by Jack Lewis
She crossed the hall and stepped into the room. Nobody was there. Even stranger, there was no other exit. There were no windows to climb out of, and even if there were, she was on the second floor and had to be thirty feet off the ground. She looked around her. She felt a tingling down her spine, and an uneasy sense that something wasn’t right. She wanted to leave.
As she turned, she saw a photograph on the floor. The paper had started to yellow with age, and it was on its back. She picked it up and turned it over to look at it.
The photograph was a grainy brown colour. It showed a row of children dressed in Halloween costumes. Some wore cloth sacks over their heads, whilst others had balaclavas that covered their faces. A few of the children had cut holes into theirs, and others had buttons where their eyes should have been. They stood in a perfect row, and even though it was a photograph, the stillness of their poses unnerved her. There was something eternal about it, like the children had always been there and would be forevermore.
Behind them was a crowding of trees bunched together so closely that no light could drain through. Tamara knew that nestled within them, brooding in the darkness, was the orangery. She didn’t need to see the tip of Towneley Manor straining through the trees to know where the photograph was set.
She felt ice spread over her skin. Her gaze was drawn to a man who stood behind the children. He was tall, with hair that was long on the sides and balding on top. He had a wicked look on his face, and she realised this was a man who needed no Halloween costume. He rested his hand on the shoulder of a black-haired boy next to him, the only one of the children who wasn’t in costume.
She slowly turned around. A sensation prickled the back of her neck, as if secret eyes traced their stare across her skin. She expected to turn around and find someone in the room with her, but she found that she was alone.
After climbing back through the window and walking across the halls and down the stairs, she found Billy outside. A winter chill nipped at her skin, and the trees of the woods shuddered in the breeze. A ladder was propped up against the front of the manor, and Billy was at the top of it. He was fifty feet up in the air, scooping leaves from the gutter of the house and letting them drift down to the ground.
The ladder swayed in the wind. Some of the rungs looked loose, and she felt her stomach sink with worry. She was about to tell him to get down, when she saw something in the window across from him. A shadowy figure stood amongst the drapes, staring out to the woods. When she blinked, the shadow was gone.
~
Later that day she found Billy in the library. It was years since she had last been in there. Sometimes memory played tricks with the size of things, and she remembered the library to be of gargantuan proportions, housing too many books for a person to read in one lifetime. Years later she stepped in again, but she found that her memory hadn’t lied this time.
The library took up half of the first floor east wing. An entire wall was covered by bookshelves that stretched up to the ceiling, and hundreds of books were lined up perfectly. On some of them the writing on the spines was too swirly to even read.
Billy was sat at an oak table with books piled around him. A large sheet of paper was spread out in front. She saw words written in italics, with lines sprouting from each one and leading to more words and more lines.
“It’s your family tree,” he said, hearing her come in. “Jesus, Tam. Your family used to be massive. Your great, great, great grandfather Alistair Towneley-”
“You don’t have to say the great, great, great bit every time you refer to him.”
“Okay. Well he was a busy guy. He had eight kids. This place must have been chaos.”
She put her hand in her pocket and felt the edges of the photograph, soft and brittle and curling at her touch. She thought about the children lined up in their costumes, with the malicious-looking man standing watch over them. Had there been eight children in the photograph? She wanted to take it out to have a look, but at the same time, she didn’t want to encourage Billy.
“But come and have a look at this,” said Billy. “Follow the tree through the years, and you see it start to wither.”
Sure enough, the family tree diagram started out large and it spread wide across the paper, but as the years wore on it narrowed and narrowed until the Towneley Family was but an acorn, stopping at Tamara, where it would die. If she and Billy had kids, their children would carry the Deacon name.
“I’ve seen it before,” she said. Her grandmother had often shown her the scroll and told her stories of the people in her family who were long dead and would never walk the halls again.
He turned to face her. She saw the twisting of his dimples that meant he was annoyed with her. His chair scraped on the floor as he moved.
“Why am I finding out about your family through books, Tam? Why couldn’t you ever open up to me? I’m your husband, for Christ’s sake.”
She backed toward the doorway. She wasn’t going to have this conversation now. Why couldn’t he understand that she didn’t want to even think about her family, let alone talk about them? She was going to leave, when she thought, no. Why should I?
“Here’s something from the family album,” she said. “A lovely story for you. My mum and dad loved me so much they packed me off when I was fourteen with hardly a goodbye. When I was lucky enough to get a phone call, Magda’s voice always sounded weird. And it was like someone was listening on the other end of the line. I’d ask her to put Dad on, but by bizarre coincidence he was never around when mum rang me. Tell me, Bill, which part of this is sating your curiosity?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just not normal to have these secrets.”
She was going to round on him again, when a book on the shelf caught her eye. The spine was yellow and the writing red and it was the only one that stood out amongst the brown and the black and the grey.
She remembered the book. She could almost picture being led in bed whilst her father read to her from it. Those nights, before she was sent away, were some of the only times she got the sense that he really cared for her. He used to settle in an arm chair beside her bed and read until she felt sleep swim in her brain. Sometimes, she’d pretend to fall asleep and she’d lay in the dark. Once, she opened one eye and saw her father still sat across from her, watching her in utter silence.
Out of nowhere, she felt tears welling at her eyes. After spending years in boarding school she was well practiced at holding them back, and she was damned if she was going to let Billy see her cry. She looked at the book again, and heard her father’s voice reading the words. A thought tugged at her.
“I’m going to go see him,” she said.
~
The crypt was at the back of the house, down a pathway that led through patches of nettles. It was a stone building the size of a shed, but in a fit of extravagance one of the older Towneley generation had given it a domed roof.
With Billy beside her, she gripped the metal rung of the door and pushed it open. The crypt was pitch black and smelled of mildew, and when daylight hit the floor it illuminated years of dirt and dust.
Eight stone coffins were lined up in a row, each one laying still in the darkness. Some had carvings on them more intricate than others, while her father’s was just a slab of granite. His coffin drew her gaze immediately. It sat at the end of the row, giving her father his place as the latest of the Towneley masters to die.
“You northerners are weird,” said Billy.
He stood in the doorway, half covered in daylight, half in the shadow from the crypt.
“Not coming in?” she said.
“I’ll hang back. I like my graves out in the open.”
“Then prop the door a little wider.”
She didn’t know what this was going to accomplish, but she felt she had to see the coffin once, and then her duty was done. It wasn’t that she owed her father anything, but more that by seeing his coffin she felt it was a door to her past that she could close.
She walked over to it. Something rustled in the corner of the room, but Tamara had never had a fear of mice. When she finally stood over her father’s stone coffin, she gasped.
The lid had been pried off, and her father was there for her to see. His flesh had completely decayed around his arms, legs and body, and rags clung to him. His skull had hair sprouting from the side and bushing against the stone. She looked down and saw his toenails. They were hard and yellow, and they were long enough to touch the sides. They had grown so much that they had curled in on themselves, and she imagined that with the slightest pressure, they would snap off.
Her mouth opened wide, but she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t help but stare at his bones spread pathetically in their final resting place. She couldn’t take her eyes away from his toenails, which were almost as long as his feet.
She had seen enough, and she’d done her duty. Whatever she had wanted from this visit, this wasn’t it. She felt like she needed to turn and run, but she wouldn’t let Billy see her scared. Part of her thought that all of a sudden the crypt door might close and leave her locked in with her father, and she’d hear his hair sweep against the stone as he raised his head.
Taking a breath, she turned round and saw Billy holding the door open. Beyond him, Towneley Manor watched and waited.
~
Later, when darkness settled over the estate and covered the branches of the trees and cast sheets of black over the windows, she walked through the lobby. Lamps glowed orange against the shadows of the house, casting their weak light over the old furniture and scuffed floors.
The phone rang. It took her a few seconds to locate the noise, and she found it sat on a small table. The phone was decades old and rather than having buttons, it had small circles where you put your finger in and spun them to dial a number. She used to love making it spin back and forth, smiling at the clacking sound as the dial wound itself around.
She picked up the phone and the ringing died.
“Hello?”
First there was silence.
“Hello,” she said again.
She heard a raspy breathing on the end of the phone, like someone was blowing into the receiver. She got the sense that someone was waiting for her to speak. She hung up.
As she walked upstairs she felt tiredness weigh down each step. When she reached number thirty, she wished that Towneley Manor wasn’t so big, and that going to bed wasn’t a mountain climbing expedition. Sleep tugged at her eyelids, but all the same, she doubted she would get much. Her room was cold and the bedsheets made her itch.
It didn’t seem to bother Billy, though. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem awfully put out that they had to sleep separately. She had expected him to kick up a fuss about it, but so far he hadn’t said a word. Strange, because it was the first time in years they’d had to sleep apart. If you’re not bothered, I’m sure as hell not bothered, she thought.
She dressed for bed and then climbed into it. The mattress was hard and pressed against her back. The black night sky loomed outside, and without curtains to blot it out, Tamara was forced to sleep with it staring in at her. She pulled the covers closer to her. The room was so dark that even a few minutes later, her eyes still hadn’t adjusted to it. She imagined the painting on the wall facing her, and the man in it staring out. Maybe he was wondering where her smile was tonight.
A feeling crept over her, inching over the skin of her arms and then onto her chest, making goosebumps bubble on her flesh. She got the sense that she was being watched. Not by the man in the painting, but by someone beside the bed. She could almost feel the eyes gazing at her, devouring the sight of her with eyes full of menace.
She heard a banging outside her room. It was a faint thud, and sounded like it had come from the end of the hall. Glad for any excuse to leave her room, she put on a hoodie and left.
The hallway pressed in on her as she crossed it, and the only sounds were the scuffles of her socks on the cold flooring. At the end of the hall, a light glowed from the bottom of the library door.
She found Billy sat at the table in the library. Again he was surrounded by books, but this time they weren’t about her family. Looking over his shoulder, she saw books on business, with titles such as ‘The Blooming Entrepreneur’ and ‘Take the Plunge.’
She felt anger start to simmer. Whether it was through lack of sleep or being back in the house she didn’t know, but seeing Billy with her books made the heat of irritation tingle inside her.
Billy saw her, and smiled. He blinked with tired eyes.
“Hey Tam.”
“It’s a bit late for this, don’t you think?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She settled into a chair across from him. She looked at him and she tried not to let the irritation show on her face.
“You promised you’d give this a break for a while. Until we’ve saved more.”
He closed the book in front of him.
“I know. I’m just getting prepared.”
“But when you start reading things like this, it makes me feel like you’re going to try and rush things again.”
He folded his arms.
“Well one of us has to,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
This time it was Billy’s turn to be irritated.
“When you’re sat there ignoring job offers, I’m selling shitty mobile phones all day. It drains me, Tam. Do you know how it feels to spend every day doing something you hate, when we’ve got all that money sitting in the bank? I know it’s our savings, but it could be the start of something.”
“Not again,” she said.
“You could at least get a job.”
“I’m trying.”
“No, you’re not. You’re hiding. Same as you hid your family away from me. You hide everything, Tamara.”
She stood up. The air around them had become charged, as if it was filled with the particles of their anger. They’d been together long enough to have gone through several blazing arguments, and Tamara had come to recognise the signs. With so little sleep coupled with being back in Towneley Manor, she couldn’t face another slanging match.
She walked over to the bookshelf and found the yellow book that her father used to read to her. She picked it up, and without a word left Billy and the library behind her, walking down the lonely hallway until she was back in her room.
After getting into bed and pulling the covers up to her chin, she opened the book. She grabbed her mobile phone and shone the light over the cover.
The cover showed two children sat by a railway. A man was in the background, smiling and waving. At the end of the tracks, far in the distance, was the faint glow of a magical land full of spirals and colour. ‘Jen and Pete and the Land of Obscure,’ read the title.
She couldn’t help the smile that threatened on the corner of her lips. There was something warm about the book, as though it could transport her back to a place where everything glowed and people were happy and had fun adventures. So what if it was written for kids? Maybe people never stopped being children.
When she opened the cover, the light on her phone didn’t shine over the pages of ‘Land of Obscure.’ Instead, another book was hidden inside it. This one had a more sinister cover. The title read ‘Diabolique Goetta; Corners of the Occult.’ The cover was dark and lined with scratches, and a black symbol took up most of the dark space. It was the black outline of a watchful eye, with a fiery sun burning around it.
The book of her childhood was gone, replaced by something all the more sinister. She looked down at the eye on the cover, and the eyeball stared back. It wasn’t right. This wasn’t the book her father read to her from.
But then, why was it here? Why was it hidden beneath that cover, of all the ones that could have been chosen?
Corners of the Occult, she read again.
She shut the book tight and threw it off her bed.
Chapter Five
When morning rose over
the manor and it was time for darkness to leave, it did so reluctantly, still gathering among the grey clouds and weaving between the spindly trees in the woods. Birds croaked maudlin songs from the branches of oak trees and mildew clung to the stems of grass. The old house stood above it all, watching the landscape around it and brooding, bricks decaying with the passage of time.
As she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the man in the painting with his devious stare. She stretched her arms out and felt her elbow joints crack. She looked to her right, and suddenly her arms stiffened.
On the table across from her bed, there was a whiskey glass. Next to it was the chair that she had seen in the hall. She got out of bed. For a second she didn’t want to touch the glass and instead just stared at the smudges on its side and the frosted glass at the bottom. She picked it up and smelled it, and the sour aroma of whiskey hit her nostrils.
