Rachel was sitting up in her bed, looking beyond the room, through the wall, like the entire scene was playing out in the air around her. ‘I told Holly to stop trying to be scary, that it wasn’t funny any more, but she kept waving her hands about. So I told her to grow up and I crawled up the ladder.’
‘Didn’t she follow you up?’ Matt asked.
‘She was still down there in the dark. She made odd noises like grunts and … when I looked back down, she was on all fours.’
‘She knew what she was doing,’ Kassy said. ‘She was trying to get back at us for treating her like crap. Either that or she was totally insane, which is possible, considering how she ended up …’ She trailed off when Matt stared at her again.
Rachel shook her head. ‘She wasn’t insane. She was just doing what we wanted. A night of laughs and scares. That’s exactly how we’d sold it to her. We were all at the top of the ladder, looking at each other, feeling freaked out, while Holly was whooping and whispering down there. I went to call her back up but … well … I don’t know what happened …’ Rachel was leaning forward in her bed, arms hugging her knees. ‘I don’t talk about this.’
‘Rachel,’ Joyce said, ‘it’s time.’
She squeezed her knees a little tighter and said, ‘Everyone just looked at each other and someone said let’s close the hatch. Kassy, I think.’
‘Excuse me?’ Kassy tilted her head. ‘Babe, that was you.’
Rachel’s eyes sank to the floor, whispering, ‘I thought it was you.’
‘It doesn’t matter who said it, just … did you?’ Matt said. ‘Did you close it?’
‘We kept looking at each other, me and Kass and the others and I don’t know why, maybe because we were all in fancy dress and looked so bloody ridiculous with the hats and stuff, but we started laughing and cackling and swigging the cider down, faster than we’d ever drunk it before. I was pretty drunk anyway, but it was a tension release, I think. Like it was us being us again, just the four of us. Holly was still doing new freaky noises down there. So we just wanted to do something that might be funny and not scary. Someone threw one of the plastic brooms down at her and it hit her in the shoulder …’
‘Yeah, we shut it,’ Kassy said, her voice far softer than before. ‘Then we ran away—’
‘… and we just kept on running.’
‘You left her down there?’ Bob said. ‘A nine-year-old in that place, in the dark?’
In. The. Dark.
Matt assembled his face. ‘How long?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Rachel said.
‘How long?’
‘Take it easy, Matt,’ Bob said.
‘I was so drunk, I’m not sure. Twenty minutes maybe … half an hour?’
‘Oh, an hour at least,’ Kassy said.
Rachel stiffened. Larry jotted something down in his book.
‘Look, Rachel was drunk and could barely walk, so we took her home. Then eventually me and the others went back and got Holly out. We walked her back to Barley Street. She was fine, just quiet. Just very, very quiet …’ Kassy trailed off, and bit her lip nervously. ‘But, hey, every kid has a moment like that. It’s a rite of passage.’
‘No it fucking isn’t!’ Rachel slammed her palm down on the mattress. Particles of dust danced in the air. Her eyes were brimming. ‘Think! She hung herself a week after us turning on her, Kassy. One week later she was dead.’
Silence.
‘And the poltergeist?’ Matt said, quietly.
‘I thought she might have staged it. Like it was some sort of cry for help … but even then … even then nobody really listened to her …’ Rachel put her face into her hands.
Kassy shook her head. ‘That wasn’t our fault. I’ve told you that.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ She glared at Kassy, then turned to Matt. ‘Wasn’t it?’
She seemed to be asking him for the correct answer. So after a moment, he found his most honest thought and laid it out. ‘If someone did that to my daughter, I’d come down on them like a ton of bricks.’
‘See?’ Rachel looked at Kassy. ‘We might as well have strung her up our—’
‘But …’ Matt said, ‘Are you to blame for her death? Of course you aren’t. You don’t even know if that was the reason. Or at least the main reason. You didn’t plan on this.’
She stared at him.
‘And you’ve all kept this secret, for all these years?’
‘Yes,’ Kassy said. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s our fault she killed herself.’
Rachel said nothing. She just stared at the window and the clouds that were gathering outside.
‘Rachel,’ Matt said. ‘Maybe you telling us this … might be the first step in letting this go. Somehow.’
Her eyes flickered, like she was zoning in and out of the room. ‘You can’t tell my mum. You can’t, you just can’t.’
There was silence for a while and Matt turned to see if Mary might be pressed against the glass window, taking it all in. She wasn’t.
‘You need a hug.’ Joyce pushed herself up and moved towards Rachel. She slipped her arms around her and pushed her lips close to Rachel’s ear. ‘You’re not to blame, poppet. You’re not to blame.’
Now her resistance broke fully. Rachel crumbled against her as the wrinkled, vein-strewn hand patted and stroked the back of her head. He saw Joyce pucker her thin lips and kiss Rachel on the scalp, holding her mouth there for long seconds, eyes closed. And when Rachel spoke again it was through the sobs into Joyce’s neck. ‘The last thing I remember that night … was waking up to find Holly right by my bed, but,’ she sniffed, ‘she wasn’t looking at me. She didn’t even look angry, though I know she must have been furious. She was just sitting on the floor of my room.’ She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, but her cheeks grew instantly wet again. ‘And she was drawing all
