The Haunting of Gillespie House (11 page)

She stood in front of the very same door I was confronting, one hand holding a candle, the other on the doorknob. Her face was only vaguely familiar. Her eyes were still dark and heavy lidded, but her black hair was streaked grey, and loosely wrinkled skin had softened her heavy-jawed face. She still wore all black, but the dress was worlds apart from the plain, ugly affair her father had clothed her in. It was made from rich satins, ruffled at the shoulders and the waist and decorated with black lace and pearls.

I gaped at her, amazed by the change. She had to be at least eighty.

She took a deep, slow breath, and her eyes fluttered closed as she braced herself for what was about to come. Hanging from a silk ribbon tied around her right wrist was a large shard of brilliantly blue crystal shaped like a teardrop and sharpened at one end.

Genevieve let out the breath, opened her eyes, and turned the handle to open the door. She stepped through the opening into the inky blackness beyond, then the thick stone door slammed shut behind her. I heard her voice ring out, firm and fierce, “Hello, Father.”

Re-entering my body was like jumping off the top of a cliff, but instead of falling I was sucked up towards the sky. I dropped to my knees, gasping air into my lungs and fighting the need to be sick as my consciousness reconnected with each of my limbs. My brain was one of the last parts to anchor itself, and my vision swam as I blinked in the faint light of my phone.

“What was
that
?” I gasped at the empty hallway. “Genevieve?”

Silence answered me. I let my body roll over, waiting for the unnatural feeling of being disconnected from myself to fade.

Apparently, it was much easier for Genevieve to take over my mind—I was sure that was what had been happening—when I was asleep. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train. My limbs shook as I propped myself against the wall.

I realised that she’d been showing me those snapshots of her life for a reason. There was something she needed me to do, and I wanted to scream at just the thought of it.

Genevieve was the only member of her family who did not have a plot of land in the graveyard. That was because she’d never been buried. She’d gone into Jonathan’s crypt to face whatever was left of him… and she’d lost. I knew, with complete certainty, that her bones were lying just behind the door I sat next to, while her spirit wandered the passageway for eternity, seeking someone to complete the impossible, terrible task she’d committed to.

She needed me to kill Jonathan Gillespie.

I shook my head and pressed the palms of my hands against my eyelids, fighting tears. My fingers trembled as I spoke into the darkness. “Please, don’t ask me to do this. I can’t. I’m not strong enough. You have to find someone else.
Please
.”

An icy hand brushed over my cheek, wiping at the tears there. I jolted back and held up my light to see the hallway, but it was empty.

Heat spread from where I’d been touched. It seeped through my face, drawing blood to my cheeks, and ran down my shoulders. As if a bucket of hot water had been poured over me, the warmth coursed through my chest and into my stomach. From there, it poured into my legs and my arms, right down to my fingers and toes, until every cell of my body felt hot and alive.

Liquid confidence followed the heat, and I drew in a shuddering breath. I was capable, I realised—and I was Genevieve’s last hope. She believed I could finish what she’d started. She
trusted
me.

More than that, I felt the urgency of the task. It had been more important than Genevieve’s life and was more important than my own. Whatever happened, I had to destroy what remained of the cult leader. I
had
to.

I already had the physical strength, and she’d lent me her mental fortitude. I could sense her smiling at me through the darkness, and I hazarded a smile back.

My aches and bruises forgotten, I pushed myself to my feet and faced the door. I felt vulnerable and empty-handed, but then something invisible guided my fingers to my jean’s left pocket. I found the candlestick I’d tucked there before entering the hallway. “Thanks,” I said, pulling it free and brandishing it in my left hand, resting my right on the door handle. “Ready?”

Her silent approval urged me on, and I turned the cold knob.

Two centuries was a long time for a door to be neglected, but it ground open under my touch, sending a high squeal of rusty metal echoing through the passageway behind me. As the gap widened, I was washed in a wave of foul, stale air. I gripped my candlestick in my left hand and raised the light in my right as I stepped over the threshold and into the mausoleum.

I could
feel
the darkness. The blackness of the hallway hadn’t been my imagination after all; it had been seepage of the concentrated inky shadows of the mausoleum: Jonathan’s shrine to a world devoid of light.

The door scraped shut behind me, and a dull thud told me it was sealed. I edged to my left, keeping my back to the wall, and my foot landed on something hard and brittle. I bent down to shine my light at the thing I’d stepped on and recoiled; I’d crushed the skeletal remains of a hand sticking out of a stained, decayed black silk dress.

Genevieve
.

I’d been expecting it, but it still made me want to scream. I raised the candlestick and wiped the back of my hand across my eyes, where tears of fear and grief were gathering.

Don’t think on it
, I sensed Genevieve tell me.
It’s not me you need to worry about.

I nodded, tried to slow my breathing, and raised my light towards the rest of the room. That was when I became aware of a sound directly in front of me. Like bones scraping across stone, as something heavy and large moved closer.

My heart was ready to explode. I kept my lower back pressed against the wall but leaned my torso forward, and extended my arm to shine the phone’s light as far into the smothering shadows as I could.

Jonathan Gillespie loomed out of the darkness, reaching a long, grasping hand towards my face.

Time had decayed him unnaturally. His skin hadn’t decomposed. Instead, it had toughened like leather that puckered and bulged over his bones. His eyes were milky white, but tendrils of black, as though his veins had been filled with ink, wove around the empty eyeballs as they swivelled blindly in their sockets.

He’d either lost or torn off his clothes during his imprisonment in the tomb, and his naked body contorted and moved horribly, as though the muscles had atrophied and the bones had fused and broken in strange places. As I watched, his left hand swung backwards, the elbow bending ninety degrees in the wrong direction, before it snapped forward again to grab in my direction.

Even worse, his skin had split just like Mary Gillespie’s. Cracks grew out from his lips, his collar bone, his elbows, his stomach, and his groin. They flapped open and closed as he moved, and I thought I could see something writhing and
alive
inside of them.

I screamed and dived backwards, tripping over Genevieve’s corpse and landing on the ground. Jonathan’s neck twisted to turn his head in my direction, followed by his shoulders. Then his back shifted one vertebra at a time, and his body clicked into place like an elongated Rubik’s Cube. His mouth opened, and some of the
alive
stuff poured out.

It was blackness in a way I’d never seen it before. It was darker than ink and flowed like liquid metal as it dribbled over his chin and ran down his body in rivulets. Each dribble of darkness sought one of the cracks in his skin, where they burrowed back inside of him like cockroaches hiding from the light.

He was almost on top of me. I thought I heard Genevieve talking to me, but my terror was so great that a harsh ringing filled my ears—I couldn’t have understood her words even if I’d heard them. I swung my candlestick at Jonathan’s head. It denting the skull under the bloated, pocked skin and cut a new gash in his flesh. More of the liquid shadows poured out, and drops landed my arm. They instantly began attacking me, squirming over my flesh, trying to dig through my skin and get inside of me.

I screamed in pain, and Genevieve’s voice suddenly became clear.
The light! The light!

My hand moved as if on its own, shining the phone at the black chewing through my skin. The tendrils squirmed and dropped off my skin, hitting the floor with heavy plops and wriggling out of the reach of my light.

The distraction had given Jonathan the precious seconds he’d needed. He was on me before I could move, his body pressing against mine, his decayed fingers gripping at my skin and refusing to let go. I stared into his milky eyes as they rotated wildly in their sockets, as if they were trying to see me through their blindness. One of his hands found my neck. He was strong; stronger even than he had been in life, and his fingers forced my mouth open. He inclined his head towards me as though to kiss me, and his lips parted to let the living black drip into my mouth.

Don’t swallow!
Genevieve screamed in my head.
Fight!

I squirmed, writhing under the monster, and freed my right hand. I brought the phone up, pushing it between our faces, shining its light directly into his open maw. Jonathan howled, and the noise was one of the worst sounds I’d ever heard. His grip slackened enough to let me get my other hand free. I cracked the candlestick across his skull a second time, denting its other side.

He recoiled from the impact, and I tried to make a break for it. I managed to wriggle my torso out from under him before his impossibly strong arms locked onto my legs. The grip was so tight I thought he might break my bones. I shone the light at his face again, but his mouth was closed. His skin protected the blackness, and the light didn’t affect him. He began to drag himself up my body, pinning me beneath his incredible weight.

The crystal
, Genevieve instructed, panic clear in her voice.
Behind you!

I threw my head back and spotted the shard of blue stone that had been tied around her wrist. It had fallen near the back of the room, just out of my reach.

I began to wriggle, pulling myself towards it an inch at a time. Jonathan was dragging himself up my chest now, and one of his hands shot out and forced the phone from my grip. It fell and skidded out of reach, its weak light barely allowing me to see Jonathan’s manic leer as his mouth opened again.

I brought the candlestick across his jaw, but before I could pull my hand back to hit him again, his fingers had tightened around my wrist, immobilising it.

“No,” I moaned, fighting his weight. I looked behind myself for a second and thought I saw the crystal glowing faintly amongst the shadows, then Jonathan’s spare hand gripped my chin again. I threw my free hand backwards, grasping at empty ground as Jonathan forced open my lips. My fingers seized on a hot, hard shape, and, praying it was the crystal, I drew it up and slashed at Jonathan’s face.

Light, just as alive as the darkness was, sparked where my weapon cut his cheek. Jonathan howled, his eyes rolling maniacally in their sockets, as every fissure in his body spewed out the blackness as if it had been expelled under immense pressure. It writhed across his flesh like a swarm of black worms and began burrowing back into his carcass.

Stab through his skull
, Genevieve urged, and I thrust my makeshift dagger upwards, towards one of the hideous eyes. It cut through the sack, and more black liquid poured over my hand and ran down my arm as Jonathan’s scream rose in pitch. I pushed harder, forcing the blade through the eye socket, into where his brain would have been if he’d still been alive, and suddenly, there was light fizzling and spitting out of the crevices around his eyes and mouth. The corpse thrashed and twitched on top of me as a river of living blackness rushed out of him, drowning me in that tomb of darkness.