Lost Girl

by J. C. Grey

I could just walk up to the door; it is not far. But I want the car close. It is all I have now. So I drive slowly up the gravel drive to the entry, parking right in front and climbing the three shallow steps. A bell clanks noisily when I pull the cord to the side of the door.

  I imagine an old crone opening the door and nearly giggle, but no one comes, even when I ring the bell again. Disheartened, I take a step back, looking up at the long, beautifully proportioned windows, curtains closed against the night.

  In frustration more than hope, I thump my fist softly against the heavy door. At my touch, the lock clicks and the door opens into a dark, tiled entry.

  I am not inclined to enter the shadowy house without an invitation so I call from the step.

  ‘Hello? I’m lost? Can you help me?’

  My phone chirps as it delivers another text. Marc. I ignore it as I have done all afternoon but knowing he is thinking of me gives me strength. I tighten my grip on the bag looped over my shoulder, and step inside.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice echoes around the empty hallway.

  Several doors lead off the entry, only one is open. In the light from my phone I can make out a grand drawing room with towering ceilings dominated by a flaking ceiling rose. The only furniture is a shabby red chaise.

  Exhaustion swamps me. I want nothing except to sink down on it and close my eyes. But I make myself retreat. I sit in the car, trying to construct a plan. I could stay inside the car, tilt the seat back and wait it out until dawn even if I can’t sleep. It is the sensible option. But then I look up and the door is still open as if waiting for me. The house looks lonely in its emptiness.

  What harm will it do to stretch out for a few hours on the chaise? I do not have to break in and I will face tomorrow better for some sleep. Decided, I leave the car for the second time, take the picnic rug and my weekend bag from the boot, and return to the house.

  I close the front door behind me and let the calm quiet sink into me. In the drawing room, I kick off my sandals, shrug out of my jacket and curl into the chaise as I drag the rug over me.

  A second later I am asleep.

  Present day, morning

  ‘I told you.’

  The little lisp comes from somewhere behind me, plaintive rather than angry now that retribution has been exacted. Whirling to face it just as the sun slips behind a cloud, I can make out a faint shadow of a small human form, slightly elongated, on the wooden boards.

  ‘Did you … do that?’ I whisper, pointing towards the stairs.

  ‘It’s not my fault. I told you to make him go.’

  I think of the other accidents over the years—Robert Sanders’ father, the women, the tradesman who fell from the window—and my heart clutches with fear as I turn back towards my husband’s crumpled form.

  ‘Marc?’ I try to say, but all I manage is a croak. When I try a second time, my voice is a little stronger but he does not respond. He is unmoving; at this distance his face is a pale blur amid the ruin of the collapsed stair and shattered wardrobe. From up here, I cannot see if he is even breathing.

  Knowing I must go to him, I move tentatively down the remaining steps at the top of the flight. But as I approach the section where the stairs have come away, there is an ominous creaking and the rending of old timbers as the rest of the staircase threatens to come away. Backing off, I know I can’t leap over the gap. I would break my neck for certain. But how can I get to him?

  Retreating back into the attic, I look around but the shadow has retreated.

  ‘Are you here, Louis?’

  The voice comes after a minute, that of a self-obsessed child who has no idea of what he has done. ‘Yes. Will you read me a story?’

  I think quickly. ‘Yes, but I need your help first.’

  ‘I want a story.’ It is almost a whine.

  ‘I’ll read whatever story you want but before I can do that I need to help my husband, Marc. He’s badly hurt. I need some rope to climb down to him. Is there rope here? Or sheets?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay.’ I try to think but it is hard when all I know is that Marc is hurt and he needs me to make things right. I go to one of the small sash windows, and try to tug it open. That’s when I realise it is nailed down. In any case, I know these attic windows have only the tiniest of ledges and getting down to the floor below would mean edging along until I can reach the bathroom ledge and then shinning down the drainpipe.

  There must be a way. ‘I need to get downstairs, Louis.’

  ‘The stairs are broken,’ he points out.

  Clenching my fingers into fists, I try to hold on to the panic-frayed edges of my composure. ‘I know that. Is there another way?’

  Feet shuffle. ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He’s not telling the truth. I am sure of it.

  ‘If you show me, I’ll come back and read you a story later.’

  ‘No you won’t. No one ever does.’

  ‘I will. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t believe you.’

  Something is nagging at me, and suddenly I know what it is—the locked room. I think of the times I sensed him behind the door and the day I caught him watching me through the keyhole.

  I look around. ‘Where do you sleep, Louis?’

  ‘In my bed, silly!’

  ‘There’s no bed here.’

  ‘It’s in another room.’

  ‘Downstairs?’

  ‘Mmm. I’m going to play with my trains.’

  ‘And how do you get to your bedroom from here?’

  Did he have the strength to move the wardrobe at will? Maybe, but I think his power is the lashing out of a little ghost boy in anger, not a wardrobe-shifting kind of strength. In any case, I would have seen him coming and going from the landing. No, there is another way down—and I have to find it right now.

  Back at the top of the stairs, I peer down at Marc. He hasn’t moved. ‘Marc! I’m coming. I’m going to find a way to reach you. Just hang on.’

  There is no response but my promise to him bolsters my determination, and I stride back into the attic, ignoring the shadow crouched by the train set, looking around, trying to orient myself so I can search in the right place.

  If there is a secret stairway, it must be towards the front, south-western side of the house. I go to the wall but there is no obvious door. Carefully, I move my hands over the faded wallpaper but there is no ridge to indicate the presence of a doorway.

  From Louis, there is silence. I sense him watching me carefully from where he kneels on the floor, pretending to play. He is a ghost, I remind myself with a sinking heart. Most likely he needs nothing as prosaic as stairs or doors to get from floor to floor and room to room. He probably just floats through walls and floors.

  ‘Please help me, Louis,’ I plead softly, looking at where his eyes would be in the shadowy head. I try to imagine them a soft brown, with a remnant of innocence and goodness lurking behind the resentment and hostility. ‘I’m sorry that other people didn’t play with you or read to you and it made you cross, but Marc is a good man and we have to help him.’

  He is very still as he listens. At long last he speaks. ‘I want to play with your little book with the buttons that play music and have pictures.’

  Confused, I frown for a second and then figure he means my mobile. Of course!

  ‘It’s a little phone. You like it?’

  He nods. ‘I made my name on it. There was a king named after me.’

  I think of Louis XIV and would have smiled if things hadn’t been so dire. ‘I think it was the other way around,’ I tell him. ‘It’s downstairs. If you take me down, I can phone for an ambulance and then you can borrow it. We can find out more about the king with your name.’

  ‘Okay.’ He shrugs and his shadow drifts across the room. I don’t see what he does, but suddenly a wall panel glides open.

  Peering into it, I see a child-size flight of stairs twisting downwards. I let him g
o first, and in a few seconds we are standing in a small windowless room containing a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair and a paint-chipped rocking horse that must have been vintage even when Louis was alive.

  ‘Okay, I just need to get help and then you can play with my phone.’ I will show him how to play games on the mobile, I promise, as soon as Marc is safe. I will do anything he wants once Marc is safe. Crossing to the door, I twist the handle. It is locked.

  There is a sound behind me. I spin around as the rocking horse begins to move. Swish-swish-swish.

  ‘You need to open the door,’ I say, my patience in tatters. ‘So I can get my phone.’ He says nothing but his shadow moves faster on the rocking horse.

  ‘Louis!’ I am angry now, and afraid. I am so close to Marc with just a locked door between us. I have no idea how badly he is hurt, but every minute—every second—might count and I am at the whim of a sulky child who is not even alive. ‘Open this door!’

  ‘No!’

  The rocking is faster.

  ‘Open this door this minute!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You promised! We agreed!’

  ‘You’ll go away.’

  ‘But I’ll come back,’ I tell him again. ‘I’ll come back and read to you.’

  ‘You won’t.’ He sounds so full of misery and hopelessness that I can’t help feeling a shred of pity amid my fear for Marc.

  I only have bits and pieces of his story, but enough to work out that he was an embarrassment to his family and shut away, promised a new mother who never arrived. And then, somehow, he died. Only those who have experienced it firsthand can understand the confusion and powerlessness of a mistreated child.

  ‘Please, let me out,’ I whisper, desperately. ‘Please, Louis. I’m scared my husband will die and I love him …’ My voice breaks. ‘Please, Louis. I’ll give you my phone, do anything if you’ll help me.’

  As, I watch, tears streaming down my face, the rocking slows and eventually stops. The shadow climbs off and comes to me and leans against me, mumbling something into my leg.

  My hand touches those ghostly curls as I listen, and stills as I begin to understand what he wants. And when he is done, I nod and stutter ‘yes’ because I have no other choice.

  We stand there a moment longer until I realise his head is no longer under my hand and footsteps are retreating back up to the attic.

  I want to say something else but I am not sure what. In any case, it is too late. My eyes fly across to the door from the room. It is ajar.

  Twenty-five

  Present day, nightfall

  Marc sleeps peacefully in the small hospital at Gloucester. One side of his face is a mess of cuts and bruises. The biggest of the bruises indicates a fracture of his left eye socket, which is causing some concern. He is also likely to suffer nausea and a hell of a headache when he wakes as a result of the concussion he suffered, and his ribs are badly bruised. At the moment, though, the drugs mean he can get some sleep.

  My hand tightens unintentionally on his and he murmurs a little in his sleep until I loosen my grip. I lean forward. ‘Marc, I love you. You know that, right?’

  It is not the most elegant declaration of feelings, but it is true. I think he has always known how I feel about him. Even when I was not sure, he was—at some level, at least. But I need him to know that I know.

  These are the first words I have said to him without an audience since the ambulance officers arrived at the house, although I have barely left his side throughout the ordeal of the day. Even when Yvette burst into the room, followed by Gordon, I removed myself only as far as the corner.

  ‘You!’ Yvette turned to me once she had assured herself that her son was alive, fur coat swirling around her. ‘How dare you show your face after all you’ve done? You are responsible for this, do you hear me?’

  Gordon had intervened, apologising as he led Yvette, sobbing delicately into a handkerchief, from the room. After a while I went out to find them both, sitting and staring at the floor. I touched her shoulder and she looked up at me.

  ‘You’re right, Yvette,’ I told her. ‘I’m to blame for this. You’ll never know how sorry I am for that, and for putting you through this.’

  Yvette hadn’t even looked at me although Gordon offered a wan smile. I returned to Marc’s side and a while later Léo arrived with Sylvie, and I gave them all half an hour together with Marc while I spoke with the doctor and tried to make sense of what he was saying so I could report back on his condition.

  Now they have all gone, although Gordon and Yvette are staying not too far away and will be back here for the start of visiting hours tomorrow. But right now it is just the two of us, and the hospital sounds are few as everyone turns in for the night. No one has kicked me out so I am staying.

  I sit back in the chair, feeling the weight of the day across my shoulders, and yet such lightness of heart that Marc was not more seriously injured. He could have died. I know it. He could have died, or broken his neck and ended up paralysed, which—for someone as vital as Marc—would have been worse than death.

  The doctors seem unwilling to confirm categorically that there is no permanent damage to his eye. They will run more tests over the coming days, but I think their hedging is more to do with insurance than a belief that something is actually amiss.

  I wonder if Léo or anyone has called Will and James. I have not thought of it until now. Someone should tell them. My phone is in my free hand and I glance at it to check the time. It is a little after nine. I could call them now—

  The thought goes out of my head as I realise I have broken my promise to return to the house. I have not even thought of Louis since I emerged from the little unlocked room and sprinted to Marc’s side. After that, all I could think of was the long minutes ticking by—forty-nine of them—as I waited for help, and tried to make Marc comfortable without moving his head.

  Then when the sirens sounded, I had to leave him to open the gates and after that I hovered anxiously as they checked his vital signs, fitted a neck brace and then lifted him onto the stretcher. Though they assured me he was stable, I drove every kilometre of the journey to hospital with my fingers clenched on the wheel of the Audi, whispering an incantation that he would be all right.

  Everything in me has been focused on my husband but now I know he is safe my thoughts travel back to the house.

  I wonder if he waits, the ghost boy, peering out of the window of the master bedroom and down the drive, wondering if I will return, as realisation dawns that he has perhaps been abandoned yet again. Or if he searches the house, looking for the phone I promised him. Or does he sit cross-legged on the floor of his attic playroom, a book lying by his side that I promised to read to him?

  My mind wanders back through this morning’s encounter with Louis, and when I check online, I find out that what he told me was not as shocking as it sounds now. Unmarried mothers in the fifties and even later were still commonly sent away to have their illegitimate children, which were then adopted out.

  Marc stirs a little and murmurs something that sounds like my name. I touch his face gently on the side least damaged. He settles back but then half-wakes again. I find a nurse but they tell me he is fine and that I need to go home. I pretend to do so but when the coast is clear I double back and perch on the edge of the bed trying to calm him.

  Each time I speak, his face relaxes and his breath eases, but when I stop, his restlessness returns. I tell him he is in hospital, my fears for him and his family’s loving concern, and about the sweetly gay nurse who I am considering setting up with Brendan, if it can be arranged.

  And as the night settles over us, I tell him things that weren’t in the private investigator’s report—that alerting the authorities to my stepfather’s brutality wasn’t just the action of a protective sister, but vengeance for Vanessa and for what he would have made me do if I had stayed. I’m glad that Vanessa is doing well now. I speak of the day I left Marc, the mist that had brought me to
the house, and how I’d found some measure of peace within its walls.

  ‘I thought the nameplate said House of Lost Souls until I looked again and it was Lammermoor House, as clear as day,’ I whisper. ‘Perhaps that’s what I saw because that’s what it is—a place where lost souls go until they are found again.’

  I tell him about my insecurities, particularly about my underwhelming career. I explain about the blog and the vintage clothes and my plans for a website, my dilemma about how to make it pay. He knows about the garden, but I fill him in on the steps I have taken to return it to splendour. And I tell him about the repairs that are needed to the house and my plans for the interior.

  ‘It’s been a sad house for a long time,’ I tell him. ‘Something happened there more than sixty years ago, something terrible. I think a child—a small boy—was hidden away for fear he would shame his family. I haven’t pieced it all together yet but somehow he died.’

  I look down at Marc. He is still except for his eyelids, and I wonder if, wherever he is, he can hear and understand me.

  ‘Afterwards, the house was abandoned,’ I continue. ‘From time to time, some people went there with plans to turn it into this and that, but each time something went wrong. There were accidents and people got hurt. And eventually no one went there anymore, until it was almost forgotten.

  ‘And then I came.’

  I think of the open door on that dark night when I had been lost in heart, mind and soul—the way it had seemed to invite me in, to rest a while.

  ‘And I stayed, even though I suspected, almost from the start, that I wasn’t alone—that there was something else, a shadow left behind.

  ‘People warned me about the house, said I should run from it. But I felt safe there and I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed and stayed. And I worked in the garden and made my plans, and I rested and ate and, little by little, I found myself.’

  My eyes open wide as Marc’s hand tightens a little in mine as though he is responding. But when I say his name, he does not answer. Sighing, I reach forward and skim a hand through his hair. It still has blood in it so I go into the bathroom to find a damp cloth.