She nodded slowly and he saw her gaze shift from his shoulder to beyond him, so that it was finally fixed on Barley Street. He was pretty sure this was the first time she’d looked directly at the house since he’d seen her. He saw her face flicker again, a child, staring up at the worst sight of her life. Her lips the same colour as her skin.
‘And Rachel?’ he called back.
‘Mmm?’ She stared at the house.
‘Sometimes there aren’t such things. Okay? Sometimes there are just sad events and us getting through them. But you know, eventually … we do get through them.’
She pursed her lips and pulled her eyes from the house. She smiled at him and mouthed the words, ‘Thank you.’
He ducked under the tree as its branch started up a fresh session of roof scratching and as he crossed the field he noticed that the swans were being incredibly noisy, over on the pond. He realised he’d never heard a swan crying out before. They were freaking out for some reason and it sounded like metal scraping metal.
He hurried across the grass toward the train station, not once looking back at the gazebo, though he did look down at the box full of crazy in his hands. He had the silly idea that if he was to look up again, Barley Street would be closer than ever now. Breaking through the trees and muscling in. But when he looked at it, it was where it always had been, with only one difference. The curtains of the upstairs bedroom, Holly’s room, were now open, and the window was open too, so that the white material fluttered and slapped through the gap like the hem of a dress. Around him, as the swans wailed, that same wind raced to him, and caused a dance of brittle leaves to scurry up his legs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rachel stood on the cracked pavement and looked up at the infamous house of mystery, rabbits and death.
29 Barley Street.
The house where she’d seen her first ever Disney movie. Where she’d eaten her first ever toasted sandwich. Where she’d first had a dream about girls. Where she’d seen her first corpse.
It was pushing 5 p.m., so the sun had finally started to plunge behind the high rises, over near the bypass. Now the sky had turned almost purple. It made the house look bruised.
She’d spent the last few hours with the girls, on Menham high street, sitting in what used to be a cafe called Citrone’s. They made ice-cream floats back when Rachel was a kid but now it was a Costa Coffee. But then wasn’t everywhere? Without the Hodges there, talk of spooks was thankfully kept to a minimum. So they chatted about each other, about work, and life and relationships. Rachel kept things vague about her own love life, not that she was ashamed of her sexuality. Only this Menham reunion was complex and mind melting enough without bringing that in the frame. Jo had cried. At one point Kassy had laid into Rachel for never coming home and never being in contact. What sort of friend does that? she’d asked. Rachel didn’t give a response because she didn’t have one. A crappy friend, she guessed. A selfish one.
Thankfully toward that last hour, they’d laughed. Somehow, they’d laughed a lot.
But when Jo offered to let Rachel stay at her and her boyfriend’s place, she knew she had to say no. Because Barley Street was calling her. Or rather, her mother was. From deep inside its empty rooms, from along its cold, quiet hall. Her mother was in there with the spiders and the dust, and she needed to talk to her about this seance.
It’s not like this would be the first time she and Mum had spoken since she left. They’d talked on the phone now and again (though the term ‘talk’ was wildly ambitious). She’d even managed to get Mum to visit her in Manchester a couple of times. That equated to lots of silence and mental finger drumming in restaurants. One of the few things Mum did say, though, was: ‘I wish you’d come back sometimes. Come back to the house.’
Now Rachel was actually in Menham, so how could she not? Besides, there was a seance to organise.
Breathe.
The professor’s words kept playing on a loop, in the tannoy of her head: Sometimes there are just sad events and us getting through them.
The front door was painted with the exact same flaking green as she remembered. With four glass squares in the top, stained with 50s sunbeams firing over a hill. Behind the glass, she could see the same old net curtain with tiny tears in it. She’d been pushing fifteen when Holly had died here, and Rachel had managed to stomach living – and the worst part sleeping – here for a few more years. But once the studying and saving was complete, she escaped. She pictured herself just over a decade ago, on this exact same path, eighteen years old and loading up the car with a duvet and crates of CDs, rolled-up posters and a cheap microwave. She’d even cut the grass that morning without being asked, and had given her mum an awkward, almost hover-hug on these steps and she remembered looking up at Holly’s window for one last time. That painful but bright moment when she assumed she would never, ever return to this place. In the younger days when you genuinely think you can outrun your memory.
Yet here she was, with her gaze doing that familiar slow crawl up the tatty-looking brickwork to the grimy glass of Holly’s room. And what she saw there made her gasp hard. So sharply in fact, that she actually stumbled backwards in a sudden flash of vertigo.
Holly was at the window, looking down.
The corners of the house stretched and twisted as the figure upstairs leant toward the
