Thank you again to everyone who is still following and reaching out. If you missed the earlier parts, this all started here. The previous post (Part 4) is here. The next post (Part 6) is here
-—–
A melody of bells from the wall-mounted clock announced midnight.
I closed my eyes. Half a minute passed before I opened them again. The smoke from the candles scented the air. The light on Parker’s camera blinked. Juliet and Beth and Parker had their eyes closed and heads bowed. Harvey watched me out the corners of his eyes.
I shut my eyes again. Where was the girl? Where was Jane Laughlin? Last time she had come to me in through the door. Last time I had felt her, and now nothing. I had not felt her since that malevolent presence flung her out of the room after the first séance. Lighting the candles and waiting for midnight had not solved the problem.
Parker’s hushed voice broke the silence, “What’s wrong?”
“She isn’t here. She hasn’t come.”
Juliet spoke calmly and clearly. “They have hidden her. We need to find her. She can’t come to us. You need to listen, you need to feel. You need to sense it. This isn’t about your eyes and your ears.”
I closed my eyes again. I pictured Jane in my mind. Her blonde hair. Her big blue eyes hinting at tears. The white dress. The gold chain around her neck hanging the heart shaped pendant.
“Jane,” I whispered. “Where are you?”
I felt a subtle sense of sinking down into my chair that for a moment I resisted, and then allowed. I dropped into an unknown ocean and it sucked the air from my lungs. A strange combination of numbness and pins and needles bubbled up through my body. It felt like it had out in the stable. I stood and felt weightless on my legs.
I left the dining room and entered the hall and then the foyer. The grand staircase illuminated by a grey light coming in from the skylight far above. The air was thick, like wading through water. I called out, my voice barely audible. My brain searched for information from my senses and found them all muted and numb.
Don’t use your eyes and your ears, that’s what Juliet had said.
I pressed a hand to my chest and couldn’t feel my heart. It sent a shock of panic through my body. I pushed down the fear. Where the familiar thud-thud should be was a subtle buzzing, the tiniest of vibrations. What had been an overwhelming sensation that first night was now reduced to almost nothing. But how and by who?
I pushed open the front door. The outside air ran as thick in my lungs as inside. A constant pressure pushed at my pores, as if I were at the bottom of the ocean. The stars in the night sky blurred, their light dulled.
I walked up the path to where I had noticed the shimmering earlier in the day. I came to a barrier formed of something like glass or a sheer curtain. I reached out and my hand went right through, a subtle pulsing of electricity wrapping my arm where it penetrated. The barrier extended up and over the house. It was like a giant snow dome clamped down by an evil giant to trap us inside.
Outside the barrier the air thinned and new sounds came from the road and the forest. This snow dome drowned Windhaven Manor in a viscous fluid. It could have only one aim. To hide Jane Laughlin. If only I could strip it down or fling it up into the night sky.
Moving back inside, the thick, heavy air returned. I rubbed my chest and felt for the vibration, still there, whispering. Jane was muted, yes, but not gone.
Taking a seat on the bottom step of the staircase, I put my head in my hands. I shut down all other thoughts and focussed only on the soft thrum inside my chest. I shone a spotlight on it.
And then, like discovering a cut on your finger you didn’t even know you had, and only upon making its acquaintance feeling the pain, the thrum started to beat louder and louder. It magnified and spread into my stomach and then my legs and arms. Finally it reached my head and my ears.
It led me to the kitchen. A low buzzing from the pantry on the western side. Shelves lined the wall supporting bottles and cans and jars. I put my hand to the stone wall and it pulsed like a living being.
She was behind this wall. Somewhere. Somehow. I heard a soft whispering, so low I could barely hear it, hushed and breathy syllables in the gloom. I ran my hands down the wall and found the rectangular groove of a trap door, painted to blend in.
I pushed at the door and it gave. Inside it was dark but there was no need for a light. I peered through the opening.
The room adjacent was small. Some sort of enclosed storeroom. In the far corner water dripped and formed a pool on the rough concrete floor. A single bed was pushed against the wall. It had an old, metal frame and was topped with a thin mattress. On the bed lay a figure shrouded in shadow.
I opened my eyes. Juliet looked up from across the table.
I said, “I know where she is.”
The far wall of the pantry matched what I saw in my dream state. The trap door did not give easily, as if it had seized up after years without use. I braced my legs and pressed my shoulder against the door. It creaked and groaned and then snapped open. I tumbled inside on my hands and knees. I tugged at the cord dangling from the ceiling and a naked bulb flicked on.
“I didn’t know that was there,” Parker said.
Juliet and Parker followed me into the cramped space leaving Beth and Harvey outside.
The room smelled of damp and dust. The wall was freezing. The light turned the concrete floor a dull, dark grey and left the far end of the space in gloom. I searched for another light switch but found none.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness, but I didn’t need them to know what was there. The bed and Jane Laughlin. Ropes pulled tight against her body, binding her to the bed.
I kneeled beside her. Jane turned her head to me and her body pulsed as if subject to a sudden burst of electricity. But the ropes did not give. Her big blue eyes full of fear. A buzzing from behind. The light bulb brightened and then burst and plunged the room into full darkness.
Parker’s voice drifted into my ears but I barely heard. His feet scraped against the concrete as he searched for a new light source.
Even without the light I saw her. And she saw me. Her nose and mouth a blank and featureless layer of skin. I set my hands on her face and ran my fingers to her neck. I rubbed my fingertips back and forth and a thick layer of what felt like damp cloth pulled loose. I pinched the ends and peeled it back, like removing a bandage. From beneath came her nose and mouth. Mask removed, she was the girl I saw in the photo in the living room of the Laughlin family. Jane.
Her lower lip quivered and she lifted her head and looked to the ropes binding her down.
“Give me a second.”
I lay my hands on the ropes. Like in the stable, the ropes burned hot in my hands and writhed like a living animal. But this was different. There was a malevolence to it. It sent a sudden sickness to my stomach. I shuddered and pulled back.
Jane shook her head.
“What is happening Sam?” It was Juliet, her voice muffled and distant.
“She is tied to the bed. I can’t break the ropes.”
“You’ve done this before.”
I thought back to the man in the woods and the rope hanging him from the rafter. Then I had gripped the rope and it had come apart strand by strand. I willed the rope to break and it had. I closed my eyes and wrapped my fingers around the rope pinning Jane to the bed, ignoring the darkness surging through my mind.
In the calm of the tiny room I felt a surge run from my brain down into my chest and then out through my arms. A flow of warm water coursing through my veins. My hands turned from warm to hot. The rope burned from within. For a second I feared it would burn and blister the skin on my palms. I almost let go, but felt the rope disintegrating in my hands. I gritted my teeth and the tension in the ropes began to release until only thin strands remained. The rope broke and dropped limply to the floor.
Jane’s bare arm brushed against my hands. When I opened my eyes she was sat up beside me on the bed. Her eyelids fluttered and she grabbed at the pendant hung around her neck.
“Are you here to hurt me?”
She recoiled a little at the shock on my face. I took a breath and held up my palms. Her shoulders pulled inwards. She looked small and fragile.
“No. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then why did you come back?”
“Something is happening to me. To us. What happened to you has something to do with it.”
“What happened?”
“The night you were-”
I trailed off. She turned away from me.
“The night they-”
She took in two small breaths through her nose.
“Who was it? What did they do to you?”
A warm rush surged through my body. My head jolted backwards and my eyes closed.
When I opened my eyes I was no longer sat on an old bed in the small storeroom on the corner of Windhaven Manor. I shouted a goodbye in a voice that wasn’t mine and closed a flimsy front door behind. I recognised the door and the yard and the street. The house Harvey drove me to that morning. The house where Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin lived, where Jane lived. Jane was showing me what happened to her.
I skipped down the road, scrolling through messages on a small phone.
When can we meet?
My parents are going away this weekend.
Meet me by the big oak tree by the park. My car is bright red. You can’t miss it.
My thumb swiped and showed a photo of a man in his early twenties, white toothy smile and wavy brown hair falling over his ears.
The red car is there, parked below the stretching arms of the oak tree. I feel my heart thumping, the sound of rushing blood in my ears. But the man in the photo isn’t in the car. It is someone else. An older man, an ugly sneering smile on his face. I almost turn away, but the sight of a woman in the passenger seat gives me a sense of calm.
“I’m looking for Garry,” I said.
“I can be Garry if you want.”
His smile turned to a sneer and an arm shot out the window. Fat and hairy fingers clamped around my arm. I shrieked and pulled, but his grip was too strong. I pressed my foot against the door and pulled again, harder, and broke free.
I turned to run. But there is more of them. They spring out from the shadows like demons. Their hands closed in from all directions. I kicked and I screamed but it was no use. No one heard me. The put tape across my mouth and then everything went black.
When they removed the hood I was in a windowless dungeon. Damp, brick walls and a hard, bare concrete floor. Shackles hang from the walls. In the corner are cages meant for animals. They will put me in there, and it is there that I will die. I know it in my heart.
A heavy, black curtain separates the dungeon in two. On the night they come the curtain is pulled back. The walls on the other side are painted black. The smell is sickly, thick with something I can’t put my finger on. In the far corner is an altar and above the altar is an owl carved from wood. Figures wearing black robes and pointed hoods join hands and chant something unintelligible. One of them shuffles over to a cupboard and opens it and inside are silver chalices and knives with long, curved blades. He takes a cup and shuffles to the altar, his back bent and his movements slow.
My hand dripped blood. I was working the lock on the cage with a twisted hair clip. I had been at it for hours. I whimpered. I begged for the lock to give. I gave one last push and it clicked. The hooded figures were kneeled before the one with the bent back. They raised their arms to the grotesque carving above the alter. I saw a stair and slinked to it. The door at the top cracked open and I went the other way, slinking into an alcove behind my cage.
In the corner is a ladder. I didn’t know where it went, but anything is better than this place. I gripped the rails with blood streaked hands and lifted myself up.
I came into a tunnel and closed the door behind. Complete darkness. A freezing and rough floor beneath my feet. My hands scraped against the sides of the tunnel. I couldn’t see. I cried. Fear pushed me on. I hit a wall at the end and groped in the dark until I found another ladder. I climbed. At the top there was a lid, but it’s too heavy to lift. They were in the tunnel now, I heard their voices. I clenched a fist and smashed it against the door. It opened and there is a face I recognised. Leon, the man from the stable. He looked at me confused and hauled me out of the hole.
I ran through the woods, my bare feet bloodied and freezing and wet. Windhaven Manor rose up as a beacon of light and I collapsed at the back door. It opened and I believed I was saved. The men who took me came out of the trees and stood on the grass. They are not wearing their hoods anymore. The light from the house illuminated their faces. There are faces I recognise. Chief Crown. Kyle the sketch artist. The man from the red car. There are others too. Each face an image burned into my memory.
I begged to be saved, for someone to call the police.
The voice behind me said, “Is this one of yours?” And then he laughed.
I scrambled past the set of legs at the door and into the house. I didn’t know where else to go. I ran up the staircase in the foyer and stumbled to the front corner of the house. I shut myself in a bedroom and leaned my back against the door. I fumbled in my pocket and found my phone. I had to call her, the one person I could trust. Kylie. She didn’t answer. I went to the window and took a photo of the lighthouse and sent it to her. I begged her to come.
They knocked at the door, a polite rapping. It was over. There was nowhere else to go.
My eyes fluttered open and I was back in the small storeroom next to Jane Laughlin. I put my head in my hands. I wanted to cry. My chin trembled. I opened my mouth to speak, but found no words.
Jane played with the pendant around her neck.
“After they killed me, they took this. It was a gift from my mother when I turned sixteen.”
“Why don’t you leave this place?”
“I can’t. I’ve tried. She stops me. If I open the door or a window all I see is black. It’s like someone enclosed the house in concrete walls. This is my hell.”
“I am getting you out of here.”
She shook her head. “She won’t let you.”
“We’ll find a way. There has to be a way. For your sister too.”
“My sister? Kylie?”
“She came here looking for you. They-”
In a flash I realised what I had done. Jane didn’t know what had happened to Kylie. This place was her prison, one with solid walls that blocked her from the outside world, living and dead.
I thought about lying to her, but shrugged and gave her the truth. “One of the men from the basement pushed her off the cliff.”
Her face descended into despair. She put her head in her hands and screamed.
Parker’s voice. “We have to go.”
Muffled sounds came from the kitchen. Someone ran across the floor. A door slammed against a wall. A flurry of commotion behind me and then a hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t want to leave Jane. I had to find a way to get her out of this house and to reunite her with Kylie. I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Come with me, we’re getting out of here.”
I stood and Jane remained seated on the bed. She looked over my shoulder, a look of fear on her face. Her eyes widened and she shrank back against the wall. Could she see Parker, or Juliet? Then I felt it. The same thing I had felt the first night and then by the cliff edge. Someone else was in the room with us.
I turned and a girl with cropped black hair stood with her hands clasped together. She wore black as if she were going to a funeral. She stood passive and expressionless. She looked young, I guessed she was twenty.
“Who are you?” I said.
She took a step forwards. “The more interesting question is who are you and what exactly do you think you’re doing. It takes time and effort to do the clean-up, to do the masking. And here you are, mister good Samaritan undoing everything. It’s growing to be quite an annoyance.”
My body shook. Parker’s voice again in my ear. He was pleading now. We had to go.
The girl in black smiled. “You better go to your friends. You don’t have much time. They’re here.”
“Who is here?”
“You know who. You have seen them already. We have instructed them to take you all. There’s nowhere to run.”
“I’m getting Jane out of here.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
She held up her right hand and looked to Jane. A new mask of skin wrapped itself over her nose and mouth. Jane writhed and put her hands to her head in a vain attempt to stop the mask attaching. It was no use. Her head snapped backwards so that she looked to the ceiling. An invisible force yanked her hands down by her sides. A coil of rope materialised and wrapped around her torso.
I reached out to Jane but I was pulled back. A screaming noise like feedback in a microphone filled my ears and I threw my hands up to my ears.
“Sam. Get it together. We have to go.”
Not yet. I had to help Jane. I couldn’t leave her. I pushed back against Parker.
The ropes pulled tight and pinned Jane to the bed. I reached out to set her free but my hands ran into some sort of invisible barrier. I looked to my hands, confused that for the first time in my life they had not done what I told them to do.
The girl in black chuckled. “If only you knew the power you possess.”
“Let her go.”
She stepped slowly towards me, her feet making no noise on the concrete floor of the cellar. “Maybe I won’t let you go either.”
My sense of balance left me and for a moment I thought I had fainted. The girl in black disappeared from my vision and was replaced with ceiling. My heels slapped against the concrete floor. I was being dragged out the room.
“No!” I yelled.
“We have to go.” Parker’s voice was clearer now.
Parker released me and I collapsed on the kitchen floor. I scrambled to my feet and skidded back towards the pantry. Parker slammed shut the door and pushed back against my chest.
“We have to go.”
“We can’t leave her now.”
Beth burst into the kitchen. “They’re outside.”
“Where is Harvey?” Parker said.
Beth didn’t respond. She sprinted out of the kitchen and we followed. She led us to the library at the front of the house. A flickering glow played through the closed curtains. Beth pulled back the curtain and made room. We crowded together at the window.
The unveiled view pushed my stomach up into my throat. Angry flames burst from Beth’s car. A moment after came the sound of shattering glass and Juliet’s car ignited, the whoosh dulled through the window. Brilliant orange sparks and black smoke shot into the sky. At the end of the driveway the gates stood open. The black van was parked behind the fountain, its headlights acting as a spotlight for the horror show.
A dark figure flitted back and forth around the two burning cars. Harvey. He must have gone out there to head them off. He was trying to buy us some time.
A car door slammed shut and a second dark figure, this one short and fat and wearing a thick coat and a beanie tangled with Harvey.
“We have to help,” I said.
We ran to the front door and flung it open. Harvey and Beanie sprawled behind the licking flames and we lost sight of them. Harvey reappeared and jumped on the hood of the van. In a flash a taller man with a ponytail appeared from behind and tackled Harvey to the ground. He writhed under the weight of his assailant and lifted his head to the house.
“Run! Run!”
Ponytail lifted Harvey into the van and the door slid shut. The van rocked and the engine revved. Beanie strolled out between the two burning cars and reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
“Back inside!” Parker yelled.
We slammed shut the door and sprinted down the hallway and past the stairs and into the kitchen at the back.
“What do we do?” Beth said. “Where do we go?”
“Upstairs?” Parker offered.
“No,” I said. “Follow me.”
All thoughts of Jane and the girl with the cropped black hair turned into background noise. A hard-wired survival instinct took hold. We had to get out. The front entrance was blocked by the black van and Beanie and Ponytail. The back door offered the garden and the woods and the cover of night. It was our best bet.
I flung open the kitchen door and sprinted across the back lawn. If the van came chasing we had to make the tree line before they made it around to the back of the house. A flurry of hurried footsteps followed close behind and then Parker’s voice.
“What’s the plan?”
“We have to find somewhere get out, or to hide,” I said.
We made it to the trees and heard the drone of the engine. The glow from the headlights flashed against the trees and jumped as the van mounted the threshold to the lawn. The van slipped and skidded and then righted itself and came hard for us.
“Hurry!” Juliet said.
Parker let out a yell and he overtook me. We belted along the rough track that wound through the forest. The revving engine cut out and doors slammed. They were out on foot. I whimpered and waited for the crack of a gunshot.
I turned behind and saw only the dark shadows of trees. They shouted to each other and the sporadic flicking of flashlights punctured the darkness in the gaps between the trees. We had to hurry. We couldn’t let them follow.
My foot caught a raised tree root and I crashed to the ground. My palms and cheek slapped against the hard wet earth and my chest compressed and forced all the air out my lungs. A garbled cry of ‘Wait’ reached my ears and Parker’s red sneakers skidded into view. He jerked me up onto my feet and took a handful of my sweater and pulled.
“Keep going.”
We ran in the vague direction we had come earlier in the night. Somewhere beside us was the stables, but we kept going. Faint light provided a subtle contrast to the dark of the trees. And then, ahead, a wall of black. The ancient stone wall enclosing the Manor. It was too high to climb. We ran up and down the wall looking for a way through.
Between the trees flashlights flickered. They were coming, the goons. Now we had the cover pf darkness, but eventually the sun would come up, and what then? We had to get off the property. I knew a way, Jane had showed me, but it presented its own problems. A dark tunnel to an even darker place. But maybe they only used it for their ceremonies. Perhaps, right now it was deserted. The sharp crack of a twig to my right made up my mind.
“I know a way out,” I hissed. “Follow me.”
The dark outline of the stables loomed large for the second time that night. I led everyone around the back and to the door and opened it. Inside was full dark and I toyed with the idea of pulling out my phone and turning on the light. The muffled sounds of the men pursuing us stayed my hand.
“Why did we come here?” Parker hissed. “We’ll be sitting ducks.”
“There’s a tunnel. A way out.”
“Where?”
I shut my eyes and brought the images back to mind. When Jane spoke the events played inside my mind like a movie reel. Stumbling and staggering down the damp and dark tunnel, her feet and hands cut and bleeding, her clothes torn. She came to the end and found a ladder and climbed. When she came up she was in the stable, but where?
He had been here when she came up. The man who would be hanged from the roof beam. He had lifted her out, crying and begging and bleeding. The back corner. There was a trap door.
“Grab my hand.”
We chained ourselves together and I strode out into the dark. The voices outside grew louder. The flickering of their lights played through the window. We didn’t have much time.
At the back corner I leaned down and ran my hand across the rough concrete floor. It had to be here. In a moment of panic I wondered if they had blocked up the opening. After Jane’s escape they wanted to make sure that no one ever repeated the feat. I muttered under my breath, my fingers searching in the dark. I pushed aside some hay that almost disintegrated at my touch and found what I was looking for. A heavy metal ring. I let go of Beth’s hand and pulled.
The trap door smacked against the floor. The air from the tunnel was stale and warmer than the freezing stable. I groped around and found a steel ladder bolted to the side. I guided Beth to the opening and whispered to her to climb down.
I was the last to climb onto the ladder and I pulled the trap door shut after me. The heavy, thick wood made it awkward to both descend the ladder and support the weight. In the end I let it rest on my hunched back and lowered it softly into place.
The door shut, I whispered, “Turn on a light.”
Beth was the first and the flashlight from her phone illuminated a cramped and damp tunnel hewn from the soft rock below the forest. Parker and I both had to crouch. The tunnel stretched out into darkness.
“Where does it go?” Beth asked.
“A dark cellar. That’s where they took Jane. It must be another house or building, somewhere beyond the back walls of the Manor. It’s a way out.”
Parker turned on his own light and pointed it at the trap door. “Does it lock?”
I shook my head.
“Do those two guys know about it?”
I couldn’t answer his question. I shook my head and raised my shoulders.
Parker pointed his light down the tunnel. “Let’s move then.”
We skittered down the tunnel like rats in a science experiment. I held my breath waiting for the sound of the trap door groaning on its hinges and then slapping against the concrete.
“What is this even for?” Parker whispered.
Juliet turned to him. “A lot of wealthy folk built tunnels like these. It was a way to get the family out in times of war or unrest. If everything went to custard above, you pile your loved ones in and escape.”
We reached the end. I guessed the tunnel ran for a few football fields. I looked back up the dark tunnel. The two goons had not followed. They did not find the entrance. That or they were waiting for us at the other end.
A similar metal ladder led up to a closed timber door. Parker went first. He pushed at the door and it did not give. He took a step back down and braced his knees and gave it another shove and managed to budge it before it came back down again.
“Put your back into it,” Beth said.
Parker complied. He lowered his head and used his arched shoulders and heaved the door open. The door tipped and slapped to the ground. Parker clambered up the rest of the way and we followed him up.
When my hands touched the cold steel I heard them. The hushed voices I first heard when I broke the rope hanging Leon from the rafter in the stable. Multiple voices, all crying out in pain. A sickly buzzing emanated from my chest. The inside of my head turned black. I remembered Leon’s words.
Bad things have happened out in these woods.
We entered into the room I had seen when talking to Jane. This was where they brought her. A bed with a tattered mattress against the far wall. Piles of thick chains, rusted red, piled into the corner. The place smelled of a vile mixture of dried blood and sweat. No windows. The thick, black curtain still in place. More a dungeon than a basement.
Above us the ceiling creaked. We played our lights over the timber joists and floorboards. Footfalls. And then muffled voices. Someone was up there. We were not alone.