by Jack Lewis
Witches.
My chest flooded as I tested the word, but it didn’t work. I was sure I was on the right track, but if witches wasn’t the word, then what was? The woods would have dominated Emily’s thoughts, I was certain of that. No child could live near that terrible place and not have it affect them. It would have soured her thoughts, turned her mind grim. With a bolt of cold, the answer hit me. 'Witches' wasn’t the cipher. I tested a new word.
Hanging.
Gradually the paragraphs started to form words that made sense, and the writing changed from random scribbles to real sentences.
I felt a shadow cloak my back. The feeling of being stared at grew, like a sixth sense that flashed a beacon inside me. The room was filled with an utter quiet, and I couldn’t even hear the banging of the gate outside. It was like the volume had been drowned out.
I looked at the diary. I felt like I needed to break the silence of the room, so I read out an entry.
‘School is rubbish! Oops, don’t tell mum I said that. Teacher put Thomas next to me, and he keeps stealing my stuff. Mum’s going to have to get me new pens and stuff and I won’t be able to write as good with them. Good thing I’m teacher’s favourite!’
This seemed normal, the kind of stupid crap that any kid would write in her diary. I remembered keeping one myself, once. When I moved into halls of residence I thought I had packed it away in a box. I reached into the box to take it out to have a read, and a laugh, but the book was gone.
The next paragraph was written in adult handwriting, a contrast to Emily’s childish scrawls. I applied the cipher to it and teased out the words. I ran my eyes down the page and read the text.
‘This one is lost, we know. But we will show her the way. She is young and her mind is soft, flesh that squeezes between our fingers. She fights us away but we tear through. We are comfortable here. Too comfortable. Her mind will be a dark place soon. Black enough for us to rest.’
I tore my eyes away from the book. It felt like an icy hand ran up and down my back, and my skin itched. I turned my head and looked out of the window. I expected a shadowy figure to be on the street, looking up into my room and watching me as I sat. Instead it was empty.
Suddenly I felt like I had to get out of the room. Like any second now it would be plunged into darkness, and shapes would form where my eyes couldn’t see. I stood up away from the desk and looked at the door. I expected the door knob to twist and for something to start pushing it open. The door stayed firm.
With my breath catching in my chest I looked at the wall. As I traced my eyes along the cold stone a feeling of dread crept up in my chest, a warning sign from my body to look away. Suddenly I caught something glinting out of the stone. My heart stopped beating and my chest tightened in a freezing vice. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I wanted to turn from the room and run.
Along from the door, there was a hole in the wall the size of coin. Darkness from the corridor should have poured through it, but instead, an eye stared into the gap.
It peered through the hole and into the room. White as milk and bloodshot with a bulbous black pupil sitting heavy in the middle. My legs felt like lead weights. I stepped to my left, feeling a chill run through me as I moved. The eye followed me, its stare fixed on me from the darkness.
A scream built up inside me but I didn’t have the breath to let it out. I was mute, a radio with the volume slid down. My body made no sound, but inside my mind I shrieked. I wanted to look away but I was scared that if I looked back and saw that the eye in the wall still watched me, I would lose my mind.
I ran into the bathroom. I slapped the light switch and the old bulb flickered to life and cast a dim glow on the laminate floor. I walked to the sink, twisted the tap and let water trickle down. It felt like a layer of ice when I splashed it on my face. I closed my eyes and tried to settle my hammering heart. I opened them again, half expecting the eye to be staring back at me from the mirror. Instead there was just my pale reflection, my face a sheet of fear.
I opened my mouth and made a sound. I didn’t know what it was, I just needed to know my vocal chords still worked. I turned the tap and cut the flow of water. Without its steady trickle, the room was silent. I shook my head, tried to empty it of the eerie thoughts that stabbed at me.
I felt emptiness inside, like my body had given up and let everything leak out. I looked down at the sink and felt shards of fear stab at me. In the plughole, wrapped around the metal, were long strands of black hair.
A desperate cry rose in my throat and escaped my mouth before I could clamp it shut.
This isn’t happening.
I reached for the hair and tugged at it. It clung to the plug hole like a leech.
This isn’t happening.
I took a breath and heaved at the hair, and finally I felt it rip away. The long, sodden strands felt like eels in my hand. Wet and slimy, and wrapping around my fingers. A damp smell invaded the air. It snuck up my nose, into my mouth, down my throat. I wanted to gag. I threw the hair away from me and heard it slap against the bathtub.
I became aware of a presence beside me. I didn’t dare turn my head to see it, but I knew it was there. It stood just beyond the bathroom doorway in the shadows of the bedroom. It watched me silently. I felt like I was going to faint. My heart raced, but its beats were weak like a battery running out of charge. I held onto the sink so as not to fall.
Is it her?
Emily. The name crawled out from the crevices of my brain. I looked out of the corner of my eye, fighting for my life to keep my head rigid and not let it turn. I knew I must not look at the shape directly, that to stare at it would be to welcome it in. But still I felt its black presence in the doorway. Waves of malice drifted from it and settled in the air like steam.
I wanted to scream for Jeremiah, but I didn’t dare make a sound. I remembered the words of the letter.
Once she’s in your room she stares at you. You can try and look away all you want but you’ll feel that glare on your face, daring your eyes to meet hers. And once you give in and look at her, well you’ve acknowledged her again. She knows that you can see her, that you know she’s there.
With a shaking hand, I picked up my toothbrush. I had to act natural, pretend nothing was amiss. My hand trembled as I brushed my teeth. I looked in the mirror and saw my wide eyes and skin drained of colour. I was like a spectre staring through a window.
15
When the feeling started to fade I walked back into the bedroom. I picked up the diary, ignoring the ice that spread across my palms. My chest was tight as if I had run a marathon, and I felt like I was going to drop. I opened the drawer on my desk, threw in the diary and slammed it shut.
Alone again, I wasn’t sure that anything had actually been here. The presence I had sensed felt like a bad dream, drifting away as I swam into consciousness. Had I imagined it all? Had she really been there?
I looked at the stone wall and saw no trace of any hole. Relief flooded through me. I ran into the bathroom and stopped in shock in the doorway. I had expected the bathtub to go back to normal, but I wasn’t that lucky. The long strands of hair hung over the sides of the porcelain and dripped dirty water onto the floor.
What was real?
I thought back to the letter. What was it the man had written about Emily?
They say she comes at night. She knocks on your bedroom door.
Knock, knock, knock.
She’ll carry on all night until you answer. She’ll never leave save for day break, and then at night she’s back. Knocking on your door. The knocks getting louder and louder until you answer or tell her to come in.
I hadn’t heard any knocking, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I would answer the door even if I did. Questions fired through my brain as I began to doubt my own mind. Was all of this getting to me? Where the years of reading about urban legends finally catching up? Had I broken my own brain by studying too hard and reading about bullshit?
I sat on the e
dge of my bed and stared at my desk. The diary was the key to everything, I knew. Within it, if I ever built up the courage to read it again, was Emily’s story. I hoped it stayed hidden forever. I couldn’t hold the thing in my hands again. I couldn’t tell Jeremiah I had figured out the cipher. To do that would be to acknowledge her. If I read her diary again, I knew I would hear those terrible knocks on my bedroom door.
I glanced at the stone walls around me. I felt naked, like unseen faces stared at me from the stonework. Some curious, others laughing. A feeling of evil intent seeped out, like someone meant me harm.
I scampered down the bed and crawled under the sheets. I pulled them tight up to my neck, reached out beside me and flicked on the bedside lamp. I was back to this, then. Back to sleeping with the light on again.
Suddenly I wished I hadn’t wasted my teenage years lost in the grim text of folklore and legends. I wished I had picked up the phone once in a while. Spent time basking in the smiles of my friends, hearing their laughter and actually listening to them talk, rather than worrying about my next assignment. I was letting life spin away from me, trapping it within the covers of dusty books.
I wanted to go and see Jeremiah, but the prideful part of me locked my body in place. I wouldn’t let him see me this way. I was stronger than this. At least, I thought I was. I cocooned myself in my bedsheets and hoped that soon the chill would leave my body and that my eyelids would start to feel heavy and allow me some escape.
As the black of night swam outside the window, I let the hours drain away. Try as I might I couldn’t shut my eyes. I couldn’t take them away from the bedroom door. My ears pricked up, expecting any second now to hear those terrible sounds.
Knock, knock, knock.
16
When I crept down the stairs and into the pub lounge the next morning, Jeremiah’s seat was empty. I didn’t think it likely that he would have slept in, because he seemed like he functioned on as little shut-eye as possible. Outside the sky was murky, and the dim light in the corner of the room didn’t do much to illuminate the shadows. It didn’t feel like a quaint place to me anymore. It felt like a chill clung to me wherever I went, like a mouth blew frozen breaths on me from the darkness.
“What do you want?”
I jerked my head up and saw Marsha stood next to the table, bony arms folded against her chest. My stomach felt light, but the idea of food didn’t sit well.
“I’ll just take some toast and a coffee.”
She looked at me in disgust.
“That all?”
“That’s all, Marsha.”
Instead of walking into the kitchen she hovered at the table like a ghost. I felt irritation scratch at my chest. I had never been a morning person, and I was even less so when my throat was thick with phlegm and my body still shook from the scare I’d had the night before.
“Can I help you?” I said, not caring to hide to annoyance in my voice.
Marsha’s skin stretched sternly across her face and showed off the bones beneath. She hadn’t put on any makeup, and black circles rested below her eyes. I noticed a silver wedding ring on her hand, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing her husband. She’d never mentioned him, either, and it seemed like she ran the pub herself.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said.
I stared ahead of me and feigned disinterest. “Just some university work.”
Her face was grave, her skin pale. She looked around her, as if checking that nobody watched us. From the silence in the pub, without even the radio playing, I knew we were alone. Or I hoped we were, at least.
“I know why you’re here,” she said.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
I expected her to raise her voice or show some of her trademark contempt. Instead she pulled out the chair and sat across from me. She stretched her arms out along the table as if she were begging. She leant forward and met my eyes.
“You don’t know what you’re doing. You have to stop. You have to tell him to leave well alone.”
I shrank back in my seat. I didn’t know what to say. Marsha harsh tones were gone, replaced by what sounded like genuine concern. I was at a loss. Marsha twisted her wedding ring around her finger, and I saw that the skin underneath was red. Despite how thin her fingers were, her ring cut into her skin.
The pub door opened and Jeremiah walked in. Water dripped from his coat and fell onto the floor in patters. His hair was soaked, and the tangles made him look like a shaggy street dog. Despite his drenching there was a spark in his face.
Marsha bolted to her feet.
“I’ll get your toast.”
“Save it,” said Jeremiah. “We’re leaving.”
“But I haven’t had my breakfast,” I said.
Despite not feeling hungry, the fact Jeremiah had already decided I wasn’t having anything to eat made me want it all the more.
“Get something later. We’ve got work to do.”
Outside the rain had stopped. The clouds looked thin and sparse, as though giant hands had choked the water out of them and left them to die. The cobblestones were stained dark with rain. One woman walked down the street with her umbrella above her, unaware that the sky had stopped throwing water on it.
I struggled to keep up with Jeremiah’s brisk strides. He walked fast normally, but today it seemed like he was in a race.
“Gonna tell me where we’re going?”
“I’ve got something.”
“Great, but what?”
“You’ll see.”
We walked through the village and passed the school. We took a few turns through narrow streets and then came out on the east side, leaving the main square and shops behind us. As we moved out from the shelter of the buildings we reached the fields. The wind swirled savagely and battered my coat. There was a building in front of us.
“Any luck with the diary?” said Jeremiah.
A pang of dread hit my chest. I’d been waiting for him to ask.
“No,” I said.
Jeremiah’s face dropped for a second.
The building looked like an old manor, the kind of country house a rich family might build as a holiday home. From the front I counted forty windows. It reached three stories high, and all along the stone work were intricate carvings of swirls and shapes that I couldn’t make sense of. Two pillars stood outside the front entrance. They were cracked, as if they strained against the weight of the roof above them. The manor looked like it was dissolving away piece by piece, as if the countryside was fighting to reclaim it and pull it deep into the earth. They had long ago given up on maintenance of this place, I decided. Whoever owned it was happy to let it crumble, or maybe they were helpless to do anything about it. A sign outside read ‘Sleepy Meadow Retirement Home.”
“Grim place,” I said.
Jeremiah stopped walking. He scanned the front of the building.
“Everything looks grim on days like this.”
Black metal railings surrounded the manor. They reached seven feet into the air and were capped with thick spikes, giving the building the feel of a medieval prison. I thought about the name, ‘Sleepy Meadow’ and how ill-fitting it was. There were meadows surrounding it, sure, but they were harsh and windswept. It wasn’t a place that inspired sleep, and I couldn’t imagine spending a night here.
“This is the most populated retirement home in a hundred mile radius,” said Jeremiah. “It’s packed with old gits.”
“There must be at least forty rooms,” I said.
He nodded. “More, actually. There are fifty-seven residents, according to the receptionist I spoke to.”
“But how? There’s not even that many people in the village.”
“Think about the kind of place this is. People move here to retire. Even if they have kids, the children leave for the cities the first chance they get. It’s a village where people come to die.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“There’s someon
e we need to see.”
Inside the manor dim lights fought against the gloom. The lobby spread out wide like a cavern. The carpet underneath our feet was patchy and stained, as if the people in charge had long ago given up trying to clean it. Large, industrial-sized radiators lined the walls but if they gave off any heat, I couldn’t feel it.
The receptionist sat behind her desk. Next to her a plug-in heater whirred and emitted a warm glow. Along the desk, pushed far away from her, was a stuffed owl. Its eyes were pinpricks of black and its beak looked sharp enough to cut skin.