Darkness Watching (Darkworld #1) (9 page)

“Someone left the door unlocked!” she’d protested. “How the hell was I supposed to know they were naked in there?”

“Hey, Ash,” said David, bringing me back to the here and now, “want to go to Blackstone? I fancy a walk, and it’d be nice to have company.”

“Sure,” I said. “I need to get dressed first, though!”

In my room, I pulled on some jeans, wondering when I’d get used to this bizarre arrangement of living with other people my age. So far, my suspicions that living in a student flat would give me less opportunity to be an antisocial hermit proved true―probably a good thing. I’d planned to spend the morning playing Mario Kart and maybe reading a book. It would be nice to get out of the flat and see the town.

I met David in the hallway and followed him outside the building. Then I stopped, realising I’d forgotten my keys.

“Dammit!”

“Huh?”

“I’ve gone and left my keys on my bed.”

“It’s okay, I can let us back in.”

“Yeah, true. I need to stop doing that!” I said. “I do it all the time at home, but my mum’s always in so I can usually get back into the house. I’m still adjusting to the whole living-without-parents thing.”

“You’ll get used to it; it’ll be fine.”

I breathed in, savouring the fresh, cool morning air. The mist swirling around us left drops of moisture on my face as we walked through the student village. Dew clung to the grass, making the lawns glitter.

Blackstone lay on the opposite side of the valley at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of the woods. The path went in a relatively straight line, as Cara and I discovered on the visit day.

“We could get the bus if you’d rather,” said David. “I normally take my bike.”

I’d completely forgotten he owned a motorbike. He didn’t look the type, but what did I know?

“Walking’s fine with me,” I said. “I never got the chance to visit the countryside much at home.”

“You should definitely join the hiking club,” said David. “I’ve heard they go all over, camping in Scotland and all sorts.”

“I’m not sure about camping,” I said. “I’ve heard too many horror stories from my Aunt Eve! She used to travel all over before she moved to Windermere.”

“Sounds like fun. Windermere’s a nice place.”

“Yeah, I used to go there every summer. But I haven’t been there for a while now; not since my aunt moved to Canada.”

We talked as we followed the woodland trail, a path that led from the student village through the woods, then looped around the campus from the back. I found it easy to talk to David; unlike most of the people I’d met back at home, he seemed genuinely interested in what I said. The conversation turned to university applications, and it turned out Oxford rejected David, too.

“Yeah, they didn’t want me. I thought the interview went okay, but I guess there were a lot of applicants.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hate interviews.”

“It’s about practice. And learning not to freak out. I used to do that a lot.”

“Really?”

David seemed pretty laid back; I didn’t think him the type to get worked up about things.

“Yeah. You get to a point when you realise it isn’t worth getting stressed over.”

By now, the mist had cleared to the point where we could make out the well-trodden path into the woods, marked with fallen leaves, dull brown and yellow. Pinecones and conkers littered the ground. A river flowed alongside the path, silently, as if unwilling to disturb the quiet. A blackbird sang softly from up in the horse chestnut branches, pecking at the spiny green conker shells.

“You’ve been to Blackstone before?” said David.

“I got the bus from there on the visit day,” I said, “but I didn’t really have the time to look around.”

“You should see the art gallery. It’s free to get into; we can have a look if you like.”

“Sure,” I said. It surprised me that a village as small as Blackstone had its own art gallery. “You’ve been there a lot? I didn’t think many people knew about this place.”

“My brother went to uni here a couple of years ago. I used to visit.”

“Ah, right.” That explained why he seemed to know the town so well.

I asked him about his motorbike; a good move, as it kept him talking enthusiastically all the way to Blackstone. When he went into detail about mechanics, I stopped trying to understand and zoned out, focusing instead on not slipping on the muddy path.

I liked that we could hear no traffic on the woodland trail, no human noise, just birdsong, and a rustling in the undergrowth that might have been a hedgehog or rabbit. I knew more wildlife lived on campus than in the city suburb I’d lived in all my life. In the student village, wild cats the size of rabbits darted in and out of the bushes, begging for milk from anyone with any going spare, and sparrows and robins nested in the poplar trees. I still couldn’t get over the fact that I could see sheep from my window, grazing in the field. At heart, I really wasn’t a city person at all.

Once out of the woods, we found ourselves on a dirt track that curved through the valley. Fields full of sheep and cows lay on either side. We passed the remains of a crumbling old manor house, surrounded by a swathe of ground completely bare of grass or life.

“That place was destroyed in a fire, about two centuries ago,” said David, casually.

The house resembled no more than a charred skeleton, most of the insides burned away so I couldn’t tell what had originally been there. Soot-blackened bricks roughly divided rooms of yawning emptiness like a giant rib cage. Something about it made me shudder; I saw a sudden, vivid mental image of flames ripping the house apart, scorching the area around it so no grass would ever grow there again.

“Who lived there?” I asked.

“The Blackstone family. The town’s named after them, as a monument to their memory.”

“Why? Were they important?”

“They were a really rich, influential family, and every one of them died in the fire.”

“That’s horrible.” I shuddered. “How did it start?”

“Who knows? It was a long time ago, and, back then, few people cared about investigating a freak accident in the middle of nowhere. I think one relative survived and inherited their millions and helped build the town as we know it.”

“Doesn’t really seem like good karma, naming a town after a family who all suffered horrific deaths.” My morbid thought came out before I could stop it.

David gave me a crooked smile. “Well, it hasn’t hurt it.”

Blackstone was a network of cobbled streets and old-fashioned houses, with the town square the main focal point. A pedestal sat in the centre of the square, on which there was a delicately carved statue of an angel. Though its stone face wore a benevolent smile, the raindrops gathering in the corner of its eyes made it look as though it were crying. The Art Gallery sat nestled in the shadow of an enormous Gothic cathedral.

The oak doors creaked as we entered, and our footsteps echoed loudly on the wooden floor.

Huge, framed paintings dominated the walls. We admired them in silence. I wasn’t much of an art enthusiast, but I found myself noticing that, the farther into the gallery we walked, the more bizarre and abstract the paintings became. The display ended with a wall devoted to depictions of Dante-esque visions of Hell. The signs told me they were imitations of Bosch paintings of the damned falling into the deep, of sinners on their deathbeds tempted by denizens of the underworld.

“Creepy,” I said, gesturing toward a painting of one unfortunate soul, surrounded by insect-like creatures which, for reasons unknown to me, wore human heads.

“Hmm.” David studied it, frowning. “Not
entirely
accurate, but Melivia did have quite an imagination, from what I heard.”

“Melivia?”

“Melivia Blackstone. She painted most of these.”

“Blackstone? Was she―?”

“Yeah. She was their eldest daughter. These paintings survived the fire, somehow. I think they must have been kept somewhere else.”

My eyes jumped to the one on the end: the only portrait. It showed a girl with delicate features, gazing into the distance. Her black hair curled to her shoulders, and she wore a long, black, Victorian-style dress. Around her neck hung a silver chain, on which gleamed a purple crystal, an amethyst.

For some reason, my hand jumped to my own neck, before I realised I’d left my own necklace in my room. An odd shiver went through me. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her pensive stare.

I jumped as the church bells rang out, echoing through the building.

“Want to go?” asked David.

I nodded, trying to push the mental image of roaring flames devouring the old house out of my head as we walked outside. The hellish paintings didn’t help.

“We can walk to the coast from here if you like, it’s just that way.” He pointed at an alleyway between the Art Gallery and the cathedral.

“Sure!” I said. “I haven’t seen the sea in forever. We were going to go to France this summer, but my parents needed to pay for all my stuff for uni.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s expensive, moving out. You don’t realise how much you take for granted until you’re on your own. This is the quickest way,” he added, climbing over a stone wall.

I followed. The hairs on my arms rose as I realised we were in a graveyard, around the back of the cathedral.

We walked swiftly, not speaking; something seemed to press on us like a heavy blanket of fog. I didn’t believe in ghosts―not the traditional ones, anyway―but, if ever a place seemed haunted, that place did. The graves themselves seemed to have a presence, like their inhabitants sat all around us, watching. I felt almost as unsettled as I did when I saw a demon.

As we climbed over a stile into a field, David said, “That place is abandoned, but it still creeps the hell out of me. I think it’s because that’s where the Blackstones are buried.”

I nodded. No one could escape that family here. The ruined house, the paintings, the cemetery―even the name spoke of their loss. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it when I’d first visited. It seemed like the sort of thing Cara would find interesting.

We walked through a small copse, large oak trees forming a canopy that blotted out the sky. The uneven ground made it hard to manoeuvre, and, with no clear path, we had to skirt round broken branches and patches of thorns. Fungi grew in clusters around the ancient trees. The salty tang of the sea breeze mingled with the scents of decay. Crows nested in the branches above, looking down at us with distrustful eyes. Once or twice, I thought I saw the shadow of a larger bird pass overhead, but, whenever I looked up, I saw nothing there.

We emerged from the trees to find ourselves at the top of a rugged cliff overlooking a pebbly beach. Waves crashed against the jagged rocks below.

“People have barbecues down there in summer, when the weather’s nice.”

“
Is
the weather ever nice here?”

David grinned at me. “You’d be surprised.”

I suddenly felt awkward. It hit me we were alone together. Cara’s words echoed in my head. “If a guy asks you out alone, it means he likes you.”

I rarely took notice when she said things like this, but, then again, maybe that was because no one had ever been interested in
me
…

“It’s nice here,” I said lamely.

He looked away from me, out across the rippling sea. “Yeah, it’s nice. A bit isolated, but I guess you knew what you were getting into when you applied, right?”

He said this with a strange kind of emphasis, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Sure,” I said. “No one from my sixth form was coming here; it was perfect.”

“You wanted a fresh start?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“A lot of people do. You’re lucky to have had the chance.”

Lucky.
Now I thought about it, I guessed I
was
lucky to be here, even though part of me worried it was a deception, that I’d not quite escaped the fear. I hesitated, on the brink of confessing what had really happened last night.

Stop.
No, I couldn’t tell him. What would he think of me?

But the girl.
She
was proof I wasn’t the only one who could see the demons. She was a student at the university; it wasn’t unreasonable to assume we’d meet again. And, next time, I’d get some answers.