by Amy Cross
“No, I was...” Pausing, I realized his 'casual' comment was actually an attempt to find out what I was doing in his village, and I was too tired to come up with a cover story. “My girlfriend and I were visiting her family's old house, a little way out of town. I guess you've heard of Shapley Hall, right?”
As soon as those words left my lips, I saw a subtle change in his expression.
“Aye,” he replied cautiously, “I reckon everyone round here knows about Shapley Hall. I saw a car headed out there on Friday. Thought I recognized the girl in it, but... Well, I couldn't be sure, could I? What's her name again? Rebecca?”
“Rachel,” I corrected him, feeling a shiver as I once again thought of her back at the house, all alone. For a moment I began to think I'd been a real asshole, although I quickly told myself that she was the one who'd lied, who'd constantly promised we'd be leaving soon. “Rachel Shapley,” I continued. “She's there right now.”
“Just her?” he asked.
I nodded.
“That's a...” He paused, clearly a little concerned. “Well, I never thought we'd see her round these parts again. I thought her side of the family'd washed their hands of the whole thing.”
“It's complicated,” I muttered, taking a sip of beer.
“I remember when they used to come visiting the area,” he continued. “They were always -”
“Can I see my room?” I asked, interrupting him before he could get too nostalgic. Over the previous few days, I'd already heard more than enough stories about the past. “Sorry, I just need to dry off and get into some dry clothes.”
He nodded, before pulling out a small tin from under the bar and rifling through some keys.
“My daughter used to know little Rachel,” he muttered. “Thick as thieves, they were. Always playing together up at that house. There was a little gang of those girls, best friends like you wouldn't believe.” Taking one of the keys from the tin, he made his way around the bar and headed over to the door. “Come on,” he called out to me. “And try not to drip too much on your way up!”
***
Stepping out of the bathroom, I began drying my hair with a towel as I headed over to the bed. My room was small but clean, and at least there was no sign of bugs and beetles in the walls. Stopping for a moment, I listened to the sound of rain outside, but I felt a rush of relief as I realized that the walls were silent.
With a towel wrapped around my waist, I made my way to the window and looked out. Rain was really lashing down now, pummeling the village, and there didn't seem to be anyone out and about. There weren't many electric lights, either, and after a moment I looked toward the distance, imagining Shapley Hall several miles away. For a few seconds, I thought of Rachel sitting in darkness. I knew she wouldn't be out digging so late, not in such terrible weather, so I figured she'd be in the house now, with beetles in the walls and...
Sighing, I realized I had to face the truth.
I'd been a complete ass. Leaving here there like that, even though she'd constantly broken her promises, had been beyond mean. Unfortunately Rachel was the proud non-owner of a cellphone, having told me once that they caused brain tumors, so I couldn't call and check on her. I was tempted to ask for a taxi and head back out to the house, but then I thought about the face at the window, and I realized I couldn't bring myself to set foot in that place again.
Every time I blinked, I saw the face again. Its furious eyes seemed to have been burned into my mind, along with the screaming, black-tarred mouth. For a moment, I caught myself imagining that same face watching Rachel.
“She'll be fine,” I muttered finally, before heading to the bed and starting to pull some dry clothes from my bag.
A moment later, a solitary black beetle tumbled out onto the clean sheets, having clearly stowed away from Shapley Hall. I instinctively crushed the damn thing, before brushing its remains onto the carpet. Once I saw the crumpled little corpse on the floor, however, I found myself once again thinking about Rachel all alone in the house, as if I couldn't get her out of my mind.
“She'll be fine,” I muttered again, trying to convince myself. “It's just a house. She'll -”
Suddenly I heard a knock at the door.
Chapter Twenty
“I wasn't sure whether to disturb you,” Lizzie continued as we took a seat in a corner of the pub. “Dad gave me a call and said you'd checked in for the night. My first instinct was to stay well away, but I just couldn't. After the way Rachel was with me the other day...”
Her voice trailed off.
“You and Rachel were friends?” I asked finally.
She nodded.
“She didn't really tell me very much,” I continued. “When you showed up at the house, it seemed to... I don't know, it seemed to unsettle her somehow.”
“She wasn't very pleased to see me,” Lizzie said with a sigh, before taking another sip of beer.
“Were you on good terms the last time you saw her?” I asked.
She nodded again. “But that was more than a decade ago. A lot's happened since.”
“So you used to hang out back then?”
“There were four of us,” she explained. “Rachel used to come to stay at Shapley Hall for a few weeks every summer, so we'd end up going to play with her.” Again she paused, and I could tell that the subject made her feel a little uncomfortable. “How's she doing?”
“She's good,” I replied, wondering just how much I should admit. “She's... I mean, she's fine.”
“Where is she now? Is she at the house?”
I nodded.
“Alone?”
Again, I nodded, although this time I felt a twinge of guilt.
“I never thought she'd go back there,” Lizzie muttered. “Hell, I never thought she'd come within a hundred miles of this place again.” She paused. “My family's from around here. I've lived in Retchford all my life. When I was a kid, Rachel's family used to come and visit old Henry at the house sometimes, and we were the same age so we got to know each other. There was a little group of us who'd play, sometimes in the village or sometimes...” Another pause. “Sometimes at Shapley Hall. Alison and Maya moved away years ago, but I'm still here.” She raised her glass for a brief toast. “Cheers to spending your entire life in one little village, huh? Life as a barmaid. Local girl all the way.”
I took a sip of beer, although I didn't feel much like drinking. I couldn't stop thinking about Rachel, all alone in that dark house.
“Why did Rachel's family stop coming?” I asked after a moment.
“I suppose it was to protect her, really.”
“From what?”
“Well, the last time she was here...” She paused, eying me with a hint of suspicion. “How much do you know, exactly?”
“I know she visited the house when she was a child.”
“Is that all she's told you?”
“I know she...” I paused, not really wanting to broach the subject of Rachel's wilder claims, although after a moment I realized there was no way to avoid the subject. “I know she thought the house was haunted,” I continued cautiously. “I know she believed that she'd seen a ghost.”
“Not just one ghost,” Lizzie replied. “She swore she'd seen Georgette and Edward Shapley.”
“Right,” I muttered, with a faint, embarrassed smile. “Did anyone else claim to have seen them, or was it just Rachel?”
“Just Rachel.”
I nodded. That made sense.
“Well...” She sighed. “Kind of just Rachel. It's complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was fun at first,” she continued. “We were kids, we enjoyed sharing spooky stories. The others and I sometimes made things up, we pretended we'd seen things even though we hadn't. We used to compete to tell the scariest stories, we used to really scare freak each other out, but I think deep down we all understood that it was all make-believe. After a while, though, I realized Rachel wasn't pretending. She really believed it, and
it wasn't just a fun game for her.” She took another sip of beer. “And then it all culminated in the stuff that happened in the basement.”
“What happened in the basement?” I asked.
“Didn't she tell you?”
I shook my head.
“Seriously?” she continued. “I thought you were, like, her boyfriend?”
“I am,” I muttered. “I just... I don't think she told me everything.”
She took another sip, as if she needed time to prepare. “We'd gone out to Shapley Hall one afternoon,” she continued finally, “and I was with Maya and Alison, playing on the lawn. I suppose Rachel had wandered off by herself, she did that sometimes. I hadn't even noticed she wasn't with us, not at first. It was a bright, sunny day, and then suddenly we heard...” She paused again, and I could see a shudder pass through her body. “I've never heard a scream like it. Even now, it's like someone running their fingernails down a blackboard, you know? I just hate thinking about it.”
“Rachel was in the basement?” I asked.
She nodded. “We didn't realize that at first. We were all looking for her in the main part of the house. Her parents and her uncle Henry were frantic, but it took a few minutes before...” She took a deep breath. “How's Rachel's shoulder now? Did it heal okay?”
“Sometimes it gives her a little pain,” I replied. “Why? What happened?”
“She never told you that, either?”
“We were...” Sighing again, I realized there was a lot Rachel hadn't told me. In fact, I was starting to think that maybe we weren't that close at all.
“When we got down to the basement,” Lizzie continued, “we arrived just as Rachel had broken the door down. It was this big wooden door, a really sturdy thing, but she'd been trapped on the other side. It turned out, she'd been reading some old books in the house's library, and she'd convinced herself she could seal the spirit of Edward Shapley in the basement, but somehow the door got stuck and she panicked. She was -”
“Hang on,” I replied, interrupting her. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that an eleven-year-old girl broke a wooden door down?”
She nodded.
“That's not possible,” I continued. “I mean, it's just not!”
“That's what we all thought,” she replied, “but she was panicking so much. She broke her shoulder in the process, I think it was in two or three places. Whatever she'd seen down there in the basement, it scared her so much, she smashed her way out.”
I shook my head.
“It happened,” Lizzie said firmly. “I was there. No matter what else you might think, Rachel did break her way out of that basement. I guess when someone's really, truly terrified, they can muster some kinda hidden strength or... All I know is that she was screaming on the basement floor, and her shoulder was visibly damaged. It was all crooked. Everyone was panicking, running around trying to help her, but Rachel kept saying that she'd seen Edward Shapley, that he'd been after her in the basement.”
I shook my head again, partly because the story was so hard to believe but partly, also, because I didn't want to admit that something so horrific could have happened. Suddenly the thought of Rachel alone at the house seemed much more worrying, and I was starting to realize that I'd made a huge mistake.
“I only saw her one more time after that,” Lizzie continued. “Only one more time before this week, anyway. Her parents brought her back to the house about six months after the incident in the basement. I think they thought it'd be good for her to revisit the scene. She had her arm in a sling, and everyone was trying to act like things were normal, but Rachel was... different somehow. And after that day, her parents took her away and I never believed for one second that she'd be back in the area, especially when I heard about the...”
Her voice trailed off.
“About the what?” I asked, feeling a slow sense of panic in my chest.
“Well, the things that happened after.”
“What things?”
She stared at me for a moment. “You know about the hospital, don't you?”
“What hospital?”
“Seriously? I thought you -”
“What hospital?” I asked again, trying not to panic.
She paused. “From what I was told, Rachel spent most of the past decade in a psychiatric hospital. She was committed at the age of fourteen.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“How could you not have known?” Lizzie shouted as we hurried through the rain, making our way across the village square. “I thought you said you were her boyfriend?”
“We haven't been seeing each other for very long,” I replied, trying not to panic. “She was always kind of vague about her past, and I guess... I guess I never wanted to push too much.”
Pulling a set of keys from her pocket, she stopped next to a car and started to unlock the door.
“Rachel isn't mad,” I continued, heading around to the other side of the vehicle. “We've been dating for a couple of months, I'd know if she was crazy!”
“All I know is that she was committed less than a year after the incident in the basement,” Lizzie replied, climbing into the car. A moment later she unlocked the door on the passenger side and I hurried in, finally getting out of the rain. “The last I heard was a year, maybe eighteen months ago, when someone mentioned that she was still in the hospital. I think she never really got over whatever happened in that basement.”
“I should never have left her up there,” I muttered, seething at my own selfishness.
“It's not your fault,” she replied as she started the engine, and the windscreen-wipers came to life. “You didn't know. Whatever's wrong with Rachel, it started a long time ago, back when she and I were just kids.”
***
“Rachel Shapley was released from Martinsville Psychiatric Hospital ten weeks ago,” Lizzie explained as she drove us along the dark country lane that led toward Shapley Hall. She had her phone in one hand, and she'd brought up her email inbox. “I just got a reply from Maya. She says Rachel was supposed to go and live with her parents, but apparently she left not longer after. She's barely had any contact with them since.”
“She must have been waiting all that time to get back to the house,” I muttered, watching the dark, rain-swept road ahead. “She said she made a promise to the ghost of Georgette Shapley.”
“She used to talk about Georgette a lot when we were little,” Lizzie replied. “She claimed to see her in the garden, and she also said she saw Edward Shapley's ghost in the house. She was scared of him, that's why she tried to seal him in the basement. She had this whole, elaborate explanation worked out, like a fantasy in her head.” She paused for a moment. “It's my fault as much as anyone's.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
“Back in the day, all four of us used to like telling ghost stories about that house. Me and Rachel, and Maya and Alison... We'd sit in a little circle on the lawn or in one of the house's rooms, and we'd take it in turns to talk about how we'd seen the ghosts of Georgette and Edward Shapley.”
“But you hadn't?”
She shook her head. “Of course we hadn't. Ghosts aren't real. When I found out that she'd been committed, I couldn't help feeling responsible. If the rest of us hadn't built the whole thing up, maybe Rachel wouldn't have started to believe it was all true, but we were just kids. We thought we were just scaring each other and having fun!”
“And Rachel took it too far,” I muttered.
“I reckon people believe in ghosts for one of two reasons,” she continued. “Either they do it because they want to, because they enjoy the buzz, which is what it was like for me and the others...” She paused. “Or they believe because they have to, because they think they've seen something they can't ignore. Rachel got to that stage. Maybe she was just more sensitive than the rest of us, more impressionable, but for some reason it became more real for her.” She glanced at me. “She really believed she'd seen those ghosts, and she lost her m
ind.”
“The timing of all this seems like a hell of a coincidence,” I continued, looking out at the dark road ahead and seeing nothing but rain crashing down through the car's headlights. “Rachel was released just around the same time that her uncle Henry died.”
“Henry?” she replied, sounding confused. “What are you talking about? Henry isn't dead! He's on his yearly trip to Thailand!”
“Thailand?”
“Everyone knows Henry Shapley spends four months out there each year,” she continued. “No-one really wants to think about what he gets up to, but off he goes every November, regular as clockwork. Never comes back before March.”
“That must be why she was so keen to get rid of you the other day,” I said with a sigh. “She was worried you'd accidentally say something that'd expose her lies and -”
Suddenly the car came screeching to a halt, almost spinning on the wet road.
“Sorry about that,” Lizzie muttered, reversing slightly and then taking a hard right onto the driveway. “It's so dark out here. I almost missed the turning.”
Looking ahead, I saw that the headlights were picking out the road that led directly to Shapley Hall. There were no lights in the distance, and the bad weather meant there was no moonlight, so I couldn't see the house at all, not even as Lizzie brought the car to a stop. Opening the door, I scrambled out into the rain, and finally I was just about able to make out the huge, brooding shape of Shapley Hall. Every window in the house seemed completely dark, with not a hint of candlelight. The place looked completely deserted.
“Rachel!” I shouted, hurrying across the driveway and up the steps. I tried opening the front door, only to find that it was locked. “Rachel, open up!” I yelled, hammering on the door. “Rachel, it's me!”
“Maybe she just went to bed,” Lizzie suggested as she joined me.
“I should never have left her alone,” I muttered, taking a step back just as she stepped past and tried the door. “I should have stayed and made sure she was okay.”