*
“Ta-da!” Roger Hathaway said, bursting from the felled wardrobe as if it were a coffin and he was Bela Lugosi. When he saw that there was no one there to bear witness to his genius, he visibly deflated. He’d gone to so much trouble, hollowing out the big black man like a Halloween pumpkin, and for what? Everyone had pissed off. “Oh,” he said, glancing around the bedroom that had once belonged to his youngest daughter, Veronica. “Oh,” he said again, and a third time as he climbed out through the wardrobe doors and wiped the blood from his ectoplasmic flesh.
Oh, indeed…
23
“Right foot yellow,” Trev said, yawning.
Nev shifted uncomfortably on the mat, tried to move without toppling to the right. He thought he’d done a pretty good job of it until Noddy Holder – who was a lot ganglier than he looked on the TV – squeaked in agony. “Owp! Yaw’m on me ballsack, yer daft bastard!”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Nev said, carefully withdrawing his foot. “Whose idea was it to play this silly game anyway?” More importantly, why did Noddy Holder carry it with him wherever he went?
“Quit whining and put your damn foot on yellow,” Trev said, glancing up at the monitors just in case – as if by some miracle – something interesting was happening. It wasn’t.
“Watch me balls,” Noddy said, wincing. “I dow know about yaw lot, but I’ve owny got one pair, and Mrs Holder’ll ‘ave me guts for garters if I dow give ‘er a proper good seein’ to when I get ‘ome because of a bloody Twister injury.”
Right foot yellow, Nev thought, easing it into place. The night was, like Noddy’s limbs, seemingly endless, and Nev Lovecraft couldn’t help thinking that one of them should have brought more booze.
24
Why was it, Peter thought, that basements were always such uncomfortably cold places? He had never come across one that he could quite happily have spent the night in, though he guessed that was why they put them underneath the house, so that they were out of the way.
This basement was no different. Spider-webs clung to anything that had been still for longer than five minutes, including Dawn Clunge. It was colder than an eskimo’s pee-pee hole down there, too. It was a wonder the spiders were still getting about the place, let alone building webs.
One corner of the room was home to boxes and boxes of empty wine bottles. Peter knew they were empty, for he had checked each and every one of them on the off-chance they were trapped down there with a nice 1947 Bordeaux.
“Well, this isn’t how I expected the show to be,” Peter said. If he closed his eyes long enough, he could almost pretend that none of this was real, that he would wake up in his own bed with morning glory and the mother of all hangovers. He would call Ed, tell him that if anyone extended an invitation for Peter to appear on a reality show, he could tell them to shove it up their arse – sideways.
“I don’t think any of us could have anticipated this,” said Lorna. She was somewhere off to Peter’s right, nestled in amongst a row of vintage suitcases, which smelt oddly of chilli-powder.
“I should have known something bad would happen.” Peter clenched his eyes tightly shut and watched as tiny white dots danced around in the space between his retinas and eyelids. “This is why I don’t leave the fucking house. There’s always something out there trying to kill you or eat you.” Visions of the rats swarming Victor Hoof’s decimated corpse swam through his head, and bile rose in his throat. He didn’t want to swallow it, but there was nowhere in the near-vicinity to put it.
“We’re not dead yet,” Dawn Clunge said from the darkness opposite, “and if an old misery like me isn’t willing to give up just yet, then you’ve got no excuses.”
She had a point, but it was hard to see how they were going to get out of this in one piece. As a writer of some of the most brutal fiction ever to see print – not counting George W. Bush’s autobiography and that story about the dingo that may or may not have eaten a baby – Peter knew that they were up Shit Creek without a paddle. He had written scenes just like this, had done terrible things to his characters in the denouements of his books.
Was that what this was? The denouement? Was this how it ended? In the basement of some rickety old house, hiding from the evil spirit of its former master, who just so happened to be terrified of spiders?
And where the fuck had the daughters gone? The mother-ghost? “Head to the basement…you’ll be safe down there…ta-ta…oh, and by the way, once you’re down there that’s pretty much it. On the bright side, one of Tony Robinson’s descendants will probably dig you out in a few hundred years’ time whilst filming one of those mind-numbing archaeology programmes.” Yeah, thanks very much for that. Peter didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but weirdly he discovered he could do both at the exact same time. He shielded his face, though the darkness hid it well enough; the last thing he wanted Lorna and Dawn to see was that he was close to the edge. A crying man was never a good sign unless he’d caught his knackers in his flies.
“Do either of you have any family?” Dawn asked. She had stood and was pacing nervously back and forth. Peter didn’t need the torchlight to see her wiry frame shift from right to left in front of him.
“Just my mother,” Lorna said. “I had a husband up until about a year ago…” She left it hanging there, and Peter was loath to ask what had happened. Unfortunately, Dawn Clunge didn’t see a problem in forcing the issue.
“Beat you, did he?” said the old lady. “Tie you up and pull your hair, even though you told him you weren’t into all that rough stuff?”
Incredulous, Lorna said, “I found out he’d been using my credit cards to fund his addiction to old Ravi Shankar records. I mean, I know there are worse things to be addicted to, but there’s only so much sitar a person can put up with before they snap.” She cleared her throat, as if the memories of her split were almost too much to bear. “What about you, Peter? Is there a Mrs Peter waiting for you at home?”
For a moment, Peter thought she was suggesting he might be gay, but he quickly realised that was not the case. “Oh! Me? No,” he said. “I find that writing is a very lonely profession, and it needs to be. I would never have enjoyed the success that Djinn and Tonic afforded me had there been a Mrs Peter…erm, a Mrs Kane in the picture.” He sighed, if only to fill the awkward silence that followed.
“You must have someone?” insisted Dawn. “Everyone has someone.” She was still pacing around the place, her bones creaking and snapping as if she were made of twigs and popcorn.
Peter thought about her words momentarily. Everyone has someone. And he supposed he did, in a way. He had Ed. That prick…that tricky prick with his two-gallon coffee cups and his remarkable knack of getting Peter to sign off on just about anything. Ed was all he had, and the sad thing was, if he made it out of Hathaway House alive, he would probably beat the poor bastard to death.
“My agent,” Peter said, trying not to reveal his anger. “He’s the one that got me into this mess in the first place.” You got yourself into the mess, buddy. You saw pound signs. You signed the dotted line without so much as a gun to your temple…and you know why? Because guns are still illegal in the UK… “It’s not his fault,” he went on, and it really wasn’t. Ed didn’t know the place harboured a malevolence the likes of which had never been witnessed before. Ed wasn’t to know that the stories were true, that the ghosts of the Hathaway family still, to this day, roamed the hallways of the manse. And Peter was being unfair, blaming his agent for the events leading up to now. “It’s the money, isn’t it? I mean, why else are we here? Everyone has a fucking price, and now…well, it looks like we’re the ones that are going to pay it.”
“I’ve got a window-cleaner,” said Dawn Clunge, her knobbly knees grinding together like a nervous cricket’s. “Nice bloke…young…massive penis. I mean, made my eyes water on many occasions, so it has.”
Lorna sniggered. “That’s your someone, is it?” she said. “The guy who comes around to give your gla
zing a good seeing to does so much more than he charges for?”
“He pays me!” said an exasperated Dawn. “I think he’s one of them fellas that likes ‘em old, like that Guy Ritchie or Dennis Nilson.”
Peter massaged his temples with two fingers. “Nilson was a necrophiliac.”
“They don’t come much older than deceased, my dear,” Dawn said without a trace of irony. “Anyway, I need to get out of here for Barry – that’s his name, the window cleaner.”
“Do you love him?” Lorna said.
“Nah,” said Dawn, with a dismissive wave of one gnarly hand. “It’s a dying trade, is window cleaning.”
“Especially the ones you employ,” Peter said. He didn’t want to mention how prostitution was the oldest trade known to man, and certainly nowhere near dying.
“Well, we all have our vices, my dear,” Dawn said. “Mine just happens to clean out the old lady-pipes once a fortnight.”
“And on that note,” Peter said, fighting back the inevitable vomit, “I believe a topic-change is in order. How the fucking hell are we ever going to get out of here?”
“You saw what happened to Mark,” Lorna said, sidling up next to Peter, breaching his personal space by a good inch or two. “We set foot outside this house, we turn to dust.”
“And why is that?” Peter said. “I mean, we were allowed in. The production company behind this fiasco have been in and out of this place for months, and none of them exploded.”
“We’re missing something,” Dawn said. “We’re being held here by the master of the house. We know what happens if we cross the threshold, and we know that there’s a damn good chance that none of this is being recorded.”
She was right. She was absolutely right. The cameras had stopped functioning hours ago, leaving them all alone in a real Hell House, where the master was anything but hospitable and the ghosts of his murder-victims were about as useful as a carpet fitter’s ladder.
“What’s supposed to happen to people when they die?” Peter stood up. It was a question he already knew the answer to.
“They get buried beneath six foot of dirt while the family are left with bills coming out their arseholes,” Dawn said.
“Good answer, Dawn,” Peter said, “but not the one we’re looking for.”
“They either go up or down,” Lorna said, which was about as close to the right response as Peter was going to get.”
“Yeah,” he said. It was his turn to pace. “Up or down; Heaven or Hell; Paradise or Purgatory. So why haven’t the Hathaways dispersed? Hm? Why are they still here, after all these years?”
“It’s a nice house,” Dawn said. “They wouldn’t get anything like this in today’s market.”
Peter bit his lip.
“Because there’s something keeping them here,” Lorna said. Peter was delighted to hear that it wasn’t a question.
“Exactly,” he said. “There is something here, in this house, some unfinished business, which has prevented them from moving on. I’m pretty sure three of them are destined to go up, and if he wasn’t before, there’s a damn good chance our antagonist is heading for a not-so-nice eternity of pain and torture.” If any of that was real, Peter reminded himself, though after tonight’s events, if you told him that goblins, faeries and fucking hobbits were real and living in the sewers of New York, he would have simply shrugged and said, Righty-ho.
Peter flicked the button on the torch and, after a few ominous flickers, their portion of the basement lit up.
“So what is it?” Lorna said, her breath crystalizing in the air so thickly that her face was barely discernible. “What’s keeping them here?”
Peter visibly deflated. Even the torchlight dimmed a little. He should have researched the place more thoroughly, gone into the history behind the family, sought out documents about the house, shoulda-woulda-coulda-bloody-didn’t. A quick browse on Wikipedia and he’d considered himself knowledgeable, a true scholar of Hathaway House and all that had happened there.
Three murders and a suicide.
Two daughters and a wife, slain in cold blood; mother strangled with a belt, girls decapitated while they slept. Father heads off to the bathroom with a Remington Wingmaster and makes a right royal mess of the ceramics. Time to apply for Mastermind – specialist subject? The lives and deaths of the Hathaways. “Beep, beep, beep. You scored fuck-all.”
Dawn Clunge strutted across the basement, peeling spider-webs from her wiry frame. “Perhaps there is nothing,” she opined. “Hauntings happen; residue is left behind; horrific events are repeated over and over for all time. Have you never seen The Ghost Whisperer?”
Peter hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. And why would anyone whisper to a ghost? Either way, it sounded like a complete rip-off of The Horse Whisperer, and Peter was reluctant to get into it. “There has to be something,” he said. “Until tonight, I didn’t believe in ghosts or hauntings or goddamned evil spirits.” Apart from the ones that made him shit himself on occasion. “But this is very real. This is happening, and we’re right in the middle of it, so why don’t we all just focus…and think…”
Dawn spun around dramatically. “Yes, dear,” she said. Her gums glistened in the torchlight, and her dress made a swooshing noise, as if she were a peacock, and the—
“Keep still!” Peter cried. Dawn did just that, as if she had been showered with liquid nitrogen.
“Is there a spider on me?” she whispered. “I’ll be honest with you, I’m not brilliant with anything that has more legs than The Bee Gees.”
“No, it’s…just don’t move a muscle.” Peter stepped toward Dawn, his eyes fixed upon the photograph beneath the torchlight. “I don’t believe it,” he said, and yet he did, because apparently anything was possible now. All of the rules that had previously kept him grounded were out the window quicker than a shit from an igloo.
“What is it?” Lorna said. Peter saw her in his peripheral vision but paid her no mind. “This is no time for a slideshow, Peter. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, and—”
“There,” said Peter, pointing at the monochrome picture that hung down just enough to cover Dawn Clunge’s back passage. “What do you make of that?”
Lorna leaned in. “It’s a bit battered,” she said, “but Dawn’s not as young as she used to be, are you Dawn?”
“Not the horrible arsehole behind the picture,” Peter said. “The picture itself!”
Lorna leaned in even closer; Peter put it down to a fine constitution, for he had no intention of pressing his nose so close to the fashion-designer’s derriere. “Looks like the Hathaways,” she said. “Standing in front of the house. So what? All of these pictures are of the Hathaways. They’re from a Hathaway photo album.”
“Can I move yet?” Dawn asked. “Only one of my hips has locked…”
“Look at the mother!” Peter said, almost jabbing at the photograph but remembering where it was positioned at the last moment. “Rose Hathaway. Notice anything about her?”
Lorna sighed, Dawn whimpered. “She looks like she’s packed on a few pounds,” Lorna said. “Did they have McDonald’s back in the 50s?”
“That’s not Big Mac and fries fat,” Peter said. “She’s pregnant!”
“So what?” Lorna glanced down at the picture once again, counted the children – two girls, both old enough to tie their own pigtails – then said, “Oh! Oh, so if she was pregnant…”
“Then there was a third Hathaway child,” Peter finished for her. “And if you look at the age of the girls, Veronica and Belle, this was taken not long before the murders took place.”
“Seriously,” Dawn said, gasping. Something on her person cracked like kindling in a fire. “If I don’t straighten up soon, you’ll have to carry me out of here.”
Peter eased the old lady up, snapping her arthritic bones back into place. “Keep still,” he told her, circling her as if he were a lion and she were an aged gazelle.
“Don’t have much choice, I’m af
raid, dear,” Dawn said, panting.
Peter searched the photograph dress, making sure he didn’t miss a single picture. “It has to be here somewhere,” he said. “Has to be.”
“Maybe she lost it,” Lorna said. “Back then, I think the odds on giving birth to a healthy baby were around one in ten. The fifties were an incredibly sad time.”
Peter ignored her stupid remark and instead focused on finding the picture that he knew might provide them with an answer. To what, he had no idea yet. But any answer was better than none at all.
Round and round the old lady he went. Up went the torch; down went the torch. In all the nooks and crannies he searched while Dawn Clunge stood motionless, staring at a dark corner of the basement. She hadn’t been given this much attention since Guantanamo.
“There!” Peter said, finally, and not a moment too soon as far as he was concerned. “One, two, and baby makes three!” He prodded overexcitedly at the picture.
“That’s my nipple,” Dawn said, smiling ever so slightly, for it was as close to intercourse as she had come since Barry’s rounds a fortnight prior.
“That’s a baby, right?” Peter said. “I’m not seeing things, am I? I haven’t gone stark raving mad?”
“That’s certainly a baby,” Lorna concurred. “And look. Still not a smile amongst them, the miserable bastards.”
“You tend to find that the ones that go on a kill-crazy-rampage aren’t full of mirth at the best of times,” Peter said, tearing the photograph from the dress and exposing what looked like an old, rusty bottle-top, which Dawn proceeded to cover as quickly as she possibly could.
“So there was a third Hathaway child,” Lorna said. “What? Should we be looking out for a killer baby now, as well, because enraged father ghosts aren’t creepy enough?”
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