Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes (7 page)

13

As we walked into the village square
Jeremiah took long strides beside me, glancing from time to time as if he
expected me to say something. I walked on without saying a word. I felt the
nervous energy coming off him like he was like a kid waiting to unwrap a
Christmas present. Maybe I was being childish, but I enjoyed the feeling of
having something over him. There was a tension between us as we walked, as
though he were always on the verge of saying something but stopped himself.

Finally he blurted out: “So are you
going to tell me what you found?”

“Let’s find a place to sit.”

The village square was more of a box.
Concrete rectangle flags covered the ground, and moss grew in the ridges
between them. There was a statue of a woman with a sheep next to her. She was
middle-aged, and her eyes stared out into the distance as though she were
looking at the woodland that lay beyond the village. Her mouth was half open,
and her eyes looked sad.

We sat on a bench under an oak tree.
The leaves were bare but the branches seemed to twist as if they were limbs
grabbing for us. I had the weird feeling that they wanted to reach out and take
the diary from me, as though it were a secret that the village wanted to keep
hidden. Jeremiah sat beside me, a fiery ball of energy.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me
on my acting?” I said.

“Sidney Poitier doesn’t have anything
to worry about,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The wind threw the clouds around the
sky like clothes on a washing line. Despite being midday there was an overcast
feel to the air, as if darkness were always straining to tear through. There
was a curious lack of people milling nearby. I knew that the village was small,
but I expected at least some people to be in the square. The wind whistled
through the tree branches and somewhere a crow shrieked. It felt like the
village at the end of the world.

Jeremiah tried to grab the diary from
my hands. I pulled it back out of reach.

“Nope, mister. Not yet. Quad pro quo,
as my professor likes to say.”

Jeremiah sighed. “Cut the crap. What
do you want?”

“You agreed to let me interview you,
and you haven’t told me a damn thing.”

Jeremiah leant back into the bench
like a kid having a tantrum. The wood rattled under his weight and for a second
I thought it might collapse underneath us. Everything in this village seemed
brittle, as though the houses and the fixtures had rotted to the point of
breaking.

“No wonder Higson was so keen to get
rid of you,” he said.

“Answer some of my questions and I’ll
let you see the diary.”

“I’ll answer one.”

At this rate I was going to have to
investigate the whole thing on my own and then drip feed him the findings one
by one before I managed to coax an interview out of him. This was better than
nothing, at least. I might actually have something to show for the trip.

“Tell me about Bruges.”

Jeremiah put his hand to his rough
beard and looked into the distance. His eyes glazed over and his forehead
creased, as if he was swimming in a memory that threatened to drown him. It was
a look of discomfort that cut through his usual bluster and made me think that
maybe he was human after all. He curled one hand into a fist and gripped it
tightly with his other.

“You remember the student I told you
about? The one Higson sent to study with me?”

“Billy something?”

“Billy Wilkins. He was in Bruges with
me, way back then. We went to investigate a possession case, but he didn’t come
back.”

“I thought you said he was in a
mental institution?”

“I mean he came back physically, but
not all of him returned. A part of him is still there.”

“Are we talking organ thieves?”

“You really don’t understand, do
you?”

Jeremiah’s words trailed away, as if
they had been lapped up by the wind and carried beyond the darkened woodland
and over the bleak hills. There was a cutting tone to his voice, like a hammer
of emotion trying to smash through a stone wall.

“That’s all I’m going to say,” he
said.

He’d only promised me one question,
but god loves a trier, as one of my old foster mums used to repeat endlessly.

“So what about the experiment at the
university, the one you want access to? What’s that all about?”

Jeremiah gave me a stern look.
“You’re professor isn’t what he makes out. He’s a liar, Ella.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say that me and him used
to study the same things. Only, I stayed true to myself. He got scared and
locked himself away. He abandoned every true thought he’d ever had, put on his
tie and then wasted his life in the lecture halls.”

A car drove down the road at the edge
of the square. It was a family hatchback that looked like it rolled off the
production line in the fifties. There was a dent on the passenger door and the
bodywork needed a respray. I couldn’t see the driver clearly, but he looked
middle-aged. He turned and looked at us, then sank back in his seat. In the
passenger seat next to him, a small shape leaned forward. It seemed to be
covered in shadow, like a little child-sized bundle of black. Gradually
daylight caught the features, and I realised it was a little girl. Her eyes
were wide and white, and black hair spilled over her shoulders. For a second
our eyes locked.

“This place is creeping me out,” I
said.

“The world’s a scary place when you
walk through it with your eyes shut.”

“The world’s a scary place with you
in it.”

“Let’s see the diary,” said Jeremiah.

I held the book tight in my hands. It
felt cold, as though it had spent an hour in a fridge. As I ran my fingers down
the spine I felt a shudder run through my arms, and I slackened my grip. It
felt like I shouldn’t be holding it.

“Hurry up,” said Jeremiah, and
shifted uncomfortably.

I opened the book on the first page.
The diary was filled with two sets of handwriting. One was child-like, full of
sloppy squiggles and crosses through the words. Every so often a paragraph
would break, and the next paragraph was written perfectly. It was the stylish
handwriting of a guided hand, and there was a control to it that could only
have been achieved with maturity. The letters bunched together so tightly they
were like a chain that couldn’t be broken.

I felt my head begin to pound. I
strained my eyes to make out the words, but my brain just wouldn’t process
them. I felt like I had forgotten how to read. For a second, I thought I was
having a fit.

“It’s in code,” said Jeremiah.

I looked closer and saw that the
adult-style writing was indeed written in code. The letters were standard
alphabet but they were matched in ways that made no sense.  I flicked through
the book and saw page after page of childish writing – ‘
mum sent me to my
room last night’
– followed by precise handwriting written in mismatched
letters and words that made no sense.

Two thirds into the book the writing
stopped abruptly, like a movie paused before the end. The last paragraph was in
the adult-style but the words were bold and angry, as though someone had
written the words and then gone over them again and again to make them darker.
It was like someone had pressed deep into the page as they wrote to try and
gouge the words into the book.

My hands started to ache as though
the book was pressing into my skin. I had a light feeling on my chest like
someone were trying to push me back. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt that the
book shouldn’t be in my hands. The branches of the trees swayed above me, like
hands reaching down to choke me. My throat tightened.

I threw the book on Jeremiah’s lap.
He jerked back in shock, and then took hold of it. I tried to hide the feeling
of dread that sat heavy on my shoulders.

“Over to you,” I said, hoping that
the crack in my voice didn’t show. I was glad to have the diary away from me.

“It’s written with a cipher,” said
Jeremiah. “This kind of code works with the use of a word chosen by the person
who wrote it. It acts as a key.”

“So we have no chance of reading it,”
I said. “It could have been anything.”

“Not quite. People usually use a word
that means something to them.”

I shook my head and felt it throb.
“How the hell would a seven year old girl know how to do this?”

“This girl was older than she
appeared.”

“So what now?”

Jeremiah let the book rest on his
lap. The piece of evidence excited him, I knew, but it was like he didn’t want
to hold it. I wondered if he felt the same way I did when I had the book
between my fingers.

“We need to work on the cipher. I’ll
make a copy at the library, and we can both go to our rooms and try and figure
it out. You take the original.”

I shrank back in my seat. “Why me?”

“You were a seven year old girl,
once. You know how they think.”

“You’re not so different to a seven
year old girl yourself,” I said.

14

As night fell I sat at my desk with a
book on Polish urban myths in front of me. My chest felt heavy and my brain
swam in a thick sludge that blocked my nose. I got colds all the time, but I
rarely felt this horrible. The last time was in a foster house. Again, the bad
one.

It was the heart of winter and I lay
in bed. Frost spread over the windows like spider’s webs, and a layer of shadow
covered the walls. I didn’t have a duvet, only a thin sheet that should have
been used to cover it. My foster parent’s house was rich with drapes and
paintings, and crystal ornaments glinted from every shelf. Despite the showing
of wealth, poverty was hidden in the places no one knew to look. Carved oak cupboards
contained cheap tins of beans, and inside panelled wardrobes were clothes that
were years old. They had been rich once, but not anymore.

I lay into bed and tugged the cover
close to me. My body shivered with every breath, and my chest felt like it was
filling with ice. I wanted to close my eyes, but shapes made by the shadows
watched me, and I knew that if I slept, they would come for me. My bedroom door
creaked open as if pushed by the wind. My foster mum stepped into the room,
hair pinned back, skin pale.

“Can I have a duvet please mum? I’m
freezing.”

“Don’t call me that.”

I swallowed. I wondered what she
wanted, why she had even bothered to visit me. She walked to the edge of the
bed and sat down on it. Her body was painfully thin, and the mattress didn’t
even register her weight. She looked at me and I saw fury behind her eyes. I
wondered what I had done to put it there. She reached down and grabbed me.

“I hate you,” she said.

The words sent a shock through my
chest. I felt vulnerable, and didn’t know whether to bury myself under the
cover or to get up and run. Somehow it felt like the walls were closing in on
me. Foster mum grabbed the cover and tugged it away from me, and the coldness
of the room attacked.

She stood up and walked to the doorway,
leaving me shivering on my bed. As she left the room she looked at me and
sneered.

“I never wanted you here.”

Wind blew against the window. I was
back in the pub, back at the desk feeling like darkness sat heavy on my back. I
looked at the book in front of me and felt a heavy paw swipe at my mind. I
couldn’t face studying tonight. Something swam behind my eyes and made my
eyelids feel heavy.

I looked outside the window. The
streets outside the pub were a river of black. The gate smashed against its fixture,
and the branches of the trees gave a grave dance in the gust. The skin on the
back of my neck tingled, and I got the sense that someone watched me from the
darkness.
You’re being stupid,
I thought.
This urban legend shit is
getting to you.

I swivelled away from the desk and
reached down to my bag. I took out the girl’s diary. I had put it in my handbag
hoping that if I buried it with all my stuff it would warm up, but the hard
print of the cover still felt icy.

It didn’t mean anything, I knew. The
whole power of scary stories and urban legends was that they were designed to
tug on your emotions. They reached into the parts of your brain that still held
onto primal fears and twisted them. Every myth ever told over campfires or
printed in horror anthologies was carefully designed to jump out at the coward
in us. None of it was real.

The sooner we finished this
investigation, the sooner things could go back to normal. Jeremiah would give
me the interview I needed, then I could go back home and get the extra credit
that Professor Higson had promised. Out here I just couldn’t work on my
dissertation. Something about the village put me on edge.

I picked up the diary and flicked
through it. I stopped in the middle and traced my finger over a page. There were
two paragraphs on it, one in the childish handwriting and the other in the
adult style. Now I just needed the cipher, and I knew it had to be something
important to a seven year old girl.

What was important to me as a kid?

I wasn’t a good model to go by, I
realised. I hadn’t exactly had a normal upbringing. So what about Emily? What
word could she have chosen? I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in her
place. I thought back to her bedroom in the cottage. It had been empty when I
was in it, but in my mind I filled it with childish things. A colourful duvet,
posters on the wall. Toy horses and colouring books. No, that didn’t seem
right. Emily wasn't a normal child.
So what would she be interested in?

In my mind I paced across her room,
heard the floorboards whine and creak. I walked to the window and looked out. A
flush of shivers spread across my arms as I stared into the countryside and saw
the darkened woodland that lay beyond.

Emily would have seen the woods every
night. They would have smothered her dreams. She would have heard the legends
of the witches, and there was nothing more terrifying to a child than tales of
witches swinging from tree branches. That was it.

Witches.

My chest flooded as I tested the
word, but it didn’t work. I was sure I was on the right track, but if witches
wasn’t the word, then what was? The woods would have dominated Emily’s
thoughts, I was certain of that. No child could live near that terrible place
and not have it affect them. It would have soured her thoughts, turned her mind
grim. With a bolt of cold, the answer hit me. 'Witches' wasn’t the cipher. I
tested a new word.

Hanging.

Gradually the paragraphs started to
form words that made sense, and the writing changed from random scribbles to
real sentences.

I felt a shadow cloak my back. The
feeling of being stared at grew, like a sixth sense that flashed a beacon
inside me. The room was filled with an utter quiet, and I couldn’t even hear
the banging of the gate outside. It was like the volume had been drowned out.

I looked at the diary. I felt like I
needed to break the silence of the room, so I read out an entry.

‘
School is rubbish! Oops, don’t
tell mum I said that. Teacher put Thomas next to me, and he keeps stealing my
stuff. Mum’s going to have to get me new pens and stuff and I won’t be able to
write as good with them. Good thing I’m teacher’s favourite!’

This seemed normal, the kind of
stupid crap that any kid would write in her diary. I remembered keeping one
myself, once. When I moved into halls of residence I thought I had packed it
away in a box. I reached into the box to take it out to have a read, and a
laugh, but the book was gone.

The next paragraph was written in
adult handwriting, a contrast to Emily’s childish scrawls. I applied the cipher
to it and teased out the words. I ran my eyes down the page and read the text.

‘This
one is lost, we know. But we will show her the way. She is young and her mind
is soft, flesh that squeezes between our fingers. She fights us away but we
tear through. We are comfortable here. Too comfortable. Her mind will be a dark
place soon. Black enough for us to rest.’

I tore my eyes away from the book. It
felt like an icy hand ran up and down my back, and my skin itched. I turned my
head and looked out of the window. I expected a shadowy figure to be on the
street, looking up into my room and watching me as I sat. Instead it was empty.

Suddenly I felt like I had to get out
of the room. Like any second now it would be plunged into darkness, and shapes
would form where my eyes couldn’t see. I stood up away from the desk and looked
at the door. I expected the door knob to twist and for something to start
pushing it open. The door stayed firm.

With my breath catching in my chest I
looked at the wall. As I traced my eyes along the cold stone a feeling of dread
crept up in my chest, a warning sign from my body to look away. Suddenly I
caught something glinting out of the stone. My heart stopped beating and my
chest tightened in a freezing vice. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I wanted to
turn from the room and run.

Along from the door, there was a hole
in the wall the size of coin. Darkness from the corridor should have poured
through it, but instead, an eye stared into the gap.

It peered through the hole and into
the room. White as milk and bloodshot with a bulbous black pupil sitting heavy
in the middle. My legs felt like lead weights. I stepped to my left, feeling a
chill run through me as I moved. The eye followed me, its stare fixed on me
from the darkness.

A scream built up inside me but I
didn’t have the breath to let it out. I was mute, a radio with the volume slid
down. My body made no sound, but inside my mind I shrieked. I wanted to look
away but I was scared that if I looked back and saw that the eye in the wall
still watched me, I would lose my mind.

I ran into the bathroom. I slapped
the light switch and the old bulb flickered to life and cast a dim glow on the
laminate floor. I walked to the sink, twisted the tap and let water trickle
down. It felt like a layer of ice when I splashed it on my face. I closed my
eyes and tried to settle my hammering heart. I opened them again, half
expecting the eye to be staring back at me from the mirror. Instead there was
just my pale reflection, my face a sheet of fear.

I opened my mouth and made a sound. I
didn’t know what it was, I just needed to know my vocal chords still worked. I
turned the tap and cut the flow of water. Without its steady trickle, the room
was silent. I shook my head, tried to empty it of the eerie thoughts that
stabbed at me.

I felt emptiness inside, like my body
had given up and let everything leak out. I looked down at the sink and felt
shards of fear stab at me. In the plughole, wrapped around the metal, were long
strands of black hair.

A desperate cry rose in my throat and
escaped my mouth before I could clamp it shut.

This isn’t happening.

I reached for the hair and tugged at
it. It clung to the plug hole like a leech.

This isn’t happening
.

I took a breath and heaved at the
hair, and finally I felt it rip away. The long, sodden strands felt like eels
in my hand. Wet and slimy, and wrapping around my fingers. A damp smell invaded
the air. It snuck up my nose, into my mouth, down my throat. I wanted to gag. I
threw the hair away from me and heard it slap against the bathtub.

I became aware of a presence beside
me. I didn’t dare turn my head to see it, but I knew it was there. It stood
just beyond the bathroom doorway in the shadows of the bedroom. It watched me
silently. I felt like I was going to faint. My heart raced, but its beats were
weak like a battery running out of charge. I held onto the sink so as not to
fall.

Is it her?

Emily.
The name crawled out from the
crevices of my brain. I looked out of the corner of my eye, fighting for my
life to keep my head rigid and not let it turn. I knew I must not look at the
shape directly, that to stare at it would be to welcome it in. But still I felt
its black presence in the doorway. Waves of malice drifted from it and settled
in the air like steam.

I wanted to scream for Jeremiah, but
I didn’t dare make a sound. I remembered the words of the letter.

Once she’s in your room she stares at
you. You can try and look away all you want but you’ll feel that glare on your
face, daring your eyes to meet hers. And once you give in and look at her, well
you’ve acknowledged her again. She knows that you can see her, that you know
she’s there.

With a shaking hand, I picked up my
toothbrush. I had to act natural, pretend nothing was amiss. My hand trembled
as I brushed my teeth. I looked in the mirror and saw my wide eyes and skin
drained of colour. I was like a spectre staring through a window.