Thank you again to everyone who is still following and reaching out. If you missed the earlier parts, this all started here and Part 2 is here and Part 4 is here
-—–
I sat up and turned my back to the black expanse of the ocean. It was out there still, the same malevolent presence that lurked unseen in Windhaven Manor during the séance the night before. The shrieking pain I felt down on the rocks echoed inside my head. Fear flooded my body, contaminating everything from the marrow inside my bones to the tips of my hair. I lifted my knees and buried my head in my arms.
Juliet shrieked somewhere nearby. “Leave us alone.” The cold ocean air extinguished her cries.
I rolled onto my knees and half-stood. My body refused to go any further and I propped there like a child. A vile taste filled my mouth and I spat out a glob of saliva. On the icy air came a faint cackling, someone laughing, mocking. I searched the faces around me and found only grave looks of concern.
And then it lifted. Like a weight relieved from my shoulders. The oppressive hideousness radiating from the ocean blew away with the wind. I trembled now as much from the cold as the fear. I balled my hands into fists and stood.
“What did you see?” Harvey said.
I pushed him away and started back up to the lighthouse, sucking in deep breaths.
He shot out an arm and persisted. “What did you see?”
I shook him off. “She’s gone.”
“Who is gone?”
I looked ahead to the lighthouse and the path back up to the Manor. The familiarity of the Manor made it a refuge in my mind. “I can’t stay out here.”
The light from Parker’s camera illuminated the grass in front. I snapped at him, “Turn that off.”
Parker lowered the camera and shut it off. He mumbled an apology. I sighed under my breath, sorry for how the words had come out. But all I could think about was getting somewhere warm and calm.
We sat together on hard couches in the sitting room across the hall from the library. Small lamps cast waves of light on the white washed walls. Oversized portraits that would not be out of place in a museum stared out at us blankly. Juliet balled up into the corner of an enormous three seater couch.
Harvey muttered something under his breath. Parker left the room and came back with his laptop. He plugged in his camera. Harvey stood behind him as he played back the video. I didn’t look.
Harvey said, “This is only for us. None of this goes online.”
I shrugged.
Parker gave commentary, “The light comes right up from over the cliff and it hovers there for a bit and then boom.” He looked up at me. “It went inside you.”
Harvey said, “What did you see? Who were you talking to? Was it the girl you said you saw?”
I put my head in my hands. I thought I might be sick.
Beth leaned across and put herself in my eyeline. “Are you alright?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Harvey raised his voice a little, stamping it with an authority that seemed to come naturally. “Tell us what happened out there.”
I played it back in my head, forming the images of the man with the cigarette, the girl down on the rocks with her open eyes, the pain and the fear, the ugly black of the evil presence that disposed of her like the girl in white the night before. I rehearsed sentences in my head, but none of it went close to conveying what it was that I had felt. I said nothing.
“Leave him be,” Juliet said, each word coming as if it took effort.
I turned to Beth and almost whispered.
“I was wrong to try again,” I said. “I should have listened to you.”
“Do you want to drive back?”
I didn’t much want to be back in my apartment in the city either. “I don’t know.”
Harvey thumped over to us. “You can’t go home now Sam.”
Beth stood tall and faced him, “Says who?”
“We need a debrief. We need to interview Sam and we need to do it right now while it’s fresh in his memory. We need to know what he saw. Details are important.”
“I’m tired Harvey,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it now. Maybe I don’t want to talk about it ever.”
“We have to-”
“No.” Beth cut him off, her raised voice echoing off the walls.
“Fine,” Harvey said. “But there’s something I want to show Sam tomorrow. Something that might shed some light on this.”
“What?” I asked.
“I have to show you. Tomorrow morning. And then, if you still want to go back, we go back and never talk about it again.”
I went to bed without dinner. My stomach was in knots and I doubt I could have eaten if I tried. I closed my eyes and over and over again I saw the girl in the red sweater and the man smoking a cigarette, and with each iteration came the terror as he pushed me off the cliff edge.
I woke late and crept downstairs. A vast ocean of silence filled the Manor. I had heard the others up until the early hours before the house finally fell silent. I assumed they were still be in bed. Harvey sat alone at the kitchen island cradling a coffee mug.
“Are you ready to go or do you want to eat something first?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Let’s go then.”
I didn’t argue and followed him out the door. I figured the sooner I got this over with the sooner we could leave.
Harvey wound his way through the narrow streets of the small town down the coast. He took a right and slowed, reading off the numbers on the houses. At number 42 he stopped.
“What are we doing here?”
“We’re going in that house and I am going to ask Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin some questions.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He opened the glovebox and took out a small notebook and a pen. “Take notes.”
A man of about fifty answered the door. “You must be Mr. Harvey?”
“Yes, sir. This here is my assistant Sam.”
“Hello Sam.” His face was stern.
I curled my fingers into a half-wave.
“Come in.”
We sat in the front room. Mr. Laughlin settled into a recliner and Mrs. Laughlin joined from the kitchen. Bright sunshine back-lit the sheer curtains across the front windows. The shag carpet showed signs of age, as did the furniture, but everything was clean and well-kept.
Harvey said, “Thank you again for your time.”
Mr. Laughlin cleared his throat. “I don’t know what else we can tell you except what we told the police at the time, and my memory of it all was better then than it is now. Are you making a pod about this?”
Mrs. Laughlin let some air out through her nose, “It’s podcast dear.”
Mr. Laughlin squirmed in his chair. “Whatever. It seems to be all the rage these days. Drag up some unsolved case and slap it together and put it on television. Are you recording us?”
Harvey pointed to the notebook resting on my lap. “No, we’ll only take notes if that is alright with you. I don’t know yet where this story will go. And I’ll ask your permission before we use this for anything else. Now, Jane and Kylie disappeared on May 24, 2019?”
Mr. Laughlin nodded. “It was a Friday night. Barb and I were up north visiting her family.”
Mrs. Laughlin peered at the ceiling, recalling the timeline. “My uncle had died. The funeral was that morning and we were staying the weekend. Janey had just turned 18 and Kylie was a couple of years older. Jane told Kylie she was going to meet up with some friends, but we found out later-“
Mr. Laughlin cut into his wife’s sentence. “She lied.”
Harvey said, “Who was she meeting?”
Mr. Laughlin shrugged. “We don’t know and none of her friends ever said anything.”
“Did Kylie know?”
“Never got a chance to ask her. We spoke to her for the last time on the phone at around 7 or maybe a bit after that night. Jane had already left.”
I scribbled all this down.
Harvey pointed to a row of framed portraits on the mantle above the fire. “Is that a photo of them?”
Mrs. Laughlin rose from the sofa and pulled down the largest of the framed photos. She handed it to Harvey. He handed it to me. I glanced at the photo and saw the two girls, Jane and Kylie. My eyes widened and my stomach kicked. The girl in the red sweater stared out at me, her hand around the shoulder of her sister, the blonde wearing white from Windhaven Manor.
Mr. Laughlin turned to me. “Is something wrong boy?”
I locked onto Mr. Laughlin’s gaze as a rabbit to a spotlight. I shook my head and put the photo face down beside me.
Mrs. Laughlin said, “We tried to call both girls the morning after and when we couldn’t get through we came back. They found Kylie washed up on the rocks down by the lighthouse. God only knows what she was doing there. They never found Jane. There’s days I believe she’s still alive somewhere trying to get home to us.” She covered her mouth and took a tissue from a box on the coffee table.
Mr. Laughlin picked up the story. “We don’t know if we’ll ever find her. The police did their best, but came up with nothing. That’s the hardest part. Not knowing. When you don’t know you imagine everything.”
Harvey said, “Is there anything else from that night?”
Mr. Laughlin clicked his fingers. “Kylie’s phone pinged off the tower by the lighthouse a bit after midnight.”
“Pinged. She made a call?”
Mr. Laughlin nodded. “Call lasted only a few seconds.”
“She was looking for her sister.” I looked up from the pad immediately after speaking, shocked I’d said it aloud.
Mr. Laughlin looked at me quizzically. “That’s what we thought too.”
Harvey asked a few more questions but I barely heard them. My mind raced. Jane had been in Windhaven Manor and Kylie had tracked her there. Maybe traced her phone. And then someone had pushed Kylie from the cliff. But who, and why? What was Jane doing? Who had she met? The image of the smoking man flashed in my head.
Harvey tapped me on the thigh. It was time to leave. He thanked the Laughlins and we walked back to the car. When we were inside Harvey pushed his face close to mine.
“You still not want to talk about this again?”
I trembled in my seat.
“Tell me what you saw. If not for me, then for them.”
Harvey drove further down the coast. Not far out of Windhaven he made a phone call. I didn’t listen. My head spun and played with the fragments of information to find a way to make them fit, but there was too much I didn’t have an answer to.
When Harvey hung up he turned to me.
“We have something else we need to do.”
“Does it have to be right away? I could use a bit of time to process everything.”
“Yes. We cannot sit on this. You’ll see why.”
Harvey turned onto small road, eyes flicking between numbers on letterboxes. We pulled in behind a red Mazda and Harvey killed the engine. “Let’s go.”
Before we could knock the front door cracked open and a woman’s voice told us to head around the back. In the back corner of the property was a stand-alone garden shed sided with lightweight panelling painted green. A tall man with unkempt, thinning hair and a beard full of grey skipped out the back door and gestured with his head for us to follow. He pulled a ring full of keys from his pocket and unlocked the shed and ushered us in.
The garden shed was in fact a studio with hand-drawn sketches adorning the walls and a desk and computer positioned by the window. I assumed the man was some kind of amateur artist. Harvey shook his hand and stepped back.
“This is Sam. Sam, this is Kyle.”
I took Kyle’s hand.
Kyle sat and swivelled to the desk. “You keeping busy?”
“Busy enough,” Harvey said. “It’s a nice place. I should come down and we can go fishing. How are the kids?”
“Pain in my ass. I’m happy to have the afternoon out here and away from what is going on in there.”
“Thanks again for doing this. I know you’re technically retired.”
Kyle waved a hand at Harvey. “Let’s get to work.”
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Harvey retreated to the corner of the room. “Kyle used to be a police sketch artist. What you’re going to do is describe the man you saw and Kyle is going to create a face for us to find.”
I was grateful Harvey didn’t give any details of how the face came to me. It was a conversation I didn’t feel like having.
“I don’t know if I can remember the face that well,” I lied, suddenly aware of the implications for the owner of the face I described. If I had witnessed the man in the act myself and with my own eyes it would have been different. But here I was about to describe a face based off a vision seen through the eyes of the girl he pushed from the cliff. I was not the witness, she was, and what if somehow something went wrong in the transmission?
“Trust Kyle, he’s the best.”
Kyle winked at Harvey and dragged a small plastic chair beside his own and tapped it with his palm. “It’s easier if you can see the screen. I used to do these by hand, but one can only hold back time and technology for so long.”
We spent the best part of an hour creating the composite. In truth it wasn’t difficult. The image of the man was burned in my brain, he could have been sat beside me. And Kyle had a sixth sense for taking broad and fuzzy characterisations and putting them on the screen.
During the process Kyle and Harvey bantered back and forth. It was clear they knew each other well and I guessed they were old colleagues. But as the face on the screen took shape, the chatter became sporadic until it stopped altogether. By the time Kyle finished there was a palpable tension in the room. It was like the aftermath of a politically incorrect joke at a family dinner.
“That’s it,” I said, happy with what was on the screen and full of pride for my part in the process. Kyle’s image was spot on. Eyes a little too close together, a flat nose and tiny ears.
“Are you sure that’s him?” Harvey said from behind me.
I tried to get a read on his face. He played with the 3-day old bristles on his chin. I turned back to Kyle who studied the screen. “Yes I’m sure. That’s the man I saw.”
Kyle sighed. “You want me to print you a copy?”
“No,” Harvey said. “Save it and put it somewhere safe.”
“You got it.”
Harvey tapped me on the shoulder. “Time to go.”
I remained in my seat. “Don’t we need a copy?” I asked.
“Not right now. Come on let’s go.” Harvey opened the door and stepped out.
I stood and exited into the garden. The sun crept lower and what warmth it had brought was fast dissipating.
“Wait for me by the car,” Harvey said.
“What’s going on?”
“Wait for me by the car.” His tone was that of a frustrated father and his eyes narrowed. I considered arguing, but like a child I obeyed.
When I made it to the side gate I turned back. Harvey and Kyle were in conversation and Kyle watched as I walked away. Harvey kicked at the ground and shook his head. I closed the gate behind me.
It was several minutes before Harvey appeared.
“I thought we were all about telling each other everything,” I said. “Or is that rule one sided?”
“Get in the car.”
“Tell me what happened in there.”
“We got our face.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it for now. Get in the car.”
Harvey dropped me outside the tall stone walls of Windhaven Manor. We barely spoke during the drive. He rolled his fingers over the steering wheel like a baker kneading dough.
As I opened the car door to get out Harvey said, “I’ll come back tonight.”
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.
I entered through the open steel gates and walked the tree-lined driveway. The late afternoon sun glowed through a thin film of white cloud. The last of the dying leaves clung to thin branches. Ahead the Manor rippled as if I were looking at it through a haze of warm air rising off a hot surface. Except it was cold out. I stopped and waited for the haze to clear, but it persisted. I had not noticed this when we first came, or when we returned from the excursion down to the cliff edge, but then it had been dark with night.
My phone vibrated. A text from Beth, the third of the day. I paused for a beat staring at the screen and then wrote a quick reply. I was almost there. I hurried down the path keeping my eyes on the ground. Right now I had to get inside and whatever was causing this shimmering of the air around the Manor could wait.
The smell of spaghetti sauce wafted through the foyer. I looked and listened and felt for the blonde girl. Jane Laughlin. I had a name now. I whispered it inside my head and a second time aloud. Nothing.
Three heads swivelled when I pushed open the kitchen door. Parker leaned over a saucepan of boiling water, ladle in hand. Juliet and Beth swiped with their thumbs and placed their phones on the table at which they sat. The warmth of the room gave it a claustrophobic atmosphere and the inescapable smell of sauce reminded me I hadn’t felt the pangs of hunger for days.
Beth’s chair scraped over the tiles as she stood. “Sam, are you ok?”
I nodded. “What are we having?”
Parker smiled. “It’s my Nonna’s recipe. I guarantee you’ve never had anything like it.”
I took a chair and Beth sat back down on hers. “You left early this morning. Is everything ok?”
I coalesced the events of the day – the visit to the Laughlin family, the sketch of the face from the cliff edge, the sudden mood change in Harvey – and arranged a few sentences in my head to begin to explain it all and then-
“Everything is fine.”
Despite everything we had shared over the last two days, I could not shake the idea that I was alone in this. Jane and Kylie Laughlin and the smoking man out by the cliff edge, the terror as I fell over the edge, the helplessness as Jane tried to speak, but could not, these were things I had seen and felt, but they had not.
After the incident at school in the groundskeeper’s shed, with the boy under the bench covered in blood, my parents made a series of phone calls in hushed voices late at night. A couple of weeks later a priest dressed in black with a white strip below his throat came to our house. He opened a leather satchel and took out crosses and metal balls that burned a sickly scent. He instructed me to lie down and he opened a book and chanted in a language I didn’t understand. He placed his hands on me and I trembled. His voice grew and he slapped his hand on my forehead and demanded that the evil spirits depart.
I looked to my parents for help, for them to put an end to the ritual. But they watched on, comforting each other and leaving me in the hands of a stranger. I turned back to the man standing over me, his eyes wide and dark and his voice rising and rising. I closed my eyes and kept still. I had read somewhere that when attacked by a bear, the best option is to play dead rather than fight or run, and that advice seemed to fit. No matter how loud he yelled or how hard he slapped, I stayed still. When the tears broke free and rolled down my cheek, I felt shame.
It lasted hours. In the lonely minutes before dawn, the priest finally gave up. From the window I watched him shrug his shoulders and shake his head. After he drove off my parents stood in front of the house, my father with an arm draped over my mother. I held back the curtain and waited for them to come back inside and explain, or even apologise. My mother looked at my bedroom window and then turned away. Her shoulders rose and fell as she sobbed and my father embraced her.
The sound of the bubbling water on the stove brought me back into the kitchen of Windhaven Manor. An uncomfortable silence worsened to something approaching excruciating.
Parker left the stove to put a white plate and a bottle of beer in front of my crossed arms. I picked up the bottle and let the cold beer trickle down my throat. He said, “Everything is fine is code for a whole bunch of crazy stuff just happened.”
Beth shushed him. “We were worried about you. Parker and Juliet and me. We wished you would have stayed this morning.”
“Harvey had some stuff he needed to show me.”
“What?”
Juliet touched my forearm. “We don’t think you’re crazy Sam. I felt it too. There is something happening here. I’ve felt it before, but nothing like this. But I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. If we know what you saw, what you felt, maybe we can help put it all together.”
I took another hit on the beer. “He thinks what I saw the last couple of nights might mean something.”
“What did you see?”
I hesitated.
I rotated the bottle on the plastic tablecloth. I lifted it and wiped at the ring of water left behind. My discomfort must have been obvious. No one spoke. No one knew what to say. The only sound was the simmering of the sauce on the stove.
Parker let go of the ladle and it clanged against the inside of the saucepan. “We’re on the ground floor of something here and we’re in. All of us. The Séance Club, this is what we do. I’m dying to know what you saw the last couple of nights. And not because I want to have you committed to an asylum.”
Beth shot him a look of disapproval, “Pay attention to the Bolognese.”
“My Nonna would never. I was in love once. Her name was Mary. She came over for dinner one night and Nonna put a huge saucepan of this sauce in the middle of the table. The single greatest smell in creation wafted up through the room. Nonna took the ladle to serve Mary first, but before the sauce made it to her plate Mary held up a hand like this, and turned up her nose and shook her head. Nonna froze, a look of unadulterated astonishment on her face. God himself held his breath. And Nonna raised a finger and pointed to the door and demanded Mary leave. I’ve never forgiven her. Mary that is. Who turns down this sauce?” Parker’s natural laugh filled the room.
When silence returned I cleared my throat. “The girl out by the cliff spoke to me,” I said. I grimaced, but with the first step complete, the rest followed as if running downhill. “Her name is Kylie. She’s the sister of the girl I saw the first night. Kylie showed me something, the face of a man. The man who killed her.”
I waited for a look of incredulity. I waited for shakes of the head, or even a snicker. I saw instead looks that varied between concern and intrigue.
Parker took in a breath. “Killed her?”
“She was pushed. That’s what she showed me.”
Juliet opened her mouth, but no words came out. Parker started to speak and she shushed him. “She showed you her death? Who pushed her, and why?”
“I don’t know. I think Harvey knows, but he won’t tell me. There was someone else there with us, something else. I felt it the first night. The second night it appeared like a shadow. It took both girls away somewhere. It took them before they could tell me anything.”
“I felt it too,” Juliet said. “The vibration was different. Something dark, something evil.”
I shot Juliet a glance. She felt the vibration too? In movies and books about these type of things no one ever mentioned vibration. I had considered the possibility that what she did was show, something for Parker’s cameras. This one word flipped that idea on its head.
“There’s too many pieces missing still. Harvey is helping, he said he had to go and take care of something and that he would be back.”
Silence descended on the room. The words I had spoken echoed and ringed in my ears. I swore I would never speak about these things with anyone, and yet here I was in a room of people I barely knew baring my soul.
A faint smell of burning wafted over from the stove. Parker threw his hands in the air. “Nonna’s sauce!” He turned down the heat and stirred with the ladle. “Pease be ok.”
Parker dropped a mess of spaghetti on our plates and drowned it with sauce. He sat, dejected at the execution of the dish. He looked to the ceiling and mouthed an apology. I expected the smell to rouse the nausea once more. Instead my stomach cried out for food.
Beth and I left the other two in the kitchen to deal with the cleaning. Parker initially refused all help, taking full responsibility for the mess, but Juliet refused to be told no.
Before we had even closed the door to the library at the front of the house, Beth spat out a question with an earnestness I did not expect.
“What do you know about him? Harvey I mean.”
“Not much.”
“Be careful. I know that sounds a bit dramatic.”
“Why?”
“Some of the things he said after you went to bed last night.”
“Like what?”
“He said that he’s been waiting for you. That you have some sort of gift. He might not have your best interest at heart.”
Harvey had acted distant in the car. There was something he was keeping from me, of that I was sure. But I had not noticed anything nefarious in his behaviour. Still, she had a point. What did we know about him? He had showed up uninvited and out of the blue.
I plopped down on a hard leather couch stood before a disused fireplace. I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to make of anything that had happened over the last couple of days.
I said, “And what do you think, about everything that’s happened I mean?”
“I don’t know. This is all a bit off the chart for everyone. Even for Juliet, the self-appointed Queen of the séance. I hope I haven’t dragged you into something.”
“I came to Windhaven of my own volition. None of this is on you.”
Her face softened. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Anything.”
Harvey returned as the sun sank below the ocean. We heard the car and went out to meet him. He pulled out his phone and gave it to me. I flicked through the photos.
A family exiting a house on a suburban street. A man and a woman and two teenage children. The woman and the children were blonde and had the same slender physique. The man wore a baseball cap and for most of the photos, had his back to the camera. I flicked further and found a photo with a clear view of the face of the man. I instinctively pointed at the screen.
The man was unmistakable. The face in the sketch. The face of the man who pushed Kylie Laughlin over the edge. The same flat nose, the small ears, the eyes too close together. I didn’t breathe, I didn’t move.
“Say it,” Harvey said.
“It’s him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. A hundred percent.”
Parker stuck up two thumbs. “Great, we know who the guy is. This is a good thing, right? Right?”
Harvey didn’t answer.
I said, “Tell us what’s going on.”
Harvey pocketed the phone and looked back out down the driveway. In the fading light a black van crept into view in the gap formed by the gate. Despite the growing gloom, the headlights weren’t on. The black van rolled to a stop, idling in the opening.
Harvey had his eyes on the van. “That man you identified is the Chief of Police. My former boss. We need to lock those gates.”
Parker retracted his thumbs. “What do you mean?”
The presence of the black van was suddenly far more sinister. All of us watched it, unsure what to do. My heart skipped a beat and the pasta roiled in my stomach. I wanted to shout at the van to make it leave us alone. And then the van slowly rolled away and was gone.
Harvey marched down the driveway. He called back, “That van might have followed me. I think I saw it on the drive back. Or one like it.”
Parker laughed nervously. “You were followed? We need to call the police.”
“Don’t you get it? They are the police.”
Parker was incredulous. He threw out his arms. “What should we do? We should leave right? We should leave.”
Harvey stopped and raised a finger as if talking to a child. “If they are here for us then they will follow. Think about what we already know and how dangerous that information is. Two girls are already dead. And if I’m right, if this is what I think it is, then there are others. There’s something going on here and our only escape is to figure it out.”
The colour drained from Parker’s face.
We followed Harvey to the giant steel gates and clattered them shut. The key was in the lock and Harvey turned it and stuck it in his pocket. Parker came jogging up behind and wrapped a bicycle lock around the inner two steel bars. The thin black cord looked flimsy and fragile against the giant steel arms of the gate.
I peered through the narrow gaps in the gate. In the gloom a black shadow stood at the end of the street. The same malevolent presence from the first séance. The same silhouette I had seen out on the cliff. I shivered and shut my eyes against a sudden headache. The black shadow grew inside my mind until it towered like a giant before the gates. Fear overwhelmed and I wanted to run. But where was there left to go? I felt like an animal locked in a cage. Beside me Juliet doubled over and took a deep breath.
Harvey marched back up the driveway towards the Manor. “Come on, we have work to do.”
We followed, the imposing façade of the Manor shining white under the spotlights. It now felt like our prison.
The wind buffeted off the ocean and brought a spray of drizzle. Bad weather was coming. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.