by Jack Lewis
Her mother smiled. It wasn’t a friendly one, nor one born from happiness. There was something sad about it.
“You need to look deep into the mirror,” she said. “The mirror of your past. Face it, Tamara. If you don’t, you’ll always be broken.”
The grandfather clock ticked. Tamara stared at it. The clock had been broken before. She knew that it had. She looked across at the fireplace and saw that the family banner was there with the deer standing proud and the wasps buzzing around its head, but the colour had been restored, and she saw the orange of the wasps’ bodies as they hovered near the animal’s mouth.
She pushed passed her mother and ran upstairs. She went into her room, shut the door behind her and locked it. She took hold of the table near her bed and dragged it across the room, disturbing the silence of the house as its legs scraped on the wooden floors.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs. She heard three urgent knocks on her door.
“Tamara,” said Billy.
Shortly after, more steps came up the stairs. These were slower, weaker, taken with deliberate care. Another voice joined Billy’s.
“We just need to talk,” said Magda.
Tamara sat on her bed. She stared at the painting across from her bed and this time the man seemed to be grinning, as if someone had restored it and added an even nastier sneer to his face.
It couldn’t have changed. Paintings didn’t just transform. It was the house. Everything was the house.
“I’m worried about you, darling. Let me in.”
Since when did he call her darling? She felt nausea rise in her stomach. It started as a ripple, and before she knew it her stomach had turned to water. She ran into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat and vomited into the basin. It felt like it would never end, and when it finally did, she sank onto the cold bathroom floor and felt empty.
Billy told her he was going to let her get some sleep. Magda left too, and Tamara heard her mother’s footsteps drag down the hall.
She climbed into bed. She pulled the covers all the way up to her chin but it wasn’t enough to ward away the cold. Branches tapped on the window outside, and she heard the shrill call of a bird from somewhere in the trees.
As sleep started to take hold, she heard a noise from under her bed. It sounded like something rustling, and every hair on her body pricked up. It felt like the cold slivered over her skin, and she had the overwhelming feeling that she wasn’t alone.
Scared to look but knowing she must, she slowly peered over the side of the bed.
She gasped.
A dark shape slowly slid from under the frame. She couldn’t help the cry of fear that escaped her throat. The bedroom door seemed far away.
The figure slid out further. Her eyes met the darkness and tried to puncture through it. She saw it clearly now.
It was a boy. His face was paler than the stones in the crypt, and his jet black hair was almost indistinguishable in the darkness around him.
She jumped out of bed and ran over to the table. As she dragged it away from the door, she turned. A chill shook her whole body. She pulled on the table and the wood made a high-pitched scrape on the floorboards.
The boy opened his mouth wide as if he was screaming, but no sound came out. He mouthed something at her. She watched him, legs paralysed with utter terror. She looked at his neck and saw that a knife wound was gouged all the way across. The boy’s chest was bare, and on it, a symbol was carved into his skin.
The eye and the sun. Staring at her, unblinking. The whites of the boy’s eyes threatened to drown the colour of his iris.
She shrunk back against the door. The boy pulled his feet from under the bed, turned and lay on his stomach. He craned his head at an impossible angle, sharp enough to snap his neck bones. He stared at her, and he spoke.
“Leave,” he said, words gurgling out of his throat.
She felt behind her for the key. She gripped it, but as she tried to turn it in the lock, she pulled it out completely, and it clanged on the floor.
“You’re like me,” said the boy. His words sent shivers up her arms. “He got you too. He’ll get you again.”
She bent down to pick up the key, and when she looked up again, her room was empty.
Chapter Twelve
She woke the next morning and found hairs on her pillow. Long brown strands, too many to be called stray but not enough to be a clump. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt them tug against a knot. She pushed through it and strands broke away, clinging to her fingers like limp spaghetti. She held them up to the light and saw that the roots were clear and weak.
Is my hair falling out?
Her stomach bubbled. Something wasn’t right. It had started when she came to the manor, and she wondered if the foul air was making her sick. If that was the case, she was surprised her body hadn’t built up a tolerance to it, given that she’d lived here for the first fourteen years of her life. Maybe the air had turned worse since she’d been away.
She looked at the hairs on her bed. Stray hairs on a pillow weren’t an unusual thing, but there were too many this time. She’d lost hair before, but that had been years ago. It was when she started at boarding school. She was in the shower shampooing her hair, and a clump the size of her fist pulled away from her scalp. After that, she’d found them on her pillow every few days. The school doctor examined her and he asked questions about her life back home, but he couldn’t give her a solution. There were no pills to stop it, no magic medicine. It was probably stress, he told her. From moving from the manor to the school.
She decided not to tell Billy. The hair loss had stopped before, and it would stop again. She knew all too well that stress only made it worse. She’d take Dr. Shukla’s advice and she’d stay mindful about it, not letting worries get to her. Above all else, though, she knew there was one cure. She needed to leave Towneley.
She found Billy downstairs at the dining table. He had a plate full of crumbs in front of him, and some had stuck in the stubble above his lip. Magda sat across from him with a cup of tea in front of her. Steam left the cup and swirled up to the ceiling, where it hit the stained plaster and disappeared.
As she entered the room, Billy and Magda exchanged a glance.
“I need a word,” Tamara told him.
When they walked out into the lobby, he tried to put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched away.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m sick of this house, and I’m done putting up with everything. You can stay a while, if you want. I don’t care anymore. I’m going today.”
“You can’t leave,” he answered.
She stared at him in silence. The grandfather clock no longer ticked, and she wondered if it even had the night before.
“I can, Billy, and I will. Like I said, you stay here and look after Magda if that’s what you want to do. But I have to go. If I don’t-”
“The car’s out of petrol,” he said.
She crossed her arms.
“Well, what are we going to do?”
Billy sighed, as if she was nagging him.
“I’ll walk into Glasspike and get some.”
“When?”
He put his hand on her shoulder. This time she let him, and his palm felt cold.
“Soon, Tamara. Just calm down.”
“Don’t patronise me. Tell me when you’re going, or I’ll go there myself.”
Billy glanced back at the dining room. Magda was hidden by the half-open door, but Tamara didn’t doubt that her mother would be listening.
“I’ll go tomorrow, okay? Just ride it out until then.”
~
She decided she would ride it out as he asked, but she didn’t have to do it in his company. She spent the day sat in the grounds where the light was the brightest. The winter afternoon had a chilly snap to it, so she wore a coat over her hoodie and zipped it all the way up. She spent the hours of the day reading while thrushes sang around her, interspersed with the odd bark from Rupert or
Butch.
Night finally came, and she knew that just eight hours lay between her and freedom. With the prospect of leaving Towneley Manor so close, she knew that sleep wouldn’t come. Instead of going to bed, she walked down to the lobby and toward the library.
The library door was made of dark stained wood. It had four squares carved into it, and each was lined with flower patterns delicately chipped into the oak, showing vines twisting up and down and broken every so often by a thorn. At the bottom of the door was an uneven row of tiny tooth marks from where Bullseye had been teething as a puppy.
As she walked down the corridor, she heard the tapping of her feet follow her. The sound seemed to come just a second behind the actual placing of her foot. Being a diligent student in school, she knew that light travelled faster than sound, but she didn’t think it applied to the steps of your feet in an empty corridor.
She placed a foot forward and the tap came late. Another tap followed it, and another, and soon it sounded not like her own steps but as if someone were tapping on the walls.
It came from behind her, approaching at a steady pace. The skin on the back of her neck tingled. She looked forward and saw the library door, with the wood so dark that it was difficult to pick out from the gloom.
The taps grew nearer. Tamara spurred herself into motion. She started to walk toward the library door. She willed herself not to run.
The noise drew closer. The sound of knuckles on a hollow wall. It was a few feet away from her.
And then it stopped.
She ran her fingers through her hair, but then pulled them away, reminding herself not to touch her hair until it stopped falling out. She took a big breath and let it fill her lungs. The cold walls made her shiver, but she knew the library was only a few feet away now.
A hand gripped her shoulder and yanked her back into the darkness. It gripped her so hard that she almost fell over, but she fought to stay balanced. She turned and expected to see Billy.
“What the hell?” she said.
When she looked into the hallway behind her, there was nothing save the wallpaper, parts of it so ruined that it looked like the victim of a savage attack. There was a long rectangular window at the end where the lobby met the stairs, but no light came through it because not even the moon shone tonight.
Her shoulder felt numb, as if someone had held a block of ice against it. She gave another look around her, but she saw nothing.
She opened the library door and stepped inside. On the table nearest to her, there was a lamp, and next to it was a disposable lighter. She flicked it and let the wick of the lamp take the flame, and soon a steady orange glow started to uncover the shadows of the room.
Next to the lamp was an old globe on a pivot, though Tamara had broken it years ago as a child and she knew that it didn’t spin. Her father had been angry when he found out. Bookcases covered the wall facing her, and a ladder was propped up against the shelf furthest on the left to help people reach the books at the top. Built into the narrowest wall of the room was a marble fireplace, though it had been decades since anything had burned in it.
She walked around the room and lit every lamp she could until five of them glowed orange and seemed like little safe havens warding away the darkness. She wished she could lock the library door but since it didn’t have a lock, she would just have to stay alert.
She had decided that since she was leaving the next morning, and given everything she had seen in the manor, she would try and find out what was happening. She didn’t want to become more involved in family secrets, but she felt something burning inside her, a longing to know what was going on.
Not many people could relate to her problem. There wasn’t a plethora of men and women who had lost a whole month of their childhoods, and those that had, usually had an accident of some kind to explain it. It was different for Tamara; there was no accident to speak of, and nothing to give any indication why she had lost her memory when she was fourteen.
Over the years she had come to live with it. It became like an itch that she learned to ignore. It would never leave her. She always felt it there, begging for attention, but she knew not to scratch it. Since coming to the manor, the feeling was stronger than ever. Something was happening in the old walls. Secrets were here. Before leaving, she would find out what they were.
She stood in front of the bookcase. It seemed that most of the real estate of the shelves was taken by books that had been placed there decades ago. It was filled with tomes of a green and beige colour, with tiny gold writing displaying their titles and spines that looked ready to break. She scanned across them and saw books on medicine and business. Encyclopaedias that were probably years out of date, and dictionaries too old to have some of the newer words such as Google or Yolo in them. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, she decided.
It was an impressive collection of human knowledge, but it didn’t help her. There were secrets here somewhere, she knew. When she had opened her adventure book in her room, a different book had been hidden inside it. It was a book on the occult, and apparently it was something that the owner felt they should hide. That probably meant there were more books hidden inside the ones on the shelf. The question was which ones?
The truth was that it could have been any. There were books on the stock market, the Roman Empire, dentistry. Whoever had assembled the collection either had a thirst for knowledge or an obsession for gathering books.
She walked beside the shelves from one end to the other, trailing her index finger along the spines of the books and watching it cut a line into the dust. She stopped at the shelf the furthest away.
This was the most colourful shelf, and it was also the smallest collection. Instead of boring green and uniform brown, these books were blue and yellow and red, and some had spirals on the spines and titles written in as large a font as possible. It was the shelf given to the collection of children’s books. She read titles such as ‘The Lonely Engine’ and ‘The Children Who Knew Too Much’. If anything was hidden, it would be within these books.
She pulled one off the shelf. This book showed two children stood at the top of a hill with a lion sat beside them. In the valley below, futuristic-looking buildings reached high up to the sky. Above them, two moons shone bright. She opened the book, but she didn’t find anything strange within it.
In the third book she tried, she found it.
Secreted inside a book about talking animals, she found an altogether older tome. This one had a brown cover that had dulled with age, and red spiralled writing showed its title.
The Seven Forbidden Practices of the Occult.
She shuddered. She glanced behind her at the door, but saw that it was shut. Darkness gathered where the doorframe didn’t quite meet the floor.
She opened the book. On the first page, which was blank, someone had written a note. To Harold, it read. For your curiosity. From Alistair.
The book described the practices of the occult. It was full of words such as ‘wickedness’ and ‘abomination.’ It described, in a cold scholarly way, how one might use the rituals of the occult to summon dark spirits from the never world. It was written like an instruction manual, and it showed everything one might need for an occult ceremony, down to preparation before the event, right through to carrying it out. Someone had underlined parts of it in pencil.
Tamara felt uneasy as she read about the gathering of animals for ritual slaughter, and how one might drain their blood for use in a ceremony. She skipped through the pages and found more pencil lines marking the words. The further into the book she got the darker it seemed, until the final chapter was titled ‘The Use of Children, and their Value to the Spirits.’
The book told how animals might act strange within the area where the occult was practiced. She thought about how the animals in Towneley Manor would always behave weirdly when she was a child; the hares that would walk too close to the house, and the dogs that would shriek in the night. She remembered the deer and how it
had stared at her, and relived the image of it jumping through the dining room window.
It also said that one must carry out occult rituals in a place of darkness and silence, where nobody would trespass and the words of the ritual would not be heard. She thought of the orangery nestled deep within the woods. Surely if any building fit that description, the orangery was it.
She flicked back and read another chapter. This one was titled ‘Preparation,’ and it was a list of everything one must have to begin an occult ritual. She traced her finger down the list and read the words in her head.
Bathe before commencing.
Illuminate your candles.
Prepare a chalice, leaving it empty.
A sacrifice to fill it.
Speak the name of the being you wish to summon.
