Lucy Lockhart: The Awakening

by Bryce THOMAS

  ‘Right,’ Lucy said, now beginning to be rather disappointed in the whole adventure, ‘let’s see what we can in the other window.’

  As they peered inside, they could see that the second room was furnished with a settee placed in the centre of the room facing a television in the near left hand corner. An electric fire was on the internal wall, but it was not turned on.

  ‘What…’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Loanne said before Lucy could finish saying, What do we do now?

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  ‘I don’t suppose we could try the door at the side?’ Lucy put forward. They were both debating whether knocking on the door was a good or a bad idea, when suddenly, they heard a car turning into the driveway down by the main road. Quickly, both girls ran around to the garden side of the house, hoping that whoever it was coming up the driveway had not seen them disappearing around the corner. There was a big straggling buddleia plant by a ramshackle garden fence. They ducked down behind it, but, looking at each other and knowing what each was thinking, they realized that they couldn’t see anything that was likely to happen from there.

  ‘Follow me,’ Loanne whispered as she set off to the rear of the house to the point where they had come over the fence. There, behind a bunch of invading brambles, they hunkered down. ‘We can see who’s coming up into the yard from here.’

  As they ducked down out of view they could hear the car pulling up in the yard. They knelt on the damp grass and, peering through the bush, they could see that the car was an old green Peugeot, not like either of the two cars they had seen before. The man inside seemed in no hurry to get out. He made a phone call on his cell phone and then, after what seemed like ages, opened the car door, got out and went to the back of the vehicle. He opened the boot and for a moment he was hidden from view, but eventually, he closed the lid and walked towards the rear of the house, turned the corner and headed towards the back door. The man, a big surly chap with dark hair that didn’t match his rather pale face, seemed to have one hand under his long plain raincoat as he walked along the side of the house. He turned the corner and approached the back door. As he lifted his left hand to knock on it, his coat lifted slightly, and something protruded from beneath it. Glancing around and then, sure that no one was able to see him, he lifted a shiny metal baseball bat up to his shoulder.

  Both girls gasped in horror. Only Loanne made an audible sound, a faint squeak. The man turned and looked around as they hunkered down as low as they could. Neither dared to even breathe. When he banged on the door again, they knew he hadn’t seen them and lifted their heads to continue watching him. He seemed impatient now, glancing around, while at the same time, listening to see if anyone was going to answer the door. Again, he banged on the door, this time even harder. Still no one answered.

  Now, clearly nervous and unsettled, he looked around once more before turning to the door and trying the handle. As he faced the bush, Lucy thought she saw a dark cloud cross the whites of his eyes. Even if all the other things this man was doing had not pointed to his intentions, his eyes would have shouted it out for anyone to know.

  He seemed surprised when he discovered the door was unlocked. It creaked open. He paused only slightly to take a deep breath, then, letting the baseball bat drop down by his side, he concealed it once more behind the flap of his coat and entered the house, calling out, ‘Hello. Hello, are you in? DCI Norton sent me. Hello…’

  At first Lucy and Loanne just stayed where they were, waiting and watching neither daring to hardly breathe. Long moments passed. Then, very slowly, they edged along the line of brambles so that from where they were crouching, they could see clearly through the open door and into the hallway. The man was passing from one room to another, opening each door and glancing quickly in before moving onto the next one. The girls watched as he came back along the passage and began to climb the stairs, disappearing from their view with every step. Several minutes passed before he came back down. Now, heading back to the door, he lifted a cell phone to his ear.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’m there now. He’s flown the nest.’ He hung up, folded the phone away and, leaving the door wide open, returned to the rear of his car and lifted the boot lid. Lucy and Loanne presumed he was putting away his weapon and it seemed a fair assumption because he slammed the lid and came around to the driver’s door with both hands empty. It took a few more moments for him to start the car, crash the gears into reverse and disappear the way he had come.

  ‘I think we are getting into more than we can handle,’ Loanne said shaking her head and turning to make her way home.

  ‘Wait,’ Lucy shouted after her. ‘The door’s open. We can go in and have a look around now. There’s obviously nobody there.’

  Loanne stopped and thought for a moment. ‘It’s starting to give me the creeps,’ she said quite sincerely. ‘I hadn’t expected that!’

  ‘I had,’ Lucy said, not expanding on what she had just said. ‘I have to look around and find out what has happened to the man we saw.’

  ‘Well, he’s gone, obviously.’

  ‘Yes, but where to? Now, what would you do if you had nowhere else to go?’

  Loanne shrugged. ‘Who says he has nowhere to go?’

  ‘I do,’ Lucy said confidently. ‘He’s hiding!’

  ‘Hiding? He’s just gone out.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he has just gone out,’ said Lucy, seriously. ‘You said he’s been cooped up here for weeks on end and then suddenly he goes out? I don’t think so!’ She thought again for a moment or two. ‘He’s gone to ground somewhere, I’m sure.’ She looked around. ‘But where?’ she added, frowning.

  Loanne just watched her as she stood there, eyes glancing everywhere. ‘Oh, okay then,’ she said to Lucy, ‘let’s go in and see.’ She moved towards the open door. ‘What have we to lose anyway?’

  ‘Just our lives,’ said Lucy.

  Loanne didn’t think she was joking. ‘You’re dead serious aren’t you?’

  ‘Or just dead,’ Lucy said with a grimace, without as much as an intimation of what she meant. ‘Let’s just do it and get it over with.’

  Together they scrambled past the brambles and up to the back door of the house. They stopped at the door again as they had done the first time, but this time peering inside the gloomy interior, they listened for any kind of noise but heard no sound. The place was deathly still.

  ‘Where’s the cat?’ Lucy suddenly asked. ‘Did you see it come out?’

  Loanne shook her head. ‘Nope. Definitely no cat.’

  ‘Then we have to find it,’ Lucy ordered. ‘Come on,’ she said as she pushed past the open door. She closed the door behind them. It creaked a little, and with the dimness created as it closed out the light, it made them both stop in their tracks and take a breath. It took several moments for their eyes to adjust to the dim light cast from the open doors of the rooms ahead. For a while, they stood facing the bare stairs. The wooden banister rail was painted white and the steps had paint on each side leaving bare boards in the centre of each tread where the old carpet runner had once lain. In the centre of the flaky painted ceiling, a bare bulb hung from a wire, stark and lonely, emphasising the emptiness of the whole place. Lucy could hear her heart pounding in her ears. She wondered if Loanne felt the same trepidation, but looking her, her companion just seemed her normal pale white self, only possibly wider eyed than usual. Lucy couldn’t really tell for sure, in the dim light, as they moved forward.

  As if to explain closing the door, Lucy said, ‘I don’t want it sneaking out while our backs are turned,’ and went ahead cautiously, peering from side to side. Loanne seemed a little less sure of herself now they had actually entered the house. But then, going back to the old house had been her idea in the first place. Lucy was simply taking it a step further, perhaps a step too far.

  ‘One small step for two house breakers,’ Loanne said nervously.

  ‘One giant step for Dianne Derby,’ Lucy
said, remembering something about her past that was solid and tangible.

  ‘Dianne Derby? Who’s she?’ Loanne asked, perplexed.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ Lucy said, now sure that she had been right all along.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Lucy was wearing trainers, but Loanne’s riding boots were noisy on the bare wooden floor. There were no carpets anywhere to be seen, and even though they trod as quietly as they could, Loanne’s footsteps echoed throughout the house like two hammers working in unison. It reminded Lucy of how Chinese quarry workers worked together each, in turn, hitting the thin bar wedge that was to eventually split the rock, but for the life in her, she couldn’t think how she knew about that process or the people that performed it. With a faint shudder, she linked arms with Loanne so as to give herself some much needed reassurance. Loanne, too, seemed to take strength from linking arms, taking in a deep breath and exhaling as if a great relief had just flowed through her whole body. Lucy liked that. They both drew strength from each other like only the best of friends could, and, although she couldn’t remember any of her friends or acquaintances from the past, at this moment in time, she felt that Loanne’s friendship must add up to the sum total of all the rest. Feeling now a little more confident, they began to search.

  The hallway and the stairs were in the centre of the building, the stairs taking up position on the right of the hall. An old picture rail ran along the walls above their heads, perhaps a foot or so below the cracked ceiling, but no pictures hung there. Two doors, both slightly ajar, led to rooms at either side. A single, wooden chair stood to the side of the stairs, but apart from that, the entrance was bare.

  They glanced first into the room on the left and then into the one on the right. The one on the left was just as it had seemed when they had looked at it through the window, completely empty. There was an old fireplace with cupboards at one side and old painted panelling at the other. The room on the right was just the same, bare of all furniture and even carpets. They headed along the side of the stairs where there were two more doors, one straight ahead and one on the left. To the right, the passage turned at right angles and led to the outside door on the side of the house. They opened the door that stood straight ahead. It was the big room that they had seen through the front window, and which was scantily furnished with large rug and only the barely necessary furniture. That was the only room in which they were to find anything hung against the walls. A single gilt frame hung beside the door and in it was an aerial photograph of the old farmhouse and its surrounding fields and outbuildings. The door on the left led to the kitchen. Both rooms showed signs that the house was inhabited, but the tidiness and the minimalist dressing with furniture seemed to emphasise the emptiness of the whole place.

  And there was no cat to be found anywhere.

  They came out of the kitchen and entered the hallway together, glancing at each other in silence, and then turned right and headed for the stairs. On her way past, Lucy noticed the cupboard beneath the stairs, and, turning the handle, she opened the door to make sure that the cat hadn’t strayed in there, knowing full well that it could neither have opened nor closed the door. Loanne shook her head and gave her the as-if look, a slight smile breaking up one side of her face as it cracked through her apprehension.

  Lucy just shrugged. She intended to search every nook and cranny.

  The cupboard was quite a bit bigger than the appearance from the outside gave out. Its ceiling ran to a slope beneath the stairs to the right, but to the left it ran all the way parallel to the hallway, ending where the wall turned at right angles to the other outside door at the side of the house, the one at which Lucy had called the day before. It was dark and gloomy in there, the light from the hallway hardly enough to enable her to see properly to the end of the cupboard. But eventually, after several seconds, her eyes adjusted to the light.

  ‘Perhaps that horrible man killed it with the baseball bat,’ Loanne stated, now feeling decidedly uncomfortable with the whole house breaking experience.

  ‘It’s here somewhere,’ Lucy stated. ‘Dead or alive!’

  ‘Huh, not a pleasant thought.’ Loanne paused and then added, ‘I’m not sure I want to go up there.’

  ‘Cluck-cluck-cluck,’ Lucy called with a smirk, her back to Loanne as she headed up the bare wooden steps.

  ‘I’m no chicken,’ Loanne called back, determination driving her legs to climb up with her.

  Lucy waited for Loanne on the landing.

  As in all the ground floor area, there were no carpets upstairs and Loanne’s footsteps sounded even louder on the hollow floor as they went about their search.

  Lucy gripped tightly onto Loanne’s hand and, together, they peered in every room. Things were getting decidedly creepy now.

  The pattern of furnishing resembled that of the ground floor accommodation. Only one room had furniture in it and that was a modern steel framed bed and a laminated chest of drawers.

  ‘Have you noticed anything odd?’ Lucy asked in a subdued whisper.

  ‘The whole place is odd,’ Loanne replied quite honestly.

  ‘And scary,’ she added after glancing further into the bedroom.

  Lucy went into the room and put her hand on the chest of drawers. ‘There’s no life here,’ she said seriously.

  ‘No life?’ Loanne was unsure what Lucy meant.

  ‘Look,’ Lucy said running her hand along the top of the chest of drawers. As she did, she noticed it was remarkably clean, polished and free of dust. ‘No photographs, no ornaments, no knick-knacks. There aren’t even any pictures on the walls,’ she said, waving her arm in a wide arc. ‘There’s nothing that shows anything about who is living here.’

  There was a small wardrobe in the corner. She went over to it and opened the door.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we should be doing that,’ Loanne said, now more nervous, but Lucy carried on regardless. The drawer inside had some of the man’s clothes in it; not many, but definitely his. A couple of clean, well pressed shirts and a suit hung on the rail and there were more clothes folded on the top shelf. She closed the door and headed back out of the room, stopping by the chest of drawers. More of the man’s clothes were there, folded neatly in each drawer.

  ‘Wherever he is, he hasn’t packed up and gone, that’s for sure,’ Lucy stated.

  ‘I thought we were looking for the cat,’ Loanne responded edgily, now seriously regretting persuading Lucy to embark on even the slightest adventure. ‘I can’t see it climbing into the wardrobe or the chest of drawers any more than it could hide in the broom cupboard.’

  ‘I’m just curious,’ Lucy said, undeterred, going back out onto the landing.

  ‘I can’t understand why you are so bothered about finding the cat, anyway,’ Loanne grumbled as Lucy’s search into drawers and cupboards continued to unsettle her.

  Lucy stopped and turned to her. ‘If the cat can hide, then so can the man; the man they seem so keen to keep hidden away; the man who is not only the key to the whole mystery at this old farmhouse, but the key to something more.’

  Two steps lead up to the bathroom, the final place they could look.

  ‘Something more?’ Loanne queried as they headed towards it. Like the rest of the rooms in the house, the bathroom wasn’t modified either. A tube of tooth paste and a tooth brush lay all alone on the old porcelain sink and some recently used soap lay on the bath next to a clean, plain, white towel. On a small glass shelf above the sink was a Gillette shaver, a shaving brush and a lidded plastic soap dish. The sink was still damp. Lucy decided that it had definitely been used that day.

  ‘There’s no cat up here,’ Loanne stated, clearly hoping that Lucy would now abort their mission sooner rather than later.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ Lucy said, thinking hard. ‘It’s got to be here somewhere.’

  ‘Well it isn’t. Not even in the drawers,’ Loanne quipped. Lucy shrugged. ‘Thought I’d be nosy,’ she said, obviously not as panicke
d as her friend. ‘But it’s strange, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well it must have slipped out when we weren’t looking,’ Loanne tried to explain. She was becoming more and more uneasy. ‘We’ll have to leave,’ she said, a desperate note entering her voice.

  Lucy didn’t seem to be listening. ‘But we were looking, both of us, all the time. One of us would have seen it leave,’ she stated as she headed along the landing back to the stairs. ‘We can’t both have missed it.’

  Silence fell over them again as they went down the stairs, Loanne taking the lead and almost breaking into a run, but before she could unfasten the back door, Lucy left her and turned once again to the front rooms. ‘One last look,’ she said and opened each door again, peering inside.

  Finally, she opened the door to the kitchen and, stepping inside, had one last look before turning to go and heading back into the hall way. There was nobody, cat or otherwise, in the house, and that was final.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Loanne said, now quite desperate. She lifted the latch and began to open the back door.

  ‘Oh no, it’s too late!’ Lucy said in a loud whisper, as the door opened. ‘Listen!’

  They both held their breath, ears straining. Lucy was right. It was too late to leave now. While they had been busy searching, a car had pulled up outside. It was the sound of a door banging shut that Lucy had heard, and now, with the back door slightly open they heard another car door being closed and voices erupting into an argument. The girls strained to hear, but couldn’t make out what was being said. They knew they couldn’t escape now. The voices were coming around to the back of the house. They had to hide, and fast. Both girls looked at the broom cupboard beneath the stairs and instantly read each other’s thoughts. As silently as she could, Loanne snecked the back door and followed Lucy to the cupboard. Lucy remembered that the door had a handle on the inside, so it would be easy to close behind them.