Haunted Lancashire (The Haunting Of Books 1-3)

by Jack Lewis

  Something was happening. She felt lightheaded. Then dizzy. A blowing sound in her ears. A dark shadow falling over her like a blanket. Was she dreaming? Should she try and shake herself awake?

  And then the room disappeared. Lights flared. Like the flash of a camera, but she knew it couldn’t have been. Her breath caught in her throat as a different scene lay before her.

  Somehow, everything had changed. She wasn’t in bed anymore. She couldn’t remember leaving the bedroom, but she must have.

  She was outside. The wind lapped at her, blowing the creases of her nightgown and sneaking up the sleeves. The wind whined as it slithered through the trees. The air smelled of smoke. She tried to get to her feet, but couldn’t. Her legs were too heavy, and try as she might, they refused to cooperate.

  She heard a scream.

  Her legs wouldn’t work. Come on, damn it. Come on.

  She looked to her right and gasped.

  Just fifty feet away, was the lake. Even the quickest glimpse of the murky waters chilled her. Made her wish she was far away. Her adult brain – all her logic and her maturity, disappeared. That was what the lapping waters did to her. Sent her hurtling into the black depths of a childhood she wanted to escape.

  She wouldn’t go back there. Knowing that to run was to admit defeat, she forced herself to look at the lake. On the east side of it, not far from the bank, was a pyre. Someone had collected wood and dumped it there, before setting it alight.

  It seemed that now she had noticed it, the bonfire next to the lake intensified, and she saw flames twist up into the sky. She heard the wood snap as the blaze burned through it.

  Someone screamed again. Her legs wouldn’t move, her pulse wouldn’t slow. It was a rhythm in her head, bringing a dull pain with every beat. This didn’t feel like a dream now. It was too real. The wind too cold, the fire too bright, the crackle of the wood too loud. The yellow flames cast an orange glow on the surface of the lake.

  She looked closer, and then opened her mouth in terror. Someone was tied to the pyre. Not a stranger though. No. Not just a stranger, bad though that would be.

  It was Ruby. She was stuck in the middle of the blaze, the flames devouring her skin, the yellow blaze burning her hair, her eyelashes, her lips. Strangling out the cries that came from her throat. Screaming in a way that Scarlett had never wanted to hear from her daughter. It made her want to scream herself, to do anything to drown out the horrible sound.

  She tried to run. This time her legs started to move. Slow, like ancient machinery clanking to life. She moved in the direction of the fire, but she couldn’t speed up. She wouldn’t get there in time, it was too late.

  As she moved with all her will, she heard a voice. A terrible voice. Words growled through an old throat.

  ‘A life for a li-’

  And then she awoke. This time it wasn’t to the image of a pyre, but of daylight streaming in through the bedroom window. It poured into the room, banishing the darkness, before meeting its match in the hallway where the gloom was so thick that little daylight could reach it.

  Trev was next to her. He had his back to her, with his right arm on his pillow and his head resting on it. His breathing was steady, almost falling into a snore but stopping just in time.

  She got up. Her forehead was wet, but her chest felt cold. She wanted to run into the hall, but Trev would think she was stupid if he saw her panicking. After all, it was a dream. Just images conjured up by her brain, no doubt disturbed by coming back to her childhood home.

  She got into the hallway and then reached Ruby’s room. She gripped the door handle, turned it and pushed the door open. She couldn’t help her breath catching in her chest.

  Then came relief. Ruby was in bed. She stirred when Scarlett stepped into the room, but she didn’t wake. It was best to let her sleep. The last few days had been tough on her.

  Hell, Scarlett had to admit that it was getting to her, too. She’d put on a brave face for Ruby and Trev, but she was tired. And she was scared. She worried that bad memories left a heavier imprint than good ones and that the last few days would affect Ruby later.

  She needed sleep. She would be stronger then. Less susceptible to the house. It was just wood and bricks. Old timber and ancient stone, made of materials that deflected the light and sucked in the darkness, but just a building, nonetheless.

  “Stupid,” she muttered to herself. Her voice broke the stillness of the room and it didn’t feel right.

  She turned and went into the hallway, and then stopped. Something was wrong.

  She looked around, wondering what had changed in the hallway.

  The wall.

  She saw it, stepped back, and folded her arms across the chest. On the wall outside Ruby’s bedroom, three circles had been carved into the wood. They were of varying size, and they interlinked with each other in the centre. She had seen them before, she was sure of it, but not here. Not inside.

  The marks. There was something sinister about them. A warning, maybe. A game. A trick. Of the house, or a man. Of something cruel.

  There she went again. The house was full of old things like this, of course. After all, it had been in the Gawthorpe family for centuries, and things were only replaced and refurbished when necessary. Marks were just marks.

  There was something wrong here. Something about the marks that made dread well in her stomach. She took a step back until she felt her back touch the wall behind her.

  When she looked at the floor, she realised that these marks had not been done in years gone by.

  On the floorboards, so small that they were easy to miss, were little shavings of wood.

  Chapter Eight

  “I want the police here, and I want Ruby in with us all the time,” she told Trev after he’d woken up.

  She spent ten minutes explaining what she’d heard during the night, and then what she’d found in the morning. So as not to appear irrational, she left out the dream she’d had.

  The nightmare of the pyre was just an image in her head, whereas the wood shavings were something tangible. They were proof that something had happened, and the thought of it made her feel cold. That someone had been in the hallway at night, making their mark on the old walls.

  “I’m not convinced,” said Trev. “It’s not like we inspected every inch of the place before we went to bed. The mark could have been there already.”

  He kneeled under the circles and inspected the floor. He ran his finger along the floorboards, then brought it up to his face to look at it. Then he walked down the hallway and did the same at other places.

  There was something about the circles that repulsed Scarlett. It wasn’t how they looked, or the way they interlinked. There was something else about them. A terrible meaning held in the gouges. They were a stain on a house that had already seen its fair share.

  “I want to paint over them,” she said.

  “What colour?”

  “Black, red, neon pink. It doesn’t matter.”

  “There are more over here,” said Trev, from the far end of the hall. “These aren’t wood shavings, Scar. It’s just where some of the splinters are flaking. And some of it is dust. This place is old as hell.”

  “What about the scratching? It’s not a coincidence that these markings appear the morning after I hear noises.”

  “How do we know they’ve only just appeared? I mean, look over there, on the doorframe above Rubes’s room. You see those little notches?”

  She saw three lines scratched into the dark wood.

  “I didn’t notice them yesterday,” said Trev. “But they must have been there. It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it. Plus, it was dark when we came to bed.”

  “I want her in with us,” said Scarlett.

  Trev nodded. “Fine. Just for one night. We don’t want to get her used to that again. You know how hard it was to get her to sleep alone.”

  “And I’m painting over the circles. I think I saw some
tins of oak brown in the kitchen.”

  “You get full authority on aesthetic choices,” he said, with a smile. “You know that.”

  He was referring to the numerous redecoration plans she’d had for their flat. Although there wasn’t much they could do to a rented property, she’d wanted to make it nicer.

  When she’d run her ideas by Trev, he’d just shrugged and said ‘Go ahead, Scar. All I want is a veto option.’ She knew he didn’t care; he just wanted to feel like he had some power.

  It maybe wasn’t the best idea for Ruby to sleep with them, but Scarlett knew she wouldn’t get a wink if her daughter wasn’t where she could see her. Trev was right, though. One night had to be the limit. She didn’t want to stir up old problems.

  Back in the flat, Ruby had taken to getting into their bed in the middle of the night. Rather than fight it, she and Trev had allowed it for a night. But one evening became two, then three. Soon, Ruby had wanted to sleep in her parents’ bed all the time. Getting her out of that habit had been a nightmare.

  “I’m starving,” said Trev. “You get Ruby, I’ll go raid the larder.”

  She nodded, but her thoughts weren’t on food.

  Chapter Nine

  Scarlett met the morning with a mug of coffee. Three spoonfuls and the barest trace of milk, so that it swished in the porcelain like treacle. Trev was already up and alert, and it would be a while before Scarlett reached that state, but she’d get there. Since Trev was a morning person and she never would be, she needed something to help her catch up. That’s why she always thought of coffee as a great equaliser.

  “What are we doing today then?” she said.

  Trev looked at her. No sleep in his eyes, no puffiness in his skin. She envied how alert he was. “I want to take a look around,” he said.

  After a day of exploring the grounds and the other rooms in the house, the three of them were in the living room. Ruby was sitting on a rug playing with a set of marbles that she’d found somewhere.

  Next to her, a fire licked over wood that Trev had found in an outhouse near the kennels. Scarlett sat in a chair close to her daughter. When she saw the light of the fire flicker on Ruby’s face, she couldn’t help but think about her nightmare.

  “Move away from there a little, honey,” she said.

  “But I’m cold.”

  “You’ll get too hot if you stay there.”

  Trev sat on a two-seater chair beside a bookcase. There was a space next to him, and he’d patted the cushion when Scarlett came downstairs. Instead of joining him, she’d taken the space near Ruby. She couldn’t leave much distance between her and her daughter after her nighttime visions.

  The living room hadn’t seen much care over the last few years. It wasn’t that it was dirty; the staff had done their job well enough. The problem was that Dad had started hoarding books. There was a bookcase near Trev that showed not an inch of space on its shelves. In the corner of the room, where Scarlett remembered there was once a coat stand, was a pile of tomes.

  “He was a book worm then, your dad?” Trev picked up a book. He leafed through the pages. “Some pretty interesting stuff here.”

  Scarlett shook her head. “Not really. I mean, he’d sometimes read adventure books. Allan Quatermain and stuff like that. But these are all history books. He must have become a collector after I left. Or maybe after Mum died.”

  A chime sounded through the house. It sounded like glass bottles smashing. Ruby looked up. A marble fell from her hand and rolled along the floorboards.

  “What’s that?”

  “The doorbell,” said Scarlett.

  Her daughter looked shocked. “That’s a doorbell? It’s really loud.”

  Trev stood up. “When you’re in a house like this, you need a big doorbell so that you can actually find the door.”

  He went to answer the door. When he returned a minute later, four people were with him. One wore a dog collar that marked him as the village vicar. Another was a woman, mid-thirties. A clanging sound came from the numerous bracelets on her wrist that shook as she walked. The other two guests were old women, wrapped up tight in thick coats and with scarves bundled around their necks.

  One of the old women stopped in the doorway and stared at Scarlett.

  “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown,” she said.

  Should she know this woman? Although the village was just a few miles away, growing up in Gawthorpe had isolated her from the villagers. Her mum and dad sometimes had social functions at the estate and invited influential people from close by. These were rare because Dad hated them and they gave Mum anxiety.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” said the old woman, with a smile. “Well, it’s been a while. I expect I’m a lot greyer than when you last saw me.”

  The vicar spoke next. “We better introduce ourselves.”

  Trev held a hand up in the air. “No. Let me see if I got this right.”

  As part of his reading, Trev had once studied a book on memory. Since then he’d built a memory palace in his head, though Scarlett had no idea what he stored in there. One trick from the book was a way of instantly remembering the names of the people you met. Trev loved to try it out whenever possible.

  He pointed at the vicar first. “Scarlett, this is Clive Harley. He runs the Jesus shop.”

  The vicar smiled. “That’s not how we usually describe the church, but yes. Pleased to meet you.”

  Clive had a face that made his age seem like it could swing either way. His skin was clear and looked soft, but his hair had begun the greying process a while ago. He could have been in his late thirties or early fifties, it was just impossible to say.

  “Mum and Dad used to take us to service at Easter and Christmas,” she said, shaking his hand. “They weren’t big on it, really. And ignore Trev. He thinks he’s funny.”

  Clive gripped her hand. His fingers were warm. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it. I woke up one day last week to find graffiti on the church wall. Some bugger had sprayed ‘Praise Satin’ in yellow paint. I almost felt like correcting the spelling, but I thought better of it.”

  Trev patted the priest on the shoulder. “Take a seat, Clive, we’ll get drinks in a minute.” Then he turned to the mid-thirties woman.

  Before Trev could speak, the woman interrupted him. She stared at Scarlett and said, “Rita Hildegast. Nice to meet you.”

  Her voice sounded older than she looked, and her name was straight from the 1940s. She was a woman of sharp features, from the pointiness of her chin to the way her hips stuck out. Her wrists held so many bracelets that they must have made her arms heavy. Scarlett was sure she knew her, somehow. Something tugged at her mind and told her to stop and really look at this woman’s face.

  “As you can tell, Rita’s a psychic,” said Trev. “She knew I was going to introduce her before I even opened my mouth.”

  Rita nodded. “Your husband likes jokes, evidently,” she said. “But psychic isn’t the preferred term now. I offer clairvoyance services.”

  “That’s where she helps you finalise a house purchase,” said Clive, with a smile.

  The psychic glared at the vicar. He and Trev seemed to make the worst comedy double-act ever. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea for the two of them to be in the same room.

  “That’s conveyance,” said Rita. “Not clairvoyance.”

  “So,” said Trev. “do you help the police on murder cases, find kids trapped in wells, that sort of thing?”

  The psychic shot Trev a ‘stop the bloody jokes’ face.

  “She helped me find my keys once,” said Clive. “But it turned out they were down the side of my sofa.”

  Rita kept her cool, but when she spoke, her voice seemed to fill the room. Scarlett supposed that it was important to have a good oratory voice if you were a psychic. Didn’t most of them make their money from shows?

  “I actually did assist with the police once,” she said. “If you recall, a village boy went missing some nine years a
go after leaving school for the day.”

  “I remember,” said Clive, and nodded. Any trace of humour left his face now.

  “A week of turning over every stone in the village, and the police had nothing. The boy’s parents were distraught. They came to me and begged me to help. Within one day, he was found.”

  “They must have been relieved,” said Trev.

  Rita sighed. “They would if they’d come to me earlier. As it was, it was only the boy’s body I found. His soul had already departed.”