Chapter 8 (Bones)
“What are you thinking, Doctor?” I asked.
I’d only know him for a day, but I’d never seen him looking so frustrated and confused. He sat there on the sofa in the front room, leant forward with his chin resting on the palm of his hand, his elbow balanced on his knee.
“Excuse me?” he said, almost as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I asked you what you were thinking. You know?”
He shook his head. “I’m actually feeling quiet positive, Emily.”
I was taken aback. “Sorry? Positive?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he nodded.
“But that ghost has taken away Holly. Your friend.”
“Yes, but it’s confirmed a few things for me.”
“Which are what?” I asked.
“That our old lady ghost cannot be a spirit.”
I frowned again. I seemed to spend most of my time frowning. “But you said-”
“I know what I said,” he interrupted me. I hated it when people did that, but somehow he didn’t make me angry, “but this changes everything. Completely and utterly. Ghosts don’t abduct people.”
Okay, that made sense, but if anything it threw everything else into confusion. If it wasn’t a ghost then what was it?
I looked across to the sofa. Eve was fast asleep. She was absolutely drained from the antics from the ghost – cos I’m just gonna keep calling it a ghost for now – and had crashed out not long after Holly had disappeared.
Now there were just the two of us.
“How are we going to get her back then?”
“By continuing on our original plan - ending this tonight. Well, before dawn at least. I want a nice slap up English breakfast after this as a way to celebrate.”
“Sounds good,” I said, smiling.”I’ll even cook it for you.”
“But first we need to lay out a timeline of events.”
“What about the message on the wall? It said to give her or Holly will die. Who does she mean?”
“Well ‘her’ is either you or Eve. Without gathering together all the information we can’t know for certain.”
We made sure Eve was sound asleep and then went through to the kitchen. The Doctor made us two steaming hot mugs of black coffee and then we sat down at the table. He got out a piece of paper from his blazer pocket and a pencil.
“So, firstly, when did you move into this house?”
“Well, it would have been when Eve was 6, so early 1979. I lost Julian the year after,” I felt sad again thinking about him.
The Doctor wrote down 1979 on the paper and then drew a timeline up till this year – 1986.
“And you never had any trouble in all that time?”
I shook my head. “No. Like I said before the house has always felt cold and uninviting. It doesn’t feel like a home, but we never had any issues at all and certainly no ghosts.”
“Okay, so when was the first event.”
“The other night when we heard the tapping on the walls.”
He wrote down ‘tapping’ on the paper.
“Can you think of anything else that has happened? Anything significant that happened on that day?”
“Eve turned 13.” I was worried that this was the direction it was headed in anyway.
“Nothing else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” said the Doctor. “It may be connected, but I don’t think it’s the significant factor.”
He rapped his fingers on the table and then chewed the end of the pencil, sticking his tongue out at the woody-taste.
“How did you care for Eve when you were working?”
“We had a babysitter - Tash. Natasha Jones.” My eyes narrowed. “And the night that Tash left the ghost started up.”
The Doctor clicked his finger, pointed at me and then wrote down ‘babysitter’ on the paper. “Deciding factor.”
“But what’s Tash got to do with this?”
“Nothing. Well, nothing personally to do with it.” He leant back on the chair. I heard it creaking. The chairs were pretty cheap and prone to collapse at any minute. “You cared for Eve until Julian passed away. Then after struggling you got in a string of babysitters, correct?”
“Yeah. There was Carol and Jenny and then Tash.”
“Eve was protected. She had an adult protecting her until the moment Tash left.”
“But I’m still here. I’m an adult protecting her.”
“Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? The moment Tash left Eve had no protection other than her mother.”
I was struggling to understand the significance. “I’m her mother. I’m the best protection she can have.”
“But our old woman ghostly doesn’t seem to think that,” he said, grinning.
“Okay, but we’re still no closer to discovering why she wants Eve. So Eve isn’t protected now, except by me, but we know nothing.”
“I think our answers – or at least some of them – may lie in that attic.”
I’d checked up on Eve one more time and pulled the blanket a little higher over her before we headed back up the stairs. Strangely, although I was still scared, I wasn’t as worried now knowing that it was potentially not a ghost and that we were getting closer to an answer.
We were now armed with head torches and two hand torches as we ascended the stairs. The Doctor had also, somehow, managed to remove the strip light from the kitchen and rig it up to light up when disconnected. He placed it in the attic and it illuminated the room pretty well.
We crawled along to the backboards and the Doctor examined them. They had been nailed down against the wooden support beams and the nails looked older than modern day ones. He grabbed the hammer we’d brought up with us and began hammering at the board.
I hoped the neighbours wouldn’t complain or that we wouldn’t wake Eve up, but the wood was very brittle and it didn’t take long for the heavy hammer to splinter the wood. Once we were through we were able to pull the rest of the board off to make a hole big enough for us to get through. The Doctor told me to stay back and then crawled forward, shining the torch into the darkness.
I almost retched. There was a horrible, foul, musty stench coming from the space. The Doctor had taken his tie off and made a makeshift mouth cover.
“What’s back there?” I asked, peering forward.
“Come and see. It’s safe,” he said.
I grabbed my torch, pulled my top up over my nose and mouth and edged forward. My torch light hit something against the wall of the house. It was covered in dust, but it was unmistakable. I gasped as I looked down at it.
Curled into a foetal position was a small, almost-skeletal corpse with most of its clothes rotted away. The mouth was wide open and it looked to have been in some distress or agony when it died.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” was all I could say.
“I think we’ve found the body of our old lady,” said the Doctor sadly. He crouched in front of the corpse and frowned. There was something not quite right about the skull. It looked Human, but in the centre of the forehead was an oval-shaped hole. It almost looked like a socket – too smooth for it to have been caused by a blunt instrument.
“What is that?” I asked, peering closer.
“This isn’t a Human skeleton,” said the Doctor, his eyes lighting up. “I have no idea what species it is, but something was here, imbedded in its skull.”
“Hey, look at this,” I said, noticing the torchlight glinting on something. I picked up what looked like a brass oval with a green jewel fixed into it.
The Doctor took it off me and peered at it.
“Was it for decoration, do you think?” I asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “In fact I think this may be what’s causing all of your problems.” He bit on the end of his finger nail and then looked at me. “I need to get to my TARDIS. The equipment there will help me determine what this old lady is.”
We made our way out of the attic and the Doctor went to the front door. “Go and wake Eve up. I need to take you both with me.”
I nodded as he turned the door handle. But something was wrong. He tugged and frowned.
“What’s up?”
“Did you lock the door?” he asked.
“No,” I said, grabbing the key from the side table drawer and turning it in the lock. “It’s unlocked.”
“Then why won’t the door open?” he asked, pulling on the door.
“Try the back,” I said.
We headed through the middle room to the kitchen and tried the back door. The same thing happened. The door was jammed shut.
The Doctor had a thought and went to the front room. Eve was stirring now, awoken by our rustling about.
He pulled the curtains open and then stepped back in shock. Outside, instead of orange streetlights and the fence to the disused railway, there was nothing but blackness. It was totally and utterly pitch black.
“What the hell’s happening?” I said, pressing my face to the window to try and see if I could see anything at all.
“She’s trapped us,” said the Doctor. “She’s isolated us from the rest of the world.” He looked at me and the closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Emily, but we can’t get out of this house.”
To be continued...
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