The Secret of Crickley Hall (29 page)

She screamed each time the cruel stick, with its splayed end, cut into the flesh of her legs, marking them, the agony streaking through her whole body.

And then, it stopped. Although the terrible pain lingered. And when, through tear-soaked eyes, through her hysteria, she looked towards the light again, the figure had gone and Cally, awakened by her sister's tortured cries, had started screaming too.

34: SCREAMS

Gabe was roused from his slumber as soon as the first scream came from his daughters' room. Eve, who had got into the bad habit of sometimes taking a Zopiclone to help her sleep at night, was slower to wake. She grabbed Gabe's arm as he scrambled to get out of bed.

'What is it?' she asked as the last dregs of sleep were banished by alarm.

'Loren,' he said urgently, throwing back the bedclothes. 'Something's wrong.' In bare feet he rushed to the bedroom door, Loren's agonized screams almost causing his limbs to lock and freeze. He was along the landing and tearing into Loren and Cally's room before Eve had even left their bed.

Although consumed by fear for his daughter, he could not help but register the deep iciness of the room—it was like plunging into a mountain lake or stepping inside a freezer storage unit—and it almost stopped him dead. In sheer reaction, he flicked on the light switch by the side of the door and saw Loren lying uncovered on her bed in a foetal position, her shoulders curled inwards, her arms round her legs. As she screamed, billows of breath vapour were expelled from her open mouth.

Cally was sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes as if just awakened, and her cries were not as forceful, nor as shrill, as her sister's.

Before going to Loren, Gabe quickly checked out the bedroom, looking for an intruder. It took but a second to see there was none. He ran to his daughter, Eve coming through the door behind him, and went down on one knee beside the bed.

Loren's eyes were closed and her pale face was drenched in tears. He reached out a hand to her shoulder and she flinched away, her eyes snapping open, a wild hysteria in her glare.

'Loren, it's me, Daddy. What's wrong, what happened?' He pulled her close and comforted her as Eve moved round to the other side of the narrow bed to reach her.

'He-he-hit-me!' Loren cried through chest-heaving sobs. Gabe did his best to calm her.

'Easy, Loren, easy now,' he soothed. 'You've had a bad dream.'

'N-no, Daddy. He hit me. He hit me.'

Eve moved nearer and when Loren felt her presence, she turned and buried her face into her mother's chest.

'There's no one here, Loren,' Eve told her gently. 'There's no one who could have hurt you.'

Gabe grabbed Cally from her bed and held her in the crook of one arm. She stopped screeching immediately, intuitively aware that it was her sister who needed attention.

'What is it, baby?' Eve was saying quietly to Loren. 'What frightened you? Did you see something?'

Loren's panted sobs went on.

'It must've been a nightmare,' said Gabe, his voice equally quiet. 'There's nothing in the room.' Just to make sure, he ducked his head under both beds. 'And nothing could've got past me in the hallway.'

Loren gave a great shudder as if the frigid air had got into her flesh. But Gabe felt it was no longer as cold as a moment before. The room was still chilled, as was the rest of the house, but when he breathed out there was no misty vapour.

Eve hugged Loren tight against her and began a soft rocking motion. 'It's okay, Loren. You're safe now. Mummy and Daddy are here. Tell us what you dreamt.'

Loren suddenly jerked away from her mother, although she stayed in Eve's comforting arms. 'It wasn't a dream, Mummy,' she implored, wanting to be believed. 'Someone hit me. Hard. With a stick.'

She buried her head back against her mother again, and Gabe and Eve's eyes met, both thinking the same thing.

It couldn't be,
thought Gabe.
That would be crazy.
He gave Eve a little shake of his head. He'd left the bamboo cane he had found earlier that day locked up in a downstairs cupboard, along with the Punishment Book.

Eve stroked Loren's hair. 'But there's no one else here, baby. Nobody could have hit you.'

Loren yanked herself away again, her tears held for a moment. She twisted round to Gabe as if for support. 'He hit me across the legs, Daddy. He hit me really hard.'

'Who did, honey?' he asked. 'Who hurt you?'

'The man. He was standing at the end of the bed. He was holding a stick and he hit me with it, on my legs. I think he made me bleed!'

As one, Gabe and Eve looked down at Loren's bare legs. There wasn't a mark on them.

Loren followed their gaze and searched her own skin for the wounds the long stick should have inflicted. 'But he hit me, he did hit me! It was as if the stick was scalding hot and the pain spread out, like he was hitting me with a lot of sticks.'

Both Gabe and Eve remembered the cane they had examined that afternoon was split several times at one end so that it would act as a flail when struck against anything.

It was Eve who asked, 'Does it hurt you now, Loren?'

The twelve-year-old stifled her sobs once more as she stared at her own body. Slowly she turned to her mother, and then to Gabe.

'No,' she said. 'It doesn't hurt at all any more. I'm not even sore.'

She broke down and Eve took her back into her arms.

35: WEDNESDAY

They left the house just before 7.30 a.m. the next morning, Loren protesting, insisting she was all right now, she didn't need to see a doctor. The sun was shining, but leaves were heavy with raindrops that had fallen in the night. The family crossed the bridge and climbed into the Range Rover.

Gabe had phoned one of his new work colleagues who lived in the area, apologizing for the early-morning call before asking him the whereabouts and the phone number of the closest GP's surgery or clinic. Then Gabe rang the latter, which was a health centre, but only got a taped message advising that the centre opened at 8 a.m.; it also gave the number of an emergency doctor if required.

The night before, Gabe had wanted to rush Loren to the A and E department of the nearest hospital, but she had pleaded with him, she was okay, she didn't want doctors and nurses poking her and asking questions. Surprisingly, Eve had agreed with her daughter. There were no marks or weals on Loren's body, no signs at all that she had been beaten with a stick. Wait 'til morning, she had suggested, see how Loren felt then. Their daughter certainly wasn't suffering any pain now.

Gabe had argued that there had to be
something
wrong. Loren's screams were not just because she was frightened, but because she was being hurt too. Even if it was only a terrible nightmare, there had to be something not right because dreams couldn't cause genuine pain. If she'd imagined the whole thing, that also meant something was wrong with her. Dreamt or imagined, it had been
real
to Loren. She needed to be medically examined in case there really was something physically wrong inside her body, even if it was only severe night cramps.

In the end, they had agreed on a compromise: Loren would see a doctor first thing in the morning. They had left for the health centre early so that they would arrive before the first scheduled patients, giving Loren a better chance to be seen right away.

Gabe was angry and frustrated, a father who had no answers for his distraught daughter. Loren maintained that there had been a man in the bedroom, a man holding a stick. Like the stick—the cane—he had found hidden away behind the false wall in the closet? he wondered. She hadn't been able to describe the intruder because he was in shadow, the light coming from behind. It must have been imagined! Or dreamt! It was this goddamn house. There was something peculiar going on inside Crickley Hall, something that caused hallucinations. Some houses had personalities, didn't they? That's what some people believed and maybe they were right. A house that fucked with the mind. Eve had been affected by it, become a little weird, wanting to stay whereas before she couldn't wait to get out of there. Now Loren had been touched by it. And Cally. Could they have been sunspots he'd seen floating round her yesterday? Or something else, something unreal?

They had to leave, find a different place to rent. It would take a day or two to arrange—no, it would take at least a week, probably more—to organize. But he'd get on with it. They were moving out.

Gabe switched on ignition, shifted into gear, and three-point-turned the Range Rover so that it was pointing uphill. They headed for Merrybridge.

36: INTRUDERS

The sister and brother with the impossibly ambitious names tramped along the road. Although the sun shone brightly enough, the air was damp and their anoraks, one blue, the other red, were zipped up to their chins.

A green van passed them heading uphill, as were they, the driver giving a short blast of the horn as he went by. Neither the girl nor the boy bothered to wave back.

'You sure?' Seraphina asked of Quentin.

Her swollen nose was a different colour to the rest of her podgy face: red and sore-looking, its yellowish bridge merging with the purple-yellow at the inner corners of her deepset eyes.

Quentin, tall and stocky, looked back at her—his sister had a hard job keeping up with him on the steep road. 'Course I'm sure. I saw them driving off when I was doing my
egg
round.'

His hardworking mother, besides cleaning other people's homes for a living, kept a chicken hutch in their backyard. It was her son's job to collect eggs in the morning before school (from which he was temporarily suspended) and deliver them to various customers in the area. Fresh eggs for breakfast brought a good price and Trisha Blaney needed the extra money. Cleaning did not pay particularly well, despite all the hours she put in with her friend and neighbour Megan, and since Trisha's husband Roy had walked out on her and the kids six years ago, any money she did earn was already spent. Not that her estranged husband had ever done much to bring home the bread when he was around. Idle and dim-witted he was—their son Quentin was of the same mould, had to be pushed into doing anything—and if truth be told, she had been glad to see the back of him.

Seraphina, not being one for climbing, nor even for walking far, puffed and wheezed as she straggled behind.

'Yeah, but you sure they won't come back?' she said to her brother.

Quentin slowed his pace to let her catch up. He was used to the hill road because of his morning rounds. 'Won't take a minute to leave it on the doorstep.' He held up the plastic bin-liner he carried, something heavy bulging at the bottom of it, and waggled it in the air. 'Be a nice surprise for 'em.'
Noice sorproise for 'em.

Seraphina drew level with him. 'No,' she said breathlessly. 'I don't wanta leave this one outside like the pigeon. This present is going inside the house. Right into her bed.'

'Don't be daft, you can't do that. What if they catch us?'

'Look, I got the key from Mum's drawer so we could do it. I'm not gonna waste the chance.'

'She'll go demented if she finds out.'

'Mum only cleans the place once a month. She don't need the key for a coupla weeks yet. She won't notice it's gone.'

'I dunno, Seph. It's dodgy.'

'Don't be such a minger. We'll be in and out, no problem.'

'You don't know where her bedroom is.'

'We'll easy find it. She'll have Barbie Dolls and things, little girly stuff.'

'You only wanta get your own back, just 'cause she punched your lights out.'

'Shut up, Quenty. You weren't there, you don't know what happened. I wasn't looking and I fell over.'

'She decked you, you mean. Anyway, it got you a few days off school.'

'I weren't going in and letting everybody see what she done.'

'You're lucky Mum's so soft on you. She'da packed me off to school all right if I come home with a busted snout'

'It ain't busted.'

'Good as.'

'No it's not. It's just swelled up a bit.'

'And red. Like one of them baboon's bottoms.'

'Shut up or I'll make you go into the house on your own.'

Quentin stayed silent. His younger sister could bully him because she was a lot smarter. And she knew things about him that she could tell. Mum wouldn't like him stealing. Or smoking. Or throwing stones through windows when no one else was around. A lot of the time, Sephy put him up to it—she was always winding him up—but Mum wouldn't believe that Sephy could be cruel; much better to do what she said and keep her sweet.

'Let me have another look at it,' his sister called out as she lagged behind again.

'What for?'

''Cause I like looking at it. She won't, though. She'll throw a hissy fit. She'll go to bed tonight, all nice and innocent like, and she'll pull back the blankets and she'll see a bloody great rat lying there. Wish I could be around to see it!'

Seraphina gave a little snigger, an unpleasant sound. Her brother joined in and ran a hand through his spiky hair.

'Why don't you shove it right down in the bed so she don't see it at first? She'd jump in, put her feet down and feel something furry and sticky.'

The stickiness would be the rat's blood. He had cornered it in the chicken hutch, where it was after the feed, and Quentin had thrown the loose brick at it, the brick that helped keep the wire door shut. It had stunned the rat, stopped it getting away, and he had bashed it until it squealed like a baby, and then was dead.

He held the top of the bin-liner for his sister, and she peered in. Like Quentin, she also enjoyed seeing the blood.

'It stinks!' she complained.

'Yeah, it's a rat,' said Quentin drily.

Seraphina raised her head and smirked. 'Fancy-knickers is gonna wet herself.'

Her brother smirked back.

They resumed walking, and though the exercise puffed her out, Seraphina could not stop smiling.