The Devil's Serenade (11 page)

“I have no idea,” I said. “Charlie?”

“Not a clue,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation when I thought he hadn’t heard me.

That hesitation bothered me. I could have sworn something had triggered in Charlie’s mind. Something he wasn’t prepared to share with us.

“Well I’d better get going,” he said, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the speed with which he packed away his tools and left. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it either.

“He was in a hurry all of a sudden, wasn’t he?” Shona said.

“Did you see his reaction when I asked him if he knew anything that could cause the roots to behave and grow like that?”

Shona shook her head.

“I think Charlie knows something he’s not telling me. Maybe to do with this house. I mean, he was in the junk room when Harry, the house clearance man, was spooked. Yet he said nothing happened. But something
must
have happened, Shona. The man tore out of here like the devil himself was on his tail.”

Shona shivered. Or was it a shudder?

After she left, I made my way back into the kitchen. I looked at the cellar door and imagined the roots down there, silently creeping farther along the floor. What would happen when they reached the stairs? It was my turn to shudder.

Chapter T
en

Charlie returned the next morning but seemed perplexed when I questioned him about the previous day. In the end, I dropped the subject. He finished the job, promising to return the following week to fit some much-needed sockets in the living room.

Meanwhile, I slept each night with my door locked and a newly acquired cricket bat in easy reach. It gave me comfort having something to defend myself with, although it would provide scant defense against anything of a supernatural origin. A new determination had taken hold of me. This was
my
house. Why should I allow something that seemed to have sprung from my imagination push me out of it? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced my problems with Hargest House could be laid firmly at the door of whatever happened to me that summer I turned sixteen. If I needed to remember and finally deal with whatever that was, I was only going to be able to do it here. So, here I must stay.

Three days went by. Quiet, peaceful, uneventful. I went shopping in the town. I even managed to talk to people and strike up conversations with strangers without having to imagine myself as confident Kelly. In fact, since I’d seen her reflection in the mirror, I preferred not to think about her.

I avoided the frosty woman in the convenience store and discovered a small supermarket around the corner. I didn’t say who I was. If they knew, they didn’t say. The cashiers and I passed the time of day and exchanged pleasantries about the state of the weather. Not much more, but it was a start. Walking back down the street, I looked over at the newly erected scaffolding along the front of the condemned apartment block on the High Street.

An elderly woman caught me staring at it. “The sooner that’s down the better. Nothing good will ever come of building there. They might as well level it off and leave it for nature to take over. That’s if anything would grow in that accursed soil.”

“Do you live here?”

“All my life.” Her pale blue eyes searched mine. “And while they’re at it, they should take down that evil man’s house.” To my dismay, she pointed down the hill.

“You mean Hargest House?”

She nodded. “Evil. He built evil into that house. My grandmother remembered the first time he came here. Nathaniel Hargest. As wicked a man as ever walked the earth. He took lives, and worse than that.”

“What could be worse than that?”

She leaned closer to me. “He took their souls.”

I stared at her. She nodded. “And he had an accomplice. That Charlotte Grant.”

I could feel the color draining from my face. The woman seemed about to say more, but her expression changed. She backed away from me. “Who are you?”

“Maddie Chambers. I live in Hargest House.”

She gave a little cry and set off down the hill, moving much more quickly than I would have thought her capable of. Anything to get away from me as fast as her eighty-something-year-old legs would carry her.

I stared after her. If only I’d learned more. I didn’t even know her name.

* * * * *

Shona did though. “I think you may mean Mrs. Lloyd. Kathleen Lloyd. She lives in the sheltered housing complex. She must be eighty-eight if she’s a day. Nice lady most of the time. Bit fierce sometimes.”

“She frightened the life out of me.”

Shona smiled. “She’s quite a local character. Famous for saying what she thinks, without necessarily considering the impact of her words beforehand. She had a best friend for years, a Mrs. Webster. They used to go to bingo together, whist drives, all that sort of stuff. Fell out over something neither of them could remember and never spoke again. Mrs. Webster died last year and I heard Kathleen refused point blank to go to the funeral.”

“Maybe she thought it would be hypocritical.”

“Possibly.”

“Shona, do you know her to speak to? Judging by the way she raced off when she found out who I was, I won’t be able to get anything out of her, but you’d be doing me a massive favor if you could. Would you ask her what she remembers about this house? Why she told me Nathaniel Hargest took souls as well as lives? And why she referred to my aunt as his accomplice? I mean that would make her as evil as he was, and I’m having a hard time believing that.”

Shona looked stunned for a moment, then quickly recovered herself. “I’ll certainly do my best, although we’re not exactly friends. I know where she lives. How are you managing here?”

I crossed my fingers. “It seems to have gone quiet at the moment, so I’m hanging on. I feel I’ve got to deal with whatever’s locked away in my head and not let it beat me.” I sounded a lot more confident than I felt.

“Well,
we
really appreciate your help. Goodness knows where we’d be without that room, especially now it’s gone so cold and you’ve got that heating in. It’s made all the difference.”

When Shona left, I fancied a walk. The weather was crisp, cold, but sunny and I decided to go down by the river. My coat kept out the drafts and my boots and gloves made sure my feet and hands were warm. Outside, a few remaining dry, brown leaves fluttered down from the trees, adding to the mulch I now squelched through.

I was deep in thought when I reached the tentacle tree. I stopped and peered up through its denuded branches as I removed my glove and ran my hand along the gnarled and scarred bark. At ground level, the roots disappeared beneath the pile of dead leaves. I scraped at them with my foot, clearing a small patch of bare earth. The roots looked like those of any other tree.

“Only yours aren’t, are they?” I suddenly realized I had spoken my thoughts. Good job no one was around.

A faint breeze caressed my cheek like a cool hand. My fingers tingled. Faint at first, quickly gaining strength. The branch I was stroking suddenly bent and I jumped back. The breeze stroked my face again and brought with it a whisper.

“Kelly…”

I cried out. My whole body shook as if a bolt of lightning had struck me. A few yards away, closer to the house, stood the tall figure of a man, dressed in a long black coat, and wearing a top hat which he raised to me. The faintest of smiles curled his lips. As I stayed there, unable to move, he turned and walked steadily toward the house. Then, as if he had stepped through some invisible door, he disappeared.

The tree rustled; withered leaves around me swirled. Still I stood, rigid, and they settled. There was no wind. No breeze. But the branches bent, until the tree was leaning over even farther than usual. A sudden gust blew me back. I tripped, fell, struggled to my feet. The gale blasted the tree. Its gnarled branches creaked and bent. But all around me remained still. Only around the tree did the wind howl.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Birds sang and I realized that this too had ceased all the time the bizarre tempest had raged.

I backed away. Where could I go? The man seemed so familiar. Too familiar. If I went back to the house, would I see him there? The very thought of him terrified me.

Somewhere deep in my brain a memory stirred. As if one of those infernal shutters had begun to lift and, as it did so, a cloud of darkness and dread filled my body and soul.

* * * * *

I staggered back to the house without seeing the strange man. My fingers trembled so much I dropped the house keys twice. Finally I opened the door. The hall seemed warm and inviting—a whole world away from what I had experienced. I listened, hardly daring to breathe, terrified the man had invaded my house. But he’d disappeared before he reached the front door.

I set the keys down on the hall table and took off my coat, draping it over the banister. I might need that again at short notice.

In the kitchen, the clock ticked. A tap dripped—I turned it slightly and it stopped. I tried the cellar door. Locked. The man couldn’t have got into the house. Not if he was
human
anyway. He was so familiar. I was sure I’d seen him somewhere before. In this house.

I crossed over the hall into the living room. I had seen an old photograph album in Aunt Charlotte’s bureau, under the bay window. I opened the top drawer. There it lay, right on top.

I set the album on the table and opened it. Shots of me as a child, playing in the garden here. The memories flooded back. A young Aunt Charlotte. Younger than I remembered her, in black and white, impossible to tell the color of her hair, but probably that familiar ash blonde, or light brown like mine used to be before I discovered gray hairs and started giving nature a helping hand.

Aunt Charlotte’s clear eyes stared out at me. Her ringless hands were clasped lightly in her lap. Next to her stood an occasional table with a bowl of roses on it. But there was something else. I peered closer. There was a photograph in a frame that could have been silver. An older man. My heart beat quicker.

I turned the pages of the photo album, past color pictures of my parents, smiling and happy. They gazed at each other, oblivious to their small child, playing with her doll on the carpet in front of them. That must have been a day when they were either dropping me off or picking me back up. My mother was dressed in a sleeveless, white summer dress that showed off her tan. My father wore a T-shirt and jeans. I lingered over that photograph for a long time. I could almost remember that time, but I could have been no more than nine or ten, if that.

I turned another page and froze. These pictures were in no kind of order. The 1970s gave way to the 1950s, or maybe earlier. The photograph was black and white. The man who stared out at me wore a long black coat and a top hat. One hand clasped a silver handled walking stick. My eyes fixed on that face. I had only seen it a few minutes earlier. Yet the owner had been dead for forty-five years. Aunt Charlotte had written beneath it in her neat hand:
The devil, Nathaniel Hargest.

The chill breeze I had felt before in this room, brushed my face. A small child’s voice rang out.

“Kelly.”

I ran. Out of the room. Up to my bedroom. This time I grabbed the largest suitcase and threw open the wardrobe and drawers. I piled everything in. I grabbed toiletries from the bathroom and threw them in too. I could barely shut the case, but I didn’t care. To hell with facing my demons. I was leaving and this time I wasn’t coming back.

I passed the window and an unusual movement caught my eye. A woman, dressed in a dark brown, calf-length coat was running, waving her arms. As she came closer, I could see she was elderly, white-haired and familiar. She was staggering, out of breath, terrified. Then I saw why. A huge black dog bounded into view, chasing her. He was almost on her. Her mouth opened in a scream I couldn’t hear.

Without thinking, I raced out of the room and out of the house, along the river path. No one else was around apart from a man in the distance, walking away. I saw a hunched bundle lying on the path ahead of me a few yards from the tree. There was no sign of the dog. Panting, I reached her and bent down. She had collapsed and was facing away from me. I touched her shoulder and she rolled over. I screamed and backed off. The dead eyes of Kathleen Lloyd stared straight at me, milky, the irises rolled up almost out of sight, her mouth open in a near-perfect O, her fingers clawed at her throat where blood coagulated.

Heavy footsteps thudded down the path toward me. The man had heard me. He was already fishing in his pocket and by the time he reached me, he was pressing numbers on his phone.

* * * * *

“There was nothing you could have done, Mrs. Chambers.” The young policewoman handed me a cup of coffee in my kitchen. “Mrs. Lloyd was a very old lady. You heard the paramedics. They’re pretty certain she had a heart attack. Shame though. There she was taking some exercise, doing all the things she should do to keep fit and healthy and this happens.”

I stared at the dark-haired officer. She couldn’t have been more than her early twenties. “You saw her face,” I said. “She was terrified when she died. And I know why.”

Oh, let her think I was a lunatic. She probably did anyway. She was a community police officer. She’d have heard the rumors about the crazy niece of Miss Grant’s living all on her own in that vast, scary house.

The young woman smiled in what I’m sure she thought was a reassuring fashion. It made me want to slap her. My emotions and nerves were raw enough without some smart-arse child cop telling me she knew better!

“I asked the paramedic about that expression on her face. It was pretty unnerving, wasn’t it? That and the blood on her throat. He said, she probably couldn’t get her breath. You know, when the heart attack struck.”

I struggled to keep my voice calm. “And what about the black dog.”

“What dog?”

“I told you. I saw a big, black dog chasing her. That’s why she was running. That’s why she was terrified and that’s why she had the heart attack. Has anyone found the dog yet? It needs to be put down. There’s something seriously wrong with it.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders and I gripped the edge of the table. One more smart comment and I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself.

“No one else has seen a dog. Mr. Hawks, who called us, said he hadn’t seen any dogs down there today. He remarked on how unusual that was.”

“Perhaps something kept them away,” I said.

The door opened and an older—male—police officer poked his head around. “If you’re ready, Lynn, we’re done here.”

“I’ll be right there.” The policewoman stood up and took my empty coffee mug to the sink. “Will you be all right on your own, Mrs. Chambers? Is there anyone I can call to come and sit with you?”

I managed a smile. More of relief that she was going than for any other reason. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

She gave me a bemused look that only lacked the single cocked eyebrow to achieve full irony. “Well, if you’re sure. Goodbye then. You really couldn’t have done anything more. Take care of yourself and try not to dwell on today. It was her time, that’s all.”

I let them see themselves out. The front door slammed.

Above me, on the second floor, the gramophone started up again. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra and my aunt’s voice singing along to her favorite song. Once again a whisper sounded in my ear.