The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m the same Lisa I always was. But what’s happened to you? You’ve changed since my brother died. Can’t you see that?”

  “In what way?” Judy ear tips were burning.

  “In every way. You’ve let yourself go for starters. I know we all take to grief in different ways, but you’ve clearly been comfort eating. You will never get a new husband if you carry on the way you are. And thinking you’re special in coming around with your cheap electronics, showing off that you know how to deal with a haunting. Well, you didn’t get that right, did you? This house is no more haunted than yours. It’s all in your mind. My dad’s said this plenty of times.”

  “What has your dad said?”

  “That you’re a bad influence. You’ve always been a bad influence on Phil, and you’re still influencing our family when you’ve got no reason to. Why did you come around again? What for? You’re nothing to us anymore. Get your own life.”

  This wasn’t Lisa talking, or at least not solely Lisa. Judy knew that there was some resentment from Lisa, especially regarding the house situation, but she loved Jemma. She’d always been a fantastic aunt and a good friend to Judy. Whatever she was saying now wasn’t from her.

  It’s from the thing in this house. The ghost or entity. The woman that I’ve seen, and Lisa’s seen but pretending not to. It’s clouding her mind. Making her think thoughts not her own. Or is it the second ghost? Was Phil making her say these things, influencing her somehow?

  But knowing that wasn’t enough to stop the anger bubbling under the surface. Judy dragged Lisa away from her brew-making.

  “We’re leaving, now!” Judy thundered.

  “What the hell? Get off me!”

  As Lisa spoke, pressure dug into Judy’s neck, invisible fingers pressing on her windpipe.

  Judy dropped Lisa’s hand.

  “Don’t you dare touch me again.”

  Judy’s feet slipped as her invisible assailant dragged her towards the back door. Judy scrambled to stay on her feet as she was pulled up until almost on tiptoes. The tiled floor was impossible to get any purchase on, so Judy reached to her sides, grabbing a kitchen cupboard to stop the backwards momentum.

  And Lisa nodded as if this was the most normal everyday occurrence in the world.

  “Do you still take sugar?”

  Judy had one hand on the cupboard and another at the invisible hands around her neck, trying to pry them away.

  “Help...” Her voice was hoarse, and she drew in a quick gasp of air. She would soon lose consciousness. Blackness was already skirting the edge of her vision.

  “I’ve tried to cut back on sugar. They say it’s like an addiction, don’t they? Maybe they should just ban selling it. It’s not like we really need it. Like salt. Why are they still allowed to sell salt if it’s so bad for us?”

  Lisa glanced up at Judy, a confused smile on her face. The look of a woman who’s forgotten what she came into a room for.

  Why can’t you see what’s happening to me?

  “Hel—” But she choked on the last utterance. No longer feeling like she was being dragged backwards, Judy released her hold on the cupboard and focused on removing the force from her neck. Lisa wouldn’t help, the poor woman didn’t have a clue what was happening. Whatever this ghost could do, it had as much a hold on Lisa’s mind as it had fingers around Judy’s throat.

  The grip was getting tighter. She felt the skin around her windpipe stretching against the cartilage.

  If she couldn’t get the thing to release its grip, she would have to find another way out of this. Judy grabbed for anything on the kitchen counter she could use, her fingertips brushing against a plate. She could just reach the edge of the plate and spun it around, thinking if she could pick it up, she could hit the thing behind her.

  But the plate dropped out of her grasp and smashed on the floor.

  Lisa glanced at the broken plate, but said nothing, returning to the almost-boiled kettle.

  “It’s probably time to think about getting a new lodger. I don’t think Ellis is right for this house. Or maybe it’s time to get myself a fella. I’ve been out of the dating thing for too long. So, come clean with me, Judy. This Richard was your boyfriend, wasn’t he? The man that Dad saw you with. Your new bit of rough.”

  If I wasn’t being strangled, I’d have slapped you.

  But the black walls on the edge of her vision were closing in. Her eyes felt like they were ready to pop across the room.

  Another plate fell to the floor. Another wasted attempt to attack the entity.

  A hiss from the doorway.

  Jasper had entered. Judy glanced down and saw his fat tail and arched back. He was stressed but ready to defend himself—not run.

  “Hi baby,” Lisa called out, and she brushed past Judy, ignoring the wheezing body, and picked up her cat.

  “Ow!”

  Jasper had struck with his right paw, unsheathed claws had slashed across Lisa’s face, leaving clear tracks of blood across her cheek. She dropped him, but he jumped straight back up on to the kitchen counter, keeping his distance from Lisa, with his eyes focused on Judy.

  He hissed again.

  The fingers around Judy’s neck moved. What was this? Was Judy’s assailant bothered by a cat?

  But cat’s claws couldn’t attack a ghost.

  Judy had another plan though. There was only one person in the room who could help her.

  Judy stopped scrabbling at her neck and grabbed Jasper from the kitchen counter instead. He lashed at her hands and got a scratch in, but it was light and easily ignored. She moved her hold until she had one hand tight around the cat’s neck and another under its stomach, supporting it.

  “Help,” she spat at Lisa.

  “What are you doing? Let him go.” Lisa stepped forward but Judy lifted the cat higher. The pressure around her neck was back at full strength again. She had seconds before she passed out.

  “He—.”

  Judy pinched Jasper’s neck tight enough that he let out a howl of pain. That was enough for Lisa. Her eyes widened and colour rushed back into her cheeks.

  “What are you doing?” then upon seeing the peril Judy was in, “What’s happening to you?”

  Lisa drove forward and Judy let Jasper go. He landed awkwardly on the floor but scrambled to his feet and darted into the back room.

  “Get the hell off her!” Lisa shouted at Judy’s assailant.

  The pressure released from around her neck. Lisa grabbed her arm and pulled her close, shielding Judy from the thing that had just tried to kill her.

  Finally, able to turn around, Judy did so but there was nobody there, at least nobody that she could see. The kitchen was empty. But then, she glimpsed a woman in the back door’s glass. The reflection had a pale angular face, skin stretched tight over pointed cheekbones. The expression was sheer malevolence.

  “Come on,” Judy said, grabbing her sister-in-law. “We need to get out of here now.”

  They crashed into the back room just before the door behind them slammed shut. The door leading to the hallway followed, leaving the women trapped.

  The vibration in the floor started slowly but Judy felt it grow in intensity through the soles of her feet, quickly becoming uncomfortable. A look from Lisa confirmed she wasn’t imagining it.

  Jasper hissed. The vibration was driving him mad. He jumped onto the back of the chair. His tail had ballooned in size, and his back was arched. Lisa approached, but he tried to bite as her hand got too close.

  Judy shook her head, trying to rid her ears of the thrumming that was building, pressing against her senses. She tried the door to the hallway.

  “Locked,” she said but didn’t give up trying. Lisa had turned and was trying the door back to the kitchen. Jasper jumped down to the floor again, then howling in pain as if the pads on his feet were burning, he jumped at the wall.

  A blast of noise from the television made Judy stop trying to force the door. Lisa came and
stood beside her.

  A black-and-white image, flashes of colour. A house in the trees. The perspective moving along as if from the point of view of a person walking through the wood.

  “The house...” Lisa said. “I’ve seen that.”

  It meant nothing to Judy. Static flashed across the screen and the image moved on, seconds forgotten. Closer now. Detail in the house could be picked out. A two-story domestic building, a home in the woods. Judy dismissed the notion of a modern-day Hansel and Gretel; the place was too ordinary for that. Or it would have been ordinary if it wasn’t for the broken windows and the missing tiles from the roof. Vines had taken hold around the lower right corner of the building, digging into the brickwork, trying to reclaim the man-made structure into the wood, delete it from the Earth.

  “Where have you seen it?”

  Lisa glanced at Judy, the fear in her eyes raw and new. “In my nightmares.”

  Before she could respond, Jasper ran across the room in front of them, but as he hit the centre of the carpet, he stopped, like he’d collided with an invisible wall.

  Or an invisible person.

  And then Jasper was in the air, floating, held by the same hands that had been wrapped around Judy’s neck only minutes ago. The cat’s back legs dangled as he tried to find something to gain purchase on.

  The threat was clear.

  If Lisa hadn’t moved, things might have been different, but she did what she had to do, anything to save her cat. She lurched forward, hands outstretched, but before she could get there, the unthinkable happened.

  Jasper’s body turned and lifted in the air, resting horizontally, the legs no longer hanging. It was clear the entity had gripped him from both ends now. The muffled howling confirming a hand was around the cat’s throat.

  When Jasper was ripped in two, the blood splattered in a crimson arc.

  Lisa screamed, and even as the two halves of Jasper were tossed against opposite walls of the room, Judy couldn’t take her eyes from the space in the centre. The space where, no doubt, the entity was still watching, observing, demonstrating her power.

  Judy tried the door again. The vibration was louder than ever, hurting her ear drums and making her want to put her hands over her ears and curl up in the corner.

  This will never stop.

  The lounge door burst open, shoving her back into the room.

  When she looked up, Ellis was standing in the doorway. His face scrunched up as he heard the vibration.

  “What the hell? Turn that down.”

  He thinks we’re playing with the stereo.

  The coast was clear.

  “Oh my god. Is that… Jasper?”

  “We need to get out,” Judy shouted above the noise. The picture frames were vibrating in their frames against the walls. A glass that had been left on the edge of a table suddenly fell over, dropping onto the carpet and spilling a small pool of coke into the pile.

  Judy grabbed Lisa’s arm, slippy now with the blood of her dead cat, and pulled her from the room, pushing Ellis backwards out of the way.

  “You need to come too. Trust me.”

  Ellis looked into the room, then his eyes caught sight of something. “Who’s that woman?”

  Judy refused to turn and give the entity any more of her fear to feed off. Ellis hurried out onto the front path after them. Judy glanced back at the front door, caught a shape of a figure lurking at the top of the staircase, then she urged the others out onto the street.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “What did you see?” Judy asked. The absence of the vibration in her ears was a welcome release.

  “There was somebody, but they looked vague and indistinct. Shit, is that what you’ve been seeing in the house?” He addressed this last to Lisa, but the exhausted woman had dropped to the floor, leaning back against the front garden wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, her bloodied arms wrapped tightly against them. She looked like she wanted to disappear into a hole in the ground. She wasn’t going to get that luxury.

  “You can’t go back into the house,” Judy told Ellis. “You’ve seen that entity, that ghost. It’s stronger now than it’s ever been and for whatever reason it didn’t want to let me or Lisa leave. I don’t know what it will make of you, but I know that it’s angry and I don’t think it cares about collateral damage.”

  He looked like he’d just been told the moon was made of cheese. “I shouldn’t believe you, but I do. You’re not messing me around, are you? This is the real deal.”

  “It’s the real deal.”

  “Can you get rid of it?”

  Judy shrugged. “I don’t know yet. We need to understand why it’s here to begin with—what it actually wants.”

  “It wants me. It’s always been about me. I was the first one to see it. It tormented me with Jasper the other night, then when it couldn’t get me to stay tonight, it punished me by murdering him.” Lisa choked back a sob.

  Judy was having a horrible feeling about this whole thing.

  It wasn’t Lisa that had first seen the woman. It was Phil.

  “I want to speak to your dad, Lisa. I need you to come with me.”

  Ellis nodded. “OK. So what about me? What should I do?”

  “Go and stay at your girlfriend’s. I’ll call you later. Just don’t step foot in there again.”

  35

  Things were moving too quickly for Lisa’s brain to process. The last twenty-four hours she’d felt this terrible bottled-up anger in the pit of her stomach. Like if she didn’t get out of the house she would scream or go mad. But the entity in her house hadn’t wanted to let her go and Lisa needed time to understand what that meant.

  It wanted me to stay. It wanted me to shut myself away from the outside world.

  And it had been partially successful in that regard. The animosity she’d felt towards Judy had been real. Yes, she couldn’t forgive Dad for making life so much easier for Phil and Judy than for herself, but none of this was Judy’s fault. She hadn’t known what financial arrangements were in place.

  But still she’d hated her.

  That wasn’t you. That was the thing in my house.

  What did it mean? Did it mean that the entity was controlling her?

  Was she being possessed?

  Safe in the car speeding a little too fast along the bypass to her parents’ house, she felt normal again. Not like how she’d felt in the house earlier. And she didn’t feel any hostility to Judy, only sorrow that she’d got her dragged into this.

  “I didn’t feel myself back there. I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean any of it.”

  “Apart from the putting on weight. You must have meant that.” Judy glanced across and then winked. “Don’t worry. I could feel it affect me as well. It’s powerful. Just look at what it’s been able to do. It’s gotten much stronger over the last few days. It’s able to move things and affect its environment.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

  “My experience is not as wide ranging as this. I mentioned you were my first client, didn’t I?” She chuckled. “The things I’ve seen before were from another realm. I didn’t see any actual hauntings at Ravenmeols, just the shadowmen.”

  “That wasn’t a shadowman?”

  “Trust me, you’d know one when you saw one.”

  Lisa’s phone rang. Her dance-tone ringtone blasted into the car, surprising Judy. “Sorry,” Lisa said.

  “Hi Mum... wait, slow down. Let me put you on speakerphone. Judy’s with me now but she’s driving.”

  Lisa pressed the screen and Faith’s voice sounded breathlessly through the handset. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”

  “Hi Faith, got into who? Is everything all right? Is Jemma all right?”

  A pause. “We’re not meant to be leaving for two hours, and now he’s got me going straight to voicemail.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Mum.”

  “Adrian got a call. We were loading the
car, ready to go to the lakes. He went all quiet, then went off to his office to speak to whoever it was. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he never goes off to take private calls.”

  “What’s happened? Is Jemma with you?” Judy asked.

  “She’s in the car. She was sat in the back playing on her phone whilst we were loading up. Adrian came back out from the office and got straight into the driver’s seat. He pulled away without checking. He was very upset.”

  “What do you mean? Where’s Jemma?”

  “She’s with him, in the car.”

  “Mum, calm down. Where was he going?”

  “I don’t know. The luggage is still here. I don’t know what’s got into him. It’s to do with the phonecall. It’s all to do with the phonecall.”

  “We’re coming over, Mum. Don’t worry, we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Lisa ended the call and was ready to say something to Judy but she was already accelerating, her face frowning in concentration.

  36

  Judy screeched the car to a halt outside Faith’s house and was out of the vehicle before Lisa unclipped her seatbelt. Faith was waiting for them by the open door.

  “I’ve tried calling him but it’s going through to voicemail. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “What did he say?” Judy asked, struggling to keep from shouting at the woman. Faith looked as shaken up as Judy felt inside. What could have happened for him to abduct Jemma like that?

  Lisa was out of the car, shouting for Judy’s attention. Judy glanced, irritated by the interruption, then she realised Lisa was holding her phone. “She’s calling you,” Lisa said, then to make sure it didn’t go to voicemail, Lisa answered before passing it to Judy.

  The voice on the end barely sounded like Jemma. There was a nervousness to it that set Judy’s teeth on edge.

  “Mum, I’m not sure what’s happening.” Her daughter was fighting back the tears, trying to put on a brave face but her voice was betraying her vulnerability.

  “Where are you?” Judy responded firmly, determined not to show how close to the brink of panic she was.