LUCY CLAYBOURNE reclined on her bed, fingers knitted around the nape of her neck, staring through a ceiling that looked as empty and featureless as the day that lay ahead. After a manic year of revision and exams, she had to come to terms with having nothing of major importance to do. Not something that she could consider a chore, just a lifestyle change that warranted consideration.
It was the laziest of mornings she could ever remember, finding difficulty recalling the last time she felt as relaxed as she did right now. It was the end of June, and the final year of high school was finally over; the exams went well – at least she felt they did; her eighteenth birthday was only one month away, and the mere thought that she’d never again get assigned a quality time-sapping homework assignment induced a level of relaxation that she found near impossible to rise from. For once, in what felt like an eternity to one so young, Lucy found herself free of an agenda.
Physically, she was a girl who’d stepped across the divide into womanhood. But life had yet to draw back the veil and display to her how wholly cruel and hurtful the real world could truly be to a person ill prepared to face it.
Witnessing her mother’s trials and ordeals, she was somewhat aware, but until she had to face the full force of life’s wrath personally, she was happy feigning blissful ignorance.
‘Come on, Claybourne,’ she yawned through contorting features, ‘shift your arse. You can’t be lying here all day.’
She sat up, wiping her hands over her face. She could feel the pressure of her fingers through the back of her eyes as she massages her lids awake.
She stretched her body long, combing her fingers back through what she would describe as pillowhair, raking her long, silky blonde tresses into a more presentable arrangement.
She’d been dreaming for most of the night, and not the recurrent nightmare that had been plaguing her sleep for the past eight months: that dream where she was sitting in an exam and turned the page only to find that all of the questions were written in a language she didn’t recognise, and certainly couldn’t read, before the world around her began to shimmer, then burn, then melt through the floor like a painting in the rain leaving her perched precariously on a jagged pillar of rock, flames licking at her recoiling legs like the fingers of hell trying to seize her and drag her down its fiery depths. No, this dream was different, but equally ominous: she dreamt of ‘Hobswyke’, the big house, calling to her from atop the hill. Calling her name like a breath on the wind, calling for her to, ‘come. Come home,’ and she couldn’t work out if the calls seemed to be for help, or to tempt her to be curious, and for reasons that seemed far more sinister than anything else.
It had caused her to wake with a jolt, and she’d felt relief that the arrival of daylight had brought with it an end to the torment, giving her reason to rise.
She noticed a blade of light on the wall opposite the window. It looked blindingly bright within the greyscale tones of an unlit room.
The Sun’s out, she thought, energised by the prospect. It shone through a parting in the curtains, warming the sandstone walls of the gatehouse to the Hobswyke estate that the Claybournes now called ‘Home’.
Lucy swung her slender legs clear of the duvet, and rose unsteadily to her feet. Toes reached and clawed at the butter-softness of the pile of the carpet. She stretched again, and yawned, flicking a cursory glance towards the clock on the bedside table. Her eyes widened at the time, and she hurried from the room.
She made her way with forced urgency along the landing towards the bathroom. ‘Ten twenty-seven, you lazy sod of earth!’ she muttered to the solitude, a personal rebuke from a confirmed early riser.
The muffled clacks of her mother washing the previous night’s dishes resonated from the kitchen, a muted siren hailing the fact that Lucy wasn’t alone in the world. It was a sound she found endearing and homely, prompting a call down the spiralling stairwell.
‘Morning, Mum,’ she shouted, with childlike vibrance warming her voice, aware that such a tone made her mother feel maternal. She draped her slender torso over the landing handrail awaiting a response.
The flick-flack of soft, slippered footsteps approached from the kitchen. A friendly face appeared at the bottom of the staircase looking up. ‘Morning, you lazy ape, I was wondering when you might bother to make an appearance?’ her mother crowed, sarcastically, but with a smile – her marigold-gloved hand wiping a stray bubble from the side of her nose; the corner of her mouth blowing upwards to clear the itch.
Lucy’s mother, Helen Claybourne, her sole parent and arguably her best friend, was an uncommonly attractive woman in her mid-forties, with a tendency to draw attention – desired or otherwise – from pretty much every man she encountered, a curse-or-blessing trait inherited by Lucy. They also shared a sunny disposition, an unquenchable desire to look on the bright side of any situation, an unfaltering drive to help others whenever they may need it, and an innate ability to get along with all classes of humanity, despite possessing what may be considered by many to be a grandiose surname.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, love?’ her mother asked, in an overtly syrupy voice. Helen Claybourne adored her daughter, and being the sole parent in her life, felt no desire to hide the fact.
‘Please, Mum. That would be lovely,’ came the response. ‘I’ll be down in a bit.’
Lucy was fully aware of the love her mother held for her, it having never been anything but freely given. She allowed the corners of her mouth to twitch a smile at the knowledge, painfully aware that many weren’t as lucky as she. She felt blessed.
Lucy meandered into the echoing coolness of a porcelain-clad, Victorian bathroom to spend time arranging her reflection, gathering herself together, fortunate enough to possess a face that required very little effort to look good. For sure, she had the freshness of youth on her side – the same as anyone else her age – but it was, in reality, far more than that.
She stared into the turquoise eyes looking back at her from the mirror, hands leaning on the sides of the sink.
‘I have nothing to do today,’ she informed the face looking back at her, revelling in the fact. ‘Did you hear me? Nothing… Ab-so-lute-ly, nothing… Nice huh…?’ As usual, her reflection failed to respond, it just stared back at her… ‘Hm. Alright then, be like that. See if I care.’
Lucy then caught sight of a looming section of roofline of the large house reflected in the mirror, reaching high above the treetops far in the distance, as though spying on her through the window she had her back to.
An image of Hobswyke materialised through the mists clouding the darker recesses of her mind – just like the dream – the black slab doors slowly opening, stretching long and wide like a gaping mouth, calling to her, calling her name, beckoning. ‘Lucyyyyyyyy… Commmmme…’ it breathed, but this time, sounding decidedly more taunting than anything that could be mistaken for amiable.
She shook it from her thoughts. ‘Stop it! Go away,’ she complained, blinking it from her mind.
She spun the taps on…
*
‘Tea’s ready, love,’ shouted a voice from the kitchen. ‘I’ll put some bread in the toaster for you.’
‘Okay, Mum. Coming!’ she replied, spitting the tongue-burning mintiness of the toothpaste into the crystal vortex coiling down the plughole.
She twisted off the taps, and dropped the brush back into the glass. It rattled in the beaker like the clapper of a bell, ringing the end to her cleaning routine. The room fell into post-activity silence.
She wiped her hands dry on the towel, and took one last look at herself in the mirror. ‘Well, I guess I’ll see ya later, if you’re still around…’ Again, no response. ‘Sod ya then.’
*
Lucy sat at the heavy, oak kitchen table and drew the tea and toast in closer. She sniffed the rising steam… Rye bread, her favourite.
Her mother was toying, with rapidly deteriorating patience, with the hot-water tap, trying to stop its recent propensity to drip. ‘If you see Peter today, honey, could you ask him to pop over and have a look at these taps for me?’ she asked over her shoulder.
‘Yeah, sure, no worries,’ Lucy replied, happy to oblige, as she scooped another dollop of zesty orange marmalade onto her toast. ‘I’ll pop over as soon as I’ve finished this, okay,’ she said, lifting her toast into the core of the conversation.
Peter Fletcher lived on the grounds of Hobswyke in an old cottage by the lake. It sat nestled in the forest like it had been there as long as the trees that surrounded it, its yellow sandstone walls streaked black from the autumnal resin that dripped from the dying leaves and branches that had umbrellaed its slates for centuries.
He resided there with his two kids, Hillary – although everyone called her Hilly – and her older brother Sam.
Peter’s job description, was ‘Everything’: maintenance engineer, handyman, groundskeeper, gardener, family friend, gossip giver, gossip receiver, and someone to have an occasional glass of wine with when Helen felt starved of adult company – a chore he often welcomed, his wife having died shortly after Hillary was born.
Owning such a large estate, Helen would’ve found it impossible to manage without him, often referring to him as ‘a gem-of-a-man’. She appreciated him, as much as she could ever appreciate anyone, but there had never been any romance.
Lucy folded the last piece of toast into her mouth, keen to get outside and feel the clement weather against her skin.
Her finger scooped the remaining soup of crumbs, butter and dripped preserves off the plate, and deposited it in her mouth, before thanking her mother with a peck on the cheek, and galloping upstairs to get properly dressed.
*
An hour later, a far more presentable version of Lucy wearing an optimistic yellow summer dress trotted down the handful of steps that swept from the front door of the gatehouse into the midday sun.
She and her mother moved from Hobswyke, the main house, a little over five years ago, as an apparent money-saving exercise, its smaller dimensions being far easier to maintain and, during the winter months, keep heated.
Lucy often felt the slightest twinge at not having the bragging rights that would almost certainly have come from living in a such a house; a building with undeniable pomp and notoriety in the area. But being the gatehouse of such a grand gothic mansion and, as such, the opening gambit of any attempt to impress visitors – it shared many of the style cues of the main building, and much of its intimidating grandeur. A fact that went a long way in helping to take the sting out of the move.
‘Hobswyke Hall’, the big house, had been standing empty ever since. Looming over the world that chose to deny it. Locked up, cold, alone…
Lucy strolled down the footpath that ran parallel to the main drive. A relaxed stroll, not complicated by having any real purpose. Simply walking for the sheer pleasure of walking, although, she did have that message for Peter.
Her slender legs lolloped lazily beneath her. She closed her eyes and hung her head back, presenting her face to an uncluttered sky. She felt her skin prickle as the sun’s rays warmed her delicate features.
A cooling breeze from the lake at the base of the hill rolled up the lawned slopes, carrying the smell of freshly cut grass into an eager nose… She drew it in, the sharp, invigorating sensation of fresh air rushing through sun-warmed nostrils heightening her awareness. An awareness of self, of the world around her, and of her own existence within it. She revelled in the feeling of being alive on such a monumentally idyllic day, and the smile on her face sang to the fact.
The path eventually peeled away from the main drive and dropped into woodland… Tall trees lined the narrow walkway beneath their thickening canopies, fans of clustering leaves obstructing the sun, texturing the path with handprints of dappled sunlight. The temporary respite from the heat felt welcome, as was the smell of the flowers, emitting an impressive body of insect-beckoning scents, a floral musk hailing a desperation to be pollinated filling the warm, summer breeze. Lucy inhaled…
The trail led down to a fork, the right-hand path snaking through the trees to the east shore of the lake and Peter’s cottage; the left, to the big house.
Lucy hung for a moment in her choices… then turned left…
She made her way across extensive grounds that had a long time ago been contrived to resemble nature, but forced into an orderly queue to create flow and motion.
She made her way along the shingled approach to the old hall that was once her childhood home, and noticed the forest floor increasingly encroaching onto the rapidly narrowing pathway the nearer she got.
Since it was closed up, everything surrounding Hobswyke had been neglected, allowing nature’s tendrils to begin the gradual task of reclaiming the building and its surrounding, contrived infrastructure.
The trees and bushes that lined the final stretch of path used to form a neat, arched tunnel, maintained almost purely by regular use alone. But now – forgotten and deserted – the branches clawed in from all sides like obstructing arms undesiring of anyone, or anything passing beneath their tortured limbs.
Lucy had to use her hands to carefully manoeuvre through the final tangle of twigs, weaving her face and favourite yellow dress clear of their cloth-snagging reach.
She swung the last branches open like saloon-doors, and quickly ducked through into the open.
Her eyes scanned her clothing for pulls as she crunched along the gravel towards the big-house – brushing away a couple of leaves that had hitched a ride. The dress still looked pristine, ‘You got away with that,’ she muttered in her solitude, to her relief.
Her attention swung back to the front… The sight that met her eyes stopped her dead in her tracks.
Lucy hadn’t visited the main house for a considerable length of time, what with having to focus all of her energy on her final year exam revision, but maybe, even more than that, to appease a desire to avoid reminders that she no longer lived in such an awe-invoking building.
She was shocked to realise that she probably hadn’t visited in at least eighteen months, or possibly even more than two years? But somehow, the house looked different now, almost to the point that she wouldn’t recognise it if she happened upon it elsewhere, or saw it in a random selection of photographs of similar buildings.
Lucy drank in the sheer volume of the tenebrous aspect: a slab-flat frontage flanked by turreted wings, topped with a complex, faceted, dormer window peppered roofline. Twisted brick chimney stacks reached far above the trees’ canopies, broadcasting the opulence of the building beneath to distant gazes in defiant red-brick, in-your-face Victoriana, before Victoriana was even a thing.
She never realised just how suffocatingly oppressive the architecture was, until now, leaving her feeling compelled to reacquaint herself with her childhood home – the view she was presented with being so at odds with her memories. Five years, she thought, feels like a lifetime.
Lucy could sense the black, murky windows looking down at her – eleven rows across, three rows high – as if the building looming from atop the bank was reacquainting itself with her. She even fancied she saw flickers of movement through the corner of her eye within the deep-set blackness beyond every grime-streaked pane of glass, but she knew she couldn’t have done, except in the eyes of her unnerved imagination.
She scanned the vast expanse of the flat, angular aspect filling her view. All those rooms, so many rooms, she recalled. And the basement. That basement! Deep. Dark. Its creaking wooden staircase that seemed to drop forever into the damp, stale blackness, inhabited by putrid earth, air-hung mould spores and the remnants of negative energy left from the dirty secrets of past occupants.
Who on earth knows what went on down there? God? she wondered to herself. No, not God, she decided, recalling the unholy tales she’d been made party to over the past handful of years, now of an age to be told such details. Details regarding the house’s long, bloodstained past, so grim in their very essence.
She tried not to think about it, uncomfortable about letting too much dark into the light of her innocence, an innocence she’d taken great pains to maintain for as long as she could. She knew it to be a cruel and nefarious world to live in, and her intention was to push against it.
Her rekindled interest drifted up the gothic facade to the gargoyles spaced evenly along the perimeter of the roofline. Taunting. Hideous. Freakish. Each face contorted with an expression steeped in ill intent.
They all seemed to possess a distant stare, as though placed there to face down anything that dare approach the heavy brick and wrought-iron fenced boundaries of the grounds. Again, Lucy struggled to recall them being so thoroughly grotesque. She swallowed back the bitter taste that had formed in the back of her throat, ingesting her undeniable revulsion.
The house seemed so utterly alien to her now. Did I really live here? she thought – the more she looked, the less she seemed to remember…
She receded into her thoughts again, straining to draw out a single, solid memory of actually living in this repugnant building. But any memories she managed to fish from the pond seemed vague at best.
‘Luuucyyyyyy…’ came a voice, drifting in on the wind, sounding so distant that she failed to hear it, too engrossed in her attempts to remember specific details of her childhood.
The ebbed tide of her attention flowed back into the real world. She lowered her fascination from the house, and found herself gazing at the staircase that ascended to the stone-flagged landing area fanning the main doors… She remembered being told they were a later addition, commissioned by ‘Mallette’ himself, the previous owner that had single-handedly fuelled two-hundred years of morbid gossip: tales of his necromantic pursuits; of babies going missing from nearby villages, of claims of seeing him floating through the surrounding forests coated in a film of coagulating blood, of overheard chants to unseen demons late into the midnight hours, and of his eventual death, sitting bolt-upright in a high-backed chair, set centre of a Neolithic stone circle located deep in Malory Woods. Charred. Burned. Immolated.
His blackened body had shown no signs of struggle or resistance, so suicide had been suspected, but no one truly knew what had happened to Antoine Mallette.
The staircase he’d commissioned could itself be considered unremarkable, airing towards utilitarian functionality rather than the artistic arrogance one would have expected to see front such a belligerent building. But in stark contrast, the fairly quotidian staircase was flanked by the most overtly ornate, anomalous wrought-iron handrails: wave-form, extravagant, and devoid of a single straight line.
The serpentine top-rails – polished smooth from well over a century of use – snaked up the elongating staircase, rolling in all directions, and Lucy could recall them being impossible to slide down, a detail of her past she could remember.
She ambled across to take a closer look, the crunch of the gravel seeming much louder now as it reverberated off the flat, unyielding facade of the building…
She climbed a few steps and squatted to examine the complexity in the design of each panel, rotating her gaze in attempt to ingest every detail.
Wrought-iron braids twisted, rolled and helixed beneath the rails, creating ornate uprights that tied them to the sandstone blocks they climbed.
Lucy squinted, beginning to see symbols that appeared to be hidden within the exuberance. Multidimensional, layered patterns that resolved, then evaporate again as she moved slowly up the steps.
Why have I never noticed that before? she wondered. She considered the possibility that such details may simply have been invisible to the eyes of a disinterested child. But to the retrospective examinations of a seventeen-year-old girl, they were far more apparent.
The sun now sat high on its path through the uncrowded sky, minimal depth of atmosphere to cool its incandescent radiation. Lucy could sense her shoulders; a sub-dermal warmth pricking at her skin. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and cupped them in her hands, attempting to protect her alabaster skin from turning an undesirable hue of crimson.
Then, she noticed a curious mist rolling up the steps from somewhere beyond the ironwork, hugging the undulations as it drifted towards the stone-flagged landing groveling before the heavy oak doors.
Her brows pinched. She stepped in closer to see from where the fog was emanating…
Oblong pools of water projected out from either side of the staircase, like an incomplete moat that failed to encircle the entirety of the building. They seemed odd to her: meaningless, unnecessary, and somewhat out of place.
Steam swirled over the surface of the water, evaporating to the beat of the sun’s rays. ‘Haaaaa yes,’ she finally remembered, her mother used to warn her to keep clear of them – Lucy never having been the strongest of swimmers. Her memories finally seemed to be rebirthing, little by little. Piece by piece.
Fascinated eyes tracked the rising mist as it vortexed up to the staircase, blanketing the ornate, gothic stonework.
‘What the hell?’ she whispered, a granite-hard look of confusion galvanising the soft features of her face.
Her lower lids flexed, kissing the coronas of her turquoise irises. She gazed down with unrecognising eyes at intricately carved, balloon-form stonework that she had absolutely no recollection of ever seeing before, projecting out from either side of the staircase, curving outwards, then down into the water from the farthest side of both handrails.
Lucy’s eyes couldn’t help but broadcast her disbelief at having never before noticed them, but they must have been there, mustn’t they?
She crouched by the railing, and extended a curious arm through the bars. Her intrigued fingers glided over the bizarre carvings, her eyes following her touch through the spiralling ironwork, face pressed up against the cold, metal rods, darting pupils absorbing the complexity of each and every sculpted detail: venom-spitting snakes, hieroglyphics, encircled pentagrams, stick-form script, swords, knives, naive renditions of naked, frolicking proletariats, and a multitude of peculiar blank areas that seemed intentionally left bereft of detail.
‘What are you doing?’ barked a voice from right behind her shoulders.
With a stuttered intake of breath, Lucy winced away from the voice, her shuddering arm rattling between the tortured bars as she withdrew it.
Panicked, she scrambled back from the ambushing figure looming over her, pin-prick pupils pleading up at the backlit silhouette, a sense of vulnerability dragging her stomach to her feet!
The black figure leaned further in, eclipsing the blinding sun behind. Lucy’s eyes adjusted… ‘Sam!’ She exhaled. ‘You shit!’