The Patchwork House (8 page)

“Can we rule her out?” Derek asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t smell any lavender. Did you guys?”

They all shook their heads.

“So that leaves Percy’s granddad,” said Chloe.

“Arthur did say he tends to make a racket at night,” I told them.

“He must be really pissed at us,” Beth said while she looked at me, making it clear that the ghost wasn’t the only one who was mad.

Derek nodded. “So it’s the old man then. Any reports of him moving furniture?”

I shrugged. “No idea. Arthur only talked about him briefly, just said he’s noisy.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Percy’s granddad? Well he must have, but I don’t know what it is.”

“We could ask him,” Beth suggested.

“Or maybe the books give a clue to his name,” Derek suggested.

“I think that’s a stretch,” I said.

“Feel free to come up with a better suggestion,” Derek snapped.

All of us sat quietly for a moment.

“Are you going to tell me why you’re so pissed off at me?” I asked him after a time. I knew why Beth was mad, however unfairly, but the cause of Derek’s ire was a mystery.

“Drop it, Jim,” he said, in a warning tone.

“Maybe I won’t. Maybe you’re going to tell me what’s up with you.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t think I owe you anything. You don’t need anything from me so just drop it, okay?”

I put up my hands and backed off. “No problem, Derek. I’ll leave you be.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Well there was no doubt about it now: he really didn’t like me and me alone. So now the only person here who could tolerate me was Chloe.

We sat in silence for a short while and then Chloe said something.

“What if it’s not one of the three known ghosts,” she suggested quietly. “What if it’s a newcomer? What if it’s Percy himself? How long ago did he die?”

“A month,” Beth said.

“Well there you go then, maybe it’s the ghost of Percy.”

“He was an old man when he died,” I said. “How’s he going to lift a bookcase?”

“He’s a fucking ghost, Jim,” Derek said. “Who the hell knows what he’s capable of?”

I ignored his abrasive attitude and went with the positive. By calling it a ghost, Derek was admitting that I wasn’t crazy. I was sure he’d try to find some kind of explanation for the bang on the door and the books on the stairs. But no, he was seemingly as convinced as I was. And he hadn’t seen the thing on the ceiling.

“It makes sense though, right?” Chloe pushed on, putting a hand on Derek’s arm to try to get him to calm down. “Percy dies having lived in the house all his life. He leaves no heirs so the house has to be sold. And we’re the first ones to stay here overnight. Stands to reason. He wants us gone.”

“You may be onto something there,” I told her. “But I still don’t think it wants us to leave.”

“Maybe it… he just wants us to know he’s here, so that your dad won’t be able to sell the house at all.”

“Or it could be Arthur,” Beth piped up. “He could have the house wired up with special effects. It could be a big ruse to get us to leave.”

“How very
Scooby Doo
,” I said with a forced smile. “I’ll unmask him for a Scooby-snack.”

Beth regarded me coldly and my smile vanished.

“It’s actually the most logical explanation,” Derek said.

“Well it might explain the thumps and the footsteps, but it doesn’t explain moving the bookcase, or the thing up on the ceiling either.” I pointed to the chandelier. Everyone else stared at it.

“What thing on the ceiling?” Beth asked.

“I saw it while you were all sleeping. It was a black mass, clinging to the chandelier. I pointed my phone’s light right at it and it came at me.”

“Came at you?” Beth said.

“Yeah, it just sort of… hurled itself at me. And I saw a face.”

“It had a face?” Derek was leaning in now.

“Yeah I’m sure of it. But it was only a fraction of a second and then it was gone. I swear it had a face but I couldn’t draw it for you or anything, or pick a guy out of a lineup. I couldn’t even tell you if its nose was big or its mouth was wide. It was in motion, fluid.”

“And what happened when it came at you?”

“Well I kind of… screamed and covered my head, and then it was gone.”

Chloe swallowed. “I will never sleep again.”

We sat in silence for a while. Beth yawned, but none of us felt willing to climb back into our sleeping bags.

“So is it time to leave?” Beth asked.

I checked my phone. It was 12.30am.

“It’s the middle of the night, where are we going to go?”

“We can take turns to drive back to London,” Chloe suggested. “You can stay at our flat. The kids are away so there’s lots of room.”

“Thanks but it might be easier to drive to the nearest city and rent a room.”

“What is the nearest city?” Beth asked.

I shrugged. “Hereford, I suppose. Once we’re back in civilization I can check some websites and see if I can get us in somewhere.”

“We’re not leaving!” Derek said.

“Hon, I think we’re not wanted here,” Chloe said, putting a hand on his arm.

“No way, I’m not leaving until we get this thing on film.”

“Derek, I’m with the girls. I think it’s time to go.”

“You can go if you like.”

I shook my head. “We’re not leaving you here alone.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said. “You can come pick me up in the morning.”

“You’re not serious, are you, hon?” Chloe’s tone was pleading. “I can’t leave you here, I won’t leave you.”

“Stay with me then.”

Chloe continued, “But this is crazy. Out of the four of us, you were the only one who didn’t want to come.  Now you don’t want to leave.”

“Now I know there’s a ghost, I want to stay. I want to find out who it is and what its motives are. And I want it on camera.”

“We won’t leave you,” I said again. Regardless of his attitude, he was still my friend. He was still the only person in the village I grew up in who took the time to reach out to me, the new kid. It was a lonely life moving around so much, and to have a friend like Derek had been a lifesaver—and I mean that probably in a literal sense.

“Then we’re all staying.”

And that was that. Beth didn’t look happy about it. Or she might have been pissed at me still. Chloe was veering halfway between terror at the prospect of staying and anger that her husband didn’t want to leave.

“I’m going to get the camera on the banister. Hopefully it got a good shot of whatever came down the stairs.”

“Shouldn’t we wait until morning?” I said.

“I want to check we got something now. If the camera’s at the wrong angle we could end up getting no good shots the whole night.”

“Oh Derek, stop it,” Chloe said. “None of us wants to go upstairs now. Let’s just stay in here.”

“I didn’t say you had to come with me.”

“We made a rule, remember,” I said.

“Bollocks to your rule. If anyone wants to come up with me then be my guest. If not, I’ll go alone. I’m just going to grab the camera from the top of the stairs and come back again. I’m not going to hang out and drink piña coladas with Percy’s granddad in the library.”

Beth, Chloe and I glanced awkwardly at each other, each hoping someone else would volunteer first.

Derek laughed. “For God’s sake, it’s either a ghost or a hoax, and the sooner we find out the sooner we can get some sleep.”

Somehow I didn’t think Derek really cared that much about sleeping. He was on a mission now. Perhaps this was the most exciting thing to happen to him in years. Or perhaps he longed for fame, and believed this was his chance to grab it.

I had to admit, while part of my mind recoiled in terror at the thought of seeing that dark mass again, another part dearly wanted to get it on film. Not because I wanted to become famous and get on TV, necessarily, but because it would be pretty cool to have actual evidence of a real life haunting.

Derek clicked on his torch and went to the door.

“I’ll come with you then,” I said. I would never forgive myself if I let him go alone and something happened to him.

Beth didn’t look too happy about that. “We’ll be fine,” I whispered to her. I picked up the spare lamp, turned on the gas and followed Derek into the hall.

He was already at the foot of the stairs, using his torch to illuminate as much of the upper floor as its beam would reveal. I stood back so as not to blind him with my lamp. After a moment he seemed satisfied that there was nothing up there and he started climbing. I followed him, keeping back a few steps. Our eyes never wavered from the landing. When Derek reached the base of the guard rail, his head at floor level, he shone the torch up and down the corridor and craned his neck to see. The camera was attached to one of the wooden beams about two feet above Derek’s head. He reached up and switched off the automatic setting—the camera had likely already taken a few snaps of Derek’s torchlight dancing over the walls. He placed the torch between his teeth, climbed another couple of steps and reached out to the camera again. This time he started taking off the drafting tape holding it in place. It was very loud, the noise echoing in the long corridor running the length of the whole house. I raised the lamp to help Derek see what he was doing. It seemed to take forever but eventually the camera came free.

Derek pulled it through the bars and then took the torch out of his mouth. “Should have brought a knife,” Derek said drolly as we headed back down the stairs.

We made it to the drawing room without anything weird happening and closed the door behind us. Chloe and Beth looked relieved.

“Nothing happened,” I told Beth. Derek ignored us and sat down with the camera. Quickly he began flicking through photographs.

“What time did you hear the footsteps?” he asked me.

“I don’t know, maybe around quarter past twelve.”

“Okay, well your camera is screwed up, because the photos have the wrong date on them. The timestamp says they were taken around three in the morning.”

“That is weird. I double checked the date and time when I set it up.”

“And something else that’s weird. It took a picture of us going into the library, and coming back out again after we set up the video camera. But later on there are more pictures of just me.”

Derek handed over the camera and I looked through some of the pictures. They were of Derek coming out of the library and going back in, but I wasn’t in them.

“You didn’t go in the library alone, so where am I?”

“Scroll back to just before those photos and you’ll see both of us,” Derek said. “I don’t remember going back in after we were done in the library though.”

“I think our friend is playing with the electronics,” Beth said.

“And that’s not the only thing,” I said. Have you seen how much battery is left? With the extended battery this should have been good at least until dawn.”

“How much is left?” Beth asked.

I shook the camera, like that would make the slightest difference, and checked it again. “A few minutes,” I said. “I’ll have to charge it again before we put it back upstairs.”

“So lots of weirdness, but nothing concrete,” said Derek.

“Is there anything else you’ve found?” I asked him, handing him back the camera.

Derek took it from me and said, “I’ll let you know. I’ve not got to the photos taken when you heard the footsteps yet, and with the timestamps messed up it’s really hard to tell where they are. I wish I could plug this into the laptop.”

“No no no,” Chloe said. “You’re not going back upstairs!”

“I have to anyway. The video camera battery is likely nearly dead as well, so we need to recharge it.

“Uh oh,” said Beth. She was holding out her smartphone. The battery level was critically low.

I checked mine too and saw the same. Yet we’d charged ours off the recharger station when we arrived.

While Chloe and Derek checked their own phones, I went over the recharger. Thankfully it was still showing a decent amount of battery left.

“Maybe power is only draining upstairs,” I said as I plugged my phone and Beth’s into two of the sockets. I had two bays left, and Derek reluctantly handed over his phone (nearly dead) and the camera and I plugged them both in.

“Now I really want that laptop,” Derek said again. “Who’s coming with me to get it?”

None of us moved.

“We need to conserve our light,” I said.

“We need to leave,” Chloe snapped. “Who’s to say the car battery isn’t dead too? Maybe we should get it running before it goes flat.”

“That’s a really good point, Jim,” said Beth.

“The car hasn’t been upstairs,” Derek protested.

“The point is we don’t know what’s causing the drain or if it’s limited to anywhere,” I said.