the only thing she ever buys is cat food. She’s got about fifty cats living in her house. She never speaks a word, not since it happened.’

  Mary had walked with a jerky shuffling gait, as if her feet were too heavy to lift. Her eyes had never left the ground. ‘Do you think she’s really crazy?’ Jake had asked.

  ‘Totally batshit. Wouldn’t you be if someone killed your parents and decorated your house in their blood?’

  Jake had thought about that question and others that stemmed from it a lot since then. How would it feel to discover your parents’ murdered bodies? How would it feel to know their killer or killers were still out there somewhere? Would you ever be able to sleep comfortably in your bed again? The look he’d seen in Crazy Mary’s eyes seemed to suggest not.

  Lauren craned her neck to peer up the kitchen chimney. ‘Anyway, what’s with going all Scully on me? I thought you believed.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Then why is there a pentagram on your bedroom wall? And why have you been reading all those books?’

  Jake gave a lame little shrug. The truth was, he’d put the poster up because Lauren liked it, and he’d read the books for the same reason. Any sense of belief he had was half formed at best, born more of a desire to please her than anything else. But now that Erin was missing, he found he didn’t want to even vaguely believe such things – Black Mass, human sacrifice, the devil – might really exist. ‘Look, can we just do this and get out of here?’

  ‘All right, chill.’ Lauren approached a doorway at the far side of the kitchen. She sparked her lighter into life. Steep stone stairs led down into inky darkness. ‘Whatever you do, don’t go into the basement,’ she intoned in a faux-ominous voice.

  Jake peered over her shoulder. The blackness seemed to stare right back, daring him to enter it. ‘Let’s search upstairs. If Erin’s here, I think that’s where she’ll most likely be.’

  Lauren flicked him a knowing glance. But she turned and headed out of the kitchen, her silent acceptance of his suggestion betraying her own unease. An orchestra of creaks and squeaks accompanied their footsteps as they ascended the stairs. Halfway up, Jake crunched through a rotten floorboard. He yelped as something bit into his leg. He twisted his foot free and pulled up the leg of his jeans. A splinter protruded from his calf. Gritting his teeth, he plucked it out.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Lauren.

  He nodded, looking uncertainly towards the landing. ‘I’m not sure about this, Lauren. This place is a death trap.’

  ‘That’s exactly why we’ve got to make sure Erin’s not up there.’

  Lauren took hold of Jake’s hand and urged him onwards. He didn’t resist. He would have done pretty much anything for her. The only thing he’d ever really said no to her about was the seance. He’d read enough to know those things were bad news. The dead were never happy to be dead, even when their life had come to a natural end. So surely the spirits of murder victims would be pissed off beyond all belief. If Elijah and Joanna Ingham were lingering in this dump, he wasn’t about to disturb them.

  The walls and floor at the top of the stairs were scorched from the arson fire. Jake glimpsed blue sky through a hole in the sagging, water-stained ceiling. A landing lined with doorways stretched out to each side of the stairs. Another, narrower flight of stairs continued on up to the attic. They edged around the burnt floorboards into a room with a gutted fireplace and a bay window. Glimpses of outside showed through a straggle of ivy, somehow seeming very distant. An old mattress covered in dubious stains sagged against one wall. Jake pointed to a used condom on the floor beside it. ‘I didn’t realise Satanists practised safe sex.’

  Lauren flicked him the finger, mouthing a sarcastic, Ha ha.

  They peered into a smaller, empty room across the hallway. ‘If that was the parents’ bedroom, this must have been Mary’s,’ said Lauren.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she was the youngest. The same way Erin sleeps in the room closest to your parents.’

  Jake thought about Erin’s room – the pink wallpaper, the mound of stuffed toys on her bed. He thought about the way he teased her because she insisted on sleeping with the door open and the landing light on. He told himself that if . . . no, not if, when she was found alive he would never tease her about that again.

  They moved on to the adjoining room. ‘Do you reckon this was Rachel’s?’ asked Jake.

  ‘I dunno, but someone’s a fan of The Exorcist.’ Lauren pointed at a scrawl of graffiti: ‘Rachel Ingham Sucks Cocks in Hell’.

  ‘That’s sick.’

  ‘I think it’s pretty funny, actually.’

  ‘You would. Do you reckon Rachel Ingham’s dead?’

  ‘No one knows for sure. She lived with a foster family for three years after the murders. Then one day she just disappeared. The police said she ran away.’

  ‘But you think it was Satanists.’ There was a teasing edge to Jake’s voice.

  Lauren shot him a narrow look. ‘Maybe. Or maybe she really did run away. I think about running away from this shithole of a town all the time. Going down to London. Finding some interesting people to be friends with.’

  Jake felt a sharp little tug inside. Not at the side-swiped insult – Lauren’s bitchiness was part of what attracted him to her – but at the mention of London. It wasn’t the first time she’d spoken about running away. It was probably just empty talk, but you never quite knew with her. She was the only one of his admittedly few female friends he really ca
red about, the only one he wanted to be more than just friends with. ‘Let’s look in the attic,’ he said, diverting the conversation.

  As Lauren turned, there was a crack of snapping wood and her leg plunged through the floor. Jake’s hands darted out, catching her as she keeled sideways. ‘Thanks,’ she gasped. ‘I thought I was going to fall right through.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Jake lifted Lauren out of the hole and poked his head into it. The downstairs floor was visible through a mess of plaster and broken laths. ‘Wow, that was lucky. You could’ve been killed.’

  An object wedged in the aperture between the floorboards and the ceiling caught his eye. ‘Hey, give me your lighter.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There’s something in here.’

  Jake sparked the lighter. A square of silver with what appeared to be a keyhole at its centre gleamed in the flickering flame. The floorboards groaned threateningly as he reached further into the hole.

  ‘Careful, Jake,’ warned Lauren, edging away.

  ‘I can almost reach it.’ The lock was attached to a dusty red rectangular object. A box? No, not a box. ‘I think it’s a—’ He broke off with an ‘Ouch!’ dropping the lighter as its flame licked his fingers. ‘Shit, I’ve lost the lighter.’