The Patchwork House (10 page)

“Honey, can you hear me?”

“Of course I can hear you.”

“Good. Listen, do you have any idea what happened to Chloe? We’re going to leave, all four of us, but if we can’t find her then we can’t leave, right?”

Beth nodded and detached herself from me. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

“I think I saw what you saw, on the ceiling.”

“The black mass?”

“Yeah. And you’re right, it does have a face but it
moves
and I can’t tell who it is or really what they look like… It’s like it’s
trying
to have a face but it’s not sure how. Oh God, it was horrible.”

“What happened to Chloe?”

“It was all over her. I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t know what to do or how to help. I think I must have fainted or something. I’ve never fainted before in my life! Really, I don’t know what happened next.”

I looked around the room uselessly. Aside from the bed and a small dresser, there was no space in here for anything else, and no wardrobes or cupboards. Even the bed was a single.

“Why was Derek screaming?” Beth asked suddenly.

“He wasn’t. Or at least he says he wasn’t. He says he was in the library when you came upstairs and he didn’t hear you at all.”

“And where were you? I thought you were right behind me!”

“I’m sorry, I heard Derek screaming from the kitchen. I called up to tell you but I got no response. Derek sounded in agony, I couldn’t leave him.”

“But he was in the library the whole time?”

“That’s what he says. I know he’s mad at me about something but I don’t see a reason for him to lie, do you?”

“No. He wouldn’t put Chloe through that deliberately.”

“Maybe he had a plan and it went wrong.”

Beth shook her head. She shuddered.

“Try not to think about it.”

“I wish,” she said, a tear appearing in the corner of one eye. “Oh God, Chloe! I should have helped her.”

“Nobody blames you,” I assured her.

“Derek does.”

CHAPTER 6

We passed Derek
on our way to the stairs, and I made sure he knew we were heading down.

“Beth didn’t see what happened to Chloe,” I assured him. It was a lie, but what good would the truth do him? He’d just get pissed at Beth and he’d be no closer to finding his wife.

He looked fraught, at his wits end. We left him throwing open cupboards in the biggest guest bedroom.

Beth and I descended the stairs, holding each other close. We had the one lamp between us.

“Before we start looking for Chloe, you need light in case we get separated.”

“I’m not leaving your side,” Beth said.

“Just in case. The thought of you waking up in that room with no light…”

Beth shuddered again. “Point taken.”

So we entered the drawing room.

And we stood with our mouths open.

Everything was gone. I held the lamp high to be sure, casting light as far as we could see into every alcove and corner.

It was as if we had never been in the room. The dustcovers were back on the furniture, and all our stuff was missing. There were no sleeping bags, no charging stations, no phones, no spare torches and no spare lamps. Even the Monopoly had disappeared, presumably put back in its cupboard. We hurried over and opened the door. Sure enough, the game was back in its box with the other games as if we’d never unpacked it.

“What the fuck?” was all I could manage.

“Please tell me you still have the car keys.”

I reached into my pocket and felt their reassuring weight.

“Yes, but without our phones… Shit. I should never have put them all in the charger together. We should have kept one.”

“If you had then the battery would be dead by now,” Beth said.

She was probably right. But I could have turned it off and conserved what little was left. Still, I’d never expected this. Our stuff wasn’t just gone, it was like our presence in this room had been
erased
.

“We need to leave,” I said.

“So let’s find Chloe and go.”

“Right.”

We headed back out into the hall.

“I wish the phones were connected,” I said. “Then I could call my cell and follow the ring.”

“You’re assuming it would get a signal.”

“Didn’t Derek leave the laptop at the bottom of the stairs?”

“I didn’t see it on the way down.”

We stepped back into the hallway. We could hear creaking floorboards from the upper floor, but most likely this was just Derek charging around up there, looking for his wife. The laptop was gone, assuming that was where Derek had left it. He wouldn’t have had time to put it anywhere else.

Then we went to the kitchen. Someone had cleared away our abandoned meal too. No dirty plates, no bags or tubs of food, no half-finished drinks.

“This ghost is damn tidy,” I said.

“I don’t like this,” Beth said.

“No argument there. So why are we stopping?”

I was on my way to the conservatory, but Beth was standing in the kitchen just in front of the door to the upstairs apartment. She was staring at the table with a quizzical look on her face. She clicked on her torch and lit up the tabletop.

“Come on,” I urged her. “Let’s find Chloe and leave.”

“Hang on, Jim. This is just weird.”

“Yeah, the ghost cleaned up. All of this is weird. Let’s go.”

Beth shook her head.

“This is not just cleaning up. Look.”

She kept the angle of her torch low so as to illuminate anything sitting on the surface. There was nothing at all.

“What’s your point?”

“Jim, the ghost has
cleaned the fucking table
!”

I laughed at that. The image in my head was almost worth the price of admission to this night from hell. And then I realized what she meant.

We had not been careful eaters. We’d spilled grains of rice, splashes of sauce, flakes of spring rolls, all over the kitchen table. Since we’d never finished our dinner it was certainly odd that the empty bags, the leftover containers and the dirty plates had all gone. But Beth was right, there was absolutely no trace of our meal. The table was completely clean. I took my lamp over and peered in close.

“Even if you accept that there’s a ghost in the house that can move a bookcase, it doesn’t explain this.”

“You know what it’s like?” Beth said.

“What?”

“It’s like we were never here.”

A chill gripped me when she said that. The gravity of her words settled on my shoulders and I realized she was completely right.

“Are we ghosts?” I asked. It seemed a logical conclusion.

“Well you don’t look like Bruce Willis.”

“And you don’t look like Nicole Kidman.”

Neither of us laughed.

“Maybe that’s the answer,” Beth said after a moment’s pause.

“The answer to what?”

“The answer to what happened to Chloe.”

I blinked. “I don’t get you.”

“Maybe she’s gone, just like our stuff, and our food and the fricking crumbs on the table. Maybe she was never here.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Then where the hell is she?”

“Well you mentioned the alternative back in the drawing room.”

“Did I? Oh, the bottom of the lake?”

My grim expression told her she was now thinking what I was thinking. But we had to keep looking, and calling. We could hardly abandon her.

Footsteps came crashing down the stairs in a serious hurry. Beth and I flashed alarmed glances at each other and then we moved back to the hall door. Derek was running towards us, a determined expression on his face.

“She’s in the apartment,” he said as he pushed past us.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I heard her, through the wall.” He didn’t wait for us. He burst through the door to the upstairs apartment and bounded up the steps two at a time, torchlight swinging wildly in his wake.

“Chloe?” he called, even as he disappeared around the turn half way up the stairs. “Chloe, are you there?”

Beth and I hurried to follow. What a relief to know where she was. Maybe now the four of us could jump in the car and leave.

But it wasn’t to be.

As Beth and I reached the top of the stairs, we saw Derek run back from the small living space to the bedroom.

“Chloe,” he called. “Where are you?”

“Chloe?” I said. Beth and I joined the search.

We must have checked both rooms a dozen times. We threw open cupboards and closets, checked the tiny bathroom and even looked under the bed. Chloe wasn’t here.

“Maybe you heard an echo of her voice coming through pipes or something,” I said. “Like what happened earlier when I thought you were screaming in the kitchen but you were in the library upstairs.”

Derek shook his head. His torch was still sweeping over every single item in the room.

“She told me, I heard her through the wall. She said she was trapped in the apartment.”

“Shit,” I said.

“So either she was lying,” Derek said, smacking his hand against one solid wall in frustration, “or she was lost, or she was moved after I spoke to her.”

“Well the only entrance is via the kitchen, and we were in there for a while. The apartment door never opened.

“Maybe there’s another way in?” Beth said.

I shook my head. “What does it matter if there is? She’s not here. We need to keep looking and we need to hurry.”

Beth caught my expression. “You’re worried about the light aren’t you?”

“I’ll search this place in pitch darkness if I have to,” Derek spat, although he did click off his torch. Now the only light came from my lamp. It had been using the same canister since the sun went down. I had no idea how long one canister would last but I was guessing it was nearly exhausted. And when the lamp went out we would have to rely on our torches. We each had one, but given the drain on the other batteries earlier that evening, it was likely they wouldn’t last too long either. I didn’t want to be in this house when we ran out of light.

Beth was clearly of the same mind. Derek looked angry with us for even considering abandoning the search, but then his face turned grim and he moved away. I guessed he too had taken a moment to realize how fruitless—and terrifying—it would be to search for Chloe without light.

“We should search the kitchen cabinets for matches, torches, candles, anything we can use,” Beth said.

I nodded. “I’ll come with you. Are you staying here?”

Derek shook his head. “I heard her calling from somewhere. I have to keep looking.”

“Voices carry in this house,” I told him. “Keep looking and we’ll join you when we’ve found more light.”

Reluctantly, Derek followed us down the stairs and back to the kitchen.

“Did you clean up in here?” he asked when I set the lamp down on the centre counter.

“Wasn’t us. Even the crumbs have been swept away.”

Derek didn’t respond to this. Clearly it was information he just didn’t know what to do with right now. He clicked on his torch. “I’m going to the ballroom.”

“We’ll go via the living room and meet you there, okay?”

But Derek had already pushed through the door to the conservatory and didn’t acknowledge me.

Beth and I turned our attention to the various draws and cupboards. We opened each in turn, searching for anything useful.

“Next time I invite an old friend on holiday with us, remind me not to, okay?”

“Our next vacation will be in Hawaii,” Beth said.

We found some string and a half-used book of matches, but no candles or torches. I considered taking one of the large kitchen knives with us, but in the dark it was likely more of a hazard to us than to any entity we could or couldn’t see.

Holding hands for moral support, Beth and I ventured back into the hall. We both gazed at the front door as we passed by, dully lit from a distance by the gas lamp. How much we wanted to just open the door, get in the car and drive away.

But then I thought of Chloe, all alone, in the dark, somewhere in this house. One glance at Beth told me she was thinking the same thing. We couldn’t leave with Chloe still missing. Despite how he’d treated me, it wouldn’t be fair to Derek to abandon him without the car also.

And so, wordlessly, we turned from the front door. I glanced into the drawing room in case our equipment had mysteriously returned. It hadn’t. So we moved on to the front room. Upon entering, we stood still by the door. I lifted my lantern so that it cast an eerie glow into the room without dazzling our eyes.

It was no surprise to see the dust cover had returned to the piano. The stool Beth had sat on to play was back to its original position against the wall, and the shutters I had opened were now all closed.

At least this house was being consistently weird.

“I guess Percy’s grandfather was a neat freak,” I said.

“It’s more than that though. It’s like everything is back how it was before we arrived. Like we’d never even been here at all.”

I shivered. Maybe that was our fate now, to wander the corridors of this house like ghosts ourselves, never able to leave. If we tried to change anything it would reset like a video game, back to the start of the level. I wondered if the grounds still lay out there beyond the black windows, or if instead there was now just infinite nothingness.

Beth moved over to the piano and uncovered it again. She lifted the lid and gently plink-plinked the highest key.

“Come on, we need to find Chloe,” I urged her. Why was she wasting time?

“I’m just seeing if the room resets again. Okay, let’s go.”

We pushed through the door into the dining room. We had barely spent any time in this room so it was hard to tell if it had also changed. We were looking around for any possible hidden doors when a distant banging stopped us dead. It was coming from beyond the conservatory, probably in the ballroom. Beth and I stared at each other for a good twenty seconds, listening. Whatever was causing it, Derek was likely involved.

We rushed from the dining room, past the back door corridor and on through the conservatory. We didn’t stop, hurrying onwards to the ballroom at the end of the house.

“Where have you two been?” Derek asked. I could see his torch was perched on a table, its beam aimed at one of the two locked doors on either side of the stage. In his hands was a fire extinguisher.

“We’ve been looking for Chloe,” I said, making my way over to him. “What are you doing with that?”

“Trying to break the door down.”

“That’s a really bad idea. That thing could explode.”

“I couldn’t find anything heavier.”

“Did you hear her behind the door?” Beth asked.