The Patchwork House (16 page)

And that was it. After this entry there was no more mention of Percy’s grandfather, or the terrible thing he had done. It was just Percy’s regular everyday life for several months following the starting of the clock and then no more. The last entry was from just over a month ago. And now Percy was dead.

I reread December 1
st
’s entry again and shuddered. Percy had created his own ghost in the house. Was he really admitting to murder?

Was there a
sixth
ghost in the house?

And that’s what didn’t make sense. If Father Jeremy had become the fourth ghost because Percy murdered him, then Percy should be the fifth ghost. Why then, was the black mass so firmly in control? Why had Percy held up four fingers to me? Why did he hold up his wrists as if they were bound? Why had his plan failed so spectacularly?

Maybe time was mixed up in this hell house and Percy had occupied the fourth slot while the priest he murdered became number five. Was the black mass, the entity that had been terrorizing the four of us all night, the ghost of a murdered priest?

I’d be pretty pissed too, if I’d taken the time to visit a parishioner’s house late one evening and then been murdered. I might take it out on the next four people to spend the night at the house.

Frankly, Percy’s ghost scared the shit out of me too. He’d sat right here beside where I was sitting now, and shown me where his journal was and complained mutely that he was a prisoner of the man he killed. And that was the point, he’d killed a man. I saw no remorse in the words of the journal. I saw no begging for forgiveness from the phantom locked away in this room. It was as if the murder was just something that he’d been forced to do to rid himself of Grandpa’s spirit. Maybe Percy’s grandfather was right to be pissed at his descendant. Maybe the real monster in this house wasn’t the entity after all. What hell would Percy have unleashed if he had ended up linked to the fifth clock face? I still didn’t quite understand why that had gone wrong for him, but maybe I was glad it had.

“Ghost number four, your time is up,” I muttered to myself. I switched on one of my torches and blew out the candle. Cooling the wick with wetted fingers, I made sure it wasn’t going to ignite anything. Then I put the candle back in my pocket.

I removed the chair from the door, took a deep breath and stepped out into the corridor.

CHAPTER 11

My fear mounted
as I moved towards the stairs, torch beam swinging from side to side. But at least now I understood the entity’s pain and why it was lashing out.

I had no idea whether I was in the past or the future relative to Beth and Derek. The library window was not yet broken so it appeared as though our group had not yet arrived, which in theory meant I could leave a message for when we did get here. Perhaps I could wipe out this time stream altogether and find myself in the car leaving the house before night fell, having received a clear and precise warning not to stay the night.

To do that I needed something to write with and I needed to leave the journal somewhere we would find it as soon as possible after arriving.

I knew exactly where to place it.

I entered the library with trepidation. After all, this was the first place I encountered the entity. Or perhaps it was Percy who had walked in, crossed the room and walked out again while I was cowering under the table. Either way, I knew I would be there, and I knew it would be a good place to leave the journal.

I hurried over to the unbroken window and looked down at the driveway, angling my torch to try to see if the car was there.

It wasn’t.

It made sense. Either we’d left or we hadn’t arrived yet. Either way, the car wasn’t there tonight, whenever tonight was. But here was concrete evidence that we had moved in time, more compelling than the disappearance of the others, or Beth’s phone showing an impossible time. The car would take a lot of work to move from the driveway in its wrecked state. It would have taken heavy equipment. Loud equipment.

If I thought about it, the entity had been moving us around in time all night. How else to explain why Derek didn’t hear Chloe just before she disappeared? It had been playing games with us from the moment we arrived.

It wasn’t hard to get disoriented, especially if different parts of the house could move around to different points in time. This was just too weird. I needed a white board to work it all out. Or perhaps a whole bunch of string.

I noticed there were no other clocks in the house. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it was true. The only clock we’d seen was in the wine cellar, and clearly that one wasn’t keeping regular time on any of its five faces. Percy had said in his journal he didn’t like the things, but without them it was impossible to tell where and when he was.

Everything, it seemed, was intended to put us off guard, make us unsure and scare us shitless. Ghosts usually wanted to move on, or to get intruders off their territory. This entity seemed to want neither of those things. It just wanted to fuck with us. Maybe it wanted revenge but had selected the wrong targets. Maybe confining Percy’s ghost to his room for all eternity wasn’t enough for it.

The library had a small bureau tucked in behind the door. I opened it and quickly found a pen. I started writing in the front of the journal.

The ghost is a priest murdered by Percy!
I wrote. Then I listed the dates of the pertinent entries. Then I added,
Do NOT stay in this house after dark. Weird shit will happen. Jim from the future signing off (don’t ask!)

I looked at what I’d written and it bothered me. If I read this note, I’d have more questions. Was I really writing it in the future? I’d want to stay and find out the answers. Maybe this was a really bad idea. Maybe I was in the future anyway, so leaving the journal for me to find soon after arriving here was a waste of time.

Too late to worry about that now. I heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside. They were different from the entity’s steps. It was hard to put my finger on why. Were they lighter? They were certainly irregular, almost shambling. I didn’t know who this was but it was abundantly clear to me that this was not the entity walking towards the library. 

I stepped back, away from the door. Was this Derek coming? Or Beth or Chloe? It didn’t sound like them. Was the entity screwing with me again? I kind of hoped it was. I wanted to talk to it, tell it I understood how unfair it was that Percy had murdered this innocent clergyman who was simply doing his duty.

I stood with my back to the centre table, light shining towards the open door. Whatever it was would see the beam illuminating the landing wall opposite, but I wasn’t about to turn it off. I had a feeling it would find me anyway, and I wanted to see what I was facing.

Thump, thump, thump.

Was that my heart or the stranger?

Finally, a figure appeared in the doorway. I gasped, nearly dropping the torch. Somehow I managed to keep hold of it. The figure turned and I saw its face. Fear gripped me like never before. My guts twisted and a low whimper escaped my lips.

The figure was that of a man, tall and thin. He wore a blank expression, regarding me with hollow eyes. His neck was slashed open, causing his head to loll unnaturally to one side. The cut was deep and ran from one side of his neck to the other. There was no blood. The torchlight caught fragments of internal muscles, arteries, windpipe.

The gash was just above his dog collar.

I backed away, moving around the table, never letting my torchlight leave the figure for a second as it stumbled into the library. It stared at me, making some godforsaken hissing sound as it tried to speak. It could not. Its vocal chords were cut. I could not tear my eyes away.

It reached out to me. I had run out of space to retreat. My back was now against the window. I started to move to the side as it lurched around the table. It wanted to get to me, I didn’t know why, but I knew with absolute certainty that I did not want those pale, lifeless hands to touch me.

I was in the corner now, with no escape. I started to sob, couldn’t help but think about how it would kill me. I didn’t want to die.

Oh God, those hands on me. Cold, so cold. I kicked out, struggled to get free but it would not let go.

“Get off me!”

Still it held on. The dead priest’s face was just inches from mine, its cold dead hands clamped against my arms, pinning them to my sides, the torchlight angled upwards making its face and neck wound even more horrific. The smell was rank like rotten meat left in the sun for days. It pushed its dead face even closer. I felt like I was going to black out.

And then it spoke.

It managed to say just one word. One simple word was all it could manage. It rasped and gargled the word, mangling it almost beyond comprehension as its torn throat tried to spit it out.

“Three.”

And then it let me go. I huddled in the corner, crying and gasping for air. The dead priest turned and walked from the room. Once out in the corridor it turned left, heading back towards the stairs. Then it disappeared from view.

I gasped and choked in the corner, listening to its receding footsteps in between my own uncontrollable heaving for breath. I threw up against the wall, violently. Then I crashed into one of the chairs, unable to remove the dust cover before I fell into it. I sat there for some time, the acid taste of sick in my mouth and the smell of the dead priest lingering in my nostrils. My arms hurt like hell where it had grabbed me, and I was shaking uncontrollably.

It took me a long time to regain any semblance of composure. For a moment I considered following the priest to see where he was returning to, but the thought of that vile corpse coming anywhere near me a second time… it made me want to throw up again.

Eventually I stopped hyperventilating. I needed water so badly, but I didn’t really want to go downstairs right now. I could make my way to the bathroom along the corridor.

Drinking could wait a minute.

I kept the torch focused on the doorway, but there was no sign of movement. I couldn’t hear anything now, except my own breathing, which was a relief.

Concentrate on putting it all together.

I worked hard to slow my breathing and tried to think about that one word the priest had said. Clearly I had been wrong. The fifth ghost, the one in control, wasn’t the priest after all. Father Jeremy was trapped by the clock before Percy had died. The dead priest was number three. Percy was number four.

So who was in control? Who was making my life such hell? Who was number five?

I heard the distant drumming again, just like before when we were in the lodge. I shone my torch out the window but I couldn’t see anything. It definitely sounded like it was coming from outside. So I tried something else. I switched off the torch and just stared into the darkness.

There, down in the herb garden, a small figure moved along the path, casting a faint glow on the plants on either side. A little boy with a tin drum.

And then I realized Percy’s mistake.

The old man assumed he would take the fifth face of the clock when he died. He thought he would be the one to take control of the house and of the other ghosts. The original three ghosts, plus the dead priest, and finally Percy himself.

But the mistake was easy to see in hindsight. While the lavender lady and Percy’s grandfather both haunted the house, the little boy with his toy drum was only ever seen
outside
the house.

The little boy was free. He wasn’t held in the thrall of the clock. The entity had no power over him. Percy had miscounted, and when he died there was still one more space in the clock’s rogues’ gallery.

Somebody else had died in this house. Between Percy’s death and our arrival, someone else had passed away in the house and was rewarded with mastery over everything.

So I was back to square one. I had no idea who or what I was dealing with.

But the priest’s visit to the library wasn’t a coincidence. The entity had wanted me to see it. It had wanted me to hear its torn throat struggle to tell me it was ghost number three. It wanted me to work out who it was.

Somehow, that chilled me even more. It shouldn’t have been a surprise—the entity had been toying with us all night. Knowing however that this thing, this being, was intelligent, insane and powerful… I realized there was no way for me to win. My only option was to try and escape again.

So I rose shakily to my feet. I stumbled out into the corridor, trying to keep my balance. By the time I made it to the top of the stairs, I was ready to collapse. The encounter in the library had drained my strength and whatever resolve I still had left. It was a struggle just to put one foot in front of the other. So I stopped for a moment and listened. There was no sound of footsteps. No signs of movement at all.

I hurried down the stairs, turning right at the bottom into the living room. I didn’t stop to look around, just went quickly into the dining room.

My heart sank. The window was unbroken again. I would have to try to break it once more. The heavy chair I had used wasn’t there either, just leaving the lighter ones. I might be able to break a window using one of those, but it would take a few tries. So this room, the dining room, had moved in time to a point either before the window was broken, or after it was repaired. Since the big chair was gone, that implied that my breaking of the window was in the past. If it hadn’t been broken yet, the chair would still be here.

I remembered back to when Beth and I spoke to Arthur. He had warned us about recent events when vandals had broken a window at the back of the house. Could this be what he was talking about? Was I the vandal?

I moved over to the window and felt around the edges. The caulking was dry but pliant, which confirmed the recent replacement of the window.

So now I knew two things. This room was now in the future, after the breaking of the window. It was also in the past, relative to our arrival at the house. Since Arthur said the vandalism was recent, that meant the chunk of time between my breaking the window and our arrival was likely not very long.

So all I had to do was break another window and then leave the room. The entity would then move the room forward in time again to a point where Arthur had called in the repair people to replace the glass, so at least one day closer to the day of our arrival.

Eventually, the entity would take me back to Beth and Derek. Of course that was assuming it didn’t work out what I was doing and send me back to 1966. It also assumed that Beth and Derek were still in the house on the same night of our first arrival.

I took a deep breath. Too many assumptions…

Arthur had said that the vandals broke the window on Wednesday. That meant that today was probably Thursday. I had to get back to Saturday, which meant two more time jumps. I figured the rest of our equipment had been moved to Friday, so I could assume the entity would skip that day and I only needed one more time jump to get back to Saturday. This theory included a whole heap of guesswork, and it made my head hurt, but it was all I had to go on. Chloe was hidden somewhere in all these days as well, and I had no clue where she was.

I froze. I could hear something. It was so faint I almost dismissed it. A moment’s pause confirmed what it was: the ticking of the clock. It was gnawing at my brain again, seeming to grow louder now that I was aware of it. Could I really hear it from here? That irritating anti-rhythm, setting my teeth on edge and unsettling my frazzled nerves.