The Haunting Read online

  The paintings hung crooked on the walls, each one tilting obviously to the left. Maybe I should have just left the room, but wonky paintings were exactly the kind of thing that seemed to upset me more than most people. I just couldn’t bear to go away and leave them like that. It would play on my mind all day. I would feel them hanging crookedly up there, even when I was downstairs.

  So I stepped into the room and, being careful to stay away from the window like Jem had said, I meticulously righted each painting so that its frame was exactly straight, exactly straight.

  Feeling pleased with myself, I walked out and closed the door softly behind me. There. I had sorted the room out, without any help from Jem, without any help from anyone. I was about to walk away when something made me pause.

  I could tell. I could tell, even without being able to see them.

  I stepped back to the door of Room 17 and threw it open. The paintings were crooked again, every single one of them, all tilted to the left at that awful, unbearable angle. I dug my nails into the palms of my hands and took a deep breath.

  I went back into the room, righted the paintings one by one, came out, closed the door, and then opened it again immediately, without even removing my hand from the door handle.

  It had happened again. Five different Waterwitches stared back at me from the walls, all at the wrong angle. Suddenly, it made me angry – really, properly angry, angry like Dad used to get – and I stormed back into the room, determined to get those paintings to hang straight even if it took me the rest of my life.

  Perhaps the room fed off my anger but it seemed to get even colder in there and then it felt like something was watching me, something was pitting their will against mine, something didn’t want me to touch those pictures. Well, too bad. I was touching them anyway.

  I’m not sure how long it went on for, always the same pattern – me straightening the paintings only for them to go crooked again the moment I closed the door. It was probably only a few minutes but it seemed like hours. Then there was a hand on my arm and I yelled and spun round but, of course, it was only Jem, home from work and looking at me that way he did whenever he thought I was acting strange.

  “I’m here,” he said. “It’s OK. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “The pictures,” I said, and, all of a sudden – maddeningly – I felt like crying. “They won’t hang straight.”

  With his hand still on my arm, Jem looked past my shoulder into Room 17.

  “They look straight enough to me,” he said in a level voice.

  “Yes, but look what happens when I close the door,” I replied.

  I closed it and, stupidly, I felt almost excited that now, finally, I would be able to show him something that he would see and believe. Crooked paintings weren’t exactly wings in a bathtub, but they were at least a start.

  I threw open the door. And, of course, of course, the paintings were all hanging exactly level. Every single one of them was perfectly, devastatingly symmetrical. I stared at the paintings, hating them, and hating the room for showing me up like this in front of Jem. Now he would just think it was more of my craziness. He would think that I was losing my mind, just like Mum had. Oh, God, I really was going to cry.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said, but my voice came out small and wobbly and completely lacking in conviction. Maybe I was crazy, maybe the paintings had been straight all along, maybe there had never been any wings in the bathtub at all.

  Jem pulled me towards him and hugged me tight. I could feel the beat of his heart through his shirt, and I could smell the chips on his clothes from the Seagull, and finally I felt warm and almost unafraid for the first time that day.

  “Of course you’re not crazy,” Jem said. “Don’t ever think that.”

  But I see things that aren’t there, I wanted to say. What other word for it is there?

  Jem drew back to look down into my face. “Listen,” he said. “Everything with Dad, and what happened to Mum, that’s a lot for anyone to take, Shell. But you’re out of there now. It’s just you and me. No one’s ever going to hurt you again and I’m never going to leave you. You know that, right? Things will get better, I promise.”

  I nodded but only because I knew that was what Jem wanted me to do. Things would never get better. Not so long as the birds were there.

  “Now,” he said, “what happened to your face?”

  “My face?” I repeated, baffled. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve cut yourself.” His voice remained perfectly steady but the pressure of his fingers on my arm increased slightly. “Didn’t you know?”

  I remembered the smashing mirror and the shards of glass. A couple of them must have flown at me. “Oh. Maybe it happened when I broke the mirror.”

  “How did that happen?”

  I couldn’t lie to Jem. He would see right through it. “I … I threw my hairbrush at it.”

  “Why did you do that, Shell?” he asked, very quietly.

  I could feel my face crumpling up like a child’s and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. “You won’t believe me.”

  I tried to turn away from him but he wouldn’t let me, his hand was firm around my wrist. “It was the birds,” he said. “It was the birds again. Wasn’t it?”

  I nodded, tears streaming silently down my cheeks.

  Jem looked down the corridor towards my bedroom. “OK,” he said. He raised his free hand to run his fingers through his always-messy hair. “OK,” he said again. “I have to get back to the Seagull in half an hour but we’ll talk about this later. We’ll figure something out. Is there still broken glass in the bathroom?”

  I nodded. I’d been too busy battling with the paintings in Room 17 to sweep up the mess I’d made.

  Jem cleared up the mirror and wouldn’t let me help him. When I peered into the bathroom I saw that there were actually quite a few pieces of glass on the floor. It was a wonder I hadn’t sliced my bare feet up on them. I could tell by the look on Jem’s face as he brushed up the broken shards that he was probably thinking the exact same thing.

  Chapter Twelve

  Emma

  Bailey and I got to Gran’s hospice promptly at 3 p.m. The nurses told me that she was having a bad day, but it still took me by surprise when she greeted me from her bed and then said, “Where’s your mother? Just parking the car?”

  For a moment I could only stare at her. Finally, I said, “Gran, she didn’t come. Remember, I told you last night?”

  She looked confused for a moment, then made an impatient gesture and said, “Yes, yes, of course. I know that.”

  I wheeled my chair up to her bedside but, as soon as we tried to continue the conversation, it was obvious her mind was wandering. She kept referring to things that had happened years ago as if they’d been yesterday and, a couple of times, she even seemed to mistake me for my mum.

  “I should have locked that cellar door,” Gran said. “I meant to lock it, I really did. But then, all of a sudden, Jem came running upstairs yelling that you’d been hurt, and I went down there, and there was blood seeping out from under the rubble. I’m so sorry, Emma. So sorry…”

  To my dismay, she started to cry, and she’d never looked more like a vulnerable old woman to me than she did in that moment.

  “Gran, please,” I said. “I didn’t come here to upset you. And I don’t blame you for what happened. It was my own fault. None of that matters any more, honestly.”

  I could almost sense the nurses glaring at me from the desk outside, probably wondering what the heck I had said to get her so upset. Finally, after what seemed like an age, Gran stopped crying and managed to pull herself together a bit. She kept patting my hand and saying she was glad I’d forgiven her and that it was a great weight off her mind – even though I’d said before, in the first letter I ever wrote to her, that I didn’t blame her. It was like she was getting everything jumbled up in her head.

  “Perhaps that witch bottle you found really did have some kind of evil spi
rit trapped inside it,” Gran went on. “You know, the Waterwitch had always been dog-friendly, always, but after that witch bottle got broken the dogs didn’t want to come into the inn any more. The owners would drag them in sometimes and they’d just go berserk. There was one dog that howled all night and the people had to check out and go somewhere else.”

  My mind instantly went to Bailey and the way he had barked at the cellar door.

  “And, a couple of months before I closed the inn, people started saying they could hear something down in the cellar. The door kept opening by itself. We had to nail it shut in the end. There’s something awful down there, Emma.”

  I was startled to hear her mention the cellar door, especially after my recent experience with it.

  “But, Gran, if the inn is such an evil place, then why did you agree to let Jem be the caretaker there?”

  Gran’s hand shot out and wrapped around my wrist so hard that I actually yelped in pain. “I didn’t!” she said. “Jem asked me if I needed a caretaker for the Waterwitch but I said no, I said no! Please tell me he didn’t go back there anyway?”

  I quickly shook my head. “No, no. He’s working at the Seagull.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Sorry, I was getting muddled up but I remember now. Jem said he asked you if he could be the caretaker but you said no.”

  I had no idea whether Jem had lied to me or whether Gran was getting confused but the safest thing seemed to be to cover for him for now.

  “Gran, please, you’re hurting me,” I said.

  She let go and I rubbed at my red wrist.

  “I hated turning him down, Emma, I really did,” Gran said. “I know why he needs the money, I know that he wants to leave home and take Shell with him. But there are worse horrors in the world than even their father. And Jem and his sister are the last people who should be in the Waterwitch.”

  “Why?” I asked, frowning.

  “They’re descendants of Christian Slade, aren’t they?” Gran said. “And whatever haunts the Waterwitch hates that man. That’s why we had to get rid of the portrait.”

  I thought of the missing space on the wall where the painting of Christian Slade used to hang and said, “What do you mean, you got rid of it?”

  One of the nurses came over just then to serve the afternoon tea and biscuits. I waited till she’d gone, then said, “Gran, what about the portrait?”

  “What portrait?” she said, reaching for her tea and looking at me with that unfocused gaze once again, as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was.

  “The portrait of Christian Slade. You said you had to get rid of it?”

  “It was sticky,” Gran said.

  “The painting?”

  “The blood. I thought it was paint at first but paint isn’t sticky like that, and it doesn’t smell like that, and it doesn’t feel like that on your skin. It was blood, Emma. Smeared all over the portrait, running down his face. But the eyes were the worst thing – they’d been torn out. Scratched away.” She shuddered. “I thought it had to be one of the guests playing some kind of prank. I ordered another print of the portrait and—” She broke off suddenly, one hand going to her mouth.

  “And what?” I asked.

  “It was delivered to the inn a few days later and I took it into the kitchen to open it, but the blood soaked through the brown paper even as I unwrapped it. The new painting was exactly the same, Emma – I never even got the chance to hang it up on the wall. Something changed a couple of months before I closed the inn. I don’t know why but it’s not just haunted any more; it’s angry, too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shell

  After cleaning up the broken mirror in my bathroom, Jem left for work and I went to the library room to try to read. But there was something in my eye, right in the corner, just beneath the skin. Every time I tried to blink it was there, irritating me. I thought it must be an eyelash that had got trapped and I didn’t want to lose it because eyelashes were very powerful things for wishes.

  I went into the bathroom and squinted in the mirror, using my finger to pull my eyelid slightly away from my eye. As soon as I found that eyelash, I knew exactly what I was going to wish for. The words played over and over again in my mind as I tried to find it:

  I wish Dad would change, I wish Dad would change, I wish Dad would change…

  In my head I could see Jem and me back home at the fisherman’s cottage with him, the three of us together in time for Christmas. Jem said that was never going to happen, that people didn’t change, and that I had to stop hoping for a reunion – but you can’t make yourself stop hoping, can you? We’d already lost Mum – it didn’t seem fair that we should lose Dad, too. So I kept searching for that eyelash until my eye was sore and red and raw. Finally, I saw it; a fine, black lash sticking right out of the corner of my eye.

  I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger and gently pulled, expecting it to come free at once. Only it didn’t come free. Suddenly it was far bigger and thicker than an eyelash and the object I was dragging out from behind my eye socket wasn’t an eyelash at all.

  It was a feather.

  It hurt as I dragged it out, each individual feathered strand feeling like a hundred thousand eyelashes dragging across the delicate surface of my eye. I wished I could stuff the feather back in but it was too late for that now. The only option was to pull it out altogether.

  I couldn’t help crying the whole time, partly in pain and partly, well, in dismay. But, at long last, the entire feather was out. I threw it into the sink where it lay, curled and bedraggled and damp with tears.

  I knew I had to be smarter than the birds that haunted me but I didn’t know how to be that clever. I lifted the feather out of the sink and placed it carefully on the little glass shelf below the mirror. It felt strange in my hands – not soft and smooth like you’d expect a feather to be, but kind of sticky and oily instead, and I hated touching it. The birds were something bad. I knew that because the first day I ever saw them was the day I found Mum hanging by her neck from the apple tree. They were lined up along the branches, strangely silent except for the occasional rustle of wings. They didn’t ignore me like most wild birds did – instead they all stared straight at me, like they were expecting something, waiting for something.

  When Jem found me there a little later he took me into the house and wouldn’t let me return to the garden, but I could still hear the birds, pecking at the windows, pressing their beaks through the gap between the floor and the door, brushing their wings over the glass.

  And they’d been with me ever since. I could feel their impatience every time they pecked at me, sharper and sharper, even drawing blood, but it didn’t help – I still couldn’t understand them, I still didn’t know what they wanted.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jem

  It was busy at the Seagull that evening and the restaurant was full. I couldn’t stop thinking about Shell and what she might be doing back at the Waterwitch. What if she really hurt herself next time?

  But I couldn’t turn down the work. Soon it would be low season, and there would be no extra shifts available, or even any at all. I had no idea what would happen to us then.

  But, God, this headache. It was like I had one of Shell’s birds trapped inside my skull, flapping its wings and trying to find a way out. My burnt hand throbbed, too. Emma came into the restaurant a little while later with her dog. We waved at each other across the room and seeing her cheered me up a bit. Smelling the food was hard, though. A never-ending torture as I went back and forth to the kitchen. I told myself that if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other then, soon enough, the shift would be over and I could go home and check on Shell and go to sleep. And by tomorrow evening there would be money to buy food and we would both go to bed full.

  “Jem?”

  I looked up and realized that Sam, one of the other waiters, was speaking to me. I got the impression it wasn’t the first time he’d s
aid my name, either.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I said, are you OK?”

  “Yes.” I blinked. “Why?”

  “Well, you’ve just poured coffee into that wine glass.”

  I focused on the glass in front of me and realized he was right. Hurriedly, I fetched one of the silver coffee pots and transferred the coffee into it. It was almost 10 p.m. and the restaurant was starting to clear out a little although Emma was still there, by the window with Bailey. I shouldn’t have told her that I would pay for fish and chips. What had I been thinking? Where had I thought the money was going to come from for that?

  Stupid.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  I started loading up a tray at one of the empty tables but my hands were shaking again and I couldn’t grip the plates properly. They slipped right out of my fingers, clattering together noisily on the tray. I leaned against the table and willed the trembling to stop but, all of a sudden, I felt like a pencil drawing that was being slowly rubbed out.

  Sam appeared at my side and said something but I had no idea what it was.

  “What did you say?” I asked, and my voice sounded odd, like I was hearing it from underwater.

  Sam spoke again but I couldn’t focus on the words. It was just noise.

  The table needed clearing still. How long had I been here anyway? Wasn’t it terribly late? Shell would be worried. She might do something crazy again, something dangerous. I reached out to pick up one of the empty wine glasses but it slipped from my grip before I could get it on to the tray. I heard the shattering of glass, only it sounded like it was coming from a long, long way off.

  Get back to work! the voice inside my head was yelling. Quick, before they realize something’s wrong!