We’ve always been heavy library users. Back in Clifton I won a competition for having borrowed the most books by anyone on a junior ticket over the summer holidays. I was surprised to win; I didn’t even know it was a competition they were running. They took a photograph of me with one of the librarians for the local newspaper and gave me a twenty-pound book voucher you could use in any bookshop in the country. It seemed to me a huge amount, but when it came to spending it I couldn’t choose, and after we’d been in the shop for half an hour, with me picking up and putting down book after book, Mum snapped and dragged me home. She went back the next day and came home with a dictionary and an atlas. I was disappointed at the time, I really wanted books about spaceships and aliens, but over the years I’ve used both books many times for homework so I understood her thinking.
Now I go to the library after school. It gives me more time away from Mum and the house and means I can do homework or research for a new vanishing. That was where I saw Jake next. He was over in the corner on the little plastic chairs with his head in a book.
‘All right Jake?’
He looked up at me. His face was grubby and needed a good wipe. He didn’t look like he remembered.
‘Donald,’ I said. ‘From the other week.’
‘Oh yeah. Hiya Donald.’
‘You all right then?’ I asked again.
He nodded that he was, and I lowered myself down onto a chair. My knees nearly touched my chin.
‘Good to be out of school?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘It’s always good to be out of school isn’t it?’
He laughed at that and said, ‘Yeah, always good.’
I asked him if he liked school but he didn’t seem to know what to say to that so I asked him if he liked books. He knew the answer to that one.
‘Horror books, yeah.’
‘Is that what you’ve got there then?’
‘Yeah, I’ve nearly read all of them.’
‘Books about dinosaurs?’ I asked.
He shrugged. Too old for that now I suppose.
‘Books about football?’
He shook his head. Of course not books about football.
‘Horror books,’ I said.
‘Yeah, ghosts and demons and horror and stuff.’
‘I like books too. I read loads of books. It’s good, isn’t it, reading?’
‘Sometimes it is,’ he said.
‘Well, I best get on Jake. See you soon.’
‘See you Donald,’ he said. It touched me that. To hear my name spoken so friendly.
He was quite often there, over in the kids’ corner alone, with his head in a book or sat at one of the computers playing away on a game. Sometimes when his free half-hour ran out I would pay a pound so he could have an extra bit of time. When he was bored he would come and sit with me and we would chat about what he’d been up to. He told me all about his mate, Harry. About how he had all the computer games and how rich his family was and the car his dad drove. He told me about the teachers, the ones he liked and the ones he hated. Sometimes I helped him with homework and other times we both just sat there reading.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I pushed the library door and it didn’t budge. I noticed the sign then: Library closed due to burst pipe. Sorry for any inconvenience. Post returns through letter box. I turned to head home and saw Jake shooting up the road towards me, his rucksack banging up and down against his back. He walked fast for a little lad with skinny legs. He saw me as he sped along and gave me a grin and a big wave.
‘They’re shut Jake,’ I said when he reached me.
‘Oh,’ he said and didn’t ask why.
‘There’s been a burst pipe. They must be flooded,’ I told him.
‘Right,’ he said and nodded.
‘Are you off back home then?’ I asked.
‘I’ll go to the playground,’ he said, and we set off walking down the road.
It was the one Saturday a year where Raithswaite gets both blue sky and warm sun, and the houses and buildings in town looked smaller than usual, shrunk in the heat, shy with the focus of two bright strangers fixed on them. The roads shimmered hot, people were wearing shorts and T-shirts and I thought that perhaps it was no bad thing that the library was closed, that it was good to be outside on a day like this. We walked ten minutes to the playground, which was just at the end of Jake’s street, and wasn’t much of a playground at all. It was a scruffy place, tucked away at the far end of Fox Street, and there was nobody about, not even on a bright Saturday.
We had a go on the swings and the climbing frame and mucked around for a while before Jake got bored.
‘Have you got some of your books in that bag?’ I asked him, and he nodded that he did.
‘Why don’t we have a read of one of your horror stories then?’ I said.
He pulled a book out of his bag, held it up and said, ‘I was taking it back. It’s rubbish. It’s not even scary.’
‘The scarier the better?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Jake, and I hit on a plan.
‘That book might not be scary in the sun in the middle of the day. It might be scary if you read it in a haunted house.’
‘A haunted house?’ he said.
‘Have you ever been to one?’
Jake shook his head. ‘Somebody said the toilets at school are haunted but I don’t believe them.’
‘Do you want to see a haunted house?’
He squinted his eyes up towards me.
‘Do you know where there is one?’
I told him that I did.
We left the playground; he was so excited, walking ahead, that I had to grab his collar to pull him slower.
I hadn’t invented the house; there is a house somewhere in Raithswaite that’s said to be haunted, a house where a tragedy occurred, it’s just that I’ve never been quite sure exactly where it is. But I knew of an abandoned house that looked like it should be haunted, a house that if someone told you it was haunted, you would think they were telling you the truth. The place I had in mind was the old quarry house, a wreck at the south side of the quarry, about half a mile from my house. It’s next to the old entrance where the trucks used to drive in and out, and it’s been empty ever since we moved to Raithswaite. It sits back from the road, nestled under tall trees. Every year it slips closer to ruin, and on dark nights when the mist comes down from the hills and there’s frost in the air, it can make you shudder to see it so abandoned and ruined. The quarry master used to live there, the man who logged the loads of the trucks and looked after the quarry in the night, making sure people weren’t stealing any rock. When the quarry closed he lost his job and moved out of the house and nobody has lived there since. That was my haunted house for Jake and I hoped that it didn’t look too friendly in the sun.
I told Jake the story of the real haunted house as we walked along. It’s a story that’s passed along from year to year at the high school and all the older kids in Raithswaite know it. I told him that it started when Mr Lorriemore was getting his gear together to go hunting. He was downstairs, it was about half five in the morning, and he’d filled his flask and packed his bag and was checking that everything was in working order with his rifle. Just as he was aiming it skyward his wife was climbing out of bed to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten to pack the sandwiches she’d made for him. She left the bed, stood and reached for her dressing gown, and was about to make her way across the room when Mr Lorriemore took a pretend potshot. He pulled the trigger, but there was a bullet in the chamber that shouldn’t have been there, and the bullet went straight through the floorboards and into his wife. She fell to the floor and was dead in minutes. It’s said that when the ambulance and police turned up Mr Lorriemore was hugging his dead wife’s body, weeping. Mrs Lorriemore was carried out of the house, covered in a blanket, and Mr Lorriemore was arrested and led away. There was lots of gossip at the time about another man and revenge on Mr Lorriemore’s part, but when the police came and took measurements and did their investigation, everything confirmed the story Mr Lorriemore had told them. There was a hole in the ceiling and the bullet had entered Margaret Lorriemore at such an angle that it had to have come from below. The police concluded that a man intent on taking revenge on a cheating wife would not take a potshot through floorboards and be lucky to strike gold with his first and only shot. Mr Lorriemore eventually left Raithswaite and was never seen again. I told Jake that some said it was guilt that drove him from town, but the more popular story was that he couldn’t bear to stay in the house and hear his wife’s ghost calling out the name of another man.
‘So he shot her dead?’ Jake asked.
‘He did.’
‘And she’s the ghost?’
‘She is.’
‘And that’s where we’re going?’
‘It is.’
He started to speed up again.
It had been years since I’d been to the house. It sits at the furthest point in the quarry away from my house, but I knew that the best way in was still probably through the back door that had been forced open years ago. We stopped at the front gate, both of us hot from the walk in the sun, and rested for a second.
‘Do you still want to go in?’ I asked. Jake nodded, I opened the gate and we walked up the path and around the back.
‘You OK?’ I asked Jake as we stood looking at the house.
‘Is this it then? Is this the haunted house?’ he wanted to know. I told him it was and he looked at it like he believed me. I followed his eyes and could see that the look of the place would convince any eight-year-old it was haunted. It must have been white back in the glory days of the quarry, but now it stood grey and desolate, broken and sad-looking. Even in the sun on a Saturday afternoon I could almost believe that it was haunted myself.
‘Shall we go in then?’ he asked.
‘Are you sure?’ I knew he was sure but I wanted to build the tension.
‘Yeah, let’s go in, but you go first.’
We approached the door and I gave it a hard shove with my shoulder and pushed until it opened. I walked a few steps into the cool dark and waited. I turned to the light of the half-open door and saw that Jake’s confidence had evaporated. He was stood just inside the door, a small black silhouette against the sunny day, one quick step away from daylight and overgrown greenery.
‘You don’t have to come any further, you know.’ I didn’t want to make him do anything he didn’t want to do.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to.’ But he didn’t make a move forward.
‘We could just sit in the garden and read the books and look at the house,’ I told him.
‘I want to come in though,’ he said, but his body betrayed him and he stayed rooted to the spot like a tree stump.
‘Do you want to hold my hand?’ I asked. He nodded. I went back and took his hand and said, ‘If you get scared just tell me, and we’ll leave straight away.’ He nodded again and we slowly stepped forward down the hallway. He giggled with excitement.
‘Have you seen her? The ghost?’
He whispered the word, like the mention of it might provoke an appearance.
‘I haven’t, no. I haven’t seen her, but I have heard her,’ I told him.
‘What does she sound like?’
He held my hand tighter in anticipation of the answer. I could feel the blood thrumming quickly around his warm fingers. He stepped closer to hear my answer.
‘She sounds like she’s dying,’ I said. ‘I live over at the far side of the quarry and sometimes at night you can hear her wailing. On still nights it echoes and carries and sounds like wolves. Over the years people who don’t know the story have rung the police but the police have stopped coming because they’ve never found anything.’
‘Maybe they’ve stopped coming because they’re scared,’ said Jake.
He was so close now he was almost under my feet. I sensed he was keener and more scared at the same time. We’d either be going right into the house or running back out into the garden and I couldn’t tell which.
‘Well, they do say that policemen who have caught all kinds of criminals and seen dead bodies smashed up in road accidents won’t come back in here after they’ve been in once.’
‘Really? Let’s go a bit further.’
I had to stifle a laugh at that. We reached a doorway on the left and looked in and saw a shell of a room. It was brighter in there; the sun was strong enough to cut through the thick garden shrubs and the cracked and dirty windows and the light made Jake braver. He let go of my hand and walked in.
‘Was this the room he shot her from?’ he asked. I looked up at the ceiling and saw there were enough cracks and scuffs there for it to seem plausible.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Can you see that mark on the ceiling there? That looks like it could have been done by a bullet.’
Jake grinned as he peered up. He was more excited than scared now and was keen to see the rest of the house. We wandered around downstairs and found most of the rooms to be as bare as the first room. In what must have been the kitchen there were still some cupboards on the wall, and a sink, but other than that, nothing.
‘Do you think there are rats?’ Jake asked. I told him of course there were rats, and he was almost as pleased by this as the thought of the shooting and the ghost. We went upstairs next and he wanted to hold hands again, but I told him I would have to go first to check that the floorboards would take our weight. I creaked my way slowly up the stairs and then shouted for Jake to follow me. There were three bedrooms, all empty, and a wreck of a bathroom. The wallpaper was still clinging on desperately in patches in some rooms, as if the structure of the house depended on it. One strong shoulder charge at any of the walls and I was sure I could bring the whole place down. We sat down in the room where I told Jake Mrs Lorriemore had ended up dead. We rested against a wall and listened to see if we could hear anything ghostlike. When there was nothing that we could even pretend might be a ghost I grabbed his shoulder and said, ‘Jake. What was that?’
‘What?’ he asked, and leant forward to listen.
‘That!’
‘There isn’t anything,’ he said, and I turned quickly and shouted a big ‘BOO!’ at him. He screamed so loudly the noise ran into every room in the house and hung in the air, but he almost immediately started laughing, and he’d enjoyed it, I could tell. We sat there for a while and it didn’t seem like the time to be reading the books, and Jake was more interested in the story of the haunted house than the ghost story in his bag anyway. After half an hour of chatting and making more stuff up I told him we should get him home. As we were walking down the stairs I said, ‘It’s a pity we won’t be here tonight Jake, that’s when she’ll come out and start with her wailing.’
‘You think she’ll be here tonight?’ he asked.
‘Saturday nights she’s always about and she’s always the loudest then,’ I told him. ‘Saturday nights her husband met his friends in town and they drank till they were silly, so she always took the opportunity to meet the other man. She cries the loudest on Saturday nights.’
‘Maybe we should come back tonight then,’ he said, and I had to laugh at that. Even I didn’t want to be creeping around the quarry house in the dark. We walked back in the direction of his house, his pace not as fast now there were no haunted houses at the end of the walk.
‘Do you not go out anywhere on Saturday afternoons Jake?’ I asked him.
He shook his head.
‘Won’t your mum have noticed you’ve been gone so long?’
‘Steve comes round and they like to be alone, so I have to play out till teatime. Can we go back to the haunted house?’
‘Next Saturday?’
He nodded.
‘We can if you want.’
‘Maybe we’ll see her next week,’ he said.
We agreed to meet at the playground and I walked him back to the end of Fox Road, and stood and watched until he walked through his front door.
There was nothing left for me to do other than go home and I set off feeling flat after the fun we’d had that afternoon. All I had to look forward to for the rest of the day was Mum and her moods. I walked up our street, the house came into view and I slowed – I could sniff trouble on the air. Sometimes just by looking at our house you can see that you’ll be walking into a fight. I stopped fifty yards off and had a think. I thought about not going in at all, but I knew that was just kicking trouble and running away when you had to come back down the same road later. The sooner it’s done the better, like throwing up – get it out of the way, clean your teeth and move on. I shut the front door behind me, careful not to be too quiet like I was sneaking, careful not to slam and set her on edge. Noise was coming from the kitchen and I followed the sound. She was at the sink, shoulders up round her ears, scrubbing at a pan like it was a bad dog that’d rolled in muck. She didn’t turn round.
‘You’ve got a fine. For a book about fishing communities in Scotland or some nonsense. They say it’s important you bring it back, they got it you from Oxford or somewhere and they need to send it back now.’
She carried on rubbing that pan raw and I saw the letter and the torn envelope on the kitchen table.
‘They shouldn’t bother with your silly requests.’
As I watched her tight back, her strong arms, jutting in and out, rubbing away, words came into my head and I told myself not to risk it. I told myself to run up to my bedroom and everything would be fine.
‘You shouldn’t open my mail. It’s illegal to open somebody else’s mail.’
That did it. She spun round and was upon me. Suds were flying as she waved her white candyfloss arms in the air. Her eyes were bright and clear with the certainty of the mad. She ranted about a mother’s eternal right to know every thought and action of any child she bore.
‘Particularly with you Donald, though, yes? With what you’ve put this family through? You can’t blame me at all for wanting to know the details of what you’ve been up to, can you?’ I started edging my way to the door and towards the sanctuary of my bedroom. I already wished I hadn’t provoked her. I didn’t want hysterics and anger. I wanted to be safe and quiet in my bedroom, thinking about the fun I’d had with Jake at the haunted house. That was all.