by Jack Lewis
It stopped when it hit her feet.
“What’s with stuff rolling around in this place?” she said.
She looked up. At the end of the hallway, the metal door watched her. A six-foot block of steel, painted black by one of her ancestors who had no eye for aesthetics. Surely Ruby hadn’t gone near the door?
She must have been in Dad’s study. Yet, Scarlett was sure she’d locked it the other day. With her heart pounding in her chest, she walked along the hallway. The floorboards protested under her weight, whining like they were in pain.
The east wing felt unwholesome. Full of locked doors, forbidden rooms. She wanted to turn back. She wanted to shout at Ruby, to tell her not to run away, scold her for disobeying her instructions.
She shook her head. Where was this coming from? She’d never been that kind of parent.
Try as she might, she couldn’t help her gaze being drawn to the metal door. The tennis ball had bounced from that direction, but the door had been closed. She gulped. She carried on walking until she reached the end of the corridor. The metal door was in front of her, and Dad’s study was to her right.
Taking the lesser of two evils, she grabbed the handle of the study and turned it. It hardly budged. It was locked, just as she knew it would be.
Was it the metal door, then? Had Ruby gotten in there somehow? She remembered Peter Jones, all those years ago, banging on the door and begging to be let out.
How had he gotten in that day? That was a question that nobody really answered. They assumed Dad had left it unlocked, but he never did that. And come to think of it, he’d had to unlock the door to let Peter out.
A sense of urgency flooded through her. The door watched her silently. There was something sentient about it, as though it knew she would have to touch it.
Holding her breath, she reached out for the handle. It was cold to the touch. Too cold, as though it had been frozen and was yet to thaw. In her head, she heard Peter Jones screaming. She turned the handle and braced herself for what lay inside.
But it wouldn’t turn. It was locked, just as it always had been, as it always would be. So where was Ruby? Anxiety was churning in her stomach now.
She turned around. The hallway deemed darker. The air was strange; tinged with something like tension but darker. More insidious.
She heard Ruby giggle. It came from along the hall, but which room? She heard it again. It wasn’t from her old room. It might have been coming from Jane’s. Scarlett didn’t want to go in there again. She couldn’t face her sister’s bedroom.
She walked down the hall. Her steps seemed too loud now, like she’d disturbed a silence that shouldn’t have been broken. More giggles came from ahead, to her left. But they weren’t giggles. Not really. When she listened carefully, they seemed more like cackles.
She stopped outside her mother’s sewing room. Daylight streamed in through the window. An old sheet was next to the frame, wrapped around a hook as if it were some sort of crude curtain. Ruby was in the middle of the floor, sat cross-legged with her back to her, playing with some marbles.
She breathed a sigh of relief. “What did I tell you, Ruby?” she said.
The house was getting to her. Whether it was carbon monoxide poisoning or the onset of some sort of mania, she didn’t know. Gawthorpe was toying with her.
“What did you tell me, mother?” said the girl. “What did you tell me?”
Scarlett was taken aback. Her daughter’s girlish voice was gone, replaced by something deeper.
She wanted to step into the room, but something held her back. Pushing through it, she walked into the sewing room.
She went forward until she stood behind her daughter. She bent down and touched her shoulder.
“Ruby, what are you-”
The words caught in her throat. This felt wrong. The shoulder. Too sharp and bony. Different, as though it was someone else’s bones. Her pulse pounded in her ears now, so loud it was like the rush of a tide sweeping over a beach.
Ruby straightened up. She got to her feet.
Slowly, as though she were a puppet on a string, she started to turn around. Jerky movements, like a video skipping and missing out a few seconds each time.
Scarlett stepped back. She swallowed, but her throat was dry. Something screamed inside her, told her to get out.
And then Ruby turned around.
When Scarlett saw her face, she gasped.
It wasn’t her daughter. It was an old woman. Five-foot-tall, face creased with wrinkles, a wicked grin on her face.
The sheet at the window flopped down and covered the glass, plunging the room into darkness. Scarlett tried to step back but banged into something.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Cold breath on her cheeks. She tripped up and fell back onto the floor. And then she sensed a face just inches away from hers.
“The child is wicked,” said a voice.
She lost control. She was dimly aware of a sound that left her lips; something like a whimper. Something pathetic, a primal sound that she’d never heard before.
“Mum?” said a voice.
This came from behind her. Summoning all her will, Scarlett got to her feet. She turned and ran into the hall where Ruby waited for her with a tennis ball in her hand.
When Scarlett turned around and looked at the sewing room, the sheet was fixed beside the window, and the room was light again.
Chapter Eighteen
Sleep missed its visit that night, just as she knew it would. Just as inevitably, Trev lay in the bed next to her, eyes closed, breaking the silence with a snore. The bedroom door was open. Sat up in bed, she had a full view of Ruby’s doorway.
She’d wanted Ruby to sleep in their room. She couldn’t get the voice out of her head. ‘The child is wicked,’ it had said. It was a seed planted by those dreadful old women, nothing more than that.
She needed sleep, and it wouldn’t be a coincidence if, once she was well rested, the strange things stopped happening. All the same, she wanted to be careful.
“You’re sleeping in ours tonight, Rubes,” she said.
“Please no,” said Trev, with a smile. “She stinks.”
Her willful daughter had refused. When Scarlett held firm, Ruby then broke into a flat-out tantrum. Not a play-acting either, as she sometimes did when she was tired. This was a full-on, plonk herself on the floor, red face, arms-flailing kind of outburst. Finally, Scarlett had compromised.
“Bedroom door open, lights out. No staying up to read,” she’d told her.
She didn’t tell Trev what she’d seen. What good would it have done? There were just too many things unanswered. What was happening to her? How could she stop it?
A wild part of her mind told her that her father was involved somehow. It was becoming clearer that something had affected him before he’d died, and that it had made him a different person.
What she needed now was a plan grounded in reality. She wanted to leave Gawthorpe as soon as possible, but her options were limited. They had no money and nowhere else to go.
Even if they pawned some of Dad’s old things, she would only get enough money to last them a month or two. She needed something more long-term. It was the least she owed Ruby. If not, she could already see the headlines:
‘Britain’s Worst Mum.’
‘Child Taken Away from Mother After Being Found Living in a Car.’
The hands on her watch marked the third hour without sleep. She couldn’t get the idea of the old lady out of her head. A suggestion presented itself, but it was ludicrous. Marga Highgate. The stern old babysitter, the bogeywoman her ancestors had told their children about to get them to behave. The hag who watched children and waited for them to misbehave, before launching into a tirade of abuse.
It was stupid. That was a story to scare children, not adults. She wouldn’t give in to fear, especially not here. She had to show Gawthorpe she wasn’t scared of it.
She got out of bed and put on her slippers. As soon as s
he put her feet on the floor, she heard a noise. It was a whirring sound that came from somewhere in the room. She looked around her, but couldn’t see any obvious source.
She held her breath and listened. It was coming from the floorboards. Not scratching, but something else. Something underneath the floor.
When she concentrated, she realised it wasn’t coming from under the floor, but on it. More specifically, from Trev’s jeans. Confused, she picked up his jeans and felt in the pockets. She took hold of something firm. Whatever it was, it vibrated in her hand. She pulled it out and saw that it was a mobile phone.
Her first reaction was of relief. It wasn’t a monster underneath the floorboards. This feeling was quickly replaced by something worse. The realisation that Trev had lied.
Someone was dialling it, and the contact listed on the screen was ‘B’. Not a name, just a letter. She cancelled the call so as not to wake Trev.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she ran her fingers through her hair. She didn’t understand. Back in the car, Trev told her that he’d sold his phone so they could buy petrol. Why would he lie about it?
Leaving the room without making a noise, she crossed the hall and checked on Ruby. She found her daughter curled up beneath her sheets, her eyes flickering in a dream that Scarlett hoped was pleasant.
As she walked down the hall and reached the stairs, she questioned her internal monologue. ‘Show Gawthorpe she wasn’t scared of it,’ had been her earlier plan. Well, what was ‘it?’
Gawthorpe was a collection of bricks and mortar arranged in a certain shape. Nothing more. It wasn’t a sentient being, it didn’t have a soul. She doubted the architect’s blueprints had included a label that said, ‘big metal door leading to ghost room.’ Gawthorpe was no more aware of her feet on the floorboards as the stars were of their position in the sky. It didn’t think, it didn’t see. It just was.
She went downstairs and into the living room. She saw the outlines of the furniture in the darkness. For a second she wondered whether she might hear someone giggling, but she shook the thought away. She needed to control herself.
She turned on the light. The antique cabinet was against the wall. The sofa and chairs were in the centre of the room. The fire, long dead, was full of ash. This was a room of solitude. She remembered how her parents would sit in here for hours, both with a book in their hand, neither of them breaking the silence.
She needed a distraction from everything. From the reflections in the glass, the woman in the sewing room, from Trev and his lies. She knew she should take a minute and think things through, but she was on edge. Her breaths were quick and shallow. She needed something to take her mind away, to give her escape for just a few minutes.
She glanced at a pile of books in the corner of the room. They would be history books of some sort, no doubt. She needed a distraction, but she couldn’t face something as dry as that. Then she remembered the book she’d found in her dad’s study.
She went back upstairs to get it, creeping into the bedroom and finding it on a table by the bed. When she saw Trev, she felt a stab of annoyance. The questions would come in the morning. She’d find out why he had lied. For now, she needed to collect herself.
She went back down into the living room. Darkness covered the chairs, though she couldn’t remember turning off the light. She flipped the switch, shut the door and settled on the sofa. There, she read.
It was strange that the book had no title on its cover. Even stranger were the words her father had written: ‘Cursed Ones.’ Was that the title of the book? It must have been.
Dad had never been one to leave cryptic messages. He had been a man not just grounded by logic but imprisoned by it. He hated star signs, black cats, rabbits’ paws. He used to love to go to the village on Friday 13th because he knew it’d be empty.
As she leafed through the pages, she realised that it was a book about witchcraft. The passages were written in a ‘ye olde’ English. It didn’t make it any more difficult to read, but it marked the book as being hundreds of years old. She wondered how much it was worth.
She soon discovered that parts of the book were marked by little slips of card, which must have been placed there by Dad. She didn’t have time to read the whole thing, so she skipped to the places he’d saved.
The first was a chapter titled ‘Witch Marks.’ It began with a pencil drawing of three circles interlinking each other. She knew full well what these were. She’d seen them outside her bedroom and in Jane’s room, but she was sure she’d seen them somewhere else, too. Where?
She read on. The chapter described in detail how the marks could be used to ward away evil spirits and would prevent a witch from entering or cursing a room or house.
She wondered how the author could write about the subject with such seriousness. But then, if the book was hundreds of years old, that made sense. People believed lots of things back then that were downright laughable now.
The next chapter discussed the identification of witches, describing the various methods employed by the would-be witch-finders. She had already heard of most of them from studying the Salem witch trials in school. The most common ones were the most barbaric.
Witches would be weighed down and thrown into a lake. If they floated, they were a witch. If they died, they weren’t. There was a similar test but with fire instead of water, and Scarlett didn’t even want to think about that.
“These poor women were screwed either way,” she said aloud.
There was another method of witch finding that Scarlett had never heard of. Town authorities would ask a victim of witchcraft to scratch the bodies of suspected witches. If the accused bled, they were guilty.
It was ridiculous. You were damned either way, and there was no logic to it. If someone scratched you, you bled, witch or not.
She sighed. It was hard to believe that things like this happened. The human mind was a dark thing, she supposed. There was a yearning to attack that which was the ‘other.’ Centuries ago it had been witches.
We’d moved on from that, of course, but the dark logic still prevailed. People no longer hunted for witches, but they had replaced them with other things. Terrorists. Murderers. There were no trials by fire anymore, but trials by torture were common enough.
Finally, Dad had marked a section on witch trials. This was an anecdotal list of examples of witch trials in the UK. As she read through them, her eyes began to grow heavy.
The book was having its intended effect, then. Sleep was there, somewhere, waiting for her to follow it to its lair. She was about to close the book and head upstairs when a passage caught her attention.
She rubbed her eyes. At first, she couldn’t believe what she saw. It described a trial that happened in a village in the north of England. The account started with a description of the area, painting an image of a simple village surrounded by woodland.
Near the village, dominating the landscape, was a manor. The building was described as having a long roof, with smaller, pointed turrets surrounding it. There was a large lake to the east, and a forest marked the edges of the estate.
It was Gawthorpe. It had to be. Sure, there were lots of old manors in England, but how many were in the north? How many had a giant lake? And why else would this book just happen to be in her father’s study?
The passage told of a trial that happened in the estate. A woman who lived in the manor spurned the attentions of a suitor, refusing six of his marriage proposals. Embarrassed and angry, the man broke into the manor, dragged the woman to the nearby forest, and then raped her.
She almost shut the book. This was getting too much. She felt cold, and she had the feeling that the light might go out at any minute, leaving her alone in the darkness.
All the same, she couldn’t stop. Her eyes were drawn further down the page. She had to know what happened.
It seemed that the woman, being of high stock, involved the police in the matter. The man was arrested. While awaiting trial, he accused the wom
an of being a witch and told authorities that she had possessed him.
This changed things. It didn’t matter how upper class the woman was. The victim became the accused, and the woman was found guilty of witchcraft. She was hung in the centre of the village, while the man walked free.
As shocking a tale as this was, it wasn’t the story that sucked the air from Scarlett’s lungs. It was the name of the man.
Glanville. Thomas Glanville.
She knew the name. She’d heard it when they first arrived at the manor; Ruby had named her puppy Glanville. The name had come to her instantly, though she couldn’t explain how she’d thought of it.
She shut the book. The heaviness in her eyes was gone again, replaced by the familiar knowledge that sleep wouldn’t come. Still, she couldn’t be alone anymore. She had to go upstairs. She needed the comfort of a person next to her.