SAM OPENED HIS PETRIFIED EYES and was instantly blinded by the stinging brightness of their world. He held a hand out in front of his face to block the sun, still instinctively leaning his body away from the grasp of the twisted figure that had come for him.
His blazed retinas managed to calm enough for him to continue his path up the stones, rising from the wake of his rebirth back to safety.
He finally swung over the top, and into the waiting arms of Lucy.
‘Sam!’ she cried, pulling him in tight… He allowed the comfort of the hold to hang for a moment, his arms cocooning Lucy from the trauma of their recent ordeal, but he eventually succumb to his worries and wrestled himself free of her embrace to pull her back from the edge of the pool, making sure to remain close enough to watch for anything attempting to come through.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, eyes burning the surface of the water for movement.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘I-I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry…? Sorry for what?’
‘I don’t know what was happening to me through there? I was changing, I could feel myself changing.’ Her head bowed to the weight of her shame. ‘I really started to feel, kind of, self-absorbed? Is that the word?’
‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ Sam confirmed.
‘I felt – I don’t know – engrossed in myself, I could feel I was starting to not care, or think about anyone else but me!’ She looked to Sam for understanding. ‘But it was strange, the real me, the proper me, was still inside, and I was screaming at myself to stop. It was horrible.’
Sam finally allowed his attention to relax from the pool, calmed by a passage of time, and the absence of anything rising to disturb the perfect sheen of the inky fluid.
He stooped a little to inspect Lucy’s eyes – they were now transitioning to a bright shade of emerald, shrinking flecks of yellow being engulfed by striations of peppermint green, their vibrancy fading as he watched, fascinated.
Lucy flinched away from his studying gaze. ‘What’s going on with your eyes?’ she shrieked.
‘Why? What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘They’ve changed,’ she told him. ‘They’ve turned red! My God, you look frightening, what’s happened to them?’ she asked, her face squirming.
He rolled his eyes down towards his cheeks, foolishly attempting to look at himself. ‘So mine changed as well?’ he said.
‘As well?’ she responded, unaware that the phenomenon was happening to them both.
‘Yes, through there, your irises turned orange, a really bright orange, but now,’ he stooped again to check, ‘they’re changing to a sort of pale green. They seem to be slowly returning to your natural colour?’
Lucy rubbed her eyes and turned her back on the house, she’d seen enough of its morbid facade for one day thank you.
She suddenly made a leaping flinch backwards, screaming towards the leafy-tunnel that snaked away from the clearing. Sam turned to look…
There was a face watching from within the clawing branches reaching across the path. ‘It’s okay, Lucy, it’s just Hilly.’ He called to his sister.
Tentatively, Hilly slowly unfurled herself from behind the tortured arms of the thicket, and stood at the edge of the gravel watching them with a subtle air of mistrust.
‘What’s wrong, Hill…? Come over here,’ Sam mewed. She padded on the spot indecisively, then shook her head.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Lucy murmured.
‘I don’t know.’
Hilly took a tentative half-step towards them. ‘Sam…?’ she called, nervously. ‘Is-Is that you?’
Sam pulled a face. ‘Of course it’s me?’
Hilly cocked a wary eye. ‘Well – okay, tell me something that only you and I would know,’ she said, taking a cautious step back towards the thicket, looking every bit as though she was readying herself to run.
‘It’s me, Hilly. It’s Sam, your brother?’ He turned a frown towards Lucy’s equally bewildered face. She shrugged… ‘Okay, okay…? Well, let’s see…’ he said. ‘Your name is Hillary, but you kind of hate it because you think it sounds old-fashioned… Yooooou love Scrabble, and crosswords, and you’ve always been better at both of them that I ever have.’ He squinted towards her, collecting his thoughts. ‘What else? Oh yeah, you like to draw, and paint, but you’re not really very good at either, but you enjoy it anyway, so…’ He pressed a quizzical finger against his bottom lip, turning his eyes to the sky. ‘You think too much makeup on a girl makes her look trashy, and you don’t really do fashion, you just wear what you like. Oh, and last year you tried to cut your own fringe, but you mucked it up, and ended up looking like Jim Carey did in Dumb and Dumber.’
A big smile extended across Hilly’s face, her stance softening, and she sprinted across the gravel to the welcoming arms of what she was now sure was her brother.
She enveloped him in her relief. ‘Wasn’t sure that was you I saw coming out of the pool,’ she said, glancing at them both. ‘You seemed – different, not the way you normally are.’ Her face puckered with disgust. ‘And your eyes! Your eyes looked horrid. They still do a bit?’
‘You saw us?’ asked Sam. ‘You were here, watching us come back through?’
Hilly nodded. ‘I didn’t know where you went. I heard you sneaking off early this morning, so I thought you might have gone into the water again. So I ran up to see. I got here just as you were both coming back. It was frightening seeing Lucy coming through the pool.’ She turned to Lucy. ‘For some reason, it-it didn’t really look like you. You looked like an imposter.’
They all held each other for a time, needing a few moments of closeness to settle their shredded nerves.
‘So, tell me where you went?’ Hilly asked, leaning out of the huddle.
‘Come on,’ her brother said, throwing a final cautionary glance to the pool, ‘let’s have a walk down by the lake, and we’ll tell you everything we saw.’
‘Okay,’ she agreed – glad to be leaving the place. ‘And I’m not rubbish at drawing!’
They paced the grounds, regaling Hilly with an account of everything they saw, things they’d both divined, and truths that had been shared by those who’d long guarded the secrets connected to the house. For more than an hour, they languished fantastic details upon ears that have to work hard to trust the honesty in the bizarre things they were hearing.
‘How old are these children?’ Hilly asked.
‘I don’t know?’ replied Sam with a shrug. ‘About your age – possibly? No, I think maybe even younger? But, I’m really not sure.’
He glanced down at his watch, it seemed to be running normally again. ‘What time do you make it, Hilly?’
‘Erm? Hang on,’ she said, twisting her wrist over to see. ‘It’s just gone twelve thirty.’
Sam rotated the face of his watch towards Lucy. ‘We went through there just after nine.’
Lucy peered at the watch. ‘Ten twenty-seven?’ she read out loud.
‘And we came back just over an hour ago,’ he explained. ‘A little after eleven.’
‘But we were down there for what? An hour and a half…? Two hours?’ Lucy reckoned.
‘Yes. About two hours,’ Sam said. ‘We probably came back through just after eleven. Nine, ten, eleven – two hours. But by my calculations, my watch must only have moved on about five or eight minutes.’
He paced the lawn, circling the girls. ‘I’ve been trying to work this out… I think something, or someone – maybe Mallette – has created a sort of parallel world, a world where the perception of time is the same as here, but that somehow, all matter within that world is tied to a different path, a path that advances at a far slower pace.’ He flicked a look towards two very confused faces. ‘I know, I know, it doesn’t seem to make sense.’
He began circling the other way. ‘We were moving within that world as we normally would, but – candles burned, objects fell, water splashed, clocks ticked, everything did everything much, much slower than it does here.’ He stopped and turned to face them. ‘And maybe: plants grew, wood rotted, matter decayed, and we aged much, much slower too? That’s what I think was happening.’
‘Oh hell, Sam,’ Lucy despaired, ‘I just wish I could speak to Mum about all of this. She must remember something about all that time she was missing. What she did? Where she was? There has to be some answers there somewhere.’
Lucy’s shoulders sagged. ‘I mean, to not remember anything at all of nine or ten years of your life, seems incredible to me, far-fetched, even. I can’t believe she doesn’t at least remember some details, however small.’
Hilly looked deep in thought. ‘I once saw a program,’ she said, ‘it was a documentary, about this boy who went missing. He was only missing for a few days, or was it a week? Anyway. He was eventually found wandering around the town where he came from. People knew who he was because he’d been reported lost, and everyone had been looking for him. But apparently, something had happened to him that had made him forget absolutely everything about his life. He had that thing? I can’t remember the word? He was suffering frommm…?’
‘Amnesia?’ suggested Lucy.
‘Yes! That’s it. He was suffering from amnesia. He didn’t recognise his mum, or his dad, or remember anything at all about his previous life. He’d forgotten everything!’
‘And? What happened?’ Lucy asked.
‘Well, one day, quite a bit after, he was crossing a road and a speeding car had to brake hard and swerve to miss him. He was okay and all that, but seeing the front of the car jogged something in his memory. He suddenly remembered that he’d been hit by a motorist, and they must have driven away. It had knocked him into a ditch, or was it a hedge? It was something like that. Thing is, as soon as he remembered that part, he started remembering loads of other stuff, and by the end – if I’ve got it right – he ended up remembering everything about his life that he’d forgotten.’
‘So, what are you saying?’ her brother asked.
‘Well – maybe there’s something you could do that might jog Helen’s memory?’
‘Like what?’ asked Lucy.
‘Well, I don’t know. You could maybe, put something somewhere? Or-Or make her think? Or do… Oh I don’t know, it was just an idea.’
Sam sniggered. ‘Maybe we should drive into her with a car,’ he joked, ‘knock her into a ditch and leave her there for a few days.’ He laughed affectionately. ‘If I had a pound for every time I’d had to listen to one of your mad ideas… I’d have about three pounds.’
But Lucy wasn’t sure the idea was so mad. On the contrary, she thought there was something there that may be worth trying.
*
The evening sky had attained the flatness of light that comes only from a sun drifting low to the horizon, diffused by an ever-deepening layer of haze-filled atmosphere. Lucy and her mother were just finishing eating dinner.
Lucy rolled the last mouthful of pasta, cheese and arrabiata ragu onto her fork with her thumb, and wrapped her whole face around it. Her taste buds fizzled to the fiery heat of the sauce.
‘That was lovely, Mum,’ she said gratefully, collecting the bowls and carrying them across to the sink. ‘I’ll wash up.’
She slipped on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and whipped on the taps…
Her mind worked overtime to formulate an effective plan to try to jog her mother’s memories. She had one idea floating about in her mind that she wasn’t particularly happy with, but in the absence of anything better, she found herself willing to run with it.
‘There. All done,’ she announced, blowing into the cuffs of the gloves and teasing them off her fingers, ‘and while I’m in a cleaning mood,’ she added, ‘there’s some tidying I’ve been meaning to do up in my room. So I’ll do that now.’
‘Blimey! Well, don’t let me stop you,’ her mother responded, airily.
Lucy jogged up to her bedroom and shut the door.
She scanned the room, and began formulating a scenario that fitted her ideas…
Helen heard a crash from Lucy’s bedroom, and lifted her attention from the newspaper she was reading towards the sound, trying to work out if it was sufficiently out of place enough to react to…
She sprung to her feet and rushed from the kitchen, sprinting up the staircase. ‘Lucy, are you okay?’
‘I think so, Mum,’ came the muted response from inside the room.
Helen rushed forwards and swung the door open. She froze…
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Lucy whined, ‘one minute I was cleaning my mirror, and then it just slipped off the chest of drawers, knocking my stuff everywhere.’ She peered across at her mother. ‘Mum, are you okay?’
Helen stared down at a floor strewn with keepsakes and ornaments. And lying face up – dead centre of the chaos – was Lucy’s antique mirror, glass shattered into a hundred jagged pieces, a sight that sent a shudder dripping down Helen’s spine like ice-cold molasses, for, lying prostrate among the shards of reflected ceiling, was a porcelain doll that Lucy’s grandmother had bought her for her thirteenth birthday.
Lucy watched on at Helen quaking at the sight of the diorama she’d contrived in an attempt to jog a displaced memory, and could see the image she’d created was far from alien to her mother’s recollections.
‘Mum?’ she asked softly. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
Her mother remained silent, frozen to the spot, shaking visibly.
‘Mum?’ she called again, but still nothing – eyes glued to the doll. ‘Mum?’ Lucy prodded, ‘Mum, please…’ Lucy took a breath, and steeled herself. ‘…Thomas!?’ she blurted.
Helen erupted from her trance. ‘What did you say?’ she slurred, her words laced with a subtle air of threat.
‘I-I said – “Thomas”.’
Her mother staggered back from the name, a sickened look saturating her contorting features. ‘Why did you say that?’ she asked, trying to decipher from Lucy’s expression how much she may, or may not know of the name she’d had the audacity to introduce into a conversation they weren’t even having.
‘Because, Mum, I know… I know about Thomas… and I also know about you.’
‘W-What…!’ she stammered. ‘But who told you?’ she demanded. Then her face widened to the realisation. ‘Mother!’
‘Yes. It was Grandma,’ admitted Lucy, ‘but don’t blame her, I asked.’
‘You asked?’ she said, looking at Lucy with a face wilting with disgust at the rashness of her daughters actions. ‘So – what else do you know?’
‘A lot, well – I think all of it,’ she replied.
Her mother staggered to a chair, grasping at the back to steady herself… She lowered her shaking frame gently onto the seat… ‘And what else did she tell you?’
Lucy swallowed back her reluctance to say more. ‘Well, I know why me and you have blonde hair and blue eyes, and Grandma and Grandpa don’t.’
For a briefest of moments, Helen had to pause to decipher Lucy’s words, then lifted a shocked hand across her mouth. ‘She told you that!’ she hissed, through splayed fingers. Lucy nodded. ‘But why…?’
‘Because I wanted to know. I wanted to know what it is that you’re so scared of… Why you seemed to be so afraid, of… of Hobswyke.’
Helen began shaking her head frantically, rejecting the reality of her daughter knowing her secrets.
Lucy steeled herself again, forcing her resolve. ‘I’ve been to the house. I’ve been in the house. I’ve seen the library. I’ve seen it all, Mum.’
Helen reeled back, clapping her hands across her eyes, head shaking in denial. All the years carefully keeping Lucy protected from a dark secret crashing down around her.
Lucy stepped in and knelt before her. Tears streamed from her mother’s eyes. ‘It’s okay, Mum, please, you can talk to me about it now.’ Her mother shook her head again. ‘Yes!’ Lucy insisted. ‘We can… and we’re going to.’
Helen sat rocking in denial, breathing hard, trying to bring herself to terms with the fact that her attempts to shield her daughter from a truth she found repugnant had failed.
Eventually though, she managed to fight through her reluctance to speak, took the deepest of breaths, and slowly emerged from behind her splayed fingers…
‘Okay… Okay,’ she agreed. ‘But I need a drink first.’
*
Lucy turned from the kettle holding two mugs of tea. She handed one to her mother who was sitting at the kitchen table, still visibly shaking.
‘Here you go, Earl Grey with one sugar,’ she said, trying to pacify her mother with a warm smile.
Helen stared into the mug, wishing it was full of something a little stronger than tea, absinthe maybe. But as the smell of the bergamot filled the air, she actually found herself glad of the slight misunderstanding.
They sat, and sipped in silence for a couple of minutes, Lucy thinking it better to let her mother take the lead.
Helen eventually lowered her mug… ‘What did you want to know?’ she asked, sounding reluctant.
Lucy shrugged at the awkwardness, trying to find an effective opener for such a conversation. But she felt very much the holder of the upper hand, so she made a start. ‘Do you remember anything at all from the time you were missing?’
After an uncomfortable pause, Helen shook her head unconvincingly.
‘Mum! If we’re going to do this… Please, is there anything?’
Helen’s whole demeanour sagged, then she lifted her eyes. ‘I have dreams, but they’re just dreams.’
‘Dreams?’ Lucy asked. ‘What are they, these dreams?’
Her mother looked dispirited. She shrugged… ‘There’s one in particular, one I have a lot – all the time in fact,’ she said, her brows flashing lightly.
‘Tell me.’
Helen loosed a resigned sigh… ‘Well, in this dream, I’m sitting on the floor of the dining hall at Hobswyke. But it’s strange, it doesn’t feel like Hobswyke?’ She frowned down into the mug. ‘It certainly looks like Hobswyke, but in the dream, I can somehow tell that it isn’t. It feels, strange. It feels, wrong. This place is run down, dirty and has an odd atmosphere.’
Lucy had to fight hard not to show recognition of her mother’s description. ‘…And? Go on,’ she said.
Helen took another thoughtful sip of her tea… ‘I’m holding a hand mirror. An ornate, silver-backed hand mirror – a bit like that one your grandma Violet has.’ Lucy nodded her understanding. ‘So I’m holding this mirror and I’m watching myself in the reflection. Sort of like – like I’m admiring myself, like I’m proud of how beautiful I look, or-or, how beautiful I think I look, which believe it or not, really isn’t me at all.’ She winced an embarrassed smile towards Lucy.
‘But you are beautiful, Mum.’
Helen rolled her eyes. ‘I guess. But anyway, that’s beside the point. In the dream, I briefly place the mirror down on the floor next to me, so I can brush my hair, to make it nice, you know how you do. And when I’ve finished brushing, I look down, and…’
‘…You look down, and?’
Helen looked pained to be forced to relive something that’s plagued her nights for decades.
‘Please, Mum… The mirror’s on the floor, and you’ve been brushing your hair, and you look down.’
‘…And when I look down to take up the mirror again, I can see the ceiling reflected in it. But the thing is, in the reflection, everything looks perfect: clean, polished, free of the dust, dirt and cobwebs that hang from the ceiling above me. The whole room – in the reflection – looks immaculate, and feels somehow different. Brighter. Warmer. Safer.’
Lucy leaned in and placed a comforting hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Go on, what happens then?’
‘Well, when I take the mirror up off the floor, the image of the ceiling suddenly changes, it shows the room dirty, dark and rotting again. So I place it back down, and once again, the reflection of the room looks perfect.’
Her mother supped the last of her tea. ‘Another one?’ Lucy asked. Helen nodded timidly, and smiled her appreciation.
Lucy carried the mugs to the kettle, and turned to keep listening. ‘So, what happens then?’
‘So, after that – in the dream – I stand and struggle to take down a large mirror from the wall, and lie it flat on the floor, in the exact same position as I placed the hand mirror, and suddenly, I can see the whole room looking immaculate – clean, pristine, well tended to. The mirror somehow makes it all look like a far nicer place, a place you’d much rather be, and then I notice something strange and out of place.’
‘And what is that?’
‘There’s an edge encroaching on the reflection, cutting across what I’m able to see. It looks kind of like, like there’s a hole beneath the surface of the mirror, that isn’t quite lining up with the frame, if you know what I’m saying. So I manoeuvre the mirror around to try and square it with the hole, so I can see as much of the beautiful version of the room as possible.’
‘And does that work?’
‘Yes, it works. I can now see the whole thing in all its glory. So I kneel down in the centre of the glass, and gaze down into the reflection of the room looking majestic and inviting.’
Helen shuffled to get comfortable. ‘The thing is, and this is what’s really odd, is that for some reason, I’m not able to see my own reflection, even though I’m kneeling right in the centre of the glass. I seem to be invisible, casting no image, like a vampire.’
Lucy placed a fresh mug down in front of her mother, and took to her seat again. ‘And – is that it?’ she asked.
‘No – no, unfortunately not… So I’m peering at the reflection, pushing my face against the glass, turning my eyes this way and that, to see as much of the perfect version of the room as I can, when suddenly, the mirror starts to crack beneath me. Splinters start growing away from my hands and knees like spiders webs.’ She shut her eyes tight. ‘I can feel the popping of the glass through the palms of my hands and my knees. Then, it gives way, and I drop through the floor into total darkness.’
Lucy gave her mother’s hand a comforting squeeze. ‘That sounds horrible.’
‘It is. It’s a horrific dream, and I have no idea what any of it means. I just keep having it, again, and again, and again.’
Lucy leant in further and gave her mother’s shoulder an affectionate rub.
Helen’s eyes flicked briefly towards the sink. ‘How did you get in the house?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t matter, Mum,’ Lucy insisted, with a shake of the head. ‘I found a way in, it really wasn’t that difficult… I saw what you and Peter had discovered in the library, I can certainly see why you decided we all needed to leave,’ she said, laughing lightly.
‘It was a horrible thing to find,’ her mother recounted. ‘Sometimes, I think I should have burned the place to the ground. Maybe I should,’ she added.
‘Nooo. Don’t worry, okay, we’ll just keep away from the place, let it crumble.’
Her mother snickered. ‘Okay.’
Lucy hated lying to anyone, especially her mother. But on this occasion she felt justified, even if just to save her mother unnecessary anguish.
Helen stared into her mug. ‘You know, I often think of Thomas, and wonder what happened to him.’ She started to weep.
Lucy rose, and rounded the table, wrapping herself around her mother’s pain.
‘Promise me you’ll stay away from the house,’ her mother pleaded.
Lucy smiled softly. ‘Of course,’ she agreed, from within the embrace – her fingers crossed tightly behind her mother’s back.
Lucy decided to push the subject no further, already in possession what she wanted – an answer.