by Jack Lewis
My bed was opposite from the door. The wall behind it was stone, cold to the touch and greyer than grey. Marsha obviously didn’t care about the comfort of her guests, because everything about the room made me feel I was unwelcome. Even so, the hard mattress of the bed had never looked so inviting. My body ached so much that I felt like I could lie down and melt away.
I wasn’t going to do that. It was stupid, but because Jeremiah’s last words to me were “go to sleep”, I was going to do the exact opposite. I wasn’t going to let him order me around like I was the hired help.
A writing desk sat in the corner of the room, next to a window that was covered by a sheet of darkness. Outside the window was the front of the pub. A wooden gate slapped against a post, and the wind grabbed the stalks of the plants and throttled them.
I pulled out the chair and slumped into it. I spread my dissertation books on the scratched surface and opened them to pages saved by crumpled post-it notes. The text was small and I had to strain to read it. Someday all this studying was going to put me in a pair of glasses.
My dissertation was nowhere near ready, which was pathetic considering the sacrifices I had made. I had spent so long with a book in front of my face that I couldn’t remember the last time my phone rang. Sometimes, I didn’t even bother to charge it. I’d let the blood drain out of my friendships until they have shrivelled and crumbled into dust. I always carried books in my bag, but they were becoming more like weights that threatened to drown me in a raging sea.
I flipped to the front of the book in front of me and looked at the title.
“Shadows That Walk Behind Us: How Historical Horrors Affect the Present,” I read. “This is going to be lovely.”
Reading these books always made me squirm. Even back in my halls of residence where the floor was carpeted and my room warm and inviting, staying up into the early hours reading about myths made me shiver. There was something wrong about urban legends. They were bullshit, I knew that much. That didn’t explain how the same stories could turn up again and again, thousands of miles away and hundreds of years apart. Legends of old women who would appear behind you in the bathroom when you turned off the light, of teenage girls possessed by demons.
The temperature of the room started to drop as though someone were blowing snow into it. I reached to my left and felt the radiator, and the coldness stung my hands. The lever that controlled the temperature was turned on and twisted to full heat. Great, another thing in this shithole that doesn’t work.
I put on my dressing gown. As I read about Romanian legends, the lamp in front of me flickered like a flame being teased by fingers. The temperature plummeted, and it felt like fingers nipped at my skin. I shivered into my clothes. A feeling built in me that the cold wasn’t just from the winter air. That something was forming in the room, a shape taking hold in the darkness and creeping just out of sight.
I looked at the door. I hoped to see a slit of light peeking through the bottom, but instead there was a black rectangle that indicted the hallway outside was dark. I pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind. I was reading too much of this stuff. I bet even Professor Higson got the creeps sometimes. I spread the book in front of me and stared at the page.
The words span round my brain. Devils, demons. Witches. Skeletons buried in church graveyards. My head felt heavy and my eyelids began to slip. I felt my vision fade into black.
I opened my eyes and found myself staring into red eyes. The corners of them were twisted in fury, as if I had wronged their owner. My heart banged and I jerked my head away. I realised it was the cover of the book, and that I had fallen asleep on the desk whilst reading. There was a dripping sound behind me, the sound of water beating rhythmically against porcelain.
“Time for some sleep,” I said, as if announcing the idea to the room would break the creepy spell that seemed to have taken hold in it.
The dripping grew louder, the water doing the best it could to get my attention. I walked across the floorboards and heard them creak underneath my bare feet. Sometimes it sounded like there were two creaks at once, as if someone walked behind me and lifted their feet at the same time as mine. As I got to the bathroom the dripping sound faded.
I stopped and listened. My pulse throbbed inside me and my arms felt sensitive, as if something was playing with the hairs on them. I swallowed. Suddenly, staying in Jeremiah’s room didn’t seem such a stupid idea. Even if it meant on his floor.
No, I thought. That’d just confirm every single thought he has about you.
A hand banged against the bathroom window and spread its fingers across the glass. I jerked away, almost backing into the door. Another look, and the hand became the spindly branches of a tree as the wind toyed with it.
The room was silent, the shadows having nothing to say. I listened again. I knew that fear was in the mind, and it was in every person’s power to feed it or let it starve. I held in a breath and tried to cut off my fear’s supply of food, tried to make wither away.
See? There’s no sound. Shadows are just shadows.
Something dripped behind me. I span round, my breath catching in my chest. Then I saw that it was the sink in the corner of the bedroom. Globs of water formed on the spout of the tap and then fell onto the cracked porcelain. I let out a sigh of relief.
I walked over to the sink and twisted the tap. It struggled against the turn, as if it hadn’t been touched in years. The sink was dirty and scratched with age. Disgustingly, there was black hair wrapped in the plughole.
“For god’s sake Marsha, you old cow,” I said.
I’m not the sort of person who can leave mess until morning. If something needs doing, it needs doing now. Although the idea of touching someone else’s hair made my stomach turn, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that it was there, the strands tangled in the plug and trying to crawl down the pipe.
I grabbed the bin from the bathroom and put it next to the sink in my bedroom. I turned my head away, as if avoiding looking made it less disgusting, and grabbed the hair. It was black and wet, and it seemed to be wrapped in loops around the metal of the plug hole. It wouldn’t come away on the first tug so I had to get a firmer grip and pull. Despite being wet the hair was tough, and it took a good few pulls with most of my strength to break it away. Finally, after another tug, I felt it start to snap and tear. It felt like pulling off a strip of Velcro.
As I pulled at the hair more and more of it came out. First just a few strands, but quickly more. They became thicker and thicker, each clump of it sodden with stinking water. It was like a wig that had been left in a muddy puddle, and the musty smell was enough to hang heavy in the air.
The putrid water slashed over my arms and onto my clothes. I started throwing hair in the bin beside me, but the more I put in the more there was in the plug. I tugged at it and pulled a slimy snake-like bunch of it. It slapped down on my arm and water flicked off, spraying my face and chin. A few drops landed in my mouth, and I gagged as I tasted the rank liquid on my tongue.
My heart thumped. Where the hell was all this hair coming from? Why hadn’t Marsha sorted it? As the stench worked its way up my nose and my arms were splashed with rank water, I wanted to shout out. It felt like it would never end.
I reached to the plug and grabbed as much hair as I could. It was slimy beneath my fingers but I gripped it. Feeling the blood rush to my face, I yanked at it with all my strength and pulled it away. It felt like I had an entire scalps worth of the long strands in my hand. I threw them to the ground, not even caring that I missed the bin. I stood in the dark room and tried to let my breathing settle.
I tried to work out where the hell the hair was from, but my mind fogged over. Then a thought hit me in the guts. A memory crept up and socked me in the stomach so hard I felt winded.
When I moved into the room, the sink had been disconnected. It had never worked.
Suddenly I saw movement in the corner of my left eye. A nearly imperceptible shifting in the
dark, as though pale fingers played with the black. A shiver ran through my body and I had the overwhelming urge to run. Suddenly the bedroom door felt far away. It was only metres, but it seemed that if I ran then it would stretch even further out of reach.
I couldn’t let this happen. I realised I was falling victim to the fear. I was thinking like the kind of people who were scared of legends.
With my heart drumming in my chest I forced myself to look to my left. My neck was stiff, as though my muscles didn’t want my head to turn. I looked deep into the darkness that swam in the corner of the room, and I saw nothing. I breathed out.
I looked back over to the bedroom door, and my heart stopped. There was an envelope on the floor.
10
Every step down the narrow stairs jolted my head and made my bones ache. My body felt like it was covered in sludge, and my brain swam in a thick goo that bunged up my nose and made my temples pound. Any sensible person would have been in bed, but I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t going to let Jeremiah see me weak.
When I walked into the pub Jeremiah was already sat at a table poking his fork into a fry-up. A radio span soft tunes from somewhere behind the bar. The sky outside still had a dark tint to it. The branches of the trees shivered in the wind and the leaves clung on for dear life. Opposite Jeremiah was a plate with four rounds of toast, honey and marmalade. There was also a bowl spilling with cereal and one full of fruit.
“What’s this?” I said, the words sounding croaky in my throat.
“Take your pick,” he said, and lifted a slice of bacon to his mouth. He had rolled up a full rasher around the fork and obviously planned to eat it whole. He added: “I’m sorry about last night.”
I pulled out the chair and had to bite back a wince as my shoulder joints ached with the movement. I knew this was going to be a bad cold. It seemed like I was a germ magnet the whole year round, and it was rare I didn’t have a red noise or puffy eyes. But it was when my joints started hurting that I knew it was going to be a nightmare.
“Did you get some kip?” asked Jeremiah.
I had already decided that I wasn’t going to tell him about the hair. I wasn’t even going to let Marsha see it. I had taken it out of the bin, wrapped it in a bag and I would get rid of it later. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the feeling I had, like someone was in my room. He’d say I was just being silly and letting all of this affect me.
“Funny thing happened to me last night,” he said.
My ears pricked. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I woke up at about three in the morning. It was pitch black. I looked over to my bedroom window and there was a face watching me.”
For a second my heartrate spiked. I breathed through my nose and tried to calm down.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a cloud or something?”
Jeremiah smiled. “No. It was a crow. Little bugger was watching me sleep.”
He sawed a sausage in half and popped it into his mouth. His ginger beard was a tapestry of egg yolk, brown sauce and breadcrumbs. It was most likely that the crow had been watching Jeremiah because it saw his beard as a potential nest.
“Did you go to the library?” I said.
Jeremiah swallowed and then gave slow nod. “I did.”
“And?”
He picked up a paper towel and wiped his mouth with it, smearing more egg yolk across his ginger hair.
“And what?”
I sighed. “Jesus. Does everything have to be a battle?”
“People prosper through adversity. Nobody ever got stronger walking down easy street.”
I picked up a piece of toast, put it to my mouth and ripped at it like a wolf tearing at flesh. A man crooned on the radio but the volume was too low for me to make out what he sang. From the back of the pub, in the kitchen, pots clanged and every so often Marsha would mutter incomprehensible curse words.
“I’m not your apprentice you know. I’m here to interview you.”
Jeremiah gave me a knowing look. He could have been saying ‘we’re both the ones being interviewed’, because that’s what it always felt like with him. But in reality, I had no clue what he meant.
I threw the toast onto the plate. “Just tell me what you found.”
Jeremiah nodded. “For such a small village, this place has a dark history. They might not have a pot to piss in, put their librarians have been diligent over the years. And a lot of shit has happened here.”
“Like what?”
Jeremiah reached to his coat pocket and pulled out a thick notepad. The edges of the paper were stained brown as if coffee had been spilled on them. He flicked through the pages until he set his stubby fingers on the one he wanted.
“In the year thirteen fifty, a hundred men, women and children died and their bodies were burned in the field. It was four-fifths of the village population. Do you know what might have happened?”
“Didn’t know I had walked into a history lecture.”
“If you don’t know, it’s fine to admit it.”
I felt a stab of annoyance in my chest. “It was the plague, wasn’t it?”
Jeremiah nodded. “Then from sixteen twelve to sixteen thirty-six, a dozen women were hanged from the trees just outside of town.”
He turned behind him and pointed out of the window. The houses of the village covered most of what I could see through the panes, but through a tiny gap, miles away, were the beginnings of a woodland area.
“Witchcraft?” I said.
Jeremiah gave a solemn nod. It was the first time I’d seen him show any real respect for anything.
“Those were dark times ruled by dark minds. When I think about how people could actually believe in witchcraft and then snap someone’s neck for it, it make me want to smash things.”
“I thought you wanted to believe in that kind of stuff.”
Jeremiah hit the table with his fist and made my plate clang. I sat upright and looked into his eyes.
“Don’t mix me up with those ignorant bastards,” he said. “Witchcraft was just a word they used because their tiny brains couldn’t handle the unknown. It was a tag to put on some poor cow so that blame could be given for goats dying and crops wilting. You see, when strange things happen, people need a reason. Blame gives people a reason when no others can be found.”
I looked out of the window, passed the town and toward the woods. It seemed like the beginnings of something thick and full of shadows, a place where daylight was choked and things crept in the dark. It was a place no person should ever go. I imagined the innocent women swinging from the branches, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. Pin-pricks travelled up my legs and onto my arms.
Suddenly the lights above us went out. The early morning twilight seeped through the window and settled over the room. The radio stopped playing, and a silence took over. It felt like time had stopped. The clanging from the kitchen ceased, and I heard Marsha’s steps trampling toward us.
She walked into the room with a red face and a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her hair was tied back so tight that it looked like her scalp was going to come off. It was as though just acting annoyed all the time wasn’t enough for her, she had to put effort into looking that way as well.
“Okay,” she said, voice tight with irritation. “Which one of you buggers messed with the electrics?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Marsha crossed her arms and lifted her bony shoulders. She looked like a spinster teacher in a boarding school.
“I know one of you did something,” she said.
Jeremiah sat forward in his seat. “We don’t know what the hell you’re saying, you old cow. We haven’t touched anything.”
Marsha huffed. “This place is decades old, you know. The fuse box is fragile as a box of eggs. Just don’t touch anything.”
With that she walked out of the room, as if she were satisfied that having the last word won her the argument. I watched her walk out o
f the doorway and then heard her steps as she pattered down a stone staircase that led to the basement.
Jeremiah shook his head. “Batty old bint.”
I didn’t disagree with him, but I wasn’t going to say anything in case Marsha heard me. I got the sense that the woman was always watching and always listening. As if she could be everywhere at once, like a spectre that haunted the walls and floors of the pub.
“Found something last night,” I said.
Jeremiah’s eyes glinted. “Oh?”
