The Patchwork House (4 page)

“I vote we check it out,” I said, putting down my fork and reaching for the lamp.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Chloe said, a slight tremour in her voice. “And you’re not leaving us in the dark.”

“It’s not dark yet,” I assured her. “You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think we should go up there,” Beth said.

“I want to know what that was. Are you volunteering to take a look?”

“Hell no. Why are you taking the lamp?”

I stopped. I was halfway across the kitchen on my way to the hall. I felt a bit guilty for walking off with the only light and leaving them all in the gloom.

“We’ll take the other lamp,” Derek said, firing up the spare. “You girls stay here while we go take a look.”

“Men go find big bang,” I grunted. Nobody laughed.

Derek carried the spare lamp and headed out into the hallway. I passed my lamp back to Chloe and followed him. My heart beat loudly and my balls receded into my abdomen. As I left the kitchen, I flashed the girls a brave smile to try to mask how I felt.

Derek was nearly at the bottom of the stairs. I hurried to catch up. It really was very dark inside the house now and I cursed Dad for screwing up the utilities. When he told me there would be no electricity, I’d seen it as a fun challenge, to survive the night in a haunted house in the dark. That was before the bang. Christ that was loud! It was far more than a bump in the night. It wasn’t even the sound of something falling over. We’d all felt it reverberate through the entire house. 

What I wouldn’t give to just be able to turn the lights on.

Slowly, we ascended the stairs.

CHAPTER 4

The only sounds
were the creaking steps beneath our feet and the hiss of the camping lamp. I should have gone to get my phone from the charger so I could use the flashlight app. Or I should have picked up one of the torches from the supply bag. Instead I had no light source of my own and I could only see by the light of Derek’s lamp, which cast eerie shadows along the walls and safety rail as we neared the top of the staircase.

“Tell me about the ghosts in this house?” he whispered as he stepped onto the landing.

“There are three of them, the groundskeeper says. The noisy one is the grandfather of the last occupant, apparently. He died in one of the bedrooms and likes to throw stuff around.”

“Which room is above the kitchen?”

“There’s an apartment at the back of the house. That door at the back of the kitchen leads up to it. But the bang came from the library. I’ll show you.”

“Is that where the old man died?”

“Nope. Maybe he’s just an avid reader.”

These were the friendliest words Derek and I had shared since he’d arrived. It felt like we were teenagers again, sneaking off to go ghost hunting in Gibbet Lane late in the evening, in the village Derek grew up in. I came to that village as a twelve-year-old after moving from place to place all my life. Hafferty was the first place that felt like home, and Derek was the first friend I kept for longer than a few months.

Now here we were, chasing a ghost in an old, creaky house.

I was scared, my stomach was threatening to eject my dinner all over the carpet, and I had to fight the urge to run back downstairs. But I
loved
it.

I could tell Derek was finally enjoying himself too. We advanced down the long corridor like a pair of spies on a mission. The lamp was making our immediate surroundings very bright, but it abandoned the rest of the upper floor to total darkness.

“Why not turn the lamp off?” I suggested.

Derek did so. We waited while our eyes adjusted, and sure enough there was still enough ambient light to see a little further than the lamp had allowed, once our eyes adjusted. In a way it was less scary up here without the lamp, although there were plenty of darkened areas along the corridor in which shadows could thrive.

I moved past Derek to the library door.

“In here,” I said, somewhat unnecessarily, and stepped inside.

Derek was right behind me.

The room was empty. No movement, no ghosts, nothing weird at all.

“Whatever it was didn’t come from in here,” Derek said.

Indeed, everything was how it used to be.

Except it wasn’t. Not even slightly. Something really fundamental had changed. Disbelief gripped my senses. My hair stood on end and my hands started to shake.

I raised a trembling finger to point to the bookcase.

“What is it?” he asked, firing up the lamp again. The light chased the shadows into the corners and lit up the most astonishing sight that defied explanation. To Derek, who had not been in here before, everything looked totally normal. But not to me.

“When I was up here, before dinner, the bookcase…” I couldn’t finish what I was saying.

“What? Tell me!”

“The bookcase was over there.”

I pointed to the right side of the room. The space where the bookcase used to be was empty. Now, impossibly, it stood on the other side of the room, directly in front of the book shelves on the wall.

“Are you sure it moved?” Derek’s incredulity was obvious.

“Of course I’m sure.”

I moved closer. I didn’t want to go anywhere near the bookcase, so instead I went to the place it had been standing earlier in the day. Sure enough, the carpet showed four deep indentations where the heavy piece of furniture once rested.

“That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe it was moved before we arrived.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You think I’m lying?”

“I think you might be playing one of your oh-so-hilarious pranks, Jim.”

I stared at him for a good long minute. “Try and lift it,” I said eventually.

“What?”

“Try and lift the bookcase.”

“Okay.” Derek placed the lamp on the reading table in the middle of the room and crossed to the bookcase. He tested it by using both hands to try to lift one end, and of course it didn’t move. Then he wrapped his arms around it and placed his hands under the top shelves. He heaved. It didn’t shift so much as a millimeter.

“So it’s bloody heavy,” Derek said. “Maybe it was moved before we arrived.”

“Moved by whom?” I stammered. “And why?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

I was really starting to get pissed off with him now. I’d invited him here, given him a chance to salvage his weekend away from the kids for the first time in forever, I’d got him out of the doghouse with his wife and I’d done it entirely of my own volition. I had done a good thing for my old friend and he was essentially calling me a liar.

Suddenly I realized something. “I can prove it.”

“How?”

“Back downstairs.”

I ran from the room, back to the stairs and hurried down. I heard Derek following me at a slower pace, his swinging lamp making my shadow lurch across the wall as I descended. I burst into the kitchen so suddenly it made the girls jump.

“So, what was it?” Chloe asked.

I didn’t answer. Instead I went straight for my camera, opening it up and hitting rewind.

Derek entered behind me, his lamp increasing the ambient brightness in the kitchen.

“Jim thinks a piece of furniture moved,” he said.

“And that caused the bang?” Beth asked.

“Jim thinks so.”

I shook my head, my eyes locked on the camera’s LCD screen, watching the images flick by in reverse. “Not just a piece of furniture,” I said, glancing up at Beth. “A fucking heavy bookcase that would take a team of people to lift—ah ha!”

I stabbed the play button and thrust the camera at Derek triumphantly. He peered at it. The girls gathered around, unsure of what they were looking for.

“Well I’ll be…” Derek said, the colour draining from his face.

“See, the bookcase was on the other side of the room!”

“Holy shit.”

“What? I can’t see,” Chloe complained.

“Then come upstairs.”

“I don’t want to.” Chloe looked visibly upset now.

“Please, I want to be sure we’re not crazy.”

Beth agreed to come with us. I think Chloe came too because she didn’t want to be left downstairs alone. All four of us went out into the hall. I grabbed a lamp and ducked into the drawing room before we went upstairs. I took my now fully charged smartphone from its cradle and picked up two torches. Rejoining the others, I gave Chloe my lamp and switched on my torch, passing the other to Beth. Now we all had a way to see in the dark, and we needed it because the natural light was all gone.

The sun had set on Binsham House and I was now convinced that something was in here with us.

We shuffled upstairs to the library. It reminded me of an old Berenstein Bears book I read as a kid. It was about three bears investigating a spooky old tree. It was one of the first books I ever remember reading to myself. I loved that book. The three bears, one with a light, one with a stick, and one with the shivers.

But we were four, we were adults, and by God half the reason we’d come here was to see a ghost.

I showed the girls the bookcase, the indentations in the carpet, and the footage on the camera again.

We stood in the library in stunned silence.

“I can’t explain it,” Beth said.

“Do you have a bunch of people hiding here?” Derek accused me. “Will they all pop out and say boo any minute? Did you invite some other old friends to meet us here? Are Ben and Nick going to show up at the front door and say hi as if they’ve just arrived?”

“I swear we’re the only people in the house. And if I did set something up, surely I wouldn’t wait this long to spring the surprise. I’d have scared you all hours ago. Besides, it would take at least six people with lifting gear to move this bookcase. I mean look.” I went over to the place the bookcase used to be and shone my torch on the floor. “The fucking floorboards are bowed where it used to stand. The wood is less faded. That bookcase hasn’t moved for
years
.”

Derek
still
didn’t look convinced. What the hell was his problem? I wasn’t making this shit up. This wasn’t some elaborate ruse designed to freak everybody out.

We went back downstairs to the kitchen and tried to finish our food. Nobody was hungry anymore. We were all a bit shell-shocked. Nobody spoke. I could tell their brains were busy doing the same thing mine was: trying to work out what could have picked up something that heavy and moved it clear across the room.

The next bang was nearly too much for Chloe. She shrieked and dropped the glass she was holding. It didn’t fall far and it didn’t shatter, but the sound it made as it hit the table made us jump again. The bang had come from the library again. I wondered if the bookcase had moved back to its original position, or somewhere else entirely.

“I don’t like this,” Chloe said. “I think we’ve pissed something off.”

I could see my weekend plans disintegrating before my eyes.

“Chloe, it’s fine,” I assured her. I wasn’t ready to leave and I knew that would be her next suggestion. “It’s
weird
but it’s fine. I mean how cool is this? A real ghost.”

“I guess.” She gave a brave smile. “But it sounds angry to me. Derek, what do you think?”

“I think we should try and get it on camera.”

I grinned. “Now you’re talking.”

“Really?”

“Really. We’ve got a video camera, a still camera, we’ve got night vision lenses, we’ve got a tripod…

“We have a laptop with a huge hard drive,” I added.

“So, let’s set up a camera at the top of the stairs, and another in the library.”

But Chloe was still not convinced. She was clearly looking to her husband to agree with her unspoken intentions.

“You want to stay?” she said, in a tone of voice that made it clear this was the wrong decision.

“I want to see what this thing is.”

“Is anyone going to ask my opinion?” Beth said.

I slid off my chair and put my arm around her. “You’re not scared, right Beth?”

“I’m scared, I don’t mind admitting it. But I’m curious too. I want to see if it will do anything else.”

“Sorry, hon,” Derek said, aware that his wife was outvoted and likely to take it out on him. “But how often do we get an opportunity like this?”

Chloe sighed. “All right then, we’ll stay.”

“But promise me this, Jim,” Beth said.

“Sure, name it.”

“If this thing, whatever it is, if it gets violent with us, if it threatens us or puts us in danger, we leave. Okay?”

I looked at Derek and he nodded. “Okay,” I said. “First sign it’s hostile towards us, we jump in the car and I will drive you wherever you want to go.”

“Not many options,” Chloe grumbled.

It was settled. I suddenly felt really excited. This was our chance to capture real paranormal activity on camera!

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the rules. Nobody goes anywhere alone. We even go in pairs to the toilet. We’ve all seen enough scary movies to know what happens when folks are separated. Everyone carries a spare torch even if they have a lamp. Derek and I will set up the cameras upstairs. Why don’t you two clear up in here and then setup the drawing room for us to sleep tonight?”

“Sure, leave us to do the women’s work,” Beth said.

Derek ignored her. “How much free space you have on the camera?”

“Oh I’ll plug it into the laptop and download the recording directly to the hard drive. I have extra-sized battery packs for the camera and the laptop—Dad went to town on batteries because he knew we’d have no power. I can setup the digital camera in the hallway to take a picture every ten seconds, and have the video camera rolling constantly in the library. I’ll have to turn the quality down a bit to save space, but it should be able to last all night.”

“If only everything would last all night,” Beth said.

“Ha ha.”