Eglantine (6 page)
“Emilie, I think you love me.”
“And if I do, Osric – what then: is it strange? Have I not
heard thy voice growing ever more musical for my hearing,
than for other ears? Have I not felt thy questing glance, thy
probing words, going deeper into my heart than any other
words or glance have ever been? If I do love thee Osric,
I cannot help it; – what then?”
After this, everything was a tangled mess, lines written over lines. I was able to make out
His eyes
were full of hope and enterprise
,
My love is not an idle passion
and
There are retreats where we may hide deep enough away
. There was something about a drooping head and yielding mien – something else about a consenting word forever undoing the ties that bind. But I couldn’t get all the words to join together.
It was annoying, I can tell you. And even more annoying was Sylvia’s reaction, when she arrived with her fellow investigator on Friday night. But before I tell you about that, I should tell you about Friday afternoon. On Friday afternoon, I came home to discover that the copy of Mum’s title deeds had arrived. Mum told me the news as soon as I walked in the door, and handed me a long piece of paper with a coat of arms at the top and a lot of typed words sitting above a series of scribbled-on stamps.
‘Prescott-Marsh, of Burrough, Teens and Walgrove,’ I read aloud, ‘is now the proprietor of an Estate in Fee Simple, subject nonetheless to the reservations and conditions, if any, contained in the Grant hereinafter referred to . . .’
‘Not that bit,’ Mum interrupted. ‘Down there.’
‘Where?’
‘That stamp. Each stamp is a new owner. You see? This mortgage here was discharged to Ernest George Higgins in March 1894.’
‘Higgins!’ I exclaimed.
‘He was probably Eglantine’s father. And look – the next owner bought the place in 1907. The year she died.’
I gasped.
‘Ernest Higgins moved out,’ Mum continued, ‘the very year she died.’
‘Because she died in his house!’ I declared.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘But it makes sense, Mum. Why else would you move out of a perfectly good house? Because your daughter died in it, of course!’
‘Because someone strangled her in my bedroom,’ Bethan suddenly remarked. He had come in quietly, and was peeling a banana from the fruit bowl. ‘That’s probably what happened.’
‘Maybe her
father
strangled her!’ I added. ‘Maybe he had to sell the house because he went to gaol.’
‘Now, stop it,’ said Mum, with a frown. ‘You’re being silly.’
‘But, Mum, just think.’ I myself was thinking – thinking hard. ‘In the story, the white-bearded king wants his daughter to marry a man she’s not in love with. Maybe the same thing happened here. Maybe it was like that TV series, “Nicholas Nickleby”, where the father was bankrupt and wanted his daughter to marry a rich man, and she wouldn’t because she was in love with someone else, so in this case he strangled her -’
‘That’s enough!’ Mum snapped. ‘You’re being revolting and melodramatic. I don’t want any more talk about stranglings in this house!’
But of course there
was
more talk about stranglings that night, because the two PRISM investigators came. Sylvia turned up in a neat pair of track-pants, a white woollen jumper and some very old running shoes. With her she brought a young guy named Richard Boyer, who was thin and pale and very keen. He had bright blue eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and a quick, breathless way of talking. He was some sort of computer expert.
When I told him about Eglantine, and Bethan told him about the choking nightmares, he suggested that Eglantine might have died, not because she was strangled, but because she had asthma.
‘I get asthma,’ he said, looking at Bethan. ‘Did it feel as if someone had parked a truck on your chest?’
‘No,’ Bethan replied. ‘It was as if someone was stuffing something down my throat.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Richard. Then he began to talk about other examples of ghostly writing on walls, including one called the Borley Rectory hoax that I’d read about at the library. He seemed very excited. He couldn’t sit still but kept jumping up, again and again, and roaming around the kitchen before returning to his seat. The sight of Eglantine’s book was almost too much for him; his hands trembled as he opened it.
‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Fascinating. Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
. Is this the same text that’s written on the bedroom walls?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That book is poetry. The stuff upstairs – well, it isn’t poetry.’
‘Maybe we should destroy the book,’ Ray suddenly remarked. He had been standing quietly near the fridge. ‘Has anyone thought of that? Maybe the book contains some – I don’t know – some essence or anchor that’s keeping Eglantine in this house. Maybe we should burn the book.’ As everyone turned to stare at him, he gave an embarrassed little smile. ‘Well,’ he finished, ‘it’s just a suggestion.’
‘It’s a good one,’ I said.
But Sylvia would have none of it. ‘
I’ll
take the book,’ she declared. ‘I’ll take it out of the house, and we’ll see if that makes any difference. I don’t think it ought to be destroyed just yet. Not when it contains this sample of Eglantine’s handwriting. Incidentally,’ she added, ‘we might have this handwriting dated, if possible. By an expert.’
‘But it was written in 1906,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s already dated.’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘The question is – are we sure it’s the correct date?’
After a lot of thought, I finally realised what she was getting at. She was saying that Mum, or Ray – or someone else – might have forged Eglantine’s name, to match the writing that they also might have put on the walls. (Human intervention, in other words.) But before I could point out, once again, that we didn’t
want
any writing on the walls, Sylvia was shepherding Richard up to Bethan’s bedroom.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, as she walked in. ‘Oh, no, this is no good.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mum asked.
‘There’s so much writing. There are no blank spaces.’
‘No,’ Mum said patiently. ‘That’s what I was telling you. It’s been getting worse and worse.’
‘But there’s too much. It will be impossible to monitor.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Richard explained that they had been intending to make a record of any paranormal activity in Bethan’s bedroom using infra-red video cameras and time-lapse photography. They had been hoping to film at least one line of script appearing on a stretch of white wall.
‘If we take a wide shot of
this
,’ he said, gesturing, ‘it will be difficult to see any new writing against the old. If it was clean, we wouldn’t have any trouble.’
‘We’ll have to paint over it,’ Sylvia declared. As everyone looked at her, she continued, ‘Tomorrow, Richard. We’ll get a can of white paint and you can paint over the walls. Not the ceiling – just the walls. Then we can start from scratch.’
‘But we’ll have to photograph everything first,’ Richard insisted.
‘Oh, of course. That goes without saying.’
‘Uh – excuse me.’ Mum sort of put up her hand, like a kid at school. ‘You’re going to
paint the room
, again?’
‘If that’s okay with you, Judy.’
‘Well . . . I guess so.’
‘Richard will do it, won’t you, Richard?’ Sylvia went on. ‘I can’t, tomorrow – I’m booked up until the evening. And that’s when we’ll be wanting to come back.’
‘Will the paint be
dry
, by then?’ Mum inquired doubtfully.
‘Oh, I think so.’
‘Unless you need two coats,’ said Ray. ‘You probably will.’
‘We’ll see what happens,’ Sylvia remarked. Then she picked up her tape-recorder, and her infra-red camera, and her electromagnetic field detector, and went home.
Richard went too, though not before photographing every square centimetre of Bethan’s bedroom. He spent about two hours doing that, and left at nine forty-five. The next day he returned at eight-thirty in the morning, with two cans of white paint, a drop-sheet, a camera, a paint-roller and a pair of overalls. He was very enthusiastic when he discovered that the walls were messier than ever.
‘So it didn’t work – taking the book away,’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied. I hadn’t bothered trying to copy out the new lines of text. They were impossible to read, you see.
Bethan and I watched Richard for a while as he took another roll of photographs. Then Bethan wandered away, and I started to help with the painting. It quickly became obvious that Richard needed a lot of help – more help than I could offer. He didn’t seem to know much about painting.
‘I borrowed all this equipment from my dad,’ he admitted, after realising that he had forgotten to bring a tray for the paint-roller. Fortunately, Ray had one of those. He also had a ladder, and a bottle of mineral turpentine, and some paint-spattered old trousers.
By ten o’clock, Ray was working beside Richard while Mum went off to do the shopping. I helped clean the brushes and listened to Richard’s stories. One was about a haunted post office, which somebody had turned into a guesthouse. Several visitors had reported going to bed, switching off the light, and feeling the weight of a person sitting beside them. When the light was switched on, however, there was no one else in the room.
Another story was about a house where the doors kept slamming, where ghostly footsteps were always being heard, and where the crockery in the kitchen kept rearranging itself. Close investigation revealed that draughts, rats and a naughty grandchild were responsible for these ‘paranormal activities’.
‘You have to keep an open mind,’ Richard revealed. ‘It’s no good coming in with your own ideas about something. You have to set aside your beliefs before you walk through the door.’
‘Do
you
believe in ghosts?’ I asked, and he laughed a little.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘honestly. I’d
like
to believe in them. I haven’t seen anything so far that’s really convinced me – but on the other hand, I’ve heard some pretty amazing stories from people I trust, level-headed people who don’t lie about things like that.’
‘How did you get involved in PRISM?’ Ray wanted to know.
Richard told him that, about a year before, he had stumbled onto PRISM’s website and had decided to join. This was only his second investigation. The first had been a case of faulty electrical wiring.
‘Your case looks
much
more interesting,’ he said. ‘Especially if we can get something on film.’
‘Can kids join PRISM?’ Bethan inquired from the door. To my horror, I saw that he was with his friends Matthew and Jonah. So
that’s
what he’s been doing since he left, I thought: rounding up the neighbourhood!
Richard knitted his brows. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know of any kids who are members. But that’s not to say it’s against the rules.’
‘Do you get paid?’ asked Matthew, and Richard laughed again.
‘No. It’s a non-profit organisation.’
‘If I was a ghost-buster, I’d ask them to pay me,’ Matthew declared, squinting down the barrel of his plastic gun. Then he roared off, taking the other two boys with him.
They came back, however, several times. They seemed fascinated by Richard Boyer – though not by the ghostly writing. If it had been up to them, our ghost would have been performing more impressive tricks. Walking around headless, maybe, or making the walls bleed. They were a bit bored by endless lines of small, neat script.
Even so, they brought some of their friends to have a look. By the end of the day, we’d had seven kids through the house, wanting to see the ‘haunted room’ with their own eyes. Matthew and Jonah brought their friends Thomas and Gabriel. Michelle brought her cousin Dommy. And a little kid named Jostein from across the street knocked on the door after lunch to ask if he could please meet ‘Caspar the friendly ghost’. Don’t ask me how
he
heard about Eglantine. Obviously the news was spreading like wildfire.
No wonder our local newspaper got hold of the story.
Actually, we didn’t hear from the local paper until Wednesday – and several things happened before that.
First of all, Richard Boyer spent Saturday night in Bethan’s room. Sylvia tried to do the same thing, but was driven out very quickly by the paint fumes, which gave her a headache. Though Ray had left the window open after finishing the second coat, the fumes were still pretty bad; Richard looked pale and sick the next morning. I found him in the kitchen, drinking coffee, when I came down to breakfast.
Mum was already wide awake, eating her homemade muesli.
‘So how did it go?’ I asked, and Richard blinked at me. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
‘Oh – ah – pretty good,’ he said.
‘Is there any new writing?’
Suddenly he perked up. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Yes, there is. I counted ten new lines.’
‘Great!’ I opened the fridge. ‘Did you see who wrote it?’
‘No.’ Richard sounded crestfallen. ‘I mean, I probably got it on film – certainly the talcum powder wasn’t disturbed . . .’
‘He fell asleep,’ Mum supplied.
‘Even if I’d been awake, I probably wouldn’t have seen anything,’ said Richard, a little defensively. ‘It was too dark. That’s why we had the infra-red set up.’
‘Then why did you have to stay in there at all?’
I wanted to know, dumping the milk on the table.
‘Oh, I had to do that. I had to.’ Richard straightened, and his voice became more breathless than ever. ‘I dreamed that dream, for one thing. I dreamed that I was choking.’
Mum and I exchanged glances.
‘It was incredible,’ Richard continued, furiously scratching his scalp with both hands. ‘Exactly like Bethan said. Not asthma – nothing like asthma. Not a pressure on the windpipe, either. It was as if something was being forced down my throat.’
‘What?’ asked Mum.
‘I don’t know. It was all dark. Of course,’ he added ruefully, ‘dreams don’t mean much, in the circumstances. I was already thinking about Bethan’s dream. My mind was probably responding to the power of suggestion.’ Suddenly Richard leapt to his feet, and scurried out of the room. He seemed to have the jitters, and looked quite awful, all red-rimmed eyes and drawn, white face.
