‘I’M JUST POPPING to the shops,’ Lucy called to her mother, ‘do you need me to get anything?’ She prayed that the answer be ‘no’, to save the inconvenience of actually having to visit a store.
‘You’re popping out?’ her mother asked. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No, Mum!’ she griped, ‘I have to get used to driving on my own at some point.’
‘Okay, okay. Just be careful, alright. There are some nutters on the road. The keys are in my bag. And erm, no – I don’t think we need anything.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Lucy said, grabbing the keys and making for the door.
Lucy strode to the car, texting her grandmother en route:
I’m on my way, I won’t be long. Just let them know at the door that I’m coming, I don’t think visiting ends for a few hours, but let them know anyway, just in case.
I’ll see you soon, love you. L X
*
At the end of a thought-filled drive, Lucy finally arrived at Furnhurst Gardens. She turned in through the gates and made her way along the drive to the visitors car park.
She hardly remembered anything of the journey, too wrapped up in wondering what it was her grandmother had to tell her. But she knew it must be in some way related to Hobswyke, because she wanted her to come alone. But other than that, she really had no notion what it could be…
Lucy rapped on the door to her grandmothers suite. ‘Come in,’ sang a voice from inside the room.
Lucy walked in. Her grandmother was sitting in her usual chair looking out of the window, watching the remainder of the day fade out.
‘Hi, Nan, how are you?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m fine, dear,’ she said. She stretched up to deposit a kiss on her granddaughter’s cheek. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘That’s okay – I was intrigued,’ said Lucy, with an excited shrug. She walked over to the kettle. ‘Tea?’ she asked.
‘Please, dear, that would be lovely.’
Lucy sat and handed the mug over. ‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’
The old woman took a sip of her drink, then settled back into her chair. She looked intensely at Lucy, eyes full of contemplation. ‘Last time you were here, you were going to tell me something, but your mother walked in on us. What was it?’
Lucy dropped her eyes to the floor, deciding how much she was willing to tell, and how much she’d be wise to keep to herself… ‘There are things I don’t want to tell you yet, Nan, because, if I’m honest, I don’t think you’d actually believe me.’
Her grandmother loosed an almost mocking laugh. ‘Let me tell you something,’ she said, ‘you’d be unpleasantly surprised what I’d be willing to believe about that house.’
Lucy squinted at the old lady’s words, wondering what she could possibly have meant by that. She found herself contemplating spilling everything. ‘I think I know where Mum was when she went missing.’
The old woman’s sepia eyes flashed. ‘What…? Where?’ she asked.
‘Well, you know Sam – Peter’s son? He discovered…’ She stopped herself, aware of how utterly ridiculous what she was about to say would sound.
Her grandmother nodded encouragement. ‘You can tell me.’
Lucy sighed… ‘He discovered, a passageway to another place, a secret place,’ she explained. ‘It’s a portal that leads to another world, a world that’s a lot like ours. Well, actually, it looks almost exactly the same, but it just feels different. It feels, somehow, rotten. And we think it must have been created by Antoine Mallette.’
Her grandmother sat motionless, listening, apparently unmoved by the revelation.
Lucy was surprised to find she wasn’t being looked upon like she belonged in an asylum, so decided to test the waters a bit further .
‘Okay. Well, we’ve both passed through into this world, and we found things on the other side that I really don’t want to talk about yet, but what I do know, is that I’m pretty certain it must be where Mum was lost for all that time.’
Violet turned her strangely calm gaze to the window again. The sky grew dark, dusk just setting in.
‘I know how it sounds, Nan. I really do,’ Lucy insisted, ‘but I’m being truthful, we went there, this place is real.’
Violet sighed a deep sigh. ‘Nothing of what you’ve said sounds unbelievable to me, not under the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances?’
‘I wasn’t entirely honest with you the other day, about how long your mother was missing.’
‘Nine or ten years wasn’t it?’
The old lady snorted an ironic laugh. ‘Just over twenty!’ she replied.
‘What!’ Lucy fizzed.
Violet shut her eyes and nodded her shame in not being wholly truthful. ‘Your mother appeared back in our lives only a few months before you were born, but two decades after she went missing.’
‘Oh my God!’ Lucy mumbled.
‘But the reason I’m not doubting your tale, is for one reason in particular.’
‘What reason’s that?’
Her grandmother averted her gaze to the wall, making sure she had the facts straight in her mind. ‘Helen, and Thomas, both disappeared. Then one night we heard the crash, and we found your mother sitting amongst the glass shards of the mirror she’d decided to break – for whatever reason? I guess that’s something we’ll never know?’
The detail didn’t pass Lucy by, but she kept her lips buttoned tight. ‘But you told me that already?’ she said.
‘I know I did, but what I didn’t tell you, is that when we found her, she looked no older than you do now.’ She turned to examine Lucy’s face, studying her apparent age. ‘Mmm – Maybe even younger?’ she muttered.
The old lady shuffled in her seat to get more comfortable. ‘Well, it didn’t even occur to us at the time that she’d been missing that long. I’m afraid when you reach a certain age, ten or twenty years can tend to feel a lot like one. But after we’d thought about it, and checked her records, we realised that she was in fact twenty-seven years old! But, she looked every bit like a young teenager?’
Lucy stood and teased the curtains closed, to keep the conversation private, the room now much brighter than the darkening skies outside.
She sat again. ‘Go on.’
‘So, here’s the weirdest part!’ her grandmother said, leaning in closer to Lucy and lowering her voice to a more clandestine level. ‘While we were cleaning and dressing her wounds, and putting her into fresh clothes, and feeding her, and cutting her hair – she started, ageing!’
‘Ageing?’ asked Lucy.
‘Yes. Ageing… Right in front of our eyes, as God is my witness, she aged… I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was almost too gradual to notice. But we suddenly realised that she somehow looked older, and more mature than when we’d first found her… At first we thought it was all in our imagination – well, you would, wouldn’t you. But as the hours passed, we realised that she was actually ageing.’
She leaned back into her chair again and sighed. ‘And by the next day, she looked every bit the age she was supposed to be.’
Lucy gazed in disbelief at the weirdness of the story. She knew her grandmother to be a wholly honest person, not prone to flights of fancy, and in the light of all that happened of late, Lucy felt no reason to doubt anything she’d being told. But still…
‘You won’t tell your mother any of this?’ her grandmother asked. ‘You see, she doesn’t actually know.’
‘What do you mean, “she doesn’t know”?’
‘We never told her, as far as she knows, when we discovered her, she looked twenty-seven years old… You, are the only person apart from me who knows any of this, so this time, don’t tell anyone, most of all Helen!’
Lucy pondered the pressure of the knowledge she now held. ‘Okay,’ she agreed.
The old lady’s brows crimped. ‘No. Hang on. There is one more who knows. I nearly forgot.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Peter… Peter Fletcher.’
Lucy reared back. ‘Peter knows?’
‘Yes, he does… You see, Peter was a Hobswyke orphan too. We fostered him when the place shut down, and when he was old enough, we gave him the lakeside cottage, and he worked the grounds as caretaker. He, knows everything. We told him so there would always be someone in Helen’s life to keep an eye on her.’
A crackling voice come over the speaker system:
Visiting time is now over. Please can all visitors make their way to the exit or we’ll have to come and eject you from the building and I’m sure none of you really want that do you? Because we will use handcuffs. So get out now, just get out.
Thaaaank yoooooou.
Lucy smirked. ‘You have the comedy receptionist on tonight.’ Violet rolled her eyes.
Lucy gathered her things together, trying to absorb all she’d learned. ‘I have to go now, Nan, but thank you! For your honesty.’
Violet smiled. ‘It was nice to get it off my chest for once. Now please, remember what I said. And stay away from that house.’
‘I will. I promise… I’ll see you very soon.’
She kissed the pensive old lady, and made a move to leave. She looked back from the door to part on a smile, but her grandmother was frowning at the ground, wearing a subtly pained expression.
‘Are you okay, Nan?’ asked Lucy.
‘You know…’ the old lady murmured, ‘my great grandmother once told me something, something I found interesting at the time, but that didn’t really mean much to me then.’
‘And what was it?’ Lucy asked.
She sighed a troubled sigh. ‘She told me that when the Claybournes originally took over the house and grounds, they’d changed the name left over by Antoine Mallette. The place was originally called “Hobswicket Hall”.’
Lucy also found interest in the snippet of history, but failed to see any relevance.
The old woman looked across at the girl leaning against the open door. ‘It didn’t occur to me until now, until you told me your tale, but “Hob’s – Wicket” are old English words, they mean “Devil’s Gate”.’
Lucy hung stunned in the relevance of the name, a blatant clue pinned defiantly to the house by Mallette for the world to notice, and for all to apparently miss – until now, that is.
Lucy nodded her understanding.
‘Stay away from the house, for me,’ Violet pleaded.
Lucy crimped a thoughtful smile, and left, closing the door gently behind her…