I walked down the path to the street, and began to go back down the hill. The view from up here was wonderful. I stood for a moment and watched the long line of surf crashing against the rocks, a pale misty sun sending a gold shimmer over the river. Coming here to see the Forbes had been a waste of time. I was no closer to the truth.
I didn’t hear the footsteps coming fast behind me. The hand on my shoulder made me jump.
It was a boy, my own age, his light brown hair falling carelessly over his brow. And I could see the resemblance to the woman I had just been talking to, except that he had a smile in his brown eyes.
‘I’m Paul Forbes.’ He glanced back to his house, pulled me in towards the bushes. As if she might be watching us. ‘My mother won’t talk to you. You’ve got to understand why.’
‘Understand what? Why won’t she tell me why you left the house so suddenly?’
‘Because she’s scared. We’ve been out of that house for months, and she’s still afraid.’
‘Afraid of . . . what?’
‘The same thing you’re afraid of. Something’s happening to you, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Saying it now, in the open, to someone almost made me cry. Telling someone at last. ‘There’s something in that house. I don’t know what. You’re the only people I can think of to talk to. I need to know what made you leave.’
‘I’m not sure if I can help you,’ Paul Forbes said. ‘Couldn’t even help myself when we lived there. But I will tell you everything that happened to us.’
Chapter 16
There was an old wooden bus shelter on the tree-lined road that wound down to the shore. We sat in there to talk. And there, out of the sun, in the shadows, Paul began to tell me his story.
‘Right from the first night, I knew there was something in that house,’ he said. ‘In that bedroom.’
I didn’t need to ask which bedroom. I knew.
He went on. ‘It was the cold at first. Do you feel that too?’
‘Yes, the rest of the house is fine, but that one room . . .’
He nodded. ‘And the chair in the corner?’
Just thinking of it, even on this warm afternoon, chilled me. ‘In the dark it looks as if someone’s sitting there,’ I said.
‘It freaked me out,’ Paul said, I tried to tell my dad but he wouldn’t believe me.’ He smiled. ‘The only books I read are about zombies and vampires. So my dad, and my mum, thought I was letting my imagination run away with me.’
‘That’s what they always say about me too.’ And I told him my name and about how I was staying with Aunt Belle, and about Mum and Dad being away in Australia. ‘There’s no one I can talk to about this.’ I felt my voice catch in my throat at the sudden realisation of how alone I was. Isolated.
‘You can talk to me, Tyler,’ he said.
So I began to tell him how the shadow was haunting me too, every night in that room. He didn’t know about the cellar, but he did know about Sister Kelly.
‘Sister Kelly,’ I said. ‘She was almost a saint, so I’ve heard. Looked after an old lady.’
‘Did you know the old lady tried to escape?’ Paul said.
‘Escape? What do you mean?’
He shook his head. ‘The woman at The Delicatessen told me. She knows everything. Of course, she didn’t call it an escape. According to her, the old woman had dementia, went wandering. When the police found her, she said she’d been kidnapped, was being kept prisoner. And do you know what they did?’
I was sure I did know. ‘They took her straight back to Sister Kelly.’
‘Yes, they didn’t believe her, because she didn’t know what she was saying, poor old soul, and Sister Kelly was an angel looking after her, they said. But I began to wonder . . . Maybe the old lady was telling the truth. Maybe this Sister Kelly wasn’t the angel she was made out to be.’
I hesitated to go on. ‘I’ve seen that old lady.’ I saw her again in my mind’s eye, there in the cellar. Terrified.
He shot forward. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘She’s called Eleanor. I’ve seen her twice. The first time she looked so happy, but the second time . . .’ I flinched at the memory of it. ‘It was in that cellar. She was terrified. She asked me to help her.’
‘Help her . . . ? If she’s dead, how are you supposed to help her?’
How could I tell him about Ben Kincaid? I daren’t lose his trust now. So I only said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Is she the shadow in the chair? This Eleanor?’
And I knew right then she wasn’t. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘There’s something vulnerable about her. Not sinister at all. Sister Kelly was the one they found dead in a chair in that room. And I think she’s still there in that room.’
‘Wow! You’re having it worse than I did, Tyler.’
‘So what in the end made you leave?’ I asked him.
‘I was scared stiff of that . . . thing . . . that . . . ’ He hesitated, not knowing what to call it. ‘That shadow. I’d sleep with the light on, and the light would be off again when I woke up. Dad said it was a bulb that had gone. He always had a reasonable explanation.’
‘And the door that wouldn’t stay open?’
‘Subsidence.’ We said it at the same time.
Paul took a deep breath, as if the next bit still terrified him. ‘Then one night, I fell asleep and I dreamed. I dreamed of spiders, hundreds of them were crawling all over the bed, and I was suddenly wide awake and the room was pitch-black and it was there, that shadow standing right beside my bed. I’ve never screamed in my life but I screamed then. I was out of that room so fast, and even though my dad was sick he came running out to me and I was pure shaking with terror. Couldn’t stop.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Mum said I’d been dreaming. That’s all it was, she said, just a nightmare. I told them I was never sleeping in that room again, and I didn’t. But the next night, my mum did.’
It was a moment before he went on. ‘I tried to stop her, but she was convinced nothing would happen to her. She wanted me to see there was nothing to be scared of. I stayed awake all night. I just sat in that front room praying I was wrong. And then, about three in the morning she started screaming.’
Paul paused, but when he spoke again it came out in one unbroken stream of words. ‘I’d never heard such screaming. Me and my dad tried to get the door of the room open but it wouldn’t budge, and Dad had to break it down. My mum was lying on her back on the bed, her eyes wide open, just staring, and me and Dad carried her into the front room. My dad was ready to call an ambulance, but my mum got really panicky when he said that, and she started yelling, “We’re getting out of here. That thing wants us out of here.”’
He took another long deep breath. ‘That’s what she said. “That thing wants us out of here.” The next day we went to a hotel. I’ve tried to ask Mum about it, about what happened, but she won’t talk about it. Now, she says it was just her imagination. Didn’t really happen at all. That’s why she was rude to you. She pretends it never happened.’
He sighed. ‘I began to think, to hope, it was just my imagination as well, until I heard you talking to Mum.’
‘What did you mean when you said . . . about your dad being sick? Is your dad ill?’
‘Not any more. We don’t know what was wrong with him, but once we were out of that house, he made a complete recovery. Why?’
‘Because, my aunt Belle, she’s sick too. I thought it was jet lag – she’s just arrived from the States – or that maybe she’d picked up a virus. But now . . .’
‘It’s that house, Tyler. That house is making her ill.’
‘What am I going to do?’
‘Get out of that house, Tyler. Take your aunt and go back home. I don’t know what’s in there. But I really believe it’s something evil.’
Chapter 17
Get out of that house. Good advice. I wished I could take it. But how could I explain that to Aunt Belle? She had sensed nothing and loved the place. S
he wanted a good price for it. She wouldn’t even get it sold if people thought it was haunted. There was no way I could leave Mille Failte. Not for the moment anyway.
Aunt Belle was still asleep when I went back. Her room was bathed in golden light. The window was open and her curtains fluttered in the early evening breeze. I could hear the seagulls cawing as they flew over the beach. Why was it that this room was always welcoming and safe? Why was it only the bedroom I slept in that held such ominous menace? I answered the question myself. Sister Kelly, the saintly Sister Kelly, had died there.
I remembered Paul’s words, what his mum had said, That thing wants us out of here. Something was trying to scare us away too.
But something else was keeping me here. Could that something be the ghost of Eleanor?
I sat curled up in the chair and watched Aunt Belle as she slept. When I felt her brow, she felt cool to the touch, but she must have been awake at some time and read her book for it had slipped on to the floor again. I was afraid it wasn’t just jet lag she had. Or even a bug. What if it was this house that was making her ill? What if there was something really wrong with her?
Sitting there, watching her, I felt once again so alone. And I was so afraid.
Something evil was here, oozing through the walls, coming up through the floor. From the cellar.
I shivered, remembering that wrinkled, frightened face and those whispered words. Help me, Tyler. And though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found myself standing up, and my feet began leading me out of my aunt’s room. I stopped at the door, looked down the hallway.
And the hatch to the cellar was lying open.
It hadn’t been open when I came home. I had walked through the hall into the kitchen, and the hatch had been closed. The rug had been lying over it. Yet, now here it was, open, luring me down. I couldn’t stop heading towards it. Step by step. Closer and closer. With every step I grew colder. I wanted to stop but it was as if I had no control over my body, almost as if I was being drawn towards the gaping hole.
And then I was at the top, staring down into that desolate darkness.
Something was moving down there. Shadows, moving, as if something was waiting for me. And I could hear whispers too. Whispers winding their way up through the darkness towards me. Whispers I couldn’t make out, and didn’t want to. Even so, I put one foot on the top step. I tried desperately to stop myself from taking another step, knowing I was powerless.
‘She’s coming . . .’ I heard those whispered words and my breath caught in my throat. I was sure that was what I heard, a fluttering of whispers. ‘She’s coming.’
Down there, something was waiting for me.
‘Tyler!’
I stepped back and at that same second the hatch slammed closed almost on my legs. ‘Tyler!’ my aunt’s voice called out, saving me.
My head throbbed. My heart raced. It felt like for ever before I could move.
‘Tyler, are you there, honey?’
‘I’m here, Aunt Belle. I’m coming.’ And I ran into her room.
Aunt Belle didn’t want to eat any tea that evening – afraid she might be sick again. She assured me it was only a bug she had. Nothing to worry about.
‘You pick up so much on these long transatlantic flights. Can you imagine all those people’s germs floating around the cabin, looking for someone to land on? And that someone is always me. I always said I was irresistible!’
That made me smile, but I was still worried about her. I wanted to call the doctor in the morning. She was determined I shouldn’t do that.
‘A doctor? At my age? He’ll whip me into hospital, before you can say “senior citizen”, and then I really will be ill. I keep well away from doctors, Tyler.’
A visit to the pharmacist was the most she would permit.
I spent the evening curled up in her chair, watching TV. The only time I ventured out of her room was to fill a fresh jug of water for her. And I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering to that hatch in the hall.
Be brave, Tyler, I told myself, drawing my courage around me like a cloak. You’re being kept here for a purpose. You have to find out what it is.
I stood at the kitchen door, watching, waiting, angry with myself for letting all this get to me. Finally, I came to a decision. At least there was something I could do about the cellar. There was a heavy chest of drawers against the wall in the hallway. I hauled at it with every bit of strength I had and dragged it till it sat square on top of the hatch.
There! I thought. Let anything lift it now.
Chapter 18
The seventh day
Early in the morning, before Aunt Belle was awake, I was in the shower. I dressed and headed for the village store. The wonderful smell of baking wafted towards me as I walked in. I would bring back fresh rolls and milk to brighten my aunt’s day.
The shop had only just opened. A couple of workmen were in front of me buying papers, and waiting for rolls to be buttered and filled with bacon for them. Finally, it was my turn. Mrs De Luca, behind the counter, obviously recognised me. Her face screwed up in a frown. ‘How’s your auntie?’ she asked, as if she cared. ‘Did the wee tonic I gave you help her?’
‘Didn’t seem to. I think she’s got a bug.’
‘You should get her to a doctor,’ she said.
‘She doesn’t like doctors,’ I replied. ‘I thought I might get her some fruit.’
‘She’s quite right about doctors. I don’t trust any of them. As long as she gets plenty of fluid, she’ll be fine,’ she said.
Now that she had taken on the role of our private medical consultant I dared ask her about Eleanor. ‘Someone was telling me that the old lady who used to live in our house ran away from that Sister Kelly?’
She looked suspicious. ‘Ran away?’
I shrugged. ‘Did the old lady try to escape?’
‘Escape? Where do you think she was, Colditz? The poor soul’s mind was gone. She just wandered away. She was all mixed up, didn’t know what she was saying. It wasn’t long after that her relatives came and got her. She was bedridden by that time.’
‘Are you sure the relatives came and took her away? She didn’t die in the house?’
She snapped an answer at me. ‘What is it with you and this dying! The only one that died there was poor Sister Kelly! Died of a broken heart when the old lady was taken away from her.’
I thought about Sister Kelly all the way home. The ‘saintly’ woman. The gentle voice I had first heard telling Eleanor, ‘This is your home now.’ But who was she really? And what had happened here?
Aunt Belle ate the rolls hungrily. I could see she so wanted to be better. Then she took her vitamin tonic. Two spoonfuls. But she was happy to stay in bed and watch television.
‘One more day,’ I told her. ‘If you’re not feeling better tomorrow, I’m phoning a doctor. Only for advice. Don’t worry I won’t let anybody drag you off to hospital.’
She waved me away with her scarlet-nailed hand and I saw that her polish was cracked. Aunt Belle would normally never let that happen. I think that worried me more than anything else.
Mum phoned that morning too. They were having a wonderful time. They were in Brisbane, getting ready for a trip up the Gold Coast. Her and Dad were missing me, worrying about me. Was everything OK?
‘Everything’s great,’ I assured her. She was a bit worried when I told her about Steven going on holiday with his mates and she called the news out to Dad and my uncle, who were firing up the barbie. I heard my dad call back, ‘He’ll be fine. Stop fussing.’
This time she had a long chat with Aunt Belle too. And I could hear her laughing on the other side of the world.
Aunt Belle had said nothing about not feeling well, so neither would I. Instead I told Mum about having the estate agent in. Then, I had a brainwave. Maybe Mum knew something about this house.
‘We’ve been trying to find out about the history of the house. The lady at the village shop mentioned someone called
Sister Kelly, who used to live here.’
‘Not you too,’ Mum said.
I held my breath. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That Sister Kelly, your gran was trying to find out about her too. I remember her talking about her. I think she said she died in that house . . . but don’t tell Aunt Belle that, whatever you do!’ I heard Dad calling for her. ‘I have to go, Tyler. I’m not pulling my weight here. They won’t feed me if I don’t do some work!’
I stood by the phone after she’d gone, my mind in a whirl. This house has a history, Gran had written in her letter. She had been interested in Sister Kelly too. And if my gran had tried to find out more about this woman . . . then so would I.
Chapter 19
After the phone call Aunt Belle was determined to get back to normal. She had a bath, put on her make-up and her wig, and appeared in the kitchen looking just like the Aunt Belle I knew and loved. Except for her nails. She held them out to me.
‘Chipped nails. I can’t bear chipped nails. You have to help me, Tyler.’ She pleaded as if it was life or death to her, so after lunch I sat with her hand in mine and painted her nails.
When I was finished, she held out her hands, with rings on her long slim fingers. ‘My goodness, Aunt Belle, you’re more glamorous than I could ever be.’
She didn’t even deny it. ‘We’ll soon change that,’ she said. ‘I’ll do your nails next.’
She painted them with a dark blue polish she was sure I would love. I couldn’t help but notice how her hand trembled just a little. My heart sank. She was putting on a brave face, wanting so much to be well, trying to make me feel better too.
‘We can stay in today,’ I said. ‘It’s a lovely day, we can sit on the patio, get some sun.’
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