by Cat Knight
He picked up the fiddle and examined it. It was a surprisingly fine piece. The carvings were remarkable.
Jones recognised it as quite probably a masterpiece of work by no doubt a skilled Luthier. The gypsy scavengers had no doubt stolen it and probably murdered for it. He pursed his lips as he looked it over. “This will fetch a pretty penny. Enough to pay the cost of my lost sheep. The day isn’t a complete loss after all.”
The woman ceased her wailing. Hate spewed from her eyes and spittle hurtled through the air stopping short of his face and landing squarely on the ground in front of Jones’s feet. He roared laughing. Perhaps he shouldn’t have, perhaps if he had simply walked away or shot her then, the rest wouldn’t have happened. But the derisive laugh was one assault too many for the proud gypsy woman. She lay watching with laboured breathing while he tied the fiddle to his saddle bag.
Crawling forward on her belly, blood oozing from her side she pointed the fingers of her hand toward him. “You will not profit from our death. You and your children’s, children’s, children will play our song. Our dead will dance and make merry. While your fingers will bleed and your soul will beg for release. So, it will continue until the debt is paid.”
That night as he made to sleep, his fingers began to itch, a tune thumped out it’s orders within his head. Thinking nothing much of it, Jones went downstairs and yet before he even realised what he had done, he plucked a tune on the fiddle. No one dared remove it from him, for he said it was the only thing that gave him peace from the woman chanting in his head. On the morning of the 12th August 1810, Albert Jones was discovered dead by his wife. From there the fortune of the Jones family declined. The sheep died, the land was sold to pay the ever-incurring debts.
Business venture after business ventures succumbed to wilier men than Mrs Jones could hope to best. Somehow, she managed to keep the mansion, to house her children. In the end, all that remained of the Jones fortune was the house and the fiddle. And the shadows, the inexplicable waiting shadows.
ELIZA JONES
1930
Devon
Southern England
She sat on the back-porch roof, legs dangling over the edge, fiddle propped against her chin, and played. No one could get to her out here. On the roof, she hoped she would be safe from them. Her mother’s shouting was carried to her on the wind. Although she was far away, as far from inside and to safety, as she could get in a few minutes, she heard every word her mother screamed.
“Get off the roof and get in here right now.”
But from further away, in the basement, she could hear the other noise. Those that laughed cruelly and danced with abandon and called insistently. “Play for us Eliza.” Those were the ones that scared her, for she could not fathom whence they came from, but she knew them as shadow like, black haired people. And she knew they called to spite her.
She had turned thirteen years now, and ever since, it seemed that the fiddle had become her only true solace. She had liked it well enough before, but now it was the only peace she ever had, even though she played till her fingers bled and ne’er got a wink of sleep. The shadow people scared her right through to her bones, for they were mean. She would have played for them willingly, if only they would let her rest. But now her every moment was spent quietly sneaking to play for them despite the pain and exhaustion.
The problem was, if she played as loud as they wanted the whole house would hear and mother would take her precious fiddle.
The other problem about the shadow people was that no-one but Eliza heard them. If her mother knew, she wouldn’t scream at her to come back inside she would let her run. And it was impossible to explain. Whenever she did – a knowing look would cross her mother’s face. “It’s time you stopped making up stories Eliza, you’re getting much too old for fabrication.”
Mother’s call came again. “If you don’t get down this second–”
She played harder, louder, drowning out the shouting of her mother.
“If I call for your father–”
Screech! Screech! Screech! She dragged her bow as hard as she could across the strings. Down below, she heard a crashing and a shriek.
“Eliza, so help me God–”
Eliza climbed higher, if she just got over this roof, she could run down the other side and along a few shingles, and she would be totally out of sight, out of earshot of the shadow people. Safe.
Racing to the edge of the room and using the brick divider running along the top to hoist herself up, she balanced her fiddle in the guttering as she went. A shadowed hand grabbed her ankle. She knew what it was. She smashed at it with the bow. Thwack thwack thwack. It leg go.
Stifling her scream, she slid back up the edge of the roof, eyes fixed on those grabbing hands.
The hands grabbed onto the edge of the roof. They started to pull up.
Eliza tucked her fiddle under her arm and grabbed onto the ridgepole. She dragged herself backwards up the roof, watching, watching the hands. She pulled herself up onto the ridgepole, straddling it, clinging with her knees onto the shingles. The hands on the edge of the roof had become forearms.
The tower was on the other side of the roof. If Eliza could get that far, she could climb down the lattice and run away, far away, into the woods, into the countryside, and not come back until things were safe.
She clung to her fiddle like a baby, and started to edge along the ridgepole. Too slow. An elbow had made it onto the roof.
She stood up. She placed her feet, booted toe to booted heel, along the ridgepole, arms outstretched, fiddle in one hand, holding her breath for balance.
A howl. A wail. She slipped.
Chapter One
2018
Devon
England
The house was perfect.
Claire sat, half in and half out of Lisa’s battered BMW, and stared up with awe and respect at the Georgian mansion sprawled out in front of her. It was built of deep, dark red bricks contrasted with white ones around the window frames and cornices. In the front, an arched porch led to stone stairs flanked by large pillars fringed on either side by second-story balconies. On the other side of the roof, a tall brick chimney rose above the frame. Now in some decline, with its weathered bricks, and crumbling plasters, wild weeds and brush rambled, where once a carefully tended and manicured garden would have stood proud. It was easy to see how the Georgian house would once have been a great beauty. The dried branches of an ivy plant rattled against a wall lattice. And it was everything that Claire and her gothy, Brontë-reading teenage self, had ever dreamed of.
“It’s not much, inside” Lisa said apologetically. “But it’s got electricity. You might need to give the wi-fi router a couple kicks, but as long as you’re not downloading anything or watching movies, it should be fine.”
“Thanks, Lisa. I really appreciate it.” Claire shouldered her rucksack and stepped out onto the gravel drive. Rock and frost crunched under her boot.
“No problem.” Lisa joined her, hugging her oversized orange cat, who had spent the entire drive exploring the backseat because Lisa didn’t believe in carrying cases. Maude, the cat, was cleaning her ear unperturbedly. “It’ll be nice to have someone up here with me. I was really dreading coming up by myself, but my parents kept nagging about how the rats would get in. That’s where you come in, right Maude?” She kissed Maude on the head. Maude twisted around and peered up at Lisa sceptically.
“Anyway,” Lisa continued, shifting Maude’s weight to her hip, like a mother with a baby, and digging in her jacket pocket for the key, “I can get you set up in the office. It’s pretty cool. My great-grandfather worked in there and after he died they pretty much kept all the furniture and decorations and stuff. And my, my—” Lisa hesitated and thought a moment. “My great-great-great aunt, or something like that, can watch you while you write.”
“Just what I’ve always wanted!”
“Tell me about it!” Lisa unlocked the door and put down Maude. “Okay,
now, go catch rats.” Maude ignored her and started licking her back leg.
“Come on, Claire, I’ll give you the tour.”
To her right, a narrow staircase rose up the second floor, which was unprotected by bannisters from the sheer fall back down the stairs. To her left, dusty light from the porch filtered through slightly warped picture windows.
Straight ahead, a narrow corridor proceeded a few meters, then turned sharply to the left. A spotted full-length mirror, framed in ornate bronze, gave the impression that the corridor was long, and that at the other end, another graceful woman, frizzy-haired student, and fluffy orange cat stared back.
Lisa, who Claire supposed had become too familiar with the house to be impressed (or just didn’t have Claire’s natural awe for all things 19th century), was already walking towards the mirror, as if she would walk right through it. Claire watched the two graceful women approach each other, and involuntarily flinched when real-Lisa and mirror-Lisa actually brushed against each other, undoubtedly leaving dust on real-Lisa’s skirt. Claire was careful not to let her own jeans touch the mirror.
“So, the library is here,” Lisa said, pulling out a pocket door as she went, revealing a cramped, dark room with two overstuffed armchairs and a long couch that didn’t match. An imposing marble bust stood on an end table, glaring with a furrowed brow at the intruders. Clothbound books lined the walls, but on the end table, the books that had last been read were My Sister’s Keeper, The Da Vinci Code, and a dog-eared fashion magazine.
“If you need any encyclopaedia’s or anything, they’ll be there,” Lisa said, barely giving the library a second glance. “And the kitchen is through here.”
She threw her whole weight against the door at the end of the hall, and visibly struggled to push it far enough open to get through. “I keep telling Mum to keep the door propped open. It’s got iron in it or something.”
“Why?”
“Eh, someone way back thought that iron kept away evil spirits, I think.” Lisa shrugged and heaved a rock from the corner of the room to hold the door open, but Claire shuddered at the thought. There was a mark on the door’s paint that perfectly aligned with the side of the rock – clearly, this was a long-standing practice. “Anyway, it’s not too bad to push open, but it’s a real beast to pull, so try not to let it close while you’re in the kitchen or you’ll have to go up the servants’ stairs and all the way around the front of the house to get it back open.
Speaking of,” she added. She tapped on one of the moulded plaster panels to the side of the oven. It made a hollow noise. “The servants’ stairs are here.” She opened a cabinet and took out a doorknob, which she slotted into a hole that almost disappeared into the panel of the moulding. It turned with a click, and the panel swung open to reveal a staircase barely as wide as Claire’s hips, and high enough that she suspected it would squash her hair. “When my brothers and I were little we would hide in here and spy on the kitchen.” Lisa grinned, hitched up her skirt, and stooped in. “Careful, it’s really tiny, but you can get up and down it if you need to, no problem.”
Claire sucked in her stomach and squished herself in after Lisa. The staircase was steep enough, and the ceiling of it rose at a fast-enough pace, that if she leaned forward, she had plenty of space for her head. Lisa climbed it quickly and agilely, clearly practiced.
Claire felt clumsy and heavy, clomping around like an elephant to get up the stairs, but worse than that, claustrophobia or at least that’s what she guessed it was, had begun to mess with her mind. Pushing away the thought that she might never get out she forced herself to move upward through the tiny space until she emerged onto the upper floor and sucked in a huge gasp of air. Lisa was already halfway down the hall. Claire stepped away from the hole in the door, and chased after her.
“So, the office is this way,” Lisa was saying, yanking open another pocket door and made a sweeping gesture with her arm, indicating for Claire to enter. “There aren’t really lights, but, you know, windows…”
These room must be in the tower, Claire thought. It jutted out from the hall, and three walls had circular windows in them, which cast a dim grey light. A roll-top desk was pushed against one wall, and a small battery lantern sat on the corner. Either Lisa or her mother must have thought of Claire last time they were cleaning the house, because there was a stack of legal pads, a jar of pencils, and a pad of sticky notes neatly stacked on one corner.
A large portrait in an ornate gold frame hung on the wall, probably about one and half metre tall and a metre wide. In it, a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, with a fiddle and with a serious concentrated stare looked out at them below pale, lowered brows. She looked down on them with eyes that seemed to flicker in the light looking out into the distance.
“Great painting, looks almost life like.” Claire set her rucksack on the desk and turned around, three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in all angles.
Claire looked back towards the painting she involuntarily grated her teeth and bit her tongue, the girl with the fiddle stared back at her.
Chapter Two
Claire howled. “OUCH. I bit my tongue. I think that climb up the stairwell made me shake. That portrait is really something. I could swear that the eyes are really watching me.” She shuddered. “It’s kinda creepy, in way, I mean.”
“That’s my great-great-great aunt, on her thirteenth birthday” Lisa said. Her eyes do seem to follow, but Mum always said it was the mark of an excellent artist and portrait painter.” They both took in the painting. “It’s always given me the creeps too, to be honest.”
Claire shrugged off the shivers and turned her back, concentrating on forgetting. The room was dingy in an aesthetically pleasing sort of way. The wallpaper had a scalloped pattern that would have been fashionable in the early 1800s, and the floorboards were worn and stained with years of use. Most of the wall space was covered in photographs and paintings. The painting of the girl with the fiddle was the largest, but there were also family portraits, landscapes.
A school picture of black-and-white men in dark graduation caps and gowns, and one coloured photograph of an elderly man with bushy eyebrows sitting in a lawn chair.
“‘Write your dissertation,’ they’re saying,” Lisa said with a wink.
“I appreciate the advice.” Claire sank down into the desk chair and pulled out her laptop. “Here’s hoping it gets through to me.”
“Good luck.” Lisa clasped Claire encouragingly on the shoulder. “I’ll go make some tea.” She swept out, and Claire was left alone with her laptop, the stack of supplies, and the portrait of the fiddle girl.
Unpacking her ruck-sack she pulled her books and her papers out. Twelve months into the process of writing her dissertation, Claire had thirty-three thickly annotated poems, eighty pages of notes about English politics and poetry, twelve outlines in various stages of completion with different parts crossed out, circled, and arrowed around, and half a page of tepid prose unceremoniously labelled “Introduction.” Her professor had written her a stern email about chapter drafts last week. It was getting embarrassing when people asked her how much she’d written. The two students who’d started at the same time as her were bragging about their page counts. She was starting to despair.
It had been Lisa who had proposed what she called the “writing retreat” at the family’s country house. She had heard Claire complaining about not being able to focus, and, with delight, related her own success in completing work up at the old house.
“Oh, do come with me” she enthused. “No distractions, no worries, just you and the writing. My parents have been on at me to go up and check on it for ages! I can’t put it off any longer. Why don’t you come with me?” Claire said she’d think about it and so Lisa said, “Can I make a confession? I don’t like being there on my own.”
And so, Claire went. Truth be told, all Claire had had to hear was “Georgian mansion.” That in itself was enough to sell her on the idea. She would arrange tim
e off from her waiting job. It would be worth it to get her dissertation finished.
Books, placed to one side, papers to the other, she plunked herself down at the desk and opened her laptop between her research. Then she closed it, and pulled out her notes folder. She’d start by making a new outline. A nice, neat, new copy on one of these legal pads. So, she’d know what to talk about in her introduction.
No, wait. She laid the notes folder aside and opened the laptop again. She’d write for a bit first and just get any ideas out. She poised her hands over the keyboard and stared at the blinking cursor.
Grace Aguilar was an obscure British poet. Her poetry was ignored by Anglophiles in the nineteenth century and subsequently most of her work was published only after her death. No, she should reread some of her poems first, for inspiration. She opened her notes folder again and pulled out the annotated copies. But they were so cramped with her handwriting and her underlining and circling and highlighting that it was hard to enjoy them anymore. She should have brought her print copies.
“Tea?” Lisa appeared in the doorway. Claire sighed heavily and leaned so far back in her chair that her head tipped over the back and she could look at Lisa upside-down. She was holding a steaming mug and a plate of biscuits, and she smiled sympathetically.
“How’s Grace?”
Claire made a noncommittal groaning noise and stuck out her tongue. Lisa pushed a biscuit into her mouth.
“Did she become a musician?” Claire asked, gesturing at the girl with the fiddle. The idea of becoming a famous instrumentalist had suddenly become extremely appealing, in comparison to trying to write a hundred pages of “Grace Aguilar was an obscure British poet.”
“Who, her? No, actually–” Lisa stopped abruptly and shook her head. “No, wait. You have work to do. I’d just distract you.”
