These stairs were narrower than the others, only space for one person at a time, and the temperature dropped further as he crossed the half-way point. It was a clear October night outside and the crisp coldness was finding its way through the brickwork and into the highest floor of the house.
Had this once been an attic, Jack wondered, as he felt his way to the top and then along the banister as the ground levelled out. The ceiling was lower, but he couldn’t tell in the dark whether it pointed into the eaves. A shaded bulb hung over head and there was still carpet beneath his bare feet. It felt slightly thicker than that below – less worn, less used. Was this a forgotten place, high in the house?
Closer to the source of the strange noises as he was, he was surprised to find them quieter than they had been only moments before outside Marshall-Jones’s door. Footsteps creaked and he froze again. This place wasn’t forgotten by everyone. Someone was up here other than him. The music box once again ground to a halt, and he searched in the blackness for the outline of a door. If there was someone inside then surely they would have put a light on? A candle or lamp at least. Who would sit up here alone in the dark?
He knocked against the wood. “Mrs Argyle?” he said softly. “Are you all right in there?” He heard his own breath in his ears, and his heart pounding against his ribs, but the room had fallen silent. He knocked again and pressed his ear to the cold wood. Silence. He wondered if she was on the other side, mirroring his actions – two strangers in the dark with only the wood separating them. He twisted the handle. The door was locked. He knocked again, slightly harder this time, and took a step back. Silence. He shivered in the cold. He was too tired for these games. Whoever was inside wouldn’t come out while he was there. He waited a few moments, though, before turning and finding his way back to the warmth of his bedroom, where he quickly fell asleep. The room upstairs remained quiet.
He stayed for a second cup of tea in the breakfast room the next morning. Marshall-Jones had blustered through breakfast and had looked quite bemused when Jack had asked him if he ever heard anything in the night, strange noises coming from upstairs for example. “Not at all,” he’d said. “That’s what I like about this place. So much more peaceful than some other boarding houses. No one coming and going late at night. A chap can get a decent night’s rest.” He’d winked then. “Sure you weren’t dreaming, old fella?” Jack had laughed and said he must have been, but his eyes had watched Mrs Argyle as she carried and fetched their plates and cups.
She was a pretty woman, he concluded. There were pale shadows under her eyes, but not the dark circles he would expect to see if she were awake and pacing and doing whatever she did in the room upstairs all night. Perhaps it was pancake make-up covering them up. Women could do all sorts, couldn’t they? And women had never been his field. He liked them, and he had his dalliances here and there, but nothing lasting and always with the kind of women who knew that he wouldn’t stay. The kind that drank their pain and who carried the knocks that life had thrown at them in the edge of their over-loud laughter. The kind that didn’t make him want to stay any longer than the duration of the job. His sadness he could almost cope with – it was their bitterness that was too much.
Mrs Agyle was different. What pain was she hiding, he wondered? How much had she loved her dead husband to drift in this vague nothingness she occupied? It was there in every step and gesture. Mrs Argyle wasn’t living, she was simply existing and waiting for her clock to run down and finally cease ticking out this exhausting life. When she looked at him, it was as if he wasn’t there at all. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he, too, was merely travelling around until the movement stopped, leaving no significant trace of himself on another human being. But he thought he would still like for her to look at him one day and really see him.
She refilled his cup from the pot. “It should be fine. If you’d like fresh, just say.”
“It’s fine, thank you.” He hesitated for a moment before continuing. “Are you all right, Mrs Argyle?”
“Yes, thank you.” Her empty blue eyes looked through him. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just that I think I heard you. Last night?” A tight line of confusion ran across her brow. “Moving around in the room upstairs?” Sobbing. Playing music. Whispering.
She paused, and he was sure he saw something, some hint of real life, flicker in her eyes. “You must be mistaken,” she said eventually, her words falling soft as autumn leaves. “That room is empty. I never go up there.”
He watched her leave the house from his position on the corner. It was half past nine. He had plenty of time before he had to be at The Red Lion and would only be back in the house for a short while. It had come as no surprise that Mrs Argyle had headed out with her shopping basket first thing. He imagined she was a creature of routine, and why would any practical woman leave fetching the groceries until later in the day, by which time the best might have gone? He wondered what she did with the rest of her days until Mr Marshall-Jones or himself or any of the other guests that had filled her too-large house got home. Did she endlessly scrub floors and polish and change sheets, or did she just sit and stare into nothingness until the inevitable round of cooking and washing could no longer be ignored? Did she go and lock herself in the upstairs room and cry? He envied a husband who could inspire such emptiness in a woman so long after he’d died.
As with the tiredness he’d felt on the train journey to this new job, he felt his own clock ticking loudly more and more these days. Was this all there was for him now? The thrill of the crime? The prospect of gaol? Perhaps he should have lodged with one of the chattier landladies and taken his chances. He didn’t have Marshall-Jones’s natural bluster. He was a chameleon – he adapted to fit in with those around him, his rogueish charm hiding a calculating mind and an unused heart.
He let himself into the house, pleased to get out of the cold air, and closed the door behind in. Around him, there was the kind of stillness that very few people understood. An invaded quiet that came from being an uninvited stranger in someone else’s empty home. He moved quickly, ignoring the large clock that ticked angrily at him. He wanted to know more about Mrs Argyle. He needed to understand her night-time activities.
He moved quickly through the downstairs rooms, carefully pulling open drawers and cupboards and examining the contents. The usual paperwork, bills and bank statements. He didn’t look at the figures. He had no interest in that. When he found it, he supposed that at one time her bedroom had been a drawing room of some sort, lying beyond the main sitting room and near to the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. There was a small dressing-table and a wardrobe and precisely made bed. He looked under it. Nothing. He searched her drawers with precision and the calm professionalism he had employed when he’d started out in this business so many years ago. He felt no titillation at the feel of her underwear in his hands as he moved it this way and that on his hunt. It was just clothing and it was in his way.
He found nothing. Not a single photograph or letter from her dead husband. No snaps of their wedding day. No man’s wedding band to match hers. He stared out of the window and into the garden beyond. It was overgrown, even for this time of year. The grass was too long, still left uncut from the summer, and somewhere in the distance he caught sight of a gnome with a fishing rod peering through the blades at him. The unkempt nature of the garden was at odds with the neatness of the house. He was sure that come spring time she would get a man in to spruce it up in case any guest wished to sit outside on a warm evening in summer, but it still struck him as odd that she had let it get into a state of mild disarray. September had been a pleasant month. Hadn’t she wanted to sit outside with a book in the warm? Did she even read? There was a full bookshelf in the sitting room, but he had no way of knowing whether they were for her pleasure or the guests’. There was very little of her in the house at all. He checked his watch. Any further investigations would have to wait until later.
Arthur didn’t show up i
n the Red Lion at midday, not that Jack was expecting him. If he’d been likely to have been back, then Scrubbers would have said so. Jack sipped two halves of stout and browsed through both the local and national papers, fully aware that Scrubbers had been standing on the other side of the road from the pub for at least ten minutes trying to check if Jack had showed up himself. In the end, he felt sorry for the little weasel and stood up and stretched right in front of the window. Scrubbers had the good sense to duck behind the telephone box he’d been using for cover, and then a few moments later he scurried off.
When he was done in the pub, he found he felt no urge to watch the comings and goings of the jewellery shops, but once again walked along the beach instead. Work could wait until Arthur had arrived and he was on the official payroll. For now, he would treat these few days as a holiday and fill his time with whatever people did when they went to the seaside at the cusp of winter. Given that most of the entertainments were closed, a long walk along the beach was going to have to suffice. As he walked, he found himself thinking of Mrs Argyle’s underwear. This time, there was no professionalism in his thoughts, and to fight them he forced himself to walk an extra mile up along the cliff tops before turning back. He hoped the house would remain silent that night. He hoped that would stop the image of Mrs Argyle rising up in his head so often. He hoped that Arthur would be there the next day and he could distract himself with work.
The house was not quiet that night, but Jack refused to get out of bed and look. He buried himself under the covers as if he was a child and squeezed his eyes shut. The footsteps turned to a loud angry stamping that shook the mattress so hard he was sure he would fall out. Still, he refused to open his eyes. He would not be drawn any further into Mrs Argyle’s mysteries. He would not. He would not.
The stamping finally stopped, the tantrum over, and he was just about to let out a sigh of quiet relief when a warm, wet breath filled his ear with an aching sob that whispered at him, too fast for him to catch the words. He sat bolt upright, gasping with fear and swiped at his face, as if he could brush away the spectral mouth. His room was empty apart from him. The house was once again still and silent as if nothing untoward had occurred. Jack’s heart thumped loudly in his chest and his face burned in the cool air. He sat upright for ten long minutes, listening out for something strange. Nothing.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling. Maybe Marshall-Jones was right. Maybe he was just suffering from some kind of night terror. That voice, that awful sobbing, had been in the room with him. It had been under his covers and touching him. He listened to the sounds of the house, which groaned occasionally like a ship at sea, but produced nothing more untoward. Marshall-Jones had gone home to his wife for the weekend, and Jack realised with a creeping dread that there was no one but himself on the this floor. His heart finally slowed to a regular pace, but when he eventually fell asleep again, it was a fitful rest punctuated with dreams of terrible things just out of sight.
Arthur didn’t show up the next day either, and the pub was filled with men enjoying a weekend lunchtime drink, checking the racing papers and discussing tips under a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. They looked happy, although Jack couldn’t quite figure out how they could be. Most of them would have fought in the war, he decided, taking in the lines and wrinkles on the laughing faces around him. How could they go from that back to this mundane existence of a weekly routine that was invariably the same?
Work, wife, pub. Work, wife, pub.
His own life might be unanchored, but at least there was always the hope that something exciting might come his way. The next job might turn out to be the ‘big one.’ The retirement job. The one that would provide the fast car, the endless women and the nice pad. What he’d do then, he wasn’t sure. Another job probably, but at least it would be his choice.
He looked again at the crowd of strangers around him and wondered when he’d become so maudlin. Was it since he’d arrived at Mrs Argyle’s, or had it been creeping up on him through the last few months? It was hard to say, but he was sure lack of sleep and the strange events in the night were taking their toll. Outside, grey rain streaked heavy against the window and he decided to give his walk along the beach a miss. Instead, he headed back to the house and settled into the armchair beside the fire with one of the books from the shelf. Mrs Argyle went out for an hour or so, and then, when she returned, headed straight for the kitchen and started preparing dinner.
At some point, warmed by the crackling flames, Jack dozed off, woken only when the landlady brought him a cup of tea and a slice of cake. He thanked her blearily, and took the tray while she busied herself adding more coal to the blaze.
“Winter’s nearly here, I think,” she said, in a tone that said she cared neither one way nor the other about the weather.
“I think you might be right,” he said, “but it’s nice and toasty in here.” He added his trademark grin. She didn’t look up. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, before sipping his tea, “why haven’t you sold this house and moved somewhere smaller? It’s very large for one person, isn’t it? Surely you’d rather not be taking strangers into your home. Pleasant as we are, of course.” He smiled again. This time she did look up.
“I can’t leave the house,” she said. There was a tremor of something under her words. Was it fear? “I’d have to take everything with me. I’d have to start again.” She got to her feet. “I can’t leave the house,” she repeated softly, before turning and walking with her precisely even steps back out towards the kitchen. Jack watched her go. What a strange response. He barely saw her for the rest of the day, and when she brought his dinner to the table, she wouldn’t meet his eye. He offered his apology for perhaps being too personal, and she’d accepted it with a slight nod, but no further conversation.
It was, however, he concluded when he had bathed and settled into his room for the night, perhaps the closest he’d seen her to having an emotional response to anything, other than the slight twitch of her mouth when she’d first mentioned her husband. He thought again about the feel of her underwear, soft in his fingers. Would her skin feel like that, he wondered, so different to the rough women he’d become used to over the years? It was a different, restless sleep he fell into, plagued with different, hotter dreams, but he woke with a start, just as he had all the other nights. He found it was no longer unexpected.
He didn’t allow time for fear to grip him, or for the unnatural sounds (because even he could no longer deny that there was something very wrong about them) to play out their angry repertoire, but instead pushed back the covers and stormed out into the corridor and up to the top of the house. He banged on the door, no gentle knocking this time.
“Mrs Argyle? Mrs Argyle? Whatever it is you’re doing in there, can you bloody well stop it!” His voice was loud, and it felt good to be combating the noise from within with some of his own. “Stop your bloody crying or come out and talk to me!” Inside, something smashed against a wall and the door shook violently. Jack jumped backwards. “Jesus Christ! Jesus bloody Christ!”
“Mr Hasting?” the soft voice called up the stairs. “Are you all right?”
He spun around as the light on the first floor came on, stretching up towards him. His heart thumped.
“What are you shouting for? Is it a bad dream?”
Jack crept down the stairs and found her standing outside his room in her dressing gown, the cord tied tight around her slim middle. She didn’t eat enough, he decided, and with her hair down around her shoulders he could see that she really was a beauty. A rare, hidden beauty. He decided all this in an unconscious instant, storming towards her.
Her eyes widened. “What were you doing up there?”
“Trying to get whoever is in there to shut up!”
She flinched slightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking –”
“– whoever you’ve rented that room to is making an infernal racket. Every night. Footsteps. Crying. Breaking things. And that
bloody music box going round and round…”
“Stop it,” she said suddenly. “Stop it. That room is empty. There’s no one up there.” She spat the words out at him. “Don’t go up there again, or I will ask you to leave.”
The sudden fire in her startled him. “I don’t care who you’ve got up there. I would simply like to have a decent night’s sleep without being woken at quarter to three every night. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
“There’s no one up there,” she repeated, before turning her stiff back on him and returning downstairs. When she reached the bottom she turned the lights off and left him in the gloom of the corridor.
No one up there? He looked back at the stairs. Something was up there, of that he was not mistaken. Could an animal have got in through the roof somehow and got stuck? No, he decided, as he crawled back under the covers. That wouldn’t make sense. They were human footsteps he was hearing, heavy but human. As was the whispering and the sobbing.
He didn’t like to think about the whisper that had damply teased his ear under the covers the previous night. Thinking about that would lead to thoughts he didn’t wish to have. Ghosts. Spirits. Something other. He hadn’t believed in those when he’d been a child, and he wasn’t going to start now. But still, he shivered slightly and hesitated before turning out his light, the chill this time in his bones and soul rather than the air around him. He was going to have to get to the bottom of this. For the sake of his own sanity if nothing else. The night crept round to dawn. He drifted into a half-sleep and dreamed of someone whispering “help me,” damp and wet, into his ear.
House of Fear Page 23
