Authors: Spike Black
He looked harder. Squinted. Tried to rationalize what he was seeing. Just shadows, perhaps. A trick of the light.
And then he said something that he would come to deeply regret.
Three words.
Three little words that fell from his lips before his brain could engage.
Three words that would cause so much trouble.
“What
is
that?”
Oona followed his line of sight. “Huh? What?”
He flushed hot, realizing instantly what a terrible mistake he’d made.
She looked back at him. “What am I missing?”
He met her stare with raised eyebrows and what he hoped was an innocent face. “Hmm?”
“Tell me. What?”
He shrugged. Shook his head. Fought hard to keep his face impassive, but a slight twitch in his cheek threatened to give him away. “Nothing. Nothing.”
Oona eyed him suspiciously. She looked up at the window.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye with mounting dread. Held his breath.
She turned back to him. “What did you see?”
He gritted his teeth and glanced back at the window. It was empty. He exhaled. “I told you, it was nothing. Forget about it.”
But Oona wasn’t buying it. Her face drained of color. “You saw something, I know you did.” She pointed. “At the bedroom window.”
“What? No…” He registered the terror behind her eyes and knew that he had to do something. He held her look a moment longer. “Gotcha.”
She stared at him, her mouth hanging open.
He smiled weakly. “It was a joke.”
“A joke?”
“Yeah. Of course there’s nothing there. Boy, you’re so gullible.”
She continued to stare, scrutinizing him, and for a moment he thought she was going to see through his lie.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just don’t do it. Ever. You know how I get.”
They reached the cottage, stepping from the track to the gravel driveway. “It was just a laugh.”
She dismissed him with a shake of the head and marched up the path to the door. With her back turned, Silas glanced up at the bedroom window, his heart in his throat.
The figure, he was relieved to discover, was not there.
The figure that, with its drawn white face and thin frame, had looked remarkably like the old man from the photograph.
4
D
espite her hatred of the place, Oona was pleased to be back at Cairn Cottage. Her bladder had been full for most of the return journey, and she had chosen to tolerate the discomfort rather than suffer the indignity of relieving herself on the moors. As she entered the bathroom and reeled from the stench, however, she wondered if she’d made the correct decision.
She identified the source of the odor immediately: the heavily stained carpet. Never a good idea in any toilet, she thought, least of all one that had a turnover of new occupants every week. It may have only been a drop or two from each male guest, but the collected samples of stale urine had formed a noxious aroma that caused her to gag as she inhaled.
Oona reached out to lift the lid of the toilet bowl and stopped, noticing the film of yellowed grime that coated the edge. Grimacing, she grabbed a wad of toilet paper and used it to winch open the lid.
Reluctantly taking a seat (she hated using shared toilets, and only ever used public bathrooms when it was an absolute emergency), she felt a surge of emotion and gritted her teeth to stem the tears.
They had been in Yorkshire for less than twenty-four hours and already she missed her home comforts and her clean, modern, un-spooky house. She had to wonder if she had made a terrible mistake in coming here. Six more days of
this?
But she couldn’t be fussy and she didn’t want to complain.
Sometimes you just have to put up with these things.
This trip was about Silas, and easing his stress. As much as he had tried to keep from her the details of what had happened, the physical toll on him had been shocking, and she had begged him to let her help. She had extracted some basic information, mostly about him not getting along with his colleagues like he used to, and she understood that. She knew from her own experience that it was rarely the job that got you down but the people you worked with.
She tried to put a positive spin on her surroundings. Compared to the rest of the cottage, the bathroom wasn’t so bad. Okay, so the bathtub had a ring of grime around it and a rusted plughole, but it didn’t look wholly uninviting. As she finished up she decided that a nice, soothing bath was just the thing to put her in a positive mood for the rest of the day.
She leaned over the tub and turned the hot faucet. Water pumped out in intermittent bursts before settling into a steady stream. She let the tub fill for a while, then ran her hand under the water and winced.
It was ice cold.
5
S
ilas warmed his hands over the flames that burned inside the large stone fireplace. The temperature in the cottage had dropped steadily throughout the day, to the point that his toes were now numb and his muscles ached and his breath plumed ahead of him when he exhaled.
He removed the poker from its rack and stoked the flames. Replacing the poker, he noticed a pair of black cast iron cats atop the andirons, staring grimly ahead with glass eyes.
He looked around, taking in the room’s exposed beams, its patterned, swirling carpet, the paintings on the walls. The furniture consisted of an old Chinese coffee table, two vintage armchairs and a matching sofa upholstered in a green and red floral fabric. He recalled his long-dead grandparents having identical seats in their warden-controlled apartment when he used to visit as a kid.
He dropped into an armchair and cracked open his book:
Don’t Stress It! The Complete Guide to Mental Health and Wellbeing
. Oona had found it while browsing the self-help section of a bookshop and bought it for him.
She was big on that sort of thing, but it wasn’t Silas’s cup of tea. Not quite enough adventure on the high seas for his liking. Still, he’d promised her that he would give it a go, and now seemed like the perfect time.
Not that he had been honest with her about why he was so stressed, of course. He could never tell her that. He’d given her some bunkum about work piling up in his tray, his impending sergeant’s exams, and the asshole colleagues on his shift. He felt particularly bad about that last one. They were a nice bunch, really.
He removed the bookmark and read a paragraph, before flipping back a page to refresh his memory. He found that he couldn’t recall reading anything that had come before, despite only starting the book two weeks earlier. He flipped forward and read the paragraph again.
And again.
(Screeee—screeee—screeee—screeee—)
Quiet times were always the worst, because the bad memories carried with them an overwhelming noise that was impossible to ignore. The flashes of image and bursts of sound were like a mental battering ram, slamming relentlessly against the walls of his sanity.
Silas slid his marker in the page and closed the book, chuckling at the peculiar irony that he was unable to relieve his stress because he was too stressed to read how.
He heard the gush of running water coming from upstairs.
Good for her
, he thought.
Making herself at home.
He settled back in the chair and closed his eyes.
(Screeee—screeee—screeee—screeee—)
“We’ll draw straws.”
That was how it always started when the alarm went off in the empty cell block.
The alarm had frightened everyone enough times that Silas knew exactly how each of his colleagues would react. They all shared the same initial response on hearing that awful squeal - a stunned silence, looks of mock-horror, and a general open-mouthed amusement at their predicament - but then the familiar patterns emerged.
Wendy always looked terrified, but she didn’t like to show weakness and was often the first to volunteer. Kelvin leaned back in his chair and took another bite of his chocolate bar. He was twenty-one, he was cool (or at least, that’s what he wanted everyone to think), and he couldn’t give a shit. And Roland treated it all as one big joke. A way to torture Maisie, the young Community Support Officer, by threatening to send her down there.
“We’ll draw straws,” said Brian, the level-headed sergeant, but Silas shook his head and stepped forward.
“I’ll do it.”
“Woo, big man,” Roland mocked, a curious mix of relief and jealousy washing over his scrunched features. But Silas didn’t believe that putting himself forward was particularly brave or noble ( although he certainly didn’t want to see poor Maisie sent down there). He volunteered only because to him, the whole thing was bullshit.
Wendy, Brian, Kelvin, Roland - they all believed the ghost stories. Especially Roland. His jokes, his banter - it was all a smokescreen. He was the most terrified of the lot of them. Silas saw it in his eyes.
Silas had never tolerated any of that supernatural nonsense. The alarm wasn’t ringing because some kind of spectral pest had set it off - it was ringing because the cell block was old, and the alarm had an electrical fault.
Even if it turned out he was wrong, and there really was a phantom setting off the alarm in the abandoned cell block of Chalkstone police station, then so what? In his years as a police officer he’d seen his share of true horror - a motorcyclist with his forehead crushed the way a boiled egg cracks when bashed with a spoon. A beautiful young woman, her brains splattered on the sidewalk after a drunken fall. The blackened husks of two children, burned to death in their car seats.
He could handle one little ghost.
6
A
large spider spun a new home for itself in the corner of the kitchen window as Oona washed dishes at the sink. She admired the elegance of the creature even as it repulsed her, its spindly legs plucking at the web like a harpist’s fingers dancing over strings.
The kitchen window had no blind or curtains, and now that the sun had gone down the window was just a square of black through which Oona could see nothing but her own reflection.
She had a thought that made her skin prickle. What if someone was out there, looking in? She imagined how she would appear from a peeping tom’s perspective - her head and shoulders framed in a perfect square of light - and considered continuing her chores in total darkness. Until, of course, she realized that would terrify her even more.
She dried the last of the chipped cups and the foggy wine glasses. She wiped down the draining board, folded the tea towel, and, leaning forward, glanced back out of the window.
They can see me, but I can’t see them.
It struck her as she stood there that it was the absence of
everything
that freaked her out most of all. There was nothing to see, but also nothing to hear.
There isn’t even a TV
, Silas had said when extolling the virtues of the cottage before they booked, and a taste of the quiet life had sounded appealing. But now all she wanted was the garbled noise of a stupid game show coming from another room, or any of the cacophony of sounds that made up suburban town life, sounds that normally she didn’t even notice - a baby’s cry, the roar of a lawnmower, the relentless bark of an angry dog.
Oona shuddered, pulling away from the window, and felt something pulling at her hair. She put her hand up to her face and broke through the strands of a cobweb. She winced, grabbing for it, but couldn’t find it.
As she wiped her face she saw something that stopped her heart.
The spider - the large, scary spider - was no longer in its web.
It had vanished.
She scrubbed frantically at her face. Shook her head vigorously.
Oh God, is it in my hair?
She felt it crawling on her, walking on her hair, over the back of her neck, down her spine. It couldn’t possibly be in all of those places and yet it was.
Now she was starting to hyperventilate, and her skin itched with the crawling legs of a thousand spiders, and she tried to regulate her breathing but her heart was pounding, her vision pulsing, and she was hot. So very hot.
She searched the window sill, the frame, the sink. All she needed was to see the spider, to know that it wasn’t on her, and she could relax. The itching, the scratching, that constant crawly feeling - it was all psychological, she knew that. If only she could see the blasted thing…
A voice broke the silence. “Hey.”
Oona jolted, placing a hand over her thumping heart. Silas was behind her. “I do wish you’d stop doing that.”
“Sorry. How was your bath?”
She hesitated, considering what she should tell him. “It was lovely, thanks. Just what I needed.”
“Ah, good.” He nuzzled into her. “This place isn’t so bad, huh?”
He kissed her neck and Oona pulled away. “Don’t…”
“What?”
“Somebody might see.”
Silas frowned. “See?”
Her face flushed. She signaled the window. “Out there.”
A laugh exploded from him. “You know what’s out there, right? Moorland. We’re surrounded by it. There’s not a soul for miles around.”
He was right, of course, except that truth didn’t make her feel very safe, either.
“Yeah, but…”
“But what? You really think somebody’s standing out there, on this cold, dark night in the middle of nowhere, just so they can spy on us?”
“I don’t know…”
“Hah! Seriously, that’s crazy. And you’re a nutcase for even thinking it.”
“Thanks.”
Silas moved over to the window and peered out. “Only a total lunatic would be out there right now.”
Oona had a creepy thought that tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Like that woman in the village?”
He paused. “Hmm, yeah.
She
might be just that mad, come to think of it.”
“Oh, great. What if she followed us home? What if she’s out there right now, watching us?”
His eyes lit up. “Or maybe it’s Aggie, waving.”