by Ruth Ware
Why not? The girls were at school, Petra would probably nap for at least an hour longer. It was as good a time as any.
“Yes, please.”
“I’ll have to hunt them out, give me ten minutes and I’ll be with you.”
“Okay,” I said. I felt better already. The chances were, there was a simple explanation for the noise, and we were going to discover it. “I’ll put the kettle on. See you in ten minutes.”
* * *
In the event, he was back sooner than ten, a tangle of rusty keys in one hand and a tool kit in the other, a big bottle of WD-40 sticking out the top. The dogs followed him in, panting excitedly, and I found myself smiling as I watched them sniffing diligently around the kitchen, Hoovering up all the scraps the children had dropped. Then they flopped down on their beds in the utility room as though the whole trip had exhausted them beyond measure.
The kettle had just boiled, and I poured out two mugs and held one out to Jack. He shoved the keys in his back pocket, took it, and grinned.
“Just what I needed. D’you want to finish the teas down here or take them up?”
“Well, Petra’s still asleep actually, so it might be a good idea to crack on before she wakes up.”
“Suits me,” he said. “I’ve been sitting in the car all morning. I’d rather drink on the go.”
We carried everything carefully upstairs, tiptoeing past Petra’s room, although when I peered in she looked like she was out for the count, sprawled like someone dropped from a great height onto a soft mattress.
Up in my bedroom, the curtains were still drawn, the bed rumpled, and my worn clothes were still scattered across the soft wheat-colored carpet. I felt my cheeks flush, and putting down my cup I hastily picked up my bra and knickers from the night before, along with a blouse, and shoved them into the laundry basket in the bathroom, before opening the curtains.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not normally such a slob.”
That was totally untrue. Back at my flat in London the majority of my underwear lived in a pile in the corner of the room, washed only when the clean pairs in my drawer ran out. But here, I’d been trying to hard keep up the image of meticulous neatness. Apparently it was slipping.
Jack, however, didn’t seem bothered and was already trying the door in the corner of the room.
“It’s this one, is it?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you’ve tried all the other cupboard keys?”
“Yes, I tried all the ones I could find.”
“Well, let’s see if any of these match.”
The ring he was holding held maybe twenty or thirty keys, all of varying sizes, from a huge black iron one, which I guessed must be the original key to the gate, before the electric lock had been installed, through to small brass ones that looked like they might be for desks or safes.
Jack tried a medium-size one that fit through the hole but rattled around loosely inside, plainly too small for the lock, and then a slightly larger one, which fit but did not turn all the way.
He squirted the can of lubricant inside the lock and tried again, but it still turned only a quarter of the way, and then stopped.
“Hmm . . . it could be jammed, but if it’s the wrong key I don’t want to risk forcing it and breaking the shank in the lock. I’ll try a few more.”
I watched as he tried maybe four or five others of the same size, but they were worse, either not fitting in at all, or jamming before he’d managed even a quarter turn. At last he seemed to make up his mind and returned to the second key he’d picked out.
“This is the only key on the bunch that has any give at all, so I’ll try it again with a bit more force, and if it breaks, well, we’ll just have to get the locksmith in. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” I said, and he began to force the key.
I found I was wincing preemptively as I watched him apply pressure, first gently, and then harder, and at last so hard that I could see the shaft of the key bending slightly, the round bow at the top twisting, twisting . . .
“Stop!” I cried, just as Jack gave an exclamation of satisfaction and there was a noisy scrape and click, and the key completed the full turn.
“Got it!” He stood, wiping the lubricant off his hands, and then turned to me with a mock courtly bow. “D’you wish to do the honors, milady?”
“No!” The word was out before I could think better of it, and then I forced a laugh. “I mean . . . I don’t mind. It’s up to you. But I warn you, if there’s rats, I’ll scream.”
It was a lie. I’m not afraid of rats. I’m not afraid of very much, normally. And I felt like the worst kind of female cliché sheltering behind the big strong man. But Jack had not lain there, night after night, listening to that slow, stealthy creak . . . creak . . . above his head.
“I’ll take one for the team, then,” he said with a very small wink. And he twisted the handle, and the door opened.
I don’t know what I expected. A staircase disappearing into the darkness. A corridor hung with cobwebs. I found I was holding my breath as the door swung back, peering over Jack’s shoulder.
Whatever I expected, it wasn’t what was there. It was just another closet. Very dusty, and badly finished so that you could see the gaps in the plasterboard, and much smaller and shallower than the one where I’d hung my clothes, but a closet nonetheless. An empty bar hung, slightly lopsided, about six inches down from the ceiling as if awaiting hangers and clothes.
“Huh,” Jack said. He tossed the keys on the bed, looking thoughtful. “Well, that’s weird.”
“Weird? You mean, why lock up a perfectly usable closet?”
“Well, I suppose so, but what I really meant is, the draught.”
“The draught?” I echoed stupidly, and he nodded.
“Look at the floor.”
I looked where he pointed. Across the floorboards were streaks, where a breeze had plainly forced dust through the narrow gaps, and looking more closely at the stained and dusty plasterboard I could see the same thing. When I put my hand to the gap, there was a faint cool breeze, and the same dank smell that I had noticed coming from the keyhole last night when I had peered through, into the darkness.
“You mean . . .”
“There is something back there. But someone boarded it up.”
He moved past me, and began rummaging in his tool kit, and suddenly, I was not at all sure that I wanted to do this.
“Jack, I don’t think— I mean, Sandra might—”
“Ah, she won’t mind. I’ll board it back up more neatly if it comes to it, and she’ll have a working closet instead of a locked door.”
He took out a small crowbar. I opened my mouth to say something else—something about it being my bedroom, about the mess, about—
But it was too late. There was a crunching noise, and a slab of plasterboard toppled forward into the room so that Jack only just got out of the way. He picked it up, carefully avoiding the rusty nails that were sticking out of the edges, and propped it against the side of the closet, and I heard his voice, echoing now, as he let out a long, satisfied “Ah . . .”
“Ah, what?” I said anxiously, trying to peer past him, but his big frame filled the doorway, and all I could see was darkness.
“Have a look,” he said, stepping back. “See for yourself. You were right.”
And there it was. Just as I had imagined. The wooden treads. The swags of cobwebs. The staircase winding up into darkness.
I found my mouth was dry, and my throat clicked as I swallowed.
“Do you have a torch?” Jack asked, and I shook my head, feeling suddenly unable to speak. He shrugged.
“Nor me, we’ll have to make do with phones. Mind your feet on those nails.” And he stepped forward into the blackness.
For a moment I was completely frozen, watching him disappear up the narrow stairs, the beam of his phone a thin glimmer in the black, his footsteps echoing . . . creak . . . creak . . .
T
he sound was so close to the noise of last night, and yet, there was something different about it too. It was more . . . solid. More real, faster, and mixed with the crunch of plasterboard.
“Holy shit,” I heard from above, and then, “Rowan, get up here, you’ve got to see this.”
There was a lump in my throat as if I was about to cry, though I knew that I wasn’t; it was pure fear that had lodged there, silencing me, making me unable to ask Jack what was up there, what he had found, what he needed me to see so urgently.
Instead, I switched on my phone torch with fingers that shook, and followed him into the darkness.
Jack was standing in the middle of the attic, staring openmouthed at his surroundings. He had switched off his phone, and there was light coming from somewhere, a thin, gray light that I couldn’t immediately locate. There must be a window somewhere, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. What I was looking at were the walls, the furniture, the feathers.
They were everywhere.
Strewn across the broken rocking chair in the corner, in the dusty, cobwebbed crib, over the rickety doll’s house and the dusty chalkboard, across the pile of smashed china dolls piled up against the wall. Feathers, feathers, and not down from a burst pillow either. These were thick and black—flight feathers from a crow, or a raven I thought. And there was a stench of death too.
But that wasn’t all of it. It wasn’t even the worst of it.
The strangest thing was the walls—or rather, what was written on them.
Scribbled on all of them, in childish crayon letters, some small, some huge and scrawled, were words. It took me a minute or two to make them out, for the letters were misshapen and the words badly spelled. But the one right in front of me, the one staring me in the face over the small fireplace in the center of the room, was unmistakable. WE HATE YOU.
It was exactly the same as the phrase Maddie had spelled out in her Alphabetti Spaghetti, and seeing it here, in a locked, boarded-up room she could not possibly have entered, gave me a jolt to the stomach as if I had been punched. It was with a kind of sick dread that I held up my phone torch to some of the other phrases.
The goasts donet like you.
They hate yu.
We want you too go awa.
The gosts are angrie.
They haite you.
Get out.
There angry
Wee hate you.
We hite u.
GO AWAY.
We hate you.
Again and again, small and large, from tiny letters etched with concentrated hate in a corner by the door, to the giant sprawling scrawl above the fireplace that I had seen when I first entered.
We hate you. The words had been bad enough, sliding in slimy orange juice across a plate. But here, scrawled in a demented hand across every inch of plaster, they were nothing short of malevolent. And in my head I heard Maddie’s little sobbing voice again, as though she had gasped the words in my ear—the ghosts wouldn’t like it.
It was too close to be coincidence. But at the same time, it was totally impossible. This room was not just locked, it was boarded up, and the only entrance was through my own bedroom. And without question, someone else had been up here, and it had not been Maddie. I had heard those relentless, pacing footsteps just moments after staring down at Maddie’s sleeping form.
Maddie had not written those words. But she had repeated them to me. Which meant . . . was she repeating what someone had whispered to her . . . ?
“Rowan.” The voice seemed to be coming from a great distance, hard to hear beneath a shrill buzzing coming from inside my own skull. Through the ringing I felt a hand on my arm. “Rowan. Rowan, are you okay? You look a bit strange.”
“I’m—I’m okay—” I managed, though my voice was strange in my ears. “I’m all right. It’s just—oh God, who wrote that?”
“Kids messing about, don’t you think? And, well, there’s your explanation for the noise.”
He nudged with his foot at something in the corner, and I looked to see a pile of moldering feathers and bones, held together by little more than dust.
“Poor wee bastard must have got in through that window and couldn’t get out, battered himself half to death trying to escape.”
He pointed to the opposite wall, to a minute window, only a little bigger than a sheet of paper. It was gray with dirt, and partway open. Letting go of my arm, Jack strode over and slammed it shut.
“Oh—oh my God,” I found I couldn’t catch my breath. The ringing in my ears intensified. Was I having some kind of panic attack? I groped for something to hold on to, and my fingers crunched against dead insects, and I let out a strangled sob.
“Look,” Jack said practically, seeming to make up his mind, “let’s get out of here, get you a drink. I’ll come back in a bit, clear up the bird.”
Taking my hand, he led me firmly towards the stairs. The feel of his large, warm hand in mine was unspeakably reassuring, and for a moment I let myself be pulled towards the door and the stairs, back towards the main house. But then something inside me rebelled. Whatever the truth of this attic, Jack was not my white knight. And I was not some terrified child who needed protecting from the reality of what lay behind this locked door.
As Jack turned sideways to edge between a pile of teetering chairs and a dried-up paint box, I took the opportunity to pull my hand out of his.
Part of me felt I was being ungrateful. He was only trying to be reassuring, after all. But the other part of me knew that if I fell into this role, I might never escape it, and I could not allow Jack to see me that way—as yet another hysterical, superstitious woman, hyperventilating over a pile of feathers and some childish scribbles.
And so, as Jack disappeared down the stairs towards the floor below, I made myself stop and turn, taking a last, long look back at that dust-shrouded room, filled with smashed dolls and toys, broken furniture and the spoiled debris of a lost childhood.
“Rowan?” Jack’s voice came from down the stairs, hollow and echoing up the narrow corridor. “Are you coming?”
“Yes!” I said. My voice was cracked and I coughed, feeling my chest tighten. “I’m coming!”
I moved quickly to follow him, filled with a sudden dread of the door shutting, being trapped up here with the dust and the dolls and the stench of death. But my foot must have caught on something, for as I reached the top of the stairs, there was a sudden rushing clatter and the pile of dolls shifted and collapsed in on itself, china limbs cracking against one another with ominous chinks, dust rising up from threadbare moth-eaten dresses.
“Shit,” I said, and watched, horrified, as the little avalanche subsided.
At last all was quiet, except for one single decapitated china head rolling slowly towards the center of the room. It was the way the warped floorboards bowed, I knew, but for a crazy second I had the illusion that it was pursuing me and would chase me down the stairs, its cherubic smile and empty eyes hunting me down.
It was just that, though, an illusion, and a few seconds later it came to a rocking halt, facing the door.
One eye had been punched out, and there was a crack across one pink cheek that gave its smile a curiously mocking appearance.
We hate you, I heard, in the corner of my mind, as if someone had whispered it in my ear.
And then I heard Jack’s voice again, calling me from the bottom of the stairs, and I turned and followed him down the wooden steps.
Stepping out into the warmth and light of the rest of the house felt like returning from another world—after a trip into a particularly dark and nightmarish Narnia perhaps. Jack stood aside to let me out, and then shut the door behind us both and locked it. The key screeched in protest as he did so, then we both turned and made our way down to the bright, homely comfort of the kitchen.
* * *
I found my hands were shaking as I tried to rinse out the teacups and put the kettle on to boil, and at last, after a few minutes of watching me, Jack stood up and
walked over to me.
“Sit down and let me make you a cup for a change. Or would you prefer something a wee bit stronger? A dram, maybe?”
“Whiskey, you mean?” I said, slightly startled, and he grinned and nodded. I gave a shaky laugh. “Bloody hell, Jack. It’s barely lunch.”
“All right then, just tea. But you sit there while I make it. You’re always running around after those kids. Have a sit down for a change.”
But I shook my head, stubborn. I would not be that woman. I would not be one of those other four nannies . . .
“No, I’ll make the tea. But it would be great if you could—” I paused, trying to think of a job he could do, to soften the refusal of help. “If you could find some biscuits.”
I remembered myself giving Maddie and Ellie jammie dodgers after the shock of the speakers going off in the middle of the night. Sugar is good for shock, I heard my own voice saying, as if I were a frightened child, able to be jollied back to cheerfulness with a forbidden treat.
I’m not normally like this, I wanted to say, and it was true. I wasn’t superstitious, I wasn’t nervy, I wasn’t the kind of person who saw signs and portents around every corner and crossed themselves when they saw a black cat on Friday the thirteenth. That wasn’t me.
But for three nights now I’d had little or no sleep, and no matter what I tried to tell myself I had heard those noises, loud and clear, and they were not a bird, whatever Jack thought. The senseless, panicked crashing of a trapped bird—that would have been scary enough, but it was nothing like the slow, measured creak . . . creak . . . that had kept me awake, night after night. And besides, that bird was dead—long dead. There was no way it could have been making noises last night, or any night for a while. In fact judging by the smell and the state of decomposition, it had probably been up there for several weeks.
The smell . . .
It had stayed with me, fusty and choking in my nostrils, and as I carried the tea across to the sofa, I found I could still smell it, even though I’d washed my hands. It clung to my clothes, and my hair, and glancing down I saw a long streak of gray on the sleeve of my jumper.
The sun had gone in, and in spite of the underfloor heating, the room was not particularly warm, but I shrugged the sweatshirt off and put it aside. I felt that I’d have frozen rather than put it back on.