The Haunting of Gillespie House (15 page)

Some showed gaggles of scrawny children and teens playing in the yard. Another was of a young girl with thick brown curls, beaming so widely that it looked as if her face might split in half, holding hands with her two new adoptive parents. Another showed how mattresses were stacked in piles during the day, so that the rooms would be usable, then unpacked at night to fill every available space. Even so, it looked as though three or four children had shared each bed, lined up like sardines in a tin.

A blurry photo depicted a nun spooning soup out of a pot that was heated over an open fire outside.
So that’s how they coped with the tiny kitchen.

The final picture showed a different bedroom. The children weren’t cramped four to a bed, but each had a mattress of their own. The room looked familiar, but not until I noticed a small shadowy bump in one wall–the secret door–did I realise it was my own room. I scrolled down to read the caption.

Children sick with scarlet fever in the infirmary. As many as one hundred children died at Hallowgate during its time as an orphanage.

“Infirmary?”

I recoiled from the computer as though it had burned me. Looked at the photo again, I saw that the children in the picture were clearly sick. A nun bent over one of the beds, ladling something–water, probably–into a boy’s mouth.

I’d seen enough. I powered down the computer, turned off the lights, and slowly climbed the stairs.

It would be easy to move to a different room,
I thought as I stood in my doorway and watched the shadows play over the place where dozens of children had struggled, and failed, to stay alive.
It’s not like I have to stay here. I only took it because it’s closest to the stairs.

I wondered how angry Mum would be if I disturbed her by deconstructing my room and moving it in the middle of the night.
Probably very.

C’mon, it’s not a big deal. You’ve slept here before. You can change rooms tomorrow.

I sighed, stepped over the threshold, and closed the door behind myself.

tk tk tk tk tk tk

“Are you kidding me?” I gasped. I was sure I’d cut all of the branches that were close enough to hit my window. I stormed towards the tree’s silhouette, pulled open the glass, and looked out.

None of the boughs were even near touching the window. In fact, the air was still, and the tree’s leaves weren’t moving except for an occasional quiver.

What’s the noise, then?

I closed my eyes and focussed on pinpointing the infernal tapping. It wasn’t coming from outside my room, after all, but from behind me. I turned slowly until I was facing the outline of the tiny square door hidden behind the wallpaper.

I felt as if I were in a trance as I walked towards the door. The rhythmic tapping seemed to be growing louder, closer. I knelt on the carpet so that my face was even with the door, and stretched out a hand to touch the surface.

My fingertips tingled where I felt the tapping lightly vibrate the wall.
Like a beating heart,
I thought, as the intensity of the taps increased again. I drew my fingers back then brought my index knuckle forward to rap on the wall three times.

The noise stopped instantly. I held my breath, listening as hard as I could, then I heard three very distinct raps mimicking mine.

I scrambled away from the wall, my heart hammering as I tried to make sense of it.

“Hello?” I called, but my only reply was silence.

A single thought echoed in my head, drowning out logic as it consumed me:
I need to get the door open. Whatever’s inside there has to be let out.

I bolted from my room and raced down the stairs. My footsteps thundered on the wood as I abandoned all attempts to stay quiet. I found a small paring knife in the kitchen drawer and clutched it in my fist as I raced back up to my room.

By the time I knelt in front of my door again, I was panting, and a light sheen of sweat was sticking my pyjamas to my skin. I put my head near the wall and called softly several times. There was still no answer, so I pressed the blade into where the wallpaper curved to cross over the edge of the door and began cutting.

The paper was thicker than I’d expected, and it took me several minutes to sever the wallpaper around the entire square. When I was done, I dropped the knife and dug my fingernails into the narrow gap I’d made. I pulled until my fingers ached, but the door stayed fixed in place.

Of course. There’s a keyhole. It’s probably locked.

I took up the knife again and carefully removed the paper from the bump on the inside of the frame. Behind it was a small bronze keyhole… and I thought I knew where I could find the key that fit it.

On the day my parents had signed the lease for the house, the real estate agent showed us a jar of keys. She’d said no one was really sure which door each key belonged to or which ones were no longer needed because the locks had been changed, but she left it with us in case we ever needed one of them.

As I went down the stairs for the third time that night, I tried to remember where the jar was. I checked in Dad’s study first, then in the laundry, and I finally found the old jam jar perched in a cupboard above the fridge. Its collection jingled when I shook it, and I unscrewed it on my way back to my room. I knelt in front of the door, tipped the two-dozen keys onto the floor, and spread them out.

They were all very old. Some were rusted, a couple were bent, and one looked partially melted. It only took a minute to find the key I needed, though. It was smaller than the others, and the bright bronze matched the keyhole. I picked it out of the pile and held it up to the light. It had a delicate, ornate carved design and was small enough that I could have covered it with one finger.

I pushed it into the keyhole. The lock was stiff after years of disuse, but I twisted it as hard as I dared. It unlocked with a gentle click.

The door swung open on its own when I removed the key, finally granting me access to the area beyond. My heart thundering, my palms sweaty, I bent forward to look inside. It was exactly what I’d expected, after all: an empty space that went on for several meters before ending in a solid wall.

I rolled back onto my heels and exhaled, uncertain if I felt more relieved or disappointed. If there was no one and nothing behind the door, then the tapping must have been coming from somewhere else–maybe a pipe in the wall that wasn’t secured properly or something in the rooms below that echoed into the tiny compartment my door guarded. Either way, I would change my room the next morning and not have to worry about it after that.

I’d half-closed the door when something on the room’s back wall caught my attention. It looked like white writing on the dark-grey stone. I squinted at it but couldn’t make out what it said.

“Jeeze,” I muttered. I hesitated on the edge of the frame for a beat, then crouched down and started wriggling my torso through the opening.
If I’m going to go to the trouble of opening the damn door, I may as well explore whatever mysteries it offers, no matter how mundane.

It was a narrow crawlspace. I could reach my hands out to the side a little, but the ceiling was so low that I had to shuffle along on all fours with my stomach only just above the ground. At least it was a short passageway. I reached the end and lowered my chest farther so that I could raise my head and read the writing.

With my body blocking most of the light from the bedroom, I had to shuffle my mass about as much as I could to get illumination.

“Lots… lets…”

The markings were crude, as though they’d been made by a child blinded by the dark, but once I figured out the main words, I was able to piece together the rest. I read it carefully, making sure I had it right.

“
Let’s… play… hide… and… seek.
”

The door behind me slammed closed.

I was engulfed in perfect darkness. It was the blackness of nightmares, when you feel like you’re drowning hundreds of miles under the ocean’s surface, and no matter how hard you kick you can’t see so much as a hint of light. I screamed and jerked, and my head hit the ceiling with a crack. Sharp pain flashed across my skull. I hunched down, pressing my forehead to the icy-cold ground until the worst of the sting subsided.

My ears were ringing–whether from the slamming door or when I’d hit my head, I wasn’t sure–and I felt dizzy. I reached a hand towards the wall to the left but couldn’t feel it.

That gives me enough room to turn around, at least.

I shuffled in a little circle, trying to get myself facing the door without getting jammed in the narrow confines of the passageway, but not even my feet bumped the walls as I made my turn. I began crawling forward, occasionally touching the ceiling above my head to make sure I was leaving enough room. Then I stretched my hand forward to feel for the door.

One minute… two minutes…

Panic started to build in my chest as I moved farther and farther into the blackness without finding the exit.
It didn’t take me this long to get inside, did it?
I kept reaching my hand forward, expecting to feel solid wood but grasping only air. My limbs started trembling from having to carry my body’s weight at such an awkward angle. My chest was grazing the floor, and every time I moved forward, my back bumped the ceiling.

It’s getting lower,
I realised with a stab of shock.
The ceiling is getting lower.

Panic hit me, and I tried to scream, but even though my throat vibrated, I couldn’t hear my own voice. I turned again, trying to find the walls, trying to find anything I could latch on to, but my fingers found no purchase, and every movement seemed to reduce the vertical space I had.

I rotated to face the opposite direction, desperate to find a wall. The stone felt ice cold under my burning, aching fingertips. The space had reduced so that I couldn’t crawl anymore. I had to stretch my hands forward, press my palms to the floor, then use my arms and my toes to drag my body a few inches forward.

I tried to call for help again. Just drawing in the air to yell pressed my chest and my back against the floor and ceiling. Tears began to leak out of my eyes as I gasped. I was suffocating, my arms aching, my head pounding, my skin chilled from where it touched the unnatural stone enclosure.

I had no more wiggle room. My head was tilted, and even by exhaling as deeply as possible, I couldn’t get enough space around my body to move. I was trapped in a vice that refused to let go.

tk tk tk tk tk tk tk

I turned my head towards the noise, and my eyes finally found something other than black. A shape was coming towards me out of the darkness—a child.

And yet… the figure was
not
a child.

Its eyes were the clearest; they had no pupil or iris, but they shone at me like huge white disks in the dark. Its face was narrow, gaunt, and unnaturally wrinkled, as though its skin had aged while the flesh and bones underneath remained those of a child. There was no colour in its face—I could have been looking at a corpse.

My mouth tried to scream, but my lungs had no room to draw in air.

The child—the
thing
—dragged itself towards me. As its hand extended in my direction, I saw its nails had grown long. When the fingers hit the floor, they made the abhorrent tapping noise that had haunted my stay in the house.

tk tk tk tk tk

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t protect myself. I couldn’t escape. All I could do was watch as the thing that belonged to the darkness scuttled closer.

Henry isn’t in the house anymore…

Then I felt them touching me—creatures had approached me from behind, unseen and silent. With their bony, bloodless hands, they grasped my legs and arms, tugging at me, squeezing my flesh, and scratching at my skin. Henry’s nails tapped on the ground twice more as he closed the distance between us, and his mouth spread into a toothless smile as he reached out two unnaturally long fingers to caress my face.

I drew in a deep, hungry gasp of air. It was such a shock to be able to breathe that, at first, I didn’t realise where I was.

Shadows cast in moonlight by the tree outside my window danced over the wall, painting beautiful patterns on my wallpaper. I stared at them for a moment then moaned, flipped myself over, and stared at the door.