The Haunting

by Alex Bell

  “Why did he check out?” I asked.

  “He said he woke up to find two sailors there in the room, trying to put his boots on for him.” He shook his head. “Anyone else had told me that – I mean anyone – and I just would’ve laughed at ’em. But Frank, I mean, he probably dreamed the entire thing, but this was a man who regularly volunteered for the coastguard and thought nothing of going out into the ocean in storms that could easily sink the whole damn ship.”

  I shrugged and said, “I used to visit the inn when I was a kid and I never saw anything.”

  “Well, it’s closed now, ain’t it? Been shut up like that for two months. But I’ve heard people say they’ve seen lights turn on in the middle of the night, like there’s someone in there.”

  I thought of that lit candle. But I’d only seen it for a moment and I couldn’t be completely sure that it hadn’t just been a reflection from a street lamp like Jem had said.

  “Phantom lights, they call them, when they’re seen at sea,” the man went on. “And the Waterwitch is part ship still, ain’t it? Unnatural place – sitting there on dry land like that, trying to convince people it’s not a ship at all.”

  He went off to lock up the museum, and I was relieved to get away from him and out into the fresh air.

  Chapter Nine

  Shell

  After lunch I went back to my room and took the poppets from their hiding place in the wardrobe. I’d made the dolls a couple of years ago, during a particularly bad time with Dad. One day I’d been up in my room when I heard him yelling at Jem downstairs, then there was a crash and a thump and I knew it had turned violent again. Sure enough, Jem came upstairs a short while later, and he was moving stiffly, and his breathing sounded funny, and he had one hand pressed over his ribs.

  I tried to ask how badly he was hurt but he just waved my concern away and said, “Don’t go downstairs for a little bit, OK? Stay up here. Out of the way.”

  That was when I decided I had to do something to try to help. So I made two poppets – one each for Jem and me. Mum’s old witchcraft book said that the more love you put into them, the more effective the spell, so I spent hours making the small dolls, taking special care with Jem’s.

  I sewed them out of cloth cut from an old pillow-case, filling the bodies with dried herbs, lavender sprigs and a rose quartz crystal for protection. Then I took hair from Jem’s brush and nail clippings from his bin and sewed those in, too. To strengthen it even more I made the doll some clothes out of one of Jem’s old T-shirts, drew hair on the head and used different-coloured buttons for eyes. Then I read out the spell from the book:

  I hereby link this poppet to Jem Penhale. Let any harm directed at him from the physical or magical worlds fall upon the poppet instead so that it may gather up any evil sent to him and return it back from whence it came.

  I didn’t tell Jem about it because he didn’t like anything to do with witchcraft, but it didn’t work anyway. The poppets couldn’t protect us from Dad, they didn’t make any difference at all. Maybe I hadn’t done the spell right. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of thing you could teach yourself how to do from a book. I’d spent so long making the poppets, though, that I felt attached to them anyway and brought them with us when we came to the Waterwitch.

  They still smelled of herbs and lavender, and the scent reminded me of Mum and made me feel safe. I took them over to the dressing table, sat on the stool and lit my last stick of myrrh incense. It was meant to be good for protection so I dowsed the poppets with the smoke every now and then. Maybe it didn’t make any difference but it couldn’t hurt, either, and just the ritual of doing it made me feel better. Because you just never knew with Dad. You never knew when he might take it into his head to come after us and hurt us some more.

  When Emma’s gran had changed her mind and sent us the keys for the Waterwitch, it had almost seemed like a miracle. Having somewhere to go, somewhere to hide, just when we needed it most – it was like there was some kind of guardian angel looking out for us. If it wasn’t for the woman down in the cellar it would almost be perfect. I could feel her watching me sometimes. Perhaps it was because she could tell I was a witch like her. Whenever I handled the poppets I could sense her closer than ever, and this time was no different. It actually felt as if she was in the room with me. There was no sign of her at all but that prickling feeling couldn’t have been any stronger if she’d been sitting on the stool right beside me…

  Suddenly my eyes took in the image of my own reflection in the mirror, and my breath caught in my throat in sudden shock. I could see myself sitting at the dressing table, but the reflection wasn’t right. My hands were resting in my lap, but the me in the mirror was gripping the incense stick like it was a knife and stabbing the smouldering tip right into Jem’s poppet.

  The smell of something burning seemed to hit me like a physical blow and, when I looked down, I saw to my horror that the mirror was right after all. My hands weren’t resting in my lap like I’d thought. I really was holding the incense stick and the tip was pressed into the poppet’s right hand. I jerked the incense away and plunged it into a nearby glass of water but it was too late. It had already burned through the thin cloth, leaving behind a blackened circle, the herbs and lavender inside shrivelling up into charred ash.

  I leaped from the chair so fast that it fell over. Turning away from the smoking poppet on the dressing table, I raced straight from the room and down the stairs to look for Jem. They might have been protective poppets but they were still linked magically to the person they resembled and I was terrified that I might find Jem with his hand burnt or mangled or terribly injured. But when I ran into him by the front door he seemed completely fine. My eyes went straight to his hands and they looked normal.

  “Did you pick those nails up off the floor?” he asked. “When I went back to get them they were—”

  “Are you OK?” I cut him off. “Is your hand all right?”

  He stared at me. “Er … yes. Last time I checked. Why?”

  “Oh. No reason. Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Did you take the nails from the cellar door?” Jem asked again. “I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “No. I don’t have them. Maybe they rolled through the cracks between the floorboards?”

  “Maybe.” Jem frowned, then shook his head. “I have to go or I’ll be late for my shift. I’ll see you later, OK?”

  I said goodbye to Jem and then went straight upstairs to mend his poppet. The scent of lavender mixed horribly with the acrid smell of burning. Some of the herbs had spilled out of the split hand but I put the non-burnt ones back in, fastened a patch over the charred cloth and silently gave thanks that no harm had been done.

  Chapter Ten

  Jem

  I hung my coat up in the staff cloakroom and then went into the kitchen. It hadn’t got really busy yet but there was still plenty of activity going on, and it felt good to be around normal people doing normal things. For the first half hour or so I helped with clearing up what was left of lunch before going out to take orders from the guests in the lounge. Someone asked for a pot of tea so I picked up one of the silver teapots on my way back through the kitchen and went over to the big industrial water boiler in the corner. The red caution light was on, and a notice stuck on the side warned that the water inside was scalding.

  I flipped the teapot lid open to throw in the teabags, but when I held the pot up under the spout and lifted the red lever to release the water, it didn’t run straight into the pot like I’d expected. It couldn’t because, somehow, the lid was closed, blocking the way. I guess I must have closed it without thinking. The boiling water gushing out had nowhere to go except straight down the metal sides, pouring over my fingers and down my wrist, soaking the sleeve and scalding my skin. Everyone in the kitchen must have heard my yell and the crash as the teapot fell to the ground.

  And there was something wrong with the boiler because, even though I’d released the red lever, the flow of wa
ter didn’t stop like it was supposed to. It suddenly blasted out everywhere in a loud spray of scalding droplets that I only just managed to avoid as I lunged over to turn the machine off at the mains.

  One of the chefs saw what happened and hurried over. “What the heck was that?” she said. “That thing only got serviced last week. Get your hand into cold water right away. And someone put an Out of Order sign on that boiler. I don’t want anyone touching it until we find out what’s wrong.”

  It wasn’t a serious burn but, as I held my smarting hand under the cold tap, I remembered how Shell had come running down the stairs earlier and asked if my hand was all right. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost wonder whether she really had seen the future in one of her witch balls.

  Chapter Eleven

  Shell

  My bedroom still smelled of burnt lavender an hour after putting the poppets back in the cupboard. It was a horrible, cloying scent and I was sure I could smell it on my skin and in my hair, so I went to have a shower to wash it off. I tied a plastic bag over my cast and then stepped beneath the hot water. It felt good just to stand there in the steam and let the water run down me. At some point, my foot pressed against the plug and I felt it click into place in the bath. I tried to pull it back out but the plug seemed to be stuck so I left it and turned back to the showerhead. I wasn’t going to be in here much longer anyway.

  I ran my hand through my wet hair and closed my eyes, enjoying the warmth and the soft sound of the shower filling up the bath. Just a few more minutes, I thought. Just a few more minutes and then I would get out.

  Something brushed against my foot and I assumed it was the flannel but I couldn’t be bothered to move. The water in the bath was ankle-deep now and the flannel was stuck to my left foot. But then something else brushed my right foot. And then the back of my ankle. What was floating in the water down there?

  I frowned and opened my eyes.

  I looked down, still expecting to see just a flannel and maybe a plastic lid from a shower-gel bottle or something.

  But, no.

  The water looked black at first and, for a confused moment, I thought there must be ink in it. But then I realized what I was actually seeing.

  The bath was filled with wings.

  It was filled with wings, filled with wings, filled with wings.

  No birds, no beaks or clawed feet, only the wings, sodden and bedraggled and ruined, with strings of blood swirling out between the feathers as they floated limply there upon the surface.

  I stared at them for one horrified moment before I screamed and stepped back, trying to get away. My heel trod directly on a wing and I heard and felt the crunch of tiny bird bones breaking beneath my foot.

  I splashed towards the side of the bath, desperate to be out of that bloody water and terrified at the thought of slipping over and falling back into the tub where the wings would brush over my bare skin, stroking and tickling like fingers.

  I leaped out on to the bathmat, grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be my hairbrush, and then hurled it at the mirror hard enough to smash the glass into sparkling shards that flew out into the sink.

  “What do you want from me?” I screamed, but the birds didn’t answer and I wasn’t surprised because they never did.

  How I wished I could be haunted by something normal.

  Like ghosts, or bad memories, or whatever it is that normal people are haunted by. But, no, none of those normal hauntings for me.

  Instead, I am haunted by birds.

  At first I thought that they were just ordinary, like the seagulls I saw all over Looe, pecking at the cobbles and biting the tourists. The first time I realized my birds were different was one afternoon when Dad was driving me and Jem home from school. I was five years old and had been seeing the birds for several weeks. As soon as we pulled into the lane where our fisherman’s cottage huddled at the edge of the coast road, I looked up at my bedroom window and saw them again – all these little black birds staring out at me. There must have been fifty of them there, squashed up against the glass. As we pulled into the drive I asked Jem why the birds were in my bedroom.

  “What birds?” he said.

  I pointed up at my window. They were still there, their eyes shining black beads in their tiny heads that stared unblinkingly down at us.

  “There are no birds in your bedroom, Shell,” Dad said from the front seat.

  I stared at the back of his head in surprise. Were we playing a game? Was that why he was pretending he couldn’t see them? But it wasn’t like Dad to play games with us. It wasn’t like him at all.

  “But they’re right there,” I said. Then I looked up at my window again and saw that they’d gone. Poof! Vanished away like the sea mist that blew in from the grey ocean.

  As I got older I realized that no one was ever going to believe me about the birds, not my teachers or my classmates or the people in the street. Not even my brother – and if Jem didn’t believe me then no one would. No one except, perhaps, for another witch. Perhaps, the witch who haunted this very inn…

  The birds were always too still, too silent. They wanted something from me but I could never work out what. I only knew that I should keep my distance – or else something very bad would happen. Something beyond bad.

  So when I heard them, late at night, pecking at the window or scratching around under my bed or flapping their wings in the dark, I would pull my quilt up over my head and pretend I couldn’t hear them, pretend they weren’t even there. Jem said that was the best way to deal with them and I always listened to Jem because I knew that he loved me.

  “I can’t see you,” I’d say to those black faces squashed up against the window, their beaks scraping over the glass. “Go away, I can’t see you. Jem says you’re not even really there. You’re just inside my head.”

  But it was harder to say those words now. It was harder to believe them after that day, just over a week ago, when I’d broken my arm. I’d seen them draw blood then – real, actual blood that glistened in red, shiny drops on the floor. And if the birds were just a phantom of my imagination, then how could they make a person bleed?

  After hurling my hairbrush at the mirror, I slumped back down on the damp bathmat and sat there shivering for the longest time, feeling trapped and trying not to cry and trying not to cry and trying not to cry. The birds had never appeared in the bath before. That was new. I wondered what other new things they were planning to do. It was almost as if they knew I was used to them by now and that it was going to take more than pressing their faces up against a window to freak me out. And it had got worse since we moved to the Waterwitch. The birds came more often, and they seemed even more restless and agitated than before.

  For the billionth time, my mind rushed round and round in circles looking for a way, any way at all, to get Jem to believe me about the birds. But, as always, I came up with nothing. Jem couldn’t see them, and if he couldn’t see them then he couldn’t believe that I saw them, either, and if he couldn’t believe that then he couldn’t help me.

  When I finally stood up and wrapped a towel around myself, the water in the bath was completely normal – swirling with soap and suds rather than feathers and blood – and the plug came out easily when I tugged it.

  I went back to my bedroom to get dressed. It took me a bit longer with a broken arm but, once I’d managed to put on a change of clothes, I walked out into the corridor. It had smooth wooden floorboards, brass lights attached to wood-panelled walls, and doors that were designed to look like cabin doors, with portholes painted on to the wood in cracked, faded paint. Right at the end of the corridor there was a large stained-glass window depicting an old-fashioned ship sailing on the sea. A giant squid lurked in the water just below it, tentacles reaching upwards as if it were just about to burst above the surface in an explosion of foam and terror, and wrap those long tentacles all around the Waterwitch.

  I knew at once that something was different. The corridor was lig
hter than it should have been. And that was because one of the bedroom doors, right at the end of the corridor, was standing wide open. I knew for a fact that they had all been closed before.

  For a moment I stood, hesitating, not sure what to do. I really hated that I was never sure what to do. If only I was a different kind of person – one of those normal, happy girls, a girl who wasn’t haunted by birds – maybe then I would be better at all this.

  What I did know was that there were twenty-six rooms altogether at the Waterwitch and some of those rooms were safe but some of them were, well, they were wrong somehow. When Jem and I had first come here last week, I had started to go round the rooms one day out of boredom but, after what I’d seen in Room 9 and then the other thing I’d seen in Room 22, I’d decided perhaps I wouldn’t explore any more after all.

  I needed to go and close that door. Otherwise Jem would think I’d been poking into the rooms again when he’d asked me not to. It was no big deal. It was just an open door that was supposed to be closed and I was going to walk right over there and shut it. Besides, it was one of the rooms I hadn’t been into yet, and so it could just be one of the normal ones.

  My feet creaked on the floorboards as I moved closer and closer to the doorway, weak sunlight spilling out to pool upon the floor. When I reached it I saw that it was Room 17. I wanted to slam the door shut without looking inside, but if Jem was here then he would glance into the room to check that everything was OK first, so that was what I did, too.

  To my relief, the room looked ordinary enough. The only thing that wasn’t quite right was that the pictures weren’t straight. Like most of the other rooms, this one had several pictures hanging on the walls – not oil paintings like the big scary one down in the restaurant – but framed prints of the Waterwitch, sailing at night, or battling stormy seas or, worst of all, wrecked at the bottom of the ocean.