by Jack Lewis
Jeremiah moved his head away from me. We reached the bottom of the stairs. Sharon stood across the hallway in the living room with both feet behind the threshold of the doorway. It was if she were a vampire who wasn’t invited to step over the line.
“I like the place,” said Jeremiah, in as affable a tone as he could manage. “And I’d be interest to talk to your estate agents. Think I could take one last look around?”
“I think you’ve seen enough,” said Peter.
“I really won’t consider putting in an offer unless I get another viewing.”
Peter leaned in, his forehead creased and eyebrows arched. “I don’t give a feck if you put in an offer or not, I’ll never sell to you.”
Sharon shrank into the doorway, as if the harsh tone of her husband's words had pushed her back. I felt my heart beat. As much as being in the house made my skin itch, I knew something was up there. The key to it all was in that room, the one that I was sure the girl had inhabited. If we left now, we would never get another chance.
Jeremiah looked to me, eyes wide as if he was telling me to do something. But what? Peter obviously didn’t believe our story, and he’d just caught us snooping in the spare room. He had his reasons for lying to us, and he didn’t look like the kind of man to spill them.
I put my hand to my mouth. I puffed up my cheeks and bent over a little.
“Jesus, I’m going to be sick,” I said, and bent over even more for effect. I looked up at Peter, and I hoped my face was pale. “Can I use your bathroom?”
“I want you to leave.”
“Oh my god, I’m going to spew.”
I made a gagging sound as if vomit was building in my throat.
“For Christ sake, use the bathroom and then get out.”
I sprinted passed him and up the stairs with such urgency that I almost convinced myself that I was sick. I got to the landing, took a left and ran into the spare room. My pulse fired and a shiver ran through me. I stood in the centre of the room and the feeling of dread took hold of me again. It felt like I shouldn’t be here, but I couldn’t turn back. There was something here, but where was it?
I walked to the wardrobe, but that didn’t feel right. I took strides over toward the bed, but the feeling lessened. Then I looked at the floorboards, and my heart leapt. In the centre of the room, one of the floorboards looked an centimetre out of place.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. They were the heavy treads of Pete’s boots, and he pounded up them with urgency. My heart rate spiked. I bent to the floor and gripped the floorboard. It looked sturdy enough, but it came away with the slightest of tugs and revealed a cavity underneath.
In the darkness under the floorboards were dust and cobwebs, but there was also a shape. I reached in, expecting something in the depths to tug at my hand and drag me down. I closed my eyes and dug further, and my hand closed on a square object. I pulled it out and looked at it in the pale light that filtered through the window. It was a book. Written on the front, in writing that looked too adult, were the words ‘Emily’s Diary’.
13
As we walked into the village square Jeremiah took long strides beside me, glancing from time to time as if he expected me to say something. I walked on without saying a word. I felt the nervous energy coming off him like he was like a kid waiting to unwrap a Christmas present. Maybe I was being childish, but I enjoyed the feeling of having something over him. There was a tension between us as we walked, as though he were always on the verge of saying something but stopped himself.
Finally he blurted out: “So are you going to tell me what you found?”
“Let’s find a place to sit.”
The village square was more of a box. Concrete rectangle flags covered the ground, and moss grew in the ridges between them. There was a statue of a woman with a sheep next to her. She was middle-aged, and her eyes stared out into the distance as though she were looking at the woodland that lay beyond the village. Her mouth was half open, and her eyes looked sad.
We sat on a bench under an oak tree. The leaves were bare but the branches seemed to twist as if they were limbs grabbing for us. I had the weird feeling that they wanted to reach out and take the diary from me, as though it were a secret that the village wanted to keep hidden. Jeremiah sat beside me, a fiery ball of energy.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me on my acting?” I said.
“Sidney Poitier doesn’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The wind threw the clouds around the sky like clothes on a washing line. Despite being midday there was an overcast feel to the air, as if darkness were always straining to tear through. There was a curious lack of people milling nearby. I knew that the village was small, but I expected at least some people to be in the square. The wind whistled through the tree branches and somewhere a crow shrieked. It felt like the village at the end of the world.
Jeremiah tried to grab the diary from my hands. I pulled it back out of reach.
“Nope, mister. Not yet. Quad pro quo, as my professor likes to say.”
Jeremiah sighed. “Cut the crap. What do you want?”
“You agreed to let me interview you, and you haven’t told me a damn thing.”
Jeremiah leant back into the bench like a kid having a tantrum. The wood rattled under his weight and for a second I thought it might collapse underneath us. Everything in this village seemed brittle, as though the houses and the fixtures had rotted to the point of breaking.
“No wonder Higson was so keen to get rid of you,” he said.
“Answer some of my questions and I’ll let you see the diary.”
“I’ll answer one.”
At this rate I was going to have to investigate the whole thing on my own and then drip feed him the findings one by one before I managed to coax an interview out of him. This was better than nothing, at least. I might actually have something to show for the trip.
“Tell me about Bruges.”
Jeremiah put his hand to his rough beard and looked into the distance. His eyes glazed over and his forehead creased, as if he was swimming in a memory that threatened to drown him. It was a look of discomfort that cut through his usual bluster and made me think that maybe he was human after all. He curled one hand into a fist and gripped it tightly with his other.
“You remember the student I told you about? The one Higson sent to study with me?”
“Billy something?”
“Billy Wilkins. He was in Bruges with me, way back then. We went to investigate a possession case, but he didn’t come back.”
“I thought you said he was in a mental institution?”
“I mean he came back physically, but not all of him returned. A part of him is still there.”
“Are we talking organ thieves?”
“You really don’t understand, do you?”
Jeremiah’s words trailed away, as if they had been lapped up by the wind and carried beyond the darkened woodland and over the bleak hills. There was a cutting tone to his voice, like a hammer of emotion trying to smash through a stone wall.
“That’s all I’m going to say,” he said.
He’d only promised me one question, but god loves a trier, as one of my old foster mums used to repeat endlessly.
“So what about the experiment at the university, the one you want access to? What’s that all about?”
Jeremiah gave me a stern look. “You’re professor isn’t what he makes out. He’s a liar, Ella.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say that me and him used to study the same things. Only, I stayed true to myself. He got scared and locked himself away. He abandoned every true thought he’d ever had, put on his tie and then wasted his life in the lecture halls.”
A car drove down the road at the edge of the square. It was a family hatchback that looked like it rolled off the production line in the fifties. There was a dent on the passenger door and the bodywork needed a res
pray. I couldn’t see the driver clearly, but he looked middle-aged. He turned and looked at us, then sank back in his seat. In the passenger seat next to him, a small shape leaned forward. It seemed to be covered in shadow, like a little child-sized bundle of black. Gradually daylight caught the features, and I realised it was a little girl. Her eyes were wide and white, and black hair spilled over her shoulders. For a second our eyes locked.
“This place is creeping me out,” I said.
“The world’s a scary place when you walk through it with your eyes shut.”
“The world’s a scary place with you in it.”
“Let’s see the diary,” said Jeremiah.
I held the book tight in my hands. It felt cold, as though it had spent an hour in a fridge. As I ran my fingers down the spine I felt a shudder run through my arms, and I slackened my grip. It felt like I shouldn’t be holding it.
“Hurry up,” said Jeremiah, and shifted uncomfortably.
I opened the book on the first page. The diary was filled with two sets of handwriting. One was child-like, full of sloppy squiggles and crosses through the words. Every so often a paragraph would break, and the next paragraph was written perfectly. It was the stylish handwriting of a guided hand, and there was a control to it that could only have been achieved with maturity. The letters bunched together so tightly they were like a chain that couldn’t be broken.
I felt my head begin to pound. I strained my eyes to make out the words, but my brain just wouldn’t process them. I felt like I had forgotten how to read. For a second, I thought I was having a fit.
“It’s in code,” said Jeremiah.
I looked closer and saw that the adult-style writing was indeed written in code. The letters were standard alphabet but they were matched in ways that made no sense. I flicked through the book and saw page after page of childish writing – ‘mum sent me to my room last night’ – followed by precise handwriting written in mismatched letters and words that made no sense.
Two thirds into the book the writing stopped abruptly, like a movie paused before the end. The last paragraph was in the adult-style but the words were bold and angry, as though someone had written the words and then gone over them again and again to make them darker. It was like someone had pressed deep into the page as they wrote to try and gouge the words into the book.
My hands started to ache as though the book was pressing into my skin. I had a light feeling on my chest like someone were trying to push me back. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt that the book shouldn’t be in my hands. The branches of the trees swayed above me, like hands reaching down to choke me. My throat tightened.
I threw the book on Jeremiah’s lap. He jerked back in shock, and then took hold of it. I tried to hide the feeling of dread that sat heavy on my shoulders.
“Over to you,” I said, hoping that the crack in my voice didn’t show. I was glad to have the diary away from me.
“It’s written with a cipher,” said Jeremiah. “This kind of code works with the use of a word chosen by the person who wrote it. It acts as a key.”
“So we have no chance of reading it,” I said. “It could have been anything.”
“Not quite. People usually use a word that means something to them.”
I shook my head and felt it throb. “How the hell would a seven year old girl know how to do this?”
“This girl was older than she appeared.”
“So what now?”
Jeremiah let the book rest on his lap. The piece of evidence excited him, I knew, but it was like he didn’t want to hold it. I wondered if he felt the same way I did when I had the book between my fingers.
“We need to work on the cipher. I’ll make a copy at the library, and we can both go to our rooms and try and figure it out. You take the original.”
I shrank back in my seat. “Why me?”
“You were a seven year old girl, once. You know how they think.”
“You’re not so different to a seven year old girl yourself,” I said.
14
As night fell I sat at my desk with a book on Polish urban myths in front of me. My chest felt heavy and my brain swam in a thick sludge that blocked my nose. I got colds all the time, but I rarely felt this horrible. The last time was in a foster house. Again, the bad one.
It was the heart of winter and I lay in bed. Frost spread over the windows like spider’s webs, and a layer of shadow covered the walls. I didn’t have a duvet, only a thin sheet that should have been used to cover it. My foster parent’s house was rich with drapes and paintings, and crystal ornaments glinted from every shelf. Despite the showing of wealth, poverty was hidden in the places no one knew to look. Carved oak cupboards contained cheap tins of beans, and inside panelled wardrobes were clothes that were years old. They had been rich once, but not anymore.
I lay into bed and tugged the cover close to me. My body shivered with every breath, and my chest felt like it was filling with ice. I wanted to close my eyes, but shapes made by the shadows watched me, and I knew that if I slept, they would come for me. My bedroom door creaked open as if pushed by the wind. My foster mum stepped into the room, hair pinned back, skin pale.
“Can I have a duvet please mum? I’m freezing.”
“Don’t call me that.”
I swallowed. I wondered what she wanted, why she had even bothered to visit me. She walked to the edge of the bed and sat down on it. Her body was painfully thin, and the mattress didn’t even register her weight. She looked at me and I saw fury behind her eyes. I wondered what I had done to put it there. She reached down and grabbed me.
“I hate you,” she said.
The words sent a shock through my chest. I felt vulnerable, and didn’t know whether to bury myself under the cover or to get up and run. Somehow it felt like the walls were closing in on me. Foster mum grabbed the cover and tugged it away from me, and the coldness of the room attacked.
She stood up and walked to the doorway, leaving me shivering on my bed. As she left the room she looked at me and sneered.
“I never wanted you here.”
Wind blew against the window. I was back in the pub, back at the desk feeling like darkness sat heavy on my back. I looked at the book in front of me and felt a heavy paw swipe at my mind. I couldn’t face studying tonight. Something swam behind my eyes and made my eyelids feel heavy.
I looked outside the window. The streets outside the pub were a river of black. The gate smashed against its fixture, and the branches of the trees gave a grave dance in the gust. The skin on the back of my neck tingled, and I got the sense that someone watched me from the darkness. You’re being stupid, I thought. This urban legend shit is getting to you.
I swivelled away from the desk and reached down to my bag. I took out the girl’s diary. I had put it in my handbag hoping that if I buried it with all my stuff it would warm up, but the hard print of the cover still felt icy.
It didn’t mean anything, I knew. The whole power of scary stories and urban legends was that they were designed to tug on your emotions. They reached into the parts of your brain that still held onto primal fears and twisted them. Every myth ever told over campfires or printed in horror anthologies was carefully designed to jump out at the coward in us. None of it was real.
The sooner we finished this investigation, the sooner things could go back to normal. Jeremiah would give me the interview I needed, then I could go back home and get the extra credit that Professor Higson had promised. Out here I just couldn’t work on my dissertation. Something about the village put me on edge.
I picked up the diary and flicked through it. I stopped in the middle and traced my finger over a page. There were two paragraphs on it, one in the childish handwriting and the other in the adult style. Now I just needed the cipher, and I knew it had to be something important to a seven year old girl.
What was important to me as a kid?
I wasn’t a good model to go by, I realised. I hadn’t exactly had a normal upbri
nging. So what about Emily? What word could she have chosen? I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in her place. I thought back to her bedroom in the cottage. It had been empty when I was in it, but in my mind I filled it with childish things. A colourful duvet, posters on the wall. Toy horses and colouring books. No, that didn’t seem right. Emily wasn't a normal child. So what would she be interested in?
In my mind I paced across her room, heard the floorboards whine and creak. I walked to the window and looked out. A flush of shivers spread across my arms as I stared into the countryside and saw the darkened woodland that lay beyond.
Emily would have seen the woods every night. They would have smothered her dreams. She would have heard the legends of the witches, and there was nothing more terrifying to a child than tales of witches swinging from tree branches. That was it.
