by Will Maclean
‘Do you inhabit this house?’ Knock.
‘Have you always lived here?’ Knock, knock.
A frantic susurration somewhere in the darkness to my left. My skin crackled with gooseflesh upon hearing this; only after a couple of seconds did I realise it was Juliet’s voice. She was reciting the Lord’s Prayer, as rapidly as she could.
‘Did you live in this house?’
Three knocks.
‘What the hell does that mean?’ said Seb.
‘We don’t understand,’ said Sally. ‘Could you repeat your answer, please?’
Silence.
Sally glanced up at the rest of us, uncertain. ‘Did you live here when you were alive?’
A very long pause, and then one uncertain knock.
‘Are you dead?’
No answer. Even the rain seemed to subside and pause, as if suspended, waiting for a reply. And then, from nowhere, a frantic, repeated thumping on the table, as if something were hammering on the wood with pure, cold fury.
‘Whoah!’ said Seb.
It was pounding now. It seemed to emanate from somewhere within the table, within the wood itself. It vibrated through the grain, sounding the circular tabletop like a gong. Louder and louder, more furious, more impatient, as if seeking to draw our attention to something so obvious that we would never, ever see it, no matter how hard we looked—
‘That’s enough!’ shouted Mr Henshaw ‘Enough!’
The lights came on. Mr Henshaw stood, white-faced, by the switch. Juliet was on her feet, a hand clamped to her mouth, breathing in rapid, small inhalations. Neil blinked in disbelief, whilst Polly and Seb simply looked stunned.
Sally calmly opened the curtains, and as they screamed along their rusty rails, the miserable grey daylight was restored to the room.
‘Bloody hell.’ Seb removed a cigarette from behind his ear. He produced a Zippo lighter, lit up and again said ‘Bloody hell’ as he exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.
Mr Henshaw, meanwhile, was looking through me, at Graham. Graham, alone among us, didn’t seem shaken or disturbed. He seemed exultant. He wandered over to his equipment, and slowly and silently switched everything off.
20
Very little was said for the first half-hour of the drive back, as Mr Henshaw navigated the web of B-roads that had brought us to Yarlings. The rain had thankfully subsided a little and was now content with being merely persistent rather than torrential. Eventually, we found the A-road and plunged onto it, but still Mr Henshaw remained silent. Only when we reached the motorway did he finally speak, and only then when we had been on it for ten minutes, listening to the rhythmic squeal of the wipers sliding across the windscreen.
‘Look, Tim,’ said Mr Henshaw, without taking his eyes from the road, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I should never have taken you there. Yes, I admit that I intended to show you an unsuccessful attempt to locate something supernatural, which is certainly the impression Graham gave me of his little project, last time we spoke. Turns out that, since then, it’s all got out of hand.’
‘It was fun. I mean that. How often do you get to be in a real séance?’
‘I was just concerned that you might get it into your head that you were – making contact.’
There was a long pause as the wet road unspooled like film beneath us.
‘With Abigail, I mean,’ said Mr Henshaw, eventually.
‘What? No. If Abi wanted to reach out, she’d do it some other way.’ I thought of our notebook, our Book of Fates. If one of us dies, the other one has to find a way to open the book on the page that best describes what they are experiencing after death.
‘Anyway, look,’ said Mr Henshaw, oblivious. ‘I’m sorry. I was a bit over-zealous in my desire to rid you of what I still consider to be a fanciful and dangerous notion, and a serious barrier to your recovery.’
‘Recovery?’ I felt the anger come again. ‘Do you honestly think one day I’ll magically recover from all this? Abi disappeared, and regardless of how I arrived at the conclusion, I honestly think she’s dead. Either way, she’s not coming back any time soon.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Mr Henshaw, unruffled by my hostility. ‘If she isn’t coming back – what then, Tim?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘You’re still here. And you must, must look after yourself. It’s vital that you come to terms with this situation, that it doesn’t spread out and devour your life, taking your future with it. Everyone agrees you’re a bright boy with a tonne of prospects, but you seem determined to waste your potential. If it wasn’t for your teachers agreeing to you taking a year out, you might already have destroyed any chance of getting on with your exams and going to university. And you may not realise it now, but that would be a terrible shame.’
‘Would it?’
‘I’ve seen the way you live, Tim.’ There was a sudden hard edge to Mr Henshaw’s voice. ‘Your parents have more or less collapsed because of all this. Do you want to spend the next ten years in that house? With them? Years when you could be studying or working? Carving out your own life?’
I was silent. None of this had occurred to me. The windscreen wipers squeaked mindlessly back and forth, diligently conjuring up the same slice of the world, only for it to be immediately obscured by the rain.
‘It’s like they’re on autopilot,’ Mr Henshaw went on. ‘They’re not coping, Tim. This thing is eroding them. And I’m certain they don’t want the same thing to happen to you. I’m sure of it.’
‘How?’
‘Because of the one positive, concrete step they’ve taken since Abigail vanished. To minimise the effects of the devastation on the life of the only person who matters to them.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘They paid for their son to see a psychologist, so he might somehow find a way out of his grief and salvage the biggest opportunities of his life whilst he still can.’
In a previous age, Mum would want to know every detail of any trip I went on. Did you make any new friends? Meet any nice girls? What did they give you for lunch? However, when I came back into the house at five, my mum merely turned one bloodshot eye over one hunched shoulder as I entered the living room. She was sitting in front of the telly, which was turned down very low. The air, as ever, was grey with cigarette smoke.
I caught her as she stood up. Wordlessly, I hugged her. She had lost a lot of weight; her body felt thin and empty, filled with nothing but dry bird bones that might bend and snap if I held her too long. She neither resisted nor committed, just let me hug her for a while. After a few seconds, I stopped, and she slumped a little. Her lip quivered in what was possibly a smile and her eyes, briefly, held some warmth.
‘Do you want a sandwich? A cup of tea?’
‘No, love. I’m quite happy here.’
‘Can I join you?’
‘Of course.’
I sat down beside her on the sofa. Despite it being virtually summer, she wrapped a woollen blanket round herself. She seemed cold all the time these days. We sat watching the news, then Doctor Who. The Doctor was trapped on the planet of the spiders. Then there was a programme about rhinoceroses, at which point my head was already tipping onto my chest. I dimly recall waking up intermittently when some kind of Western was on, and then nothing.
Then I was alone in the darkened living room. Next to me on the sofa was an empty blanket, roughly human-shaped, a discarded cocoon. My mouth was dry. On the television was a bleached-out landscape, an impossibly flat, almost lunar beach of brown-and-gold sand, met at the horizon by a cold blue sky. The camera crawled along this blasted emptiness, as an unseen seabird cried. And then a voice:
‘Along the coast of Norfolk, there persists an ancient legend …’
And then I knew what I was watching. It was a repeat of A Warning to the Curious, the M.R. James adaptation from the last Christmas Abi was with us. The last time I had seen it, Abi had been sitting n
ext to me on the sofa, where the empty blanket was, and we had both drunk it in, hearts in mouths, delighting in each and every scare. And now the programme was back, the way all recordings come back, eventually, but Abi wasn’t recorded anywhere, neither in the stones of the house nor anywhere clearly enough in my mind, and she was only ever gone now.
I turned the television off, watching the picture as it shrank away to a tiny dot in the blackness behind the screen. Then I went to bed.
21
Over the next few days – partly, no doubt, as a result of the excursion with Mr Henshaw, and our conversation on the return journey – I found myself acutely aware of how directionless my existence had become. I did not have to attend school, but I didn’t enjoy being at home. Dad came and went with various things – bits of plywood, plastic pipe collars, sandpaper – and continued his ritualistic quest to perfect absolutely everything about the house. His relentless cheeriness, so obviously a mask, was enervating to be around, as was his sheer busyness. His projects spread through the house like the mycelia of some strange fungus, connecting and merging, and I began to feel there were progressively fewer places in my own home where I could be. Withdrawing to the part of the house that was solely mine was no help, as my room had begun to feel oppressively small. It had always been a small room, but now I was seventeen years old, and wherever I sat or even lay in there it seemed I was unable to straighten my legs.
There was another, newer facet to my dissatisfaction. After going away to the house in Suffolk, my own life now seemed small and uninteresting. Somewhere, right now, a group of people I had liked were conducting an exciting experiment in an area I had a real interest in, and I had attended an actual séance during which something, some force, appeared to be active. And now, chances were I would never see any of them again. Whenever I thought of Suffolk, and Yarlings, I found myself thinking of Sally. I pictured her blue-green eyes, her freckled skin, her red hair cascading down her bare shoulders. The adventure in Suffolk and Sally became fused in my mind – possibilities I had glimpsed momentarily, now closed off to me for good. Lying on my bed at home considering these things was like coming to terms with a prison sentence.
It was a relief, then, when Tony Finch called round the following Saturday afternoon. Mum answered the door. Despite the fact that Tony was clearly the kind of person my parents would, only very recently, absolutely not have tolerated, my mum always made him tea and enquired after his mother, who worked at the supermarket. Tony was always polite, although he was not great at small talk and always looked hugely relieved when I came to rescue him.
He was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, his brown brogue boots and tartan donkey jacket reinforcing his air of chunky solidity. In a house of people who were shadows of their former selves, he was a reassuringly definite presence. He virtually jumped up from his chair when he saw me.
‘Where are you two going today?’ asked my mum. For a second, she sounded almost like her old self.
‘Out and about, Mrs Smith!’ said Tony roguishly, in a tone of voice that would charm any mother. ‘Out and about!’
‘Well, promise me you’ll stay out of trouble. And no vandalism.’
‘Mum!’
‘We’ll stay away from them phone boxes, Mrs Smith. Don’t you worry!’ Tony was already halfway out of the door, grinning and waving. I smiled at Mum weakly, both of us acutely aware that I had promised nothing.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked Tony, once we were a safe distance from my house. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘What makes you think there’s a plan?’ He grinned, showing his huge, square teeth.
‘Call it intuition,’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’
Tony looked up at the sky. ‘Impossible to say. We could be going anywhere. Up into the sky. Another planet. Who knows?’ He grinned again. This was immediately infuriating. One of the things I relied on Tony Finch for was his complete lack of mysticism, his freedom from pretence or artifice. And now he was talking like this. I could get whimsy anywhere; this was not what Tony Finch was for.
‘Where are we going?’ I repeated.
‘Depends. How much money you got on you?’
I dug in my pockets. There was a carefully folded pound note and the large, angular 50p piece I still considered emblematic of The New Money, and which still felt thrillingly futuristic. Tony produced a grimy pound note and a selection of even grimier 5p and 2p pieces.
‘Should be enough,’ he said, and nodded his head to indicate we should cut through the alleyway at the end of our street. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Where are we going?’
All I got by way of explanation was the square-toothed smile again.
We headed past the shopping arcade, then through the empty patchwork of lawns between the sand-coloured council blocks, and skirted the woods. After twenty minutes, we found ourselves in a neighbourhood of once-grand houses, three- and four-storey Victorian dwellings, set in generous gardens, all now dilapidated. Their windows were invariably occupied by torn, yellowing net curtains, hung like skins.
The further we went into this once-affluent part of town, the more decrepit the houses became. Some were boarded up with corrugated iron; others were halfway towards collapse, the stucco broken away here and there, revealing bare red bricks riven with cracks.
Eventually, we stopped outside a large white stucco-fronted house, screened from the street by an explosion of privet that reached halfway across the pavement. Through a lopsided gap in the hedge, a front path of black-and-white tile led to a set of steps up to a peeling black front door. The garden bordering the pathway was a Sargasso Sea of chaotic green weeds from which the sleek lines of a 1950s automobile emerged, like a surfacing whale. In blood-red house paint, someone had written the word NEVER on the stone banisters, for reasons unclear. Tony, unacquainted with foreboding of any kind, clambered up the steps and, without hesitation, hammered on the door.
‘What are we doing here?’ I said, despite promising myself I wouldn’t. Tony either didn’t hear me or chose not to. I thrust my fists deep into the pockets of my jacket.
After some thudding around inside – much more than I would have thought possible for the simple operation of walking down a hallway – the front door opened. A tall, gangly, bearded man of about twenty, wearing a tatty dressing-gown, stood looking down his beaky nose at us.
‘Hello, Kevin!’ said Tony.
‘Tony.’ Kevin looked at me but decided in a split second I wasn’t worth talking to, and looked back to Tony.
‘Have you got it?’ said Tony.
‘Yeah, man,’ said Kevin, in an affected way. ‘Do you have the bread?’
Tony held out our money, the majority of which was, I remembered, mine.
‘Not here! Jesus. You better come in.’ Kevin turned and vanished into the house’s dark interior. Tony shrugged and followed him inside, and, after a couple of seconds where I really did consider shutting the door on both of them and walking away, I went inside too.
The house smelled. It was a multi-layered, complex smell, made of many strong odours. There was bad cooking, and burned fat, and stale, sweat-stained clothing, left to dry and stiffen for weeks on banisters and chairs. There was patchouli oil, and incense, and a hint of something I was not experienced enough to positively identify, but suspected was marijuana. Underpinning it all was an ancient smell of earth and water, as if the house were being slowly digested from its foundations up by the relentless English damp. The hallway was lit by one bare bulb, and was lined with clammy orange anaglypta that looked, by this light, peculiarly organic.
We followed Kevin into the front room, which was vast, and had once been a very grand room indeed. Two colossal Chesterfield sofas, their upholstery battered and scarred as rhino hide, formed an L-shape in front of a magnificent bay window and a white marble fireplace, both of which were valiantly attempting to maintain their Victorian dignity amongst the squalor. The mantelpiece was crammed with clutter: ligh
ters, rolling papers, a statue of the laughing Buddha, a lava lamp. A coffee table in the middle of the room was covered with similar mess, plus several overflowing ashtrays, a pack of Tarot cards and six mugs, all of which held various amounts of cold tea, or things that had formerly been cold tea. On a sideboard, a record player ticked and crackled, an LP turning pointlessly round on it, having long ago reached the end of the side. Apart from a sun-faded poster of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and a mirror, the walls were bare. The filthy carpet was covered in threads of tobacco, drifts of grey fluff and yet more rolling papers. There seemed to be rolling papers everywhere.
Kevin motioned for us to sit down on the sofa facing the fireplace. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the top drawer of the sideboard. He threw the money we had given him inside, and, as he reached further inside the drawer, I glimpsed more notes. He then pulled out a battered metal strongbox, which he flipped open with both thumbs. He rummaged around and found a small clear plastic envelope. No sooner had he done so than he snapped the strongbox shut and closed the drawer, in one practised motion. He turned the key and I heard the lock click shut.
Kevin sat down on the other sofa and passed the cellophane envelope casually to Tony, before probing through the butts in the ashtray with one long, bony finger.
Tony held the little envelope up so I could see it, and grinned. Inside, I saw two squares of paper, each with a dark black eye printed on them.
‘Drugs?’ I said. Despite all the mounting evidence, I was still surprised. Kevin sniggered derisively and lit half a rollup, putting his bare, filthy feet up on the coffee table.
‘Lysergic acid diethylamide,’ he said pompously. ‘LSD to you. Trips. Acid.’
I couldn’t think how I was supposed to react to this. ‘And?’
‘It’s for us, you ‘nana,’ said Tony. ‘You said you wasn’t into glue, and Kevin says this is great. Colours and lights and seeing stuff that isn’t there. Sounds like a laugh.’
