“It’s not about the money. It’s just…not the right place for you.”
“You keep saying that but let me explain something. I need somewhere to live. You’ve told me money isn’t an issue. You’ve told me it’s not already been let. I made an appointment in good faith for three o’clock today and I intend to be there.”
“Miss MacCallister, I really don’t think-”
“That it’s right for me, I get it. Well, do you want to let the place or not.”
“Of course, as agents for the owner, we have a responsibility to find the right tenant for the property.”
“But you don’t think I’m the right tenant?”
“Exactly.” He sounded pleased.
“Tell me something, Mr. Hansard. Who would be the right tenant?”
“Well, I…” His voice faded into silence.
“I will see you at three o’clock.” She hung up, looking down at the cellphone in shock. Who was the woman who’d just taken that call? That wasn’t her. Since when was she that assertive?
She smiled to herself. She could get used to being that woman. After all, that Hansard guy had never met her. For all he knew, she was the most confident woman in Scotland. Fake it until you make it. She stood up, folding her arms and looking at herself in the mirror. Shoulders too rounded, that wouldn’t do.
She stood up tall, taking several deep breaths. That was better, straight back, no smile, a face that said, I make the decisions around here. Confidence. She could do it.
They would give her the castle to live in.
She would finish the book.
She was a decent catch.
She needed a pee.
After getting out of the bathroom she changed into the most formal thing she owned. Charcoal gray trousers, matching jacket over white shirt, plain black shoes. The kind of person you could trust to take on a house. She just needed to play down the unemployed loser thing. Keep that to herself.
Driving north toward the castle, she felt increasingly nervous. She tried to blame it on the condition of the car. Would it survive the journey?
The roads were surprisingly quiet for the time of day so she got there early. The drive had taken her out of the village, along the lochside and then up through the trees, the car engine straining to cope with the steepness of the mountain roads.
They wound slowly upward back and forth, zigzagging along the slope until she finally emerged into the open about halfway up.
From there she could see the village across the other side of the valley. A strange thought occurred to her. She might never see it again. Why on earth would she think that?
Reaching the driveway that led to the castle, she came to a halt. The wrought iron gates were closed. She was about to step out of the car when they suddenly swung inward. Were they automatic gates? They didn’t look like it. They looked as if they’d been there at least a hundred years.
There was a strong wind. Maybe a gust had blown them open. Either way, what mattered was she could continue along the driveway. Either side of her the trees were overgrown, reaching overhead until they touched, blocking out the light. Branches whipped the side of her car as she drove past, adding a sense of gloom to her increasing anxiety.
She was glad when she emerged into the light again, the castle towering above her.
She brought the car to a halt and stepped out, amazed to be so close to the castle she felt she knew so well. The earthworks were overgrown, the drawbridge replaced by a wooden one, a couple of the planks looking close to rotten, moss covering more than half of them.
She doubted a car would survive the journey across. As it was, they creaked alarmingly when she walked over. She stopped halfway, looking down into the earthworks. Someone climbed through that, she thought.
The image entered her mind from nowhere. A boy, clutching a letter. It was dark and he was scared.
The breeze picked up and blew the image away. She frowned as she turned back to the castle. Where had that come from? It was quarter to three. There was no sign of the letting agent’s car.
She wasn’t sure what to do. She tried the front door but it was firmly locked. Turning back to the drawbridge, she was just crossing over it when a car appeared from the driveway. The occupant waved to her as he pulled up, parking beside her own vehicle.
Out stepped a man in his mid-sixties. He wore a plain black suit but his tie made up for it, filled with more colors than a bumper box of crayons. Low over his head was a flat cap which he lifted as he approached to reveal a shock of white hair. “You must be Miss MacCallister,” he said, holding a hand out toward her. “I’m Albert Drayton. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”
She shook, surprised by how warm his hand felt. “Nice to meet you.”
“Mr. Hansard asked if you would reconsider your position. The place isn’t really fit for human habitation. Lots of damp and creepy-crawlies.”
“You’re selling it brilliantly.”
“It’s not my job to sell the place. If it were I’d be done with it by now. But no, the owner wants it let so we’re to try and let it. But I must say-”
“Let me guess, it’s not for me.”
“How did you know I was going to say that?”
She was about to say something when she realized she was hunching her shoulders again. Taking a deep breath she stood up tall. Fake it until you make it. “I will look inside, Mr. Drayton, and then I will decide if it’s right for me.”
“Of course,” he said, looking surprisingly pleased. “I’ve got the key here somewhere. Ah, here it is. Follow me.”
She watched him cross the drawbridge. As she went after him, she again was struck by the image of a boy clambering through the earthworks.
“I must warn you,” he said as he unlocked the front door, “You may not like what you find in here.”
The door swung open and he vanished inside. Natalie stood at the threshold for a moment, one foot poised. Something told her choosing to go in meant something big, though she couldn’t think what.
She walked through, pushing the thought aside. Of course it was something big, she might be living in the castle of her ancestors soon. How exciting was that?
The entrance hall was huge. “Built in the 1600s,” Drayton said, pointing up at the whitewashed ceiling. “The rest of the place is much older of course.”
“Of course. I don’t smell any damp or see any bugs.”
“No, I guess not. This way.”
They passed through a door on the far side of the room, emerging into a grassy courtyard that was surrounded by four tall walls.
“That section is derelict,” Drayton said, waving his hand. “Over here is the part you’d be living in. Okay with heights?”
He unlocked a door in the wall to their right. Inside was a narrow corridor with a staircase that led down out of sight. Drayton walked straight past it but Natalie paused. She was sure she’d heard something. It sounded like chains rattling.
“What’s down there?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Drayton replied without stopping. “This way.”
“I heard something coming from those stairs.”
“No you didn’t. This way.”
“I did.” She put a foot on the stairs, peering down into the gloom. There it was again, rattling chains. “There’s someone in here with us.”
She jumped when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned around to find Drayton pleading with her. “Nothing down there but a locked door. Come on.”
“Do you have the key?”
“No one does. It’s been locked for hundreds of years.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever tried to get inside?”
“Aye, and no one’s managed it. Sealed shut. The place is full of dead ends like that. Probably just a brick wall behind it anyway. This way, come on.” His eyes were wide, almost bulging. Was he afraid?
She listened for another moment but the sound was gone. Turning, she followed the agent up the next flight of stairs, stepping o
ut into the most beautifully appointed living quarters. “Living room, kitchen through there. Bedroom. Bathroom down the hall.”
“I thought you said this place was damp and filled with creepy-crawlies.”
“Well, it’s all so old. That bed’s been here more than two hundred years, bound to be filled with spiders. And don’t get me started on the rats. I know, you hate it. I do too.”
“I love it, Mr. Drayton.”
“You…love it?” He again looked more pleased than shocked. “Really?”
She nodded and as she did so a blood curdling shriek echoed up the stairs toward them. The door to the bedroom slammed shut at the same moment. Mr. Drayton shook his head, already running, not looking back. “No, no, no!” he said, taking the stairs two at a time.
Natalie found him by his car, panting for breath. “I should have told you,” he said when he got his breath back. “The place is haunted.”
“Oh, I see.”
He frowned, looking at her as if she was mad. “Why didn’t you run when he screamed?”
“When who screamed?”
“The spirit that haunts the place. Why didn’t you run from him? Everyone else does.”
“I never understood that. Everyone always runs from ghosts. If all he’s going to do is slam the odd door and scream every once in a while, I reckon I can live with it. I’ll take the place.”
“You’ll take it?” Now he really seemed to think she’d gone mad. “You would willingly live in a haunted castle? Have you any idea of the risk? That scream, it chills me to the bone every time and yet you would willingly go back in there?”
She nodded.
“But why? I don’t understand. Aren’t you scared?”
“Of a ghost? I stood in the living room and waited after that scream and do you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Nothing. And do you know what?”
“What?”
“I got the feeling that ghost wants something and the only way to find out what is to have a talk with him.”
Drayton shook his head as he unlocked his car. “Mad, you’re quite mad.”
“Will you let me live here?”
“Sure, why not. You and the ghost will make a great couple.” He started his engine. “Come to the office and sign the paperwork and the place is yours but mark my words. You won’t last a day. I’ve tried to get him to sell, to accept no one wants a haunted house. Six tenants it’s had in the last year and none of them lasted longer than a day. You won’t last twenty-four hours. No one does.”
“I will see you at your office tomorrow morning.” She closed his door for him, watching him drive off, his head still shaking as he muttered to himself.
When he was gone she turned and looked up at the castle. Was there really a ghost in there? If there was, what did it want?
She’d seen The Sixth Sense. She knew that if spirits were hanging around after death, it was to get Haley Joel Osment to do something for them. Well, they’d have to get used to her doing it instead.
In the castle, down the stairs, in the darkness of the dungeon, a figure stirred. His eyes opened. She was here at last. The final descendant of the MacCallister line.
It was time to fulfil his vow, to bring his worst enemy back through the centuries. Then, he would be free and his father would live.
His smile broadened. The wait was almost over.
5
Time was a strange concept.
Wallace had never really considered it before. More than a few centuries in the dungeon of MacCallister Castle had given him plenty of time to catch up on the philosophy of it all. Was he alive? Dead? Both? Neither?
He had no answers. If he had been told the tale of his own incarceration he never would have believed it. The barefoot man had left out one crucial element of their deal. His death.
He remembered vividly looking down at his own body, laid beside the skeleton of his father. He saw the barefoot man leave. How was that possible?
At first he thought he was dead, about to ascend to heaven, hopefully not in the other direction.
Nothing happened. He blinked and his feet were solidly on the floor. He tried touching his body but his hand passed through it. He tried again, concentrating this time.
If he’d been older, it might have broken his mind to undergo the torment of dealing with his own death as a spirit. He moved his hand and this time he was able to move the body. It was only slight, the arm shifting a fraction to the left but it was enough. With time, he could maybe hone that skill.
Time.
Time was something he had plenty of. It passed whether he wanted it to or not. Time had taken his father’s body and turned it to nothing more than a skeleton. Would the same thing happen to his body?
That was the only way he knew time had not frozen upon his death. His body slowly decayed. And yet he remained in the dungeon, unable to open the door or pass through it. He paced back and forth, nothing more than a zephyr to anyone who might be walk into the cell, a slight chill to the back of the neck.
As the weeks turned into months, his anger grew, threatening to consume him. The barefoot man had tricked him into this eternal half-life. What was to be at the end of it? Would it ever end?
He sat. He stood. He walked. He never ate. He never slept. More months went by. How many? There was no way of knowing.
All he knew was that he was trapped until the last of the MacCallister line made themselves known to him.
When the door to the cell opened, he tried to make himself visible. A man in the strangest of clothes walked inside, holding a lantern. Wallace waved. He spoke. The man heard nothing. He left, locking the door behind him. Wallace had already squeezed through the gap and was heading up the stairs.
That was the first day of his freedom. It was the seventeenth century, not that he knew that. He had been held in the dungeon for more than three hundred years.
He drifted through the castle. Soldiers were everywhere. None of them could see him. As an experiment he walked up behind one and placed a hand on his shoulder. The soldier turned, looking straight through him, seeing nothing.
He tried again, picking an apple from a barrel, tossing it through the air. It hit a sergeant square on the nose. The man yelled abuse, spitting out his words in his hunt for the culprit. Wallace raised another apple and hurled it into the group of assembled soldiers.
They saw it lift itself from the barrel. They saw it hover for a moment in the air and then come flying toward them.
Their flight was swift. Within an hour the soldiers had fled the castle, leaving weapons and armor behind. The talk of witchcraft and spirits went with them, along with many apples hurtling their way over the battlements.
Wallace was alone. For the next three hundred years his method was the same. Anyone who entered the castle got the same treatment as the soldiers. He wanted to be left alone. The only person he wanted to see was the last of the MacCallisters. Until then he haunted the castle and scared away anyone foolish enough to enter.
He would know her when he saw her. Since being freed from the dungeon he had been able to sleep again.
Sleep brought dreams and dreams brought her. He knew what she looked like already. Only her face. It swam above him whenever his eyes closed, looking past him not at him. It felt as if he were spying on her, though he knew it was only a dream. She would appear at some point. He would know her by her face.
When the twenty-first century began, so did the attempts to sell the castle. It had slowly fallen into ruin around him, the crumbling stone his long-term companion.
In the late 1960s, restoration work began. It continued for a long time, the workmen not seeing him, not caring for his attempts to scare them away. He felt himself becoming thinner, more see through, fading like the light at dusk.
The restoration took a long time and when it was done he was little more than a dark shadow haunting the dingiest parts of the castle, barely able to move without immense mental effort.
After the restoration came the selling people. The ones who talked about the value of the place. Then they went away and once again nothing happened for a long time.
More restoration work, the men with strange tools and curse words fouler than any he had heard before. Then attempts to move people into the castle. He saw them off though, his strength slowly returning as each one scurried out the door, never to return.
Until her.
She was a woman and a pretty one at that. Her hair was blonde, framing her face perfectly. She smiled little, her eyes lighting up the few times she managed to laugh.
He recalled well the first time he saw her. He was in the dungeon asleep when she arrived. He rattled the chains, enough normally to scare some of the meeker ones away. Not her.
He flitted up the stairs, slamming the door to the restored section of the castle, screaming as he did so. The man she was with ran, his face white as a sheet.
She did not move, just stood there smiling, as if she could see him. Her clothes were odd but it was not her clothes that drew his eye, it was her face.
He peered closely at her. Was she the woman he’d dreamed of for so long? He waved his hands in front of her face but she saw nothing. Then she left.
She came back the next day. He caught her name when she stood by the drawbridge talking to the man who’d brought her. She was Natalie MacCallister.
He could barely contain his excitement when he heard that. She was a MacCallister. Fate had done it. The last of the MacCallisters.
He watched her unpacking, though she did not see him. He watched her settle in, seething at the sight of the descendant of his bitter enemies.
Soon, she would be locked in chains in the dungeon. He waited for any sign of the silver key but when the last box was unpacked, he realized she did not have it. What did that mean?
He needn’t have worried. She was barely settled in before she began exploring the castle. He followed her in silence, watching closely, waiting patiently.
During the day she wrote. At night, she often cried. He left her when she did, feeling for the first time as if he were intruding on her privacy. He felt a strange tug deep inside her when she cried, wanting to hold her, tell her it would be okay.
The Key to Her Past Page 4