by Jack Lewis
In the lobby, Ruby crouched down on the floor. Glanville lay in front of her and nuzzled against her legs.
“Stay where I can see you,” said Scarlett.
“What are you doing?” asked Ruby.
“Just talking.”
Rita looked thoughtful for a second. She put her handbag on the table. The clasp unfastened, and Scarlett saw the spine of a book poking out. ‘Beginner’s Economics,’ it read. That certainly wasn’t what she’d expected the psychic to be reading.
“Let the child come in,” said Rita. “She should be here.”
“No way,” said Scarlett.
“You brought me here for my help, did you not? Well, then perhaps you should listen to me.”
“Trev brought you here. Not me.”
Trev crossed his arms again. “Come on, Scar. Let’s just follow her lead.”
Bit by bit, the house was chipping away at her resolve. Just a few days earlier, there was no way she’d have entertained something like this. Now, though, she didn’t see that she had a choice.
There was just one day to go before they could leave, and she wanted it to be as uneventful as possible. If inviting a psychic in the house was what it took, she’d just have to do it.
“Come here, Rubes,” she said.
Ruby picked up Glanville and walked into the dining room. She hovered just inside the doorway and stared at the psychic. Scarlett didn’t like where her daughter was standing, and she put her hand on her shoulder and guided her to a seat.
The four of them all took their places around the table. Despite the daylight leaking into the lobby, little of it made its way into the dining room. Rita leaned forward into her seat and pulled her handbag closer to her.
“So, do you have tarot cards or something?” asked Trev.
Rita shook her head. “Those things are a crock.”
“Okay. Do we need to hold hands, then?”
“The spirits don’t care if we hold hands. They don’t need cards, Ouija boards, or anything like that.”
She put her handbag down on the floor next to her.
“What do we need to do, then?” asked Trev.
“Simply open your minds, and listen.”
With that, the psychic closed her eyes. She opened her lips and began to mouth words silently. Scarlett wished she knew how to lip read because then she’d know what kind of crap Rita was saying. She flashed Trev a look, and he shrugged his shoulders. Ruby squirmed in her seat.
She didn’t know if she was imagining it, but the room seemed to get darker. It looked as if shadows gathered at the top of the walls and then ran down them like paint until she could no longer see the faded patterns on the wallpaper.
Was something supposed to happen now? Would the lights flicker? Would they hear the dim giggle of a child in the corner of the room? She knew that as a psychic, Rita would have a way of making it seem like something supernatural was happening.
Get on with it, thought Scarlett.
Despite the brave words she repeated in her head, she was unnerved. She got the sense that something was slowly drifting into the room. Not a breeze, but something more sinister.
Rita suddenly snapped her head back. It caught Trev by surprise, and he shifted in his seat. He gave Scarlett a worried glance.
Rita sat so that her neck rested on the edge of the chair and her face pointed at the ceiling.
Scarlett reached across and grabbed her daughter’s hand. The shadows were thicker now. They spread out from the walls and seemed to float through the air, becoming a mist that hovered in front of them.
It looked so real that Scarlett thought she could reach out and touch it, if she wanted. Something inside her told her she shouldn’t move.
The room was silent. Rita mouthed her noiseless words, and Scarlett suddenly wanted to be far away. She felt something in the pit of her stomach. A feeling akin to fear, but thicker. More drawn out, like a sensation that would never leave her.
Rita’s head snapped forward again. She faced Scarlett, though her eyes stayed closed.
This was real. Suddenly, she knew that Rita wasn’t pretending.
The psychic slowly turned her head. She never opened her eyes to look, but she seemed to be taking in every inch of the room. It was as though she’d never been in it before. She focused on Trev for a second, before finally settling on Ruby.
Scarlett had the overwhelming urge to run. To just get up from the table and leave. Get in the car and see how far the petrol would take her.
Rita started to speak. “There was a girl here, once,” she said, her voice low, almost a growl. “Abused by a spirit wracked with anger.”
Then she stopped. Though her lips moved, no sound came out. Scarlett sighed. Trev leaned forward in his seat, careful not to disturb the psychic.
“He attacked the girl,” said Rita. “She was a witch. He knew it. God, how he knew it. In a previous life, this child practised magic.”
Who was the girl? Was it one of her ancestors? A family member who died long ago? Scarlett was stuck with the idea that she knew nothing of her family’s history.
She crossed her arms tight against her chest. She felt uneasy, as though someone watched her from the shadows. There was a tension in the room, a cold aura that felt as though it might snap with the slightest touch.
Something vibrated. She looked around, but nothing was in the room with them. Then Trev put his hand below the table and reached into his pocket. Scarlett shot a look at him. The expression on Trev’s face was something she’d never seen from him. He was scared.
It must have been the phone in his pocket. She knew he had it, but she’d tried to pretend otherwise. At least until they left Gawthorpe. Now, though, he’d flaunted it in her face. He’d broken that unspoken pact they’d made where neither of them would fully acknowledge his lies.
Trev looked like he was going to say something when Rita suddenly jerked forward.
She moved her whole body until it looked like she was going to hit the table face-first, but then she straightened herself again. She sat rigid in her chair.
“He thinks that something inside the girl is very old,” she said.
Scarlett couldn’t hold herself back. “Which girl? Someone in the family? You don’t mean Jane?”
“He will follow her all her life,” said Rita. “Until it’s done. He’ll never leave her.”
Before Scarlett could even process what the psychic had said, Rita’s eyes opened. They rolled back until only the whites were showing. Ruby let out a gasp, and Scarlett reached across to comfort her.
Rita turned her ear and snapped her eyes at Scarlett.
“Thomas Glanville,” she said. “He wants her.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“A life for a life,” said the psychic, her voice tight. “That’s all he’ll accept.”
Scarlett gasped. She jerked her chair back so quickly that the legs scraped on the floor. Hearing the name knocked the air from her lungs. The room seemed to shrink and become confining, and she needed to get out.
Rita stood up. Without saying a word, she walked away from the table and out of the dining room, before taking shaky steps across the lobby. Sweat dripped from her forehead, though her skin was chalk.
Trev stood up. He reached to the floor and picked something up. “Your bag,” he said.
It was too late. The front door opened and then shut again, leaving the three of them alone in the darkness. The psychic walked away from the manor and down the path, before disappearing into the darkness at the edge of the estate.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I’ll give her a lift,” said Trev. “It’s miles to the village.”
Trev went after Rita, following her out of the front door and then onto the gravel drive. The psychic was already getting toward the tree line of the estate. Scarlett didn’t envy her having to walk through the woods.
Trev got in his car and drove toward Rita. She turned around when she heard the engine
, and Trev pulled to a stop. There was a discussion. Scarlett was far away, but she was sure that it looked heated.
A life for a life. What did it mean? It was like some horrible riddle. She wanted to think that the psychic was just being dramatic, that she wanted to cause a scene so that her reputation would spread. Somehow, Scarlett knew Rita wasn’t that sort of woman, and that made it worse. Was there some truth in her words? Were they even her words?
She heard footsteps behind her, and she turned to see Ruby in the lobby with her puppy in her arms.
“Glanville hates it here,” she said.
Glanville. The name sent a shudder through her. Thomas Glanville was the name the psychic had said during their session, and she said that he wanted the girl. Did that mean Ruby?
She took a sharp intake of breath. The marks in Ruby’s room. The writing on the wall. There was no doubt now who had done it. It had to be Thomas. But still, how could she even take that seriously? Did she really believe that a man named Thomas Glanville was stalking them from death?
It wasn’t them, was it? He didn’t seem to care about Trev or Scarlett. He wanted Ruby.
“Mum?”
She knew what she had to do. They were leaving today, and that was that. When Trev got home they would load up the car and drive as far away as possible.
The truth is in the marks.
That was written in her dad’s letter. He must have meant the witch marks. He’d taken the time to write the letter to Scarlett, so he must have had a reason other than making some cryptic statement. After years of pretending she didn’t exist, why, in his last few weeks, had he written a letter to her?
“Why was the lady talking like that?” said Ruby.
“She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Did she mean me? When she said, ‘He wants the girl?’”
She walked over and rubbed Ruby’s head. “Not you, Rubes. It was all make-believe. Now I want you to go upstairs and start packing.”
“Are we going?”
“Yes. Tonight.”
“And is Glanville coming?”
That name again. Who was Thomas Glanville? Why was his name so important?
The book. She remembered the book on witchcraft that she’d found in her father’s study. It described a woman spurning a man’s marriage advances, so he raped her and then had her hung for being a witch. That was Thomas Glanville.
That didn’t prove anything, though. It wasn’t difficult to read a book and then use some sort of knowledge of the area to make a psychic session seem authentic.
That was what most mediums did; before a show, they’d research the local news, look through the death register for years gone by, and then use this knowledge in their show. Rita was a fraud. She must have been.
“We can take him with us,” she said to Ruby. “But he needs a new name. Now.”
“But why?”
She couldn’t entertain the subject, she just knew that she didn’t want the puppy being called Glanville. “Because if you don’t, he’s staying. That’s the deal, Ruby. Now choose a name.”
“I hate you.”
She’d heard that before. It stung the first time, but right now her body was so full of tension that it was hard to stir any emotion.
“That’s not a great name,” she said, “but if that’s what you want, then okay. Come on, Ruby and I Hate You, we need to pack.”
She went upstairs into their room and started to collect their possessions. Most of the things from the flat were still in the car, since there was no point bringing ironing boards and pots and pans into the house. It would be a good idea to take some things with them that they could sell. It wouldn’t get them far, but she just needed a break from the place.
As the day wore on, Trev still hadn’t gotten back from the village. She didn’t understand what was taking him so long. All he had to do was drop the psychic off and come back.
She walked downstairs and went to the lobby windows. Here, she could see out across the estate. There were wheel tracks in the gravel drive. The grass, patchy through lack of care, was covered in dew. The woods were in the distance, the branches in the tree line swaying and seeming like hands extending an invitation to step into the darkness.
Looking closer, she saw a figure. He was to the east of the estate, walking through the trees and toward a path that, from memory, she thought led to a wood store in the forest. It couldn’t have been Trev because his car wasn’t here. So, who was it?
“Ruby, come here.”
Her daughter walked downstairs with the puppy in her arms. “I’m calling him Stephen,” she said, lifting the puppy.
“Why?”
“After Stephen Hawking.”
Scarlett smiled. “Much better, honey. We need to go for a walk.”
“Where?”
“Clip a lead on Stephen and come with me.”
The three of them stepped out of the manor. The gravel crunched beneath her feet, then gave way to the soft squelch of wet grass. She headed east, but she couldn’t see the figure anymore.
She knew it wasn’t Trev. She hadn’t been able to see his face clearly, but she had a good idea who it was, and she needed to speak to him.
As she reached the tree line, she gripped Ruby’s hand tighter. The woods were so dense on this side of the estate that it was difficult to make out much more than a few feet.
The sky had started to darken above, settling into what would be her last night in Gawthorpe Manor. She just wished it were a bit lighter and warmer. What she wouldn’t do for a nice, hot fire right now.
“Where are we going, Mum?”
“We need to meet someone,” she said.
They stepped into the woods. The ground was muddy and littered with leaves and twigs. In one section, where she’d known it would be, a path led deeper into the trees. It wasn’t a path that had been specifically designed but instead had been worn into the ground through footfall over the years.
They followed it until she saw a building in front of them. It was a small stone hut. There was one door, one room, and one window. It had always been used as a place to store chopped wood. Since this part of England was in a near-constant state of rain, most of the firewood they cut was wet. To dry it out, the groundsmen used to keep it here for a few months.
It was being used for something else now, though. Through the window, she saw a faint orange glow. Someone was staying in the wood store, and she was sure she knew who. She walked over, knocked on the door three times, and then stepped in.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Only half of the wood store was taken up by timber now, and it was piled in the corner. There was a sleeping bag on the floor, with empty tins scattered around. She saw beans, chopped tomatoes, syrup-covered peaches. They must have been taken from the larder.
In another corner, a man was sitting against the wall. His face was covered by a shadow, but she knew who he was. When Scarlett entered, he shot to his feet and stepped forward.
“Hello Jonathan,” said Scarlett.
“Ms Gawthorpe.”
“Thorne, actually,” she answered.
Next to the sleeping bag, there was a pile of books. These weren’t light reading. The spines were old and had flaked away, and the book titles were written in spiralled gold font. ‘The Pendle Witch Trials,’ read one of them. Another was titled ‘The Past They Tried to Bury.’
She put her hand on Ruby’s shoulder. “Sit down please, Rubes.”
Ruby settled down on the floor. Stephen slumped next to her with his paws outstretched. Above them, resting on a pile of wood, a lantern burned and sent shimmering orange light across the room. It illuminated the walls and floor of a building that was decades, maybe even centuries, old.
Rather than looking guilty, Jonathan didn’t seem to care that he had been caught in his little camp. He crossed his arms. The elbows of his suit were dirty, though Scarlett supposed he hadn’t exactly been able to stick them in the washing machine.
Jonathan look
ed around, his eyes darting from one side of the room to another. “I can’t offer you a chair,” he said, with a genuine trace of sadness in his voice.
She walked over to the pile of wood and, grunting, moved some of it into the centre of the room. She sat down on it.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“After you dismissed me, I had nowhere to go.”