‘No. Why would it?’
‘Well, doesn’t it usually mean something’s wrong if a house is on the market that long?’
‘Sometimes. But it can also mean it’s a small town and the market’s pretty limited.’
‘But how did you guys find it?’
‘We didn’t. It found us.’ When Dad laughs, the sound rushes right through me.
‘How can a house find you?’
‘Well, your mum was on the internet and she was looking for places, and this one just appeared. The way she tells it, it flashed onto the screen like it was begging to be bought. We’d never even heard of Gideon. I tell you, Lil, it was pure luck.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Before he can try to sell me on all the positives of Gideon, Mum’s voice echoes through the rooms. ‘John, where are you?’
‘Your mother wants me. Better go. You right, kiddo?’
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
This time he does ruffle my hair as he passes, and for some reason I don’t really mind.
5
the anagram
After our neighbour’s pool was filled in, their dog went quiet. Before that he’d always patrolled the fences, barking as people approached the front gate, and sniffing madly under our fence line if we were in the backyard. But then he stopped barking altogether, and even when Dad bought me my cat Jasper, a present after my brother was born, the dog never came near it. Jasper could torment it for hours and it never showed any interest. It was like something changed it, that day when I almost drowned. I think the dog found fear. Even though it hadn’t cared for me at all, the sight of me lying under all that water, not moving, was more than it could deal with.
The night before the old neighbours left, they knocked so lightly on our door, hoping that we wouldn’t hear them, but they could still feel like they’d done the right thing. When Mum and I opened the door, they’d already turned away, ready to leave. Mum invited them in, but they shook their heads, explaining that they had to get going. Then my brother started crying in the nursery; he was still a tiny baby and Mum had rushed off to pick him up. I was left alone with them and neither of them liked looking at me. I think they imagined me dead each time they saw my face. Or maybe they blamed me for the loss of their pool and the selling of their house. I remember looking up at them and asking them where their dog was, and the man – I don’t remember his name now – but he got quite teary. The woman stepped in, angry with me for asking, and told me the dog had died.
I never did get to hear how, but whatever the reason was, they blamed me. And all I can remember is feeling really happy that the dog had gone. It would have ripped me apart happily that day in the backyard.
Of course, Ruby’s family bought the house next door, and kept the concrete patch where the pool had once been. We used to draw on it when we were little. We’d make rainbows out of chalk and water, smudging the colours together with great big paintbrushes and letting them dry again.
It took me a long time to understand that it was only because I had nearly drowned that Ruby had come to live next door. If I hadn’t, the dog would have barked every night for the rest of its life, terrifying me as I slept. And Ruby would have moved to a different house, somewhere else in the city, and we would never have met.
*
It’s amazing to me that Mum has just started moving furniture in without investigating all the rooms. As far as I know she hasn’t even ventured up the stairs to the attic. Perhaps it’s lucky she hasn’t because if she did, she’d say it wasn’t fit for anything but storage. She’d see it as a practical space, one to be filled with old boxes of photos and school reports and anything else she could shove out of sight.
Luckily, I get to sneak up here alone. As I shut the door, the room sort of sighs, a low, deep breath. If I were a character in a horror film, this would be the room I’d avoid entering because it would hold all the freaky secrets. Whatever has happened in this town is connected to this room. It is possible that I’m imagining the whole thing and the house is only old, cold at times, creaky at others, and I’m just scared.
But as I stand in the doorway of the attic and look around, trying to believe that there’s nothing creepy going on here, some shape flashes past me, causing me to spin round just as the door slams shut. My heart’s charging, as cold air rushes around, pushing me forward and further into the room. And as I do, I reach a little patch of water in the centre of the floor. It doesn’t make sense. Where would water come from? The window’s shut and the roof doesn’t seem to be leaking. Maybe Max has been up here already and spilt a glass of water. I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s so annoying. As I sidestep the water, I know there’s more to it than that. I’m just not sure what. I keep remembering what Ruby said about the number 4. There has to be a reason the house was on the market for so long. I know Dad thinks that it’s just because it’s in the country, but they obviously paid almost nothing for it, and the only reason no one wants to buy a super-cheap house, even in the boring old town of Gideon, is because something terrible happened there or because it’s haunted.
Normally I’m quite brave, but right now I’m scared. I thought a haunting might be fun, might be a distraction from living in this town, but I don’t want the haunting to be too terrifying. Maybe I just need a break. Go outside, grab some fresh air, as Mum would say, or actually even a drink of water.
Backing out seems to be the way to go, less likely to disrupt whatever’s happening here. But as my foot tries to move, something grabs it. I can feel it wrapping around my ankle, my heart’s leaping out of my chest and I’m balanced on one foot.
‘Dad!’
Someone’s screaming.
‘Dad!’ It’s me.
Loud, too. So loud that whatever’s stopping me lets go and I tumble over and hit the floor. Weirdly, my ankle feels wet and that doesn’t make sense.
As I go to get up, I notice something on the floor where I’m lying. It’s a bunch of capital letters that look like they’ve been roughly carved into the timber. I run my finger over them and as I do, a shock charges up my fingers. I snatch my hand away. I’ve got to leave, go downstairs to my family, but I don’t. Can’t. I trace over the letters again, but this time in the air without touching them. There’s an L, Y, I, R, L, O, S, T, and an F. They don’t make sense. But if they don’t mean anything why would someone bother taking the time to carve them into the floorboards?
My dad’s always doing those letter puzzles in the paper in the morning. I’ve watched him. He writes the letters down in a circle and tries to find words. I’m pretty average at it, but I have to give it a go. I poke around in my bag and find a piece of paper and a pen. The paper is the school camp notice and for a second it drags me out of this house and back to Ruby and the camp that I’m going to miss out on. I don’t want to think about that right now, so I copy the letters from the floor into a circle and start rearranging them. Every combination I can think of. The longer I try, the more determined I am that they will spell something. They have to.
Then I realise what they spell and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to see it.
LILY FROST. My name.
I feel a rush then. A weird cold breeze prickles up my legs and I almost vomit. I jump up fast. Away from the letters that seem to be snaking around the floor, alive. But they can’t reach me if I’m up high. Thoughts fly. How? Why? Who?
Maybe Dad’s playing a trick or my brother’s mucking around, but I don’t think they’ve been up here. And the letters don’t look like they’ve been scratched recently. So how did someone know I was coming? Or is the message meant for someone else?
I start rearranging the letters, hoping I can spell another name. There’s LIL FROSTY, FI TROSLLY and FRILLY OST. I try MATILDA, after the name on the wall downstairs, but there’s no A so that can’t be it. I give up after that because there could be lots of dif
ferent possibilities. Even though I’m dreadful at maths and statistics, I know it must be pretty long odds that two people with the same anagram could come to be in the same room. So someone has definitely left me a message. And as creepy as that is, I kind of like it.
There’s a scratching noise at my door. It sounds like someone’s fiddling with the lock. Maybe Max has come to explore too. I don’t want him up here, though. Not yet. Not before I’ve checked out everything properly. Taking off my shoes, I tiptoe across to the door. Looking through the keyhole, I half expect to see his eye blinking back. But there’s nothing. It’s just black. I try the door handle and it turns, but the door won’t open. I shake it, feeling slightly panicked. But the door’s locked from the outside. There must be a key, but there wasn’t one when I came up here, so who’s locked me in?
I’m trying hard not to be scared, but doing a hopeless job. I’m losing it. The house that picked my parents. The room that sort of picked me. And now all these signs, and the feeling that there’s something going on. Where’s Dad? He’s got to come looking for me eventually.
Maybe he couldn’t hear me before, so I start yelling even louder. I even jump up and down on the floorboards but being two floors up makes it hard for him to hear.
‘Dad! Dad, I’m upstairs. Dad!’
Then footsteps outside the door. The handle turns wildly. My heart’s racing so fast, I’m going to faint.
‘Lil, honey, you in there?’
It’s him. Thank God. I just want to rush out and give him the biggest hug. ‘Dad, the door’s stuck.’
Dad’s so big, if he keeps banging like that on the door he’ll probably smash it down, and the last thing I want is my family being able to come in whenever they like because I don’t have a door.
‘Lil, try and open it from your side.’
As soon as I turn the handle, the door opens, and Dad lurches into the room just like I did the first time. But he doesn’t faint. He doesn’t hit the floor. He sort of collects himself on the way, does a fancy little jump and he’s standing right next to me, like a crazed superhero.
‘But it was – locked. I’m sure of it.’ I must sound dazed.
‘It’s just an old door. I guess it gets stuck sometimes.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘You all right?’
‘As all right as I can be in this hole of a town.’
He looks down at me intensely as if something is way off normal. Even when I’m grown up he’ll still look down at me. He’s huge. ‘What are you doing up here anyway?’
Despite everything weird that happens in this room, I know I’m meant to be here. Even if I’m terrified.
‘Finding a bedroom.’
He looks around now, taking in the darkness, the sloping ceiling, the small rickety window, and he shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so, Lil.’
‘I do.’
‘Your mother won’t like it.’
‘Too bad. You guys told me to pick a room. And I have.’
‘But it’s – it’s creepy.’
‘Yeah.’
He shrugs like he often does when he disagrees with me, because he doesn’t really like to fight.
‘I’m sorry, Lil. I know you didn’t want to move. But it’ll be good here, I promise.’
I want to push a bit harder, make him cough up for a new bike or a tablet. Play the guilt card for as long as I can, but he looks so genuine that I can’t. So I settle for trying to dodge doing any work and enlisting him to do it instead.
‘Can you help me move my stuff up?’
‘Sure, honey.’
I want to hug him for letting me have my way. But I haven’t cuddled my parents for a year or so. Sometimes I still kiss them. Like when I left for camp over summer. But I only really hug Ruby. I can tell he’s disappointed that I don’t hug him and after shifting around uncomfortably on his feet for a minute, he walks out. It feels like the conversation isn’t finished. So I run after him, wanting to tell him about the room, all its secrets and weird energy. But he’s already down the stairs, so the moment’s gone and it’s too late to say anything.
Downstairs, Mum’s still bossing the removalists around. She’s changed her mind three times about where the couch should go, and made them shift it from one spot to another, so she can see what it looks like. I wonder if they’re going to charge her extra. I would.
‘What do you think, Lil? Under the window?’
‘Yep.’
‘Or along that wall.’
‘Yep.’
The younger removalist smiles at me then. He’s obviously about as interested as I am. The couch looked good in our old house because it’s square with sharp edges and stiff arms. But here, in this peeling room, it doesn’t fit. Just like me.
‘Come on, Lil. Help.’
‘I am. I’m helping. It looks fine. Wherever.’
‘John? What do you think?’
Dad pretends to consider both options. I know he’s faking because he doesn’t care about stuff like furniture or making rooms look pretty. As long as he can lie on the couch and see the TV from where he’s lying, he doesn’t care about anything else. He points vaguely in the direction of the wall and I think that’s pretty clever, because he isn’t really committing to either. He can argue later that he was actually pointing to the window. But of course Mum already has her own opinion, and she’s just pretending to ask for ours, so whatever we say doesn’t really matter. She’s faking too.
‘Great. I agree. The wall.’
Dad smiles like he had something to do with it.
‘Picked a room yet, Lil?’ Mum says.
‘Yep.’
She expected me to be difficult for longer. She’ll be even more surprised when she sees the room I’ve chosen, but I might leave that revelation until I’ve moved my bed up the stairs and it’s harder for her to make me change.
She nods. ‘Knew you’d grow to love this house.’
‘Oh yeah, Mum. Once in a lifetime dream.’
Then before she can start the argument I dodge her and disappear. As much as I don’t want to feel any sort of attachment to this house, I strangely do, but I’m not admitting that to an adult anytime soon, and particularly not to her.
In the end Dad drags my bed in pieces up the stairs. I can’t believe he’s so strong. He lifts the slats and the sides and heaves them onto his shoulders, like he’s carrying nothing heavier than paper. I like him being this big. He’s never been one of those dads who look like they might blow away if someone bad confronted them. He’s a sort of fairytale dad with a massive body that could protect a princess from a dragon. And in only five minutes my bed has moved from a box in a truck up a flight of stairs to the middle of my new room. He even pulls out some little screwdriver thing and puts it together while I’m still watching.
‘You can do the sheets, Lil.’
‘Yeah, cheers.’
‘Well, you’ve done nothing else all day.’ He grins at me then. He loves giving me a hard time. Always has done. He jokes around more than any dad I’ve ever met and sometimes it’s even funny. I really want him to leave, though, so I can see how the room feels now. I want to see if it’s still creepy, if the things I think I know are real. But he’s fussing around and doesn’t look like he wants to go anywhere.
‘Shouldn’t you go and help Mum?’
‘Probably.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Righto.’
And finally he goes. I’m alone in this huge room that could be anywhere in the world and doesn’t feel like any room I’ve ever been in. My bed fits under the window so the sun can come in and shine on my feet first thing in the morning and I can look up and see the stars before I go to sleep. I can’t put up bookshelves, wardrobes, or my desk, so all my books will have to stay in piles around the edges of the room and my clothes will just
spew out of suitcases. It feels like I could leave at any minute. If everything had a place then it would feel final, like we were staying forever and that’s too depressing.
But the best thing about being up here is that the rest of the family’s down below. I can hear them banging around and moving things and even muffled words being spoken, but not what they’re actually saying. In our old house, if someone was fighting you could hear every word. Up here it’s like the room has wrapped me in a strange fog and I’m hidden away from the rest of the house.
6
a haunting
Parents like to think just because you’re not ranting about something, that you’ve accepted it. Dinner went badly. Mum and I had a fight. Actually it wasn’t really dinner: it was chips and potato cakes, because no one ate the fish, except Mum, who refused to admit it was disgusting. It’s right what they say about buying fish hours away from the sea: it’s never going to be good. Mum tried to make me admit how much I was enjoying myself. Dad even warned her to stop but she kept going. Why do parents want you to pretend their bad decisions are awesome when they are clearly not? Luckily, Ruby texted me before I completely lost it with Mum, so I had an excuse to bolt.
I can’t be bothered texting Ruby back. I just want a real conversation. I want to pretend she’s hanging in my room with me. So I ring her and she answers in a second. There’s that heartbeat of hers.
‘They showed heaps of people through your house today.’
‘Really?’ I don’t want to know.
‘Yeah, but Mum and I weren’t impressed with any of them.’
‘I can’t believe our house is going to be sold.’
‘I know. I can’t believe you’re not next door.’
‘Nope. Here I am. In Freaksville.’
‘It isn’t that bad.’
‘It is. Weird stuff happened today. Something grabbed my ankle and left my skin wet. Then I found letters on the floor that spelt my name.’
‘Really? Take a photo and text me.’ Ruby sounds a bit more intrigued than she’s letting on. ‘Maybe it was just Max.’
Haunting of Lily Frost Page 5