by Jack Lewis
She stepped back as if she expected the door to burst open at any minute. She held her breath and listened. At first, she only heard the thudding of her pulse in her ears. But then, concentrating, she heard something else.
Footsteps. Old wood groaning as something walked across it. Not boots, though. It sounded like bare feet padding on the floor, trying not to make a sound. Crouching down and making their way across the room that Scarlett had never seen.
A thought occurred to her that she should press her ear against the door and listen, like a child eavesdropping on a conversation. The metal would feel cold against her skin. A breeze would blow through the keyhole. She’d hear the footsteps in the forbidden room.
Maybe she should go in.
Go on, her mind told her. Go in.
No. There wasn’t a chance in hell she’d go in there. Suddenly the hallway seemed darker as if a hand had cupped a flame and extinguished the daylight. A sense of dread filled her, that everything was wrong and there was nothing that could ever put it right. Hopelessness strong enough to leave some people bedbound and to put others in the ground.
There were more footsteps. These were different. It was the sound of boots on the floor. They were approaching her from behind.
She turned, ready to face whatever it was.
“Are you okay?”
It was Trev. He held his hands in the air as if to demonstrate that he wasn’t a threat. Scarlett wondered what kind of look was on her face. She tried to control it.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just thought I heard something.”
“Isn’t this where Pete Jones got stuck?” he said, nodding at the metal door.
“I didn’t know you knew about that.”
“I was told about it from some of the kids at school. What are you doing here?”
Scarlett hugged herself to ward away the chill. “I thought I heard someone in there.”
“Want me to try and wedge it open?”
No. Never open the door.
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
Trev leaned against the wall. His t-shirt was damp with sweat. “I’m stopping for something to eat, just wanted to see if you need anything.”
At that minute, nothing sounded better than going downstairs and leaving the east wing behind. The problem was that if she left now, she’d never be able to face this part of the house again. It would have a hold on her, like the lake, and soon she wouldn’t be able to stay in the manor. With no money and nowhere else to go, she couldn’t let herself get into that state.
“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she said. “I just need to finish up here.”
As Trev walked down the hallway, Scarlett moved away from the metal door. Ahead of her was her father’s study. The doorframe was marked by scratches. She grabbed the handle and turned. To her surprise, the door was unlocked. Just as she opened it, a memory flashed before her.
She was seven.
She was scared.
Something had spooked her, but she didn’t know what.
The floorboards felt rough on her bare toes as she left her room, crossed the hall, and went to father’s study. She heard voices from inside, and a feeling of dread welled up inside her. Something about his study scared her more than whatever had made her leave her room.
As an adult, she should have felt different, but she didn’t. It seemed that fear wasn’t just something you got over. It wasn’t a tub full of water, where all you had to do was reach in and grab the plug.
Fear was a seed. The earlier it was planted, the taller and stronger it grew. Gawthorpe was a field of seeds, a forest of fear, and Scarlett had to walk through it carefully. You never knew whose attention the sound of your footsteps would attract.
She moved away from the door when she heard a noise inside. Again, bare feet padding across floorboards, but this time from Dad’s study. She knew it would be the height of stupidity to reach for the door handle. There were no good options here. Either someone was in there, creeping around the room in bare feet, or she was hearing things.
But what if it was Ruby? She was almost certain that her daughter was downstairs, and there was no way she could have passed her in the hall without Scarlett noticing.
There was always a nagging doubt though. Like the voice that told you to check you’d turned the oven off, even if you knew you’d flicked the switch. A voice that told you ‘Imagine if you don’t check, and it turns out that you didn’t switch it off? They’d blame you for the fire. You’d lose everything.’
The voice she heard now was telling her to check Dad’s study and make sure her daughter wasn’t inside. That if she walked away, she’d regret it.
Nagging doubts won out, as they often do. She turned the handle, pushed open the door and stepped inside.
She’d only been in once, and many years had passed since then. The study looked as she remembered it. Rows of bookcases filled one wall of the room. Her dad was a collector of old books, and not even one of the tomes had been written in the last century. The air smelled of age. Dust and mildew. It was stuffy for want of opening a window.
Scarlett looked around. There was a framed poster on the wall. It was crudely made, and lacking any sort of frame-worthy aesthetic. It was a roll of honour for something called the ‘Reincarnation Society’, and it consisted of a list of scrawled names of members of the club. She wondered why it had been put on display.
There was a desk in the centre. It was waist-high, made of oak. Sturdy enough to look like a battle station. On top of it was a globe on an axel. Looking closer, she saw that the geography was wrong; continents met where they should have been isolated, and countries that existed now were nowhere to be seen. It must have been made over a century ago. Her father had stuck little stickers on all the countries that he’d wanted to visit, marking locations like Paris, Rome and Berlin.
It was stupid, really, because he’d never even left the confines of the village. Scarlett knew he’d never have admitted it, but he was scared to go. He spent his life in a house that dominated the landscape around it. If he left it, he’d no longer have that security. As constricting as Gawthorpe was, it was familiar.
To that end, Scarlett noticed that most of the books in the cases against the wall were of history of the region, starting with their estate, and then the village, before expanding to cover the county. She hoped she didn’t have problems sleeping later. If all the books in the house were like this, it’d be dry reading.
Dad had spent hours in here, she knew. It was a place she’d always wanted to see but only once had the opportunity. It was like a piece of her father was bound within the walls. By being here, she was spending the time with him that had been stolen from her. But then, it wasn’t stolen really, was it? The time was there, but Dad had thrown it away.
She started to feel hot, as though she couldn’t breathe. It was all too much. She walked over to the window. On the way, she banged into the desk, and the Victorian globe spun on its axis. Its under-oiled joints made a squealing sound.
There was something she didn’t like about the study. A sense that she shouldn’t be there. She didn’t know if it was because father had always said she wasn’t allowed, or because there was something here she didn’t like.
Whatever it was, she felt hot. When she put her hand to her forehead and wiped it, her skin was damp. She needed air. Cold wind to chill her skin, and to rid the room of the smell of age that was suffocating it.
The globe still squealed. Round and round it went, whizzing through the countries. A sticker fluttered onto the desk. Ignoring it, Scarlett crossed the room.
She reached the window, and then looked on in shock.
A face was reflected in the glass. Cast on the window and staring back at her. Not hers, though. It was a leering face with squinting eyes.
She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She stared at the glass, and she saw a figure stood behind her, just feet away. Watching her from across the room.
She didn’t
want to move. She didn’t want to look at the face but knew she mustn’t close her eyes. The estate gardens were in front of her, but all she could see in the window was the pale figure.
She turned around, and nobody was there. The globe spun around and around, before finally coming to a stop.
Scarlett let out a sigh of relief. Trev’s earlier offer of food had never seemed more appealing, but she knew that to get out of the room, she’d have to pass through space where the figure had stood.
But no. Nothing had stood there. And what was she going to do? Stay in the study forever? Get Trev to bring her food and a bucket? Live like a recluse, and feed the village gossip; give them a story to tell about the woman who never left the room?
As she went to move, a book fell from a bookcase and landed on the floor. She walked over to it. The cover was green, but there was no writing on it. On the inside, there was just one piece of text. Two words, written in her dad’s handwriting.
Cursed Ones.
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning broke as it did every day over the Gawthorpe estate; dreary and foreboding, with daylight struggling to penetrate the shadows left by darkness. Scarlett dressed. She went downstairs to find Trev already heading for the door.
“I’m just going into the village,” he said.
“To see your dad?”
He shook his head.
She thought she should say something. Tell him that he should at least try and mend the bridge with his father. Who was she to judge, though? She’d spent years hiding from her past. Trev had tried to make her call her parents over the years, but she’d refused. They didn’t want her, so she didn’t need them.
“Need anything?” he said.
She thought about it. An all-inclusive package holiday to Spain would have been nice. “Can you pick up a couple of carbon monoxide detectors?” she said.
He looked at her strangely. “Why?”
“I just think we should be careful.”
She’d heard of the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. That it could give you headaches, turn you sick, make you see things. She was grasping at an answer to the things she’d witnessed. The reflection in the mirror, the figure in the glass in Dad’s study. There had to be an explanation more grounded than, as Clive would have put it, ‘spirits with ill-intent.’
When Trev left, she went around the house and opened every window she could find. Some of them struggled against her grip, reluctant to open after years of staying closed. It let a cold draught circulate in the dark rooms, but she didn’t want to take any risks. If carbon monoxide was leaking, she wanted it out of the house.
Really, though, she knew it couldn’t be that. Still, she had to grasp at something. What else could be the answer? That she’d seen a ghost? Gawthorpe estate was many things, but it wasn’t haunted. The only spirit with ill-intent around here was a bottle of whiskey that had sat on a shelf for years.
Trev returned a few hours later. They set the detectors in the house, two downstairs, then one in the east wing, another in the west. As Trev arranged them, a question occurred to her.
“Where’d you get the money, anyway?”
He scratched his head. It was a tic that always showed when he was nervous. “I pawned some of your dad’s old records.”
“Without asking?” she said.
“There’s so much stuff here, Scar, I didn’t think they’d be missed. Surely our safety’s more important than a reissue of The Greatest Hits of The Clash?”
With the supplies he’d bought from the village, Trev set to righting some of the DIY issues around the house. Ruby played in the living room, arranging her card house in front of the roaring fire.
Scarlett, unwilling to explore any more of the manor, decided to package some of the antiques that were still on display. If the busybodies ever came back, she didn’t want Penelope playing another game of ‘Guess the Price’.
As she took a French clock from the cabinet and set it in a box, she heard a crash. Ruby looked up, and her house tumbled, sending the queen of diamonds and king of hearts spinning out on the floor.
“What was that?” said Ruby.
Scarlett ran out into the lobby and through to the dining room. There, she saw that the dining room door had come away from its hinges and was on the floor.
Trev kneeled next to it. He had a screwdriver in his hand. “I was trying to replace a hinge,” he said.
Scarlett sighed. “Do you really think you can do this?” she said. “Let’s just get a contractor and bill the trust.”
“I told you, Scar. Let me do the work for free, then we’ll invoice the trust and keep the money. Your family owes you something after what they put you through.”
She’d always admired that Trev was a trier. He rarely thought things through, and instead preferred to learn by doing. Back in the flat, this had led to him dismantling the third toaster to fix it, only to leave it irreparable. For months after that, she’d spent her mornings warming bread under the grill.
Scarlett was more cautious. Before doing anything, she needed to know that nothing would go wrong. It was the risk factor that she didn’t like. If you took a chance, things could work out, sure. But there was a possibility that you’d mess up and leave things worse than they had been.
She hadn’t always been this way, though. After all, she hadn’t feared the risk of pregnancy. That changed after Jane died and Dad kicked her out. She found that she needed to have certainty in everything.
“Just leave it to me,” said Trev, picking up the door and propping it against the wall.
“This is like the wardrobe in our room all over again. Either leave it to the professionals or at least think about things before you do them.”
“There’s no need to be like that,” he said.
She didn’t know if it was tiredness, or just fear about their situation, but things were getting to her. She needed some sort of security. Until then, though, she couldn’t take it out on her husband. All he’d ever done was stay by her side.
Before she could say anything else, Ruby walked into the lobby. She took one look at the door and saw Trev struggling to put it back into place.
“Why don’t you just put a sheet over it?” she said.
Trev sighed. He put his screwdriver in his pocket. “I’m going to take more wood outside,” he said, then left.
Ruby looked at Scarlett. “Did you find your necklace?” she asked.
“Which necklace, honey?”
“The one in your room.”
She stepped back. She was surprised; how could Ruby have known about the necklace? She sensed yet another avenue opening that she would prefer not to walk down.
“Can I go play in my room?” said Ruby.
She didn’t want her daughter too far out of her sight, but she needed to get things done.
“Fine,” she said. “But the minute I shout your name, you come down immediately. Understood?”
Ruby nodded.
“Words please, Ruby. We’ve spoken about this.”
“Words,” answered the girl.
She sighed. “Go on, have fun.”
When Ruby went upstairs, Scarlett went into the dining room. With the staff gone and Jonathan missing, probably back in the village, there was a shortage of fresh linen. She pulled the tablecloth from the dining room table. Trev had left a hammer and nails on a table near the door, and she used these to pin the sheet over the hole where the door had been.
After straining to knock in the last nail, she stepped back and admired her work. The sheet didn’t quite reach down to the floor, leaving a gap of eight inches in the doorway. At least it covered the hole, though. It would have to do for now.
As she cycled through the list of jobs in her head, she heard a thudding sound from upstairs.
“Ruby?”
Her words echoed through the house, but no answer came.
Chapter Seventeen
She walked across the lobby and up the stairs.
Nothing. She went to the west wing, but Ruby wasn’t in her room, nor was she in Scarlett and Trev’s. There was no evidence that she’d even been there. She and Trev were too soft on their daughter, she knew. That little girl could wrap them both around her fingers.
Taking a deep breath, she left the west wing, crossed the stairs and walked onto the east. As she stepped into the hallway, she heard another thud. A tennis ball bounced out from the end of the corridor and then settled into a roll, making its way through the shadows and toward her.
