Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes (11 page)

20

Jeremiah slammed the drawer so hard
that the desk wobbled and the floorboards whined underneath it. I felt a chill
run through my body and for a second I thought of telling him about the busted
radiator to give him another reason to have a go at Marsha. From the heated
look in his face I knew that was a bad idea.

“Where is it?”

I walked over to the desk and slid
open the drawers. Part of me dreaded opening them and seeing that the diary was
there. I didn’t know where it had gone or who had taken it, but a part of me
felt happy. I hoped someone had stolen the diary and taken it far away. I hoped
they’d walked into the fields in the dead of night and buried it in a mound of
dirt.

“It was right here,” I said.

Jeremiah raised his fist and pounded
the desk. The sound made me jump. I had never seen him like this. He always
wore a grimace on his face, but now his features twisted with pure anger.

“This is all bullshit. I’m ready to
call curtains on the charade.”

Do it. Let’s get in the car and get
the hell out of here.

But I knew that couldn’t happen. If
we took off, where did that leave the village? Were people going to die because
of this girl? Was I going to have to live with the knowledge that I knew about
it, and that instead of doing something to stop it I fled into the night?

What if she followed me?

“I swear it was here, Jeremiah. I
translated a page and then shut the thing up in the drawer.”

“What did it say?”

I tried to remember the words written
in adult handwriting, but they were hidden away. I ran through my mind, lifting
rocks and looking into the shadows, but it was like something had teased them
away from me and locked them up. As though they were words I shouldn’t
remember.

“It was horrible stuff. Something a
kid couldn’t have written. ‘The flesh is soft. Her mind will be a dark place
soon’. Shit like that.”

Saying the words felt wrong on my
tongue.

“You’re losing your mind.”

Irritation stroked my spine. “Really?
After all the shit you’ve told me, you still don’t believe me?”

Jeremiah pulled the chair from under
the desk. He lowered himself into it, and his weight sagged against the wood.

“It’s because of everything I know
that I can say it. I know what it’s like to believe. I know how it feels to
want there to be something else. And listen to me when I say this, Ella. I
wanted there to be something here more than anything.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew
what she was like.”

“Who?”

“Emily.”

Jeremiah looked at the floor. When he
lifted his head back up and stared at me, there was sorrow in his eyes.

“I’ve been on hundreds of cases.
Possessions, hauntings, poltergeists, demons. All of them were convincing to a
fault. But the thing is, sometimes they are just a load of crap. You want to
believe so much that your mind twists facts and squeezes them into theories
where they just don’t fit.”

“Damn it, Jeremiah. I’m not
bullshitting. I felt things in here, in this room.”

He shook his head. “You felt the
effects of a nasty cold. You got the creeps. I mean, it’s a horrible story, a
girl killing herself. I might not show it, but I feel sorry for the poor
bastards who had to cope with it.”

I clenched my fists. “I can't believe
that I'm the one having to convince you about this.”

“Find the bullshit, Ella. Always
remember that. You need to be able to see through it, and right now you’re blind.
It’s time to go home.”

My arm muscles tightened, and I felt
like my heart was trying to beat out of my chest. When I had come here I had
been the doubter. Now I felt like a crackpot. I was jumping at shadows, hiding
from things that I couldn’t see. Jeremiah’s words washed over me and left me
drenched in a feeling of stupidity, as though I were a little kid hiding from
my imagination.

Jeremiah sunk forward. He let out a
long huff of breath.

“I regret bringing you along.”

There were three knocks on the
bedroom door. Without a word of invitation, the door started to open. When it
swung wide, Marsha stood in the doorway. She crossed her arms, and her face was
pale like it had been powdered with flour.

Jeremiah got to his feet.

“What do you want?”

“It’s time for you to settle up,” she
said.

Jeremiah pushed up his sleeve and
looked at his watch.

“It’s only half-three. We’ve got
another night left yet.”

“Aye, you have. But in the morning I
want you to scarper.”

I felt Marsha glance at my face but as
I looked to meet her eyes, the glare disappeared. I had always known that we
would have to leave, but when I thought of going with so much unfinished,
something stabbed at me. It felt like I would be letting everyone down.
Professor Higson. Jeremiah. Clive. Emily’s parents. I turned toward Marsha.

“You know something,” I said.

Jeremiah shot a look at me, ginger
eyebrows arched.

“What are you talking about?” He
said.

Marsha leant into the doorframe.

“The lass is tired.”

I was sick of this. My head throbbed
and my arms ached. I wanted to get in bed for a week and sleep off the phlegm
and the cold. When I thought of being in the room alone, I felt goosebumps
tingle across my skin. When I pictured the woods beyond the village, with the
shadowy figures watching the children play, a needle of ice threaded through
me. Despite it all I knew I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t just scared, and I
definitely wasn't making things up.

“Cut the crap,” I said to Marsha in a
voice so firm it seemed to surprise her. “You warned us to stop what we were
doing. What was that all about, if you didn’t know anything?”

Jeremiah stood up. “She did what?”

Marsha shook her head as if she were
dismissing the tall tales of a school kid. “Make sure she gets some sleep,” she
said. “The Scottish air sends you southerners loopy.”

“Just give us more time,” I said.

“No. In the morning, I want you
gone.”

I looked at Jeremiah, pleaded with my
eyes for him to say something. Instead he looked at Marsha and nodded.

“We’ll leave at first light.”

21

When Marsha and Jeremiah left my room
I walked to the side of my bed and collapsed onto it. As my back hit the
mattress I felt the energy leave my body. My muscles slackened and my brain
emptied.  My thoughts drifted out of the pub, floated over the barren fields
and stopped outside the darkened woodland where the trees stood like sentinels
and beckoned me in. I felt the shadows calling me, tempting me to take a step
into their forest tomb.

I sat up on the bed. I looked at the
bag of books next to the desk, and it seemed like a sack full of boulders, too
heavy for me to take with me when we left the next day. I didn’t know if I even
wanted to. The idea of staying up in my room every night, the lamp beside me
warding off the shadows as I poured through small-print texts, made my head
hurt.

What was the point?

What was I doing with my life? As
soon as I hit eighteen I had left my last foster family and resolved to cut all
ties with them. They were a nice enough couple, a little cold maybe, but I had no
desire to see them again. I made some friends in university but as I got sucked
into my work I let the friendships wilt until they were just weeds dying in the
soil.

I thought about the Jenkins family
and their tragedy. They had lost something, but they still had each other. I
had never even had anything to lose, and the way I was going, I never would. I
kept a cold layer of ice around me that made people scared to come close, and
those who did soon felt the life drain out of them. One by one people stopped
calling me, and before coming on this trip I had spent so much time behind
drawn curtains that when I went outside the sunlight hurt my eyes. In the end
all I had was a throbbing head and a sack full of books written by men who died
decades ago.

I tore myself off the bed. The
floorboards screamed underneath my feet as I strode to the door and went out
into the hall. As I walked down the stairs I heard a radio playing in the pub
lounge, where a lonely voice bemoaned the loss of his wife, and the twang of a
guitar undercut his grief.

Marsha stood behind the bar. She
stared across the lounge and out of the window, eyes deep in thought as they
swam over the grey village buildings.

“Mind if I use your phone?”  I said.

She jerked her thumb to the end of the
bar.

I picked up the receiver and dialled
Professor Higson’s number. As the tone beeped I tried to settle the pounding of
my heart.
Was I really going to do this?

I knew I should have waited until I
got back to Manchester. It would have been better to do it face to face, so
that he could see the resolve in my eyes as I told him, but I worried that the
further away I was from the village the easier it would be to slink back into
old habits.

“Professor Higson.”

“Professor, it’s Ella.”

A pause.

“Is everything okay?”

I took a deep breath, held it in my
chest.

“I’m leaving the course.”

“You sound distressed.” His voice was
academic, emotionless.

“I’ll explain some other time. But I
want you to take this as notice that I’m done with it all. I’m sick of
studying. There’s got to be more to everything than this.”

I heard him swallow as though he were
taking a drink while talking to me. “Maybe you should finish your interview and
we’ll talk when you get back.”

“We’re coming back in the morning.
Jeremiah has told me fuck all.”

The word sounded harsh as I croaked
it into the receiver. I had never sworn in front of Higson. In a way I was
scared of his reproach as though he were one of my foster dads. I’d always
guarded my tongue around him. It didn’t matter anymore.

“Did you ask him about Bruges?”

Annoyance made my throat dry. “I
couldn’t give a shit about Bruges. You used me, Higson. You don’t give a shit
about me. When I'm off your course you’ll move onto another toy.”

“I don’t know where all this is coming
from,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice.

“I’m just sick of it.”

Another pause.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you. I was
going to leave it as a surprise until you came back, but you sound like you
need good news.”

I drummed my fingers on the counter
of the bar. Right now, ‘good news’ sounded like long forgotten words, like
fragments of an ancient language buried centuries ago.

“Go on.”

Higson forced levity into his voice.
“Funding for a doctorate has come up. I could put you forward for it, Ella.
Imagine that. A PHD and a research post at the university.”

There was a time when I would have
jumped around the bar with my arms in the air after hearing those words. Now,
they tumbled over me like stones in a rock slide. A PHD meant years of studying.
When that was done I  would get a job as a researcher at the university, and
that meant spending  the rest of my life with my eyes locked on the black print
of academic texts.

I felt my chest tighten. I knew what
I had to say, but the words slipped from my grasp like mice scurrying from the
swish of a broom. I took hold of them and squeezed.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m done.”

I slammed the phone into the receiver
with such force that Marsha jerked her head up. I wondered if she had been
listening to the conversation. Her eyes had been engrossed in a magazine
crossword, but nothing escaped her eager ears.

I didn’t care. I leant against the
counter and felt myself sag into it. I looked out of the pub window and caught
a glimpse of the fields beyond the village, empty except for the faded grass
that was throttled by the wind.