by Jack Lewis
And then it did. She heard a click, and the door opened.
Billy climbed out. She shined her light on him and saw that his clothes were covered in dust. Bringing the light back up to head height, she saw that his face was pale, and he had lost his grin.
“There was nothing there,” he said. “I think it’s where the monks used to hide though. Remember, all the stuff about the persecutions and how Towneley used to shelter them?”
“What was all the noise?”
“What noise?”
There was no way that he couldn’t have heard it. She looked at his face again and wondered if he was lying to her. Too much of what he said and did lately hadn’t been truthful.
She looked at the crawlspace again. It was dark inside. She imagined the little boy they had found in the walls, throat slit and body drained of blood.
Towneley wasn’t going to win. She shouldn’t let it scare her. She felt an urge to prove to the manor that she was better than it; that she was an adult and things like this weren’t going to hurt her.
Without thinking, she got to her knees and crawled into the space. She scuffed her knee on a sharp edge of the door, and cried out.
“You okay?” said Billy from outside.
“Banged my knee.”
“I don’t think you should go in there, Tam.”
“Well you did. And you’re not that tough.”
The crawlspace gave barely enough room for her to lift her head. It smelled of dust and damp wood, and the ground felt cold on her hands. As she crawled forward she felt spider webs break against her head and twist in her hair. She followed it along until the crawlspace widened.
There was a room at the end of it. Although still not full sized, it opened up into a room large enough for her to stand up. The ceiling was made of stone, and she felt it brush the top of her head. The floor was made of black granite, scratched through the passage of time but with little else to mark it. She shined her phone along the walls and down to the floor, and she crossed the room. Then she stopped.
Two footprints were on the floor on the opposite side of the room. They were in the corner, as though someone had stood facing it with their nose against the wall. She shined her torch and saw that the footprints were too small to be an adult’s. Next to them, there was a sheet of paper folded up.
“Tam?” said a voice outside the crawlspace.
She put the paper on her pocket. She left the room the way she had come, and by the time she reached the hall she realised her heart was racing, and she was glad to crawl out into the hallway.
“Find anything?” said Billy.
She thought about the paper in her pocket.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
They said their goodnights, and Billy went to his room and Tamara to hers. She sat down on the edge of her bed. The mattresses moaned under her weight, and she saw the silhouettes of tree branches on the window, looking like they were reaching across the glass to try and find a way in.
She took the paper out of her pocket. It felt rough in her fingers, and as she unfolded it she smelled the dust coming off. The paper was covered in a paragraph of words written in the sloppy handwriting of a child. She held her phone light up to it and read.
Father wants to get me. His eyes are different when he comes out of the woods. I hear noises coming from the trees. I know which part they come from. The bad place. The place father goes. He wants to kill me.
It was another one of Billy’s tricks. It just had to be. He had gone into the crawlspace first, and there was no way he could have missed the note. But then, he didn’t have the torch, did he? So it would have been difficult to see in the dark. Unless he had his own phone with him. No. It was a trick. He’d planted the note.
She put the note on the table across from her bed and then dressed for sleep. As she was about to get into bed she looked at the paper again, and she felt uneasy. It seemed wrong to leave it out in the open, so she folded it up and put it in the pocket of her jeans.
She climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. This time she had no smile for the man in the painting because he would see right through it, she knew. The truth was that Towneley had gotten to her. There was no sense denying it now. She put her head back on the pillow and fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later she woke. The fragment of a dream drained from her head, leaving too quickly for her to remember any of it. Her forehead was wet with sweat, and she felt an aching running through her limbs. Maybe she was getting a cold.
She glanced around the room. The windows were pitch black, and not even the moon shone that night. She looked at the table and was pleased to see no chairs and no whiskey bottles across from her.
She thought of the note. It was sick of Billy to write it, and she wasn’t going to ignore it this time. He hadn’t been acting right ever since they came to the manor.
Then again, what if he didn’t write it?
It was impossible to know what to think. She shook her head, as if the action would dispel the sense of dread welling up inside her.
She pulled the covers up over her chin and to her nose, and she felt her cold breath fill the space underneath. She looked across her bed toward the painting of the man, wondering if he would be watching her. A chill spread through her like ice.
There was something in the darkness. A black figure at the edge of her bed, standing over her silently, not moving. She tried to speak but it was as if her mouth was shut tight. She daren’t move her head, scared that if she did, the figure would move too.
There were three sharp knocks on her bedroom door. She quickly glanced at the door, and then back at the foot of her bed. The figure was gone.
“Tam?” said the voice outside.
“Come in.”
The door opened, and Billy walked into the room. He was dressed in his beige panama bottoms and his university football shirt. He held his mobile phone in his hand and lit his way with a sickly stream of blue light.
Despite everything, she was glad to see him. Relieved that it was his face in her room, and not the dark figure.
“What time is it?” she said.
“Just gone three.”
“What are you doing up?”
He scratched his ear.
“I was thinking that I could stay in your bed tonight,” he said.
“I’m not in the mood for that.”
He smiled uneasily. “No. I’m not going to try it on, I promise. Truth is, I’m getting spooked. There’s something wrong with this place, Tam.”
She drew back her covers and squeezed up against the wall.
“If you snore tonight, I’ll kill you,” she said, feigning a light tone but not feeling it.
She wondered if she had been wrong to suspect something of Billy. He hadn’t actually done anything wrong; nothing that she could pinpoint, anyway. Any thoughts she had were as dim as the old manor halls, and she knew he’d just say she was being stupid if she repeated them. She thought about mentioning the note, but decided to let it rest. If he was having a joke, so be it. Maybe one of these days she’d have play a joke of her own.
That night she slept better than she had since they had come to Towneley, and when the morning sun rose and light filled the room, she didn’t meet it with a groan. Instead she climbed over Billy and went into the bathroom to get ready for the day.
She kept the bathroom door open so that she could see clearly. Bathroom doors didn’t mean much to the two of them, really. They’d been together too long for that. She stood in front of the sink and stared into the mirror. When she saw the reflection in the glass, she jerked back.
Her face, arms and chest were covered in long, red scratches. These weren’t just the accidental kind that she sometimes did to herself in sleep; it seemed as if every inch of her skin was scratched by fingers that had meant to hurt her. She stared at the long red welts across her skin and felt dread fill her.
Chapter Ten
She glanced out of the bathroom door and saw Billy spread out on the child-sized bed. He stirred in his sleep, stretching his arm out and scraping his fingers down the wall. He let out a groan, and then he laid silent, chest rising and falling softly.
She crept back into the room, picked up her phone and then went into the bathroom. After turning on the light on her phone, she shut the door. The blue glow from her screen was the only thing to illuminate the granite counter, and her reflection looked hazy in the mirror as if she were a spectre. The taps were made of brass and even though they were probably over a hundred years old, not even an antique dealer would consider them valuable. A plug sat next to the sink, chain broken, and a soggy towel was draped over the bath.
She looked into the mirror. Some of the welts on her skin were so thick that it looked like she’d been whipped, and a particularly bad one ran from her neck and down to her breasts. Others were long, thin scratches, red fault lines running through her skin and criss crossing against each other.
She heard Billy stir in the bedroom, and the mattress creaked as he shifted his weight. Had he done this? Had her husband scratched her while she slept? Billy had a history of nocturnal movements, and a couple of times he’d woken up with scratches that he’d done to himself, but nothing like this. When she looked in the mirror she couldn’t help wincing, and it was only by taking deep breaths that she forced herself to keep it together.
She turned the brass handle of the tap. A weak trickle of water came out, and then when she turned it all the way, it spat out a torrent that splashed over the counter and onto her legs. Everything in Towneley was all or nothing; sunshine or darkness. Pure skin or scratches. A trickle or a torrent.
She wet her hands and started to clean the scratches. As she touched them, she realised that they weren’t painful. It was almost as if they had been drawn on in red ink, except the scratches wouldn’t come off with water. Someone had gouged them into her skin, but somehow it didn’t hurt.
Billy’s feet slapped down onto the floor. There was the sound of him rummaging, and then his footsteps walked toward the bathroom door. When he reached it, he twisted the handle. The door rattled, but didn’t budge.
“You in there, Tam?”
She stared into the mirror. The scratches didn’t run in straight lines, but in curves. Some looped in long lines, while others were small. She shuddered. Looking at the welts, she just knew that they had been done with malice. Someone angry had taken their nails to her skin and marked her while she slept.
The door handle rattled. The door threatened to budge, but it held firm.
“Tam? Since when do we lock doors?”
It couldn’t have been Billy. He didn’t have fingernails, for one. Whenever he sat down, the first thing he did was lift his fingers to his lips and start chewing, and most of the time his nails were bitten down to the skin. He didn’t have the sharp nails to make the scratches, and she couldn’t imagine him being able to do it while she slept.
The door shook. She heard something start to twist.
If it wasn’t Billy, then who? Was it Magda? Had she walked down the dark hallway and crept into their room, shadows covering her curving spine and the moon lighting her face as she stood over Tamara and scratched her? No. It just couldn’t have been.
What about an allergy then? Everything in Towneley was so old and mouldy, who knew what kind of pathogens were in the air? But then, allergies generally didn’t cause a spiderweb of scratch marks on your skin.
Something clicked, and then the bathroom door opened. Tamara turned in shock. Billy stood there with a coin in his hand. The locks were the kind that you could unlock from the outside, if you had the mind to. When he saw her, he drew back in surprise. The coin fell from his hand and clattered to the floor, landing heads side up.
“What the hell happened?” he said. He looked at her strangely.
“I was hoping you could tell me that.”
He shook his head.
“You think I did this? With these?” he said, holding up his fingers, the nails bitten down to his pink skin.
She sighed. She leaned against the sink. Water sprayed from the tap and onto her hands, and she could smell the bar of soap near the mirror. She didn’t have the energy for this. She couldn’t even turn her head to look in the mirror, because every time she saw the scratches she wanted to scream inside. What was happening?
“Maybe you scratched yourself in your sleep?” he said.
“I think I would have felt it.”
“You better get them cleaned up.”
“We need to leave, Billy. Forget selling, forget everything, and just leave.”
She got dressed and then went downstairs into the lobby. A rug was in the centre of the room covering a portion of the wooden floor. It was dark blue and had silver twinkles dotted on it, like the stars in a night sky. She didn’t know if it had always been there or if it was new. That was the trick of Towneley Manor; you could live there for years and not notice a chair moved out of place or a table shoved against a different part of the wall. It was a house where the outside was so hard to forget that it meant little attention was paid to the details inside it.
She walked into the kitchen and saw Magda stood on a chair. She was on her tiptoes and trying to reach a cupboard above her. The chair legs were uneven, and as Magda strained, the chair wobbled. Finally she gave up trying to reach for something. She tried to climb off the chair, but she put her hands to her back and winced in pain.
Tamara walked over and put her hands out. Taking most of the weight, she helped Magda down off the chair.
It was pathetic; she couldn’t even get something from the cupboard without hurting her back. They couldn’t leave. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t leave Magda alone. It wasn’t just about Billy’s conscience now. Tamara realised that unless she did the decent thing here, it would hang over her for the rest of her life.
When Magda looked up at Tamara, her eyes widened.
“What on earth happened to you?”
Magda reached up to touch her face. Tamara recoiled. She glanced at her mother’s fingers and saw that although her nails were long, they didn’t seem sharp. She suddenly imagined the lady in the caregiver centre and her fake nails tapping on her keyboard.
Then she remembered her father in his crypt. Toenails yellow and curled back like the horns of a goat. She hadn’t paid much attention to his hands, but there was no reason to think his fingernails weren’t just as long. She flinched at the thought.
Magda walked to the sink, picked up a cloth and wet it under the hot tap. As she turned the tap off she touched her back and winced, and then she hobbled over to Tamara. She tried to dab her face.
“Come on, Magda,” she said, moving her head away.
“I just want to help. Did Billy do this?”
“You need to think about yourself. What were you trying to reach up there?”
She looked at the open cupboard. It was full of tins of powdered milk and baked beans. The labels were wearing off the cans at the back of the cupboard, and Tamara wondered if some of the stuff in there dated back to World War II.
“Can you pass me the pasta?”
She took hold of a clear bag filled with fusilli and handed it to her mother.
“You need to consider selling, Magda. I know it’s tough, but if you can’t even go into a cupboard without doing your back in, then something’s wrong.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“What?” she said, surprised. It wasn’t the answer she expected.
“I said I’ll think about it.”
~
She decided to start getting things ready for sale. There were still rooms in the manor that she hadn’t inventoried, and anything she could do to speed along the sale, or even the possibility of one, seemed worth it. It felt silly to be walking around the halls with a pad and pen, but it took her mind off everything.
She walked up the steps that led to the second floor. Her feet tapped on t
he wood, but the further up she went the more muted the noise seemed, as if the wood was soft. The whole place needed a survey for woodworm. She realised that selling it was going to be a nightmare.
Just power through, she told herself.
On the second floor west wing, most of the room windows were boarded up. Although it was daylight outside, the only indication given by the manor was through the thin slats of light that crept through the gaps in the boards. A freeze chilled her and made her wish she’d worn an extra layer.
Her childhood bedroom was on the end of the corridor, she knew. She remembered that she used to collect empty tins from her mother and set them up in a tower outside her door, and then she’d take aim and toss a cricket ball toward them. Eventually she got so practiced at it that every single throw was a strike, and the tower of tins would clatter to the floor.