The grey girl.
She was real. Not real in the sense that I could reach out and touch her. My fingers would pass through her misty form as though it were smoke. But she was real – she existed. Fiona had seen her too.
I stood shivering in the graveyard long after Nate had mumbled some excuse and taken his mother away. Part of me wanted to run after them, to shake Fiona until she told me everything she knew about the grey girl. Who was she? How did she die? And why would she not leave Dudley Hall?
Somehow the whole day passed before I found my feet scrunching down upon the gravel driveway of Dudley Hall. I must have walked for miles around the village and the surrounding countryside, going around in circles and trying to make sense of what Fiona had said. I know just by looking at you that you’ve seen her. She’s appeared to you, hasn’t she? The grey girl.
Whatever Fiona had seen in me, I wondered if Nate had seen it too. Did I wear my memories like a mask, is that really what people saw when they looked at me? Did I look haunted, frightened, unhinged?
As I pushed open the heavy oak door to Dudley Hall I knew I had to find a way to ask Fiona what she knew. Nate seemed so protective of his mother, I doubted he’d want me asking her about such things. But I had to, I didn’t have a choice.
Aunt Meredith appeared in front of me as I was about to climb the grand staircase. ‘Suzy, you’ve been gone all day,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve promised your mum and Richard that this is the best place for you. You can’t just run away like that.’
‘If I’d run away I wouldn’t have come back,’ I said flatly.
She frowned at me with concern. ‘Go and freshen up for dinner, I’ll see you in the kitchen in ten minutes.’
I moved around my room like a ghost. I felt so numb being back there, where I knew the grey girl could be watching me. How could Aunt Meredith possibly think that Dudley Hall was the best place for me? She must have really fought to bring me here. I felt so betrayed. If she had any idea what was lurking between the crumbling old walls of the house, if she cared for me at all, then she’d try to keep me as far away as possible.
We sat around the dinner table in silence. Toby nervously pushed a few pieces of penne around his plate and Aunt Meredith’s gaze flittered towards Richard every few seconds as he bulldozed his way through his food without a word to anyone.
‘I saw Nate in the village today,’ I announced clearly.
‘The cook’s nephew?’ Richard said gruffly.
‘Nell’s a bit more than just a cook,’ I corrected him. Richard ignored me and carried on eating. ‘Nate was in the graveyard with his mother, Fiona. Do you know her, Aunt Meredith?’
‘Fiona is nothing but trouble,’ Richard grumbled without giving my aunt a chance to speak. ‘Whatever she may have said to you you’re to ignore it. The woman is as mad as a deranged hatter.’
‘Why?’ I pressed. ‘Because she thinks this house is haunted?’
‘Suzy,’ my aunt warned.
‘You knew that, didn’t you?’ I said to Aunt Meredith, my anger beginning to rise to the surface. ‘You knew that everyone thinks this house is haunted.’
‘Everyone does not think Dudley Hall is haunted,’ Richard said curtly, putting his knife and fork in the centre of his empty plate. ‘No one thinks that because it’s not true. Don’t be so childish. That woman is insane, everyone knows that.’
I ignored Richard and directed my hurt right at Aunt Meredith. ‘If you knew the rumours about this house then why did you bring me here? After everything I’ve been through you think I’d want to be here?’
‘That’s enough!’ Richard slammed his palms down on the table. Toby winced and shrank back in his chair.
Richard looked at me coldly and said, in a measured voice, ‘It would do you good to remember whose house this is, Suzanne. You’re staying here because we let you, because you have nowhere else to go. I understand that you may be ill, but dredging up such nonsense will do no good for your recovery. I won’t have you filling young Toby’s head with superstitious mumbo-jumbo, and I won’t have you speak to your aunt like that. There’s no such thing as ghosts.’
I narrowed my eyes and threw my best quotation at him, ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Richard grinned a slow, cat-like grin. ‘You really are a few sandwiches short of a picnic, aren’t you? Do you always quote Shakespeare when you have nothing else to say?’
In that moment I’d never hated anyone more in my life. I hated the way Richard treated my aunt, the way he was with Toby, and the way he spoke to me as if I was so broken I couldn’t be fixed. And it was all his fault. If he hadn’t bought Dudley Hall then Aunt Meredith would never have brought me there.
I got up, picked up my plate and calmly walked over to the kitchen bin. I scraped the entire contents of my food into it, then walked over to the sink and quickly washed my plate, putting it on the drying rack. ‘Thank you for dinner, Aunt Meredith. It was delicious but I have an issue with the company. Next time I’ll eat in my room.’ I dared a glance at Richard; it looked as though his blood was about to boil, like his eyeballs would pop with the pressure of his steaming head.
Toby stared at me, mouth agape. I’m not sure if I saw admiration or fear in his eyes. I felt a momentary wave of regret that he should have to witness such an outburst. He was only a kid, after all, he should be sheltered from all of this. He didn’t need to know that ghosts exist, and that Dudley Hall was haunted. But as I walked away I reminded myself that it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t bought Dudley Hall, I hadn’t forced Toby or anyone else to live here. If anyone was to blame, if anyone should feel sorry, it was Richard.
I marched out of the kitchen with my head held high, through the dark corridor, up the grand staircase and straight to my room on the second floor.
Less than a minute later the door swung open and Aunt Meredith stood on the threshold. ‘Suzy, that was uncalled for.’
‘Was it?’ I glared at her.
‘Richard is right – if it weren’t for Dudley Hall you’d have nowhere else to go. And neither would me or Toby – we’d all be out on the streets.’
‘Wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’d take a cardboard box over this ghost house.’
Aunt Meredith walked further into my room. ‘Look, Suzy, I’ve been thinking about what you were saying earlier.’ I looked at her blankly, not knowing what she was referring to. ‘About that story you were writing, The Ghost of Dudley Hall. Maybe we could use your story this weekend. The guests are already coming in the perfect costumes – all we’ll need to do is give them your characters when they arrive. And I meant it when I said I’d love to have a read of what you’ve –’
‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ I cut her off. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.’
‘Suzy,’ Aunt Meredith said gently and walked towards me. She took a deep breath and looked me dead in the eye. ‘I’m so sorry, but you can’t go home. Your mum’s not well enough to look after you.’
‘Not well enough?’ I shouted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her! She chugs down prescription pills and spends the day in bed – she cares more about herself than she ever has about me. I swear she was glad when I was carted off to Warren House – if I’m mad then I must have got it from somewhere. Now she can hold her head high and think that I’m just like her – a crazy old bat who nobody cares about.’
I waited for Aunt Meredith to slap me, to shout back or tell me to pack my bags and leave. But she just stood there, concern etched on her face and her eyes watering up. ‘Suzy, people care about you. I care about you, and I want you here. I’m sorry if you’ve heard upsetting stories about Dudley Hall, but they’re just that – stories.’
She reached out to touch me and I flinched away. ‘I want to be on my own please,’ I said, trying not to cry.
‘I don’t want to leave you, Suzy,’ she said, taking another step towards me. ‘I know you must be lonely here. Why don’t you call your friend Frankie – it might do you some good to –’
‘I want to be on my own!’ I shouted.
Aunt Meredith stared at me for a long moment before nodding and turning away. I watched, my eyes stinging with tears, as she gave me one last sorry glance before leaving the room.
I locked the door behind her as she left. Frustrated and angry, I headed towards my notepad, kicked off my shoes, sat on my bed and flicked it open at the first clean page. I put the nib of my pen to paper and began to write whatever came into my head. I wrote a hate-filled letter to Richard that I then screwed up and threw violently at the locked door. I wrote a poem about how betrayed and disappointed I felt in Aunt Meredith for allowing me to come and live at Dudley Hall. And when I’d finished that then I poured my angst and hurt into The Ghost of Dudley Hall. Whether I was ever going to show the story to Aunt Meredith or not, whether it would ever be anything more than words on a page, I didn’t care. I just needed to write it. I wrote about the girls in the boarding school, about the ghost they’d seen – it was the ghost of a girl who’d been murdered at the school, and the girls had to discover who had killed her in order for her spirit to rest. The evening passed in a frenzied blur of writing. That evening I discovered that there’s nothing like the feeling of boiling blood to really inspire my creativity.
After hours of furious writing I leant back against my bed’s headboard and rubbed at my tired eyes. I was suddenly exhausted. My hand ached from gripping my pen, my arm was numb from pressing down hard on the notepad. Too wired to sleep, I decided to fire up my laptop and distract my busy brain from the angry thoughts still whirring about inside it. I spent a while looking at internet gossip sites before I went onto Facebook. I couldn’t bear to scroll through the pages and pages of inane status updates from the lives of people I didn’t really care about. I would have logged straight off but I saw that I had over a dozen private messages waiting to be read. They were all from Frankie. I only read the most recent one.
Suzy.
I know you don’t want to hear from me. I know you think it’s better to just walk away and try to pretend that nothing happened. But I can’t do that.
I went back to St Mark’s. I had to see the school again. I had to see if anything had changed. They wouldn’t let me in. They shut me out just like they did to the Blue Lady all those years ago. I may as well have laid down and died on the school steps, just like she did.
I just don’t see the point of anything any more.
I think Seb is starting to hate me. He was so angry at me for going back. If I lose him too I don’t know what I’ll do.
Please call me, Suzy. I really need a friend right now.
Frankie xxx
I slammed the laptop shut, wishing I hadn’t read Frankie’s message. How dare she contact me? How dared she think that I was the answer to her problems? I couldn’t help her! I couldn’t even help myself. Besides, Frankie was the strong one. It was me who fell apart after what happened at school. Me who had to go into the loony bin. I was the one who should have been asking her for help, not the other way around.
Frustrated, I walked away from my desk and paced around the room. It was dark outside, the night was warm and I hadn’t yet shut the windows from having them open all day. The curtains flapped about in the night-time breeze. Yawning, I went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I picked up the shadow puppet from my nightstand and twiddled it between my fingers. I moved the puppet so it sat in front of my bedside light. I slowly twirled it around and watched as a silhouette of a woman appeared on my bedroom wall. She looked like a medieval maiden. I made the puppet walk and skip along the wall, twirl about and fly through the air.
A gust of cool air swept into the room and I shuddered. I placed the puppet on my bed and walked over to the window to close it.
As I got nearer to the window I could see movement outside in the garden below.
I recognised her straight away.
A small grey girl, running away from the house. She was shrouded in a heavy winter cloak, and she ran over the grass as if she was desperately fleeing from something. She was running towards the river, running towards a boat.
I leant out of the window, my heart fluttering like an angry caged bird in my chest. I rubbed at my tired eyes and blinked furiously to try to clear them of any haziness. She was still there when I opened them. It wasn’t the moonlight or my weary eyes; I was seeing her. She was real. Every beat of anger, frustration and disappointment I had felt that evening suddenly fell away from me. All I could feel was an enveloping exhilaration at what I was seeing. The grey girl – she was real. As real as the last time I’d seen her from my window, and clawing at the floorboards in the attic room. This was the same girl Fiona had spoken of, the girl she could see painted onto my face. The grey girl.
In that moment all I wanted was to know who she was and why she was there.
Without bothering to put on my shoes or a jumper, I turned and ran for my bedroom door. I unlocked it and flew down the stairs, and down the corridor to the kitchen. I rummaged around in the dark for the back door keys. I soon found them, opened the door and let myself out into the cold spring night.
I ran, barefoot, down to the stream. It was dark but there was enough moonlight to see the rippling water trickling through the grounds.
As I got down to the river bank I walked along the edge of it like a tightrope. I came to the weeping willow and ducked beneath the bowing branches, all the time my eyes searching the water for a boat, for the girl. I needed to see her, to be close to her. In that moment I could have stood face to face with her and looked her dead in the eye. I could have reached out and touched her; adrenalin was pumping through my veins like fire. My eyes wide with terror, my skin rippling with exhilaration, I followed the stream as it wound through the grounds. Sharp rocks and twigs on the ground snagged at my naked feet, but I could barely feel a thing. I was driven by a primal fear to confront whoever she was – the demon that haunted me. All I wanted was to look her in the eye and unlock her secrets.
But there was nothing. I looked around me in desperation as I walked and saw nothing but the dark night and the lonely grounds of Dudley Hall. There was no trace of the girl and no trace of the boat she had been fleeing in. I looked around desperately, wishing her to appear. I wanted to shout out for her, I wanted to summon her back from whatever dark realm she was hiding in.
My body began to shake with the cold night air and the feeling of defeat that crashed down upon my shoulders like a boulder. Suddenly all I wanted was to lie down and sob. I felt so ready to face her, I didn’t think I’d ever feel that brave again. I didn’t have the strength inside me. The next time she appeared I would want to run. I’d hide in shadows, withdraw from the world. I’d lose myself.
Nell was right. The ghosts you chase you never catch.
Shaken, I turned and made my way back into the house. I locked the door behind me and tried not to cry as I walked back towards the staircase on numb feet.
The first footprint was on the bottom step.
Moonlight flooding through the glass roof and bounced off the wet little puddle. The next footprint was on the step above, and then one above that.
Shaking, I followed the footprints as they led me up the stairs. They wound around the first-floor landing and up the second flight of stairs. My throat tightened painfully as I followed them along the second-floor corridor. The footprints came to a stop outside my room. Slowly, every fibre of my body shaking with fear, I raised my hands and pushed my bedroom door open.
I knew what I’d find inside my room. This was how the dead worked. How they communicated. They came for you in ways you couldn’t predict or understand. I didn’t know what she wanted, but I knew one thing for certain. She was coming for me.
My teeth chattered violently, and my legs vibrated beneath me as I stood in the doorway.
The small, wet footprints trailed all the way to my bed.
Quivering and cold, I followed the footprints into the bedroom and up to my bed. There was a rectangle of old brown leather propped up neatly on my pillow. It was a book.
Lavinia caught Tilly and I laughing together outside French class today. We had been talking about our perfect knights in shining armour. Tilly says that she would prefer Sir Galahad to Sir Lancelot, and I joked that whoever her ‘Loyal knight and true’ might be she could borrow his suit of armour and wear it to dance around in the sunlight. ‘Only if he wears my winter cloak in the moonlight!’ she laughed.
‘I’m glad you think it’s so funny that you’re such a freak,’ Lavinia spat, as Margot and Sybil sniggered behind her. ‘And Annabel’s laughing at you, not with you.’
‘That’s not true!’ I shouted back.
This made Lavinia really mad. That’s when she grabbed Tilly’s school jumper and began to drag her along the school corridor.
‘What are you doing, Lavinia?’ Tilly shrieked, as Lavinia pulled her towards the school entrance.
‘I don’t believe that you’re ill,’ Lavinia snarled, reaching for the door handle. ‘I don’t believe that you’re allergic to sunlight. There’s no such thing as a sunlight curse. You only skip out on Games because you’re lazy. And you only sleep on your own up in the attic because you’re such a freak no one else will share with you.’
I tried to pull Lavinia back as she swung open the door and dragged Tilly out into the sunlight. As soon as Tilly was outside Lavinia slipped back in and slammed the door shut, bolting it locked. I argued with her to open it, I pleaded with her as Tilly banged on the door, begging to be let in. ‘I thought we were friends, Annabel,’ Lavinia said to me as Tilly begged desperately from outside. ‘But friends don’t desert one another, especially when they are bound together like we are.’ She dropped her voice and whispered in my ear, which only made Tilly’s cries from outside sound louder. ‘Don’t you remember what you let me do to you? You let me burn you. Not only that but you let me give you the Kiss of Death. Don’t you remember, Annabel? It was me who did that to you, not her, not some little freak who’s too lazy to play hockey.’
‘Let her in, Lavinia!’ I shouted, finally managing to push her aside.
I unbolted the door and Tilly fell into me as it opened. Her face was red and swollen and her eyelids fluttered as she murmured in pain. Lavinia took a step back in horror and the other two gasped in shock. ‘Fetch the nurse!’ I demanded. ‘Now!’
The nurse came and took Tilly away. We haven’t seen her since.
‘It’ll be your fault if she dies,’ Lavinia said to me. ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have done it.’
I hope Tilly doesn’t die.
I prayed to the Goddess tonight that she doesn’t.
I would never forgive myself if she does.
Until I write again,
Annabel