Chapter Twenty-Six
Guy stood in the lawn as shock slackened his limbs and numbed his mind. He turned to his right. Tiff’s car waited a dozen yards away, its hood reflecting the moonlight behind the fallen tree. His own truck would be behind the building.
That’s impossible. I only crossed the wall once. I only crossed the river once! How could I have looped back on the same building? And what’s causing the light?
The last question prompted Guy to move. The glow was coming through the dining room windows. It was bright, had a gold tint, and offered the impression of warmth. Guy was freezing. He shuffled forward, resentful that he had to return to the building but starved for choices.
The back door still stood open. Leaves and bits of dirt had blown in and mixed with the remnants of the flour. Guy waited on the threshold, listening, but there was no sign of Amy. He dropped his bag and continued into the dining room.
Someone had lit the gas lamp. Guy checked it and found it had been given fresh fuel. He ran his fingers through his hair.
This ghost, woman, creature—Amy—she must be doing this. She somehow twisted me back to the house. She lit the lamp to guide me inside. She broke my car and hid Tiff’s keys… all because she doesn’t want me to leave.
So then, what does she want? Guy pulled a chair out and collapsed into it. A headache throbbed in the back of his eyes. I look a lot like Thomas Caudwell. Amy loved him. Does she expect me to take his place?
He resisted the temptation to drape his torso over the table and cry. Despite the aches, the headache, and the way stress made his limbs throb, he couldn’t afford to rest. Resting meant giving Amy the upper hand, and she already had too much of an advantage.
But what can I do? Following the driveway to the road didn’t work, and it’s a fool’s hope to believe I can revive the car. Tiff’s keys are missing, and short of scavenging through the yard for them, I don’t know where else to look. All of my options involve walking in circles… literally.
Tiff’s letter had dried on the table. The paper was warped in creases, and as Guy’s mind tried to pick through his problem, he let his gaze drift over the purple-ink words.
‘Maybe we could meet up some day and have coffee if you want to chat about it or whatever? Text me.’
He sat a little straighter. Did Tiff bring her phone with her? It hadn’t been in her pockets, and he didn’t remember seeing it in her purse, but then, he had only been searching for keys.
Guy shot out of the chair and grabbed the lamp. It was night, but in a twisted way, he actually felt safer outside. He hopped back into the thigh-high weeds and sought out the sedan.
The car loomed out of the darkness, and Guy hurried forward to wrench open its door. The contents of the purse were still laid over the passenger seat. Guy left the lamp on the ground outside then stepped into the car to rest his legs. He sifted through the trinkets, but there was no phone.
“Damn it.” Did Amy hide it, like she did with the keys? If she died during the sixties, she shouldn’t know how mobiles work…
Guy put his hand on the door to push it open again. His fingers touched something solid and metallic in the little pocket below the handle. Guy pulled the object out and exhaled a laugh as he stared at a mobile.
It was a newer model compared to his, but the screen had already developed a crack. In a wave of hope, Guy checked both the driver’s and passenger’s door pockets for the keys, but they weren’t there. Still—a phone’s a step forward. As long as it turns on…
The mobile came to life when he pressed the power button. Guy watched the logo fade in and out, then his attention darted to the top bar as soon as the screen lit up. The phone had forty-two percent of its battery left but no bars.
Guy chewed on his lip. He stared at the screen, willing it to develop a signal, but the bars didn’t change. He tried dialling a number just in case. It wouldn’t connect.
A hand slammed on the car’s window. Guy yelped and jerked back. Amy stared in at him with wide, unblinking eyes. She tilted her head to one side. The hand, its fingers painted red with blood, slid down the glass. Then she faded. Like evaporating mist, she was gone before Guy even realised what was happening.
His heart throbbed. He’d bent as far away from the door as he could but reached forward and pressed the button to lock it then did the same to the passenger side.
She’s getting bolder. Sweat beaded over his back and face. He clutched the precious mobile to his chest as he twisted to peer through the car’s other windows. When he turned back to the passenger door, the bloody streak left by Amy’s hand was gone, too.
So she can touch the physical world… but only for brief moments at a time? That means she can hurt me again. It also means the boards against the attic door are useless. Not that that’s a surprise.
Guy could see Rookward through the car’s windshield. He couldn’t stomach the idea of returning to the building. The car wasn’t necessarily safe, but at least it wasn’t the house. His thirst could wait until sunrise, Guy decided. He tightened his jacket around himself and settled back to spend the night in the dead girl’s car.
He dozed erratically. Rain started falling in the early hours of the morning. Guy initially hoped the noise would be soothing, but it wasn’t. In amongst the water’s gentle taps was something harder: fingertips knocking against the sedan’s hull. They tapped around the car’s outside, running along the sides and across the roof, a plaintive request to be let in. The lamp outside the door cast elongated shadows across the car’s ceiling. Guy initially tried to search for Amy amongst the shadows and falling rain, but when he couldn’t see her, he pressed his eyes closed. His legs cramped, and it was nearly impossible to get them into a position to relax them.
The rain continued into the morning and obscured dawn. Guy, exhausted, finally fell into a proper sleep. The tapping followed him into his dreams.
* * *
“Are you enjoying yourself, my dear?” Amy tightened her fingers around Thomas’s hand. They sat in the family room as they watched the static play over the TV. It was after midnight, and rain drizzled through the broken window, creating rivulets across the wooden floor. Thomas didn’t reply, but he seemed happy, as did their three children lounging on the floor ahead of them.
Lightning burst across the sky and brightened their room for half a second. Amy drew a slow breath and held it as the thunder shook the air. The lightning reflected off her husband’s clouded eyes and the teeth in his slack jaw. His gums were turning black. Amy wished they wouldn’t.
She preferred spending time with her family at night. The TV’s static cast a grey pall over the room but didn’t properly light it. It was better that way, when they were all safely cocooned in the house’s shadows. It made it harder to see the dried blood coating her dear husband, the green-grey shade his skin had turned, or the way his eyes were shrivelling in his skull.
“Don’t worry so much. I’ll keep you safe.” She rubbed her thumb across his limp fingers as she answered his unspoken question. “You know I can. I removed that whore of a woman, like excising a tumour from your life. She made you miserable, didn’t she? You argued constantly. Unlike us. We never disagree. It’s proof we were meant to be together, don’t you think?”
The static crackled. Water continued to spread across the floor. It was soaking into the girl’s dress, but Amy didn’t want to have to get up and move her again. The girl’s slack features didn’t register any alarm or distress, so Amy supposed she enjoyed playing in the puddle.
She kept the children for Thomas’s sake, but she hoped he would soon grow tired of them, like she had. Then she could move them into the attic, where she’d hidden their whore mother. It would be easier now that they were no longer frozen by rigor mortis.
“I hope we can stay like this forever,” Amy whispered. She passed an arm around Thomas’s shoulder and pulled him closer, so that his cheek rested against her hair and she could tuck her head into the nook below his chin. His skin
was cold and starting to bubble with decay, but she didn’t mind. He was with her. That was the way it was supposed to be.
* * *
Guy gasped as he broke out of the sleep. His legs ached from the awkward position he had them in. His cheeks were cold, and when he touched them, he found tears. He scrunched his face up and used the backs of his arms to wipe away the wetness.
The tapping noise that had dogged him through the night had finally ceased. Water created a beautiful pattern as it ran down the windshield. Guy stared at it as he waited for the tingling numbness to leave his leg. The clouds muted the sun, but it was day, and he vastly preferred day to night.
Guy had dropped the mobile during his sleep. He felt around the car’s floor, between a long-lost potato fry and a sweet wrapper, until he found it. He powered it on. The battery was down to thirty percent. A single bar appeared. Guy bolted upright, but before he could press a button, the bar vanished.
“No, come on! Don’t do this to me!” He stared at the phone, willing it to regain its bar, but it wouldn’t budge, not even when he moved it into different locations in the car.
Still, a vanishing bar is better than nothing. It might just need the rain to clear. Or maybe it will work if I can get it to a higher elevation.
Guy glanced at Rookward. He didn’t want to think about returning to the upper floors. But if it let him make a call…
The phone fell to twenty-eight percent power. He turned it off to preserve its battery. Then he shuffled closer to the windows and peered out.
The weeds surrounding the house had been weighed down with water. They shifted in the wind, but as far as Guy could see, nothing lurked amongst them. The lamp he’d placed outside the car had run out of fuel during the night but remained where he’d left it.
He opened the door and barrelled out. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was consistent, and drops trickled down the back of his neck and wormed into his hair to chill his scalp. Guy grabbed the dead lamp and moved towards the back of the house. He tried his hardest not to look at the tree covering Tiff, but he couldn’t help himself. Her hand was still visible through the rain. Flies swarmed around it, and Guy tasted bile.
Despite the cold and the wet, Guy stopped for a moment beside his pickup truck and shovelled handfuls of water into his mouth. The pool had started to collect drowned bugs and small leaves, but he was too tired to care.
Back inside the house, he shook himself dry in the kitchen. He spent a moment refuelling and relighting the lamp. The house was dim on a good day, but with cloud cover, it felt as if it were still night. He couldn’t see any sign that his possessions had been disturbed, so he turned on the phone and checked its bars a final time. No signal.
“All right.” Guy set his jaw and tucked the phone into his breast pocket. “Up we go.”
The stairs seemed steeper than he remembered. Guy climbed carefully, sticking close to the wall and alternating his attention between the top landing and the open doorways he could see in the foyer. Glass crunched under his shoe. He looked down at the photo frame he’d dropped; the two pictures lay beside each other. Amy’s cold little smile appeared to be intended for Guy. Someone had scratched over the wife’s face in the second picture, digging the pigment out of the photo until it was just a block of white. Guy shuddered and kept moving.
As he reached the top of the stairs, the master bedroom door groaned open, as though inviting him inside. Guy stopped dead. The bed, which he remembered dismantling and throwing out the window, was back in its place. He gazed towards the baby monitor just as it crackled to life. The sound of footsteps echoed from the device. Guy shrank away from it then moved to the next room along, the girl’s.
Rebecca, he corrected himself. I know all of their names. Louise, Dan, Becca, and Georgie. The dreams have to be replays of what happened to them.
The wardrobe’s door was open once again. As Guy passed it, he saw a smear of dried blood marred the bent handle. His throat tightened, and he stepped towards the window.
The frame was frozen from long years of neglect, and Guy strained to tug it open. Finally, it rose, showering him with flakes of paint. Blinking dust out of his eyes, Guy leaned through the opening, took Tiff’s phone out of his pocket, and held it through the window.
Twenty-four percent battery. No bars. Guy sighed and slumped over the sill. Maybe I really do need to wait for the rain to clear. Or maybe even that won’t be enough. Her phone might never work at Rookward.
As he made to step away from the window, a single bar flickered into life. Guy froze, staring at it, and fresh hope pumped energy into his veins. But before he could move his thumb to dial a number, the bar vanished again.
“Come on,” he said, as if he were speaking to a small child. “Come back. Please.”
He extended the phone through the window. As he lifted it higher, the bar flickered back into life. He began dialling. The bar vanished again before he’d entered the third digit.
“Please, please, hang in there for me.” He stretched even farther through the window, resting his torso on the frame, and held the phone high. It seemed to do better with altitude, but the bar wouldn’t stick. Guy kept trying, stubbornness and desperation making him struggle until well after his rational mind accepted it wasn’t going to work. He pulled back inside the room, his arm wet from the spitting rain and the phone devoid of bars.
Anger-infused light flashed across his vision. Guy’s fingers tightened around the phone, and the crack on the screen lengthened a millimetre. He forced himself to relax his grip on it then bent over while he waited for the waves of fury to ebb.
The bedroom door behind him drifted open. Guy swivelled, belatedly realising he hadn’t brought a weapon, but the patch of hallway he could see was empty. His lips twisted. The only way to get higher is to go through the attic. But what if that’s what she wants? If I go up there, will I ever come down again?
Guy ran a hand over his mouth and let his attention shift back to the window. A tendril of the vines poked over the sill and bobbed in the wind. Guy frowned at it then leaned forward, stretching himself over the sill again to see outside. The vines had grown thick on that side of the house, and he hadn’t yet attacked their lower supports. One part of the vine in particular caught his eye; it followed a water pipe up the house’s wall and clung to the edge of the roof.
“I can make it.” Even as he spoke, his stomach tightened. Exhaustion pressed on him, and his leg still ached. But he didn’t give caution time to speak. Instead, he moved to the hallway and went in search of the room that shared a wall with the stubborn vines.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Guy chose the sewing room. Vines covered half of its window, and the frame had stuck worse than the others. It was so tight that Guy eventually had to resort to bashing it out of its casing with the chair. Shards of glass and wood cascaded down the side of the house, and Guy used his jacket’s sleeve to knock the last of them out. Then he flexed his shoulders, felt his pocket to make sure he still had the phone, and crawled through the window.
The chill air bit at him, and specks of rain dotted his skin within seconds. He wriggled around so that his head and shoulders were out of the room but his legs still hung inside. Vines looped all around him, but the patch Guy was especially interested in was to his left. He reached for them, grabbed a fistful, and tugged. The plants were thick and seemed tightly bound to the pipe, and they held better than the ones that clung only to the stones.
A slow footstep scraped down the hallway. Guy peered back into the room just long enough to see a shadow creeping along the hallway’s runner. He shuffled himself farther out the window and trusted more weight to the vines and the pipes. Then he stepped out.
For a second, Guy’s feet scrambled in the air, then they found purchase on a knotted section of wood. He hugged himself close to the vines and tried not to shake as the water they’d collected soaked into his clothes. Fire radiated from the hurt ankle, but he had no choice except to bear some of his
weight on it. The footsteps had reached the room’s doorway, but Guy didn’t hear them come inside. He took a shallow inhale and began climbing.
Each inch was a battle. Swaths of the vine came away in Guy’s hands, but he was reluctant to reach through them and hold the pipe. What patches he could see were badly rusted. The metal made unpleasant clunking noises under his weight, but Guy took advantage of the strange way the vines and pipes were supporting each other. He hugged himself to them as he scaled the wall.
The vines grew thinner the higher he climbed. Guy stopped just below the eaves and balanced himself as well as he could. Then he shifted his weight into his left arm and took his phone out to check the signal.
One bar hovered on the screen long enough for him to dial the number but dropped off before it began to ring. Guy muttered to himself and held the phone out at arm’s length as he waited for it to come back. When it did, it stayed for only a second.
“Don’t do this to me!” The battery was down to twenty-one percent. Guy put the phone back in his pocket and eyed the pipe. It ended at the gutter ringing the roof. Parts of the gutter had broken and hung loose, but he thought he might be able to get a hold on it. The roof was sloped but not sharply, and it offered a safer perch than the vine-tangled pipe.
Guy shifted higher then reached an arm over the gutter. The slate roof was slimy from the rain, but when he felt around, he found a hole where one of the tiles had cracked. He tightened his grip on the lip of the hole, took a leap of faith, and released his hold on the pipe entirely.
He dangled for a second, one hand on the gutter and one in the hole in the tiles, straining to pull him up while his feet kicked at the vines and stone wall. The tiles grated together under his hands, threatening to break free. Guy called on his reserves of strength and hauled himself up. Once his torso was over the gutter, he bent forward, using his centre of gravity to get onto the roof.
The Haunting of Rookward House Page 16