Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes (14 page)

26

Jeremiah left me when we got to the
village. I didn’t know where he was going, and my head throbbed so much that I
didn’t want to ask. My body felt weary, the energy drained out of me and sucked
away into the night sky. My nose felt like it was swollen with snot. As soon as
we left the village and went home, I was going to crawl into bed and hibernate
through the winter.

At the pub I unlocked my bedroom door
and was greeted by a warm glow. At the end of the room flames spiralled inside
a black fireplace. Funny, I hadn’t even realised it was there. It was strange
the things you missed when they weren’t used. If I had, I would have made sure
Marsha had kept it constantly lit. 
Chop down the entire forest for fuel if
you have to,
I would have said,
just keep that fire going.

The heat spread from the fireplace
and warmed up half the room, but it couldn’t seem to fill the rest. The stone
walls looked like the sides of a cavern, and the air near my bed was draughty.
I walked over to the desk and flicked the switch for the lamp, but the bulb
stayed dead. There were three candles on the desk and next to them was a box of
matches. Marsha hadn’t reset the fuse box, but she’d obviously been in my room
and tried to make it comfortable. I picked up a match, struck it against the
rough side of the box and smelt sulphur in the air. The candle wick soaked up
the spark and a flame teased up the end and cast a dim glow in the room.

I reached into the pocket of my coat
and took out the diary. It felt like a slab of stone. I threw it on the desk
with a thud, settled into the chair and positioned myself so I could see the
door. I wasn’t taking my eye off it tonight.

I lifted the cover of the book and
opened it carefully, as though I expected a poisonous gas to seep out. The
diary was the key to it all, I knew. I just didn’t know how. We were leaving in
the morning, and this was one last chance to sift through the lies and the
secrets. I hardly dared admit it even to myself, but I hoped that there might
be a way to stop it all.

I turned the pages and read. I only
scanned Emily’s part of the diary, unable to bring myself to decode the adult
writing. Something deep inside me, hidden away in my core, knew that written in
the careful handwriting were things that should never be read. I cast a glance
to the door, and seeing that it stood firm, I read Emily’s story, turning her
childish words into adult facts.

At school the teacher -
I knew this to be Clive -
had
taken exception to Thomas talking too much in class. It seemed that he was the
class clown, always laughing and joking and doing his best to make his
schoolmates smile. So Clive sat him next to Emily, who was always a quiet,
serious girl.

Emily didn’t like this at first.
Thomas always copied her work. He pinched her under the table, stole her pens,
and hid her lunch. Emily tried to get him to tone his jokes down, but the boy
wouldn’t be deterred. He talked over the teacher, shouted things out as the
class memorised their times tables.

In one lesson, they learned about the
witches. It was a watered-down version, a tale that saved the children from the
grisly details. Nowhere did the school texts mention the creaking of the trees
as the ropes were tied around them, or the snap or the women’s necks as their
foot supports were removed.

Emily became obsessed with the
witches. She wished she could be one. Then she could make Thomas disappear. She
could magic herself some sweets when mum and dad said no. She could trick the
sky to make it seem like it was daylight, and that would mean she didn’t have
to go to bed. That she didn't have to go up to her room, where things scratched
the walls and footsteps creaked on the floorboards. At night she thought of the
witches as she fell asleep. She dreamed about them as the house swam in
darkness.

Thomas never stopped trying to be
friends with her. One day, Emily decided to use it to her advantage. After
checking with her parents, she offered for Thomas to go for tea at her house
after school. The boy grinned and agreed, and he followed Emily to the cottage.
After a meal of pork chops and mashed potatoes they went outside to play.
Emily’s parents told them not to stray too far, but Emily was in no mood to
listen.

She convinced Thomas that they should
go into the woods and explore. She knew from teacher that that the villagers
had trials for the witches here, though she didn’t fully understand what a
trial was. It sounded bad. Maybe if they were lucky, a witch would still live
in the woods. Maybe she would give Emily powers, and she could turn Thomas into
a centipede and then leave him to live in the forest.

As the evening light began to fade
and clouds stretched over the sky, the children walked into the woods. Thomas
was scared, his face went white. He said that maybe they should just play cops
and robbers. Emily shook her head. She cast her eye to the darkened elms and
knew that tonight they must go.

I sat back in my seat and shuddered.
Emily’s entries in the diary ended here, and the rest of the book was written
in the adult style handwriting, the paragraphs longer, the words bolder. I
wanted to tear out the pages and throw them in the fire. Something told me that
they shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

What had happened in the woods? Where
had Thomas gone, and what had the children seen as they wandered alone through
the trees? My brain screamed inside my skull, told me to stop reading. But I
had to know what happened after Emily stopped writing her diary.

I took a deep breath and felt the
cold air swirl in my lungs. I applied the cipher to the adult paragraph
immediately after Emily’s last entry. As I read the first sentence back to
myself, I felt my chest tighten and close in, as though something were
squeezing me from the inside.

The new body is fresh. It is young,
but we will make it old.

Without thinking I reached forward
and swept the diary away from me. It flew off the desk and clattered onto the
floor, but even that wasn’t far enough away. I swung my foot and kicked it
until it skidded across the room.

My head throbbed in pulses that made
me nauseous. My nose ran, and it felt so stuffed that I struggled to suck air
through it. I couldn’t read anymore of the diary. My skin shivered and my arms
ached. I needed sleep. I was going to be ill for a while, I knew. I’d had
enough colds to realise what a bad one felt like.

I picked up the candle and walked
over to my bed. As I set it down on the bedside table I must have moved too
fast, because a breeze whipped the wick and blew out the flames. I lifted the
duvet and climbed into bed fully-clothed. Despite the jumpers, dressing gown
and bed cover on top of me, I felt like I was in an ice bath. The room was dark
now save for the dim flicker of the fire as the flames chewed through the wood.

I wished there was a hotel nearby. I
wished I could just get in the car and leave. Something told me to get far away
from this place, that to stay even one more night was madness.
I tugged
the duvet up to my neck and over my face, so that only my eyes poked out from
it.

Something rustled in the hallway
outside my room. I lifted my legs and let the blanket hook underneath them,
cocooning myself in it. I stared at the door, wanting to close my eyes and let
sleep take over but unable to tear my eyes away.

The rustling sound grew, until it
sounded like something scraped along the wooden floor outside. My heart pounded
against my chest. I stared at the doorway, eyes wide. Darkness pressed against
the windows and tried to climb into the room, and the fire put up a weak fight.
Soon the logs would burn and the darkness would win. I hoped I was asleep
before then.

The sound stopped outside the door.
There was silence, a moment of utter quiet that stretched out for what seemed
like hours. I tried to take a breath and hold it in, hoping I could still the
beating of my heart and throbbing of my head. A sound thudded out and shattered
the quiet, a terrible noise that threw my pulse into a beat so wild that I
thought my chest would explode.

Knock, knock, knock.

It echoed off the wood of the door. I
gasped and pulled the cover tighter around me.

Knock, knock, knock.

Who was it? Did I lock the door? I
must have done.

“Jeremiah, is that you?”

Knock, knock, knock.

I knew that I had definitely locked
the door, yet as the door handle turned, I realised it would make no
difference. A sharp blast of ice covered my chest as the handle rotated and the
door started to swing open. I tried to close my eyes and hide away from it, but
my brain refused to let them fall shut. A feeling of utter dread seeped into
the room and filled the air, and the darkness grew so heavy that it sat on my
chest like a gremlin. The door slid all the way open, and I heard the patter of
feet as they tread across the floorboards.

27

As the figure moved into the room I
knew who it was. I knew I shouldn’t talk to her, that I shouldn’t look at her.
My head banged and my forehead burned. The room blurred at the edges, like it
was a photograph that had been set alight and had started to curl.
You have
a fever
, I told myself.
You’re not right.
Maybe she was symbolic of
me, of my inner lost child, my own guilt, frustrations, misery. The kind of
stuff I wrote in my analytical essays. “The shadows on the curtain represent
his diminished ego and sense of responsibility”. How pointless it all seemed
now, with my head sweating and the eyes itching.

She moved into the centre of the
room, directly facing my bed. She looked at the floor, her neck bent so sharply
it looked like it was snapped. I saw her out of the corner of my eyes. I didn’t
dare risk moving my head, and the sight brought a burning sense of revulsion to
my stomach.

I realised that the door had shut
behind her, and somehow I knew that it was locked again. Or had it never opened
in the first place? Was the entire thing a product of my panic-filled mind?

Her hair was a sooty black. In
another life she would have been a pretty girl. A happy girl. But now, the
figure in my room didn’t represent happiness. Dread and depression seeped off
her, as though that was what she exhaled rather than carbon dioxide. I wanted
to hold my breath, but I was sucking it through my mouth in such shallow bursts
that my lungs didn’t have enough to hold. At the same time it sounded loud, and
I was aware of it gushing in and out. The girl’s was raspy and strangled.

I wanted to move further up the bed,
get myself into an upright position, but I didn’t dare move. I couldn’t feel my
legs underneath me, and it was as though they overrode the commands my brain
put out.
This is a fever
, I thought
.

This is not a fever
, replied another part of me. I felt
like I was draining away. Like I might liquefy and spread into the bedsheets.
Where was Jeremiah?

I moved my head a fraction and let
more of her come into my vision. She wore pale blue pyjamas with white dots.
They looked a few years too big for a seven year old.
Seven years old,
Christ.

This sent a jolt to my brain. A spark
of recognition, a fact learnt, or in this case, not learnt. I knew that Emily
was seven years old. That was for definite. I didn’t know she wore spotted
pyjamas that were clearly too big for her. That was a detail too rich for my
brain to make up, fever or no fever. When you dream your brain takes the images
it weaves from reality and it pieces things together that you already know.

I couldn’t have possibly known this
detail. I had never been told that instead of buying the correct sized clothes
her parents had gone one or two sizes up, obviously hoping to save money on the
fact she would grow into them in later years. Years that, in reality, they
didn’t get to have with her. Phlegm slid down my throat and landed in my
stomach. It spread through my gut into my legs, my arms, up my spine. With it
came a numbness that cut through the shivers. The girl was real.

Jeremiah, where the hell are you? I
need you!

I knew that I couldn’t look at her. I
remembered what Clive had written. She doesn’t want to be acknowledged. She
doesn’t want to exist.

“Then what the hell are you doing
here?” I said out loud, the words blurting unwanted into the silence of the
room.

Slowly, the girl turned her head away
from the floor. Inch by inch she lifted it in jerky movements. I didn’t want
her to complete the turn. I didn’t want to look into her face, but I just
didn’t know the real reason why. Maybe I was worried that I would see myself in
her face, and that she was a symbolic hallucination of my own fears. Or even
worse that she was real, and I’d be looking into the eyes of a dead child.

Icy tendrils moved in waves across my
skin. I couldn’t think of anything else but escape. Getting out of this room,
into the car, and driving until the tank was empty. I tried to command my body.
This time my legs worked, and I used them to push myself up into a sitting
position, as far away from her as possible. I banged into the headboard and
realised there was nowhere else for me to go. The girl’s forehead came into
view, and then her eyes. So dark they were almost black, darkened rings around
the edges. Pupils lost amidst the darkness. Staring at me.

I screamed. My cry seemed to bounce
off the walls then die. Marsha wouldn’t hear me, I knew. Even if she did, would
she come? Who else knew about this? There was only one person, and he’d left me
alone.

She stared at me now. She waited. For
what? For me to speak? For me to try to run? I didn’t want to look fully into
her face, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. So I looked down at her
legs, followed them to her feet. There was the nail polish on her big toe, no
doubt from where she’d tried to copy her mum. It hinted at a little girl who
wasn’t always depressed.

The room was ice, and it was silent
except for the banging of the pub gate outside as the wind threw it against its
frame. My breath left my mouth in hurried gasps, sighing through the stillness
in the room. It felt like this was a deathly peace that should be left
undisturbed. To make a sound was like kicking the foot of a sleeping bear. Yet
I couldn’t stop the sound of my breathing, and I knew that she could hear it
too. Somehow I hoped she didn’t see me, that it was a one way mirror that only
I could see through. I knew this wasn’t the case. She took a step toward me,
nail-polished foot first.

I looked out of the window and for a
second considered jumping out. At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t. There
was a fifteen foot drop, and even if my neck didn’t snap when it hit the ground
I knew my ankles would. Yet I had to do something. My arms and legs had stopped
working. All I could feel was the headboard as it dug into my back, and the
drum beating inside my head.

The girl’s footsteps made a soft
patter as they got closer to me. There was a smell in the room like earth.
Dampness and mud, and something sour. I choked back a retch.

I caught a glint of movement across
the room. The doorknob moved, and then stopped. It rattled again. I knew now
that the door was definitely locked. There was nowhere for me to go. Nothing
for me to do but what the girl craved. I had to look into her eyes.

Cold breath blew on my skin, and I
realised that the girl’s face was next to mine now. I felt the ice that drifted
off her skin. She wanted me to look at her, and I knew I had to do it.

The door rattled again. Something
heavy thudded against it, but the door held firm.

“Marsha! Marsha! Wake up you old
cow,” said a voice outside.

My skin tingled and I felt her stare
burn onto me. I knew that she peered at me, eyes wide and black, skin pale. I
gulped. Against my will, I felt my head begin to turn towards her. Pinpricks of
fear dotted up and down my arms, and a voice inside my head told me to shut my
eyes. I knew that I couldn’t. I knew the only end for me was to look into those
dead eyes. With my breath catching in my chest, I twisted my head and met her
gaze.

When I looked into her face, a rush
of dread covered me like snow. My heart stopped beating, my arms felt numb. I
stared at her young face and I wanted to scream. A realisation hit me as I
looked at her. One so sudden that it felt like a hammer on my skull. The figure
looked like Emily, but it wasn’t her. There was something in her eyes,
something old. Something sick.

The thing stood at my bed, whatever
it was, sure as hell wasn’t Emily Jenkins. She was dead and her body was in the
ground somewhere. Her poor parents, still shell-shocked a decade later, were
testament to that. The figure stood beside me was something else entirely. It
wore the body of the girl, but it was something that had used her when she was
alive. Now that she was dead, it tied her to the earth as a spectre. It was a
drowning spirit that wouldn’t release its grip on the girl’s soul, and it
wanted to erase any trace of its retched crimes.

Well I could certainly do that. I
didn’t want to bury the secrets away from those who should know, but I was the
only one who could put an end to it, I realised. The diary was the key. Within
its pages, gouged in ink, was a record of the terrible things that had
happened.

I knew who the words belonged to,
those that weren’t written by Emily’s hand. I knew what the children had seen
in the woods. I knew what swung from the branches of the trees, and what had
followed Emily out again.

My legs felt like weights, but I
strained and lifted myself off the bed. The figure stood on the other side. It
twisted its head as I moved, following me with its eyes as I crossed the room
and picked up the diary. Next to me, built into the wall, the flames of the fire
licked and spat. The figure’s mouth opened wide as if to shout, but no noise
left its lips.

I took a breath and held it firm in
my chest. I held the diary in the air, and in one decisive motion I threw it
into the fire. The flames welcomed the book, and soon they twisted over the
pages and began to melt them into ash.

There was another thud at the door,
and this time it burst open. A familiar mass stood in the doorway, a thick body
bulging in tight fitting clothes. A mop of red hair, eyes wide and full of
fire. Jeremiah paused as if he didn’t know what to say. He looked at me, and
then looked at the fire. He saw the book roasting against a charred log, and
his face turned red.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I couldn’t squeeze out the words. I
looked over to my bed and expected to see the girl crawling towards me.
Instead, the room was empty.

I tried to find my voice.

“Jeremiah...look.”

 I wanted to gesture to the left with
my head, but I didn’t have the energy. I felt like I was going to collapse.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?
Do you have a fever?”

“A ... fever?”

Did I have a fever? I thought back to
when I first got into in bed. My head swimming. Feeling like my skull was a
balloon ready to burst. The bedcovers scolding hot on my skin. I did have a
fever. I was sick.

 “That’s enough,” he said. “This trip
is finished. You need to get home, get to bed and stay there for a week. You
should have told me you were this bad.”

He was right, of course he was right,
how could I be so stupid, how did I forget something like that? I looked at
Jeremiah. His face was concerned. He guided me over to the bed and watched me
as I climbed into it. As he pulled the covers over my icy body, I cast my eye
over to the fire. The flames climbed over the pages over the book and roasted
it into a black dust. I felt the weight slip off my chest, and my breathing
came easier. Soon my eyelids started to drop, and I felt like finally I could
sleep.