Haunted Lancashire (The Haunting Of Books 1-3)

by Jack Lewis

  “What do curses have to do with this?” she said.

  “In its barest form, a curse is a wish that misfortune will fall on someone. There are components to a curse. A curse needs a target, a consequence, a duration, and a caster. Without those things, a curse is just, like you say, a person venting their anger.”

  “Target, consequence, and duration? I guess that I’m the target of this curse?”

  “An egotistical way of looking at it. Not just you; the children of Stanway Harrow. Every child in the Harrow family, in fact. The curse has eaten its way through generation upon generation of your family, and it will continue to do so. It claimed your father. His father. Then his father, or mother, or aunt, or cousin, or any relation with Harrow blood. The curse eats through a family tree like termites. It ate away at your father, and then when it was done with him, it moved onto the nearest branch of the tree.”

  “Me. And Mag, Jay, Altair.”

  “Correct.”

  Cursed.

  What a word. It wasn’t every day that you were told that someone had hexed your bloodline, and she could barely process it.

  Thinking about it was like pulling on a hangnail. It hurt, it was uncomfortable, but she couldn’t stop until she’d plucked it out.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t seem the right time to joke,” he said.

  “So we’re cursed? How?”

  “How? What exactly are you asking me?” said Emory.

  Another pedant who wanted questions to be worded perfectly or he wouldn’t give a reasonable answer. Great. She had half a mind to really use the trap again.

  Instead, she took a deep breath, cleared her head, and decided what she really wanted to know. Trouble was, there were too many things.

  “What exactly is this curse? What does it do?”

  “Ah. Its consequence. A good question to ask, once you know the target. What happened to your father?”

  “He killed himself.”

  “And your grandfather?”

  She had to think about that. She knew little about him.

  “I told you. I didn’t know my father, and I sure as hell don’t know my grandfather.”

  “His obituary said that he fell off the roof,” said Emory. “But that was in a local paper, written by a local journalist. In a village like Eldike, people will do anything to spare their collective blushes. ‘Fell off’ the roof is the polite, albeit wrong, way to report it. Your grandfather jumped from Harrow Hall.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Well, he wasn’t trying to land in a pile of leaves.”

  “Watch it,” she said, swinging the trap.

  “You know, you can set that down. You’ve made your point, and I can see how heavy it is.”

  Her arm was aching too much for her to argue. Besides, the guy wasn’t going anywhere. She threw it down.

  “So, the curse made them kill themselves.”

  “That was the result of the curse,” said Emory. “Its eventual, lasting consequence. The true effect of it is despair. Once it settles on a new target, one of the branches of your family tree, it begins spreading its sickness in their mind. Slowly, at first. A feeling of sadness, of unease. Even that stage might take weeks to come. It grows and grows, spreading roots, eventually flowering into its final form, where the unfortunate target sees only one way to be rid of it.”

  She tried to get this straight in her head.

  Her family was cursed, and the curse moved from generation to generation. It had killed her father – she now refused to say that he’d killed himself – and it had skipped onto her, Mag, Jay, and Altair. Things were beginning to make sense.

  “He sent them away to protect them,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “My father must have found out about the curse when they moved here. He sent them away before it could affect them.”

  “He did the right thing,” said Emory. “Getting your siblings far, far away. A curse always has a source of power. An anchor. Its targets must be near that anchor. Your father had the foresight to send them away before my father - the curse’s caretaker back then - could alter the forest and keep them here. Of course, your father wasn’t clever enough. He didn’t have the foresight to realize that in his death, it was only natural that his seeds would come back.”

  “Seeds? Don’t call us that. That’s a creepy as hell way to put it, and you’re a creepy enough guy as it is.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “The curse is the reason why this damn forest is a maze, then? It won’t let us get too far away.”

  “Not quite. Don’t blame the forest; it can’t think for itself,” said Emory. “It isn’t a magical forest, that would be silly. Every curse needs a person to cast it. The best curses, ones meant to last generation upon generation, need a caretaker to shepherd them through time.”

  “You’re the caretaker.”

  “Correct.”

  “You knew they’d come back here when my father died, and you were waiting to keep them here so the curse could start.”

  “I did. I just didn’t expect a fourth Harrow child.”

  “What if I’d just stayed away?” said Loe. “What if I never came out here?”

  “You’d have lived your life in ignorant boredom. A mundane safety. This is a much more exciting end for you.”

  “Why has nobody ever warned anyone? If this thing passes through the family, why did father never tell anyone?”

  “Because there is always a caretaker! Damn it, aren’t you listening? He sent letters to his children, pathetic letters full of apologies and explanations and warnings, but alas, they never arrived. After I used my family’s knowledge to change the forest, there was no more question of letters.”

  “So he was alone. Lost here, waiting for the curse to take him.”

  “When you put it like that, I did a great job.”

  She wanted to beat him over the head with the trap until he was a bloody pulp, but she held back. “And after he died, you sent word to his children.”

  “Correct. Do you think that when your father died, news of his death got out before I was good and ready for it to? Before I’d searched the hall for any sneaky messages he may have hidden to warn you all?”

  She pictured it now. Her father hanging from the window. Emory scuttling around the hall and checking for hidden notes. Maybe father had left a note explaining everything, but Emory had taken it.

  Wait. He had left a note, hadn’t he? The very first time she’d met her siblings, they’d been talking about their father’s note, where he said sorry to them.

  “You left the note, didn’t you?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You wrote a note pretending to be Stanway, and you left it for them to find. You’re sick.”

  “Things had to look realistic. I won’t pretend to be proud of everything I must do.”

  God. This explained so much. It explained why someone had gone to the trouble of hiding the book in the cell. It explained why the hidden room, with its book of yesses, was so secretive and why it wasn’t on the building plans.

  Some Harrows, over the years, had tried to hide things from the Gale caretakers. They’d tried to warn people.

  “You keep talking about caretaking, about what you have do. You’re crawling around, setting traps, turning the fucking forest into a maze.”

  “Language…”

  “Why, Emory?”

  “Because I find it uncouth and unnecessary.”

  “No, not the language. The curse, why do you help in it keep going? I just don’t understand what’s in it for you. Is your whole family screwed in the head?”

  A faint smile played on the corner of his lips. Not a happy one, not an amused one. Rueful, more than anything.

  “The curse cuts both ways,” he said. “The Gale family are just as much under it as the Harrows. I told you; our roots are intertwined. While the curse cuts through your family and doom
s you all generation by generation, so does it cut through ours. Every generation of my family must play caretaker to it. And if not…”

  “Something suitably nasty happens to you, I hope.”

  “You would be right.”

  “A self-perpetuating curse, then. Why, Emory? What could possibly have happened that was enough to warrant this?”

  Emory reached toward his pocket.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  He patted his trousers. “May I?”

  She’d already checked him. She knew he didn’t have any weapons. “Go on…”

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his sweaty forehead. Then he swept his hair back over his scalp.

  “The tale of our two families is a tragedy in scope and scale,” he began. “A tale of woe, passion, doomed love, hopeless dreams.”

  She nodded at the bear trap on the ground. “Get to the point. Five sentences, that’s all I’ll give you.”

  He sighed. “One of your ancestors fell in love with one of mine, and when she spurned him and made him a figure of ridicule, he had her declared insane and chained her up in his cellar. Her parents were understandably upset by this, so they had a witch put a curse on the Harrows in revenge. But all curses come with a cost, and ours was what you see - we have to be caretakers of our revenge. There. Two sentences left to spare.”

  There it was again. A feeling inside her. Pity and guilt mixed into one. She pictured being in the cell, knowing the girl was in there with her. Only, the girl wasn’t one of her relatives, after all. She was one of Emory’s, mistreated by the Harrows yet still willing to help Loe.

  It was all so sad. A poor girl put in chains, and for what? Because some arsehole’s ego got pricked?

  Growing up, all Loe ever wanted was to know more about her father and his side of her ancestry. Now that she finally knew, she wished she’d never heard the name Stanway Harrow. That she’d lived in ignorance.

  All that remained now was to get out of here. To find a way out of this, leave Harrow Hall and its forest, and never turn back.

  She took a step closer to Emory, towering over him. “You’re going to tell me how to end this.”

  The smile on his face changed. No more ruefulness. This time, he really was amused.

  He started laughing. Just a chortle at first, but then louder and for longer. It was off-putting, as though she was seeing a man take his first step into true madness.

  “Quit it.”

  He wouldn’t. If anything, he laughed louder.

  She picked up the trap. “Let’s test this on your other arm.”

  This made him laugh even more, and Loe began to get a dull feeling inside her. Something weighing in the pit of her stomach.

  A twig snapped behind her.

  She turned around, raising the trap and ready to club someone with it.

  There, two feet away, was an old woman in a dirty gown. She held a log in her hand.

  Loe had no time to react before she felt a sickening crack on her head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Alt?” called Jay. There was no answer, no sign that his older brother had even come this way. The forest had an especially unwholesome feel tonight, and Jay would be glad if he never saw pines, pine needles, or large groupings of trees ever again. He was even going to toss away the pine air freshener in his car.

  Mag walked alongside him, holding a hammer in her hand. “Maybe he didn’t go into the forest.”

  “We checked the house.”

  “I know.”

  “Where else could he go?”

  “He might just need some air. If we go back to the hall and wait for him, he’ll turn up. He’ll be back to his old self.”

  “You know that isn’t true, Mags.”

  Jay badly wanted to agree with her and go back and wait this all out, but he couldn’t shake the idea that something terrible had happened. First Alt relapsing, and then Loe disappearing. It gave him a horrible, acidic feeling in his stomach.

  And so they carried on walking deeper into the forest where only their footsteps broke the silence, where the darkness kept tricking his mind into believing he saw things moving around. Shadows lurking behind trees, darting from one side of the forest to another. Watching them. Skittering over leaves and twigs and bracken, devilish shapes with malicious intent. They weren’t really there, but his brain was doing its best to trick him into thinking they were.

  Even though he had a meat knife and Mag had a hammer, he didn’t feel safe. Exactly what he needed to be safe from, he didn’t know. The shapes weren’t real; they were just illusions borne from darkness and his panicked mind. All he knew was that the deeper into the woods they went, the closer Mag walked beside him, the more he felt like something was watching them.

  A half-hour later, they still hadn’t seen any sign of Alt or Loe. The feeling of being watched was so strong that Jay kept turning around and staring into the forest behind them to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  “Every time you do that, you freak the hell out of me,” said Mag.

  “Maybe you’re right. We should go back to the hall.”

  She grabbed his arm so suddenly that he jumped. She pointed ahead. “See that?” she whispered.

  He had to squint, but he saw it.

  Fifty meters away, there were two shapes moving through the forest. It was too dark to make out who they were.

  “Shit!” Mag whispered. Jay had never heard such panic in her voice, and it chilled him deep into his marrow. She gripped him harder. “They’re dragging something.”

  Oh, hell.

  They were. Now that she mentioned it, when he really looked at the figures, he could see that they were dragging something.

  Or dragging someone.

  He stopped walking. “That’s a person.”

  “Two people.”

  “No, I mean what they’re dragging. See?”

  “Is that…Loe and Alt?” said Mag.

  “This is too much. Way too much.”

  “Wait here.”

  “Mag?

  “Just wait here for me,” she said.

  Before Jay could say anything Mag was away, moving in a crouch across the forest, cutting an arc around the figures in the distance. Torn between watching her and watching the figures to make sure they didn’t see her, he did both, but soon it was hard to keep track of anything in the darkness.

  Jay crept forward too, following his sister, but he’d already lost sight of her.

  Then he heard a scream.

  Birds fluttered from a nearby tree, making him jump.

  The scream echoed for a while, refusing to die.

  Jay moved toward the sound, and it was only when he reached it that he saw that Mag hadn’t screamed. It was a man. A man who was on the ground, face pressed into the mud. Mag was standing next to him, breathing heavily. She dropped her hammer.

  It was too much to take in. A sensory overload of things he couldn’t have possibly expected, and his brain didn’t even know where to begin processing it.

  A man on the ground. Maybe breathing, maybe not.

  Mag’s hammer on the ground, covered in blood.

  Loe on her back next to the man. Eyes shut, unconscious, but with her chest rising and falling.

  Then there was the old woman. Pale-faced and wearing a gown, the bottom of which trailed along the forest ground and was covered in mud, bracken, pine needles.

  Jay put his hand on Mag’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “I hit him. Just smashed him on the head. I saw that he was dragging Loe, and I hit him.”

  “Good,” said Jay.

  He kicked the man hard enough to turn him over. Staring back at him, glassy-eyed, clearly not conscious and almost probably dead, was a guy he didn’t know, but he recognized all the same.

  A face that looked to be his own age, but more time-worn at the same time. Balding hair, skinny arms and legs. Wait, I know this guy! This was the man that Jay had chased earlier,
it had to be.

  Caught up with you now, haven’t I?

  Jay nodded at the old woman. She looked panicked. What the hell was she doing out here, dressed like that?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She blinked three times in succession. “Who are you, dear?”

  Mag pointed to the man on the ground. “Do you know him? Did he bring you out here?”

  “Know who?” said the lady. “What happened?”

  “It’s no good,” said Mag. “Loe saw her earlier. She’d got demen-”

  Loe bolted upright and took a great gulp of air as if she’d just been dragged out of the sea.

  Jay took off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  She pushed him away, scrambling to her feet. She looked from Jay to Mag.

  Jay held up his hand. “Loe, it’s okay! It’s us.”

  “I know who you are. Stay the hell away from me.”

  “Just calm down.”

  “Where’s Alt?”

  “We came looking for him. Have you seen him? Who the hell are these people?”

  “Bollocks. You all know what’s going on, don’t you?” said Loe. “You know what Alt’s trying to do. He thinks he can use me, somehow. That the curse will be content with having just me. You know.”

  “Know what?” asked Mag.

  “About the curse, what else? Alt thinks he can feed me to it. Is that it?”

  Mag leaned close to Jay and whispered. “Alt’s problems…can they run in families, or something?”

  Jay shrugged. He looked at Loe with as much compassion as he could muster. Man, he really, really needed a drink.

  “Remember the book, Mags. Listen to her. Loe couldn’t possibly have read it.”

  Mag shrugged.

  Jay took a step closer. “Loe, whatever you think is going on, Mag and I have nothing but the best intentions toward you. We’re not here to hurt you or do anything. We came out here to find you and Alt. We were worried about you both.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We didn’t find him.”

  Loe seemed to be recovering herself. He could see it in her eyes. Maybe they could finally have a sensible conversation, and not just exchange insane exclamations.