by Jack Lewis
I span around and shot bolts of light over the dusty floor and cold walls. The fuse box was set at knee height against the wall furthest away from the door. At first I couldn’t force myself to cross the cellar, as though there was a thick web that would trap me if I moved. I took a few steps, felt the stony floor sting my feet. As I walked across the darkness swallowed me up and I got the sense I was lost in a never-ending wilderness. How could Marsha live here and face this place every night?
I bent down toward the fuse box and flicked open the lid, but the plastic fell shut. I would need two hands, one to prop the lid open, and the other to flip the switches. I set the torch beside me on the floor, but as I placed it down I felt like a mountain climber willingly cutting her own support line. I angled it so that the beam of light pointed at the fuse box, and the yellow glow hit weak cobwebs and illuminated the switches.
“Let’s see which fuse blew,” I said, feeling my words scatter over the silence of the room.
The pub lounge switches were fine, as were the toilets, Marsha’s room and Jeremiah’s room. As I traced my fingers across them I stopped at the one that had tripped, the only one that pointed down. It was the fuse for my room.
As I gripped the switch and went to flick it, I felt my back freeze and the hairs on my arms stiffen. My nerves endings screamed out, warned me that something stood behind me. I stopped mid-breath and became as still as a statue. I didn’t dare move, like a camper playing dead as a bear prowls nearby.
I knew something was there. Stood silently in the shadows. Watching. Creeping. I didn’t dare breathe out, and I held the air in my lungs until I couldn’t take it anymore. I wished I was upstairs in bed or in the lounge. Anywhere with light. Just a place where things didn’t move around me in the darkness.
I gasped as I felt something walk closer to me. It stood behind me, so close that I could almost feel it brush against my clothes. My skin tingled with a terrible chill.
Oh my god, I thought, even the voice in my head a whimper.
A hand took hold of my hair and wrapped the locks around its fingers, then glided through the strands. Their touch was gentle, like a fine comb running through from end to end. I felt the skin on my back itch, and I held in a shudder as the fingers moved through my hair.
My insides turned to water. My legs were locked in place and wouldn’t move, and it was all I could do not to let a whimper escape my throat. The cellar door seemed miles behind me, leaving me trapped in the darkness with this thing caressing my hair. A scream rang in my head but that was where it stayed. It was like my body was frozen in fright, and that whatever happened I must not move or make a sound.
The hand gripped hold of my hair once again. This time it tightened, and suddenly it yanked at me. It was so hard that I felt hairs start to tear from their roots. My head jerked back sharply, and I almost fell onto the stone floor. My heart smashed against my chest. I couldn’t hold back the scream now. It pierced through the darkness, echoed off the stone walls and seemed to break the spell on my legs.
I picked up the torch and scrambled to my feet. I span the light into the darkness behind me, but there was nothing. A cold shiver wrapped around my arms like a blanket, and a wave of despair settled over me. My breath rushed out in panicked gushes, rising in the air like steam.
I ran out of the cellar and left the fuse tripped. The lounge and stairs blurred passed me until finally I found myself in the upstairs hallway. I didn’t dare risk a look behind me as I went, fearing that I might actually see her stalking me through the empty halls of the pub.
I stopped outside Jeremiah’s room. Inhibitions gone, I pounded on his door until my knuckles stung. The door stood firm, the silence held.
“Jeremiah!” I shouted, my scratchy voice stabbing at the quiet of the halls.
I pounded again, felt my hand sting. Still the door didn’t move.
I turned and walked back to Marsha’s room. I knocked on it again, this time not giving a damn whether I annoyed her or not. I knocked and knocked, and the only answer I got was silence.
I twisted her handle and felt it move all the way. I slowly opened her bedroom door and stepped inside. The glow of the moon poured through the window, and I saw that the landlady’s room was empty, her bed made as though she had never slept in it.
Next to the bed, on a dresser with a mirror in the middle, was a book. I knew what it was straight away. As I walked over to the dresser my pulse fired. Up close, the light of the torch confirmed my suspicions and made my heart thud. It was the diary.
Marsha must have taken it from my room, but why had she done it? Where was she now? And where the hell was Jeremiah?
Footsteps creaked on the threshold of the door. I span rang and shot a beam of light at the doorway. A figure stood there, bathed in shadow. An old and twisted face watched me.
23
The figure stepped over the threshold of the door. I shrank back and bumped into the dresser, knocking a bottle of nail varnish to the floor. The figure moved closer, and as the moonlight hit them the features untwisted. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was Marsha.
“You’re a snooper,” she said. She looked around the room, inspecting it as if I was a thief and she needed to make sure everything was in its place.
I held the diary in the air. “I could say the same about you. What the hell are you playing at?”
Marsha strode across the room, the floorboards thudding under her feet. She stood in front of me, reached out and grabbed the diary. She held it tight in her hand and looked at it, as if figuring out what to do.
I pictured her creeping around my room while I was gone, sifting through my case and poking through my drawers. The nerve of the woman. I felt my fingers curl into a fist, and the vein on my temple pounded.
“Are you going to explain what the hell is going on?”
“Where did you get this?” said Marsha, shaking the diary in the air.
“Have you read it?” I asked.
Marsha looked at the ground and stared as if she expected it to open up and devour her. When she looked up at me, a moist film glinted as the moonlight hit the corner of her eyes.
“Aye, I’ve read it. Knew that I shouldn’t, for what it’s worth. Couldn’t stop myself.”
I thought Marsha was just being nosy, so I didn’t understand this reaction. What was she so upset about? What did Emily have to do with her?
“Did you know her?” I said.
Marsha gulped. “Everybody in the village knew her. Though you’d not get any of them to admit it now.”
“And why were you warning me away?”
Marsha took a step to the side and sank herself into the bed. She sat straight and stared at me, eyes narrowed on mine.
“You better sit down.”
The adrenaline seeped out of me, taking every last scrap of my body heat with it. Despite the layers I wore my shoulders still shivered. I sat down, wrapped my arms around my torso and hugged myself, tried to shock warmth into my worn-out body.
Marsha stood up, lifted a dressing gown off a hook and threw it on my lap.
“Put this on.”
I wrapped the dressing gown over my back.
“This is my fiftieth layer.”
“It’s been a lot colder around here. Ever since he died.”
It felt like a shadow had slipped into the room. As though some invisible mass had drifted through the keyhole, under the door and began to whirl around us, watching and listening from the corners of the room. I leaned forward and whispered.
“What do you know about her?” I said.
Wait. Did she say ‘he’?
Marsha’s face sagged and her skin was as pale as the weak light of the moon. Her eyes were glass balls, no life in them anymore. She ran her hand through her hair, straining at the knots that wouldn’t let her fingers pass.
I got the sense that something was building inside her. Like there were words forming that she had long-fought to keep buried, but she had been de
sperate to say. The vacant look on her face and sloping of her shoulders showed me what a sad woman she really was. Suddenly I felt a pang of regret for how I had treated her.
“This wasn’t always such a dark place,” said Marsha, her words breaking the silence like a hammer smashing glass.
“No?”
She shook her head. “Your room didn’t used to be for rent. There was a time when it would be full of toy cars, Bob the Builder posters. Goosebumps books. It used to be my favourite room in the whole pub.”
I crossed my legs, kept my mouth shut. It didn’t seem right to say anything.
“Thomas was such a good lad. Smarter than me and his dad. There’s no way he would have been around here when he was grown. No, he’d be working in some office in the city earning loads of cash.”
“You have a son?”
As she spoke she stared at me, but her head didn’t move.
“I used to. Had a husband once, too, until he loaded up the car with his clothes and the takings from the till. Folks said they saw him in Falkirk one summer but I never bothered to look. The pig can piss off.”
A crow landed on the windowsill outside. It twisted its head and preened its oily feathers, and then it turned and looked at us. I wondered if it had been the same one that had watched Jeremiah the other night.
Marsha rubbed her hands up and down her trousers in agitation. The skin around her eyes was red and her eyeballs were glazed.
“I’m sorry lass,” she said. “This is hard to talk about.”
“Then you don’t have to,” I said.
She gulped again. “I do. If you’re going to poke around in secrets of the village then you better know what you might find.”
“And what’s that?”
“Everything about Emily is black.”
The name spread out as a chill as it left Marsha’s lips and drifted over the room. I lifted my legs onto the seat and tucked them close against my chest. My heart pounded as I thought of what to say. I knew what I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t know if she’d believe me.
“I’ve seen things, Marsha. Here in this pub. You’ll probably think I’m talking shit. But I’ve had a weird feeling about my room since day one.”
Marsha nodded. “Aye. That’ll be Thomas.”
I jerked my head up in surprise.
“What?”
Marsha’s stare met mine, eyes intense. “I’m going to tell you something now, but afterwards you don’t question me on it. Just believe what I say, and take it as the warning it is.”
“Okay,” I said, but suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.
Marsha began to speak. The words pushed weakly through her lips.
“Thomas came home from school one day with a big smile on his face. You’d have thought it was his birthday. I asked him why he was grinning like a clown and he told me ‘teacher let me sit next to Emily’. Boy was always trying to make friends. I wished to god he’d never met this one.
“The weeks go by and he won’t shut up about Emily. It was always ‘Emily this’, ‘Emily that’. We had her round for tea one night and I tell you, there was something cold about her. The words she used sometimes, ones a kid shouldn’t know. The look in her eyes when she thought you couldn’t see, sort of like a mocking grin, like she was getting one over on you. I told Dennis, the bastard in Falkirk, ‘She’s not coming round here again. She makes me shiver.’ He told me I was being a daft bint.”
Marsha looked at her feet. Red rings sat heavy under her eyes, a contrast to the chalky pale of her cheeks. A trickle ran from the corner of her eyes and cut a channel across her face. She sniffed, then rubbed her palm across the tear and smeared it away. Her voice grew softer, as if the words wouldn’t come.
“One night, he went out to play with her. Nothing special, something he did all the time. Den and me thought nothing of it. Then the hours passed and I sat in the lounge and waited for the doors to open and for my smiling boy to run in covered in mud. But Thomas’s room stayed empty from that night on.
“Every parent thinks their child will live forever. They never imagine that they will see their son’s coffin before they lie in their own.”
Her breath left her mouth in a steamy trail. Water welled up in her eyes like a sink filled to the brim. She lifted her hands into her face and sobbed silently into her fingers.
When she pulled her hand away her face was red, but her features looked strong again. The stern look had gone from her face, and I didn’t think I would ever see it there again. All I saw was a sad woman who had lost everything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”
I wanted to know what happened to Thomas and Emily, but she looked one finger poke away from shattering. I couldn’t push her on this. There was a deep sadness in her, thick like oil and sitting heavy in her chest.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“No you don’t.”
I nodded. “Okay, I don’t. But I don’t expect you to say anything.”
The moonlight hit half of Marsha’s face and left the rest covered in shadow.
“You better go see your friend,” she said.
“I don’t have a clue where he is.”
“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the woods. Here, take the diary. You might as well have it.”
24
The streets of the village looked alien when covered in the darkness of the night. The moonlight glistened on the old cobbles and made them look slick, like scales on a lizard. The wind whipped and nipped at me but I made no effort to stop it. I scanned every corner as I passed the shops and houses, but I couldn’t see Jeremiah.
Surely he hadn’t really gone to the woods? I knew he was desperate to find something, but nobody in their right mind would go to such a place on their own. A shudder crept through me from thinking about the dark trunks stretching into the sky, branches twisting together to block out light. The crunch of leaves as I imagined something walking behind me.
I moved so fast and was so deep in thought that I didn’t see the figure in front of me until I walked into it. My nose hit something hard and I felt it sting.
“Watch where you’re going,” said a voice.
My eyes took a few seconds to adjust but gradually I saw ginger hair, a short beard and eyes darting in dozens of directions.
“Murray,” I said.
“What are you doing out here?” he said.
“I could ask the same about you.”
“Well I live here. Whereas you…what are you still doing here? Looking for holes to poke your nose through?”
I shoved my hands into my pockets so that he couldn’t see them clench into fists.
“That depends. Got anything else to hide?”
Murray’s nose curled and his eyes looked harsh. “This goes way beyond you, lady. You couldn’t even begin to understand. There are hundreds of years of history in the village. Do you honestly think you have a right to know its secrets?”
He took a step forward, shoulders set firm and face in a grimace. My heart started to beat faster.
“Like I said, it’s for a university project.”
He shook his head. “Cut the shit. You’re looking for them. Believe me about this. Once you find them, you will wish with all your soul that you hadn’t.”
“Them?”
“I saw your friend head toward the woods half an hour ago. Go that way if you want to look under rocks.”
With that he pulled his coat collar over his chin and walked away. He didn’t stop to look back, and soon he turned a corner and disappeared from view, leaving me stood alone. It felt like I was the only person awake at this hour. Usually that was something I thought about with pride as I sat at my dorm room desk and studied into the twilight hours. Now it was a lonely thought, as if nobody would be awake to hear my screams if something were to happen.
The air grew colder as I left the village, and the wind was harsher. It licked at me and s
wept my hair around until it was a mess of curls. Part of the back of my head still stung from where something had tugged my hair in the basement. I put my hand to the back of my scalp and winced.
Soon the Jenkins cottage loomed. As I got closer I made a pointed effort not to look at it. I didn’t want to see the ivy smothering the walls, and I didn’t want to look at a window and see the harsh glare of Peter or Sharon staring back. Soon the cottage was behind me, and as I went by it I saw movement in the corner of my eye.
Emily’s room was behind me now, I knew. It had faced the woods, so right now it looked down on me. I felt a prickly sensation on my face as though something stood in the darkened room and stared out of the window, watched me as I walked towards the woods. A shiver seeped through my skin and massaged goosebumps into my flesh. I knew I mustn’t turn around. If I saw something now, anything, this would all be lost. I wouldn’t be able to carry on.