“Yes. And no.” The chuckle hurt, and he crossed his arms over his torso. “Savannah assumed I hit her deliberately. I didn’t—I swear I didn’t. I loved her even when I was angry at her. But she thought I’d lost control in a big way. Her family had been warning her about me for years, saying it was an abusive relationship and would escalate if she didn’t get out, and she finally believed them. Her parents made sure it went to court. Attempted manslaughter. I was acquitted for lack of evidence, but wow. I turned into the town’s own OJ Simpson. Legally innocent, but everyone believed I was blatantly guilty.”
“OJ eventually got jail time, though,” Blake said.
Tiff smacked his shoulder. “Stop it. Insensitive jerk.”
“Nah, it’s all right.” This time, the chuckle felt a little more natural. “It’s good to talk about it to someone impartial. Thanks for listening.”
Tiff pursed her lips. “It’s a sad story. Might even be more miserable than this house’s. You’re all alone now, right?”
“Mostly.” He picked at a scratch running along the table’s edge. “My friends sent a few supportive text messages during the court case, but they’ve avoided talking to me since. My mum believes me, though. Bless her.”
“Well, I hope you can sell this house and move away like you want to. Rookward is pretty notorious in the town, but you might be able to snag an out-of-state buyer or something.”
“Fingers crossed,” Guy agreed. Eager to change the subject, he said, “I’m still a bit foggy on why you’re here. Did you just want to mosey around a fifty-year-old crime scene, or…?”
She shrugged. “Pretty much. I drive down the lane twice a week to get to softball practice, and the gate was missing yesterday. It looked like someone had driven down the path. Like I said, I assumed the government was finally doing something about the property. I thought it might be my last chance to visit before it was torn down or something. So I convinced Blake to come with me. I wanted to see if the house was as creepy as people said, and if it was really haunted.”
“Ghost stories, huh?” I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the scene of multiple murders; of course people would be pre-disposed to imagine spectres live here. And a house this old is bound to have some bizarre quirks to reinforce the theory—just look at how many times I’ve managed to scare myself while staying here, and I don’t even believe in ghosts.
“When I was a kid, my older sister visited with her boyfriend a couple of times. She says she saw Amy’s ghost walking through the windows.” Tiff held her arms out ahead of herself, hands limp, and mimed a zombie’s shuffle. She laughed as she slumped back in her chair. “I’m, like, ninety per cent sure she made it up to scare me. But I was curious, y’know?”
“I can believe that.” The earliest hints of dawn were starting to spread natural light through the dining room. Guy’s focus was drawn to the tiny chips and scratches in the table, the age stains across the ceiling, the grimy window, and the floral china closeted away in the cabinet. “I feel the same way.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You’re sober enough to drive?” Guy asked Blake. They paced around the outside of the house, towards the front yard. The teen was just as surly as normal, but half of the brandy bottle had disappeared while they were talking, and Guy knew he hadn’t put that much in his coffee.
“Sure.” Blake shrugged nonchalantly.
Tiff gave him a shrewd-eyed scan then held out her hand. “I’ll drive. It’s my car, anyway.”
He looked ready to argue, but Tiff lowered her eyebrows, and he sighed as he passed her the keys. “Whatever.”
They made a beeline for the old sedan parked near the house’s front door.
“I feel like I should thank you for visiting, or something,” Guy said. “Even though you broke in. Sorry for almost knocking your head off, Tiff.”
“It’s cool. Sorry for smashing your window.”
“You—what?”
She gave him a sheepish smile. “I didn’t realise the back door was open.”
Guy remembered being woken by a smashing noise and smothered a groan. Glass was expensive. “That’s all right. Drive safely. Stay in school, don’t do drugs, drink lots of water. Et cetera.”
Tiff laughed as she leapt into the driver’s seat. Blake raised a hand in goodbye as he slipped through the passenger’s door, then the car’s engine rumbled to life.
Guy backed up as he watched the car trundle towards the narrow path through the woods. A low-level headache had come on the tail of the disturbed sleep and elevated stress, but Guy wasn’t unhappy about the surprise visit. After spending nearly two days alone with the house, it was nice to talk to another human.
And she looked so much like Savannah.
Guy scuffed his boot on the doorstep. It wasn’t completely true; both Tiff and Savannah had pale skin and long, fine hair, but the similarities ended there. Tiff was short, bouncy, and a little flighty. Savannah was tall, graceful, and sweet. Her large eyes and long neck had sometimes reminded him of a gentle deer, almost painfully lovely and far too good for him.
Even after the accident, he didn’t think she’d truly hated him. The day in court was branded into his memory. The bruises had faded by that point, but she’d still been wearing the wrist cast and walked with a limp. Her family surrounded her, nudging her forward and shooting Guy hateful glares, and Guy had prepared for the worst as Savannah took the stand.
The judge had been sympathetic towards her. All she would have had to do was embellish the facts a little, and Guy would have been in jail. But she hadn’t. He could still picture her, nervous eyes fixed on the table, hands clasped tightly, as she spoke. She’d softened a lot of the details, omitted others, and skirted around the truth. She hadn’t wanted Guy to end up in jail, and the case had been dismissed based on her testimony.
It had given Guy a small, urgent hope that the relationship might still be saved. He’d tried to speak to Savannah on the way out of the court, but she wouldn’t look at him no matter how loudly he called her name. As he watched her get into the backseat of her parents’ car, he’d realised she didn’t want him in her life anymore.
And so Guy had tried to respect her wishes. He knew he could probably demand visitation rights for his child, but he didn’t feel right putting Savannah in that situation after she’d spared him. The best thing he could do was to leave her alone to rebuild her life.
A spark of frustration bloomed in his chest then fizzled out. He lost his temper less since the accident. Sometimes it still surprised him—like the fury at the upstairs door during his first day at Rookward—but more often, the anger was a painful reminder of what he’d lost. It evoked a wave of sadness that doused the rage before it could take hold.
Guy folded his arms across his chest. He shivered in the cold air and turned his mind to Tiff’s story to distract himself from the pain. She’d given him a lot of history about the house, but he wasn’t sure he was better for the knowledge.
Be careful how much of it you trust. He stepped through Rookward’s kitchen door. It’s a fifty-year-old urban legend. Almost all of it could be fictionalised.
And yet, he was surrounded by evidence. Guy hesitated in the dining room, staring at the table that had likely once sat a family of corpses, and shuddered. He was due to drive back to his mother’s that morning, and he couldn’t deny it would be a relief to sit in her smaller kitchen instead of Rookward’s. He moved towards the family room.
The crusty stains across the sofa took on a new significance. They’d matched the marks on the clothing in the upstairs bedroom. Guy pictured an insane woman carefully undressing and redressing the corpses, changing their clothes each morning, for four days while she waited for the police to find her. Some of the stains would be blood. Some would be fluids produced by the early stages of decomposition.
Guy felt faintly sick. He retreated from the family room without touching anything.
I was wrong. The family wasn’t weird. They were just a normal
family trapped in an awful situation.
He remembered the drawings and the homemade spear in the tree house. The boy had been defending his family against a dark-haired, pointy-toothed woman.
I hope they didn’t suffer. Guy lingered in the hallway. It was shocking to think of how abruptly the family’s existence had been snuffed out. There were plates in the kitchen sink and stains on the chopping board; he wondered if that meant they had been interrupted shortly after dinner.
And was Amy the reason the children all slept in the one room? I wouldn’t want my family scattered across the house if I were being stalked—
A fresh twinge of pain pulled at Guy’s aching insides as he thought of Savannah and her baby. His baby. One of his friends had told him it was a girl, but he didn’t even know her name.
Face forward. He’d repeated the mantra to himself a thousand times since the accident. Regret will drag you down, smother you, kill you. You’ve got to face forward. Try your hardest. Do what you can to improve the world while you have the chance.
He gazed about Rookward. It had been the scene of great suffering. But there was no rule saying it couldn’t ever experience joy again. Maybe, in a few months, a new family would live in it. Children might grow up there. Their parents might laugh as they repainted the rooms together. Good memories could be superimposed over the painful.
Just got to keep facing forward.
Guy rubbed his fingertips over his eyelids and rolled his shoulders. His muscles were still stiff from the cold, and his fingers were growing numb. He’d fetched his shoes and a jacket from upstairs before making the teens their coffee, but the pyjamas he still wore underneath were nowhere near thick enough to shield him against the chill.
He jogged upstairs to change and brush his teeth, spitting the water and toothpaste out of the window, then rubbed his hands together as he returned to the ground floor.
The hallways felt alien in the grey morning light. The shredded wallpaper rustled as his movements created eddies of air in the still, dusty space. The floorboards groaned under his weight, and the mournful strains left an uneasy echo bouncing between the walls.
Guy ran his hands through his hair as he reached the foyer. He’d donned the same clothes from the day before, and they felt dirty enough to make his skin crawl. He was craving home—the idea of a hot shower and warm meal was like a siren song—but it seemed wasteful to leave early in the morning when he could still squeeze in another few hours of work.
The front door caught his eye. It was still boarded shut and overrun by vines. He could save himself a fair bit of trouble on his next visit to the house if he had a second way in and out. And with clean clothes and shampoo just a few hours away, there would be no better time to wade into what promised to be grimy work.
The door was locked on the inside with three bolts, so Guy undid them and tried to open it. The boards nailing it shut creaked but didn’t budge. Guy scrunched his mouth up and resigned himself to getting it open the hard way.
He retrieved his work gloves, grimacing as he pulled the sap-caked, grimy fabric over his fingers, then left through the kitchen door and loped around the house. He’d left a pair of shears leaning against the building’s wall, and he collected them as he passed.
The front porch was on the shaded side of the house, where dew still clung to the grass and the vines. The wooden porch wasn’t small, but it had been criss-crossed with generations of vines that obscured the door beyond them, smothering the space like a living shawl.
Guy poked one of the curling, lime-green tendrils with the end of his shears. A drop of water fell off it. He considered leaving the porch until the sun could dry it out and warm him up, but that would mean either getting home late or letting it wait until he returned.
No, better I deal with it now. He dug around the porch’s base until he found the base of one of the vines. Knotted tangles of toughened, cracked wood protruded from the decay-smothered ground. He put his shears around one of the stems and strained to cut it. Water rained down on him as the leaves shook. Shaking his head to get the droplets off, Guy grabbed the severed part of the vine with both hands and began dragging it away from the porch.
The wood groaned and cracked as its vines were torn free from where they’d tangled around other plants and the porch’s supports. Guy staggered when it finally came free, then threw it behind himself and wiped grime and drops of water off his forehead.
The space was still a grizzled tangle of plant matter, but he’d removed a respectable section of it and could see the door more clearly.
A woman’s corpse, twisted and enveloped by the plants, huddled in the porch’s back corner.
Chapter Sixteen
Guy yelped and jumped back. He had the impression of a greyed face, slack jaw, and empty eyeholes turned towards the sky, then he tripped over the vine he’d removed and tumbled onto his back.
What the hell? That can’t be real—
His arms shook as they grasped at the vine to give him leverage to stand. Something feather soft and unpleasant ghosted over the back of his forearm. A small grey spider scrambled over him, its thread-thin feet waving erratically. Guy flicked his arm to throw it off.
His mind unravelled as it fought to make sense of what he’d seen. He rose slowly, afraid his legs would buckle, and edged closer to the porch. The shears had fallen near the front step, and Guy picked them up. He used their tip to push errant vines aside to give him a view of the front door and the small, shadowed alcove next to it.
Vines wrapped around a lamp attached to the side of the house. The leaves were no longer green but mottled greys and blacks as they withered and decayed.
Guy inhaled sharply and pressed a hand to his heart. The greyed leaves wrapped around the dead bulb created the impression of a distorted, bloodless face and empty eye sockets. The plants gathered below the lamp were reminiscent of a body, and stained wood behind it was just the right shade to mistake for dirty black hair.
It had looked so clear, though. His throat hurt as he tried to swallow around the lump in it. This house is messing with my mind. He’d never been a jumpy sort of person, but he guessed the isolation and claustrophobic spaces were making him see things that didn’t exist.
The swing creaked as it shifted in the breeze. Icy sweat made Guy’s arms and back itch, and he rolled his shoulders. He had an explanation for the figure he’d thought he’d seen, but it was still difficult to take his attention off that corner of the porch. The irrational, panicked part of his mind gibbered that the corpse would reappear if he looked away, only this time, its empty eyes would be fastened on Guy.
“Quit it.” He smacked his shears at one of the vines as though that might quiet his mind. The swing continued to move, its mournful creaks beating at his sanity like a dripping tap. Guy tightened his lips and gave the porch’s corner a final scan before kneeling to work the cutters through another of the thickened vine bases.
As the wood snapped in half, drops of water rained down onto Guy’s arms and face. He shook himself to get rid of them, but some clung on—and then began to move.
Guy lifted his hand. Another two of the small grey spiders scuttled over his skin just above his wrist, and Guy smothered a grunt of disgust as he knocked them off. Tickles across his scalp told him more were in his hair. He beat his gloves through it, knowing that more grime and flakes of dried sap would tangle in there, then grabbed the severed vine and began pulling it away from the house.
A dozen spiders tumbled down the stem. Some bounced off his gloves, but others found purchase, clinging to him. Guy bared his teeth at them and pulled harder. Web threads glistened in the wan light. The vine broke free with a crash, all ten feet of it tearing away from the house in a solid mat, and Guy hurled it aside.
Hundreds of the grey spiders scurried off it and disappeared into the long grass. Their movement made the plant seem to shiver, and Guy beat the tiny arachnids off himself in disgust. They were everywhere. In his hair, on his pants, crawlin
g under his shirt—
The anger burst through him like an inferno. A strangled scream caught in his too-tight throat as he smacked himself, tugging at the shirt harshly enough to tear through the cotton and leave bruises around his throat. He threw it aside, followed by the gloves, then he staggered back, panting and blinking through the haze of red blotting his vision.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” He hurled the words at the house, his voice hoarse and the syllables mangled. A string of spit hit his jaw. His heart felt about to explode from the strain.
Then the burning anger ebbed. Exhaustion flooded into its place, accompanied by intense shame. He bent over, hands braced on his knees, as he focussed on breathing and waiting for his vision to return to normal.
I’m done here. The front door can wait for later. It’s time to get home.
A grey spider skittered over his bare hand, its legs waving, but Guy didn’t have the energy to flick it off.
* * *
“I promise you, I ate three solid meals a day.” Guy stared at the pile of mashed potato his mother was heaping onto his plate. She’d cooked a feast for his return home, and by the way she fussed around him, she seemed to have assumed he’d starved during the time he’d spent at Rookward.
“You’re looking peaky.” Heather added another spoonful for good measure then settled back in her seat. “I worried about you the entire time you were there, you know.”
Guy chuckled. “I told you I’d be fine. I didn’t see a single bear.”
“Hmm.” Her lips tightened, and her eyes narrowed as she stared at her food.
Understanding hit him. Mum must have learned about the murders when she called her uncle. That explained her initial reluctance to let him visit the house. She would have thought she was protecting him by not telling him about it… and in a way, she was right. Guy knew sleeping in the building would be a little more challenging now that he knew its history.
The Haunting of Rookward House Page 9
