Secret of the Shadows

by Cathy MacPhail

  The house was silent. I stood for a moment listening. Then I shouted.

  ‘I’m back, Sister Kelly!’

  Chapter 33

  I stood in the dark hallway with the moonlight streaming in through the window above the front door. The stained glass turned the silver light into a myriad of colours that played across the walls. I walked from room to room. What was I looking for? For a moment my courage failed me. I wanted to run back to the hospital, face any repercussions there might be. Almost at the same time a voice spoke silently in my mind, and it was my gran’s.

  ‘Help me, Tyler.’

  There could be no other answer. ‘I will.’ I said it aloud, pushing every doubt I had from my mind.

  I stood in her room, felt her comforting presence giving me the strength I needed to make me go on. She would show me. She would help me. I could almost hear her speak. ‘You have to do this, Tyler. Be brave.’

  I stepped back into the hall and my heart leapt with fear.

  The hatch to the cellar was open.

  The chest of drawers was once more back against the wall. I stepped towards the opening.

  The cold air of a tomb gusted up towards me. I looked down. The stairs disappeared into blackness. My hand was shaking as I took a step down. I reached for the switch and flooded the cellar with light. Was I really going down there? How could I be so sure my gran would protect me?

  And yet in that same instant close behind me, I heard her words again, so close, so real. ‘Help me, Tyler.’

  The words made my heart almost burst. She was here, urging me on. Only I could save her from that fall.

  I took another step down. The cellar was bright, and empty. No shadows here. Yet with each step I expected to see that dark shadow, the shadow that had sat in the corner of my room, and the spiders that heralded her presence.

  But there was nothing here. Just an empty white space, and again doubt rose in me. I reached the bottom. There was nothing here. I turned in a circle, looking from bare wall to bare wall. No shadows, no menacing presence, nothing.

  And then, something changed. The floor seemed to sway under my feet. The light went out and the cellar was plunged into darkness. And someone stepped down from the hall above.

  I looked up.

  Can your heart really break? Break into tiny pieces like a crushed eggshell? Because I was sure mine did at that moment.

  I was looking at my gran.

  Alive. Warm. She was wearing the green sweater I had given her one Christmas. I wanted to call out to her, but my voice was frozen in my throat. I couldn’t move, though I so wanted to reach out and touch her.

  She couldn’t see me. Once again, I was like a ghost from the future, watching. She took another step down, swinging her torch around, its light cutting into the dark. She swung the beam from here to there, searching for something.

  There was a sound. I heard it, and so did she. We both gasped and listened. Whispered words. Pleading, ‘Help me. Help me.’ It was Eleanor’s voice. I was sure of it.

  ‘How can I can help you?’ We both asked it at the same time. Gran in her time. Me in mine. ‘How?’

  Something stirred in the cellar. The walls seemed to come alive. They seemed to shimmer and move and something began to emerge from behind those walls. A shape not quite substance, shade and shadow.

  A figure like smoke. It became form. An old woman stepped out from behind the walls. It was Eleanor.

  My gran let out a cry. ‘Oh my God, she kept you down here.’ There was a sob of pure horror in her voice.

  And in that second the truth of it hit me. This was what Gran had discovered and hadn’t been able to tell anyone. She had discovered Eleanor walled up down here. Proof at last of Sister Kelly’s evil.

  And then I heard Eleanor’s whispered voice. ‘I knew you would help me, Tyler. I knew.’

  And that was the moment my gran realised I was there with her. Her time and mine fusing into one.

  ‘Tyler?’

  ‘Gran?’ I called her name and she turned, and I knew she saw me. Perhaps a wraith, perhaps like smoke, but I knew she saw me. ‘Gran!!!’ I shouted it, but my voice was like some distant echo.

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Tyler . . .’ Her hand reached out to me.

  Then there was another sound like the rumble of thunder, an ominous sound, and in the same instant Eleanor’s ghostly figure began to shuffle, terrified, back into her walled tomb. In death, just as scared as she had been in life. She held out her hand to me, her face barely discernible. ‘Help me, Tyler.’ Not even a whisper of a voice. Wanting her body found, wanting Sister Kelly brought to justice.

  The thunder became a roar and the shadow of evil filled the cellar. It was heading for Gran. This was the moment when she would fall, stumbling, tumbling down those steps. That shadow loomed over her and I knew I had to stop it. This was the moment I could change everything!

  ‘Gran! Run! Get away now!’

  And she heard me. I knew she heard me, though the sight of me was lost to her now. ‘Tyler?’

  I saw the shadow speed towards her – it would be upon her any second, and I couldn’t let that happen. Gran had to get out of this cellar, tell her story. She had to.

  I yelled again, ‘Run!’ and I threw myself between her and the dark terrifying shape that was there.

  Gran hesitated for only the split of a second, then she was up those stairs. I called after her. ‘Tell them, Gran. Tell them everything.’

  Did she hear me? I don’t know, but she ran up those steps and out of the cellar. She didn’t fall. I had stopped that.

  The roar grew, and the shadow turned and came for me. I would not look at the face. Sure looking at that face would bring more terror than I could handle. I flung my arms across my eyes and felt ice envelop me, dragging me down. I struggled against it. ‘No!’

  I was caught in a whirlwind, sure I was about to fly away. My ears stung. My heart raced. I turned and I twisted. I had no power over my body.

  And then, I was the one who fell.

  Chapter 34

  The cellar swirled around me. My eyes stayed tight shut until I was sure everything was still again. Only then did I open them. I was in the same cellar, but now it looked so different. Bricks had been taken out of the walls, leaving dark open gaps. The floor had been dug up too.

  I knew then that, once again, I had changed time. People had been digging here. Eleanor’s body had been found. And most importantly, there was no presence here now. The cellar was clear of her. I looked at my arm. There was no bandage there. I had no stitches. Nor was there a plaster on my other arm.

  Everything was changed.

  My heart was ready to burst. I stood up, unsteady on my feet. I couldn’t wait to get out of here, find out what else had changed. Afraid to believe I had done it once again. I took the steps two at a time, and threw up the hatch. Light and air streamed in. I took a deep breath and stepped up into the hall.

  There were boxes piled up everywhere. The kitchen door was open, the doors to the garden lay wide. I could smell the wonderful scent of the sea. In the kitchen the cupboard doors were all open, and the shelves were bare. More boxes sat on the worktops. Handle with Care marked clearly on each of them. This house was being emptied. Someone was moving out. But which someone? My aunt Belle, or my gran?

  Then I heard singing somewhere in the house.

  ‘Yesterday.’ The strains of it floated towards me. My gran’s favourite Beatles song.

  My gran. She was in this house, singing, alive. My legs felt weak now at the thought of seeing her again.

  I had changed things once more, stopped my gran from falling in the cellar, stopped her from dying, because she wasn’t meant to die when she did. She had more years to live with us. With me.

  ‘Gran?’ I called out, but she didn’t stop singing, busy in the front room packing more boxes. I longed to see her face again. I stumbled through the hall.

  I saw the shadow of her, and stopped dead. She was ho
lding a glass vase up to the sun and a prism of light exploded around the walls, and all the while she was singing.

  I burst into the room. ‘Gran!’

  And she stopped singing and she turned round to me.

  But it wasn’t Gran.

  It was Aunt Belle.

  And the world began to spin. I slumped to the floor.

  I came to with Aunt Belle’s face close to mine, all concern. ‘Honey!’ She was patting my face gently. I felt a cold cloth on my brow. ‘Can you sit up?’

  She helped me to my shaky feet and settled me gently on a chair. ‘I knew this would be too much for a young girl like you,’ she said. ‘Too much has happened in this awful house. I shouldn’t have let you come.’

  She looked around the room at the boxes and things on the floor. ‘It’s just we’ve got so little time to get all this stuff sorted before the removal men come.’

  ‘Removal men?’ I was trying desperately to catch up.

  She looked at me, a puzzled frown on her face. An arched eyebrow, a lipsticked mouth, her make-up, her blonde wig. How could I ever have mistaken her for Gran? It was because I had hoped – wanted it so much.

  ‘Well, I certainly want all our things out before they demolish the house.’

  Now I was lost again. ‘Demolish?’

  ‘Raze it to the ground,’ she said dramatically. ‘And a good thing too. With the history this house has got it’s better for it to be destroyed, obliterated, wiped off the face of the earth.’ She said it with such an angry passion, she didn’t sound like my funny aunt Belle. ‘It would only become an attraction for ghoulish tourists. A body in the cellar! I still can’t get over it.’ She was talking to me as if I knew everything already. ‘And your gran slept here with all that buried beneath her in that cellar.’

  ‘Where’s Gran?’ My mind was still wrapped in a mist.

  Aunt Belle leaned down to me and held my hand. ‘We both know where she is, honey. She’s in heaven now. You can be sure of that. She opened the door of heaven when she found out who that evil woman actually was – when she made sure that poor old dear at last had a decent burial.’ Aunt Belle shivered, as if the thought froze her blood. ‘Your gran’s a heroine, Tyler. No, we know exactly where she is. Heaven, with all the other angels.’ She smiled.

  She thought those words would comfort me and maybe in another time they would have. But not now – now, all I could think was, She’s dead. After everything I’d done, my gran was still dead.

  She had told the world about Sister Kelly, but the part of the past I most wanted to change hadn’t happened. I hadn’t brought my gran back.

  Aunt Belle saw my tears. ‘Come on, we’re getting out of here. We’ve done enough.’ She pulled me to my feet. ‘We’ll go home and make a nice cup of tea.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Home. To your own house! And you can call your mum and dad. They’ll be in Sydney now.’

  Mum and Dad in Australia – that hadn’t changed.

  ‘And Steven will be back on Friday. I think he’s run out of money.’

  Steven had still gone off to Blackpool with his mates, and Aunt Belle had still come over from New York to spend time with me and clear the house.

  Some things had changed and others had stayed the same.

  ‘And remember, all your friends will be home from their vacations in a couple of days.’

  My friends were coming home, and I had missed them so much. I stood by the car watching Aunt Belle lock the door of Mille Failte. The sign was still there. Such a lovely bungalow, with honeysuckle climbing round the door. A picture postcard kind of house, hiding such a wicked secret.

  ‘At least now the evil’s gone from it,’ I said, as Aunt Belle started the car and we began to drive down the track to the main road.

  She sighed. ‘I hope so.’

  Chapter 35

  Mum phoned us later that day. I cried when I spoke to her. I’d tried not to. I didn’t want to worry her. She was so excited at seeing Sydney Opera House for the first time, calling me as she sat on the steps outside. But I just couldn’t stop the tears.

  ‘I’ll be home soon, Tyler. I knew I should never have left while that blinking house was being knocked down.’

  ‘Mum, I’m OK. Honest. Aunt Belle and I are fine.’

  And by the time Aunt Belle and I had made spaghetti and meatballs for tea, I had almost come to terms with a lot of what had happened. I’d seen the press cuttings Aunt Belle had proudly kept.

  HOUSE OF EVIL

  The Angel of Mercy who was really the Angel of Death

  And there was the grainy photo of Sister Kelly, the one Gran had left for me to find. They had discovered that Sister Kelly really was the same person as all those other nurses. Mary Duff, Catherine Macey, Margaret Campbell, Mary Cameron, Dorothy Blake and Sister Kelly – they were all one and the same evil woman. They had dug Sister Kelly up and found the DNA evidence to prove it.

  We had got her in the end, my gran and I.

  I figured out a lot of things that night. The spirit of Sister Kelly had lain dormant, her secret undisturbed, until Gran came with her latent psychic ability and had felt the evil in that house. Somehow, somewhere, she had found the photograph and she had begun to investigate Sister Kelly, digging out the truth, piece by piece. And that was when Sister Kelly had manifested herself in all her evil. She had come back with a vengeance to protect her vile past. She had stopped Gran from exposing her secrets. And now I knew for certain, it had been Gran who had made sure I would stay there, using everything to keep me in that house, so I would change the past and give her the time to root out the truth. Gran was as strong in death as Sister Kelly, but her strength was used for good, not evil.

  My gran. There was a lovely photograph of her on the front page of one of the papers. She had gone to the authorities, told them of her suspicions that the remains of a body were in the cellar and that she knew the real identity of Sister Kelly. Things had happened very quickly after that. All Sister Kelly’s secrets began to tumble like dominoes, one after another.

  Poor Eleanor. She had escaped and tried to tell the world what was really happening at Mille Failte, and no one would listen. So easy to dismiss the rantings of a confused old woman. They had taken Eleanor back to her terrible fate. Eleanor, whose spirit had stayed there to make someone listen, to make someone believe her at last.

  My gran smiled out at me from the front page of the paper, and that smile reassured me. She seemed to be saying, ‘You and I, Tyler, we beat her. We beat Sister Kelly.’

  I had achieved that at least. I had given her those extra few days she needed to expose Sister Kelly.

  ‘It’s so good to see you smiling again,’ Aunt Belle said as we sat with our hot chocolate before bed.

  ‘I’m so proud of Gran, Aunt Belle,’ I said.

  ‘Me too. She was always the strong one. My big sister. She’d be so happy that you and I are sitting here and we get on so well.’

  ‘Yes, but it would have been so much better if you and she had been able to spend all those happy times together in the house of your dreams.’

  Aunt Belle scoffed at that. ‘With a dead body down in the cellar. I don’t think so. That house is better gone. In two days the bulldozers move in.’ She sighed. ‘End of a dream, Tyler.’

  End of a nightmare, I was thinking.

  And then I asked the question that had been bothering me all day. ‘Aunt Belle, what did you mean today, when I said at least the evil’s gone from that house and you said, “I hope so”? You can’t think there’s any evil there now?’

  She took a long sip of her hot chocolate. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this to you, and don’t tell your mum I said this. But, you know how I’m a little psychic too?’ I tried not to smile. She said it so seriously, but I knew there wasn’t a psychic bone in my lovely aunt Belle’s body. Imagination, that’s what she had. Lots of imagination.

  She went on. ‘I couldn’t say this to your mum. Anything like that freaks your mum
out – she would never listen to me.’

  ‘Listen about what, Aunt Belle?’

  ‘I told your gran she should move out of that house right away. As soon as she told the police of her suspicions, she should have been out of that place, not spend another second in that house. But, of course, I was only the little sister, the one with the imagination. She wouldn’t listen to me. She said she didn’t intend to move out until they started digging the cellar up.’ Aunt Belle hesitated. ‘You’re the only one I could tell this to, Tyler, honey, but I think there was something evil in that house, had to be. And your gran stayed there one night too many.’

  I lay in bed thinking over what Aunt Belle had said. And I knew it was true. Sister Kelly didn’t get Gran in the cellar, but she got her later, that final night in Mille Failte. And I knew something else. She was still there. In that house. Waiting. Waiting for me.

  I knew too I was going to go back, as soon as Aunt Belle was safely asleep.

  I thought about it for a long time as I lay there, listening for Aunt Belle’s gentle snoring. Yes, I was going to go back.

  I would have my revenge.

  Chapter 36

  There was no other way to get to Mille Failte at this time of night except by taxi. I waited till I was well away from our house before I took out my mobile and called the taxi number.

  I didn’t have long to wait till a taxi picked me up. The driver had a big smile on his face. ‘You’re out late for a young lassie.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, slipping into the back seat. ‘My mum’s going to kill me.’

  One thing about our local taxi drivers, they loved to chat. He turned to me and grinned. ‘Och, don’t worry. She’ll only shout and bawl at you and then just be relieved you’re still alive.’ He began to drive, still talking, glancing at me now and then in his rear-view mirror. ‘You’ll have been at your pals’, eh? Lost track of time. I was young myself once.’ He was giving me a cover story for this imaginary mum without me saying a word. ‘Just tell your mammy the truth. Because mothers have a knack of seeing through lies.’ I let him talk. He was helping me forget what lay ahead of me. ‘Now, where exactly are you going?’