The Haunting Read online

  Kara picked up the incense and I noticed she had long acrylic nails that had been painted silver and midnight blue to represent the changing phases of the moon. “Is the witch still in the cellar?” she asked.

  Shell nodded. “I hear her most nights.”

  Kara took the money from Shell, put the incense into a striped paper bag and handed it over. “My offer still stands, you know,” she said. “Any time you want me to come and bless the Waterwitch, I’d be more than happy.”

  “The witch wouldn’t like that,” Shell said, picking up the bag. “I don’t think it would be safe for you.”

  Kara laughed. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Besides, didn’t you say once that it was mostly men she doesn’t like?”

  I looked at Shell, who shrugged and said, “Well, that’s just a feeling I get from her sometimes but I don’t know for sure. And, anyway, if you got in her way I don’t think it would matter much whether you’re a—”

  “Shell, honestly, I’ve blessed countless haunted inns – the Dolphin, the Three Pilchards, the—”

  “Yes, but this is a witch’s ghost,” Shell said. “It’s different. She’s different. She can do things that other ghosts can’t do.”

  “Ghosts can’t hurt you,” Kara said firmly. “They’re just wraiths. Hardly more substantial than sea mist.”

  She glanced towards the door as she spoke and I followed her gaze to see Bailey looking wet, bedraggled and very sorry for himself. He was too well behaved to paw at the door but he was peering in at me through the glass with a woebegone expression on his face and his tail tucked between his legs.

  “I’d better get back out to my dog,” I said. “I don’t want him to get too cold. Nice to meet you.”

  “And you,” Kara replied.

  Shell said goodbye, too, and followed me out of the shop. We cut around through Buller Quay where the netting day boats and deep-sea trawlers were moored alongside the fish market, straining against their salt-crusted ropes on the restless grey ocean. The market was shut up now but I used to come here early in the morning with Gran to buy freshly landed seafood for the Waterwitch’s restaurant. I still remembered the cases of fish – monk and cuttle, cod and dover, sole and squid, packed in ice in their plastic crates alongside metal traps filled with lobsters and brown crabs, and ceramic pots overflowing with Cornish shellfish and Fowey mussels. Even when the market was shut up and deserted, the smell of seafood never quite left the place.

  A few minutes later, Shell, Bailey and I were wedged into a small table in a corner of the Smugglers Bay Inn, a building perched right on the quayside, looking out across the water. We ordered burgers which came with a huge pile of hot chips.

  Shell was delighted. “This is the best meal I’ve had in ages.”

  She didn’t say another word until she’d cleared her plate, even mopping up the grease with her last chip.

  “So are you going to tell me about this woman who’s been using your hairbrush?” I asked once she’d finished. “The one you were talking to Kara about?”

  Shell sighed. “You won’t believe me, Emma. No one ever does. But there’s a woman down in the cellar of the Waterwitch. I think she came out of that witch bottle we broke. She must be the witch that Christian Slade had put to death. She was on board the Waterwitch and now she’s here.”

  “So … do you think she’s evil then, if you believe she cursed the ship?”

  Shell looked at me for a long time and I got the impression she was trying to decide whether to reply at all when, finally, she said, “She’s not evil. It’s worse than that. She’s mad.”

  “Mad?”

  “Yes, mad. Stark raving. Because of what they did to her, I suppose. I think there must have been fire involved because I smelled burnt flesh coming out of the cellar once. She was probably burned at the stake. That happened a lot to witches back then. I wish there was something I could do to help her.” She glanced at me and said, “This probably won’t make any sense to you, but I feel a kind of connection with her. Maybe it’s because she’s another witch. Maybe because I was there when you and Jem broke the bottle. Or maybe because Christian Slade was a relative of mine, which almost makes me feel responsible, in a way, if she’s the woman he had killed. And maybe if I help her, she’ll help me back by telling me how to get rid of the birds. She’s the only person in the world who might know what I’m supposed to do. Even Kara had no idea about the birds when I asked her. But the witch would understand, I know she would.”

  I tapped my fingers thoughtfully along the wooden table for a moment, thinking about the witch bottle and how it might be connected to Christian Slade’s ghost ship.

  “They’re all over your wheelchair, by the way,” Shell continued. “The birds, I mean. They’ve been there since we came in.”

  I couldn’t help looking round at the back of the chair – and some part of me almost expected to see a row of silent birds staring at me from the handles but, of course, there was nothing.

  “Can you lean forward a bit?” Shell asked. “One of them has got stuck. It’s making an awful racket.”

  Against my better judgement, I did as she asked – although the small movement instantly sent a jolt of pain through my back.

  “Thanks,” Shell said. “I couldn’t take much more of that squawking.”

  When we’d been kids I’d always kind of assumed that Shell’s bird thing was just a cry for attention. Now I wasn’t so sure. Was it an act or did she really, actually believe we were sitting here surrounded by her strange, mysterious, silent birds?

  It felt like there was a noose slowly tightening around my throat. This was not what I had come to Cornwall for. Phantom birds, and ghosts in the cellar, and paintings that moved, and mad women brushing their hair with other people’s brushes, and God knows what else. I must be out of my mind to be having this conversation with Shell at all. Jem would be pissed off if he knew. I was supposed to be reassuring Shell that there were no ghosts, not encouraging all her ideas about them.

  And yet, Gran seemed to believe that the Waterwitch was haunted. And that man at the museum had told me about his friend who had checked out in the middle of the night. I knew that other guests at the inn had done the same. All those stories had to have started somewhere. They couldn’t have just come to life out of nothing.

  Suddenly, I recalled the feeling of the witch bottle slicing into my palm as it broke, all those years ago. If there really had been a spirit trapped inside, then I was the one who had let her out…

  “Have you tried to find out who she was?” I asked. “The witch, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start, Emma. I don’t even know her name.”

  “What about Christian Slade?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Well, if he’s right there in Room 7, like you say, then why don’t you just ask him about the witch?”

  Shell’s eyes went very wide and her voice was practically a whisper as she said, “Christian … Christian doesn’t speak.”

  I sighed. “What about the Guildhall Museum then? Doesn’t it still have all those old documents and family history stuff? Christian Slade was from Looe originally so they might have some information about him. Why don’t we take a look on the way back?”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  We paid the bill and went outside. The rain had stopped but the sea mist still hung about in ribbons that reminded me of shredded sails. It didn’t take long to go down the road to where the fifteenth-century Guildhall Museum and Gaol stood on Higher Market Street. Visitors were supposed to enter by way of the outer staircase that led to the first floor so Bailey and I had to wait outside while Shell went and found someone to let us in at ground level. She told them she was doing a school project about the Waterwitch and the elderly female volunteer set about helping us to run a search for Christian Slade. They had records of heaps of old documents on microfiche: Parish Registers and census listings, ancient deed
s and wills, as well as hundreds and hundreds of old photographs.

  “There isn’t much that goes back as far as you want, I’m afraid,” the volunteer said. “In fact, there are only two mentions of Christian Slade on our database.”

  The first turned out to be a copy of his will. He had left everything to his wife, Elizabeth Slade, except for the Waterwitch. The ship had been left in trust for someone called Annis Slade Merrick.

  “That’s the first owner of the Waterwitch Inn,” Shell explained. “Our great-great-great-something grandmother. I remember Mum telling me about her. It’s her side of the family that links us to Christian Slade. Was Annis Merrick his daughter? It’s weird that they don’t have the same name.”

  “There’s no record of the Slades having any children,” the volunteer replied. “But this probably was a child if the ship was left in trust. And there must be some connection as her second name is Slade.”

  “The will is dated just a couple of weeks before his death,” I said. “Almost like he knew he was going to die.”

  “No one can predict getting crushed by a falling beam, dear,” the volunteer said.

  “But he’d had poor health, hadn’t he?” I asked, remembering what Gran had said years ago. “And he was worried about being cursed.”

  “He was supposed to have had some kind of nervous breakdown while the Waterwitch was being built,” the volunteer agreed. “But he must have recovered from that if he went to Dartford to inspect the ship.”

  “How many other ships had his company built?” I asked.

  We looked through some of the shipbuilding records but the Waterwitch was the only one listed to Christian’s company. It looked as if it was the first and last ship he ever constructed.

  “That’s strange,” the volunteer said. “The second mention of his name on our database is on these ship plans for another vessel called the Elizabeth.”

  She pulled them up and we all gathered closer around the computer to look at them.

  “But that ship is the Waterwitch,” Shell said at once. “It’s identical in every way.”

  It did seem so, for this too was a 140-foot long, three-masted, 400-ton galleon. But then I noticed the figurehead.

  “The figurehead in these plans is a blonde woman,” I said. “Whereas the Waterwitch figurehead is dark-haired.” I frowned. “Wasn’t Christian Slade supposed to have been having some kind of argument about the figurehead when he was killed?”

  “This ship could have been one he planned to build afterwards,” the volunteer said. “In honour of his wife, perhaps?”

  “But look at this.” I pointed at the date scratched into the plans. “It’s the same year the Waterwitch was built. That ship is the Waterwitch except for the different figurehead.”

  “It ended up with the wrong name,” Shell said.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” the volunteer said. She peered closer at the plan and said, “I suppose there’s no way to know for sure. Perhaps one of the crew thought the orders to put a witch bottle on board was funny and decided to play a practical joke with the name change?”

  “No one would have found it funny,” Shell replied. “Everyone believed in witches back then. None of the workers would ever have played a joke like that.”

  “How else could it have happened, though?” the volunteer said. “A ship’s name doesn’t just change by magic.”

  She smiled as she said it but the word magic seemed to hang in the air between us. There were no more documents about either Christian Slade or the Waterwitch so we thanked the volunteer and left the museum.

  “I should be heading off anyway,” I said. “I promised Gran I’d visit her again this afternoon. I’ll see you back at the Waterwitch, OK?”

  We had only just stepped outside when my phone rang. It was Gran’s hospice. It turned out that I wasn’t going to be visiting her that afternoon after all. In fact, it was too late to visit her ever again. I would never get the chance to ask her about the keys that Jem had received in the post, or any more questions about the Waterwitch. I’d never hug her or feel her hand clasped around mine. She had died an hour ago.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Emma

  I knew it was coming, but that didn’t help much. Why should it? A punch in the face isn’t going to hurt less just because you know it’s coming. I would never see Gran again and my memories of her would fade, bit by bit, until I couldn’t quite recall the exact sound of her voice, or the way she had looked when she smiled.

  There was nothing else to do but go back to the Waterwitch. We stopped at the supermarket on the way and bought some food. I gave Bailey the bread to carry, since that was the lightest bag, and Shell and I carried the rest. Jem was already at the inn when we arrived and when Shell told him about Gran, he squeezed my shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry, Emma.”

  I wanted to put my hand over his so that he’d leave it there, but I couldn’t pluck up the nerve, and in another moment he’d removed it.

  I went to my room to phone Mum. When I told her about Gran, she went completely silent on the other end of the line. Finally, she said she’d phone the hospice to discuss funeral arrangements, and then asked if I’d be coming home now. I couldn’t go back on my promise to keep Shell company so I made up some excuse about wanting to visit some of my old favourite places here in Looe and told her I was still going to stay in Cornwall until the end of half-term.

  After hanging up I joined the others in the library where we spent most of the afternoon around the wood-burning stove, playing cards or talking. Jem left at six to start his evening shift at the Seagull, and Shell cooked us the frozen pizzas I’d bought earlier. I didn’t have much appetite for mine, and turned my attention instead to the books lining the shelves. After finishing her dinner, Shell went upstairs “to practise with her witch balls” – whatever that meant – and I stayed by the fire, leafing through the books. The shipwreck museum had said that the Waterwitch had been built in 1577 so I looked up some of the witches and witchcraft stories from around that time. Like Shell had said, many of the women accused of witchcraft back then had been killed in horrible ways and there was nothing that drew my attention to any one particular woman. Their stories all seemed fairly similar – accused of witchcraft, dragged from their homes, burned at the stake. Sometimes they were drowned or stoned instead.

  Shell came down a little later to say that she was tired and going to bed and, as Jem wouldn’t be back until gone 1 a.m., I decided to do the same.

  As soon as I got back to my bedroom I felt tears pricking my eyes. It wasn’t just the fact that Gran was gone, it was all the time I’d wasted with her, too. I sat for a while and cried quietly, which confused and worried Bailey, who poked his snout at me a couple of times before laying his head in my lap. Finally I made myself stop and gave him a scratch behind the ears.

  “It’s all right, Bailey, I’m OK,” I said.

  He wagged his tail and flicked his tongue out at my fingers. I was so glad he was here with me and wrapped my arms around him to kiss the top of his head. Then I wheeled across the room to draw the curtains. Remembering what Shell had said earlier about the moon, I looked out for it. I’d seen it earlier from the window of the library and it had very definitely been a crescent moon. I didn’t know what I would do if I looked now and saw it was full. But, in fact, I couldn’t see the moon at all because the sky had clouded over, hiding even the stars from view.

  On a whim, I switched on my iPad to have a look at some of the online reviews. Gran and Shell had both mentioned guests leaving negative reviews online but I hadn’t expected there to be quite so many. And hardly any of them were complaining about the food or the staff or the facilities. They were complaining about ghosts.

  This seemed odd because, when I looked at reviews for Cornwall’s other famous haunted inns, like the Jamaica Inn, there were no complaints about ghostly goings-on. If anything, people seemed to treat the idea of those places really being haunted as a joke or a bit o
f a novelty. It wasn’t like that with the Waterwitch. Some of the guests seemed genuinely frightened.

  I’d only scrolled through a few reviews before I found Room 7 mentioned. The guest said he had woken in the middle of the night with blood dripping on to his face from above, and that when he turned on the lights he’d seen actual blood bubbling up through the holes and cracks in the wooden ceiling beam. The review had been written a few months ago by the priest Shell had told me about. He said in the review that he had blessed the room before he left the inn.

  Another reviewer claimed that they had taken photos of the Waterwitch from outside and, when they had looked at them later, they’d seen the pale faces of ghostly sailors peering out of the windows. They’d even uploaded one of the photos. One of the windows looked a little bit like it had faces in it but the photo was so blurred and grainy that it was impossible to tell for sure. And even if they were faces, it was probably just other guests looking out. The reviewer claimed there’d been no one there at the time but perhaps she had just failed to see them. That was the most likely explanation, after all.

  Further on down the page, one inventive reviewer had written: “Those of us who have worked at sea know that ships have souls. It’s a matter of historical fact that men were murdered on board the Waterwitch and, obviously, the wood remembers.”

  The wood remembers…

  I raised an eyebrow. “Obviously,” I muttered. “Sure. Why shouldn’t the wood remember?”

  I snapped my iPad cover closed and put it to one side with a sigh. All of a sudden I felt like I couldn’t really be bothered with any of this. There were no ghosts – only stories and superstitions. Gran was dead and she was the reason I’d come here in the first place. It would be so nice to just pack up my stuff in the morning and drive home. But I’d promised Jem I’d stick around for half-term to keep Shell company and I couldn’t go back on that now. Just a few more days, I told myself.