Read Secret of the Shadows Online
Authors: Cathy MacPhail
And I screamed.
‘Tyler, Tyler,’ said a voice. It sounded as if it was coming towards me down a long tunnel. ‘Tyler.’
I was afraid to open my eyes. Afraid of what I might see.
‘Tyler! Tyler, honey!’ I opened my eyes at last. Aunt Belle’s worried face broke into a relieved smile. ‘Oh, honey, you gave me such a scare.’
I was still in the cellar, but now it was light and bright again. ‘If I hadn’t caught you, you would have gone down the whole flight of stairs,’ she said. Now that I seemed to be fine, Aunt Belle could even see the funny side. ‘Lucky I’ve got a bit of fat on me. I broke your fall.’ Then she hugged me.
I wanted to tell her, I longed to tell her, about the face, the shadow in my room, the cold. If Susan hadn’t been there, I’m sure I would have told her right at that moment. But then Susan’s face appeared behind my aunt.
‘Let’s get you back upstairs,’ she said. ‘You just lost your footing. Easy to do on these steep steps.’
When we reached the hall Susan asked, ‘Do you want to lie down?’ She indicated my room.
‘No!’ I almost shouted it. My room was the last place I wanted to be. ‘No, I’ll be fine in the front room.’
They must have wondered why. I saw them exchange glances, but they didn’t say anything. But I couldn’t bear the thought of going in there, in case that old woman was waiting there for me too.
I limped into the front room and Aunt Belle went off to the kitchen to make more tea. Aunt Belle’s answer to everything.
‘It’s a lovely little house,’ Susan said, dropping back into estate agent mode for want of anything else to say. ‘It really will be easy to sell.’
‘Were you the one who rented it out to the last people?’ I asked her.
‘The Forbes? Yes, I was.’
‘They left because of his job, didn’t they?’
She didn’t answer straight away. Maybe she was just writing something on her clipboard, but I didn’t think so. She was thinking about what to say. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Funny though, they rented another house not a mile from here. Up on the hill.’
‘They’re still here? In the village?’
She turned to me then. ‘Yes, up on Craigview Drive. They rented a semi-detached house up there. Nice, but not half as nice as this.’
Now I was puzzled. Why did they leave so suddenly and move only a mile from here? Had something scared them too?
It was just as Susan was leaving that Aunt Belle was sick. Her face went suddenly pale and she ran into the bathroom. I hurried in after her. ‘What’s wrong?’
She splashed her face with water. ‘I don’t know. It just came over me.’ She smiled at Susan, who was standing in the doorway looking concerned. ‘It’s Tyler here, I think she’s trying to poison me. She’s my sole heir. She gets this house if anything happens to me.’
Not used to Aunt Belle’s sense of humour, Susan looked a bit taken aback.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Susan, ‘your tea was OK. I only poison one person a day.’
We giggled as we watched Susan drive off. ‘Poor soul,’ Aunt Belle said. ‘You’d better take good care of me, or she’ll be having you arrested.’
Then she ran into the bathroom again and was sick. ‘I think I’ll lie down,’ she said as I lead her back into her bedroom. ‘I got quite a shock there in the cellar. When I saw you just about to tumble down those stairs, my stomach did a somersault too.’
She lay down on her bed. ‘Maybe you can go and get me some fruit. Some oranges maybe.’
‘Sure I will. As long as you’ll be fine on your own.’
‘Feel better already,’ she said. But she lied. I picked up her book and put it on her bedside table.
‘Here’s your book if you want to read.’
I had planned to tell her all about the things that had happened to me. I had promised myself I would tell her after Susan left. But how could I do it now, when her face was so pale and she looked so tired?
‘I think I just need a nap,’ she said.
She was sound asleep by the time I left the house. I wasn’t really wary of leaving her by herself. Somehow I knew she was safe in her own bedroom. It was me the ghosts wanted to reach . . . But now I had another thought. Maybe they had tried to reach someone else too. Perhaps the Forbes family had also experienced strange things.
I had to meet them, talk to them. Find out the reason they had left so suddenly.
Craigview Drive was situated high on the hill overlooking the village. It only had four houses on it. It was easy finding the one the Forbes were renting. A woman opened the door. A redhead. She looked as if she was sucking something sour. ‘Yes?’ She didn’t smile.
‘Hello, my name is Tyler Lawless . . . My aunt owns Mille Failte.’
Did she catch her breath when I mentioned the name of the house? I was sure she did, but her face stayed as tight as ever.
I had a story ready and began to blurt it out before she could shut the door on me. I had found something in the house, I said, and I wanted to check if it belonged to any of her family. I had a soft leather purse in my hand, one of my old ones.
I held it out to her as I told her my story. I had hoped she would invite me in so I could get talking to her. But by the grim expression on her face as she took the purse from me and turned it over in her hand, I doubted that now.
‘Never seen this before,’ she said, and she handed it back to me. She managed a muttered sorry before she began to close the door on me. I couldn’t let her do that. I decided to be honest with her.
‘Please, that’s not the real reason I came here.’ I held out the purse. ‘I know this doesn’t belong to you.’ The door was almost closed.
‘So why
are
you here?’
‘I need to know why you didn’t stay in Mille Failte. Why you left so suddenly.’
Her eyes flashed angrily and she sucked in her cheeks. ‘We left because of my husband’s job.’
I wasn’t going to accept that. ‘You’ve only moved a few streets away. That’s not the truth.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
I was getting her back up. I took a step closer, afraid, this time, she would shut the door in my face.
‘It’s actually none of your business why we left. I didn’t like the house. All right?’
‘I’m living there now. I need to know if something happened in that house. Something weird.’
That shot home. She couldn’t hide the sudden flash of understanding in her eyes. For a second I thought it might make a difference, but I was wrong. ‘Good luck,’ was all she said.
She was about to shut the door so I splayed my hand against the wood, holding it open. ‘Why would I need good luck?’
I thought again she was going to tell me something, say something more. She stared at me for a long moment. Giving herself time to think. Then she glanced back into the house. She’d made a decision. ‘I have to go. I have something on the hob.’ And a second later, I was staring at a closed door.
I stood for a moment, not quite knowing what to do. If I knocked again, she would ignore me, somehow I knew that. Was she even now standing in her hallway, watching the door, praying for me to go away? I imagined I could see her through the wood and glass, willing me to leave. She was afraid. Couldn’t she see I was afraid too? Why couldn’t she tell me what she was afraid of? What harm could come to her now? So far away from Mille Failte?
I walked down the path to the street, and began to go back down the hill. The view from up here was wonderful. I stood for a moment and watched the long line of surf crashing against the rocks, a pale misty sun sending a gold shimmer over the river. Coming here to see the Forbes had been a waste of time. I was no closer to the truth.
I didn’t hear the footsteps coming fast behind me. The hand on my shoulder made me jump.
It was a boy, my own age, his light brown hair falling carelessly over his brow. And I could see the resemblance to the woman I had just been talking to, except that he had a smile in his brown eyes.
‘I’m Paul Forbes.’ He glanced back to his house, pulled me in towards the bushes. As if she might be watching us. ‘My mother won’t talk to you. You’ve got to understand why.’
‘Understand what? Why won’t she tell me why you left the house so suddenly?’
‘Because she’s scared. We’ve been out of that house for months, and she’s still afraid.’
‘Afraid of . . . what?’
‘The same thing you’re afraid of. Something’s happening to you, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Saying it now, in the open, to someone almost made me cry. Telling someone at last. ‘There’s something in that house. I don’t know what. You’re the only people I can think of to talk to. I need to know what made you leave.’
‘I’m not sure if I can help you,’ Paul Forbes said. ‘Couldn’t even help myself when we lived there. But I will tell you everything that happened to us.’
There was an old wooden bus shelter on the tree-lined road that wound down to the shore. We sat in there to talk. And there, out of the sun, in the shadows, Paul began to tell me his story.
‘Right from the first night, I knew there was something in that house,’ he said. ‘In that bedroom.’
I didn’t need to ask which bedroom. I knew.
He went on. ‘It was the cold at first. Do you feel that too?’
‘Yes, the rest of the house is fine, but that one room . . .’
He nodded. ‘And the chair in the corner?’
Just thinking of it, even on this warm afternoon, chilled me. ‘In the dark it looks as if someone’s sitting there,’ I said.
‘It freaked me out,’ Paul said, I tried to tell my dad but he wouldn’t believe me.’ He smiled. ‘The only books I read are about zombies and vampires. So my dad, and my mum, thought I was letting my imagination run away with me.’
‘That’s what they always say about me too.’ And I told him my name and about how I was staying with Aunt Belle, and about Mum and Dad being away in Australia. ‘There’s no one I can talk to about this.’ I felt my voice catch in my throat at the sudden realisation of how alone I was. Isolated.
‘You can talk to me, Tyler,’ he said.
So I began to tell him how the shadow was haunting me too, every night in that room. He didn’t know about the cellar, but he did know about Sister Kelly.
‘Sister Kelly,’ I said. ‘She was almost a saint, so I’ve heard. Looked after an old lady.’
‘Did you know the old lady tried to escape?’ Paul said.
‘Escape? What do you mean?’
He shook his head. ‘The woman at The Delicatessen told me. She knows everything. Of course, she didn’t call it an escape. According to her, the old woman had dementia, went wandering. When the police found her, she said she’d been kidnapped, was being kept prisoner. And do you know what they did?’
I was sure I did know. ‘They took her straight back to Sister Kelly.’
‘Yes, they didn’t believe her, because she didn’t know what she was saying, poor old soul, and Sister Kelly was an angel looking after her, they said. But I began to wonder . . . Maybe the old lady was telling the truth. Maybe this Sister Kelly wasn’t the angel she was made out to be.’
I hesitated to go on. ‘I’ve seen that old lady.’ I saw her again in my mind’s eye, there in the cellar. Terrified.
He shot forward. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘She’s called Eleanor. I’ve seen her twice. The first time she looked so happy, but the second time . . .’ I flinched at the memory of it. ‘It was in that cellar. She was terrified. She asked me to help her.’
‘Help her . . . ? If she’s dead, how are you supposed to help her?’
How could I tell him about Ben Kincaid? I daren’t lose his trust now. So I only said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Is she the shadow in the chair? This Eleanor?’
And I knew right then she wasn’t. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘There’s something vulnerable about her. Not sinister at all. Sister Kelly was the one they found dead in a chair in that room. And I think she’s still there in that room.’
‘Wow! You’re having it worse than I did, Tyler.’
‘So what in the end made you leave?’ I asked him.
‘I was scared stiff of that . . . thing . . . that . . . ’ He hesitated, not knowing what to call it. ‘That shadow. I’d sleep with the light on, and the light would be off again when I woke up. Dad said it was a bulb that had gone. He always had a reasonable explanation.’
‘And the door that wouldn’t stay open?’
‘Subsidence.’ We said it at the same time.
Paul took a deep breath, as if the next bit still terrified him. ‘Then one night, I fell asleep and I dreamed. I dreamed of spiders, hundreds of them were crawling all over the bed, and I was suddenly wide awake and the room was pitch-black and it was there, that shadow standing right beside my bed. I’ve never screamed in my life but I screamed then. I was out of that room so fast, and even though my dad was sick he came running out to me and I was pure shaking with terror. Couldn’t stop.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Mum said I’d been dreaming. That’s all it was, she said, just a nightmare. I told them I was never sleeping in that room again, and I didn’t. But the next night, my mum did.’