‘She’s up there, she’s home.’ Mary bumped into her shelves and sent the porcelain penguins shattering to the floor because she refused to look anywhere but up. Then she was out of the room and rushing up the staircase. ‘Holly, love! I’m coming. I’m coming. Don’t be scared.’
Rachel was on her feet too, while Bob protested. She raced from around the table and slipped on the sheets of paper scattered on the floor. She fell on all fours, splayed out on them but quickly pushed herself up again, scrambling through the dining-room door.
Matt followed quickly after, calling out for Rachel to wait, but she didn’t.
He stumbled on the floor when a piece of penguin snagged into the rubber of his shoe. He could hear it cracking on the steps as he ran up. Wondered if it was pounding in deeper, reaching for the foot through his sock. He had no idea what he expected to see upstairs, and perhaps it was the sheer amount of emotional tension in the air, but the skin of his arms was prickling into visible bumps.
In the dark. Rachel and my rabbit. In the dark.
He heard a new sound, from higher in the house.
Boom, boom, boom.
Footsteps? On the roof? He couldn’t tell. It was probably Mary pounding her feet around Holly’s room. Maybe.
He paused near the top step and looked through the banisters. Her door was wide open.
Mary was in there frantically opening cupboards, looking under the bed and desperately calling out, ‘Don’t hide, love. Don’t be cruel.’
Rachel ran across the landing and went inside too. She must have accidentally knocked the handle with her hip, because the Holly-covered door was slowly closing, with the two women inside.
The motion detectors were squealing, like car alarms.
He ran up to the door, covered in pictures of Holly, and was almost reluctant to put his finger on one of Holly’s smiling, toothy-looking photographs. But he did, and the first thing he saw out of the corner of his eye was a frantic movement. There was white material by the window.
He heard Mary say, ‘Holly! It’s you!’
Things seemed to slow down, sound itself seemed to suck into silence, and he thought: this could be the moment … the moment where my entire worldview changes.
Something in his brain told him to brace himself. That he was about to see Holly swinging, swinging wild and chaotic from the beam, just like Pastor Todd’s frantic little finger dance, but instead he saw a long white curtain blowing into the room from a sharp wind that was sweeping through a jagged, freshly made hole in the glass. And when he looked at the floor he saw shards of the shattered pane, hundreds of pieces of it.
Amongst it all Rachel sat on her knees, cradling something in her hand.
He dropped next to her.
‘Matt?’ She looked up at him and opened her hands, tears flooding her eyes. ‘What’s happening here?’
The hefty wooden cross that had ruined the window slid from her grip and landed with a thump on the glass-strewn carpet, while the little painted Jesus nailed to it gazed up at him with bright, eager eyes.
‘What’s happening?’ she said again.
While downstairs, the school bell was ringing madly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘And you really saw nothing …’ Larry stepped across the bedroom carpet, trying to avoid the glass shards but still causing cracking sounds. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘I looked out of the window, I ran downstairs. I ran up the street both ways and saw nothing.’ Matt was sitting on Holly’s bed, with crumpled My Little Pony faces looking warped and deformed as his weight pressed into the mattress. ‘You need to ask the neighbours if they saw anything.’
‘Really? Do you think?’ Larry snapped, then frowned at the cross on the floor. He tilted his head to look at it. ‘I’ve got people doing that right now.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to—’
He held up an apologetic palm. ‘Don’t apologise. Long day, that’s all. And you really think it’s the prayer group that did this? Like, really?’
‘Well, I don’t know it was them but …’
‘And they knew a seance was going on here, how exactly?’
‘They’re pretty clued up on local affairs …’ He rubbed one of his eyes with the knuckle of his thumb. ‘All I’m saying is, if you’re looking for Menham people who might want to shut seances down, then those guys are at the very top of the tree. Heck, they call themselves the Phoenix Club. How gung-ho do you want?’
‘So they’d throw a cross as a protest?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the evangelicals were getting a little symbolic in their spiritual warfare.’ He shifted on the bed. ‘It worked, anyway.’
‘The cross broke the spell then …’
‘No. The cross coming through the window scared the crap out of everyone, before we even got to anything really interesting. But if it was them that threw it, then it’s reasonable to consider they might have put those lily crosses up in Jo’s—’
‘Hey.’ Larry waved a finger. ‘You just be cautious, throwing around accusations, okay?’
‘These guys were pretty rabid about their faith.’
Larry slipped what looked like an oversized sandwich bag over the cross, overturned it and sealed it shut with a jerk and swish of his thick fingers. The plastic billowed out, catching the air. Now it was upside down and hanging by Larry’s side Matt had this silly echo of a minister’s voice. Some twitch of the superstitious nerve that said: Um … maybe it’d be better if you turned the cross upright and didn’t walk around with it looking so bloody Satanic. Jesus is going to get a nosebleed.
‘And there’s no sign of Jo or Lee?’
‘No.’ Larry checked his watch, an old digital thing. He wandered to the door, cross in hand, where Matt had propped up a broom, bucket, dustpan and brush, which he’d found in a cupboard downstairs. Larry stopped suddenly. ‘Do you need a hand cleaning this up?’
‘I can sort it, thanks. Besides, you’ll be busy. I guess you’ll head up
