by Jack Lewis
The Haunting of Towneley Manor
Chapter One
“Tell me about Towneley Manor.”
Dr. Shukla’s words drifted from across the room where the skinny mid-forties woman had settled into an armchair. She shuffled for comfort every few minutes and tried to find a sweet spot, as if she didn’t spend each second of the day sat there and didn’t know every single crease in the fabric.
Tamara Deacon lay on a couch. Dr. Shukla told her that not everyone spread out like that; that was just how the movies portrayed sessions like this. Most people just sat. In their first session, Tamara did just that. She sat with a straight back and stared at her therapist and waited for the words to come; the sentences that would take her out of her rut and let her do something with her life. Instead, all she got was question after question, and their hours together felt less like the freeing of her mind and more like a dead end with darkness on each side of her and nowhere to turn.
“Did you know,” she said, not turning her head, “That the word ‘therapist’ is just ‘the rapist’ without any spaces?”
Dr. Shukla rolled her eyes so hard that Tamara felt it disturb the calm of the office.
“You’ve used that one before.”
She looked around her. Shukla’s office was lit by the pale daylight from an open window. Sometimes, when it got too sunny, Tamara would tug on the blinds and cut the light with shadow. When she did, Shukla would give a polite little cough, which Tamara knew meant that the therapist was going to reprimand her. Shukla usually gave the cord a sharp tug and let light breathe back into the room.
“My plants,” she always said.
There were so many flowers in the office that it was like being in a greenhouse. Tamara had always wanted to bring a Venus flytrap or a cactus, just to add a little edge amongst the Yucca plants.
Besides the greenery there was little else to mark where the therapist ended and the real Shukla began. A bookcase was propped against a wall, and to the right of it the plaster was marked from where the case used to rest. Tamara wondered why it had been necessary to move it by only an inch. Maybe she’s hiding something, she thought. Maybe she’s got a secret safe where she keeps the exam papers she forged to get her qualifications. Her being a fake was the only thing that could explain their slow progress.
The shelves of the bookcase were taken up by thick academic textbooks with enthralling titles such as ‘Mind and Matter’ and ‘Coding the Brain.’ On the bottom shelf, almost tucked out of view, was a row of fiction paperbacks. One of them had its cover facing out, and it showed a black and white drawing of a man wearing a plague doctor costume.
Dr. Shukla’s office was supposed to be light and airy. She’d designed it that way to get people to open up, Tamara supposed. It couldn’t have been more different to Towneley Manor.
“We’ve got forty minutes left, Tamara,” said Dr. Shukla.
“What do you want to know, doctor? How is describing Towneley going to do anything? You want to know about the crumbling stone, and how mum and dad never bothered to clean off the moss? The chimneys stretching into the sky, poking holes in the clouds?
“Dad blocked them off. I don’t know why, but he bricked all of them up. He did all sorts of weird shit in the house. He was always building and fixing, adding walls here, doors there. Like the house wanted to spread out and it ordered him to pick up his hammer. Does that give you a better picture?
“Or how about the fact that I never felt warm? The damn place was freezing, even in summer. I used to hate school holidays, you know. At least in the classroom they had working radiators. Summer meant having to be at home, trying to avoid the woods where not a damn thing bloomed. And the shed. The goddamn shed door always banging when I was trying to sleep. Bang, bang, bang for hours.”
Dr. Shukla spread her fingers out on the arm of the chair, as though peace and tranquillity flowed from her fingertips and she wanted it to gush through the room.
“You seem angry today, Tamara.”
Suddenly she felt agitation flow through her arms and legs, like she had all this energy in her and she had to expend it on something. She sat up.
“You know,” she said, “last week I got a call. It was from Drake Hosthorpe at Duck and Duke Publishing. You know how long I’ve been waiting for them to ring me? So I took the call, and Drake sent me a book to proofread and editorialise. ‘Give it a whirl, girl,’ he said. He did some weird accent, like he was Australian or something.”
“That’s great news,” said Shukla.
“I sat down with a cup of coffee and put the book on my lap. The cover had this house on the front with a family outside it. The dad with a full head of hair, and the mum stared at him with puppy eyes. The children stood there looking like angels. It made me sick. This is bullshit, I thought. By the time I’d finished brooding on how crappy it was, my coffee was cold.
“So I didn’t send it back. I didn’t even read it. Then Drake calls me and tells my voicemail that he wants to set up a meeting, but I didn’t return the message. Every time my ringtone went off I muted it.”
She felt the energy flowing through her arms and her fingertips, and then draining out into the room where she imagined it met Dr. Shukla’s calm aura and created some kind of spiritual tornado just above her desk.
“I just can’t focus on anything anymore,” she said. “Coming here is about as far as I go. I filled the tank of my car a month ago, and the gauge is still riding high. I’ve worked so hard to get here, and the minute a job opens up, I piss it up the wall. Tell me, Shukla. How long did you study?”
The doctor’s face screwed up. It was almost imperceptible, but Tamara saw the flinch that usually accompanied any personal questions directed at her. It was strange that the doctor expected Tamara to pour out every secret in her body, but left her own carefully guarded. She didn’t even know her first name.
“Twelve years to get my doctorate,” she answered.
“Well, I spent five years at university getting my master’s degree, and it was damn hard. Now I’m just screwing it up.”
There was a noise in the hall. Footsteps tapping on porcelain. A shadow covered the frosted glass of the office door, lingered a few seconds, and then went away.
“Tell me more about Towneley,” said Dr. Shukla.
“I’m not here to talk about that old place. I want to be able to leave the house without feeling like someone’s hovering over my head with an anvil and waiting to drop it on me.”
Shukla gave her a patronising smile. “You don’t think the two subjects could be linked? Your childhood house, and the way you feel?”
“Oh, you’re so smart, aren’t you?”
Shukla shuffled in her seat. Tamara imagined that the cushion beneath her arse must have been worn away with all the squirming she did. This was Shukla’s job; thirty pounds an hour to wear away the base of her chair and ask questions.
“Come on, Tamara,” said Shukla. “Don’t resist me on this. You don’t look like you’ve slept much.”
It was true. It was rare that she didn’t feel a stinging behind her eyes, like a scratch that she could never get to without jabbing her eyeballs. When she was in bed next to Billy she would lie awake and stare at the ceiling, and it had gotten to the point that she had memorised every ripple of the fake plaster patterns.
“I need to,” she said. “I know that. It’s not good for me to not sleep. But I don’t want to.”
“You have to let the worries of the day sit idle at night, Tamara. Try the worry diary we discussed.”
“It’s not that.” She sat up straighter. The energy had left her, replaced by lethargy. “It’s the
dreams.”
“You’re having them again?”
Tamara nodded.
“About the orangery. Ever since I remember, the windows have been bricked up. It’s in the woods, tucked far enough away that when you’re only halfway there, you can’t see the manor anymore. In the dreams I’m younger, but I don’t know what age. I’m walking toward the orangery, and I know I shouldn’t be there. Dad always used to tell me, ‘Never go there, Ra Ra.’
An orangery was supposed to be an airy place, she knew. People who owned expensive houses, and those who liked to give the appearance of having a posh house, built them as places to relax in the sun. They were meant to be surrounded by beautiful plants and filled with light, but Towneley’s was the opposite. Nestled deep within the woods and with its windows filled with bricks, it was a place where no light dared tread.
“Carry on, Tamara,” said Shukla.
“Then everything gets fuzzy. I can’t breathe, it’s like someone’s squeezing my chest to stop the air getting in. I look through the woods and I can’t see much because the trees are packed so tight that the light can’t get in, almost as if they don’t want me to see anything. I glimpse a man half-hidden by a tree. I think it’s my father, but I don’t know, and for some reason I want to turn back but I can’t make my legs work. And then he steps away from the tree, and I see his face. It’s Billy.”
“Your husband?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he look threatening?”
“No, he’s there to save me.”
Shukla stopped shuffling. “From what?”
Tamara shrugged.
“The impending collapse of the economy? I don’t know, doctor. It’s a dream. I prefer it to the other one, though. You know, the one I told you about.”
“The symbol?”
She nodded.
“I checked my dream diary yesterday. Thanks, by the way. It’s always diaries with you, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve dreamed of the symbol twelve times this month. The eye surrounded by a fiery sun. Staring at me, watching me. Listen, what’s the dream diary meant to accomplish? Because all it’s doing is making me think I’m a freak.”
Shukla flinched. Tamara guessed that after twelve years of study, the doctor didn’t like her methods coming under question. Tough, she thought. For thirty pounds an hour, you can take a bit of criticism.
“It’s to help you recall what you dream about. Sometimes there are meanings in the things we see when we sleep.”
The clock above the door ticked. Ten minutes left. In some ways, she couldn’t wait to get out of the room, away from the plants, away from the doctor and her squirming. In another way, she wished she could rewind the hands back and reset the clock. Every time the session ended, she was faced with the idea of walking out having gotten nowhere closer to resolving things.
“I don’t need to remember my dreams,” she said. “How about that massive hole in my memory? Think it might be useful to try and recover some of that? I’m guessing you don’t get many people in here who can’t recall a full month of their teens.”
“We’ve discussed this, Tamara. When the answers are ready, they’ll come to you.”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to force things.”
It felt like blindness inside her head, a darkened hallway of her memory where her eyes were open but all she saw was an impenetrable black. She remembered having her fourteenth birthday, and then spending the next few weeks riding her new bike around the manor estate. After that, there was a sudden darkness. Next thing she knew, like the skipping of a video, she was walking toward a bus at the manor gates, where it took her to a boarding school a hundred miles across the country.
After that, she never saw the manor again. Her parents never answered her letters, and their phone calls were both rare and brief. She wasn’t even allowed home when school broke up for the holidays, instead going to stay with Uncle Shaun, her mother’s brother.
Dr. Shukla spoke, and her clipped tones dragged her away from the tunnels of memory.
“You said on the phone that your mother wrote to you last week.”
“Yeah, Magda sent me a letter. I didn’t even read it. I picked it up, and somehow I just knew it was from her. It smelled like her and that mothball-ridden house. Screw the old bitch.”
The letters came from time to time. It started when she was in university. Despite never being answered, the mold-scented envelopes still arrived. She had no intention of responding. Though she never read it, she was pretty sure that in one of them, Magda told her that her father had died. Tamara only found out a few weeks later in a phone call with Uncle Shaun. The years had gone by and the stack of unopened envelopes had filled a box which she had made Billy put in the attic.
“Guess what?” she said. “Last week was a double-whammy. A letter on Tuesday, and a phone call on Wednesday.”
“From your mother?”
“Not from Magda, no. From a guy called Larry Tremblane. I thought his name was Trombone at first, and he didn’t seem happy about it. Told me that he was Magda’s caregiver, and that she’d had a fall. Went head first down the main staircase, apparently.”
She still remembered the silence after Larry said the words ‘had a fall.’ She guessed that he was waiting for her to fill it. Maybe to say, ‘No problem, Larry. I’ll be there in a jiff.’ The fact was that since Dad and Uncle Shaun had died, Magda had no family but her. That was hardly Tamara’s fault, though. Maybe if she’d not been sent away without any explanation, things could have been different.
“Is she okay?” asked Shukla.
“Billy thinks we should go see her. Says it’s the right thing to do.”
“Maybe he has a point.”
“He’s a good fella.”
“And what do you think is the right thing to do?” asked Shukla.
She thought of the hallways where decaying walls smothered light. Endless construction work, the pounding of her father’s hammer as he built staircases that led nowhere but to the ceiling, and doors that opened onto blocked halls. She remembered the woods where the trees never grew leaves, and the orangery. Windows blocked up, brickwork as black as the soil around it.
“Where Towneley Manor is concerned, there’s no such thing as right.”
Dr. Shukla started to squirm in her chair. It wasn’t just an arm movement but a full body shuffle, as if the chair was crawling with ants. Such a change in posture could only mean one thing, Tamara realised. Shukla was about to deliver one of her trademark pieces of gold. Sure enough, the doctor spoke.
“I think you should go,” she said. “It could be the only way to get rid of the anvil over your head, to borrow your metaphor.”
Chapter Two
Billy’s car always made a rattling noise, and neither of them could pinpoint where it came from. It sometimes sounded like the windows were shaking, and other times like something was crawling in the engine. She’d have been more comfortable in her own car, but the check engine light had come on a month ago and she’d never bothered having someone look at it. The idea of driving to Towneley Manor in a death trap made Billy uneasy, so he gripped the wheel of his own car while Tamara, the better driver, watched the pale countryside drift by.
She rolled the window down and stuck her arm out, and she felt the forty mile-per-hour backdraft cool her skin. It was so hot that she’d rolled her sleeves up past her elbows, showing the blue ink of her bicep tattoo. Billy glanced at her arm, and she caught the threat of a glare in his face.
She’d got the tattoo in university, during a time when, for a fading period, she felt like her life was beginning. That was before the shadowy curtains fell and she was sucked into a world of locked doors and books. Billy had always grimaced when he looked at her tattoo. Once, in one of his drunken poetic moods, he said it smeared the beauty of her skin.
He reached for the radio dial and turned up the volume. The beats and thumps of the music were so bad that T
amara felt offended by them.
“I didn’t know you liked this,” she said. “Bit of a change from Johnny Cash.”
He gave her a surprised look.
“It’s your favourite.”
“I hate this song,” she said.
“Are you sure? I thought-”
“Come on, Billy. Eight years and you can’t remember my favourite song?”
She turned the dial until the music was drowned with nothing but the rattling of the windows or whatever was in the engine to break the silence.
A car drove close behind them. Another foot and it would have been kissing their bumper. It was just another impatient driver looking to overtake, she thought. Probably seething with anger that they couldn’t zoom down the road at eighty miles per hour.
