A choked cry escaped Guy. He staggered away from the window, heart in throat, and reflexively raised his handful of vines as a shield.
Without his body to block the sunlight through the window, the room’s interior was clearer. He could see the table with its chair pulled out, the china cabinet, and the two closed doors. There was no sign of the woman.
Guy swallowed around the lump in his throat. He threw the vines to the ground and half walked, half jogged towards the back door. Passing his pickup truck, he seized on a hammer from amongst the tools that filled the back. He held it ahead of himself as he stepped up to the open kitchen door. “Hello!”
Even as he spoke, he knew he wouldn’t get a response. His skin crawled, and his heart leapt as he crept over the kitchen’s threshold. Floating flecks of dust glowed in the light coming through the window, and their motion kept catching in the corners of his eyes. He inhaled through his mouth and rolled his feet to muffle the noise as he shifted towards the door to the dining room.
The handle screeched as he turned it, making Guy flinch. He bumped the door open with his foot, hammer held above his head just in case, but the space beyond was still empty.
She can’t have escaped through the kitchen, or I would have seen her when I went to the pickup truck. That means she went… where? Into the family room? Up the stairs?
Guy tried the door to the family room first. The space remained intact, the way he’d last seen it—fluffs of decayed mouse fur on the floor, mould creeping over the walls, and vines strangling the window. The gap between the plants was too small for a human to fit through without disturbing the foliage. Guy gave the room a fleeting scan before closing the door again.
He went to the door leading to the hallway and bent his ear close to the wood to listen. A bird called out in the distance. Guy’s heartbeat thundered. For a moment, no other noises reached his ears. Then a floorboard groaned.
Guy threw open the door. It banged against the wall and rebounded, the wood shivering from the impact. The space beyond was empty.
I didn’t imagine it… did I? The lump in Guy’s throat had grown painful. He stepped into the foyer and looked in both directions. I’m not crazy, and I’m not delusional. If someone’s in my house, I’ve got to make them leave.
The mysterious door upstairs groaned closed again. A dreadful weariness coursed through Guy, making his limbs feel heavy. He approached the stairs, touched the dusty bannister, and began to climb.
The old boards were noisy beneath his feet, even though he tried to stay to the stair’s edge. Dust stirred up during his earlier exploration still hung in the air. He wondered how long it would take to fully settle. Hours? Days? The hallway came into view in increments but remained empty.
At the top of the stairs, Guy stopped to listen. The upper floor felt eerily quiet. He held his breath, ears straining, then flinched as the door to his left moved.
The hinges groaned as they shifted. The door drew inwards, as though inviting Guy into the room. He tightened his grip on the hammer and approached.
The double bed, sheets neatly made and pillows squared, suggested he’d found the master bedroom. It was a bizarre sight; the bed was impeccably tidy, except for the muffling layer of dust. The centre of the mattress sagged sadly, and the once-white pillowcases were an unappealing yellow.
The room was empty, but he’d finally located the source of the shifting door. Odd that I didn’t see it move the first time I stood on the landing. Maybe I was facing the wrong direction?
He lowered the hammer. The longer the search went on, the more convinced he felt that he wouldn’t find anyone. The figure at the window had seemed so vivid at the time, but doubt had started to prick holes in the memory. Am I really, truly sure it was a woman, and not an illusion? Maybe I saw my own reflection. Shadows from the trees could have given the impression of long hair. Because it’s impossible for someone else to be in the house. It’s got to be impossible.
The large window held a view of the woods behind the house. Only a handful of straggly vines blocked the glass, but they couldn’t reach more than halfway up. Guy approached the window.
There was no sign of humanity in any direction. No lights, no smoke, no break in the carpet of green growing over the hills surrounding him. He’d never felt so isolated in his life.
There isn’t anyone in Rookward. There couldn’t be, because there was no running water and no food. No one would survive there without supplies, and to bring any quantity of supplies, a car would have been necessary, and Guy’s truck was the only vehicle on the property. The thought wasn’t as reassuring as he would have liked it to be.
He rubbed at the hairs that had risen over the back of his arms. A bird flitted through the trees then took off in a flurry of wings and shrieks. Something about the woods—their expansiveness, their density, or their colouring—made Guy’s pulse quicken. He tucked the hammer into his back pocket and stepped away from the window.
A dull-blue baby monitor sat on the bedside table. The speaker was crusted over, and the paint was chipped, but it looked similar to the baby monitors Guy had seen in the window of the local dollar store. He imagined what it would have been like to buy one with Savannah, picking out their favourite colour, reading the instruction manual together. A sickening, miserable ache settled in his chest, and suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to escape the bedroom.
Guy drew in a series of harsh gasps in the hallway. His hands were shaking, and his head ached. He no longer cared about what he thought he’d seen in the window; he just wanted some kind of action that would give his mind a reprieve from itself. The vines offered that in bountiful measure. He stumbled down the stairs, knocked the dining room chair further askew as he passed it, and stalked around the outside of the building until he found the basin. Then he attacked the vines near the kitchen door, tearing at them, not noticing when flecks of dirt hit his bared teeth or shoots scraped his arms. He abandoned his original plan of working through the windowed sections methodically and grabbed any plant within reaching distance. If the vine grew too thick to pull up at its base, he used the shears to hack through it.
Each time he passed one of the windows, he reflexively set his jaw and narrowed his eyes before tearing the foliage away from it. No phantom faces appeared.
His intensity gradually dulled as he spent his energy. By the time he staggered away from the house, grimy, scratched, and bone-tired, he felt only a foggy, indistinct sadness.
He’d cleared most of the western wall in his frenzy. Some of the plants still clung to the stones beyond his reach, but he suspected they would wither and fall off after a few days without roots. The conquered vines had overflowed his bucket early in the assault and littered the ground in clumps. It would take a few trips to get them into the forest, but Guy’s hands were numb, and his arms ached, so he figured that could wait until after he’d rested and eaten.
He stripped off the gloves and flexed his fingers. They were red but the only part of him that hadn’t been splattered with sap and grime. He glanced towards the driveway, where a hot shower and comforting hug were just a few hours away. He could get into his pickup truck and not have to worry about what he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—ever again.
No, you committed to this. Don’t flake.
Guy snorted and went back to the truck. He dragged out one of the large jugs of water he’d brought. If he’d possessed the energy and motivation, he could have lit a fire and figured out a way to heat the water, but it seemed like too much effort for such a small luxury. He stripped and, with soap from his toiletries bag and cupfuls of water sloshed out of the jug, did his best to clean himself.
There’s no one inside the house. He scrubbed suds into his hair and tried to ignore the weight of the unease that had settled onto his back. There can’t be. It’s an old house, and the atmosphere is making your mind think it sees things that aren’t real. You won’t help anything by worrying about it, so put it out of your mind. Do your job.
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By the time he changed into a fresh set of clothes the jug was empty, he was shivering, and he felt nowhere near as clean as he would have liked. The sap was stubborn and probably wouldn’t fully peel off without an exfoliating scrub. In spite of that, his mood had lifted, and he’d regained at least part of his earlier enthusiasm. Something about washing in the outdoors made him feel stronger and bolder.
Status check. We’ve got one quarter of the building clear of vines. That should let some light into those rooms, at least. Which means I can set up a bit of a base and start stripping the house’s guts out.
He hopped from one foot to the other in an effort to warm himself. The house loomed over him, its black windows ever watchful, and he half wished he could stay outside and continue attacking the vines. But there was a lot to do before the sun set. At the very least, he needed to set up a place to sleep and develop a plan for clearing out the damaged furniture.
Procrastinating never achieved anything. Get moving.
Guy set his shoulders, collected armfuls of equipment from the pickup truck’s back, and stepped through the kitchen door.
Chapter Seven
The house looked wholly different with light. As Guy looped through the dining room, his sleeping bag and bucket of supplies in one arm and spare blankets slung over his shoulder, he could finally see the fruit-patterned plates in the china cabinet and the chips and scratches on the table. He stopped in the foyer to listen, but the only noises were deep, heavy creaks from the aged wood shifting as the sun warmed it.
All of the downstairs rooms were filled with decaying furniture, which meant the cleanest place to sleep would be the empty upstairs room he’d found earlier. Guy began climbing the stairs. The family portraits on the walls were finally visible, and he stopped to study his predecessors.
They showed a family of five: a brown-haired, middle-aged man sat in the centre of a lounge, one arm draped over his wife’s shoulders. She was tall and thin, and a small smile curled her lips. Sat on either side of them were a boy, a girl, and a toddler.
Although the arrangement was banal, the picture made Guy’s skin crawl for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate. There was something fundamentally, thoroughly wrong with it. The husband’s eyes didn’t quite meet the camera. The children weren’t smiling. Although the man’s arm rested over his wife’s shoulders, the fingers were lifted away from her skin, as though he were reluctant to properly hold her. And even disguised by the picture’s warped colours, the family was unusually pale, as though they never left the house.
He leaned away from the photographs and continued up the stairs. The more he explored the house, the more he believed that there was something strange about the family that had once owned it. Maybe they belonged to some kind of fundamentalist cult? That would explain why their home was so remote. It might also provide a reason for their sudden departure if they were expecting the end of times or had been called away by their cult leader.
They must have been related to us somehow for Grandpa to inherit their home. I wonder if he knew them? Did he ever visit here as a child? Was there a reason he never used this place?
Guy’s curiosity was piqued. He couldn’t afford to spend weeks picking through the building for clues, but he intended to keep his eyes open. With luck, he might find hints during the cleaning to tell him what had happened.
He reached the top of the stairs and started towards the empty room at the other end of the hallway. As he passed the doors he hadn’t opened yet, he stopped to look inside them. The children’s bedroom was right next to the master bedroom. Two beds and a cot had been crammed into the space, and the other half of the baby monitor hung from the end of the cot. That puzzled Guy; the house was easily large enough for each of the children to have a room—and there was evidence that they had, at one point—but they’d all been crowded into the one space.
Almost like they were afraid to sleep alone.
Guy shivered and kept moving. He found a bathroom and tested the tap. The pipes were bone dry, which didn’t surprise him. If the water had been shut off, the solution might be as simple as getting it reconnected, but because it was so far from other houses, Rookward was more likely to run on well water. In that case, if the tap wasn’t functional, the fault was in the pipes. If he couldn’t find the problem and fix it himself, he would either have to pay a plumber or sell the house as-is and take a hit on the profit.
Past the bathroom was another mostly empty room with indents on the carpet where a bed had once sat. Was it the children’s choice to move in together, or the parents’? Either explanation was strange. He hitched the sleeping bag a little higher under his arm and turned the hallway’s corner.
The final room, which held only a table and a chair, was a welcome relief from the rest of the building. There was no evidence of the previous family to unnerve or depress him. Two well-sized windows overlooked the woods and let in a healthy level of light. The only thing about the room Guy didn’t like was how far he needed to travel to get outside. The idea of racing along the hallway, trying to reach the kitchen door but having to pass through virtually the entire house, flashed through Guy’s mind. He dismissed it after a moment of hesitation. The only plausible threat to his safety was a house fire, and he was too careful to start one by accident.
Guy dropped the bucket and snagged a dust cloth out of it. He wiped down the table before putting his bedding there, then he set to work sweeping out the rest of the room. He was glad the family had chosen to leave the wooden floorboards instead of covering them with carpet; it made his job infinitely easier. Setting up his bedroom took no more than a couple of minutes. He unrolled the sleeping bag on top of a layer of blankets and tossed the pillow on top.
An odd crackling noise made him turn towards the door. The sound faded after a second, leaving Guy frowning. If he hadn’t known it was impossible, he would have thought he’d heard distorted voices coming through the baby monitor.
It’s probably branches dragging across the stones. Or maybe some kind of animal living in the attic. I’ll have to check up there before I finish working on the building.
He had little time before nightfall would make work too difficult, so Guy jogged back downstairs and went to unpack the truck. He dragged the remaining jugs of water and crates of food into the dining room and arranged them on the table. Then he collected changes of clothes, torches, and his radio before refastening the tarp over the work tools to protect them from the damp night air.
A crimson sunset painted the tops of the trees as Guy ate a muesli bar and wandered through the house’s lower level. A guest room stood opposite the stairs, and he admired the once-grand furniture there. Even though time had stained the chair covers yellow and left dust across the surfaces, Guy had the impression the room had never seen much use, even when the house was inhabited.
An ornate wooden clock stood on the fireplace’s mantelpiece. It had died at 12:15. Guy’s own phone wouldn’t last long without any power source, so he used it to adjust the clock’s time then wound it up. A soft tk-tk-tk filled the room as the second hand advanced around the dial. Guy grinned at it. It was a beautiful clock—as long as it could keep the time, he would take it home and give it to his mother.
He opened his phone, intending to call Heather, but it didn’t have any service bars. Guy held the mobile above his head, hoping a few bars would appear, but he eventually had to turn it off and tuck it back into his pocket. He was on a budget plan, and the service was dodgy on a good day, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that the isolation rendered it useless.
He placed his radio next to the clock and turned it on. Static flooded the room as Guy hunted for a station. There wasn’t much available at Rookward, so he settled on one that played classics. Screeching violins filled the air, and Guy poked his tongue out in disdain, but he preferred it to the silence.
Guy retrieved a pen and notepad from the dining room and began making a list of supplies he still needed to buy. Most of his money
would have to go towards fixing the family room. Glass was expensive, and he would probably have to strip the walls and floor to get rid of the mould. But he also wrote down any other equipment and materials he hadn’t packed into the truck, including a weed cutter and paint for the walls.
If I max my credit card, I should have enough to pay for everything. Just barely. Let’s hope the house doesn’t have any other surprises for me.
The song floating out of the guest room faltered then broke. A strange, echoing stillness replaced it. Frowning, Guy lowered his notepad. The radio crackled, and the song resumed for no more than two seconds before dying again.
He pocketed the paper and stepped into the guest room. Streaks of thin, insipid light coming through the grimy window distorted the room’s colours, turning the area into a nightmarish scape of reds and burnt golds.
Almost as though it could feel him staring at it, the radio released a burst of static. Something was audible through the crackles. Guy stepped closer, his dry tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. It’s like someone breathing…
He pushed the volume up. The rasping, grating noise grew clearer, encapsulated in static but strangely distinct.
Did I accidentally pick up a private broadcast? Did the announcer leave the microphone on without realising?
The breaths were quick, almost frantic. He raised the volume again, until its echoes filled the room, and he caught the muffled sound of footsteps underneath the inhalations.
Guy was struck by a sudden, disorienting sensation that the source came from behind him. The steps fell on the carpet, creating a muted crunch of crushed fibres. The breathing was so close that he expected to feel the exhales across the back of his neck…
The Haunting of Rookward House Page 4
