I spent that night on my bathroom floor. I left the wet footprints – I couldn’t bring myself to mop them up. And I left the book. I didn’t even get close enough to touch it. I didn’t want to know what was printed on its pages. I didn’t want to think about what it might mean and who might have put it there and why. There may have been a fleeting moment the night before when I’d felt brave, when I felt that I could face her. But that had disappeared as soon as I realised I could never have the upper hand. She controlled this, whatever this was, not me. I hated myself for being so weak, for being so terrified. If Frankie had been there she would have picked up the book and read it cover to cover, she would have done anything to make this stop. And what had I done? I’d cowered away in the bathroom behind a locked door. I may as well have been a child hiding under the bed from nightmares. Except I couldn’t even bring myself to go anywhere near my bed. I had edged around the room and locked myself in the bathroom like I was trying to avoid a wild animal.
I curled up in a corner of the bathroom on the cold tiles and hugged myself for comfort. I stared into space. My mind yo-yoed from being as blank as an empty page to as busy as a speeding highway. There were moments when I tried to convince myself that this wasn’t happening. I was imagining the whole thing. But in my heart I knew the truth. Dudley Hall was haunted by the ghost of a small girl, ‘the grey girl’, as Fiona had called her.
It was only when bright daylight streamed in through the bathroom window that I realised the whole night had passed and I hadn’t moved from my spot on the cold tiled floor. The only time I’d moved throughout the night was to scratch at my hands. They were red-raw from where I had picked and clawed at them anxiously as I sat catatonic on the bathroom floor. Summoning all the strength I had inside me, I pulled myself to my feet and took my aching body over to the sink. I gently scrubbed the blood from my hands and then patted them dry with a towel. I found some lotion to rub into the wounds, which only made them sting worse than they did already.
Slowly, exhaustion consuming every cell in my body, I made my way towards the bathroom door and unlocked it. For a brief moment I wished that I was mad. I wished that I’d open the bathroom door and find an empty room with no sign that someone other than me had been there the night before. I wished it was all in my head, that the book and the footprints had never been there at all.
I opened the bathroom door with a violent jolt of my hand. I stood in the open doorway and studied my bedroom. The footprints had vanished – evaporated in the morning sun. But there on my pillow, just as it had been last night, was the old book.
In a series of swift movements I crossed the room, picked up the book and threw it at the far wall. Its pages splayed wide as it fell to the floor with a gentle thud. I stared at the crumpled heap for a moment before running from the room.
I bolted along the landing, down the stairs, through the great hall and along the back corridor.
No one was sitting in the kitchen as I marched through it. From the pale, fresh light outside I knew it was early, far too early for anyone to be up and eating breakfast. I had no idea what I aimed to achieve by running through the kitchen back door, into the garden and heading for the river. I knew there was nothing to see there. There had been nothing to see the night before when I ran down to search for her. She was gone with the passing night, evaporated like the footprints on my bedroom floor.
My bare feet took me along the river bank towards the boathouse. I pushed open the rusty hinges and embraced the smell of rotting wood and stale river water that wafted up my nose as I entered.
In the old boathouse lay the remains of the ancient boat I’d sat and written beside a dozen times. The shape of the hull was exactly the same as the boat I’d seen the girl with on the river. Staring down at the rotting wood, I knew it was the same boat I’d seen the girl desperately clamber onto in the dead of night, the boat that was to be her escape. This was the relic of a story that I so desperately wanted to know.
The Lady of Shalott.
And then I remembered.
The line I’d seen scratched into the mirror in the attic: I am half sick of shadows. The line had been taken from the poem of the same name. My eyes widened and I backed out of the boathouse and onto the muddy ground at the sickening reminder of what was haunting Dudley Hall. I turned around and started to run. I needed to get away.
My legs took me back through the garden, inside the house and up to my room again.
The book I’d thrown from my bed minutes before sat crumpled on the floor where I had left it. The golden embossed lettering on the book’s cover glistened at me in the morning light.
The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
My heart jolted inside me. I knew what I’d find within the pages of the book before I opened it. Whoever – whatever – had put the book on my bed wanted me to look inside. There was one poem they wanted me to read.
I bent down and picked up the ancient book with quivering fingers. The book’s well-worn spine fell open on the poem I knew I was meant to read: The Lady of Shalott.
Still shaking, I perched on the edge of my bed and began to read: ‘On either side the river lie, Long fields of barley and of rye …’ I read the poem until the end, and then went back to the beginning and read again. The poem told the tale of a beautiful maiden who was cursed to live her life in a tower. The curse forbade her to look out the window, instead she could only look at reflections of the world outside in a mirror. I read and re-read the poem countless times, never moving from the bed. My fingers flicked the thin and delicate pages back and forth with care as I read the lines again and again.
As my eyes moved over the words of the poem I searched them desperately for meaning. There must be something hidden in between those lyrical lines that would provide the clue I needed. The clue that would lead me to discover why the grey girl wouldn’t rest, and how I might help her to move on. When staring at the book felt fruitless, I moved over to my desk, booted up my laptop and searched the internet for answers. I typed all manner of words into the search engine: Lady of Shalott – meaning. Who was the Lady of Shalott? Dudley Hall – Ghost. Lady of Shalott – Ghost. I read each new page as it popped up with fascination. As the minutes slipped into hours I felt myself being dragged deeper and deeper into my new obsession. I hadn’t eaten, I hadn’t washed, I hadn’t slept. All I could think about was the link between the poem and the house, and what it had to do with the girl who must have died there. My mind drew blanks at every new internet page that popped up. I knew that the grey girl had scratched words from the poem into the mirror upstairs, I knew an ancient boat at Dudley Hall was named after the poem, but beyond that I couldn’t see a link.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
As I read through the poem I was vaguely aware of the doorbell chiming. It chimed and chimed until I heard my aunt run through the house to answer it.
The sound of muffled voices grew louder as I read the poem for the umpteenth time. The voices became even louder. My aunt was leading whoever it was up the stairs. She was taking them through the house, towards my room.
‘She’s just in here,’ I heard my aunt say. ‘Suzy!’
The door pushed open and I turned around to see Frankie standing in my doorway.