The Patchwork House (6 page)

“So what does this have to do with me?”

“I have no idea. I’m just guessing. But the reason he’s pissed at you could be something to do with how he ended up with Chloe.”

“You’re reaching,” I said. “The timelines don’t match up. I haven’t seen Derek in eight years. He’s been with Chloe for, what, seven?”

“I think so. Maybe it was a delayed rebound. Did he ever date any women you dated?”

“No I don’t think so. I was pretty self-absorbed in my late teens and early twenties, so it’s possible.”

Chloe and Derek returned with the wine.

“All quiet?” I asked them.

“Not a sound, thank God,” Chloe said.

Derek sniffed loudly, as if to challenge the silence. “Kind of disappointing,” he said.

Chloe placed two bottles of wine on the table and opened a third as she sat down. Derek handed out a glass to each of us.

“Just three bottles then?” I asked with a smile.

“That’s just for me,” Chloe said.

“Don’t drink too much,” Beth warned her, “or you’ll have to keep going to the bathroom during the night.”

“Oh good point. Can we get a chamber pot in here or something?”

We all turned up our noses and laughed at that. We chose our playing pieces and started the game. The wine was a cheap red but it was quite pleasant and helped sand the rough edges from our little group. Even Derek was mellowing. Between the ghost hunting and the alcohol, something resembling my former friend began to surface. We even told Chloe and Beth about our experience on Gibbet Lane.

“We used to go down there quite a lot when it was dark,” I said. “Our parents thought we were each at the other’s house, but instead we snuck off to Gibbet Lane.”

“It was quite a long walk too.”

“Yeah but it was so spooky, and there were so many weird stories about it. How could we resist?”

“We never took a video camera, did we?”

I shook my head. “No, missed opportunity there. Neither of us owned one. I had an old cine camera somewhere though.”

“So,” said Beth, “did you ever see anything?”

I glanced at Derek and said, “We didn’t
see
anything, no.”

“So what did you hear?” Chloe asked, catching on.

“We were walking down the lane towards the crossroads in the middle,” I said. “There was a grassy area in the center with an old tree, and that’s apparently where they used to hang highwaymen caught robbing people on the London Road.”

“So why did they call it Gibbet Lane?” Beth asked, interrupting. “If they hanged people from a tree, you don’t need a gibbet.”

“I don’t know! Hello! Trying to tell a story here. So this is a narrow lane, barely wide enough to get one car down. On both sides are these tall grass-covered banks and beyond that is just fields, so there isn’t much light other than from the moon.

“Derek was walking along the top of one of those banks, and I walked in the lane. You felt it more than me, right?”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “It was so weird. All of a sudden, no warning, no buildup, suddenly there’s this booming noise and the whole bank shakes. Literally it shakes. But not like an earthquake where it’s constant movement. No it was like BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, three times in a row.”

I picked up the story. “The second boom actually knocked Derek off the bank. The third boom we heard behind us, because we were running the hell away.”

“I’ve never been so scared,” said Derek. “I remember the first boom making me stumble and the second one was violent enough to knock me off.”

“He crashed into me and then we just took off.”

“So what was it?” Beth asked.

“We don’t know,” I said. “To this day we have no idea.”

“People we talked to suggested it was a rabbit underground kicking the inside of its burrow.”

“Bloody strong rabbit!” I said.

“Someone else said it could have been a water pipe that got blocked.”

“Seems really unlikely given the lane is bordered by fields. I don’t know why anyone would run a water pipe along it, and underneath one of the banks. Makes no sense.”

Derek nodded. “A mystery,” he said.

“Bullshit!” said Beth

I stared at her with my mouth open. So did Derek.

“It’s not bullshit!” I insisted.

“I know. I just wanted to see the look on your face.”

“Just for that I’m going to buy out your entire hotel chain and demolish the lot.”

Chloe turned to Derek. “Didn’t you tell me you failed A-Level maths because you went ghost hunting?”

Derek shifted. He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah we went out the night before the exam.”

“Did we?” I didn’t remember that at all.

“Yeah we did. I wanted to stay home and revise, but you insisted.”

“Oh so it’s
my
fault you failed maths? I managed to pass it.”

“Not really a surprise there, Jim. You did fuck all work all year and just strolled through the bloody exams. What did you get, straight As?”

“I got a B in History…”

“Meanwhile us lowly humans had to put in some actual fucking work to get good grades. It didn’t matter if we had a big exam coming up, you still wanted to go bloody ghost hunting.”

“You could have said no.”

“I
should
have said no. Do you know what happened when my dad saw my maths mark?”

He didn’t have to tell me. I remembered all too well the bruises Derek sported when his father’s temper got the better of him.

We all fell silent after that. The game went on for another ten minutes but Derek had descended into a funk and I wasn’t really in the mood either. Only Chloe and Beth kept the game going through sheer determination. But in the end we gave up before it was done, declaring Beth the winner because she had the most money and property.

Chloe yawned dramatically. “Maybe it’s time to get some sleep.”

Thankfully it was still warm in the drawing room, and I think we were all glad we’d decided to bunk down in here together rather than venture upstairs to separate rooms.

We all had to use the bathroom again. Derek and Chloe went together and returned without incident. Then Beth and I took our turn.

When we got back to the room, Derek and Chloe were already wrapped up in their sleeping bag, fast asleep.

“Parents,” I whispered.

“Shhh, this is probably their first sleep in years!”

“You know what I’m scared of, more than anything?” I asked as we climbed into our double sleeping bag.

“Things that go bump in the night?”

“No, I’m scared of taking a freezing cold shower in the morning.”

“Oh shit!” Beth said, too loudly.

“Shhh!”

But it didn’t matter. Derek and Chloe would have slept through anything.

Beth whispered anyway. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s not too bad. I’ve stayed in one of Dad’s houses before where there was no hot water. You get used to standing
beside
the shower and sticking bits of yourself in. It’s almost bearable that way. The worst part is washing your hair.”

“Maybe we should just go jump in the lake.”

I laughed gently. Beth yawned and I took that as my cue to turn off the gas lamp, plunging the room into total darkness.

“Can’t you leave it on?” Beth asked.

“The gas will run out. Don’t worry, I have the flashlight right here. I’ll put it on the floor right by our heads. And remember, if you have to go to the loo before dawn, you can wake me up and I’ll go with you, okay?”

But she didn’t answer me. I could tell by her breathing she was already asleep. It had been a very long day, even though 10:30pm was only 3:30pm for us. Still, we had slept so badly on the plane. I was glad she’d fallen asleep before me. It meant she wouldn’t be the only one left awake.

I couldn’t get to sleep right away. I was wondering if the cameras upstairs had captured anything interesting, assuming they were still running. I should have gone to check them but I wasn’t feeling brave enough to go on my own. Plus it would be really hard to get out of the sleeping bag now, not just because I didn’t want to wake Beth but also because it was so warm and comfortable in here and I felt like…

***

I woke suddenly. I had no idea what had startled me, and it was so dark it was hard to tell whether or not my eyes were open.

I listened for a moment, but I couldn’t hear anything aside from loud snoring coming from either Derek or Chloe. I reached outside the sleeping bag and grabbed my smartphone. Switching it on, the light hurt my eyes and I had to blink rapidly. The luminous display danced in front of me, an illusion caused by the contrast of light and dark, but still unnerving. It was 11.30pm. I’d been asleep just an hour.

Strangely I didn’t feel tired. Instead I experienced again the same feeling I had while hiding beneath the table in the library. My heart was beating fast and my hair was standing on end.

Why? I turned off the phone and listened, trying to make out if there was any sound in the room beyond my three sleeping companions’ breathing. There wasn’t anything else. I waited to see if my eyes would adjust to the dark, but there just wasn’t any light, however faint, for my vision to get used to. I tried closing my eyes and going back to sleep, but I was hyper-aware now. I couldn’t relax. What had spooked me? Had I heard something just before I woke? I turned the phone back on and switched on the flashlight app. The camera flash lit up with surprising brightness, aimed at the door in a focused beam of light. I sat up and swept the light slowly around the room. The light moved over the wall by the door, passing over a side table, the alcove in the corner with the empty vase, the fireplace ahead of me, with its metal grate and wooden mantle. Another recessed area to the left of the fireplace, with empty shelves. I kept going, my hearing still trying to filter out the others’ snoring, trying to detect any hint of something that didn’t belong.

Something rustled to my left. I jumped, jerking my light towards the source. It was just Derek, turning over. His movement caused Chloe to turn onto her side too. Their breathing quieted down after that. There were no other sounds in the room.

So I kept going with the light, sweeping it over Derek and Chloe’s sleeping bag and beyond them to the shutters over the window. I twisted my body as the light moved past the corner of the room to my rear left and then right behind me. I swung around so I was now looking over my right shoulder and followed the circle made by the phone’s light. Then I moved it across the corner to the right of the door, and back to my starting point.

Nothing unusual.

I switched off the phone and lay back down next to Beth, trying to listen to her gentle breathing, letting it wash over me, trying to relax. I stared up at the ceiling, though of course now I could see nothing at all.

And that’s when I realized.

I’d checked the room at eye level, but not above my head.

I snatched my phone up and stabbed at the on button. The light glared in my face again, casting the room in a dull, blue pallour. I didn’t turn on the phone’s flashlight again, I just used its regular illumination to see by.

And then I looked up.

In the centre of the ceiling was a chandelier that wasn’t terribly opulent, but was in good condition. I knew this because I’d seen it in daylight. Right now I couldn’t see it at all.

The centre of the ceiling, right above my head, was black.

Quickly I turned on the phone’s flashlight and aimed it upwards.

The blackness swallowed the beam. It was like anti-light. The lit circle shone on the ceiling around the edges of something black where the chandelier should be. Something that shouldn’t be there. Something that would not reveal itself no matter what angle I shone the light.

And then it moved. Very very slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. I found myself reaching over to Beth, trying to shake her awake.

And then it
turned
.

I’m sure it
looked at me.

It had no eyes, no shape, no form, but it was looking at me. I knew it. I felt it in the core of my soul. It was watching me. It knew me.

It hated me.

And then it fell from the ceiling, like it had let go. It fell right towards me. For a brief second, I saw something form in the centre of the black mass as it dropped.

I screamed and dropped my phone. My arms flew up to protect my head.

But there was nothing. Nothing touched me.

I picked up the phone again, shaking. I aimed it upwards, hardly daring to look.

There was the chandelier. No blackness, no inexplicable shadow.

But it was in here, with me, with us.

I used the light from the phone to find the lamp. I turned the valve and it hissed into life, filling the room with warm, comforting light.

The others didn’t stir.

I got out of the sleeping bag and searched the whole room. I looked beneath the table and under the chairs, even in the fireplace. My eyes kept returning to the ceiling, wondering just what the hell I’d seen.