Haunted Lancashire (The Haunting Of Books 1-3)

by Jack Lewis

  “Thanks for this,” she said. “I guess I could leave my car here for a fortnight and nobody would ever see it, but it wouldn’t feel right.”

  “True. Not many safer places to leave a car than here. There’s a reason the road to Harrow Hall isn’t listed on sat navs.”

  “What’s with that? It made it a real pain in the arse to find.”

  “That’s the intention. Dad was hardly trying to advertise the place.”

  “I’d still feel bad leaving my car there like that. Seems irresponsible. If someone did happen to drive through, the last thing I need is an accident on my conscience.”

  Mag grinned but said nothing.

  “What?” said Loe.

  “You sound like Alt. He’s like that. Always thinking five steps ahead to disasters that haven’t happened yet.”

  “I just don’t want to be the cause of someone getting hurt.”

  “Nobody’s getting hurt out here, Loe. Nobody ever goes to the Hall, and they sure as shit don’t use the road.”

  “Someone must have. Stanway had to get his shopping from somewhere, unless he survived on roasted squirrel and forest mushrooms.”

  Mag was silent for a second. “That’s a good point.”

  “You really don’t know anything about him, do you?”

  “Look, when you showed up saying that you’re our half-sister, I wanted to sock you in the nose. Every subsequent question you asked made me want to do it again. But I understand your curiosity, because I’m the same. Every question you have, Loe, I also have. I was the youngest when we moved here, and those days are just a haze in my head. I barely remembered Dad. The only memories of him that I have are made up half by fragments of real things, and half by what Alt and Jay tell me about him. I can’t trust the pictures in my mind.”

  “I’m guessing most of those memories aren’t good. Jay and Alt seem to hate the guy.”

  “Altair can get vicious when you bring up Dad. Swears like a sailor who just got bit on the arse by a rabid dog. Jay, on the other hand, doesn’t like to criticize. You have to catch him in a really bad mood for his bitterness to come out, but it’s there. We all share it.”

  “Did your mum never tell you why Stanway just abandoned you?”

  “It wasn’t abandonment. Abandonment is leaving someone behind, which I guess is what he did to you. With us, it was different. The opposite. He cast us out, banished us.”

  “And your mum…”

  “She didn’t have a clue why. He wouldn’t answer her letters. He disconnected the phone. She once left us with Aunt Clare. She wasn’t a real aunt, just a nice lady who lived next door. Mum said she just needed a break, but I think she came out here. Whatever answers she came for, she didn’t get.”

  Loe took a second to process it. She didn’t know how she’d feel if it happened to her. At least with her situation, she had never known Stanway, so she had nothing to miss. But Altair, Jay, Mag had a father one day and then lost him the next. Why the hell would someone be so cold?

  “Something just occurred to me,” said Mag, finally slowing the car more and more, until they came to a stop.

  “What?” asked Loe.

  “You said you walked ten or so miles to the Hall, right? Well, we’ve just driven for more than that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My mile counter was 19,981. I’ve been waiting for it to hit 20,000. Sort of a game.”

  Loe could only dream of owning a car that had already driven less than 60,000 miles, let alone 20,000. But Mag still had a point. “You’re right. Where the hell is my car?”

  The forest was bathed in early evening grey, a darkness made more pronounced because it was a winter night, and winter nights struck early and quick. But the forest itself seemed to create its own darkness. Maybe it was the lack of artificial lights.

  Even in the darkness, though, she wouldn’t have missed her car. She’d left it on the road, after all. Mag was right. They’d driven way too far.

  “Let’s take a look around,” said Loe, unclipping her seatbelt. “Maybe I’ll recognize where I left it.”

  And then they were out in the forest air, but it would be wrong to call it fresh. Even far away from any city or town, any source of pollution, the air felt anything but healthy. It was cloying, as if it didn’t want to go down her throat. The pinecone smell was less like the scented air fresheners people put in their cars and more like cones submerged in bog water and left to rot. It was an unwholesome place.

  They walked away from Mag’s car, stepping off the road and breaching the tree line. The forest trees were a conundrum. They were few enough trees that someone could drive a car between them all, weaving a pathway through the woods. But the trees that were there had grown close together, enough that their roots probably competed for room to breathe deep in the earth. Even with a full woodland to grow into, the trees had chosen to grow close enough to strangle each other.

  It gave her a strange feeling. The further away from the road they went, the deeper into this unwholesome place they walked, the more she wanted to be somewhere warm and light. She suddenly felt like she needed to hear a voice, even if it was her own.

  “This is pointless. I know for a fact I didn’t leave the road. Maybe someone from the village towed it away?” said Loe.

  “The villagers don’t go anywhere near Harrow Hall. There’s no reason they’d use the road.”

  “Is it superstition or something?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Do they think the road is cursed? Or haunted, maybe? Do the villagers warn travels not to travel to Harrow Hall when the moon is full and crap like that?”

  “No…Dad was just an arsehole, by all accounts. The woods belong to the hall, and this is a private road. I heard that he used to call the police on anyone who came too close.”

  “So all of this…the road, the woods...it all belongs to…”

  “The family.”

  Those two words left a lot unspoken and seemed to create a tension between them. Or was Loe imagining it? She felt like the implication was that the family-owned this vast estate, but she was not family. That she shouldn’t expect a cut of it all just because Stanway had a fling with a woman he never spoke to again.

  “I don’t want anything, you know.”

  “We all want something, Loe.”

  “Stanway could have been dirt poor and I’d still have come to his funeral. It was just something I had to do. That doesn’t mean I came here to steal the family silver.”

  Mag didn’t say anything.

  Loe decided to fill the silence with something else. “How did he die?”

  “You’re very to-the-point. I like that. It’s an understandable question, but you might not like the answer.”

  “The newspaper didn’t say anything about how it happened.”

  “I can sympathize with their reluctance to print ‘hung himself from the top-story window.”

  “What?”

  “It was a family who found him. They were trying to get to a campsite in Yellowback forest, about half a dozen miles away. Their sat nav decided to bring them here. They were driving through the woods and they came to the house, where they saw Dad hanging from it.”

  “Like, from the roof?”

  “He’d wedged one end of rope in the window, shut it tight, then tied the other end around his neck and said bon voyage! It wasn’t long after Halloween, so I guess he thought he’d really go all out for the decorations this year. Or he’d gotten bored and decided to try a homemade bungee jump.”

  Loe had always had a healthy appreciation for gallows humor. It wasn’t cruel but instead a way for people to process things since everyone grieved differently. This caught her funny bone for a second.

  But then she imagined Stanway hanging from the uppermost window, and she felt ashamed at even smiling. She pictured the window, with the darkness of Harrow Hall staring out from it. Stanway hanging with a rope coiled around his neck, tongue lolling out, face bloated.
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  Although she felt bad, it was in a general sense rather than personal. The way she’d feel bad if she heard something tragic on the news. Empathy for a stranger’s misfortune, but nothing more intimate than that. She wondered if Mag was the same. Judging from her joke, maybe she was. Or perhaps that was just a way of coping with it all.

  “The coroner said he was riddled with cuts,” said Mag. “All over his arms. His neck. Old cuts that had healed over, some of them from years ago. Self-inflicted, judging by the patterns. In the house, they found boxes of all kinds of shit. Rat poison. Lots and lots of bleach bottles, half-empty. Tons of different kinds of pills, half-empty. Either he’d taken them, or he’d thrown them away. God knows.”

  “What do you think?” asked Loe.

  “I think he was fighting some kind of inner battle. Wanting to end it all, then stopping himself. Taking pills, throwing up. Cutting himself, then staunching the blood.”

  “He was all alone out here. Going through this again and again. Trying to work up the courage to… But why?”

  “Courage?” said Mag, stopping dead. “Don’t give me that shit. There was nothing brave about the man.”

  She carried on walking, and Loe realized that they’d left her car even further behind now.

  “Mag, I definitely didn’t drive up here.”

  “Right, of course. So let’s double back, and-”

  Something crunched in the forest beyond them.

  From far away, further, than a stone’s throw, came the sound of wood snapping.

  “A squirrel,” said Mag. “Or a fox.”

  “Let’s get back to the car. I really didn’t think it’d be this hard to find where I left mine. Maybe I’ll go to Eldike in the morning and see if someone towed it away.”

  As they headed back to Mag’s car, they heard it again. A snapping sound, only closer this time.

  Turning around, all Loe saw was trees and darkness, nothing else. The dim outline of Mag’s car was ahead but it felt too far away, like a distant coastline stretching before a tired swimmer, with a mile of shark-infested water between them and it.

  Then they heard something else. Someone humming a song under their breath, but in a tuneless way. A long, drawn-out, a sound coming from someone’s throat.

  “Okay, screw this,” said Mag. “Come on.”

  They sprinted to the car. Mag pressed her fob, and the indicator lights blinked three times. They got in, and Mag locked the door. But she didn’t start the car yet.

  “Listen,” she said.

  The only thing Loe could hear was her pulse. Throb-throb-throb, matching the chut-chut-chut her car engine had made before it died earlier that day.

  “There!” said Mag, prodding Loe and then nodding at her windscreen.

  There, in the ocean of darkened forest, was a figure. Far away, sloping through the trees. So far away that a shape was all it could be. It stopped then as if it knew they were staring at it.

  Loe felt a cold dread paralyze her body, so she grit her teeth and willed it to go away. She stared at the shape.

  She could almost see…a gown?

  It isn’t safe for you here.

  “It’s her,” she said. “The old woman.” Her relief was almost intoxicating. “We better help her.”

  They got out of the car. Mag opened the trunk and handed Loe a gold club. “You get the four-iron. I’ll take the five.”

  “You’re a golfer?”

  “Pete left them in the house when he pissed off with his little girlfriend. When he came back for them, I told him to go fuck himself. There’s a driving range near my house, and when I get annoyed, I go there and whack a few hundred balls into oblivion, and I pretend they’re Pete’s head.”

  “Pete?” said Loe. “And right now you’re with Ariella.”

  “Right. Come on, let’s go see who the hell this old bint is.”

  Night had descended quicker than she’d expected. There were no stars, but a pale moon loomed way above, watching them. The old lady seemed to be waiting for them way across the forest, never moving from her tree. After closing half the gap, Loe still couldn’t make her out at all. It was as if the darkness refused to let them see the old lady properly.

  “Maybe she has dementia or something,” said Loe. “She must be from the village. When my gran was at her worst, she’d get up in the middle of the night and-”

  Mag tapped her.

  Loe looked up. The woman was gone.

  “Damn it! She’s going to freeze to death out here.”

  “Won’t she wander back home?” said Mag.

  “Home might not mean much to her. Depends how far gone she is. She might stay out here all night on her own. And by then…let’s just find her.”

  Loe had no idea how long they searched. Time seemed to lose all meaning in the forest, and her sense of direction didn’t fare much better. It was easy to spin yourself around in that maze of trees. To search one way, then another, and then accidentally loop back on yourself. The only way they could stay orientated was when Mag would press her car key fob and they’d see orange lights blinking from the distance.

  At one point, Loe looked up at a tree and saw the old woman perched on a branch, staring down at her. The sight was like getting punched in the chest.

  “The hell?”

  “Loe?”

  When she looked back up, the lady was gone. That was when Loe knew her brain was getting too excited, and she resolved to never go traipsing around a creepy forest, in the dark, again.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I must be more tired than I thought.”

  “Me too. Let’s look for just a little longer.”

  It was when Mag pressed the fob and no lights answered, that they decided they couldn’t go on.

  “We’re out of range,” said Mag. “And it’s dark as shit. The last thing we need is to snap our ankles in a rabbit hole.”

  “How about we drive into Eldike and tell someone about her?” said Loe.

  “We can’t go knocking on everyone’s doors and asking if the mad forest lady belongs to them. What if someone says yes and asks where she is? What do we tell them, that we lost her?”

  “There must be a pub or something. We’ll speak to the landlord. Everyone knows each other in these old villages, right?”

  Mag shrugged. “I suppose it’s worth a try.”

  As they headed in what should have been the direction of Mag’s car, a peculiar feeling stalked up on Loe. It was a cold sensation, one that froze her blood. She felt with utter certainty that she was being watched.

  She imagined an old lady with a crooked back and a gown leering at them from the trees. Turning around, she saw nothing.

  “Loe?” asked Mag.

  “It’s nothing.”

  But there it was again. That feeling of harsh eyes fixed on her, watching her intently.

  With it came another feeling. A certainty that whoever they were, they weren’t prepared to just watch her. No, they weren’t just observing. Loe felt a current of hate in the air, a wave of hate as hot as the forest breeze was cold. Something was in the woods, something that had no love for her or Mag.

  She found herself speeding up. She gripped the four iron tighter, ready to club the hell out of anyone who stepped out of the shadows. Holding a big piece of metal filled her with resolve and helped her carry on, and by the time they reached Mag’s car, nothing had stepped forward to meet her challenge.

  “Let me just say, for the record, that I hate these woods,” said Mag.

  “An entirely sensible opinion. We should get t-shirts printed.”

  “Let’s get to Eldike, tell someone about the old hag, and at least we’ll have done our bit,” she said. Her voice trailed off into a selection of curses and insults under her breath, the tamest of which mentioned a dim-witted old bat.

  Minutes later they were driving again, with beams from the headlamps cutting through the darkness ahead, hot air blasting out of the air conditioning vents. Mag went a hell of a lot slow
er this time. She had both hands on the wheel, and she was biting her lip and squinting at the road ahead. Loe was about to say something, but she looked at Mag’s eyes and then decided not to.

  Loe was looking forward to seeing Eldike. When she’d passed it earlier that day, she’d thought it looked like a dismal village, one not worth stopping in. But now she just wanted to see some lights. People. Any sign of normality.

  It was after another thirty minutes that Loe felt like something wasn’t right. That they should have gotten out of the woods by now, and they sure as hell should have reached Eldike. Something was wrong here.

  When Harrow Hall loomed back in front of them, she was certain of it.

  Mag killed the engine. They sat there in silence.

  Harrow Hall waited ahead of them, watching them.

  “How the hell…” began Mag.

  Loe couldn’t believe it either. “We headed away from the hall, right? You stopped the car, we got out and looked for the lady, and then we got back in. You never turned the car around.”

  “Nope. It’s a straight road. It only goes one way.”

  “You’re telling me. Straight back to Harrow Hall, apparently.”

  Chapter Five

  Loe could hardly believe it, but she was actually glad to be back in Harrow Hall. They were sitting in a small study, having decided that the living room/kitchen/bathroom that their father had lived in felt too open and too cold.

  Jay had gathered up four lamps and found plug sockets for them, lighting the place up as much as he could. Altair made them all a cup of hot chocolate. Jay’s hot chocolate was cooling down in the kitchen where it would stay abandoned, and he was sipping whiskey from a mug.

  Loe tasted her hot chocolate, then set it down. She reached out toward Jay, who grinned and passed her his mug. The whiskey was sharp, and it hit the spot much better than a cup of cocoa.

  “Cayenne pepper, anyone? I found it in a cupboard,” said Altair.

  “Pepper? In hot chocolate?” said Loe. “That’s a war crime.”

  Mag shook her head. “Alt used to eat all kinds of weird crap. I thought you’d grow out of it.”

  “Cayenne pepper is good for blood pressure. It gives anything a kick.”