Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes (5 page)

9

When I shut my bedroom door behind me
I felt alone. The timber floorboards creaked when the slightest weight was
applied to them, and walking barefoot across my room made them sound like
someone was opening a coffin. Dusty wooden beams ran across the roof, the wood
thick enough to slip a noose around and high enough to finish the job.

Paintings hung on the wall of
woodland areas that I assumed were somewhere nearby, because the art work
reeked of being from the paintbrush of a local artist. Their technique wasn’t
the best, but they’d managed to capture darkness in the trees that looked heavy
enough to trap anyone walking underneath them. It looked like the kind of place
no person should ever go, and the feeling seemed to spread out of the confines
of the painting and seep into the room.

My bed was opposite from the door.
The wall behind it was stone, cold to the touch and greyer than grey. Marsha
obviously didn’t care about the comfort of her guests, because everything about
the room made me feel I was unwelcome. Even so, the hard mattress of the bed
had never looked so inviting. My body ached so much that I felt like I could
lie down and melt away.

I wasn’t going to do that. It was
stupid, but because Jeremiah’s last words to me were “go to sleep”, I was going
to do the exact opposite. I wasn’t going to let him order me around like I was
the hired help.

A writing desk sat in the corner of
the room, next to a window that was covered by a sheet of darkness. Outside the
window was the front of the pub. A wooden gate slapped against a post, and the
wind grabbed the stalks of the plants and throttled them.

I pulled out the chair and slumped
into it. I spread my dissertation books on the scratched surface and opened
them to pages saved by crumpled post-it notes. The text was small and I had to
strain to read it. Someday all this studying was going to put me in a pair of
glasses.

My dissertation was nowhere near
ready, which was pathetic considering the sacrifices I had made. I had spent so
long with a book in front of my face that I couldn’t remember the last time my
phone rang. Sometimes, I didn’t even bother to charge it. I’d let the blood
drain out of my friendships until they have shrivelled and crumbled into dust.
I always carried books in my bag, but they were becoming more like weights that
threatened to drown me in a raging sea.

I flipped to the front of the book in
front of me and looked at the title.

“Shadows That Walk Behind Us: How
Historical Horrors Affect the Present,” I read. “This is going to be lovely.”

Reading these books always made me
squirm. Even back in my halls of residence where the floor was carpeted and my
room warm and inviting, staying up into the early hours reading about myths
made me shiver. There was something wrong about urban legends. They were
bullshit, I knew that much. That didn’t explain how the same stories could turn
up again and again, thousands of miles away and hundreds of years apart.
Legends of old women who would appear behind you in the bathroom when you turned
off the light, of teenage girls possessed by demons.

The temperature of the room started
to drop as though someone were blowing snow into it. I reached to my left and
felt the radiator, and the coldness stung my hands. The lever that controlled
the temperature was turned on and twisted to full heat.
Great, another thing
in this shithole that doesn’t work.

I put on my dressing gown. As I read
about Romanian legends, the lamp in front of me flickered like a flame being
teased by fingers. The temperature plummeted, and it felt like fingers nipped
at my skin. I shivered into my clothes. A feeling built in me that the cold
wasn’t just from the winter air. That something was forming in the room, a
shape taking hold in the darkness and creeping just out of sight.

I looked at the door. I hoped to see
a slit of light peeking through the bottom, but instead there was a black
rectangle that indicted the hallway outside was dark. I pushed the thoughts to
the back of my mind. I was reading too much of this stuff. I bet even Professor
Higson got the creeps sometimes. I spread the book in front of me and stared at
the page.

The words span round my brain.
Devils, demons. Witches. Skeletons buried in church graveyards. My head felt
heavy and my eyelids began to slip. I felt my vision fade into black.

I opened my eyes and found myself
staring into red eyes. The corners of them were twisted in fury, as if I had
wronged their owner. My heart banged and I jerked my head away. I realised it
was the cover of the book, and that I had fallen asleep on the desk whilst
reading. There was a dripping sound behind me, the sound of water beating
rhythmically against porcelain.

“Time for some sleep,” I said, as if
announcing the idea to the room would break the creepy spell that seemed to
have taken hold in it.

The dripping grew louder, the water
doing the best it could to get my attention. I walked across the floorboards
and heard them creak underneath my bare feet. Sometimes it sounded like there
were two creaks at once, as if someone walked behind me and lifted their feet
at the same time as mine. As I got to the bathroom the dripping sound faded.

I stopped and listened. My pulse
throbbed inside me and my arms felt sensitive, as if something was playing with
the hairs on them. I swallowed. Suddenly, staying in Jeremiah’s room didn’t
seem such a stupid idea. Even if it meant on his floor.

No
, I thought.
That’d just confirm every single
thought he has about you.

A hand banged against the bathroom
window and spread its fingers across the glass. I jerked away, almost backing
into the door. Another look, and the hand became the spindly branches of a tree
as the wind toyed with it.

The room was silent, the shadows
having nothing to say. I listened again. I knew that fear was in the mind, and
it was in every person’s power to feed it or let it starve. I held in a breath
and tried to cut off my fear’s supply of food, tried to make wither away.

See? There’s no sound. Shadows are
just shadows.

Something dripped behind me. I span
round, my breath catching in my chest. Then I saw that it was the sink in the
corner of the bedroom. Globs of water formed on the spout of the tap and then
fell onto the cracked porcelain. I let out a sigh of relief.

I walked over to the sink and twisted
the tap. It struggled against the turn, as if it hadn’t been touched in years.
The sink was dirty and scratched with age. Disgustingly, there was black hair
wrapped in the plughole.

“For god’s sake Marsha, you old cow
,”
I said.

I’m not the sort of person who can
leave mess until morning. If something needs doing, it needs doing now.
Although the idea of touching someone else’s hair made my stomach turn, I knew
that I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that it was there, the strands tangled
in the plug and trying to crawl down the pipe.

I grabbed the bin from the bathroom
and put it next to the sink in my bedroom. I turned my head away, as if
avoiding looking made it less disgusting, and grabbed the hair. It was black
and wet, and it seemed to be wrapped in loops around the metal of the plug
hole. It wouldn’t come away on the first tug so I had to get a firmer grip and
pull. Despite being wet the hair was tough, and it took a good few pulls with
most of my strength to break it away. Finally, after another tug, I felt it
start to snap and tear. It felt like pulling off a strip of Velcro.

As I pulled at the hair more and more
of it came out. First just a few strands, but quickly more. They became thicker
and thicker, each clump of it sodden with stinking water. It was like a wig
that had been left in a muddy puddle, and the musty smell was enough to hang
heavy in the air.

The putrid water slashed over my arms
and onto my clothes. I started throwing hair in the bin beside me, but the more
I put in the more there was in the plug. I tugged at it and pulled a slimy
snake-like bunch of it. It slapped down on my arm and water flicked off,
spraying my face and chin. A few drops landed in my mouth, and I gagged as I
tasted the rank liquid on my tongue.

My heart thumped. Where the hell was
all this hair coming from? Why hadn’t Marsha sorted it? As the stench worked
its way up my nose and my arms were splashed with rank water, I wanted to shout
out. It felt like it would never end.

I reached to the plug and grabbed as
much hair as I could. It was slimy beneath my fingers but I gripped it. Feeling
the blood rush to my face, I yanked at it with all my strength and pulled it
away. It felt like I had an entire scalps worth of the long strands in my hand.
I threw them to the ground, not even caring that I missed the bin. I stood in
the dark room and tried to let my breathing settle.

I tried to work out where the hell
the hair was from, but my mind fogged over. Then a thought hit me in the guts.
A memory crept up and socked me in the stomach so hard I felt winded.

When I moved into the room, the sink
had been disconnected. It had never worked.

Suddenly I saw movement in the corner
of my left eye. A nearly imperceptible shifting in the dark, as though pale
fingers played with the black. A shiver ran through my body and I had the
overwhelming urge to run. Suddenly the bedroom door felt far away. It was only
metres, but it seemed that if I ran then it would stretch even further out of
reach.

I couldn’t let this happen. I
realised I was falling victim to the fear. I was thinking like the kind of
people who were scared of legends.

With my heart drumming in my chest I
forced myself to look to my left. My neck was stiff, as though my muscles
didn’t want my head to turn. I looked deep into the darkness that swam in the
corner of the room, and I saw nothing. I breathed out.

I looked back over to the bedroom
door, and my heart stopped. There was an envelope on the floor.

10

Every step down the narrow stairs
jolted my head and made my bones ache. My body felt like it was covered in
sludge, and my brain swam in a thick goo that bunged up my nose and made my
temples pound. Any sensible person would have been in bed, but I couldn’t do
that. I wasn’t going to let Jeremiah see me weak.

When I walked into the pub Jeremiah
was already sat at a table poking his fork into a fry-up. A radio span soft
tunes from somewhere behind the bar. The sky outside still had a dark tint to
it. The branches of the trees shivered in the wind and the leaves clung on for
dear life. Opposite Jeremiah was a plate with four rounds of toast, honey and
marmalade. There was also a bowl spilling with cereal and one full of fruit.

“What’s this?” I said, the words
sounding croaky in my throat.

“Take your pick,” he said, and lifted
a slice of bacon to his mouth. He had rolled up a full rasher around the fork
and obviously planned to eat it whole. He added: “I’m sorry about last night.”

I pulled out the chair and had to
bite back a wince as my shoulder joints ached with the movement. I knew this
was going to be a bad cold. It seemed like I was a germ magnet the whole year
round, and it was rare I didn’t have a red noise or puffy eyes. But it was when
my joints started hurting that I knew it was going to be a nightmare.

“Did you get some kip?” asked
Jeremiah.

I had already decided that I wasn’t
going to tell him about the hair. I wasn’t even going to let Marsha see it. I
had taken it out of the bin, wrapped it in a bag and I would get rid of it
later. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the feeling I had, like
someone was in my room. He’d say I was just being silly and letting all of this
affect me.

“Funny thing happened to me last
night,” he said.

My ears pricked. “Oh?”

“Yeah. I woke up at about three in
the morning. It was pitch black. I looked over to my bedroom window and there
was a face watching me.”

For a second my heartrate spiked. I
breathed through my nose and tried to calm down.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a cloud or
something?”

Jeremiah smiled. “No. It was a crow.
Little bugger was watching me sleep.”

He sawed a sausage in half and popped
it into his mouth. His ginger beard was a tapestry of egg yolk, brown sauce and
breadcrumbs. It was most likely that the crow had been watching Jeremiah
because it saw his beard as a potential nest.

“Did you go to the library?” I said.

Jeremiah swallowed and then gave slow
nod. “I did.”

“And?”

He picked up a paper towel and wiped
his mouth with it, smearing more egg yolk across his ginger hair.

“And what?”

I sighed. “Jesus. Does everything
have to be a battle?”

“People prosper through adversity.
Nobody ever got stronger walking down easy street.”

I picked up a piece of toast, put it
to my mouth and ripped at it like a wolf tearing at flesh. A man crooned on the
radio but the volume was too low for me to make out what he sang. From the back
of the pub, in the kitchen, pots clanged and every so often Marsha would mutter
incomprehensible curse words.

“I’m not your apprentice you know.
I’m here to interview you.”

Jeremiah gave me a knowing look. He
could have been saying ‘
we’re both the ones being interviewed’
, because
that’s what it always felt like with him. But in reality, I had no clue what he
meant.

I threw the toast onto the plate.
“Just tell me what you found.”

Jeremiah nodded. “For such a small
village, this place has a dark history. They might not have a pot to piss in,
put their librarians have been diligent over the years.  And a lot of shit has
happened here.”

“Like what?”

Jeremiah reached to his coat pocket
and pulled out a thick notepad. The edges of the paper were stained brown as if
coffee had been spilled on them. He flicked through the pages until he set his
stubby fingers on the one he wanted.

“In the year thirteen fifty, a
hundred men, women and children died and their bodies were burned in the field.
It was four-fifths of the village population. Do you know what might have
happened?”

“Didn’t know I had walked into a
history lecture.”

“If you don’t know, it’s fine to
admit it.”

I felt a stab of annoyance in my
chest. “It was the plague, wasn’t it?”

Jeremiah nodded. “Then from sixteen
twelve to sixteen thirty-six, a dozen women were hanged from the trees just
outside of town.”

He turned behind him and pointed out
of the window. The houses of the village covered most of what I could see
through the panes, but through a tiny gap, miles away, were the beginnings of a
woodland area.

“Witchcraft?” I said.

Jeremiah gave a solemn nod. It was
the first time I’d seen him show any real respect for anything.

“Those were dark times ruled by dark
minds. When I think about how people could actually believe in witchcraft and
then snap someone’s neck for it, it make me want to smash things.”

“I thought you wanted to believe in
that kind of stuff.”

Jeremiah hit the table with his fist
and made my plate clang. I sat upright and looked into his eyes.

“Don’t mix me up with those ignorant
bastards,” he said. “Witchcraft was just a word they used because their tiny
brains couldn’t handle the unknown. It was a tag to put on some poor cow so
that blame could be given for goats dying and crops wilting. You see, when
strange things happen, people need a reason. Blame gives people a reason when
no others can be found.”

I looked out of the window, passed
the town and toward the woods. It seemed like the beginnings of something thick
and full of shadows, a place where daylight was choked and things crept in the
dark. It was a place no person should ever go. I imagined the innocent women
swinging from the branches, their tongues lolling out of their mouths.
Pin-pricks travelled up my legs and onto my arms.

Suddenly the lights above us went
out. The early morning twilight seeped through the window and settled over the
room. The radio stopped playing, and a silence took over. It felt like time had
stopped. The clanging from the kitchen ceased, and I heard Marsha’s steps
trampling toward us.

She walked into the room with a red
face and a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her hair was tied back so tight that
it looked like her scalp was going to come off. It was as though just acting
annoyed all the time wasn’t enough for her, she had to put effort into looking
that way as well.

“Okay,” she said, voice tight with
irritation. “Which one of you buggers messed with the electrics?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I have no
idea what you’re talking about.”

Marsha crossed her arms and lifted
her bony shoulders. She looked like a spinster teacher in a boarding school.

“I know one of you did something,”
she said.

Jeremiah sat forward in his seat. “We
don’t know what the hell you’re saying, you old cow. We haven’t touched
anything.”

Marsha huffed. “This place is decades
old, you know. The fuse box is fragile as a box of eggs. Just don’t touch
anything.”

With that she walked out of the room,
as if she were satisfied that having the last word won her the argument. I
watched her walk out of the doorway and then heard her steps as she pattered
down a stone staircase that led to the basement.

Jeremiah shook his head. “Batty old bint.”

I didn’t disagree with him, but I
wasn’t going to say anything in case Marsha heard me. I got the sense that the
woman was always watching and always listening. As if she could be everywhere
at once, like a spectre that haunted the walls and floors of the pub.

“Found something last night,” I said.

Jeremiah’s eyes glinted. “Oh?”

I took the envelope out of my pocket.
My heart began to beat and I felt a smile creep on my lips. There was something
pretty damn good about knowing something Jeremiah didn’t. He tried to hide his
surprise, but he was no actor. I pushed the envelope across the table.

“Someone slid it under my bedroom
door last night.”

Jeremiah teased the paper out of the
envelope. He unfolded it and read.  It was a weathered piece of paper, with the
words typed in black ink. When he had finished reading, he put it on the table
and gave me a look of surprise, as if it was strange that I could ever know
something he didn’t.

“This is the missing page from the
death register,” he said.

I nodded. “And there was a young girl
who was born in nineteen-ninety who died seven years later.”

“Someone in this town is playing
games.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jeremiah sat back and folded his
arms. He looked at me with his teacher expression. It was a similar look that I
saw on Professor Higson’s face when I asked him questions about my
dissertation. What was it about older guys and smug looks?

“You tell me,” said Jeremiah. “What’s
our mantra?”

“Look for the bullshit.”

“
Find
the bullshit.”

“Whatever.”

“And there’s certainly some bullshit
in this village.” He ran his finger along the birth certificate and stopped in
the middle. “It lists the girl’s parents,” he said. “So let’s see if they still
live in the village.”