Dark Ages. John Pritchard
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Grimacing, he looked up towards the ceiling. The plaster and paint had cracked like a drought-ravaged field. The light-fixing was gone, the flex protruding. It hung in the penumbra of the beam. He moved the light away, and glanced at Lucy.
‘Okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she murmured calmly.
He led the way in deeper, hearing brittle cinders crunch beneath their boots. The fire had swept the front room and the hall. The walls looked black and oily in the beam; there were traces of a pattern in the rags of wallpaper. The ceiling had collapsed, exposing skeletal charred wood. The ruin of an easy chair still squatted in the corner.
Lucy had her own torch out: she shone it up the stairs. The gloom up there absorbed the light completely.
‘It started up there?’ she asked – almost whispering now.
He wet his lips and nodded. ‘In the bedroom.’
The glow of her torch slid down onto the staircase. ‘Reckon it’s safe?’
The stairs looked fairly dodgy, but he wasn’t sure she’d meant them. ‘Let’s … just wait for a bit.’
‘And see what happens?’
He waited for her to turn her head; then nodded grimly. ‘Yeah.’
She shrugged. ‘Is it all hearsay, then? Or has anyone actually seen it … heard it?’
‘Well, one of the girls claimed she heard something knocking on one of the window boards, when she was running past one night. She always runs past the place, she says.’
‘Could have been anything, then. Or anyone.’
‘That’s what I thought. But one thing’s for sure, she’s scared of something. They all were, underneath their smiles.’
‘And one child was killed in the fire here, right?’
‘Right. About a year ago, I think. But there’s more to it than that … or so they said.’
She clicked her torch off and came back into the shell of the front room. ‘Oh yes? You didn’t tell me that.’
‘It isn’t nice,’ he muttered flatly.
‘No …’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose it is. Well, you’ve obviously been saving it, so better tell me now.’
He let the torch beam sink, and pool between them.
‘This is what they said, all right? The little boy who lived here kept having bad dreams. Someone was coming to get him, you know the kind of thing. Anyway, one night he wakes up screaming: says that someone’s in the bedroom, running fingers through his hair. So his mother comes, and gets him settled down. Then half an hour later, he’s screaming again. So she goes to him again. And it’s a demon, apparently. A demon keeps appearing in the room. She gets him off again. And then, on her way to bed, she decides to look in on him … and when she gets to the door, and touches it, it’s hot.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Lucy whispered.
‘So she opened it, of course she did, and the fire was just let loose. She and her husband got out with severe burns. The boy died in his room.’
She stared at him; then brushed her mouth, as if to wipe a sour taste away. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Any … cause for the fire, do they know?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. Could have been an electrical fault … or something.’
‘Or something. Yeah.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘So what do they reckon is haunting here? His ghost? Or … whatever might have killed him?’
‘Maybe both.’ He paced around; then looked at her again. ‘My dad told me a story once. A legend of King Arthur, ’cause he’s into all that stuff. They were caught in some place, his knights and him – besieged by burning ghosts. And when the ghosts were stabbed, they lost their shape, becoming fiends and ashes.’
Lucy’s smile was wry enough; but her shudder didn’t look entirely faked. She watched as he unstuffed his bag and spread a tattered blanket on the floor. They both sat down. She’d brought her Thermos flask. Pouring a cup, she paused and glanced around.
‘You can’t feel anything, can you?’
He hesitated. The house itself felt looming, ghastly, steeped in its despair. But nothing seemed to move within its walls. He shook his head.
‘Neither can I,’ she said, and gave a wan little smile. The perkiness had died away long since.
By midnight, he’d worked up the nerve to try and broach the subject.
The Burnt House was still dormant, but its aura felt increasingly oppressive. A claustrophobic itch had started nagging: as if the place was sealed again, and they were trapped inside. He glanced more than once at his propped-up torch, almost willing himself to see it flicker.
The past – his past – was creeping up: the atmosphere congealed to give it shape. He knew he’d talk before the night was out. Like the onset of a stomach ache that has to end in sickness. And this would be a purging, too – and maybe a relief.
He glanced at Lucy. Their small talk had subsided, but the silence was companionable enough. He’d never breathed a word of this to anyone before; he wasn’t sure how even she’d react.
So begin at the beginning. Building-blocks.
‘What’s your theory, then: on ghosts?’
She looked at him over the plastic mug. ‘I thought you knew.’
‘After-images and such?’
She shrugged. ‘Or psychic echoes. Call them what you like. I think they’re just a way of seeing into the past. Not sentient at all.’
‘And not things that can hurt you.’
She shook her head.
‘So what about demons, then?’
‘Doesn’t that imply a Christian view?’
‘Other religions have them. Evil spirits.’
‘Active agents, you mean; rather than passive images?’
He nodded slowly, thinking of the burning room upstairs. The house had always felt unsafe, but now the air of dull threat seemed to grow.
‘Maybe,’ she conceded – and looked at him quizzically. ‘Why?’
He glanced around; then back at her. ‘I think I might have called one up, one time.’
Lucy straightened up. ‘What, in a seance or something?’
‘No, I was at home and it was the last thing on my mind. I never believed in things like that.’ Restless now, he clambered up as if relieving cramp.
‘But now you do?’ she murmured.
He looked around, and nodded.
‘So what happened?’
‘I don’t know. I was looking at something in one of my dad’s old books; just stringing names together in my mind …’ He wet his lips. ‘Dubhe and Merak; Alioth. Mean anything to you?’
‘No, but they sound like mythical names. Forgotten gods, or something?’
He gave a small, tight smile and shook his head. ‘They’re the names of stars, that’s all: the stars in the Plough. This was just a picture of a medieval star-chart. One that was used for magic of some kind.’
She frowned at that. ‘So … what was it like? This thing that came.’
‘There were more than one,’ he said.
‘You