by Jack Lewis
She almost dropped the trifle. Taking a breath and holding it firm in her hand, she left the kitchen and joined Magda and Billy.
“You must have some pretty cool stories about the place,” she heard Billy say as she entered.
Magda tipped the last of her wine into her mouth. She burped.
“I have one,” she said. “And Tammy will kill me for telling you this. She used to hate it.”
Tamara set the trifle onto the table. She felt unsettled. She pictured the face smeared on the glass, and wondered if she had really seen it, or if being back in her old house was affecting her mind.
“There was a boy who lived here years ago,” said Magda. “Long before Tamara was born. Before I was born, even. This boy had a brother, but his sibling was ten years older, and the age gap was too much. So the boy only had one companion in the world, and that was his cat. They went everywhere. Go upstairs sometime and find the second study, and you’ll see scratches on the bottom of the doorframe from its claws.”
“I’ll check it out,” said Billy.
Tamara glared at him.
Magda carried on. “One day his cat found a gap in one of the walls upstairs, from where woodworm had worn it away. The tabby crawled in and scurried along, and then got stuck. The boy heard his pet whining, so he used a hammer to widen the gap, and then climbed into the walls himself. After a while, he got stuck too. It was pitch black in there, and he felt spiders and woodlice crawl across his face. He called out for help, but the house was so big that nobody heard him. He was found four days later, stuck in the walls and covered in plaster, with his mouth full of spiders.”
Tamara shivered. She’d heard the story before from her grandmother, though in her version it was a mouse, not a cat. For years she’d been scared to walk down the hallways at night, worried that she might hear the mouse scratching or the boy crying out for her.
“That’s enough,” she said. “Why are you telling him this? Are you just trying to freak us out?”
“I asked,” said Billy.
“Don’t defend her, Bill. It’s things like this-”
An almighty smash cut her words off. The window beside them exploded. Glass flew over the table and clattered to the floor as a deer jumped through the window and onto the dining room table. It thrashed around, knocking plates and glasses to the floor.
A shard of glass stuck into its mouth just below the chin. The deer let out a long whining sound, so high-pitched that Tamara put her hands to her ears. Its legs squirmed for a few seconds, and it arched its back and let out a rasping breath. Then it was still.
Her breath caught in her throat. Amidst the shock of the deer on the table and the blood dripping from its neck, all she could think was the glass that had gone in the trifle. She thought about picking it out with a spoon, and then realised how stupid a thought it was, and that her mind was focusing on something to get over the shock. She realised that she was freezing, and her breath was shallow, and she just couldn’t understand what she had seen.
Billy was the first to stand. Ever practical, he leaned close to the deer and listened for a few seconds.
“It’s not breathing,” he said.
Magda stood next. She stared at the deer, and there was a look of utter pity on her face. Her mum had always loved animals. Dogs, birds, cats, deer, it didn’t matter. If it wasn’t human, she loved it. Tamara remembered her mum crying the night one of her dogs was put down. Dad said it got its leg trapped in a hole in the woods, and he had to do the decent thing. Her mum and dad had argued that night.
“The shit I put up with,” her mother said. “Why this particular dog? It couldn’t have been any other dog in the whole bloody county? You had to choose this one?”
Tamara stared at the animal as it took its last breath on the dining table of Towneley Manor. A rush of questions hit her, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to answer them.
Then, she remembered something. Animals had always behaved strangely within the confines of the manor estate. Squirrels would be that little bit too brave and would sneak close to the house. Dogs would whine at night time to be let out, and once set free they would run to the woods and bark at the shadows. She had never seen anything like this though. Had it jumped through the window on purpose? Maybe it had seen the food on the table, and it hadn’t realised that a pane of glass lay between it.
Billy and Magda seemed equally as surprised, from the pale looks on their faces. Billy walked to the window and stared out. The night time chill blew in and filled the room.
“It just jumped through the window,” he said, incredulously.
The interruption put an end to the evening. She and Billy hauled their suitcases up the first forty-six steps that stretched out from the lobby and carried them deeper into the house. Billy held his case a foot above the ground, while Tamara dragged hers by the handle and let the wheels tap on each step.
When they were upstairs, they found that only two guest rooms had furniture in them, and they looked to have been cleaned recently. Larry must have done it, Tamara guessed, but he must have overlooked the fact that she and Billy were married. Each room had only a single bed in them, the mattresses barely child-sized.
“Guess we’re sleeping alone,” said Tamara.
“Shame,” said Billy.
“Not really. You weren’t getting lucky anyway. Not here.”
“I got lucky the minute I met you,” he said, in his fake romantic voice, though he couldn’t completely disguise the nervous edge to his voice.
She wondered if he was thinking about the deer, too. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, and couldn’t stop wondering why it had jumped through the glass. She tried to forget it, but anxiety filled her chest.
“Shut up, you soft idiot,” she said, forcing herself not to think about it.
Billy stood in the doorframe of her room as she opened her suitcase and started to take her clothes out piece by piece. Hers was a city wardrobe of hoodies and jeans, the opposite of the cargo pants and walking boots that were Towneley Manor fashion.
“It’s a little run down,” said Billy. The dark hallway cast shadows over his face that looked like they were creeping up on him. “But it’s nice.”
She unfolded a pair of faded denim jeans.
“Don’t get used to it. I’m leaving the second Magda seems okay.”
He folded his arms.
“You know, I get the idea she just wants to make up for things.”
“That door’s staying closed. Tomorrow morning I’m going to persuade her to sell up. Then, with the cash, she can go into a care home and I can walk away. She abandoned me when I was a kid, so why the hell should I do any different? And it’s not about money, either. For all I care, anything I’m owed can just go to charity.”
“Let’s not be so hasty,” said Billy. “What the hell was with the deer, anyway? Does that sort of thing happen a lot around here?”
“I’m beat, Bill. I need to try and sleep.”
“You don’t seem too put-out by this, Tam. A frigging deer jumped through your window and died.”
“Not my window,” she said. “But there has to be an explanation. It’s dark; maybe it couldn’t see. Perhaps it saw the food. It could have parasite controlling it, for all I care. I don’t know, Bill.”
They said their goodnights and she climbed into bed, and then she was alone in the draughty room. She was just glad it wasn’t her childhood bedroom, because those familiar walls were the last thing she wanted to see.
Across from her bed was a small wooden table. On the wall that faced her if she laid on her back, was a portrait of a man with flowing brown hair and a crooked sneer. She watched him as she prepared to close her eyes. She couldn’t help but shudder at the look of malice on his face; it was like his skin was wrinkled with years of accumulated bitterness and his eyes were drowned in gloom. She made sure to smile at him so that the man in the painting knew that nothing about Towneley Manor or the Towneley family had any effect on
her.
She drifted into a sleep made uneasy by the cold that snuck into her bed covers. Her eyes closed and the room became even darker, until soon there was nothing.
And then she jolted up from her sleep. Her forehead was soaked in a cold sweat.
She heard a rhythmic banging sound coming from outside. She lay back and listened to it, and it sounded like the slapping of wood meeting wood, a violent thudding that didn’t want to stop.
It was that damn shed door, she realised. Even so many years later, it still banged at night.
She got out of bed. She was going to have a pee and then try and sleep again. There was a lot to do the next morning, and she didn’t think she could face it if she didn’t sleep.
The hallway sat silent. She could sense the walls on either side of her, two dark masses closing her in, but she couldn’t see them. She felt along one of them with her fingertips, feeling the gouges in the wood. She found the switch and flicked it, but nothing happened. She walked back into her own room and tried the switch, but the darkness refused to leave.
With her phone in her hand, she walked back into the hallway. The floor stung her bare feet, and her skin made a tapping sound every time it touched the floorboards. The house groaned as it settled, like a giant turning over in its bed.
She pressed a button on her phone and sent a sickly stream of light into the hallway. It crept along into the darkness and then shone over a chair in the middle of the corridor. It was a small wooden chair, with spirals carved into the arms, and a cushion on the base.
All around it was the blackness that only an old house like Towneley was capable of making. The light of her phone battled bravely against it. She looked at the chair sat alone in the hallway, and she shivered. There was something unnerving about it, and it conjured questions that she didn’t have the time nor desire to face. Why was the chair there? Who left it? It felt as if it had been there on its own, waiting for someone to join it.
Then she cast her light over the cushion, and saw that the fabric was indented. It was squashed down from where someone had been sitting in it in the darkness. It cast her mind back a decade, to lying in bed while things dragged in the hallway, to the house whining as it settled, groaning as if to say I’m here, I’m alive, and I know you’re here too. She stared at the chair and she knew that someone had been sitting in the pitch black of the hallway, mouth closed and not making a sound, instead letting the faint scream of the wind do its talking for them. Towneley Manor woke from a ten year slumber and knew it’s favourite child was back. It hadn’t been Billy or Magda in the hallway but something else; something only the old house knew.
Chapter Four
When she went downstairs in the morning she found that Billy had already boarded up the broken window. Where once light had seeped in and filtered through the drapes, now there was nothing to illuminate the crevices of the room. He’d taken the cloth off the dining room table, but blood had drained through and dried onto the wood. She didn’t even want to think about what he’d done with the deer.
They had breakfast in the same room. It didn’t seem right, given what had happened, but there was nowhere else to go. Every other scrap of furniture had been removed from the lower floor.
“We stored some of it in the attic,” said Magda, forking a piece of fried egg into her mouth. Her cheeks were red with blusher but she’d overdone it, and the effect made her seem like a corpse dressed up for the grave. “The rest, we just scrapped. I had Larry try to give some of it away in the village, but when they heard it was from Towneley, they said they didn’t want it. Silly buggers. Some of it was worth a fortune.”
Billy served her a plate of eggs, but Tamara wasn’t hungry. Sleep was encrusted around her eyes. She rubbed it away.
“I don’t understand what happened last night, Magda,” she said.
“Animals are funny, sometimes,” answered the old woman. “That old deer has prowled the estate for the best part of twenty years. It had gone loopy. It used to walk all the way up to the house and press its head against the glass. I never thought it would jump through it, though.”
Tamara shivered. It was wrong, all of it. Wrong that things like that should happen, and wrong that she should be here to see it. He hid it well, but she knew Billy was as freaked out about the deer suicide as she was.
“Did you get up last night, Bill?” she asked.
He looked at her quizzically. “Once, to use the toilet. Why?”
She thought of the chair. “No reason.” Then she looked at Magda. “Your hallway lights are out,” she said. “On the guest wing.”
“Oh, they’re out all over, dear. None of the electric is on. I never paid the bills. I mean, why bother? The oven works on gas, and it’s not like I watch television.”
“This is why you can’t live alone,” said Tamara.
“Nonsense.”
Billy settled into his chair. There were three eggs and four rashes of bacon on his plate. He stabbed a rasher and shoved it into his mouth. He spoke as he chewed.
“You look like crap.”
“Men are so polite these days,” said Magda.
Tamara glared at him. “Charming. It was the bloody shed door.” She turned to Magda. “Why haven’t you had it fixed in the last ten years? It was banging all night.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Magda.
Billy swallowed a rasher of bacon.
“I’ll sort it.”
“No, I will,” said Tamara. “I’m not an idiot, I can use a hammer.”
After breakfast, Billy said he was going to bury the deer out in the woods. He’d found a shovel in the shed, and while he was there he’d seen that the door latch was broken, so that was why it banged. He stood in the hallways and leaned on the shovel.
“Think I need to call someone to report it? Like a vet or something?”
Tamara shook her head. “Just bury it, I guess. I don’t know. This isn’t something that’s ever happened to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Start cataloguing Magda’s things,” she answered.
She didn’t care what Magda said, she was selling the house. If she couldn’t even pay electricity bills, how the hell could she live alone? The house was far too big for her. In fact, it had always been too big, even when her father was around. As a girl she would walk the corridors and the house would swallow up the dainty patters of her feet. Hallways seemed to spread out as she walked them, as if dad was on one of his construction projects and for every step she took, the house grew another yard. The manor was too big for anyone, she decided.
She went from room to room. The house had thirty-four in total. Some were nothing but walls and floorboards. Others had bookcases standing alone, or chairs that looked too rickety to sit on. She found the second floor study that Magda had mentioned, and sure enough there were scratches on the bottom of the doorframe. She remembered the boy and his cat again, and she wondered where Billy was. Towneley was so big that sometimes it felt like you could scream and nobody would hear.
She walked through hallways that had ceiling panels with patterns carved into the wood. Light shone over the trees outside, and the branches made shadow fingers on the floor. Paintings hung in places that made no aesthetic sense, and showed desolate landscapes with greying grass and roads that seemed to lead nowhere. She couldn’t believe she’d spent years here. It was no place for a child to live, and it wasn’t a surprise that she often had moods where gloom seemed to seep through her. Living in a place like this, who wouldn’t grow up with darkness inside them?
Every so often she’d see one of her father’s weird constructions. It wasn’t him that started it, of course. It was something the Towneley men had done for generations, always adding to the house as if it was their blood-born duty to expand its reach. She came across staircases that led to the ceiling, and doors that opened onto fifteen foot drops.
Turning a corner just past the library, she noticed a window. Looking through it,
she saw that it didn’t give a view of the outside, but rather looked onto a room that she had never seen before. The room was twenty feet away so even through the window she couldn’t see it clearly. As she watched, she saw a figure cross the room. Its back was hunched, and it almost looked to be walking on its tiptoes.
Magda was playing games, she realised. She gripped the window latch and pulled it open. She checked to make sure there wasn’t another unexplainable drop below it, and then climbed through the frame.
The air around her grew colder, and wind whistled toward her as if it snuck in through a crevice in the wall. Her footsteps echoed on the wooden floorboards but the sound was soft, as if the wood was beginning to rot. How long before the whole house crumbles, she thought?