Secret of the Shadows (3 page)

‘I do them myself, dear. Always have. I think I should have been a beautician. Missed my vocation there.’

‘What did you do?’ Aisha asked.

‘I was a waitress at a Republican club in New York,’ she told them proudly. ‘I met presidents and film stars and so many interesting people. I’ve had such a terrific life, and two wonderful husbands.’

I giggled. ‘My aunt Belle always manages to get double her share of everything!’

Aunt Belle laughed too. ‘I was born lucky,’ she said.

‘Tell us about when you first went to America,’ Aisha said eagerly.

They didn’t need to ask Aunt Belle twice. She loved sharing stories about her past.

‘Maybe you could do my nails at the same time.’ This was Jazz, holding out her black painted nails to my aunt.

And that was the way we spent the afternoon, Aunt Belle sitting happily with her nail polish collection, filing, polishing and painting me and my friends’ fingernails, and telling them wild tales of her early days in New York. I was sure she made half of them up, but who cared?

I knew she would be a hit with them.

‘When are you going off on holiday?’ I asked. Jazz was off to Spain with her family, Aisha to Egypt.

‘In a couple of days,’ Jazz said, admiring her nails.

‘We’re all going to be away. The boys are going on holiday too. You’ll be all alone, Tyler,’ Aisha said cheerily.

Alone. For a second the word made me shiver, but I shook the feeling away.

‘Not with Aunt Belle here,’ I said.

The boys came just in time for dinner. If Aunt Belle had been expecting Mac to be a kilted Scotsman and not a skinny Asian boy, she said nothing, just smiled and winked at me in approval behind his back.

Aunt Belle’s spaghetti Bolognese was so good. We ate in the dining room round that oval table – Aunt Belle insisted we have dinner there – and we talked and laughed, and every so often, Mac would look over at me and smile. Jazz spotted him one time and groaned. ‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said. ‘Aisha and Callum, and Tyler and Mac. But what about poor little me?’ She grinned at Adam and made an effort at fluttering her eyelashes. ‘You could be my boyfriend, Adam. You’ve always fancied me, haven’t you?’ She puckered her lips, offering them to Adam.

He shrank back from her. ‘Me? I’d rather kiss a cobra.’

Jazz hissed like a snake. ‘That could be arranged.’

They were always winding each other up like that, but I was sure deep down they did like each other. It was only a matter of time till they both realised it.

Aunt Belle insisted they go before it was too late. ‘It’s a lonely road,’ she told them.

‘I thought you told me it was only delinquent five-year-olds we had to worry about here?’ I giggled.

Jazz put on a spooky voice. ‘But at night, who knows what horrors could be lurking in the shadows.’ She laughed. We all did. But in that moment, despite the light and warmth of the dining room, the words ‘lurking in the shadows’ made my skin break out in goose pimples.

It was a warm summer evening, with the orange sun setting over the river. I brushed away any fear I had. What bad things could happen in this lovely house? With my cheery aunt Belle here beside me?

My friends left soon after dinner. I felt a knot of fear in my stomach I couldn’t explain as I watched them walk up that long road to the bus stop. Mac looked back once and waved. And then they were all gone, swallowed up in the distance. Almost as if they had vanished from my life. Why was I feeling like that? They were only going on holiday. Why did I suddenly feel so isolated?

Aunt Belle must have noticed my mood. She slipped an arm around my shoulders. ‘Come on, let’s go for an ice cream. That’ll cheer you up.’

We brought a big tub of ice cream back from the cafe in the village, and we sat on the patio outside the kitchen, savouring it and watching the sun sink behind the hills.

‘The evening your gran and I came here to view this house, it wast just like this. We couldn’t believe our luck. We’d found the perfect house. Couldn’t believe it hadn’t been snapped up by someone else. That it had been empty for so long. That it was so cheap! So we signed for it the very next day.’

She got to her feet. ‘Right, time for bed, for me at least.’ She yawned. ‘I feel so tired. Must be jet lag.’

I sat up for a while after she went to bed. There was a film on television. A strange story about a missing boy. Had he run away? Had he been kidnapped? Who was guilty? As it neared the end and it was clear the boy had been long dead, that he was a ghost back for revenge, I wished I hadn’t stayed up to watch it. And I knew then I had only been putting off going to bed. I kept imagining the closed door of my bedroom, and couldn’t stop thinking about what was behind it.

Nothing, Tyler!
I kept telling myself. There was nothing inside that room.

I got myself a glass of milk from the kitchen and stood for a moment outside my room before I opened the door. I had left the light on deliberately, so I could see every corner. It was still cold, even with the heater blasting away. And when I stepped inside, after only a few moments the door still swung shut. As if a dead breath had blown it closed.

There was something wrong here, in this room. I only wished I knew what it was.

Chapter 6

I wedged the door open again, climbed into bed and tried to concentrate on the next chapter of my book. But I was tired and so I turned off the bedside lamp after only a few pages. The slashes of moonlight coming in through the window reassured me, and the memory of Aisha sitting laughing in the chair in the corner too. I could make it out in the silver light, and the lopsided lampshade made it look faintly comical. I could even hear Aunt Belle’s gentle snoring from her room. There was nothing to be afraid of here, I told myself. And with those comforting thoughts I fell asleep.

The duvet was right over my head when I woke up. What had woken me? Was it a sound? I listened, but all I could hear was the comforting rush of the incoming tide, and the early cawing of the seagulls.

Yet, there was something there. Something in the atmosphere of the room. And it was even colder than I remembered. I dared a peek over the duvet.

Darkness.

And that’s when I realised the door had closed again. I had wedged it open, and now it was closed. How could that happen? Was that what had woken me? The sound of that door clicking shut.

There was a cold sweat on my brow. My eyes were drawn to that chair in the corner. I tried to make out what was there in the darkness and it seemed to me that the chair was enveloped in that same strange shadow. I stared at it for an age.

And the shadow moved.

Something stirred in that chair. Something was watching me. I saw no eyes. There was nothing but shadow, yet I was convinced it was watching me. My teeth began to chatter and my hand trembled as I reached for the lamp. In my mind’s eye, I saw another hand, its skeletal fingers reaching out to stop me.

With one flick the lamp was on. Light flooded the room and I leapt from the bed.

I stood in the corner, back against the wall. The chair was empty. Of course the chair was empty. It was only a harmless, inoffensive chair, and a door that wouldn’t stay open. In the light, I refused to think otherwise. Still, I never took my eyes off the chair as I moved towards the door, telling myself all the time I was foolish.

The handle of the door was ice cold. I turned it slowly, pulled the door open, and backed out of the room and into the hall.

I stood, rubbing my arms, staring into the gloom of that room, half expecting something or someone to materialise there.

And then, another shadow made me jump – a shadow in the kitchen.

At that moment the door was pulled open wide. ‘I thought I heard you.’ It was Aunt Belle, in her purple dressing gown. ‘Couldn’t you sleep either?’ She held up the kettle. ‘I’m just making myself a cup of tea. Do you want one?’

I looked back into my room at that green chair and I shrugged. It was as if a veil had been lifted. Normality had returned. How stupid I was being. Bad dreams and my wild imagination. That was all.

Chapter 7

Aunt Belle and I sat in the kitchen with our tea – in a china teapot with china cups and saucers. Aunt Belle had no time for mugs, she said. And we talked until the red lights of dawn brushed the sky.

‘I think it’s the cold in that room that wakes me up,’ I said, almost talking to myself. I didn’t want to alarm Aunt Belle with stories of moving shadows on chairs. ‘And the door keeps closing all the time.’

‘Subsidence,’ she said at once. ‘This is an old house, built in the 1920s. What with its age and being right next to the sea, there’s bound to be subsidence . . . I think I remember your gran mentioning that to me once.’ She looked thoughtful, trying to remember. Finally she gave up with a shrug. ‘We’ll get a carpenter in about the door. See what he can do.’

Subsidence made the door close, and it was just a gap in the woodwork creating the draught. Down to earth, sensible explanations. They reassured me. I was happy to believe them.

‘Jet lag. I feel so tired,’ Aunt Belle said, and she yawned. ‘I can only sleep a couple of hours and then I’m awake again.’

I wondered then if there was something of the shadow in Aunt Belle’s room, but she dispelled that notion straight away. ‘I love that room. I feel as if your gran’s in there with me. We always had so much fun together.’

I remembered then that my mum had told me once that Gran had a gift, a gift for seeing the dead, and that she’d passed that gift on to me.

‘Did you ever think Gran might be psychic, Aunt Belle?’ If anyone would know more, surely it would be her?

She spluttered into her tea. ‘Your gran? You’ve got to be joking. She was always taking the mickey out of me because I was the one who believed in all that stuff. I used to go to seances and I was told once I was the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess, and do you know what your gran said? “Oh, of course, Belle, you would never have been the reincarnation of a kitchen maid, would you? You’d have to be a princess.” She thought I was too gullible and all that kind of stuff was just nonsense.’

I laughed. Aunt Belle, a kitchen maid? Never.

‘Mum said she felt Gran wanted to tell her something before she died,’ I went on. ‘Something was bothering her. And Mum always regrets she didn’t get the chance to ask Gran what it was.’

Aunt Belle looked thoughtful. ‘It’s funny you saying that, because the last letter I got from your gran she said something similar.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ve got the letter in my case. I’ll show you.’

As I waited I imagined my gran, alone in the night, here in this house, with its ice-cold room, and a door that closed of its own accord. Were those the things that had been bothering her?

Aunt Belle came back, pulling the letter from a blue envelope. I felt a lump in my throat when I saw my gran’s neat handwriting.

Aunt Belle pointed a finger at one of the pages. ‘It’s all about how much she loves it here, until you get to this bit.’

She handed me the letter and I read it aloud.

‘“
You’ll love it too, Belle. We can walk on the beach every day, and watch the sun set every night. There are a few things about the house that are concerning me. I won’t bother you about them yet. I can’t sleep at night. I think this house has a history. I’m going to find out what it is.
”’

‘Of course, being me, my first thought was it was something supernatural that was concerning her,’ Aunt Belle went on. ‘I was reading a horror story at the time, all about a house that had evil in its very stones. Then I remembered it was your gran writing this letter. She probably meant the plumbing was acting up, that’s what was keeping her awake. Bad plumbing. Your gran always said I had an overactive imagination.’

‘That’s what people say about me too, Aunt Belle. I think I’m just like you.’

‘I’d be very proud if you were,’ she said, smiling.

‘But what if you were right . . . and there
was
something in the house. You can’t sleep and neither can I.’ I just stopped myself from mentioning the shadow I thought I had seen in the chair.

Aunt Belle patted my hand. ‘I’ve got jet lag, and your room’s a refrigerator. That’s why we can’t sleep. There’s nothing bad in this house. Your gran’s here. I can feel her everywhere. She’s watching over us.’ She took the letter from me and folded it back into the envelope. ‘Now, why don’t you come into my room till it’s time to get up.’ She giggled. ‘It’ll be like a girls’ sleepover.’

It was. We lay together as the sun rose higher in the sky and I listened and laughed at more of her stories about her life in America. And I thought, Aunt Belle’s right. Gran is here, in this room, listening and laughing along with us.

Chapter 8

The third day

By the time we surfaced it was nearer the afternoon and after a very late breakfast we went for a walk along the beach.

‘Gran used to do this,’ I said. ‘She said she’d never felt so healthy.’

Yet, she had died here, another voice in my head whispered.