The Patchwork House (20 page)

“I mean it. This thing will do anything to get you inside. Maybe you shouldn’t stay here at all.”

“Listen, I don’t relish standing around outside in the dark, but I’m not going inside again.”

“Okay, wish me luck.”

He didn’t. I clicked on the torch, stepped forward, and opened the back door.

CHAPTER 15

As soon as I stepped
inside the atmosphere changed. More than just going from the fresh air to stuffy confinement. The environment seemed wrong, foreboding. It didn’t feel like I’d time travelled, but it did feel like stepping into another world. The silence felt artificial. I remember visiting a science museum many years ago and walking through a sound-deadening tunnel. Hundreds of tiny holes lined the walls, which absorbed sound and made the centre of the tunnel utterly silent. It was so unnatural, to hear nothing at all, it hurt my ears. That’s how it felt at that moment.

There was an odour as well. Like something had died. Which of course, it had. Today? Tomorrow? Months ago? It was hard to be sure, but the smell was old and decayed.

My torch lit up the short corridor and the two doors on either side. Both were closed. I expected the entity to send me back and forth in time, and to be honest I had no clue if Derek would still be there when I returned.
If
I returned. Right now it was the same night as it was when Derek, Beth, Chloe and I arrived at this house.
If
I got out of here, it might be the middle of next week and Derek would be long gone.

Nothing for it but to press on. I couldn’t go back to Derek and tell him I’d given up. Beth’s spirit was probably in this house somewhere, lost and afraid. The clock may not have her trapped, but maybe the entity was torturing her. And poor Chloe, innocent Chloe, who I had invited to come here. She was still lost somewhere, somewhen. She wasn’t my wife but she was my responsibility.

I paused at the end of the corridor. In front of me was the conservatory door. To get to the drawing room would be faster through the dining room, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back in there after we left Beth’s corpse alone. I knew she wasn’t there
now
, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to open the door.

So I went through the conservatory. My torchlight made terrible shadows from the branches and leaves of the plants. They moved as my torch moved, as I moved, so they lurched and leered. I tried to put such thoughts out of my head. I knew what I had to do and I wanted it done quickly.

But first, the drawing room. I had to get there before the ghost time-shifted me. So I hurried into the kitchen. I shone the torch over the counter and saw the reassuring presence of our meal’s detritus, including the shopping bags and food containers. This was the same night that we arrived. I hadn’t shifted yet, and if I could make it to the hallway without a time jump, I should be able to get our stuff from the drawing room.

I crossed the threshold into the hall. I didn’t feel any shifting in time. If I’d moved in time, there was nothing to indicate it. Perhaps the ghost was busy haunting tomorrow. But it must have known I was here. Was it toying with me? Did I not pose a threat? Was it bored with me?

I tried not to think about the stairs as I passed by. The entity could be anywhere, but the stairs filled me with more dread than anything else, perhaps with the exception of the wine cellar.

I could hear something now. I held my breath and stood in place, listening. At first I thought it was footsteps, but the pattern was irregular. With a shock I realized I was hearing the ticking of the clock. How the hell was I hearing that? Was I going crazy? I had to get this done and get out of here quickly.

I crossed to the drawing room, took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

The room was silent, mercifully free of ticking sounds. I pushed my torch beam into the corners of the dark, poking and prodding with the light, chasing the shadows away only to have them crowd back into place when I moved on. To my delight, all our equipment was here. The lamps were present too, though they were both dark. I hurried over to the first one and tried to light it, but the valve was already open, the canister spent. I moved to the other lamp and this time was rewarded with room-filling light.

The shadows scurried and receded. It took my eyes a little time to adjust, and I turned around in place examining every corner, every nook, and especially the ceiling. I was alone in here. I turned off my torch and closed the door to the drawing room.

I went to the mobile charger and pulled out my phone and Derek’s. While the charger itself was dead, our phones had full power. I switched both of them on but of course there was no signal. It was reassuring just to hold them though. I could leave right now through the front door with my key, and Derek and I could walk away from this place until we were back in range and we could call for help. It was so tempting, I felt like abandoning my elaborate and doomed-to-fail plan and just doing that instead.

I had no idea how much gas the lamp held, so I spent a minute replacing the canister on the second lamp. It was awkward to do, but once done I fired it up. The room was brighter than it had been since before dusk. It felt almost safe in here now, but I knew it was anything but. Memories of falling bookcases and Beth’s empty eye sockets chipped away at my fragile resolve.

I picked up another spare torch, put the phones in my pocket, and abandoned everything else. I didn’t need the laptop or the video and digital cameras either. They would just slow me down.

With the lantern in one hand, I reached out with the other and pulled on the door. I opened it slowly, not knowing what I would find on the other side.

I jumped in shock.

Derek was standing there.

“Holy shit! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

“Sorry,” said Derek.

“Why are you here? I told you to stay outside.”

“Yeah, you did. It was dark. I got scared.”

I retreated into the room and let him enter. I closed the door behind him.

“I don’t want you here, Derek. What if your head gets screwed with again?”

I turned around to face him but he wasn’t there. The room was empty.

I was alone.

My heart pounded, my skin crawled and I shivered.

What. The. Fuck?

“Derek?” Maybe he was playing a prank on me. I opened the door again and looked outside into the hall. There was nobody there either.

I turned back into the drawing room and there he was, standing two feet from me. I jumped again.

“Derek what are you doing? Where did you go?”

“Did you miss me?” he asked. His voice was wrong. It sounded like it was coming from another room, like a distant call. It didn’t quite match the movement of his lips.

Derek exploded into a mass of blackness.

I screamed and fell backwards into the hall landing hard on my back.

The thing with Derek’s face charged after me.

“Where is he?” it screeched.

I scrambled away from it, unable to get up.

“Where is who?” My voice was breaking up. I pushed myself away, scrambling to keep from letting it touch me, never taking my eyes from it.

“Where am I?”

“You mean Derek?”

The entity stopped. It coalesced for a moment, the lamp light from the drawing room framing its dark mass, making it appear much larger.

“I must be here. I must be here.”

And then it was gone. In the blink of an eye it disappeared.

I lay there breathing hard. More than ever I just wanted to flee. The front door was just metres from me.

I rose to a sitting position, but before I could stand up I fell back again. I was moving along the floor, feet first.

Something was dragging me.

Oh God, I couldn’t stop it. It was pulling me towards the stairs. It was going to drag me
up
the stairs. I fought and twisted, lashed out as it took me away from the light. I couldn’t see anything pulling me, felt no tugging on my clothes, but something held my left foot and I couldn’t stop moving.

The stairs were agony, each step digging into my spine as the invisible something yanked me upwards. I felt utterly helpless. I cried out, scrabbling to gain a hand hold on one of the railings.

“Get off me!” I yelled, over and over. Panic took over. I thrashed about, kicking out with my free foot, hard enough to split one of the wooden railings.

And then it let go.

I tumbled down the staircase, banging my head at least twice on the way down. I landed in a heap at the bottom, groaning in pain and struggling to move. I had to move.

Shakily I stood up. Nothing seemed to be broken but my head throbbed and my arms, legs and back ached and smarted from a hundred bruises.

I didn’t stop to check myself for further damage. I lurched back into the drawing room, staggering against the door frame and forcing myself forward.

It wasn’t a change in the air or the hairs on my neck standing on end that confirmed that I’d moved through time, though I experienced them as before. Instead it was the sudden, blinding daylight streaming through the windows of the drawing room.

I fell to my knees and blinked repeatedly. I felt battered and confused. The sudden daylight made my head spin. I couldn’t grasp it. Was I being released? Could I walk out the front door? Were the others outside? Had I just woken up and dreamed the whole thing?

I stood shakily, determined to seize the opportunity and leave the house while I might have a chance. The lamp had time travelled with me. It was no match for daylight though. I should take it with me in case I time shifted back into night again.

I reached out for it but something outside the window caught my eye.

Someone.

It was a man, approaching a window from the outside as he neared the house. I stared at him, my head tilting at an angle as I tried to take it in.

It was me.

I moved towards the window, my mouth open like a zombie, staring at my own face as I approached from the outside. I seemed so undamaged, so clean.

Oh shit! This was me arriving! I was seeing what I thought was a reflection, except it wasn’t. It was really me! I wanted to scream and wave my arms at the other me, staring in with a confused expression on his—on
my
face. Instead I just stared back, unable to process what I was seeing.

And then the other me was gone and I was plunged back into the dark.

CHAPTER 16

The window went black
as the atmosphere shifted and my skin tingled. It was night again. I’d been given just a torturous glimpse of where I’d been just hours ago, when I still had the chance to turn around and walk away. But I already knew that the sight of my battered and bloodied face through that window had not been enough to deter me. The entity was fucking with me, pure and simple.

I grabbed the lamp, made sure I still had the house keys, torches and phones, and then headed back to the bottom of the staircase.

The fall had shaken me. The time jump had assaulted my sanity. But I knew what I had to do. For this all to be over, I knew I had to go up. I stood rooted at the bottom step, unable to continue. Dread filled me. Palpable fear locked my feet to the ground. I stared at the shattered railing, broken by my tumble down the stairs, splintered wood sticking out at an angle. It was a visceral reminder of what had happened to me and might well happen again.

I told myself I had to be brave, and yet my head turned and my eyes gazed longingly at the front door. I wanted to be the other me again, the me that walked carefree in the daylight, the me that was bruise and wound free, the me that could reach out and touch Beth whenever I wanted to.

I held the image of Beth in my mind. Not dead-Beth with no eyes, but living, lovely Beth, spinning on the lawn of the gardens, loving her surroundings as I loved her. I missed her so much it hurt me deeper than any of my injuries. Taking her away from me was crushing my soul, and there wasn’t much the entity could do to me that was worse than that.

I held up my lamp and I took my first step upwards. The roof didn’t cave in, nothing appeared at the top of the stairs and I wasn’t dragged into hell.

So I kept going. In no time I reached the top. It was just as it was the last time I was up here.

I walked on. I wanted to be done with this and gone as soon as possible.

When I reached the library that feeling of dread took hold again. Given what had happened the last time I was in here, I felt like a moron for voluntarily coming back.

But in I went. This time at least I had more light.

The air was fresher in here, mostly due to the broken window letting in the night breeze. It occurred to me that what I was looking for might well be in the bookcase embedded in the four-by-four outside the window, but I trusted my memory and moved over to the shelves covering one entire wall. Sure enough, the Bibles were here. But tucked in beside them was what I was really after. Like a good Catholic, Percy had exactly what I was looking for.
Rites of the Catholic Church Volume 1
. I didn’t see volume two anywhere so I had to hope this would be sufficient. And there it was, Rites of Christian burial.

I turned around and nearly walked straight into Derek again.

“What are you doing?” he said in that weird, shifted voice.

I backed away, bumping into the bookshelf.

“You’re not Derek,” I stammered.

“I look like him.” He moved closer until he was just inches from my face. I felt a wave of extreme cold that sucked the air from my lungs. “I sound like him. Are you sure, Jim?”

“Yes I’m sure.” I could barely breathe, never mind speak.

Not-Derek backed away suddenly, seeming to phase in and out of reality, moving to the door with impossible speed. “What will you do next?”

And then he was gone. I clutched hold of my book and my lamp and I made for the door, gritting my teeth to stop them from chattering.

One with a lamp, one with a book, one with the shivers…

Something struck the back of my head. I turned in surprise as something else collided with my chin.

It fell to the floor. It was a book.

“Oh no.”

A torrent of books flew off the shelves. I raised my arms to protect my head and they clattered against me with astonishing force. I struggled to stay upright against the onslaught, pushing towards the door, my back turned on the flying books. I refused to let go of my lamp and book of rites, but the volumes hitting me were so heavy I was worried the lamp would shatter.

I made it to the corridor outside. The library door slammed behind me and I collapsed against the far wall. The lamp was dented but intact and still alight. My other hand still clutched the book of Rites.

I wanted to sit there for a moment to at least calm myself down and get my breath back, but I knew I had to keep moving. I hauled myself to my feet and staggered back down the corridor. It could throw books at me, it could drag me up the stairs, it could murder my girlfriend, but it would not stop me. I was absolutely determined, more than I ever had been in my life. So Derek thought I was lazy? I would show him I was a survivor and I could get the job done.

I stood up, clutching the far wall for support. I felt dizzy but still conscious. I took a step towards the stairs, then another. Derek was waiting for me at the top, except it wasn’t really Derek. It was dead-Derek.

“You won’t believe what I’m going to do next,” he said. The words settled on me like freezing rain down my back. I wanted to run at him and punch him and shove him down the stairs. I wanted him dead. Of course this thing was
already
dead, but I knew that whatever happened tonight, I would see this through and I would send this hateful, vile, rancid creature screaming into hell if it cost me my life.

But I kept calm. I kept myself composed somehow. I didn’t rise to its taunts. It did not frighten me anymore. It could be violent, it could be devious and it could send me hurtling through time like a spinning top in a TARDIS, but it had already taken away the only thing in this world I truly cared about and it had nothing left with which to hurt me.

So I walked up to dead-Derek and I calmly, deliberately, spat in his face. To my surprise, the sputum landed on solid flesh. I reached out and poked him with a finger.

“You’re real,” I said.

“I am anything I want to be. When I died and woke up a ghost, I thought I was doomed to wander these halls forever. It took a good hour of stumbling around before the clock sucked me in, or at least it felt like an hour. And when that happened, everything changed. Such power! It felt amazing. And you, my dear friend Jim, you made it happen. You killed me, and you will still kill me, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it happening.”

“I’m not going to stab you with a kitchen knife,” I said.

“No, that’s true. It’s going to happen just as it was supposed to happen. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but it doesn’t matter now.”

“Why doesn’t it matter now?”

“Events are already in motion.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

And then I heard a voice that chilled me even more than dead-Derek’s unearthly tones. I heard a single word called, cried out into the night that made my mind unravel with dread.

“Derek!”

The voice was female, utterly terrified, beyond sanity almost. It came from the library and that voice echoed in a way that voices didn’t echo in these upstairs rooms. It echoed around a walled-in area. It echoed because it was shouting and screaming out of a broken window into the cool night air outside.

It was Chloe.

It was the one thing, the one word said by the one person absolutely guaranteed to get Derek, the living Derek, to set foot in this house.

“No. No no no. No, Derek no!”

I was torn. Should I rush in and stop Chloe shouting, or should I run downstairs and try to intercept Derek before he inevitably entered the house in search of his wife?

Indecision gripped me. But in the end, the choice wasn’t mine to make.

“Chloe! Is that you?” Derek’s voice was distant, muted, but it was unmistakably him calling back from outside.

“Oh God, Derek?” Chloe screeched. “Please help me! It’s so dark! I can’t see. I’m so scared. Derek, please!”

“I’m coming, just stay there!”

It was too late to silence Chloe. In her current state I couldn’t explain to her fast enough that she had to tell her husband to stay outside. In the distance I heard the crashing of doors as Derek entered the house by the back door and tried to find his way to us in the dark. I had no other choice. I had to get him out before he was possessed again. I turned back to the stairs.

Derek, dead-Derek, blocked my way. He looked less solid now, more gaseous like the time I had seen him on the ceiling of the drawing room. I lunged at him, desperate to get past.

Something strange happened.

I halted at the top of the stairs. A weird feeling came over me. It was like the world shimmered around my head. For a moment I thought I was time jumping again, but this felt different. What the hell was going on? Now, terrifyingly, I couldn’t move. I was stuck in one place, unable to even move a finger. What was it doing to me?

Then I started walking.

I cried out in shock, but my words sounded muffled and unreal. I wasn’t in control of my legs or my arms or any part of me. I was walking back to the library. I couldn’t stop myself. Visions crowded my head of pushing Chloe out of the window, or stabbing her with my knife, or some other terrible thing the entity was going to make me do to her. I couldn’t stop it. I was on a roller coaster just before the first big drop and I’d changed my mind, I wanted to get off. I felt sick, overcome with disgust at the lack of control over my own body. I was lurching like a fucking zombie and I couldn’t stop myself.

“I’m coming, Baby” I said. Except, I didn’t say it. The entity surrounded me, I was sure of it. I felt like something evil, something utterly
wrong,
had invaded every cell of my body. I couldn’t stop talking.

“Follow my lamplight, I’m here.”

I raised the lamp to illuminate the library door as I approached. Behind me, I could hear Derek, still downstairs but close, trying to locate the staircase in the faint light from the drawing room.

Chloe appeared in the doorway of the library.

“It’s me,” I said, involuntarily. “It’s Derek! Oh my God, Chloe, you’re alive!”

“Jesus, Derek, oh thank God, thank God.”

Chloe rushed forward. I tried to scream, tried to tell her to keep away. I wanted to yell at her, I’m not Derek, I’m not him! Keep away! Keep away! Please…

Chloe hurled herself into my arms. I enfolded her in a tight embrace, all the while saying things like, “Oh baby, oh my love, oh I’m so sorry I lost you.”

And then she kissed me. She kissed me like she hadn’t seen me in years. Like she loved me more than anything else in the world at that exact moment. And despite everything, I sank into that kiss. I don’t think I had a choice, I couldn’t have resisted if I wanted to. But to have a living, breathing woman kiss me felt so good, it eased my panic and calmed my nerves.

We parted. I parted from her. I felt myself in control. The lantern lit up our faces. The entity was gone. Chloe was staring at me in confusion, clearly shocked to see that my face had changed, from her perspective.

I swung the lamp around.

Derek stood at the top of the stairs. The real Derek. The living Derek. His expression was dumbfounded, totally blown away.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, Derek, no. Derek it’s not what it looks like.”

“You fucking bastard.”

“No, Derek, no!”

I could only keep protesting. I didn’t know which words would convince him. I didn’t know what to say. I felt guilt and self-revulsion and anger and hatred towards myself and the entity that made me do this.

“I fucking
hate
you,” he screamed.

And then he charged.