by Dean Cole
‘But killing him, Stan!’ cried Mrs Brown. ‘Murder!’
‘I thought about killing Crowley instead. But his goons, Dennis and Midgely, were in on his plan. Those two would have gone blabbing to the pigs and I’d have looked like the guilty one, like I was trying to cover up what Joe had done by killing Crowley. And they were as warped as their leader, they’d have kept the lie going out of spite. Joe and I both would have ended up inside. And how would I have been able to protect him then? Joe had no friends, no family, just me. He might as well have not existed, way people avoided him like the plague. It had to be him.’
Stan extended his shaky arm across the table, looking pleadingly at Mrs Brown. But she snatched her hand away at once. The sobs that came out of Stan in reaction to this rejection sounded as if they welled up from a deep place inside his gut. His arm slid slowly back across the table.
‘How did you commit the murder without anyone hearing the shotgun?’ I asked, shivering in my rain-soaked clothes.
‘No one was in the house that night. The family had gone away for a long weekend. I went up to his room when he was asleep. I crept over to the bed with my shotgun. He only saw me for a brief second before I grabbed a pillow, pressed it over his face and …’ Stan’s face creased with guilt as it entreated for forgiveness. ‘… he didn’t know what was happening! He died quickly and without any pain!’
The caretaker broke into heavy sobs, his shoulders juddering, snot and tears glistening on his upper lip. It was as if a dam had burst inside him and all the shame and regret was pouring out. I recalled once again the vision from the cellar that I had believed to be my own murder. It was exactly as Stan had just described it, except I must have woken up before I saw the part where he grabbed the pillow. I remembered the feeling of sadness. Was that Joe’s emotion I was feeling? Sadness because he knew that the one person who cared about him was about to kill him?
‘What did you do with the body?’ Will had spoken, calm and authoritative, controlling the situation, though he looked paler and less steadfast than he was before entering the kitchen.
‘I buried him around the back of the estate, empty patch of grass midway down the garden,’ Stan sniffed. ‘A few years later I planted the weeping cherry as a memorial to him, a few feet away so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the roots. Nobody even came looking for him. Lad didn’t have anyone worrying about him. Only me.’
Will shook his head in disbelief. Stan, wiping his eyes, looked over at the window and a wistful look grew on his face.
‘I knew he’d like it out there. He loved the garden, it’s where he would have wanted to rest. And he never left. Not really. I could always feel his presence. Especially around the anniversary of his death. It were his birthday that night. That was just a coincidence, because it happened to fall on the only night I could do it, with the family away, and the pigs about to come sniffing over Crowley’s accusation. But it was the best birthday gift I could have given him, sending him to the safest place he could be.’ Stan’s face lightened with a fond memory. ‘We had the best day — biscuits, cake and homemade lemonade. I showed him chicks in a wren’s nest. He loved birds. He loved to draw them, he did.’
‘And did they come looking for him? The police?’ asked Will.
The smile on Stan’s face shifted to an angry scowl. ‘’Course they did. That evil little git was true to his word. Once that one sets his goal on ruining someone he doesn’t go back. Little bastard relishes it. Pigs came marching up here in pairs to arrest Joe as if he’d done summat as bad as rob a bank.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘That he’d left and didn’t say where he was going. And they had no reason not to believe me, no one to say otherwise, no family to draw any suspicion. I guess they didn’t care enough about Crowley’s accusation to dig any deeper or bother following it up because I heard no more from the bastards after that. Billy was angrier at that than anything else, revealing to everyone he’d been molested by the ‘freak’ for no payoff. The smallest bit of justice I got that was, watching him try and wriggle out of his own lies when he realised he wasn’t going to get his revenge after all.’
Will crossed his arms. ‘That was the end of it for Crowley?’
‘Yeah, buggered off not long after to no doubt wreak havoc in some other poor sod’s life. But it wasn’t the end for me.’ Stan’s face turned dark with fear as he looked at each of the faces staring at him in turn. ‘They live on, you know, after they die. They still have the ability to think, to want, to need. Joe was angry. He couldn’t understand why I’d done what I did. He couldn’t rest. He was always more active around the anniversary. I could feel him, sense the unrest. But I’ve never felt him as strong as I did this time. When you lot arrived it was the last thing I needed. A bunch of folk summoning the dead.’ Stan’s eyes met mine. ‘You even look like him. And you’ve got the same sort of soul he had. You see things others don’t. I’ve lived long enough to spot folk who have the gift when I see them. It’s in the eyes, the way they see right through you, reading every part of you. I was so ruffled with stress I thought you were him for a moment, that he’d reincarnated and come back to avenge me. But you weren’t that. You were the missing piece he needed to find his way back. People like your ghost hunting friends have come and gone over the years, but they’ve never been clever enough to work out what Joe was trying to tell them. That’s what he needs. That’s why he can’t rest, why he’s so angry. The lad’s confused, he wants others to see what happened to him. He only knew how to communicate through emotion in life, and it’s the same on the other side. With your help he managed to frighten me until I confessed. Be proud of yourself, son. Joe’s got what he wanted because of you. The secret is out now.’
I glanced at the photograph of Stan and Joe Maguire, noting my resemblance to the deceased young man once again. So that’s why Stan had been watching me with suspicious, loathing eyes from the second I’d arrived at the manor. No wonder he hated me so much, the thing reminding him of what he had loved and lost, of what he despised, and the thing that threatened his dark secret being revealed.
‘Something doesn’t make sense,’ I said, looking at Mrs Brown as a memory from our conversation niggled at my mind. ‘You said Joe came back about a year after he first went missing, that someone saw him looking for Stan in the garden.’
‘That was Aubrey,’ said Stan. ‘Young housemaid who worked here a few years. She had the gift, too. She didn’t see Joe that day. She was looking at his ghost. I just told Elspeth that so she wouldn’t get suspicious of my story.’ Stan’s eyes drifted to the window again. ‘It all makes sense now. It’s as if everything came together at the right time so he could find a way of getting what he wanted. Not like I hadn’t had conversations with him before, tried to explain why I’d done it. But I guess he couldn’t hear it. Everything changed last night after you lot and the witchy woman brought that cursed board in the house. You gave him the strength to come back stronger than he’s ever done before. He began haunting me like nobody’s business after that, making noises in the cottage, moving stuff. Scary how much force they have in death. He was as meek as a mouse in life, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. That’s why I nicknamed him Mouse. He loved that name. He couldn’t spell a word to save his life, but he learnt how to spell that name, he loved it that much.’
Mouse. It was a nickname. I looked at Will, saw the recognition of the name dawning in his eyes. And now the indecipherable word, the one Joe’s spirit had spelled when asked how it had died — MUDRGUNN — suddenly made sense too. Joe Maguire couldn’t spell, but he had tried to: MURDER GUN.
‘Thought my heart was about to burst out my chest I did, he spooked me that much,’ Stan went on. ‘Thought he was going to kill me, if not by force through sheer fright. Got me so startled I grabbed my shotgun and put a hole straight through the wall.’
‘The loud bang we heard last night,’ said Will, almost to himself.
‘You’re a murderer!’
‘I don’t care why you did it,’ she yelled. ‘You took a young, special boy’s life away from him before he’d had a chance to live it. You got rid of him the way you’d exterminate one of your boggin rats. You’re not God, Stan, you don’t get to decide someone else’s fate!’
‘You’re right, he was special!’ blubbered Stan. ‘Too special for a life behind bars, being abused. Ninety eight years I’ve lived. And if one thing’s sure after that much time it’s that this world is a rotten place. It takes everything pure and turns it black. I showed the boy mercy, Elspeth. Can’t you see that? I saved him from having to suffer, before the evil of this world tore him apart. Please, love, you have to forgive me. They’ll lock me away and do what they want with me now, but I can’t have you hating me too. You’re all I have left!’
Mrs Brown watched in despair as her friend burst into more tears from across the table. You’d have thought releasing such a burden would have made Stan look younger, but sitting there, a hunched and devastated figure, he looked like he’d aged another hundred years.
I turned to Will, a sick feeling in my stomach. ‘What do we do?’
‘Leave it with me,’ he said, combing damp strands of hair out of his face and pulling out his phone. ‘You stay here and make sure he doesn’t try and do a runner.’
Will left the room. I looked at the table and saw Mrs Brown sobbing into a handkerchief, mirroring her distraught friend. Both people were far ahead of me in years, yet in that moment they appeared like small children in need of a comforting arm around their shoulder.
Instead of playing adult, I stayed near the door, guarding it. When I heard Will’s voice on the other side, I opened it a crack to see what he was doing. But then I heard the scrape of chair legs on tiles. The sound of feet rushing towards me. I turned and saw Stan coming at me, his eyes on the crack in the door, ready to make a run for it. I hardly had time to register what was happening, but I knew I had to do something. And I did. For the first time in my life I hit someone. I punched an old man right in the nose, knocking him straight to the floor.
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN -
The Attic
SLEEP EVADED ME when I lay in bed hours later, when the police had been and left with Stan and the commotion had died down. My head nestled in the pillow, I gazed out of the window at an indigo sky twinkling with hundreds of tiny stars. But even its mesmerising beauty couldn’t lull the errant thoughts, carry me to the blissful oblivion of sleep.
My writer friend, however, was not allowing the shocking revelations of the evening to keep him from rest, evident by the long snorts and whistles issuing from his side of the bed. And I’d thought sharing a bed with Kat was bad. Actually, that’s being unfair. Will’s snores were soothing in a strange way. Here was a man who had been willing to put himself in harm’s way to help prove that the vision I had seen was real. He had possibly saved me from being shot in the face in that rainy garden. And for that I would be forever grateful.
My eyes drifted to the suitcase under the window. I hoped Kat, oblivious to the events that had unfolded, wouldn’t be too annoyed come morning that she’d missed all the action. But then I’m sure scooping her rivals to what was certain to be a top news story in the following days would make up for it.
I rolled over and thumped the pillow. Outside the manor a distant wind sang to the night with ghostly howls and whistles. The spooky sound would have been enough to unsettle me a couple of nights ago, but exhausted and still reeling from the evening’s events, it had an unexpected lulling effect, like an haunting lullaby that crooned to me as I reflected on my stay at the manor.
So I finally had the proof I wanted. Ghosts were real. And they haunted us as much as we haunted them with our guilt and regret. Just like Esther said, we keep the dead alive by being aware of them. And it seemed the closer the bond in life, the more turbulent the circumstances surrounding the death, the stronger the haunting. The haunting of Stan Crouch and Joe Maguire had a resolution. But would my own haunting ever come to a similar closure?
Esther’s words when I’d bumped into her on my way to the bathroom made sense now. My need to know that Elliot was haunting me, that he still existed, was really about needing to know that he forgave me. If he had come back to help me then it proved to my broken heart that he didn’t hate me for not jumping into the water to save him. Maybe I would never know if he had forgiven me. Or maybe not getting my own resolution was proof he hadn’t. I was to be tormented for the rest of my life with the uncertainty as my sentence.
I was just beginning to drift off when I heard a noise coming from above me. I lifted my head off the pillow and listened. There was a scratching, scraping noise coming from the floor above. From the attic.
The first thought that came to mind was mice. Or maybe a nocturnal bird had got inside and was fluttering about trying to find its way out. But then I recollected the night of the first ghost hunt, Norman telling us Stan had warned the attic was strictly out of bounds. After the evening’s revelations I was suddenly very curious, despite being apprehensive, about what the disgraced caretaker might have been trying to hide.
I groped for my glasses, slid them on, then pulled back the covers, creeping in my t-shirt and boxer shorts over to the door. I opened it a crack and wavered on the threshold. All was still and quiet in the house, just that howling wind beyond its walls. And then the noise again … scratch scratch scratch.
I glanced back at Will, watching him slumber on. If I ventured out he wouldn’t be around to help me, the way he did when he wrapped me in his dressing gown at the kitchen table, when he pulled me out of the cold and took me back to his room. God forbid any more dead bodies had been hidden around the place. I’d be screaming like a banshee myself if I went upstairs and stumbled upon a decades-old skeleton. Will slept on his front, one arm under the pillow, the other hugging it close to his cheek. His naked back was bathed in pale light, the bed covers just below the hem of his underwear. Few people would be so keen to abandon a bed that contained such a sight. But there was that irresistible pull again. The same pull that drew me down to investigate the cellar.
In the corridor, the sconce lights had long been extinguished and the central heating turned down for the night. The scratching noise grew louder as I crept along the carpet runner. When I reached the door that led to the attic and pressed my ear against the cold wood it had stopped. I turned the handle a little then cast a wary glance in the direction I’d just came from. It remained dark and quiet, guests fast asleep behind its panelled doors. Did I really want to go up in the attic, in the dark, with the cobwebs and spiders and God knows what else? Of course I didn’t. But there was no resisting the strong urge compelling me to do just that. I opened the door and, steeling myself, climbed the steps.
The attic was musty and full of dust. Motes danced like glitter in the bands of moonlight flooding through the windows, prickling my eyes and tickling my nose. I waved it out of my face before it made me sneeze and searched around for a light, giving up when I realised there was enough light to make out most of the space around me. It was the largest attic I had ever seen, stretching the entire length of the house, and its beamed ceiling was high enough to make the space habitable had anyone wished to convert it into a living space. They hadn’t. The dusty floors were covered in mountains of disused furniture and clutter. There were boxes brimming with ornaments and books, ornate picture frames stacked by the dozen, and there was even a heavily-scratched and flaking bed frame in one corner, one of those types you see in hospitals and orphanages. Two intricately carved torchères stood like sentinels guarding the door.
My toe hit a cardboard box and I refrained from cursing. I edged forward, the floorboards creaking underfoot. I regretted not wearing shoes. If there were any loose nails or sharp splinters protruding out of these boards, I’d be
waking the whole house up if one of them went through my foot.
I found a clearing in the clutter and stopped to listen. I eyed nooks and crannies, hoping a rodent wasn’t going to shoot out at any moment and cause a heart attack. But it appeared the scratching noise had stopped for now.
A pile of books, files and elastic band-wrapped letters stacked on top of a cardboard box caught my eye. I walked over and squinted at them through the gloom. There was a scrapbook with dogeared pages protruding from its leather binding on the top of the clutter. A closer inspection showed it wasn’t as dusty as the other items, as if someone had been looking through it recently. I picked it up, blew off the remaining dust and pulled open the strap. Inside were pages and pages of drawings. Drawings that looked like they had come from a child’s hand. But I knew immediately they hadn’t been drawn by a child. They had been drawn by the same person who had drawn the picture that had fluttered down and landed on the runner in the corridor. These were Joe Maguire’s drawings.
I flicked through the portfolio. More stick figures standing in front of a large house with lots of windows: obviously Hilderley Manor. Who knew who the people were supposed to be. The drawings were decades old; they could have been staff or people who lived in the house at some point. I flicked some more. Sketches of birds. Lots of birds. Black ones. They were crows, just like the blessed beasts that encroached the exterior grounds. There were pictures of them pulling wriggling worms from long grass with their beaks. Perched on the tall gates at the bottom of the drive. It was clear to see Joe had a fascination with the animal. A chilling thought occurred. Had that been why the ebony creatures had pestered us from the moment we’d arrived? Did they somehow sense the mystery that was about to be unearthed? I continued to turn the pages. The caretaker’s cottage was next. Then butterflies fluttering around daisies sprouting amid blades of grass. Each drawing was signed in the bottom right hand corner: MOUSE.