by Jack Lewis
She couldn’t face that room yet. She didn’t know what waited in there; what memories lied in slumber and waited for her to wake them.
In one room she found a full-sized oval mirror, supported by a metal stand. The screws keeping the mirror in place were loose and it swung slightly in the breeze, whining as the metal twisted on the pivot. The glass was dusty and she didn’t dare look in it, scared that if she did she’d see even more scratches on her face.
The window of the room was boarded up not by a full sheet of wood but instead by eighteen thin slats that were fastened by rust-covered nails. Trees swished in the wind outside, their thin branches brushing on the wood and making a scraping noise as they passed. Every few seconds it happened, and it sounded like they were scratching the way a cat does when it wants to come inside.
Two wooden beams ran from the floor up to the ceiling supporting the roof. This room must have been at the corner of the house where the roof sloped. She looked at one of the beams and watched a woodlouse climb halfway to the top and then stop. The wood looked wet, and she thought it might crumble if she touched it. She wondered how long they could continue to support the roof, and whether one day they might just give up.
If Towneley was a monster, then it was a sick one. Maybe it watched her as she walked through its halls and felt her feet on its floors like a fly crossing its skin, but what could it do about it? The house was decaying from the inside, infected by something dark and ill.
The only thing in the room besides the mirror was a chest of drawers in the corner, where not even the streams of light from the gaps in the window could penetrate. She walked over and opened the first drawer. There was nothing in it but a dead fly.
The tree scraped across the window boards again. Wind sneaked in and blew down the back of her neck. For some reason, she felt like she was being nosy; that she was searching through rooms where she wasn’t wanted nor welcome. She opened the second drawer, and she found a tape recorder.
She recognised it immediately. It was a recorder that she used to play with as a child. Her father had given her a tape that used to have loud rock music on it, but he’d shown her how to record over the music. She spent hours speaking into the microphone and making funny voices, and then she’d play them back to herself and laugh. Sometimes when she pressed play and fast forward at the same time her voice became high-pitched like a chipmunk.
She rewound the tape to the beginning and pressed play. At first she heard nothing but the crackle of static. As she stood in the cold room she kept her glance away from the mirror, away from her reflection. The static on the tape buzzed. Maybe it was broken.
And then a voice spoke.
It was her voice, but years younger. It was strange hearing herself as a child, almost like it wasn’t her but another person entirely.
“Who are you?” her younger voice said.
There was silence.
“Who are you?”
Then there was a sound. It wasn’t words, but it was a noise all the same. A low wheeze, and then a grumble.
“Do you want me to leave?”
Then a voice joined hers. She heard a raspy voice say, “Yes.”
She pressed rewind. Again, she heard her own question.
“Who are you?”
A noise answered her. It wasn’t just the static of the tape or the moan of the wind. It was a noise made in reply to her question.
She played it again and again, rewinding to the question and listening to the answer. A chill crept over her, and she felt as if she shouldn’t be playing it, but she couldn’t stop herself. Her innocent child voice filled the dark room.
“Who are you?”
She played it again, and this time she heard the noise clearly. Somebody answered her. She was certain of it.
“Who are you?”
She stopped the tape. She took a deep breath and pressed play, and listened intently for the answer.
“Alistair,” it said. The words were spoken in a growl, so low that it was almost a whisper.
She remembered it now. She remembered sitting in her room on her bed with her legs curled under her. She didn’t dare let her feet dangle over the bed because she was scared something might reach out from underneath and grab her. She remembered the room being cold, and the feeling that someone was there with her.
It was almost like a door opened in her mind. Another memory came back to her, one of the secret place in her bedroom, the one that she didn’t want anyone else in the house to know about. It was her secret, nobody else’s.
Tamara stood up. She put the tape recorder in her hoodie pocket and left the room. The hallway seemed even darker now, as though someone had doubled the boards on the windows, painstakingly blotting any light that dared enter the manor.
She walked down the silent halls and stopped outside a door at the end. It was her childhood bedroom, she knew. She didn’t want to go in but her memory tugged at her, and her mind told her that she must. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
Maybe she had expected her room to be as it was; her bed with the pink bedsheets. Posters on the wall of the pop groups she worshipped. A shelf full of adventure books. None of it remained. Instead there were just walls and floorboards, and the flooring was marked where her bed used to rest.
She was drawn to a floorboard in the corner of the room. She remembered it clearly now. She walked over and kneeled in front of it. She took hold of one of the floorboards, and just as she knew it would, it pulled away to reveal a hole underneath.
Laying in the hole, waiting for her to return to it, was a box. She took it out. A cobweb covered the lid, and the sides of it were painted in pink and orange stripes. She wiped away from the dust and felt some of it blow into her eyes.
She looked behind her, almost expecting someone to be in the doorway, watching her. She was alone.
She opened the box. Inside it were sheets of paper carefully folded up. She took them out and saw some of the drawings she’d done as a child. She could almost feel the pencils held tight in her hands as she sketched them all those years ago.
The first drawing was of their house. The manor took up most of the paper, spreading dark across the white. In front of it, she had drawn her family. There was her mother, her father, and her. She only reached up to her father’s waist. They all held hands outside the manor, and she’d drawn big, black smiles on all of their faces.
The drawing made her feel sad. They were a family once. She remembered that Magda used to smile at her, and her father used to sit her on his lap and read to her. They were happy times. Times of smiles and laughter, pleasant memories. As a young girl she hadn’t known it then, but those times would soon end. She would barely be in her teens before something happened and her mind was wiped clean for a whole month, and the next thing she knew they had made her leave Towneley and go to a boarding school miles away, and her father would never read to her again.
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. She began to look through the others and saw more of the same; smiling families, nice times. Fruit growing from the branches of trees, deer prancing through the bracken of the woods.
When she reached the last drawing, she stopped. She looked at it and she felt a cold shiver run through her.
A black eyeball stared at her from the paper. Surrounding it were flames that threatened to lick over the eyeball. She had seen the symbol before; in her dreams, in her nightmares, on the book Billy had hidden in his room.
She dropped the paper to the floor. The room shrunk around her and became dark, and she felt as if eyes stared at her from the shadowy corners.
Had she drawn this? She couldn’t remember it.
The eye watched her from the page, and she had a dim image of her tracing its ugly shape on the paper.
Why had she drawn it? And then, after drawing it, why had she chosen to hide it underneath her floorboards?
And then the doors of her memory opened wider, and she was cast back into her younger mind
. The truth hit her, cold and ominous. She remembered who she had hidden it from.
It was her father. She didn’t want him to see that she’d drawn the symbol, because she knew he would get mad.
Chapter Eleven
That evening she stood outside the manor with Rupert and Butch. Rupert, the smaller dog, sniffed the ground and trotted in circles as he watched crickets moving in the grass. Butch sat still and stared at the woods, never moving. She was glad that he’d come back after he had run into the woods, but he had been quieter ever since. Tamara wondered what he saw through his little black eyes. Every so often his ears would prick up, as if he heard a sound.
She hadn’t seen Billy for the rest of the day. He had been spending a lot of time in the woods, though she hadn’t had a chance to ask him why. It felt as if every day they spent at Towneley pushed them further apart, and the air between them was like ice and was getting colder by the hour.
It wasn’t the first time they’d had problems. Like any couple who had been in a relationship for eight years, they’d argued. Tamara had her faults, and sometimes she would have to concede that yes, it was annoying when she left all the housework to him and okay, maybe she could do more of the cooking.
They had their first big quarrel when they moved in together. They had spent their first week in their house painting the walls and doors. Billy hadn’t been happy with the yellow paint Tamara picked, but she asked him to pick something else, and he couldn’t. He sighed and said that they would use her colour, and after a week of hard work, the house looked fresher.
The following Monday she was given some work by an agency. A solicitor’s office needed a temporary receptionist while theirs was sick, and Tamara filled in. When she got back later that evening, she found that half the living room wall was painted indigo blue. Billy stood there, paint covering his t-shirt and brush in hand.
“It’s not fair that you get to choose everything,” he said.
“I gave you the chance.”
“No you didn’t. You pretended to, but you didn’t mean it.”
They argued for over an hour that day, and it ended with Billy picking up a tin of paint, turning it over and emptying it all over the living room carpet. It spread along the fibres of the polyester like a bloodstain.
That was the last big fight they’d had. Since then he had started to open up more. He’d started speaking more freely and giving her his opinion, and she was glad for it. They became stronger.
Now, stood in the wind that swirled over the manor grounds, she didn’t know who to trust. Deep down, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Billy had scratched her skin, and that he was hiding things from her. Maybe he was even conspiring with Magda.
She shook her head. She was being stupid again. Towneley was getting to her, and it was turning her against her husband. She wouldn’t let it win. When she next saw Billy, she was going to make an effort to talk to him.
Something still nagged at her brain. She pictured herself back in the conservatory, glancing at the windows and seeing the men watching her from outside. She saw their cruel stares, faces twisted with hate. One of them had long hair that fell down to his sides like the strands of a mop.
She had to tell the police. The figures had been real. She knew that she had seen them.
She tugged on the bigger dog’s lead.
“Come on, Butch,” she said.
He wouldn’t move. He stared with his head fixed firmly on the woods. Rupert walked over to her and sniffed her feet. She pulled Butch’s lead again. She noticed that he was shaking, and his ears stood to attention as if someone was calling his name.
She didn’t like it. Whatever the dog saw, she wanted no part of it. Her phone was inside, and she just needed to make a single call and the police would come and investigate.
She turned toward the door. As she stared at the entrance of Towneley Manor, she heard a noise bellow out from behind her.
She slowly turned around, scared of what she would see. There was nothing there but the woods, dark and brooding, with spindly limbs waving at her.
The noise shrieked through the air again and made her skin crawl. It came from beyond the trees. Butch turned his head and started barking. Tamara was frozen in place, her legs numb. She heard the noise a third time, and this one was clear.
TA MA RA
Something roared her name from the trees, deep inside the forest where the night was darkest and not even the nocturnal animals dared tread. Something called out to her.
Butch jerked on his lead. It slipped from her hand, and before she could grab it the dog raced across the grass and toward the woods. Tamara willed her legs to move. She starting running after him, unsure how far she dared go, but knowing she couldn’t let him get lost again.
As she neared the woods, a figure stepped out of the darkness. It crossed through the break in the trees and stood silently, watching her.
Her heart pounded. She wanted to turn and run, but knew the figure would chase her.
And then it stepped forward. Moonlight shined over its face, and she saw that it was Billy. He reached down and grabbed Butch’s lead and pulled the dog close to him. Butch strained to get away.
“What are you doing out here?” he said. “It’s freezing.”
He walked over to her and linked her arm in his, and together they walked over the sodden grass and toward the manor. Billy held Butch’s lead in his hand. The dog growled at him every so often, but it seemed keen to get back to the house. Tamara realised that in her shock, she had just let Rupert’s lead fall to the ground, but the little dog hadn’t strayed from where they had stood.
She turned and looked at her husband. Shadows covered his face.
“What did you want?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You shouted my name.”
“When?” he said, with a confused look on his face.
It was Towneley again. Either that, or she was losing it. Losing herself, losing her mind, losing the part of her that she had kept locked away and untainted by the gloom of the manor.
She wouldn’t let it get to her. She felt like she needed to talk to Billy, but not about the house or the woods. She didn’t even want to talk about the scratches on her face. She just wanted something normal, anything that would take her mind away from this place.
They walked into the house, through the lobby and into the dining room. The board on the window shuddered against the frame, and she saw that one of the corners was coming loose. She sat down on a chair and rested her elbows on the table, and it was all she could do not to close her eyes. Billy sat across from her. The space between them over the long table seemed infinite, like he was miles away.
She looked at him and tried to smile, but the gesture felt strange on her face.
“You need sleep,” he said.
She didn’t. The last thing she needed was to go up to her room and sleep, because she was scared about what new marks would be on her body when she woke. She changed the subject to one she knew he loved.
“Tell me about the bar,” she said.
“Come on, Tam.”
“What kind of whiskeys are you going to serve?”
“Is this really the time?”
She sighed. Talking about their future felt wrong. Sat in the gloom of the manor it felt like there was no future, as though her life consisted of the crumbling walls and dark hallways and it was all she’d ever see.
“I did some more reading,” he said. He scratched at the wood of the table with his finger. Some of the table was still stained by dried deer blood. He looked at her. “I found out some stuff about Alistair Towneley.”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Bill.”
“He was into some weird stuff,” he said, ignoring her. “Rituals. I don’t know what kind, but something dark. I took a look at some of the manor accounts. Did you know that they used to have a fresh intake of servants every year? Replaced the whole lot of them. It was like nobody stayed lon
ger than a year. They either left or…”
No, she wouldn’t talk about this. She didn’t want to know about Alistair Towneley and his dark past. She wished she’d never been born into this family.
She stood up so fast that her chair tipped up behind her. Without giving him a chance to speak, she got up from the table and walked to the door. As she opened the dining room door, she saw Magda pressed up against it. Her mother recoiled in shock when she saw her.
“You’re spying on us now?” said Tamara. This was all getting too much.