by Will Maclean
‘Hmm.’ Janice wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, I have to say, it’s not what I was expecting.’
‘And what were you expecting, Janice?’ A confrontational edge crept into Abigail’s voice. I tried and failed to catch her eye.
‘I dunno.’ Janice sniffed again. ‘More books. You two are meant to be really brainy, aren’t you? You’re always coming top in stuff. I expected more books.’
‘All our books are over there.’ I pointed to the orange bulk of the stack of boxes with the sheet over it. ‘We’re going to paint it up here, make full use of the light, so all our books are stacked away.’ This just came to me, as I said it, and I was as surprised to hear it as Abigail was. I found myself thinking it was actually quite a good idea.
‘Anyway, look,’ said Abigail. ‘We can pretty well do what we like here without anyone interrupting. Which is why …’ She took an almost imperceptible inward breath. ‘… we faked that terrible photograph.’
Janice said nothing and simply glared at us, arms folded.
‘It’s true, Janice,’ I said, in as soothing a tone as I could. ‘We shouldn’t have done it, but we did.’ I had sat down on the arm of the chair, but stood up now, hands open in a gesture I hoped she saw as conciliatory.
‘We just wanted to see if we could. I said we couldn’t, that it would never work—’
‘And I said it would,’ Abigail interjected. ‘So we made up a story – the creepiest story we could –and chalked a figure on the wall. We rubbed the chalk outline so that it was all blurry and vague, made it as convincing as we could.’
‘But I still didn’t think it would convince anyone,’ I said, smiling a contrite smile. ‘So Abi and I had a bet.’ We were rattling through our prepared story without a hitch. ‘I bet Abi she couldn’t convince someone we’d taken a photo of a real ghost. She said she could, and, well, you know the rest.’
Abi and I were now both looking as contrite as we could manage, smiling pleasantly. I wondered if Abi’s face was hurting as much as mine.
‘We’re sorry, Janice,’ said my sister. ‘Really.’
Janice Tupp looked sad. For a long time, nobody said anything. Janice looked up and I saw that her eyes were wet. For the first time since this whole thing began, I felt sorry for her, rather than sorry for myself and Abi.
She walked slowly over to the wall, the one we’d chalked our ghost on, the one we’d deliberately left bare in order that Janice could see for herself what we’d done. She stood with her back to us, looking up at the large brown wall that loomed above her. I shot Abigail a glance – should we approach her? Comfort her? Abigail read my look and shook her head, and I stayed where I was.
Janice turned round. She wiped her eyes swiftly and precisely with the back of her right hand, then stared at us both. There was something in her expression I had never seen before. Something almost imperious.
‘Why me?’
‘We just … your name came up at random.’ Abigail wasn’t smiling now. She looked impatient, as she always did when a matter she considered concluded continued to be discussed.
‘Liar.’ Janice all but spat the word. I felt the situation was slipping out of our grasp but could do nothing about it.
‘It’s the truth, Janice,’ said Abigail. My sister never had any qualms about lying if she believed the ends justified the means. I – a lesser person in all respects – very much did have qualms about lying, and when Janice looked to me for confirmation, I found that I automatically looked at the floor. And that was all Janice needed.
‘You two,’ she said caustically. ‘You think you’re so bloody special, don’t you?’
‘Now Janice—’ began Abigail.
‘Cleverer than everyone else. Better than everyone else.’
‘We don’t, Janice. We really don’t.’
‘Well, you certainly think you’re cleverer than me, don’t you?’
It was my sister’s turn to look at the floor.
‘No wonder everyone at school hates you,’ said Janice, matter-of-factly.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Oh, isn’t this what you wanted? You chose me to look at that picture because you think I’m stupid. But you’re the stupid ones. You don’t know anything.’
Janice skewered both of us with a stare that was like a slow, painful ache. I had entered that strange hyper-clarity of fear, and Janice seemed to have become more solid, more real, than the room around her.
‘You showed me that photograph thinking you could scare me. Well, you did. But not the way you think.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Abigail.
‘No, you don’t. Neither of you. You drew a shape on a wall, thinking it was clever, thinking it was funny. But it’s not. And now it’s here. And you live here.’
‘I’m really lost here, Janice,’ said Abigail.
‘You woke something up,’ continued Janice, almost to herself. ‘You let it in.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Some things need a shape. To be. Some things wait, in the darkness. For a shape.’ Janice looked directly at me, then at Abigail. ‘There’s something here. In this house. In this attic. It was waiting, for someone to name it, to make it real.’
Despite myself, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. If this was an act, it was an incredible one.
‘You gave it a shape, and you gave it a face. That’s what I saw when you showed me that picture. Not all that stupid stuff about a bridesmaid. I saw its face.’
‘What?’
‘Horrible, sneering face it is too. Cruel.’
‘Janice—’
‘I see a lot of things like that. No one else sees. But I do. The day Dad died, I knew he wasn’t coming back. I could see it on him.’
‘I’ve had just about enough of this,’ said Abigail. ‘We came clean with you, Janice, and we apologised. And now you’re just trying to throw it back at us. It’s childish.’
Janice Tupp smiled widely. In that second she seemed anything but childish, anything but immature. She seemed very old, almost ancient. I wondered then if she was genuinely mad.
‘But you did photograph a real ghost, despite everything. Or you will have done, soon.’
‘That’s enough.’
‘Would you like to see? To see what I see?’ Janice put her hands to her eyes. ‘I think it’s what you two deserve.’
And then, before either of us could answer, Janice collapsed, just as she had in the classroom.
Abigail and I stood, open-mouthed, rooted to the spot, looking at Janice, at each other, at Janice again.
Janice sat up, kneeling. Her posture was strange, as if she were being dragged off the floor by a hook under each arm. Without warning she slapped herself across the face, with incredible force. The slap echoed around the attic.
‘Jesus!’ said Abigail. Janice Tupp looked up at her with an expression devoid of all thought, as if her head was empty.
She turned to look at me, and pointed. Her voice was subtly different. Thick and grating. Old.
‘You. I see you. I see the broken house, with all the broken people in it. I see it coming back for you. I see four halves and two quarters. I see it returning, and it will never let you go. It will always be with you. Twenty grins all grinning back at you, salt in the wound, and you break.’
She swung round awkwardly. The finger was now pointing at Abigail.
‘I see you too. I see you there, but you can’t see me. Grinning away again, showing your teeth, saying nothing but sand. And you can’t stop it now. What else is there to do? What good is being clever now? Here? And you can’t stop this. He’s coming for you. He has eyes but no face. He’s near.’
‘Do something,’ I said flatly.
‘He’s near!’ screamed Janice. ‘He can’t be stopped!’
‘Who?’ I shouted.
‘Essssssss,’ hissed Janice. ‘ESSSSSSSSSSSSSS. ESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.’ She blared the syllable at us aggressively, like a warning.
‘Sod thi
s,’ said Abigail. She marched over to the vase, tore out the lavender and threw the cold water in Janice’s face.
Janice took a very sharp intake of breath, and seemed to suddenly become conscious of where she was. She was just about to sob when Abigail, tears streaming down her face, smashed her to the floor with a sudden slap of her own.
6
‘I didn’t see Janice leave,’ said Mum brightly, as we sat around the dinner table, eating casserole.
Abigail shot me a brief look, which indicated that she’d be leaving the talking to me.
‘Janice didn’t stay very long. She wasn’t feeling very well,’ I said. This, at least, was true. She had seemed distracted and disoriented after Abigail had slapped her, and we had sat her in one of the armchairs to recover. I had gone to fetch a glass of water, leaving Abi and Janice alone, which I only began to fear was an unwise move when I was downstairs running the tap. I had expected Janice to be fuming, to be cursing the pair of us, but when I returned with the water, she was merely slumped in the armchair like a doll. She was polite but extremely withdrawn, and strangely distant. None of us was sure how to continue, how to pick up the pieces after what had just happened, and in the end we simply escorted Janice downstairs, where she said she’d walk herself home. She was so bewildered she forgot her coat, and we waited patiently in the hall whilst she staggered back upstairs to fetch it. Then we both watched her leave, striding away as if in a daze, not looking back.
‘Well, she’s always struck me as a very sickly child,’ said Mum. ‘Her arms and legs are like pipe cleaners. If you looked hard enough at her she’d probably snap.’
‘She’s tougher than you think,’ Abigail muttered into her plate.
‘Well, she certainly doesn’t look it,’ said Mum. ‘Oh, I was going to mention, I had to go up into the attic earlier to bring the tray down. I really like what you’ve done up there. It’s about time you got rid of some of that old junk.’
‘Well, it’s nice to have a change, Mum. But I don’t think we’ll leave it like that.’
‘Oh. Well, anyway, I like being able to see the floorboards. Maybe you should paint them before you put everything back.’
‘Oh, we’re painting floorboards now, are we?’ said Dad, without looking up from his crossword. ‘You’re not at art college now, Alice.’
‘Oh, really. It would just be the attic, I wasn’t suggesting we do the whole house.’
‘To be honest, Mum,’ said Abi, seizing the opportunity, ‘we were thinking of repainting the whole place. Can we?’
Mum looked at Abigail as if she’d just suggested we buy a yacht. ‘I’m not made of money, Abigail. I only suggested painting the floorboards because it’s the kind of thing you two could do yourselves.’
‘What colour were you thinking of painting it, anyway?’ said Dad, filling in a crossword answer.
‘If you say black, Abigail, this discussion is over,’ Mum said sharply.
‘No,’ said my sister, lying. ‘We were thinking about white, actually.’ She scowled and sat back, checkmated.
After dinner, Abi and I climbed the stairs together, deep in conversation. As in all matters involving Janice Tupp, it seemed, we had not had a chance to properly discuss what had transpired until an agonising period of time had passed.
‘What do we do now?’ I said.
Abigail shrugged. ‘What can we do? I think it’s over, though.’
‘You slapped her in the face!’
‘She also slapped herself in the face.’
Our footsteps thumped onto the first landing.
‘Do you think she was joking?’
‘Of course she was joking. She was trying to scare us, to get her own back for scaring her. She did a bloody good job of it too.’
‘Yeah. It was a great performance. Who knew she had that in her? And the stuff she was saying …’ I realised I was sounding a bit like Mum. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t find an appropriate reaction to what we’d witnessed. It was just so far out of any frame of reference I had in real life.
‘Have you read The Crucible by Arthur Miller?’ said Abigail.
I scowled. Abigail knew I hadn’t. She liked to keep her reading habits just one step ahead of mine, so that she could have moments like this, where she knew more than I did, and could lecture me as if she were ten years older than me, instead of ten minutes.
‘Enlighten me,’ I said.
‘It’s set during the Salem witch trials. A group of girls – powerless in every other respect – make up a story about witchcraft, and the whole town believes them. That’s what’s happening here. Janice wanted to get her own back on us, so she made up that whole routine.’
I thought about this. We had reached the second landing now, where the attic ladder was.
‘OK, but if she wanted to get her own back on us, why didn’t she just tell her mum?’
‘Her mum thinks she’s an idiot, just like everyone else does.’ Abigail started to climb the ladder. ‘No one respects her. She has no authority, so she did something very creative in order to assume some. She’s a good actress, I’ll give you that, but she did have a week to prepare. She’s probably been practising every—’
Abigail stopped mid-sentence, a rare enough thing in itself. She had stopped climbing the ladder too. All I could see were her jeans and plimsolls, entirely motionless.
‘What?’ I called up. ‘What is it?’
Abigail climbed the rest of the ladder without uttering a word. I scrambled up after her, asking what the matter was, until I saw it too, and fell silent.
7
Neither of us had heard the doll’s house fall. Both of us were certain that it had been in the middle of the table, nowhere near the edge. The doll’s house was very heavy, and difficult to move at the best of times. Now it lay upended on the floorboards.
‘It … must have blown off the table?’ I said thinly.
My sister shook her head. ‘I think Janice did this.’
‘When?’
‘When she came back to get her coat. She pushed it off the table!’
‘We would have heard it, surely? Plus she was only up here for about ten seconds.’
Abigail shrugged. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible …’
I was about to argue that this was beyond Janice’s capabilities, but if today had proved anything, it was that we had both miscalculated in that department. We stood looking down at the upturned doll’s house, which seemed half-buried in the bare floorboards, like a meteor in a desert.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand putting it back.’ Abigail nodded and we both grabbed one of the gable ends.
‘Flip it over first,’ said Abigail.
‘Right you are.’ With some effort, we managed to put the house the right way up.
‘No!’ yelled Abi, as we did so.
‘What?’
‘That rotten witch has broken the front of it!’
The facade of the house, the dark bricks which were hand-painted, not well, but with rigour, had cracked from the eaves to the foundation, a lightning slash of old wood, the colour of the honeycomb in a Crunchie bar. Abigail swore and, brushing the hair from her eyes, ran her hands over the front panelling.
‘That rotten cow,’ she said, not taking her eyes from the damaged house.
‘It’s not so bad,’ I said, trying to sound as calm as I could. My fear was that Abigail would take this up with Janice at school, when, to my mind, tonight had been the end of the matter. ‘Look, it’s just the front panel. A spot of glue and some panel pins will fix it. We’ll just prise it off and mend it. Like so.’
The panel, though held in place by several lethal-looking rusted tacks, had been loosened by the fall and came off easily in my hands, exposing the innards of the house.
It was my turn to swear.
Removing the panel had revealed a compartment, long and thin, like a chimney, running through all three floors of the front of the house, where the main stairwell would
be if it was a real house. Jammed in that space, to the point where there was no room for anything else save the fluff of ancient cobwebs, were lots of little wooden bodies. A family of tiny wooden people.
Painstakingly, we laid out the inhabitants of the house on a cloth, like tiny casualties in the world’s smallest house fire. Each was comprised of a wooden head and body, each one carved from the same piece of wood, with arms and legs held on by wooden pins. They were a family, certainly, and the house had almost certainly been built by some enterprising father or grandfather to accommodate them. There was a mother and a father, two boys of differing heights, twin girls, and a strangely unformed baby, which fitted into a tiny wooden crib. Their clothes were still present – frayed and ancient miniature outfits in strange colours, saturated with the dust of almost a century.
Though some had an arm or a leg missing, each family member had been further damaged – vandalised was the word that sprang to mind – in a very specific way. Each of their painted faces had been scratched out. There was no mistaking it for an accident or a coincidence. Someone had deliberately and thoroughly obliterated their faces.
Abi and I stared down at the little wooden people for a long while.
‘I don’t know,’ said Abi at last. ‘I’m stumped.’
‘About what?’
‘How she did it,’ Abi said.
‘I’m sorry? I don’t follow you.’
‘How Janice did this.’
‘She just shoved it off the table! You’re right. It’s funny we didn’t hear it crash, but she did it alright. She had to have done. Once you have eliminated the impossible—’
She turned to look at me. Her face was pale and her eyes were bright, and for a second I thought there were tears in them.
‘Tim, don’t you remember? What she said?’
‘Who?’
‘Janice, of course. When she had her … episode.’
‘When she was going off her head, you mean! No, I don’t remember exactly what she said. Do you?’