Mary Hades: Beginnings: Books One and Two, plus novellas

by Sarah Dalton

  “The grandfather clock is an antique. My father bought it for me when I was a little girl.” Her eye twitches again and I’m sure she grips her cane even harder than before. As she stands before the clock it’s as though she completely spaces out. Mum has to clear her throat to get her attention. Beryl finally comes to life. “The kitchen is brand new…” she continues.

  As we walk around the house, a strange sensation takes hold of me. It’s not fear. I’ve felt fear before and am familiar with its icy grip. This is different. I sense a deep malevolence within the house, but I’m not afraid of it. On the contrary, I’m intrigued by it, drawn to it in a way that I shouldn’t be.

  My mind wanders to thoughts of my dreams. The gathering swarm of darkness. The thrum of it in the air. That’s what it’s like. It’s a mass of energy, so deep and powerful that it drags me into it. I gasp, surprised by the way it tugs at me, urges me.

  Lacey senses the change and moves closer. Her crackle of electricity only heightens my senses toward the house. It’s one of those old houses with creaking floorboards and dark hallways. A wooden staircase leads up to the second floor, where the hall runs towards the rear of the house. The house itself is so deep and wide that the rooms are far more spacious than our terraced house. Once again I wonder why this woman is swapping with us when she’s clearly getting the bad end of the deal. The whole situation doesn’t feel right.

  For the rest of the tour I’m in a daze. Mum and Beryl chit and chat like two old birds reunited after many years. Lacey follows me around as I wander from room to room. The electricity sparks from her. Concern is etched on her face.

  Cobwebs hang from the corners of the rooms. Dark paint peels from the plaster. There are light-coloured spaces on the walls where paintings used to hang. Apparently, Beryl only had time to renovate the kitchen. The rest of the house is still in complete disarray. But there is charm in the antique wooden features. The original four poster bed is still in the master bedroom. Long velvet curtains trail the floor. An ornate chandelier hangs from the ceiling, its crystal droplets resembling suspended tears.

  “It’s a marvellous house,” Beryl says. “But it’s too much for me.” Her tic begins again, as though she’s winking at us.

  She stares at a dark corner in the bedroom and a haunted shadow appears over her eye sockets. It’s a cloud passing in the sky, blocking out the sun coming through the window. The effect is unsettling. “I…” she says. “I can’t live here anymore.”

  May 15th 1847

  I missed two days. How naughty. I hope you will forgive me, diary. I’ve been so busy helping Mama unpack our belongings. We have a new servant—Bess. She is very grumpy and very superstitious. Apparently Papa had to pay her extra to work for us. Every time she enters the house she crosses herself and whispers holy words in Latin. Lottie keeps saying it’s because the devil sleeps in my room. I hate Lottie. She is an utter beast and I wish she would keep her mouth shut. It makes it terribly difficult to sleep at night. Father gets so angry with me when I leave the candles burning as I fall asleep.

  The trouble is, sometimes, very late at night, I will wake up and feel as though someone is staring at me through the darkness. I appreciate that it’s strange to say such a thing. It’s very silly. I’m such a little fool. I must stop being so ridiculous. No doubt Lottie is relishing my distress. Beast.

  Goodnight, diary. If I leave my candles burning any longer Papa will scold me. I must be a brave girl and face the darkness. Papa’s brave soldier as always.

  Liza

  Chapter Five

  After Beryl has shown us the house she insists that we take a stroll through the woods nearby. It’s extremely beautiful in good weather, especially in August when the trees are about to turn to gold for the autumn, so she tells us.

  As soon as the door shuts behind me, the fog lifts. Perhaps I was imagining things. Beryl is certainly a little eccentric, and the age and disrepair of the house must have got my imagination going overdrive.

  Lacey walks alongside me as we head into the woods. She’s careful not to distract me as Mum has been keen on using her watchful eye to check for signs of mental instability. I don’t blame her, to be honest. Even an innocuous family holiday ended up with me sat by a dead body on the moors, and discovering the murder weapon from a crime committed years ago.

  The scent of the trees takes me back to the moors and a shiver runs down my spine. My breath catches as I remember the horrible agoraphobia that gripped me as I was lost and alone in the middle of nowhere. I remember Igor’s face as the life left him, and his ghost coming to me before he moved on. It was only weeks ago. The moors are an unfortunate aftertaste left in my dreams. They’re the image your eyes hold when you close them, inverted on your eyelids after looking at a bright light. I wonder if I’ll ever shake it.

  “What did you think of the house?” Mum asks.

  I pull myself from my thoughts. “It was very interesting.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Mum says. “It needs a lot of work, but I have some time off work and Dad doesn’t go back to school yet. Neither do you.”

  “Yeah, sounds good,” I say.

  “Happy families with a paintbrush and roller,” Lacey mutters. I glance towards her and frown.

  “What is it?” Mum asks, seeing my movement.

  “Oh, nothing. I thought I saw a bird.”

  “These woods are lovely,” she continues. “Look how the sun comes in through the branches. It’s one of those woods where it’s not too dark. There’s nothing worse than being lost in the dark.” I watch with interest as Mum visibly composes herself by rearranging her facial expression. For a moment there she seemed distressed. Almost haunted.

  I turn away, oddly embarrassed by the sight of my parent in a personal moment. I let myself be entranced by the nature around us. It’s a very pretty place for a stroll, and I take comfort in the fact that the path is well marked and the trees are not too dense. My shoulders drop and I lift my head and inhale the musk of tree bark and the tang of pine, pushing away the thoughts of Nettleby.

  We walk for a while and Mum turns to general chit-chat about the weather, and what colour we could paint the living room, and wasn’t the little conservatory nice, a real sun-trap. Far nicer than the patio at home.

  “Why is she swapping houses with us?” I ask. “Her house is clearly worth more than ours.”

  “Who cares?” Mum swings her arms out with emphasis. “Look at the amazing house we’re getting. Why do you want to question it?”

  “Well, surely there’s a catch. There must be something wrong with it.”

  “The survey came back good,” Mum says with a shrug. “It’s structurally sound but it needs some work doing inside.”

  But the longer we walk the more I realise that I can’t shake my doubts. Perhaps everything that’s happened over the last few months has made me so suspicious that I can’t take anything at face value anymore. Even during a relaxing walk in the woods my nerves are a jangle and I find myself drawn to the shadows. I must stop it. I can’t let the ghosts affect me. I can’t let them tug threads away from the normal life I want to maintain. I can help ghosts and be normal too, right?

  Lacey runs off ahead, her form crackling on and off as she moves. She darts in and out of trees with so much energy I forget she’s dead.

  “You’ve got to stop being such a Negative Nancy, Mares,” she shouts. “Your mum is right. It’s a gorgeous house and this place is gorgeous too. Just get on board.”

  I want to shout back, but that would do nothing except make Mum think I’m even more mental than usual. Instead, I allow a little spring into my step. We leave the path for a while to follow a brook. The trickling water helps to relax me again, until a dog zooms past me and into the water, barking and shaking its coat. I start, letting out an embarrassing little girl scream.

  Mum laughs as the soaking wet dog—a collie—leaps up out of the stream and bounds over to her. It shakes out its coat, coverin
g us in muddy water. Lacey laughs, tipping her head back. The dog wags its tail and jumps up at Mum for a fuss.

  “Murphy, get down from there,” comes a voice. It’s an odd voice, strangled and discordant. “I’m so sorry. He gets excited, but he’s harmless, really.”

  When I see the speaker approach, my heart seems to drop to my stomach in shock, and immediately after I feel completely ashamed. A woman walks towards us in Wellington boots and a Barbour jacket. She has the lead for the dog slung over one arm. Her hair, or what’s left of it, is mostly covered by a patterned silk scarf. She wears the kind of outfit worn by the queen on a hunting trip.

  But her face is very different, and it’s her face that has me staring, yet at the same time trying not to stare. Half of it has been obscured by scars running down from her forehead to her collarbone. They’re burn scars. Her eyebrow has been completely obliterated and her left eye doesn’t move. I wonder if it’s glass. The skin across her cheekbone is shiny and stretched, pinkish too. It’s then that I realise her voice has been damaged in the same way as her face, which is why she croaks rather than speaks.

  “Go on, girl. Get a good look,” she says.

  Mortified, I mutter, “I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to—”

  She waves a gloved hand. “If it bothered me to see people staring, I wouldn’t have lived all these years. Now, come on, Murphy. Let’s be going.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry about my daughter.” Mum shoots me a glare and I stare down at my shoes. “We’ve come from Ravenswood. We’re going to be moving in in a few months.”

  The woman pauses. “Is that so? Well, I’m going to be your neighbour, then. I live in The Mulberries. You don’t see the house, as it’s set back into the woods.”

  “Oh, how lovely,” Mum croons. “These woods are very special.”

  “I suppose,” the woman says. Her one eye seems completely trained on me.

  “I’m sorry, how rude. I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Susan Hades, and this is my daughter Mary.” Mum holds out her hand.

  The woman shakes it. “Emmaline Delacroix.”

  “Lovely name,” Mum says. “Is it French?”

  “Yes, my father was French. Fell in love with an English girl and moved here. Of course he left my mother for the maid when he was fifty. Old bastard. Died six months later in a car accident. Mum died in the fires, you see. I bought Mulberries not long after that, with the inheritance. I’ve lived here about five years now. So Beryl has given up with the place, then, has she?”

  “I think it was a bit too much for her,” Mum replies.

  Emmaline laughs, though it sounds more like one of Murphy’s barks. “I’ll bet.”

  I share a glance with Lacey, wondering if she sees some hidden meaning behind the words as well. It’s then that Murphy turns to Lacey and begins to growl.

  Emmaline watches Murphy with interest. She looks straight up at Lacey and I see Lacey’s face freeze with terror. Emmaline stares in Lacey’s direction for a long time before she turns to me. Her gaze trails down my face to the scars on my neck. As her eyes narrow with recognition, the scars heat up as though I’m stuck in the fire once again. My hand instinctively moves to cover them.

  “Well, I had best take Murphy home for his bath,” Emmaline says. She never stops looking at me. “It was nice to meet you both.”

  “And you, Mrs. Delacroix,” Mum says.

  She slaps her thigh and Murphy moves away from Lacey. “Listen, I sometimes have dinner parties at The Mulberries. They’re an unusual affair. I enjoy surrounding myself with… interesting people. You must come.”

  As she remains fixated on me I feel as though it’s my responsibility to answer. “We’d love to.”

  “Very good. I’ll have my maid bring you an invitation. Come along, Murphy.” And with that, Emmaline Delacroix disappears into the shadows she emerged from.

  “What a strange woman,” Mum says. “Very nice, but very odd.”

  “I wonder what she meant about the unusual dinner parties,” I say.

  “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” Mum replies.

  As we find our way back to the car, Lacey walks closer to me than before. She has her arms crossed over her body.

  “I think she saw me,” she says. “She stared right at me as though I was there.”

  Sometimes it makes my life easier when I can rely on someone to understand my world. With Igor, I found a mentor. It didn’t last long, but it was nice to have a teacher. Being in Nettleby surrounded by those mysteries—and with that malevolent ghost—was hard. Having Igor there was a comfort. But for some reason, the idea that Emmaline can see ghosts brings me no comfort. And it’s not just her. It’s this place. It’s the house, the woods, the surrounding fields, the air… it’s all laced with death. I can’t breathe this dead air, this foggy cloud of deepest dark.

  Yet when Mum asks me if I liked the house I say without hesitation, “I loved it,” and I mean it.

  *

  We leave Beryl in the late afternoon and drive home as the sunny weather turns into a light drizzle. The sun keeps trying to break through the knitted clouds, glowing yellow-grey over the green fields.

  Later that night Mum orders takeaway for dinner—Indian, with the rich, aromatic flavours seeping through the bag, making Lacey growl with jealousy.

  “Not eating is the worst part of being dead,” she says.

  Dad joins us late. He’s been working in the library all day. In a couple of weeks he’s taking some A-Level students on a trip to Germany for a week and needs to brush up astrophysics. It’s an unusual trip with the students he’s about to leave behind. A sort of last hurrah for them. Dad is fond of his students; he befriends them on Facebook and often bumps into the older ones in pubs. I guess he’s one of the “cool” teachers, which makes me appreciate going to a completely different school.

  It’s strange having a parent who’s a teacher. Summers with Dad have always been my favourite time of the year. He used to take me on road trips to the zoo or to art galleries or to visit his old University friends. The art galleries were my favourites. I grew up on Whistler and Singer Sargent. I never learned about the techniques or showed any talent for drawing, but I love to look at the art, to recognise that I am in the presence of real beauty. Old things, especially paintings, are magical gateways to a history we can only ever imagine.

  Mum spends all dinner gushing about the house, and Dad reacts to her happiness with animation. For once things are normal in the Hades household. For once we’re happy. There aren’t any long chats, or level stares. There’s no impending worry of psychiatric wards, or medication. The worry lines on my parents’ faces are not as prominent. The dark circles have dissipated from beneath their eyes, and I’m glad of it. I’m not some rebellious teenager out to make trouble for her parents, I’m not filled with Schadenfruede when they’re upset because of my behaviour. And when they’re happy, I’m happy, my onion bhaji tastes better, Lacey looks brighter, even the drizzle doesn’t seem so bad.

  And yet, there it is: the rub. The niggle at the back of my mind. The longing in my gut to be at Ravenswood. It pulls me to it, and as it pulls me alarm bells ring in my mind. I want to speak up, tell them that we shouldn’t move, that we should keep our little terraced house high up on the hill, and yet I can’t do it. I can’t break up this moment, and worst of all, I can’t do it to myself. I can’t deprive myself of succumbing to this desire.

  After dinner I sit on my bed with Lacey, my television turned on to a soap opera to drown out our voices. Ravenswood is still on my mind.

  “I think Beryl has a secret,” I say. “She had that look.”

  “What look?”

  “You know, the kind that someone gets when they’ve been haunted.”

  Lacey laughs. “Oh, yeah, I get what you mean. When I walk through someone they always have that gormless expression on their face. Like they’ve lost something but they don’t know what. It cracks me up.”

  I shake my head and
let out a soft laugh. “No, it’s slightly different. Did you see the way her eyes twitched? Or the way she stared at the shadows in the corner of each room. It’s like she expected lurking ghosts and monsters.”

  “Lying in wait,” Lacey says in a deep voice. “Teeth ready to gnaw on the flesh of the living, glinting in the darkness.”

  “Easy there, Stephen King,” I say with a laugh. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Lacey’s smile slowly fades. “No. Not at all. I felt it too, and I saw the effect it had on you. There was this atmosphere to the entire place that influenced you. I saw how dreamy you became, as though you were in a trance. Truth be told, I’m worried. I think the house is great, but maybe it has a bad influence on you.”

  “The weirdest thing is that I long to be there. I’ve loved this house”—I tap the wall of my bedroom—“for as long as I can remember. I spent my childhood here. I made friends with the kids down the street. But now I have to force myself to remember all the good times I had here, because I only want to think about Ravenswood. When I close my eyes I still see the long hallways and the antique beds. I see the dust lingering on the floor and the cobwebs in the corners. The sun warms the wood of the staircase. It smells like history. Dusty history.”

  “You’re starting to freak me out. First you with that house, then the weird woman. I swear she knew I was there. Her dog did too.”

  “What do you reckon her dinner parties will be like?” I say.

  “Terrifying,” Lacey replies.

  May 16th 1847

  We went to Ashforth today. Mama looked very smart in her new bonnet and she let me wear my finest silk gloves. Papa thoroughly enjoyed taking the trap out for a spin. The new pony is very lovely indeed. She is called Storm, which seems appropriate for this part of England. It rains an awful lot. There’s always fog in the early morning. It settles around the trees like a blanket, misting everything in sight. Sometimes when I look out of my bedroom window I see nothing but the mist, and the shadows of the trees in the background. The swing at the end of the garden rocks back and forth in the wind. Ravenswood is a strange house, yet I love it very much. I cannot describe why I love it so, I suppose I just do.