Read Secret of the Shadows Online
Authors: Cathy MacPhail
‘Yesterday.’ The strains of it floated towards me. My gran’s favourite Beatles song.
My gran. She was in this house, singing, alive. My legs felt weak now at the thought of seeing her again.
I had changed things once more, stopped my gran from falling in the cellar, stopped her from dying, because she wasn’t meant to die when she did. She had more years to live with us. With me.
‘Gran?’ I called out, but she didn’t stop singing, busy in the front room packing more boxes. I longed to see her face again. I stumbled through the hall.
I saw the shadow of her, and stopped dead. She was holding a glass vase up to the sun and a prism of light exploded around the walls, and all the while she was singing.
I burst into the room. ‘Gran!’
And she stopped singing and she turned round to me.
But it wasn’t Gran.
It was Aunt Belle.
And the world began to spin. I slumped to the floor.
I came to with Aunt Belle’s face close to mine, all concern. ‘Honey!’ She was patting my face gently. I felt a cold cloth on my brow. ‘Can you sit up?’
She helped me to my shaky feet and settled me gently on a chair. ‘I knew this would be too much for a young girl like you,’ she said. ‘Too much has happened in this awful house. I shouldn’t have let you come.’
She looked around the room at the boxes and things on the floor. ‘It’s just we’ve got so little time to get all this stuff sorted before the removal men come.’
‘Removal men?’ I was trying desperately to catch up.
She looked at me, a puzzled frown on her face. An arched eyebrow, a lipsticked mouth, her make-up, her blonde wig. How could I ever have mistaken her for Gran? It was because I had hoped – wanted it so much.
‘Well, I certainly want all our things out before they demolish the house.’
Now I was lost again. ‘Demolish?’
‘Raze it to the ground,’ she said dramatically. ‘And a good thing too. With the history this house has got it’s better for it to be destroyed, obliterated, wiped off the face of the earth.’ She said it with such an angry passion, she didn’t sound like my funny aunt Belle. ‘It would only become an attraction for ghoulish tourists. A body in the cellar! I still can’t get over it.’ She was talking to me as if I knew everything already. ‘And your gran slept here with all that buried beneath her in that cellar.’
‘Where’s Gran?’ My mind was still wrapped in a mist.
Aunt Belle leaned down to me and held my hand. ‘We both know where she is, honey. She’s in heaven now. You can be sure of that. She opened the door of heaven when she found out who that evil woman actually was – when she made sure that poor old dear at last had a decent burial.’ Aunt Belle shivered, as if the thought froze her blood. ‘Your gran’s a heroine, Tyler. No, we know exactly where she is. Heaven, with all the other angels.’ She smiled.
She thought those words would comfort me and maybe in another time they would have. But not now – now, all I could think was,
She’s dead
. After everything I’d done, my gran was still dead.
She had told the world about Sister Kelly, but the part of the past I most wanted to change hadn’t happened. I hadn’t brought my gran back.
Aunt Belle saw my tears. ‘Come on, we’re getting out of here. We’ve done enough.’ She pulled me to my feet. ‘We’ll go home and make a nice cup of tea.’
‘Home?’
‘Home. To your own house! And you can call your mum and dad. They’ll be in Sydney now.’
Mum and Dad in Australia – that hadn’t changed.
‘And Steven will be back on Friday. I think he’s run out of money.’
Steven had still gone off to Blackpool with his mates, and Aunt Belle had still come over from New York to spend time with me and clear the house.
Some things had changed and others had stayed the same.
‘And remember, all your friends will be home from their vacations in a couple of days.’
My friends were coming home, and I had missed them so much. I stood by the car watching Aunt Belle lock the door of Mille Failte. The sign was still there. Such a lovely bungalow, with honeysuckle climbing round the door. A picture postcard kind of house, hiding such a wicked secret.
‘At least now the evil’s gone from it,’ I said, as Aunt Belle started the car and we began to drive down the track to the main road.
She sighed. ‘I hope so.’
Mum phoned us later that day. I cried when I spoke to her. I’d tried not to. I didn’t want to worry her. She was so excited at seeing Sydney Opera House for the first time, calling me as she sat on the steps outside. But I just couldn’t stop the tears.
‘I’ll be home soon, Tyler. I knew I should never have left while that blinking house was being knocked down.’
‘Mum, I’m OK. Honest. Aunt Belle and I are fine.’
And by the time Aunt Belle and I had made spaghetti and meatballs for tea, I had almost come to terms with a lot of what had happened. I’d seen the press cuttings Aunt Belle had proudly kept.
HOUSE OF EVIL
The Angel of Mercy who was really the Angel of Death
And there was the grainy photo of Sister Kelly, the one Gran had left for me to find. They had discovered that Sister Kelly really was the same person as all those other nurses. Mary Duff, Catherine Macey, Margaret Campbell, Mary Cameron, Dorothy Blake and Sister Kelly – they were all one and the same evil woman. They had dug Sister Kelly up and found the DNA evidence to prove it.
We had got her in the end, my gran and I.
I figured out a lot of things that night. The spirit of Sister Kelly had lain dormant, her secret undisturbed, until Gran came with her latent psychic ability and had felt the evil in that house. Somehow, somewhere, she had found the photograph and she had begun to investigate Sister Kelly, digging out the truth, piece by piece. And that was when Sister Kelly had manifested herself in all her evil. She had come back with a vengeance to protect her vile past. She had stopped Gran from exposing her secrets. And now I knew for certain, it had been Gran who had made sure I would stay there, using everything to keep me in that house, so I would change the past and give her the time to root out the truth. Gran was as strong in death as Sister Kelly, but her strength was used for good, not evil.
My gran. There was a lovely photograph of her on the front page of one of the papers. She had gone to the authorities, told them of her suspicions that the remains of a body were in the cellar and that she knew the real identity of Sister Kelly. Things had happened very quickly after that. All Sister Kelly’s secrets began to tumble like dominoes, one after another.
Poor Eleanor. She had escaped and tried to tell the world what was really happening at Mille Failte, and no one would listen. So easy to dismiss the rantings of a confused old woman. They had taken Eleanor back to her terrible fate. Eleanor, whose spirit had stayed there to make someone listen, to make someone believe her at last.
My gran smiled out at me from the front page of the paper, and that smile reassured me. She seemed to be saying, ‘You and I, Tyler, we beat her. We beat Sister Kelly.’
I had achieved that at least. I had given her those extra few days she needed to expose Sister Kelly.
‘It’s so good to see you smiling again,’ Aunt Belle said as we sat with our hot chocolate before bed.
‘I’m so proud of Gran, Aunt Belle,’ I said.
‘Me too. She was always the strong one. My big sister. She’d be so happy that you and I are sitting here and we get on so well.’
‘Yes, but it would have been so much better if you and she had been able to spend all those happy times together in the house of your dreams.’
Aunt Belle scoffed at that. ‘With a dead body down in the cellar. I don’t think so. That house is better gone. In two days the bulldozers move in.’ She sighed. ‘End of a dream, Tyler.’
End of a nightmare
, I was thinking.
And then I asked the question that had been bothering me all day. ‘Aunt Belle, what did you mean today, when I said at least the evil’s gone from that house and you said, “I hope so”? You can’t think there’s any evil there now?’
She took a long sip of her hot chocolate. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this to you, and don’t tell your mum I said this. But, you know how I’m a little psychic too?’ I tried not to smile. She said it so seriously, but I knew there wasn’t a psychic bone in my lovely aunt Belle’s body. Imagination, that’s what she had. Lots of imagination.
She went on. ‘I couldn’t say this to your mum. Anything like that freaks your mum out – she would never listen to me.’
‘Listen about what, Aunt Belle?’
‘I told your gran she should move out of that house right away. As soon as she told the police of her suspicions, she should have been out of that place, not spend another second in that house. But, of course, I was only the little sister, the one with the imagination. She wouldn’t listen to me. She said she didn’t intend to move out until they started digging the cellar up.’ Aunt Belle hesitated. ‘You’re the only one I could tell this to, Tyler, honey, but I think there was something evil in that house, had to be. And your gran stayed there one night too many.’
I lay in bed thinking over what Aunt Belle had said. And I knew it was true. Sister Kelly didn’t get Gran in the cellar, but she got her later, that final night in Mille Failte. And I knew something else. She was still there. In that house. Waiting. Waiting for me.
I knew too I was going to go back, as soon as Aunt Belle was safely asleep.
I thought about it for a long time as I lay there, listening for Aunt Belle’s gentle snoring. Yes, I was going to go back.
I would have my revenge.
There was no other way to get to Mille Failte at this time of night except by taxi. I waited till I was well away from our house before I took out my mobile and called the taxi number.
I didn’t have long to wait till a taxi picked me up. The driver had a big smile on his face. ‘You’re out late for a young lassie.’
‘I know,’ I said, slipping into the back seat. ‘My mum’s going to kill me.’
One thing about our local taxi drivers, they loved to chat. He turned to me and grinned. ‘Och, don’t worry. She’ll only shout and bawl at you and then just be relieved you’re still alive.’ He began to drive, still talking, glancing at me now and then in his rear-view mirror. ‘You’ll have been at your pals’, eh? Lost track of time. I was young myself once.’ He was giving me a cover story for this imaginary mum without me saying a word. ‘Just tell your mammy the truth. Because mothers have a knack of seeing through lies.’ I let him talk. He was helping me forget what lay ahead of me. ‘Now, where exactly are you going?’
Of course I couldn’t tell him the truth. Couldn’t admit I was going to that infamous house in the middle of the night. So I gave him an address on the coast road. Somewhere he could drop me. But the address was close enough to impress him. ‘Wow! What do you think of that house on the shore, eh? Mille Failte? He was shaking his head. ‘What was going on in that house and not a soul knew about it. Not till that old lady comes along and gets suspicious, and finds out the truth. Better than Miss Marple, eh?’
Yes
, I thought,
better than Miss Marple.
‘I’ll wait till you get into the house, hen,’ he said when he pulled up at the address I had given him. I couldn’t think of an excuse to send him away, so I opened the gate, walked up the drive and pretended to ring the bell. I turned and waved at him, but still he stayed, his pleasant face still smiling. I wished he would go, though I knew he was only anxious for my safety. Then he pointed upstairs and I looked up and my heart sank. A light had come on in an upstairs room. Panic must have shown on my face, because he gave me the thumbs-up and winked. ‘Remember. Tell the truth.’
I sighed with relief when I heard another call coming in to him on his radio. He threw me another wave, and then he was gone.
I have never moved so fast. I was down that path and out of the gate seconds after he sped away. I saw his tail lights disappearing round the bend in the road. Only then did I cross the street and head for the house.
It lay still and silent, and though I held my breath and listened hard there was no sound, no feeling of a malevolent presence. Yet, I knew she was here, waiting for me. Her next victim. Her final victim. And I knew where I would find her.
I opened the door and walked into the hall. My step was steady and firm as I made my way to that room, the room where she died.
The green chair still sat in that corner and the bed was bare now, with only a mattress, but otherwise there was no other furniture here, just some boxes piled up by the door. Tomorrow, the removal men would come and clear the house of everything before it was obliterated from the face of the earth.
What I had to do must be done tonight.
I lay on the bed on my back and stared at the ceiling. The door of the room swung slowly shut.
The room grew darker. The only sound was the beating of my heart.