Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes

by Jack Lewis

  “What did it say?”

  I tried to remember the words written in adult handwriting, but they were hidden away. I ran through my mind, lifting rocks and looking into the shadows, but it was like something had teased them away from me and locked them up. As though they were words I shouldn’t remember.

  “It was horrible stuff. Something a kid couldn’t have written. ‘The flesh is soft. Her mind will be a dark place soon’. Shit like that.”

  Saying the words felt wrong on my tongue.

  “You’re losing your mind.”

  Irritation stroked my spine. “Really? After all the shit you’ve told me, you still don’t believe me?”

  Jeremiah pulled the chair from under the desk. He lowered himself into it, and his weight sagged against the wood.

  “It’s because of everything I know that I can say it. I know what it’s like to believe. I know how it feels to want there to be something else. And listen to me when I say this, Ella. I wanted there to be something here more than anything.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what she was like.”

  “Who?”

  “Emily.”

  Jeremiah looked at the floor. When he lifted his head back up and stared at me, there was sorrow in his eyes.

  “I’ve been on hundreds of cases. Possessions, hauntings, poltergeists, demons. All of them were convincing to a fault. But the thing is, sometimes they are just a load of crap. You want to believe so much that your mind twists facts and squeezes them into theories where they just don’t fit.”

  “Damn it, Jeremiah. I’m not bullshitting. I felt things in here, in this room.”

  He shook his head. “You felt the effects of a nasty cold. You got the creeps. I mean, it’s a horrible story, a girl killing herself. I might not show it, but I feel sorry for the poor bastards who had to cope with it.”

  I clenched my fists. “I can't believe that I'm the one having to convince you about this.”

  “Find the bullshit, Ella. Always remember that. You need to be able to see through it, and right now you’re blind. It’s time to go home.”

  My arm muscles tightened, and I felt like my heart was trying to beat out of my chest. When I had come here I had been the doubter. Now I felt like a crackpot. I was jumping at shadows, hiding from things that I couldn’t see. Jeremiah’s words washed over me and left me drenched in a feeling of stupidity, as though I were a little kid hiding from my imagination.

  Jeremiah sunk forward. He let out a long huff of breath.

  “I regret bringing you along.”

  There were three knocks on the bedroom door. Without a word of invitation, the door started to open. When it swung wide, Marsha stood in the doorway. She crossed her arms, and her face was pale like it had been powdered with flour.

  Jeremiah got to his feet.

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s time for you to settle up,” she said.

  Jeremiah pushed up his sleeve and looked at his watch.

  “It’s only half-three. We’ve got another night left yet.”

  “Aye, you have. But in the morning I want you to scarper.”

  I felt Marsha glance at my face but as I looked to meet her eyes, the glare disappeared. I had always known that we would have to leave, but when I thought of going with so much unfinished, something stabbed at me. It felt like I would be letting everyone down. Professor Higson. Jeremiah. Clive. Emily’s parents. I turned toward Marsha.

  “You know something,” I said.

  Jeremiah shot a look at me, ginger eyebrows arched.

  “What are you talking about?” He said.

  Marsha leant into the doorframe.

  “The lass is tired.”

  I was sick of this. My head throbbed and my arms ached. I wanted to get in bed for a week and sleep off the phlegm and the cold. When I thought of being in the room alone, I felt goosebumps tingle across my skin. When I pictured the woods beyond the village, with the shadowy figures watching the children play, a needle of ice threaded through me. Despite it all I knew I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t just scared, and I definitely wasn't making things up.

  “Cut the crap,” I said to Marsha in a voice so firm it seemed to surprise her. “You warned us to stop what we were doing. What was that all about, if you didn’t know anything?”

  Jeremiah stood up. “She did what?”

  Marsha shook her head as if she were dismissing the tall tales of a school kid. “Make sure she gets some sleep,” she said. “The Scottish air sends you southerners loopy.”

  “Just give us more time,” I said.

  “No. In the morning, I want you gone.”

  I looked at Jeremiah, pleaded with my eyes for him to say something. Instead he looked at Marsha and nodded.

  “We’ll leave at first light.”

  21

  When Marsha and Jeremiah left my room I walked to the side of my bed and collapsed onto it. As my back hit the mattress I felt the energy leave my body. My muscles slackened and my brain emptied. My thoughts drifted out of the pub, floated over the barren fields and stopped outside the darkened woodland where the trees stood like sentinels and beckoned me in. I felt the shadows calling me, tempting me to take a step into their forest tomb.

  I sat up on the bed. I looked at the bag of books next to the desk, and it seemed like a sack full of boulders, too heavy for me to take with me when we left the next day. I didn’t know if I even wanted to. The idea of staying up in my room every night, the lamp beside me warding off the shadows as I poured through small-print texts, made my head hurt.

  What was the point?

  What was I doing with my life? As soon as I hit eighteen I had left my last foster family and resolved to cut all ties with them. They were a nice enough couple, a little cold maybe, but I had no desire to see them again. I made some friends in university but as I got sucked into my work I let the friendships wilt until they were just weeds dying in the soil.

  I thought about the Jenkins family and their tragedy. They had lost something, but they still had each other. I had never even had anything to lose, and the way I was going, I never would. I kept a cold layer of ice around me that made people scared to come close, and those who did soon felt the life drain out of them. One by one people stopped calling me, and before coming on this trip I had spent so much time behind drawn curtains that when I went outside the sunlight hurt my eyes. In the end all I had was a throbbing head and a sack full of books written by men who died decades ago.

  I tore myself off the bed. The floorboards screamed underneath my feet as I strode to the door and went out into the hall. As I walked down the stairs I heard a radio playing in the pub lounge, where a lonely voice bemoaned the loss of his wife, and the twang of a guitar undercut his grief.

  Marsha stood behind the bar. She stared across the lounge and out of the window, eyes deep in thought as they swam over the grey village buildings.

  “Mind if I use your phone?” I said.

  She jerked her thumb to the end of the bar.

  I picked up the receiver and dialled Professor Higson’s number. As the tone beeped I tried to settle the pounding of my heart. Was I really going to do this?

  I knew I should have waited until I got back to Manchester. It would have been better to do it face to face, so that he could see the resolve in my eyes as I told him, but I worried that the further away I was from the village the easier it would be to slink back into old habits.

  “Professor Higson.”

  “Professor, it’s Ella.”

  A pause.

  “Is everything okay?”

  I took a deep breath, held it in my chest.

  “I’m leaving the course.”

  “You sound distressed.” His voice was academic, emotionless.

  “I’ll explain some other time. But I want you to take this as notice that I’m done with it all. I’m sick of studying. There’s got to be more to everything than this.”

  I heard him swallow as though he w
ere taking a drink while talking to me. “Maybe you should finish your interview and we’ll talk when you get back.”

  “We’re coming back in the morning. Jeremiah has told me fuck all.”

  The word sounded harsh as I croaked it into the receiver. I had never sworn in front of Higson. In a way I was scared of his reproach as though he were one of my foster dads. I’d always guarded my tongue around him. It didn’t matter anymore.

  “Did you ask him about Bruges?”

  Annoyance made my throat dry. “I couldn’t give a shit about Bruges. You used me, Higson. You don’t give a shit about me. When I'm off your course you’ll move onto another toy.”

  “I don’t know where all this is coming from,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice.

  “I’m just sick of it.”

  Another pause.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I was going to leave it as a surprise until you came back, but you sound like you need good news.”

  I drummed my fingers on the counter of the bar. Right now, ‘good news’ sounded like long forgotten words, like fragments of an ancient language buried centuries ago.

  “Go on.”

  Higson forced levity into his voice. “Funding for a doctorate has come up. I could put you forward for it, Ella. Imagine that. A PHD and a research post at the university.”

  There was a time when I would have jumped around the bar with my arms in the air after hearing those words. Now, they tumbled over me like stones in a rock slide. A PHD meant years of studying. When that was done I would get a job as a researcher at the university, and that meant spending the rest of my life with my eyes locked on the black print of academic texts.

  I felt my chest tighten. I knew what I had to say, but the words slipped from my grasp like mice scurrying from the swish of a broom. I took hold of them and squeezed.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m done.”

  I slammed the phone into the receiver with such force that Marsha jerked her head up. I wondered if she had been listening to the conversation. Her eyes had been engrossed in a magazine crossword, but nothing escaped her eager ears.

  I didn’t care. I leant against the counter and felt myself sag into it. I looked out of the pub window and caught a glimpse of the fields beyond the village, empty except for the faded grass that was throttled by the wind.

  22

  Back in my room I half-heartedly opened my case and began stuffing my clothes into my bag. The black of night pressed on the windows so hard that I thought it might crack the glass. I wore four layers, including a thick woolly jumper, and topped it off with a dressing gown that came with the room, but still the chill worked its fingers up my sleeves, down my neck, across my skin.

  I walked over to the desk and picked up my study books. The titles flashed at me as I put them in my case. Studies of the Occult. The Fantastic and the Other. What a grand waste of time it had been. The pages of these books had sucked away so many hours of my life that even though I wanted to just leave them behind, I couldn’t. It was like a part of me was trapped in them, and if I didn’t take them with me it would be stuck in this chilly room where floorboards moaned and the wind shook the window frame.

  I thought about Jeremiah in the room next to me. He had seemed so deflated about it all. I told him what I could, but I didn’t dare explain the whole truth out. It wasn’t about getting one over him anymore; I wanted to protect him. Maybe he had to make that decision for himself though. Perhaps I should just tell him everything, about the hair in the plug, the presence watching me as I looked into the bathroom mirror.

  He would never believe me.

  That was the face of it. Despite how much he wanted to believe, he reigned himself in. He was so eager to prove himself to the academics who spurned him that he wouldn’t accept truth unless it was impeachable. He wasn’t all that different to Professor Higson, in that regard. They sat on the same branch, but they stared at each other from opposite ends.

  The moon peeked through wispy clouds, its pale light dying as it met the black sky. The lamp on the desk flickered. I looked to the bedroom door. I ran my eyes along the wall, stopped where I had seen the eye staring through a hole. A shiver tapped up my spine. It was just wall now, but what about later? Would I wake up in the night and see that bloodshot eye bulging through a crevice?

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that tonight I would hear the sounds that sent a stab of fear into my chest. Three terrible knocks on the wooden door from tiny knuckles that shouldn’t be able to make a sound. Would she rap incessantly on my bedroom door until I couldn’t take it anymore?

  Suddenly the darkness seemed to creep in through the windows and cover me. I looked outside the pub, saw Jeremiah’s car parked up. I wished I had the keys. We had one last night here, but it seemed to stretch out like an endless road, and I wondered if I would ever get to the end.

  The light bulb fizzled and the yellow glow dropped, replaced by a shroud of black. The room plunged into darkness, and straight away I felt the skin on the back of my neck tingle. Shadows formed in the corners of the room, grew and took shape as my mind tried to make sense of them. A chill floated along the ground, blew on my ankles and up my legs, raising tiny goosebumps as it snaked its way up my body.

  Adrenaline stabbed through my chest. The fuse box had blown. My mind clawed at memories that I had tried hard to forget. Of being in my room at the bad foster home, lying in bed and seeing black masses grow in the darkness near my bed. Getting up and flicking the switch, the light staying dead because my parents never replaced the bulb. A feeling of helplessness as I heard groans in the walls, felt unseen hands reaching for me, faces staring at me.

  I opened the bedroom door and walked into the hallway of the pub. It took all my self-control not to break into a run, and the effort drained me and threatened to paralyse my legs. I looked to the end of the hall, and I felt my chest constrict and my heart leap into my throat.

  At the end of the hallway, in the darkness, someone sat in a chair. They faced me and watched silently as I padded along the floor in bare feet and stumbled into the wall. My face washed with cold as though my blood had drained from it, and I clutched the bottom of my dressing grown and gripped it tight as though it were a life ring in a raging sea.

  Another look, and I saw a chair with a heavy coat draped over it, the sleeves slumped over the back. Get a grip of yourself.

  I took careful steps over to Marsha’s door. I listened. I couldn’t hear her stir, nor could I hear the groans or snores of sleep. It was gone midnight and the pub was shut, so she must have been in her room, but silence lay beyond her door. I knew she would get mad at me but I didn’t care. I tapped softly on her door.

  No answer. The hallway became darker still, as though someone were pouring black paint over the walls and ceiling. I knocked harder on the door.

  “Marsha?” My voice left my throat as a croak.

  Another knock, loud enough to wake anyone inside. Still, no answer.

  She said the fuse box is in the cellar. I looked further down the corridor. Jeremiah’s room lay at the end, but I knew I couldn’t go to him. If he saw me jumping at every twist of the shadows, he would call me crazy.

  I swallowed, and my throat felt dry. I clenched my fist and pressed my fingers into my palm, tried to settle my raging pulse. This is up to me.

  I went into my room and took the torch off the desk. I walked into the hallway, clicked the button and a curve of light spat onto the walls. As I tiptoed down the creaking stairs my brain shrieked at me. It told me to get in bed and wait until morning, that going into the cellar was a stupid idea. But I couldn’t turn back. I couldn’t spend a night in darkness. I thought my fear of it was long gone, left behind in my childhood years where bedside lamps warned away the monsters of the night. It turned out that fear never left you; it always stalked you, hovering behind close enough to watch you without being seen.

  The cellar felt like a refrigerator. Stone walls lined the sides. They were
colder than the ones in my room, as though they had been built centuries ago and had held a sheet of ice on them ever since. Bulbous wooden beer barrels sat empty along one side, and a rack full of wine bottles glinted when the beam of my torch hit them. I span my torch around the room and let the light bathe over every inch, but it seemed that as soon as the light left one area the shadows crept back.

  Something is here.

  I couldn’t see anything, but I knew it was true. I had the sense of certainty in me. It was a feeling of being watched, where your skin prickles and a heavy weight settles over you, and when you turn around you meet eyes staring back at you.