Glimpse (9 page)

‘Officially, he’s innocent.’ She shrugged. ‘But the police investigation went on all summer. Hulbourn was one big dramatic crime scene; it was all anyone talked about for months. They interviewed all the kids, all the parents . . . I mean, it’s a small village, everyone knew Lucy and Scott.’

‘But it was an accident?’ I prompted.

Susie shrugged. ‘Officially. But there was a lot of doubt around it. There was all this evidence against him. All the kids and teachers had noticed the attention he’d been paying Lucy, the weird presents. And, on the day it happened, he took her upriver from his mates – it was just the two of them; Scott was the only witness. Why would he do that? Even if he didn’t kill her on purpose, a lot of people thought he pushed her in as a prank, that he was at least partly to blame. But he never admitted anything. When school started again in September, he just looked blank, like he’d put up a wall. He didn’t smile any more, but he didn’t look sad or remorseful either. It was creepy.’

I shuddered.

Susie kicked the table leg with her studded boot. ‘Anyway. No one wanted to sit next to him in class after that, not even his old mates. A couple of parents even moved their kids out of the school. Then secondary school started and Scott began hanging out with these rough boys in the village, and it all went downhill from there. He’s just got this really bad reputation. No one trusts him.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘I . . . think I’m getting that.’

My thoughts fluttered between panic and disbelief. I didn’t know what I’d expected Susie to tell me, but certainly not this. This . . . this was just . . . more horrifying than I could have ever imagined.

Scott had been creeping around my house in the middle of the night.

He had been suspected of killing someone.

And now he knew too much about me.

The end-of-break bell rang, making every nerve in my body jump.

Susie slid off the desk and picked up her bag. She gave me a sympathetic look. ‘I didn’t mean to rattle you. I’m not saying Scott’s a killer. But I thought you should know, especially if he’s around your house. Just don’t trust him, okay?’

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I didn’t anyway, but now . . .’ I shuddered. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

She gave a small smile. ‘No problem. And, please don’t tell anyone it was me who told you? I don’t want to get on Scott’s bad side.’

After school, I speed-walked from the bus stop back to the Highwayman. The sooner I spoke to Dad, the better.

I’d barely reached the tree in the driveway before pins and needles jolted up my arms.

I scanned the outbuildings, the trees at the edge of the wood, the driveway I’d just come down. No Glimpse.

Then I looked towards the inn. In Granddad’s bedroom window a hand pressed to the glass, thin and pale, five fingers stretching out. Only blackness behind it.

I wanted to be sick. I couldn’t handle any more, not today. I doubled over, but nothing came out. When I stood up, my forehead damp with sweat, the hand in the window was gone.

Ignoring every instinct, I charged towards the inn, flung myself through the front door, dropped my satchel to the tiles, thundered up the stairs and threw open Granddad’s bedroom door.

Relief and frustration flooded through my system simultaneously. The hand was gone. I marched into the room anyway. ‘Go away!’ I whispered (I would have screamed if Dad hadn’t been downstairs). ‘Whatever you are, just leave me alone!’

I glared around me. Something on the window caught my eye. A five-fingered smudge, like a child had wiped their dirty palm on the glass. Goosebumps rose on my arms.

‘Liz?’ Dad’s voice floated up the stairs, accompanied by an urgent creaking of floorboards. ‘Liz, what’s wrong?’

I turned from the window as Dad appeared in the doorway. He looked at me with something approaching panic.

I didn’t have the patience to tiptoe around things any more. ‘Did you know Scott might have killed a girl?’ I demanded.

Dad’s eyebrows went haywire. But the look of shock I was expecting didn’t appear on his face. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Someone at school. You already know, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I know. It was a big drama, the last summer we were here. I didn’t know Scott then, but your granddad gave Crowley time off to deal with it. I hope whoever told you also made it clear Scott was innocent.’

I folded my arms. ‘They did. But there are a lot of people at school who aren’t so sure that he is.’

Dad shook his head. ‘Really, Liz? After everything you were put through at Jameson, you should be the last person to listen to gossip.’

‘He’s got a bad reputation, Dad. And—’ I stepped forwards, my voice hardening ‘—somebody told him about me. You told Crowley about my problems, didn’t you? And now Crowley’s told Scott.’

‘Ah.’ Dad grimaced. ‘Crowley and I were talking yesterday, about your mother and that you had a hard time afterwards. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about him telling Scott.’

‘And if Scott tells people at college?’

‘Talk to him. I’m sure if you ask him, he won’t tell anyone.’

Like I was going to believe a word Scott said, after his lies this morning.

‘And anyway,’ Dad said, ‘you don’t have those . . . problems . . . any more. So you don’t have anything to worry about.’ His words were casual, but I could feel him scrutinizing me.

‘That’s right,’ I said, trying to be reassuring, matching my tone to his.

His face relaxed. ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you downstairs.’

He headed back down the corridor. As soon as he was gone, my whole body sagged.

It was obvious I was on my own with Scott. If I could have made Dad believe Scott’s friends were sneaking round the inn at night, it would have been a different story. But if Dad confronted Scott, and Scott told him I was imagining things . . . well, I knew which of us Dad would believe.

I couldn’t let him start worrying about my Glimpses again. As far as he was concerned, they were worse than the amnesia and not remembering Mum – they were the result of a brain damage the doctors hadn’t been able to explain; a brain damage that Dad saw as his fault. I’d learnt quickly that the more I told Dad about my Glimpses, the more worried he became, the guiltier he felt, and the more he dragged both of us down.

I hadn’t told him about any of my Glimpses for years and it had been months since I’d seen one in his presence. If he were to start thinking that I was seeing things here, now, Dad and I would be right back to square one.

I had to hand it to Scott. Whatever he and his mate were planning, they were planning it well. He’d backed me into a corner.

I gave the handprint on the window one last glare, and headed to my bedroom to change out of my school clothes.

Usually, Dad and I ate dinner on the sofa in front of the TV. But tonight I made an excuse about homework, and ate my microwaved lasagne at the kitchen table, in front of the laptop.

The inn’s wireless broadband was mind-numbingly slow, but it existed, which was more than I’d hoped for when we moved in. Even with the slow internet, it only took a few minutes of typing and clicking to verify Susie’s story about Scott.

Lucy Robertson. That was the full name of the girl who’d drowned. A black-and-white reproduction of her school photo showed a girl with a shy smile, a thin face and a blonde ponytail. ‘A tragic drowning’, the online article called it. There were details of a memorial service at Hulbourn church.

My lasagne turned sticky in my mouth. I put the fork down, my dinner unfinished. Susie’s story felt so much more real now I’d seen Lucy’s face. Even if Scott was innocent, I couldn’t imagine how he could slope around school with that grin when there was something like this in his past. Dad crashing his car had been an accident too, but Dad and I had paid for that for years. Were still paying for it.

I closed the laptop and scraped what was left of my dinner into the bin. I needed to think about something else for a while. My heart was starting to feel like it could only pump poison.

‘I’m going to check out the library,’ I told Dad. I grabbed my notepad and a pen from my school bag and headed out of the kitchen. Doing some research for our History project would take my mind off things. I couldn’t face any more worrying about Scott or drowned girls.

The library wasn’t far from the kitchen. It wasn’t even a real library, more of a cupboard under the stairs with the letters ‘l-i-b-r-a-r-y’ painted on the door, but it did have books, and when I’d told Susie about it she’d agreed it was worth investigating.

I propped the door open so I could still hear the TV – it was kind of comforting – and also to let out some of the stale, ancient, mildewed air. The room was only just big enough for a two-seater sofa and the bookcases. A brass-framed mirror opposite the door reflected grimy wallpaper, the sloped ceiling and the low door frame.

I approached the built-in shelves. The books were mostly old hardbacks, many without dust jackets:
Reader’s Digest
encyclopaedias, a set of classic novels. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. I had hoped Granddad would be the type to be interested in local history, or had at least thought some of the inn’s guests would be, and I was right.

I pulled a few volumes from the shelves, dislodging a dead spider and a layer of dust.
Hulbourn Living Memories. Hulbourn: A History and Celebration. Hulbourn’s Past in Photographs
.

A fourth book caught my eye, so thin I almost missed it.
Haunted Hulbourn
. A shiver tingled up my spine. Susie was going to love this one.

I retreated to the sofa and sank down, my right leg curled beneath me. I held my breath as dust poofed up around me and then settled.
Haunted Hulbourn
looked up at me from the top of the book pile. I knew I should save it for Susie rather than risk scaring myself, but just like I couldn’t help peeking at the screen from between my fingers during scary movies, I couldn’t stop myself opening its cover. I checked the index. ‘The Highwayman Inn’ was the first entry.

The Highwayman Inn stands at the edge of Hulbourn. With its long driveway, dark woods to one side and empty fields behind, it retains a sense of isolation from the village that has characterized it for five centuries.

The Inn itself is not as quiet as its location, however – the number of ghostly sightings reported there make it one of the most haunted buildings in Hulbourn. Records show that paranormal activity at the inn traces as far back as 1789, the year we first find reports of a ghostly highwayman. Numerous guests since then have reported seeing the highwayman, often in the company of a spectral black-haired young woman. These sightings no doubt inspired the poet Alfred Noyes to compose his well-known poem ‘The Highwayman’, for which the Highwayman Inn is now famous.

Other ghostly sightings at the inn range from phantom servant girls to black-cloaked old ladies. In the 1950s, a seance was conducted at the Highwayman by local psychic Meg Sanders. Unfortunately, there is no record of what transpired during the event.

I shuddered, and read the few paragraphs again. ‘Most haunted building in Hulbourn’? Susie really was going to love this. I wasn’t sure I did.

Over the years, I’d considered more than once whether my Glimpses might be ghosts. The medical experts – neurologists and psychiatrists, mainly – hadn’t been able to explain the things I saw, filing my Glimpses under either ‘unknown brain trauma’ or ‘mental illness’. For a while, part of me had hoped the Glimpses were ghosts – at least that would mean I wasn’t the problem. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Brain issues could be cured, seeing ghosts couldn’t. And it was much less creepy to think of my Glimpses as imaginary. To believe I was seeing dead people would be a whole new level of scary.

I closed
Haunted Hulbourn
with a shudder.

As if on cue, the tingling started. I launched to my feet, wielding the pile of books like a weapon. To my embarrassment – and relief – my right leg gave way beneath me. I crumpled back onto the sofa in a heap. A roar of laughter floated down the corridor from Dad’s TV as I rubbed at the pins and needles in my foot. No Glimpses this time, just bad circulation.

Rolling my eyes at my mistake, I picked up my notepad and the books and stood up again (gingerly) to go back to the kitchen. In the mirror opposite, there was a flash of white. Fast movement. Blue eyes.

I spun round, but the doorway was empty. I ran into the corridor, but the Glimpse had gone.

Four Glimpses in three days. Instead of getting better since coming to the inn, they were getting worse.

I stand on the lawn in silence. The rabbits peek at me between the long blades of grass. I’m waiting for something. I don’t know what.

An explosion. A scream of metal.

Now I remember.

With awful certainty, I wait inside the car, bracing myself. Here she comes.

‘Get out, get out, get out!’ Over and over and over.

My mother’s voice turns hoarse with repetition. I try to move, to get away from her. I’m thrashing now, back, forth.

‘Wake up.’

I woke, wild-eyed and gasping for breath. It took me a second to realize where I was. For a moment, I just lay there, remembering. Then I snapped on my bedside lamp and reached for my locket.

‘Are you all right?’

Adrenaline shot back through my veins. I
had
heard a voice. And I was sure I knew who it was: Scott’s green-eyed accomplice.

Locket forgotten, I threw myself from bed and grabbed my dressing gown. Scott might have wheedled his way out of it, but I’d make sure this guy wasn’t going to get away that easily. I was going to demand an explanation.

I pushed the window wide, letting in a gust of cold air, ready to lay into the creep. What I saw, though, made my voice freeze in my throat. I gripped the sill and gawped out at the night.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I gasped.

The boy’s pale face was level with mine, surrounded by dark leaves. He was perched on a branch no further than two metres away from my window, his body half lit by moonlight, half obscured by shadows.

A moth fluttered past, brushing my cheek, but I didn’t even flinch.