The Patchwork House (15 page)

“Where are you?” I called.

Silence.

Definitely a trick. There was no question now. Derek and Beth weren’t up here. The fucker could pretend to be any one of us. I wondered if it was luring Beth to a terrible fate right now by pretending to be me, calling out to her. I wondered if it threw a torch at her too.

I let my anger boil over. I allowed myself to be enraged at this manipulative bastard son-of-a-bitch. I wanted it dead, or even more dead. I wanted to find out exactly what it was and I wanted to hurt it. Maybe there was someone it loved while it was alive and I could hurt
them.
Either way, I would make it pay.

“Why are you doing this?” I called into the darkness.

Again no response.

I’d had enough. I was more angry than scared right now. I had a chance to walk down those stairs and leave via the dining room window. I didn’t take it. I was so angry about that. If I’d still just been scared I might have done the sensible thing, gone back downstairs and escaped through the window.

Instead I switched on the dropped torch. Now two beams sliced through the darkness, clear and strong. Neither was on the verge of cutting out. Neither was dimming. Neither was about to switch itself off mysteriously. And if one did, I had the other. It gave me strength. It gave me determination to do something about this. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like a coward. This was my chance to prove I had some balls, to myself, to my girlfriend, to the old schoolmate who had lost all respect for me, and to the entity that sought to make my life hell.

I advanced down the corridor. I didn’t look in any rooms. I was heading for the library. Always the damn library. When I reached it, I pushed the door open and shone one of the torches inside. The other I directed down the corridor.

There was nothing odd about the library. The window was intact, the bookshelf was back in its original position, my laptop and tripod were nowhere to be seen, and the furniture was still covered.

I moved on. I kept going until I reached the door to Percy’s room, the bedroom right at the end of the corridor. Ahead was the games room. I must have been standing directly above the ballroom now.

I heard a noise behind me.

I turned, my false courage evaporating like warm breath on a winter’s morning. I aimed both my torches down the long corridor, back the way I had come. They picked out nothing.

The lights came on.

The brightness was so intense I couldn’t stand it. I cried out, my arms flying up to cover my face. The electric lights had come on, all the way down the corridor. It lasted for maybe a second, but the impact on my vision was crippling.

I cried out and dropped to my knees, dropping both torches as my hands came up instinctively to protect my eyes. The lights had gone out yet fireworks flashed across my vision. My optic nerves burned. I scrambled for either torch, searching blindly, desperately in the darkness. I couldn’t see anything, even if the torches were still on. My hand grasped one of them, the other lay somewhere to my left. One was enough. I stood up and shone the light down the corridor again. I blinked, trying to focus. Slowly, my eyesight returned to something near normal, even though tears streaked down my face. I blinked a few more times, trying to work out in the gloom if I had suffered permanent damage.

Boom, it happened again. The whole length of the corridor lit up. For a split second I could see every door, every picture hanging on the wall, the stairs at the far end, and something else before I was plunged back into the dark. My assaulted eyes struggled to adjust back to torchlight.

It didn’t hurt so much this time, but it still left me disoriented. Every hair on my body stood on end. I was rooted to the spot, utterly incapable of processing what I’d seen.

Standing at the top of the stairs.

Not standing.

Just
there.

It. The thing. The entity. Black as night, absorbing light like a black hole. Staring at me. A face distorted beyond recognition. Suggestions of limbs, rolling like thunder clouds in the mass that shouldn’t have existed at all. I aimed my torch at it but the beam didn’t even reach the stairs.

Footsteps now, booming, coming towards me. I felt panic rising. It was coming. It was coming for me.

The electric lights flickered on and off again, several times, showing me a stop motion image of the thing coming closer and closer, moving with impossible speed… at the library door, next to the wall of the apartment, just three doors away from me.

I screamed and hurled myself sideways, pushing into Percy’s room in panicked desperation. It was instinct more than anything. I don’t remember making the decision. I slammed the door behind me and just a second later felt a bang as something collided with the other side of it. I stumbled forward at the impact, trying to regain my balance as the door came open. I threw myself backwards, my back slamming into the wood and forcing it closed, knocking all the wind out my lungs and sending a jolt of pain though my spine.

Bang
. Against the door again, nearly pitching me forward into the room.

Oh God, why didn’t I leave this fucking house when I had the chance? What the fuck was I trying to prove? That I’m brave? That I’m somehow a big man who can cope in the face of terrifying opposition? I was an idiot.

I braced myself for the next assault but it didn’t come. I shone the torch to one side and saw a chair, just three feet away from me.

Taking a deep breath I lunged at the chair, moving away from the door for a precious couple of seconds. I grabbed the heavy wingback and dragged it, using my body to brace the door again. Gasping for air and trying to think straight I took a moment to think, listen and recover. Then I spun around and rammed the chair up under the door handle.

Checking that it was secure, I retreated a few steps into the room and stood watching the door, ready to leap forward and brace it again if the chair didn’t hold.

There was no sound from outside the room. Had it given up?

I was breathing so heavily, I can’t imagine it couldn’t hear me. My heart pounded and my eyes stung with tears. I did not for one moment think I was safe. I knew it would come back. It was toying with me, seeing how much I could take. I knew at that moment that there was no way this thing was going to let me leave. Even if I had not advanced down the corridor, even if I had run back down the stairs to the hall, it would have slammed the door to the living room and sealed me in. I just knew with a sense of crushing dread that my last chance to escape had been when I was halfway out of that window. From the moment both feet landed back inside I was toast.

But I wasn’t defeated, not yet. Maybe I could get the window open in this room and escape across the roof?

I shone the torch further around the room and jumped with fright, crying out in shock.

A man was sitting on the bed.

CHAPTER 10

I had no idea
who he was. He was staring at me, clear as day, his eyes blinking in the light of the torch. He’d just been sitting here in the fucking dark this entire time.

He was old, clearly, with white hair and a heavily lined face. He was clean shaven and wore neatly pressed white clothes.

I retreated, standing up against the wall right next to the door. I kept the torch trained on him, wondering what the hell he was going to do to me.

He simply put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhhhhh.”

That was about as much as I could take. I started whimpering again, making odd noises I wasn’t in control of. I wanted so badly to pee I was surprised I’d not pissed myself already. I broke out in a cold sweat and felt dizzy. I think my body was shutting down from the stress.

“Shhhh,” the man said again.

He pressed his wrists together and held up both fists, like his hands were bound together. One hand dropped and the other held up four fingers. Without a word, he pointed to his nightstand and vanished.

The nightstand popped open, unlocked.

I was completely alone in the room. The only sound was my urgent breathing and a soft, sobbing sound I realized was also coming from me.

I tried focusing on making sense of what I had seen. Four fingers? Four what? What did that mean? Number four… Four four four. The significance eluded me. I wondered if it wasn’t conveying the number at all but was instead some obscure message in sign language.

My curiousity was helping to calm my fear. The old man’s disappearance had weirdly cancelled out some of my panic. Clearly he’d been trying to tell me something, and by focusing on the puzzle I was able to gain some sanity back. I risked leaving the door and went over to the nightstand. Carefully I pulled open the drawer. There were a few odds and ends inside, but my eyes were drawn to a journal with a rubber band around it.

I lifted it out and took it to the bed. Before sitting down, I was careful to make sure I was the only one there. I removed the band and opened the first page.

The paper had, “Percy Logan’s Journal”, written on the cover. I recognized the handwriting from the library earlier.

Was the man I’d seen Percy? If it was, that meant the entity outside the room was someone else. So if it wasn’t Percy and it wasn’t his grandfather then who the hell was it?

I wanted to read some of the journal, but not here. Escape was still foremost in my mind.

I put the book down on the bed and moved to the casement window. I tried sliding the bottom frame upwards but it wouldn’t budge. I strained against it for about a minute but only succeeded in wearing myself out more. I checked all around the edge of the frame but I hadn’t missed a latch anywhere. The window was stuck closed. I looked around for something heavy enough to break the glass, or bludgeon the frame with, but all I could see that might do the trick was the chair wedged under the door handle. I wasn’t about to remove that.

Clearly I wasn’t going anywhere right now. I sat down on the bed again, took out the candle and matches, wedged the candle into a standing position between a small bedside lamp and an empty vase, and lit it. The candle sputtered and then filled the room with a soft, flickering glow.

I turned off my torch. No sense in wasting the battery.

Then I picked up the journal again. I glanced nervously at the door before starting to read. I was hoping Percy would mention the entity or the clock, or the number four. It might shed some light on how to find the others or even get rid of the entity. Knowledge is power and all that. Clearly Percy, if it was really him, had wanted me to read this. I wasn’t going anywhere for the time being. I had all the time in the world.

That’s when the connection hit me. Number four. The clock. The fourth clock face didn’t correspond to Chloe. Instead it was tuned to Percy’s ghost. Percy was number four. When Percy held his wrists together he was trying to tell me that he was a prisoner. Percy was as trapped here as me. The old man was number four! So that meant the first three clock faces must represent the drummer, the lavender woman, and Percy’s grandfather. The fourth was Percy himself. And that left one more. The fifth ghost. The black mass. The entity that could mimic voices, could crush a car with a bookcase hurled out of the window, and could make people and things move around in time. It was the last one in.

It was in control.

I opened at a random page and started reading. Percy’s handwriting was very neat, almost serial-killer-neat in fact.

Sunday, December 5
th

I can’t sleep. The banging keeps me awake every night now. It drives me to distraction. I am tired all the time, I cannot get any rest. As soon as my eyes close, Grandpa starts up his racket again. The old bastard will not leave me alone. He’s been dead for forty-five years and he still will not leave me alone. Some nights I wake up and he’s sitting by my bed, staring at me. He calls me useless, tells me I’ve wasted my life and amounted to nothing. The family line will die with me and he’s ashamed I’ve not found a woman to help me pass on my cursed genes. He never lets up.

I rubbed my eyes, which were still stinging from the burst of light. It was hard to read by the candlelight but this was fascinating stuff. It seemed the original ghosts of Binsham House were not as benign as Arthur had made out.

Many entries said much the same thing, they outnumbered the mundane accounts of Percy’s participation in the village choral society or his outspoken opinions on tourism in the area (he was dead against it, refusing to open the house and grounds to visitors even to raise money for his church).

But most of the entries were about the regular torture Percy suffered at the ghostly hands of his dead grandfather. Before tonight I would have assumed his writing was that of a delusional geriatric, but now…?

Monday, February 15
th

I spoke to Father Jeremy again today about my predicament. He is friendly but young, and thinks me a doddering old fool. I asked him to come up to the house, to see for himself what goes on here and the nightly abuse inflicted upon me. He simply smiles and says of course, but not tonight. Always not tonight. Always got something more important to do. I hate his smugness and his youth. He thinks he’s above everyone in this village despite the fact that the estate makes me worth one hundred times his value. Nobody wants to hear my opinion these days. All in too much of a hurry to modernize everything.

And Grandpa? Yes he visited me again last night. I am not afraid of him. He does not usually try to hurt me. But he is disruptive. He shines lights in my eyes. He bangs things in my room. He shouts and yells and screams at me. He even once threw a glass at me. I told him he could have killed me and if he did, I would haunt his buggering arse for the rest of eternity. He didn’t like the sound of that but he didn’t throw anything at me again.

But as I grow older I know inevitably I will be joining him one day. My Lord in Heaven, I beseech thee not to abandon me to such a fate as this.

As time went on, it was obvious the lack of sleep and peace was affecting Percy’s sanity. His entries became less coherent and more sporadic. Months would go by with no update, followed by rambling pages cursing everyone he came into contact with and calling his grandfather dirty names that belied his intellect and education.

What I held in my hands was quite simply an account of one man’s descent into madness. Before tonight I would have dismissed it as the ramblings of a deranged lunatic, conjuring the image of his dead grandfather in order to focus and justify his rage.

Now I knew better. I’d heard his grandfather in the lodge, confirming what Percy himself recounted in the book. After my encounters with the entity tonight, I was ready to believe anything.

I flicked through more pages, scanning the odd sentence here and there and finding much the same, yet making even less sense as time went on.

And then suddenly, one year ago, everything changed. The journal entries became lucid, much more mundane and far less disturbing to read. There was not a single mention of the abusive grandfather. When had everything changed?

I flicked back some pages, then some more, until I found the last rambling account of sheer hell at the hands of his ghostly ancestor. And one word leapt from the page immediately.

Clock.

I scanned to the start of the entry and began to read.

Thursday, July 3
rd

My salvation is at hand. Greg from the antique shop called me. He says he has something that can help me. He has no idea if it will work, but he’s been worried about me for months, especially after Father Jeremy told him about my story.

I headed down there after lunch. It is hard for me to drive these days, my eyesight is deteriorating, but this was worth it. As soon as I saw the clock I wanted it, regardless of its more unusual properties. I have never liked clocks that much, don’t keep many around the house, but this one spoke to me. It is beautiful. It stands on a tall column and has five clock faces all grouped together on one side. It is quite exquisite, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

And this clock is going to save me.

Greg explained how it works. There are five faces, he said, and the clock is able to ‘capture’ five spirits. The final spirit, the fifth one, would gain control over the other four, and over the entire house, able to control every aspect of it. I found this fascinating. It had been sold to him by a traveller who had unwittingly released its previous occupants and had tried to recapture them within the clock. He had failed, so instead he moved on, but he took the clock with him. He said the part he got wrong was to not physically connect the clock to the house itself. The clock must become part of the very foundations. He had ignored that part and he had released five very angry spirits in his house.

I brought the clock home and have read the little note he placed inside it over and over again. This could be my salvation.

Monday, November 18
th

Construction on my new wine cellar is nearly complete. Grandfather is mad as hell at me about it, but I do not care. This whole house has been torn down, rebuilt, burned down, reorganized, rearranged and rearchitected so many times in its potted history, digging a cellar will make no difference. I have bought a case of wine and intend to order more. It is something I have a passing interest in. The real trick is connecting the clock directly to the foundations of the house. This is a unique building, in that what still stands today is not what originally stood on these foundations, so I pray this will work and will bring me peace.

Thursday, November 28
th

Tonight I started the clock. There are three ghosts in this house. When I die, I need to be the fifth. I am missing one. If I am not the fifth, I will not be in control. I must be in control. Grandpa is asking about the clock. I don’t know or care if he understands what it is for. It is part of the house now. There is nothing he can do about it. Maybe he sees the future. Maybe he knows what’s coming. All I know is, as soon as I have a fourth ghost, I can send my grandfather away and never suffer another night’s unrest for the remainder of my years.

Tuesday, December 1
st

I have done what I needed to do. Last Sunday I finally convinced Father Jeremy to come to the house tonight. I told him to tell nobody, lest they fill his head with more stories of my insanity. I told him that only he could save me, and as his parishioner it was his duty to attend to me. If he saw or heard nothing unusual I promised never to mention this again. Reluctantly he agreed, probably just to shut me up.

I am not proud of what I did tonight, but I did what I must do. I now have my fourth spirit. I regret that I did not have time to give Father Jeremy last rites nor did I bury him on sacred ground. But thanks to his sacrifice, when I die, I will be the fifth ghost and I will be in control. I will shut my grandfather out of the house and I will reach back through time and ensure that from the moment the clock is started, he can no longer bother me. I will not suffer his abuse any longer!

Seeing Father Jeremy’s spirit absorbed into the clock was truly remarkable. It took time for the good priest to find his way to it, and all that time the clock remained open to receiving new guests. But after about an hour of searching, the spirit found its way to the clock and was safely ensconced within. It was fascinating and disturbing. I hope that I will not have to carry this guilt for much longer.

Perhaps, once I am gone, someone will discover this diary and remove Father Jeremy’s remains from the hidden space behind the wine racks, accessible from the corridor to the left of the ballroom stage. His body is safe there until such time as our spirits are released from this realm. I apologize to his parishioners. He was a good man, if naïve, and he did not deserve what happened to him. I am a desperate, old man and I need to ensure that I do not end up in this house with my grandfather for all eternity. I will make my peace with Father Jeremy on the other side.