by Jack Lewis
She hated to admit it, but the house was getting to her.
In front of her was a stack of old newspaper clippings. The oldest were at the bottom, yellowed and brittle with black and white photographs on the cover, and the latest one was dated only six months ago.
It had always been a Towneley tradition that if the family or the manor were ever mentioned in the local paper, a copy would be kept. She remembered a paper boy making the lonely journey up the pathway every morning. He wound through the woods on his bike, and by the time he reached the manor his face would be red with sweat. He’d throw the paper on the step, cast a wary look at the upper windows of the house, and then cycle away again, soon becoming a blot in the distance that was gobbled up by the woods.
She pictured her father bringing the newspaper indoors. He’d sit at the long dining table with the paper spread in front of him. Some light would filter through the drapes, but the shadows in the room made his eyes look dark, and she’d hear him mutter and grunt as he read.
She started at the bottom of the pile. The first few newspapers barely contained any mention of Towneley Manor save small sections given to the report of poachers caught on the grounds. Four newspapers in, she stopped.
A column of text caught her attention. The paper was so old that it felt as though she should be using gloves and tweezers to turn the pages. Nevertheless, she found an article about Towneley three pages in.
Boy Missing. Constabulary Ask for Information
A local boy, Adrian Greenwood, had been reported missing to the Glasspike constabulary. Adrian, thirteen, was a servant at the Towneley Manor Estate where he reported to chief servant, Terence Fletch.
Adrian was last seen cycling away from the manor through the woods, where he was accustomed to joining the main road and cycling to the home he lived in with his mother, Rebecca Greenwood, and his father, Leroy Greenwood.
Police are appealing for information on the whereabouts of Adrian. Any leads may receive a reward.
She rifled through the newspaper and reached a quarter of the way through the pile, when another story got her attention. This one was dated decades after the disappearance of Adrian Greenwood.
Little Boys Lost
- A column by Josephine Linklater
Glasspike may seem like a peaceful town, surrounded one side by hulking rocks and the other by hills so green they seem to stretch through the distance. Coming from London, the land of smog and noise, I find its tranquillity peaceful at times.
The first thing apparent to me on my arrival here was the familiarity with which every person greeted each other. There is not a face that is unknown to them, not a single name forgotten. Knowing that, I could forgive the curious glances directed my way as I went about my business.
What I cannot forgive, however, is the lack of effort bestowed by the constabulary on what seems to be a major problem. Looking through the records of the fine Glasspike Chronicle, I have found not one, not two, but five articles detailing the disappearance of young children in the area. All were approaching or just beginning their teenage years when they slipped off the face of the earth. All had the promise of a life stretched out before them, but snatched away and blotted out.
What is happening in Glasspike? There is but one common thread, and it is one that the police seem afraid to tug on. What is this thread, you ask?
Step outside your house. Look north, beyond the main road, and tell me what you see.
Do you see Towneley House?
Tamara dropped the newspaper on the floor. Her father had never told her of the children going missing but then again, he might not have known about them since the disappearances happened before he was born. She wondered who would have been the owner of Towneley Manor around the time the children went missing. Was it her great, great, great, great grandfather, Alistair Towneley? Or had the vanishings been happening for generations?
She picked up the next newspaper in the pile. This one only had a brief mention of the manor.
The Glasspike Chronicle would like to issue and apology and retraction regarding comments in a column by Josephine Linklater. No implications were intended in the publishing of this column.
The rest of the clippings reported livestock found dead in the fields near Towneley, some mutilated and disembowelled. They told of the various burglaries on the estate, and one reported that a burglar was found in a bedroom on the east wing by a servant. He was sat in a corner with his arms wrapped around his waist, his face pale, his body shivering. When the police came to get him, he left eagerly.
She sat back. Glass windows covered the entire conservatory to her right, and she could see out onto the grounds, the gravel-filled driveway, and the overgrown front lawn. Beyond it all were the woods, and deep within them, the orangery. Don’t look, she told herself.
She glanced at the chest of drawers beside the pile of newspaper clippings. In the bottom drawer, a sheet of yellow paper peeped out, and she could see the start of some black writing on it. She tried to pull the drawer open, but it was locked.
Something about the paper prodded at her curiosity, and she knew she had to read it. She went to the kitchen and found a long carving knife. Back in the conservatory, she stuck the knife through the slits in the drawer just above the lock, and she put pressure on it. She heard the crack of wood breaking, so she pushed down harder, and finally the lock snapped.
She opened the drawer and found another newspaper article. This was older and more age-worn than the rest. The cold of the room made her shiver, and she put the hood of her jumper over her head and pulled the strings so that it tightened around her face.
The article was a report of a death in Towneley Manor. A boy had been found dead, it said. They discovered his body hidden in the walls after servants reported a foul smell on the east wing. When they created an opening in the wall and pulled out the boy, they saw that his throat had been slit and his body drained of blood. He was identified as Alistair Towneley’s son.
The clipping showed a picture of Alistair Towneley. He stood tall outside the manor, though there was a slump to his shoulders as if the weight of grief was slowly pressing down on him. There was a cruel look about him. His was a face that was not used to any expression but a wicked glare or malicious snarl.
He was the man in the photograph that she found. He must have been. He had been stood with the children in their Halloween costumes, watching over them. The boy stood next to him, with the jet black hair and pale face, must have been his son.
The stories were true, then; the ones her grandmother and Magda used to tell her of the boy in the walls. Only, he hadn’t been looking for a cat. He had been murdered and then placed inside the walls. What had happened, she wondered? Had there been an investigation? She thought about the family tree that Billy had found in the library. The branches withered away as time wound on. What had happened to the rest of Alistair’s sons?
She became aware of a sensation on the right side of her face, the prickling of her skin as though someone stared at her. Somehow, she knew she mustn’t look to her right.
Her face grew cold, and the feeling intensified. She felt the energy of eyes focus on her skin. The feeling became too much for her.
Slowly she looked to her right. Outside the conservatory, blended into the darkness around them, four men stood at the conservatory windows.
All had black hair and cruel looks. There was a common resemblance in their faces, as though they were all variations of the same person. They looked directly at her with dark eyes and faces twisted into ominous expressions.
Her chest tightened. She felt like she couldn’t get air.
The men stood silently and stared through the glass, each and every eyeball drilling into her.
Suddenly, she felt alone. She wished Billy was here. Even Magda.
Feeling their stares send cold shivers through her body, she got up. She turned and walked into the lobby, all the while listening for the sound of the conservatory doors opening. S
he had to tell someone. She picked up the landline phone and held it to her ear.
Stupid, she thought. It’s not working, it was cut off.
Raspy breaths met her ear through the earpiece. She dropped the phone to the floor, disturbing the silence of the house as it clattered on the wood.
Panic started to flood her chest now, and the walls of Towneley Manor seemed closer together, as though the house was contracting and it was going to trap her. She needed to do something. Find Billy. Find a knife. Anything.
She ran up the steps and turned onto the hallway that led to her room. She ran through the darkness and felt it break on her face like a spider web. Gripping the cold handle of her door, she turned it and stepped in.
Her mobile phone had been on the table opposite her bed. She knew she’d left it there. Instead, the surface of the table was empty.
Where’s Billy? She thought.
She imagined the men with their oil black hair and harsh stares walking into the conservatory and through the lobby. Drawn to her, wanting her, following her up the stairs.
She ran out into the hallway. Her whole body shivered now, as though the temperature dropped with each step. Every creak on the floorboards was magnified. The settling of the house became not a normal sound but something more sinister, the noise of the manor laughing at her.
She pounded on Billy’s door, but he didn’t answer. She tried the handle and found it was unlocked, but his room was empty. Sprinting away and back down the hall and into Magda’s room, she found that empty too.
Am I alone? Have they left me?
She went back onto the hallway. There was no sign of the men and their threatening faces. There was no sign of Alistair Towneley walking the old halls of his house. But she heard a sound.
She stopped. Fingers of cold stroked the back of her neck. Her stomach turned to water. She cast everything out of her mind and just listened. Soon, she heard it clearly; it was a scratching coming from inside the walls.
She tried to walk down the hall and away from the scratching but it only grew louder, until finally, the volume reached its peak. She felt like she was going to faint, so she rested her hand against the wall on her right.
Something made a clicking sound. She pulled her hand away, and a small section of the wall swung open. She couldn’t see much in the darkness, but there was a cavity in the wall it had opened, and she glimpsed a dark crawlspace.
Footsteps walked toward her from the end of the hallway. She looked at the crawlspace and wondered if she should climb into it, but the rational part of her mind cried out at her and told her that it would be madness of the highest order.
The footsteps stopped a metre away. Something watched her from the darkness.
Second by second her eyes adjusted, and she saw that it was Billy. He stood in front of her in the hallway. In his hand, he held her mobile phone.
Chapter Nine
“Hey Tam,” he said, his voice echoing across the hallway. “Where’ve you been? I was looking for you.”
He’d never before looked as tall as he did then, looming in the dark space across from her.
“What are you doing with my phone?” she demanded.
He held it up for her to see. He pressed a key by accident and the screen lit up.
“I was charging it for you.”
It made sense. They only had one charger because Tamara’s had broken months ago. She kept meaning to replace it, but since she and Billy both had the same make of phone, it was easier just to borrow his. He was always moaning about it, but she just couldn’t be bothered going to the shop.
She sighed with relief. Here, in the house where the lights were all dead and the wall paper sagged and the floorboards groaned with each step, he was her only ally. Somewhere along the way they’d become distant, but he was here now.
She tried to hold it back, but she couldn’t stop the words pouring from her mouth.
“I saw some men,” she said, “in the conservatory. Well, they were outside it, I mean. They were staring in at me. I think we need to call-”
Billy started to laugh. She couldn’t help but think it was the first laugh the gloomy halls had heard in years.
“Tam,” he said, grinning. “I’m sorry, okay. Don’t get mad. But that was me outside the window. I was out walking Rupert and Butch and I saw you in the conservatory. I thought I’d give you a little scare. I’m sorry, I know you hate it when I do that.”
Back home, Billy was forever playing tricks on her. His favourite was to wait for her to go to the bathroom. The light switch was on the wall outside it, and he’d wait until she sat down to pee and then he’d flip the switch it and plunge her into darkness. While she sat on the toilet in the pitch black room, he’d scratch up and down the door.
This was different, though. This wasn’t Billy. She’d seen the faces outside the conservatory, and none of them belonged to her husband.
“There was more than one person outside,” she said. She folded her arms close against her chest.
“You’re getting spooked, Tamara.”
Was she even talking to the same person? Was this the Billy she’d driven here with, the one who’d turned up a song because he thought it was her favourite? She’d snapped at him when he did it, but he’d only been trying to make her smile. The man stood in front of her now wasn’t her husband. This was a different Billy, one who was lying to her.
“What was I doing? If you watched me in the conservatory, what was I doing?”
“Come on, Tam.”
She felt like she could vomit. She hadn’t felt right since coming to the manor, but she became aware of a feeling in her stomach. She was nauseous.
Billy was up to something. She knew it, she felt it. But without him, who else did she have? She hadn’t actually seen him do anything wrong, so what choice did she have other than to trust him? The truth was that she didn’t want to disbelieve him. Being back here, back in the manor where she’d spent the gloomy years of her childhood, she needed a supportive face.
“I found something,” she said. “Back in the hall. It looked like a crawlspace.”
“No way,” said Billy. “Show me.”
They walked back through the darkness until they found the spot where the wall had opened. Billy handed her phone to her. She clicked the light button and cast a blue glow on the hole in the wall.
Someone had opened up the wall and put a door on it, and then afterwards they’d papered over it so that it looked no different from the rest of the hallway. It only reached up to her thighs and looked to be a tight squeeze, but it seemed as though someone could climb into it if they had the mind to.
Billy got down to his knees.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What did you think was going to happen when you told me about this? I need to see what’s inside.”
He had a grin on his face like a treasure hunter who had discovered a secret passage. She didn’t know what she’d expected when she told him, really. It was just that she felt the need to say it, as though the secrets of the house were something she shouldn’t keep to herself.
Billy put his hands into the crawlspace.
“It’s wet,” he said. She heard his hands tap on the wood. “Shine a little more light over here.”
Before she could stop him, he climbed the whole way in. Slowly, as if pushed by unseen hands, the door shut behind him. It didn’t seem to perturb Billy, and she listened as she heard him crawl along through the walls.
The house was freezing now. She held her phone up to head height and slowly turned from left to right, shining the blue light across the corridor to make sure nobody approached her in the darkness. She knew she was being stupid. She couldn’t have seen men outside the conservatory, she just couldn’t.
A sound came from inside the wall. It was muted, but when she leaned in closer, she could hear it. It sounded as if someone was chanting in the crawlspace. Was Billy singing?
It couldn’t have been him. T
here wasn’t just one voice but many, and they chanted in a scornful tone, repeating the same sounds over and over again. If they were words, she couldn’t tell what they were.
She wanted to run down the hallway and go to her room, but she wouldn’t leave Billy alone. She banged on the wall, and her knocks sounded hollow as they rang off the wood.
“Billy?”
The chanting grew louder, the words spoken quicker and quicker until they became frenzied. She banged on the wall harder. Blood rushed to her head and she felt her heart thump in her chest. The chanting drifted out louder until it was the only thing she could hear, and she pressed her hands to her ears and wished for it to stop.