Ruined 2 - Dark Souls (17 page)

She flashed the light onto a rickety wooden staircase.

“This way up,” she said. “We should be quiet, in case someone’s come back to the house.”

But nobody was in the house. Miranda and Sally clung together, taking careful steps and gasping in unison when the flashlight’s beam picked up a mouse scuttling across the floor. It was a narrow building, dusty and empty. The ground floor was dark as pitch, and so were the two floors above. Every step made the stairs creak,
but it couldn’t be helped. Miranda was amazed that Sally had already made this trip once, alone. She had a lot of guts.

On the top landing, Sally paused to brush away a cobweb stuck to her hair. Miranda’s grip tightened on Sally’s arm. She wasn’t sure what she was going to see up here, if the ghost would decide to make an appearance. Of course she wanted to see him, to talk to him at last, if that was possible. But the prospect of meeting him face-to-face, without the protection of the window, was scary as well. And what if he wasn’t a ghost, after all? What if he was the cellar vandal? How would he react to two girls breaking into his house?

Whatever happened, Miranda told herself to keep calm, even if she felt jittery and weak-kneed right now. She and Sally walked slowly along the narrow hall to the sole doorway. It was ajar.

“As I left it,” Sally whispered. They stopped in the doorway while Sally shone her light around the room. “Nobody here,” Sally said, and Miranda could hear the relief in her voice. Miranda was relieved, too — relieved and disappointed at the same time. Where was the ghost? He’d shown himself to her so many times, through the window. Why not appear now, when she was here in his room?

As Sally had said, there were a few signs of life in the attic, and they were all on the side nearest the door, where the dormer window was boarded up. A dingy mattress lay pushed up to one wall, devoid of any
bedding. In one corner, crowded onto the seat of a wooden chair, was a burner — the kind you’d take camping — and battered saucepan. Underneath the chair lay an empty can of baked beans and a discarded plastic spoon.

“No light,” said Sally, flicking the switch back and forth. “But there’s a candle over there.”

She shone the flashlight over to the far wall, by the window Miranda could look into from her room. A stub of a white candle sat in a saucer, melted down to almost nothing. Miranda pulled on Sally’s arm, the floorboards groaning and shifting as they crossed the attic. She crouched down to finger the candle. Could this be the one the ghost placed in the window? Or did he have some ghostly candle, pilfered in another lifetime, that he used to reveal himself whenever he wanted? Was he in the room right now, watching them?

“There’s
your
window.” Sally tapped on the glass. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you there.”

“I couldn’t believe it either,” Miranda began, swiveling on her heels so she could stand up. Sally helpfully pointed the flashlight down at the ground and, as the beam dipped, Miranda caught sight of something scrawled low on the wall, underneath the window.

“Hold the light still a second,” she whispered. “Here — look.”

Sally directed the flashlight at the wall, stepping back so she could see what Miranda was pointing at. The marks on the wall were words, smudged and black.

“Like someone was finger painting,” Sally said, thinking aloud. “What does it say? ‘Dark’ something …”

“ ‘Dark soul and foul thoughts,’ ” said Miranda. Like the picture on the wall of the cellar, this was something she remembered, somehow. Dark soul and foul thoughts. Dark soul and foul thoughts.

“This place is so creepy.” Sally shivered. “He must be a right nutjob, the bloke who’s living here.”

“Lord Poole,” said Miranda, standing up. It had come to her in a flash.

“Lord Poole lives
here?”
Sally looked at her, mystified. “I thought he had some big house in the country.”

“No, no,” Miranda explained. “I don’t mean Lord Poole lives here. I mean, I heard those words at his house — he said them. He was quoting someone, some poet.”

“Well, how does it … how does it explain all this?” Sally waved the flashlight, arcing the beam around the room. “I don’t get it.”

“Hang on,” said Miranda. “What was that?”

Sally’s light had glanced over something out on the floor, in the far corner of the room. She scanned the peeling floorboard until the light picked out the object again.

“A piece of glass?” Sally said, walking toward it. “Or no — wait.”

She bent down to pick up whatever it was, holding it up so Miranda could see. It was a clear glass button, as
big as a quarter, trailing the frayed tail of a piece of black thread. Miranda reached out to touch it, her hand trembling. No, she thought.
No, no, no.

Someone was living in this attic, and that someone was Nick.

S
ally said they should get back to the pub cellar before Rob got frantic with worry, and Miranda agreed with a silent nod of the head. She didn’t want to hang around in this attic a moment longer. Nick might come back. The ghost might appear. What the connection between them might be was starting to take shape in her mind, but it was still a gray cloud, like the ones that had loomed over York all week.

The journey back along the underground passage didn’t feel any shorter, and Miranda managed to slip, halfway along, coming down hard on one of her knees. She was dirty, damp, and tired by the time she slithered back into the White Boar’s cellar, the smell of mold rank in her nostrils. She had to explain things to Rob and Sally. They weren’t going to believe her, but she had to try and explain.

“Where have you two been?” Rob was stamping his
feet with irritation. A redundant question, Miranda thought. “I’ve been going crazy in here. I was just about to call the police.”

“We saw some other things,” Sally said, stroking Rob’s arm to calm him down. “Some words painted on a wall, and a glass button. I think …”

She turned to face Miranda, pinning her down with that blue-eyed gaze. Rob made one of his hurry-up-and-tell-me-already faces.

“I think they meant something to Miranda,” Sally said slowly. Now was the time, Miranda thought. If only she could muzzle Rob, she might be able to get the story straight.

“Okay,” she said, not sure where to begin. “Just don’t start shouting at me, Rob. Let me speak, all right? I think … I think I know who’s living in the attic. It’s this guy I met. His name is Nick.”

“The loser with the blankets and the attitude?” Rob glared at her. “I told you that guy was trouble. Of all the guys in this city, you have to meet a violent offender.”

“We don’t know he’s a violent offender. He’s
Lord Poole’s grandson.”
Miranda glared back at Rob. At least that particular piece of information seemed to shut him up. “And the thing is … Look, I know neither of you are going to believe this, but
please
let me say what I have to say before you jump all over me.”

“Nobody’s going to jump all over you.” Sally sat down on a barrel that was lying on its side. Her voice was calm. “Really, Miranda. Just tell us everything.”

Miranda swallowed. Everything in her head was a jumble.

“Well,
you
know, Sally, that I can see into the attic from my bedroom window. But I can’t see the other side, where the window’s boarded over. So I had no idea that Nick was sleeping up there. Living up there. He never told me.”

“I bet he never told you that he liked to vandalize pub cellars or set fire to things either,” muttered Rob, but a stern glance from Sally silenced him.

“The thing is, there
was
something I could see in that window. Someone, actually. Only at night. I’ve seen him many times since we arrived in York. I tried to tell you about it, Rob, but you wouldn’t listen. He’s a ghost. Sally, I can see ghosts.”

“Miranda …” Rob began, in his most patronizing voice.

“Ssshh,” said Sally. “Miranda, go on.”

“You believe her?” Rob was incredulous. “You believe all this ghost stuff?”

“Well,” said Sally matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a ghost, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And didn’t you ask me, Rob, if we had a cat at the White Boar? Remember, you said that Miranda had seen it that night your family came for dinner.”

“What about it?”

“I told you we don’t have a cat, and that was the truth. But Miranda’s not the first person to see it. A black cat, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Miranda, wondering if her guess had been right.

“About forty years ago, the previous owners had some building work done, because a room had damp in the walls or something. Their black cat disappeared, and some people said it had got itself bricked up alive in one of the new walls. Over the years it’s been spotted, usually in one of the front rooms. And sometimes when people bring dogs in, the dogs go absolutely mental. Barking and jumping up at something that nobody else can see.”

“So the black cat
was
a ghost,” said Miranda, and Sally nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell
me
all this?” Rob complained. “Why didn’t you say, ‘Dude, for real, your sister is a ghost whisperer’?”

“It was
her
business.” Sally flashed Miranda a conspiratorial smile. “And I was going to ask her about it myself, when we had a quiet moment, but everything’s been so …”

“Crazy,” Miranda said. “I know.”

“All right, then,” declared Rob from his staircase podium. “I don’t know if I buy all this, but go back to what you were saying. You saw some ghost in the window,
allegedly.”

“Yes.” Miranda nodded, trying to ignore his suspicious tone. “And I knew that Nick had an older brother named Richard. Nick told me himself, and so did Lord Poole. Richard was a lot older than Nick, and he died in some kind of mental hospital seven years ago, when
he was twenty-one. He committed suicide — hanged himself.”

Sally grimaced.

“So you’re thinking,” she said, “that this ghost you saw in the window may be Nick’s brother? That they’re living together, in a way, up in the attic?”

“Well, mostly I thought he was the ghost of this murdered apprentice,” admitted Miranda. “I read about him in my book. He’s been seen in a house on the Shambles several times.”

“Oh, I know about him!” Sally exclaimed. “I’ve heard the tour guides telling the story, and one of our customers claimed to have seen him ages ago. But that’s not the house across from yours. It’s right down at the end of the Shambles. Overlooking Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate.”

“That street name is
another
thing I just don’t believe,” said Rob.

“He’s just a kid,” Sally added. “The apprentice, I mean. He was fourteen or something when he was murdered.”

“ Wow — okay.” This was another new piece of information for Miranda to compute. So the ghost in the attic couldn’t be the murdered apprentice. The house was wrong. The age was wrong. Pieces of the puzzle were sliding into place.

“Does this ghost look like Nick?” Sally asked.

“Kind of,” Miranda replied. He was more handsome than Nick, she wanted to say. There was something much
more charming about him. Debonair, her mother would say. “He has the same really dark hair and pale skin. And another thing — with ghosts, you know, you can often see how they died. You see the … the marks on them. He has a wound right here.”

She drew her hand across the base of her throat to demonstrate. Rob flinched.

“And then there’s that picture,
The Fall of Babylon,”
she continued. “They grew up with it at Lord Poole’s house. Nick and his brother stayed at that house all the time when they were growing up. And the other night, the ghost had a version of this fire cloud thing painted on the palm of his left hand. He showed it to me, in the window, but I didn’t realize what it was until tonight, when I saw the paint on the walls here.”

“I wish we’d brought you to look at the cellar sooner,” said Sally ruefully.

“There’s other stuff, too. Nick’s been saying lots of weird things this week….”

Rob snorted with derision, which brought him another cool look from Sally.

“Go on,” she said to Miranda.

“Things about how he’d come back to York because he felt his brother calling him. Because it was seven years since Richard died — seven years today, actually. Nick said his brother needed him to do something for him, that ghosts reach out to us because they want our help. Sometimes we can help them, and sometimes
we can’t. But he said he’d do anything to help his brother.”

“But why would his brother want him to break into our cellar and bust open all the barrels and paint on the walls?” Sally looked mystified. “And why would he want to set fire to our pub?”

“I don’t know,” Miranda said. She really had no clue.

“You said there were words painted on the wall in the attic,” said Rob. He was sitting on the stairs, leaning forward. Not scoffing at her anymore, at least. “What did they say?”

“Dark soul something,” Sally said.

“Dark soul and foul thoughts,” Miranda reminded her. “Sounds like Shakespeare,” Rob said. “Dad would know.”

“Yeah — why don’t we text him and ask?” Miranda asked sarcastically. “Hey, Dad, we’re not exactly at the concert right now, but we have a literary question that can’t wait.”

“Dark soul and foul thoughts,” murmured Sally. “I should know this — I’m reading English at university.”

“You’ve only been there one semester,” Rob said. “Can you get onto the Internet on your phone?”

“Yes!” Sally tugged her phone out of her pocket and started tapping away. Miranda resisted the temptation to look over her shoulder.

“Any luck?” Rob asked.

“Hang on — sorry, the reception is awful down here.
Wait … here, it’s loading. Yes! It’s John Milton. A poem he wrote called …”

“Comus!”
Miranda remembered where she’d heard the line before. “Lord Poole was talking about it the other day, when Dad and I went to his house. Reciting it. Something to do with the picture by John Martin. You know,
The Fall of Babylon.
Or … no! It wasn’t about the picture. It was about John Martin himself.”

“I’m confused,” said Rob. “What do all these different Johns have to do with Nick’s brother’s ghost coming back to York after seven years or whatever — not that I necessarily believe all this.”

“What’s the connection?” Sally glanced up from her phone. “Miranda, do you know?”

“I think so.” Miranda felt a rush of exhilaration: At last things were starting to make sense. “John Martin had a brother named — something. I can’t remember. Anyway, this brother — he tried to burn down York Minster. And the lines from the poem had something to do with it. I don’t remember exactly.”

“I could look it up,” Sally said, frowning at her phone. “But this thing is
really
slow right now.”

“What about your book?” Rob pointed to
Tales of Old York.
It lay on one of the barrels, where Miranda had left it before venturing into the underground passage. “Maybe there’d be something about it in there?”

“There’s a picture of the Minster burning,” Miranda said. Sally handed her the book. “I remember the caption,

T
HE
M
ADMAN’S
F
IRE,
1829. He was insane. Jonathan Martin — that was his name! Instead of hanging him, they sent him to Bedlam, the asylum. Lord Poole told us.”

As she paged through the book, looking for any information on the 1829 fire, Miranda remembered something else. Lord Poole wasn’t the only one who’d talked about that fire of 1829. Nick had mentioned it, too, the day they sat together in the Minster’s Quire stalls. He knew all about the fire.

“Here,” she said, finding the line drawing of York Minster, its wooden roof ablaze. “There’s something here….

“But that doesn’t explain the Milton poem thing,” Rob complained.

“Hang on, hang on.” Miranda flipped the page. “Here — look. It gets mentioned here.

“So why would these words have meaning for Nick and his brother?” Sally looked pensive. “Why would they be painting them on the wall?”

“Ghosts can’t paint,” Rob said matter-of-factly.

“Like you’re the expert now on ghosts,” said Miranda, though secretly she thought he was right. “You wouldn’t even
listen
to me when I tried to tell you about them until Sally did.”

“I wonder if they felt some kind of affinity with Jonathan Martin,” Sally mused, ignoring Rob and Miranda’s squabble. “Is Nick religious at all?”

“No.” Miranda shook her head, thinking of her conversation with Nick in the Minster. He went there all the time but never, she suspected, to services. “Not religious. But he
is
quite bitter about the Church. When Richard died, he said, their mother wanted to have the funeral in York Minster. But someone — I don’t know who — wouldn’t give permission, and he was buried out in the country instead. That’s what Nick said happened, anyway.”

“So Nick could have a grievance against the Minster.” Sally drummed her feet against the barrel. “And that means he and his brother could relate in some way to Jonathan Martin and
his
grievance. But hang on — there’s something not quite right about this. I understand it from Nick’s point of view. But what would Richard care about his funeral? He still had a church burial.”