Haunted by the Past, page 3
part #11 of Ismael Jones Series
“Didn’t anyone go to the police?” I said.
“They didn’t want to know,” said the barman. “They knew they wouldn’t be able to prove anything. The Glenburys have always been a law to themselves.”
“Couldn’t you do something?” I said. “I mean, if all the townspeople got together...”
“It’s not just the Glenburys,” said the barman. “It’s the Hall. Bad places call to bad people. The Glenburys have been monsters for generations; it’s steeped in the blood and the bone. Now that they’re back, it’s all started happening again.”
“We have to go there,” said Penny. “It’s our job.”
The barman shook his head and started to turn away, but there was still one more thing I wanted to know.
“If everyone around here is so scared of the Hall, and you’re all convinced it’s so dangerous...why do you stay? Why go on living here when you could move to somewhere safer?”
“Because this is our place,” said the barman. “And we will not be driven out of it—by the Hall or the Glenburys. And because someone has to be here to warn fools like you.”
He turned his back on us and moved to the other end of the bar. He’d said all he was going to say. I looked at the Colonel.
“How much of that did you already know?”
“Find Lucas Carr,” said the Colonel. “And don’t contact me until you know something.”
He didn’t need to tell us we were on our own. We always were. The Colonel rose to his feet with unruffled elegance and strode calmly out of the inn. None of the locals so much as turned their head to watch him go. Penny and I looked at each other.
“Well, that explains why we were chosen for this mission,” said Penny. “A family tree with its roots in Hell, and a house that devours people.”
“If that is what’s happened, we’ll just have to make it cough Lucas Carr back up again,” I said.
“And the family?”
“They’re just people,” I said. “We can deal with people.”
Penny and I took our time finishing our drinks, to make it clear we weren’t going to be hurried. When we finally got up to leave, I slammed the empty glasses down on the bar with some force, so the barman couldn’t ignore me.
“Why are there so many stuffed animal heads on the walls?”
He met my gaze unflinchingly. “This has always been good hunting country. Everyone around here knows how to use a gun.”
“Is that allowed, these days?” said Penny.
“If anything should come out here from the Hall,” said the barman, “it’ll find us ready.”
“You think guns will protect you against ghosts?” I said.
“It’s not just the dead you have to worry about, at Glenbury Hall,” said the barman. “The house is bad, but the family has always been worse.”
Penny and I headed for the door, and the locals watched us leave like they didn’t expect to be seeing us again.
ChaPter TWO
At Home with the Glenburys
“What a friendly little hostelry,” said Penny, as we emerged into the open air.
“Couldn’t do enough for us,” I said, as we stood outside the door and took a deep breath of the evening air. “But whenever people tell me I don’t want to go somewhere, that’s when I really want to go there.”
“Sometimes I think your ship’s machines transformed you from some kind of lemming,” said Penny. “Do you think any of those stories the barman told us could have something to do with Lucas Carr’s disappearance?”
I shrugged. “Old houses always come with old stories attached. Locals think it adds character. Our old house is spookier than yours. But there’s really only one way to find out for sure. Go to Glenbury Hall, ask a whole bunch of questions, and make such a nuisance of ourselves that the people there will tell us everything we want to know just to get rid of us.”
Penny smiled brightly. “In other words, standard operating procedure. Of course, it is entirely possible that all of this weird stuff is nothing more than misdirection, to keep us from noticing what’s really going on.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said. “But after hearing so much about the terrible Glenbury family, I have to wonder...Did bad things happen because of the family who lived in the house, or did living in such a bad place affect the family?”
“In my experience, it’s the bad people who make places bad,” Penny said wisely.
“But now the old family is back in the Hall, and people have started disappearing again,” I said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s just the universe nudging your elbow, to get your attention.”
Penny nodded. “And this is the kind of nudging that leaves bruises.”
I looked at her thoughtfully. “What’s your first reaction to Lucas Carr’s mysterious disappearance?”
Penny shrugged. “If you believe everything the locals have to say, it must be something to do with Glenbury Hall. But what if Lucas stumbled onto something way above his pay grade, some secret information he was never supposed to know about? What if he tried to sell it to the wrong person, and it all went horribly wrong? You have to admit, that sounds far more likely than a house that eats people.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I don’t believe the Colonel would have brought us all the way out here, unless this missing man is a lot more important than we’re being told about.”
“The stories about the Hall were interesting, though. Not your usual spooky stuff.” Penny shot me a sideways look. “How do you feel about investigating a haunted house after your experiences in the House on Widows Hill?”
“That was a unique situation,” I said steadily. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot to convince me that there’s any supernatural element to Carr’s vanishing.”
“But what if it turns out the ghosts really did take Lucas?” said Penny.
“Then we’ll just have to persuade them to give him back.”
Penny raised a single elegant eyebrow. “And how are we going to do that? Offer to buy them some nice new sheets and chains?”
“That is so last century,” I said. “I thought maybe leathers and chains...”
“Goth ghosts and punk poltergeists?” Penny shook her head. “The horror, the horror...”
We laughed quietly as we made our way through the parked vehicles, and then came to a sudden halt as we looked at our car and what had been done to it. While we were busy being lectured on the evils and iniquities of Glenbury Hall, someone had painted a large white cross on the roof of the Bentley. The rough shape stood out starkly against the black paint, though the artist had made a sloppy job of it, presumably because he was in a hurry and didn’t want to get caught. Drops of white paint stood out against the sides of the car, like elongated bird crap. Penny stood frozen in place beside me, wide-eyed and shocked speechless.
“I didn’t see anyone leave the inn,” I said, after a moment. “One of them must have sneaked out quickly, through a hidden back door. I should have known there’d be one. Remember, the barman said this used to be smuggling country. The locals would have needed a quick exit, for when the Revenue Men came calling. The cross is probably intended to protect us, if we insist on visiting the infamous Glenbury Hall.”
“But...My car!” said Penny.
“They’re just trying to be helpful.”
“But...My car!”
“I wonder why they painted the cross on the roof, rather than the bonnet,” I said thoughtfully. “I mean, the bonnet would have been a lot easier for them. Less of a stretch. Is something supposed to see the cross from above, and be scared off? Or maybe...remember how the barman talked about the old-time smuggling operations? Perhaps some modern-day smugglers are trying to scare us away from investigating the Hall. No. That’s a bit too Scooby Doo, isn’t it?”
I stopped talking, as I realised Penny had torn her gaze away from the violation of her car so she could glare at me.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Is there something I should be doing?”
“Are you kidding me? I want you to march straight back into that poxy little pub, drive every one of them out here, and stand over them with a whip in one hand and an electric cattle prod in the other, until they have scraped every last bit of this mess off my lovely vintage car!”
“I don’t think we have time for that.”
“Why?” said Penny, just a bit dangerously.
“Time could be a factor, when it comes to locating Lucas Carr,” I said carefully. “And making sure that he’s safe.”
Penny tilted back her head and let out a primordial howl of rage and despair that drove all the birds out of the surrounding trees. No one emerged from the tavern to investigate, which as far as I was concerned demonstrated good self-preservation skills. Penny lowered her head, breathed deeply, and then strode over to the Bentley without looking at me. She unlocked the doors and got behind the steering wheel, while I slipped in beside her, carefully keeping my opinions to myself.
I thought providing such obvious protection was rather sweet, myself.
Penny fired up the engine and crashed through the gears, double-declutching like a wild thing as she sent the car roaring out of the car park. Gravel shot from under our wheels with such violence it pebble-dashed the parked vehicles and left them rocking in place. We put The Smugglers Retreat at our back and followed the narrow winding road away from the inn.
A pleasant summer evening was falling on the open countryside as it laid itself out before us: calm and contented and apparently entirely at its ease. But as I looked past the dry-stone walls bordering the road, I couldn’t help noticing that all the fields were completely empty. No cattle, no sheep, no people out working...and not a single piece of farm machinery. The fields and meadows stretched away to the horizon without so much as a single scarecrow to break up the view. The countryside was completely empty, as though no one wanted to be out in the open, so far away from the town, because it wasn’t safe.
After a while, the road narrowed so much we had no choice but to drive down the middle, with the way ahead often concealed behind the curve of an approaching bend. Penny took this as a personal affront to her driving skills and put her foot down. I clung onto my seatbelt with both hands, quietly hoping we wouldn’t meet another driver in a similar state of mind coming in the other direction.
But we didn’t encounter any other traffic on the road, even though we had to travel some distance to get to the Hall. Narrow country lanes are often a minefield of Land Rovers, cyclists, and slow-moving farm vehicles, but the road remained open and empty. I had to wonder whether that was significant, that no one would come out this way unless they absolutely had to.
Eventually the road straightened out again, and we spotted a large house up ahead, squatting on the horizon like a great stone ogre. Penny yelled, “Tally-ho!” and aimed the car at it. The entrance to the private road wasn’t sign-posted, and I swear we took that curve on two wheels, before we plunged into the entrance road and the car dropped back again. The wheels dug in, and we roared along a narrow track engulfed by tall hedges that buried us in shadows, until the road suddenly opened out into a broad open area next to Glenbury Hall. There were no marked parking spaces, so Penny brought the car to a shuddering halt right next to the single gap in the topiary trees surrounding the Hall’s grounds.
She turned off the Bentley’s engine and shot me a triumphant smile. I shook my head, lost for words, and fortunately she took that as compliment. We looked around, while the cooling engine ticked noisily. There were no other vehicles, and no sign of life anywhere. The parking area was just bare mud, with the odd tuft of grass here and there. Nothing at all between us and the wide-open fields that stretched away to the horizon. The long row of topiary trees formed a great green wall protecting, or possibly hiding, Glenbury Hall from the rest of the world. Each tree had been trimmed into a basic geometric shape: squares, triangles, and spheres.
“Brutal and yet unrelenting,” I said. “Overpowering and intimidating and not in any way welcoming.”
Penny nodded and pulled a face. “Functional and ugly wouldn’t have been my choice, to make a first impression on the paying customers. Why would they want to conceal the Hall behind something as off-putting as that?”
“Maybe the old family valued its privacy,” I said. “Unless...the trees were put in place to keep something out.”
“Or something in,” said Penny.
I looked at her. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” said Penny. “That’s rather the point, isn’t it?”
I studied the trees appraisingly. “Makes me wish I’d brought my chainsaw.”
Penny looked at me. “You haven’t got a chainsaw.”
“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.
We got out of the Bentley. Penny carefully didn’t look at the cross painted on the roof, and I didn’t say anything, just in case. I did study the sky carefully, but there was nothing flying above us that struck me as threatening. In fact, there were no birds at all for as far as I could see. Which was just a bit unusual, this far out in the countryside.
Penny locked the doors carefully, while glowering suspiciously around her. There was no one else in sight, but the setting didn’t inspire trust. Our footsteps made soft ghostly noises on the hard mud as we approached the opening in the topiary wall. We had to walk in single file and turn sideways to edge through the narrow gap, and then we were inside the grounds of Glenbury Hall.
A majestic lawn stretched away before us, with scattered stone statues caught in awkward and unnatural poses. They stood in strange patterns, all of them facing the Hall, like chess pieces on an unseen board. Their grey stone bodies were savagely scarred and pitted from long exposure to the elements, and spotted here and there with moss and mould, like some disfiguring disease. What faces I could see had been scoured away by the wind and rain, with nothing left but blank monstrous voids.
I couldn’t even tell whether the statues were meant to be male or female, but they all had a certain strength to them, a sense of having endured despite everything the elements could throw at them. As though they had to be there, to serve some purpose.
“Why are they all facing the Hall?” Penny said suddenly.
“Maybe they’re keeping an eye on the Glenburys,” I said. “To see what they’re getting up to. Or maybe the family deliberately had them arranged that way, so they could be sure of an audience for their sinning.”
“Oh, that’s just creepy,” said Penny.
“They’re just statues,” I said.
I looked around the grounds, took a deep breath and then smiled suddenly, surprised by a pleasant scent.
“What?” Penny said immediately.
“Can’t you smell that?”
“No,” she said, just a bit resignedly. “What have you picked up this time, with your amazing alien senses?”
“The scent of freshly cut grass, still hanging on the air,” I said. “Someone’s been out here recently with a petrol mower. I can smell the fumes.”
Penny took a few quick sniffs at the cool evening air, just to show willing, and then shook her head. We moved slowly forward, weaving in and out of the slightly sinister statues, until we could get a clear view of the Hall.
Topiary walls surrounded the grounds on three sides, with Glenbury Hall at the far end, a huge manor house of the old school. Two stories of old grey stone, buried here and there under great mats of moss and ivy, with arched and gabled windows. Suitably ugly gargoyles peered down past the guttering. Although the house had a good many windows, only a few of them had lights showing, and they were all right next to the front door. Which meant either there was hardly anyone home, or whatever walked there didn’t need the light. Glenbury Hall looked dark and dour and threatening, the kind of place any self-respecting visitor would disappear from, the first chance they got.
“I am ready to bet you,” said Penny, “that this crumbling old pile turns out to be riddled with hidden doors, sliding panels, and secret passageways. Because houses this old nearly always are.”
“Of course,” I said. “You grew up in one, didn’t you?”
“Dear old Belcourt Manor,” said Penny. “Home to freezing draughts, coal fires that were always going out, and secret doors that might as well have had a neon arrow pointing at them. But just as I was getting old enough to take an interest, Daddy had them all nailed up and sealed over. He said, to make sure I didn’t get lost in the hidden passageways. I always thought it was to stop me having any fun.”
“This house does look like it has a reputation to live down to,” I said. “An ancestral home held together by generations of grudges, and family secrets too grim to be shared with the outside world.”
“Of course there are secrets,” said Penny. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”
We stood together for a while, taking our ease in the evening air and studying our surroundings. The Hall stared back at us from out of the gathering gloom, just waiting for us to come within reach. The topiary walls cut us off from the surrounding countryside, and I suddenly realised how quiet it was. I couldn’t hear any birds singing, and there was no buzz of insects, as though nothing in the countryside wanted anything to do with this place. Looking at the Hall, I could believe it. A house heavy with sin, home to a family steeped in corruption. If you believed everything you were told, which I try very hard not to.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said finally.
“Really?” said Penny. “Because I’m pretty sure I haven’t.”
“First impressions can be deceptive,” I said.
“Trust me,” said Penny, “I am not feeling even a little bit deceived. This is a bad place, Ishmael.”
“Let’s go in and introduce ourselves,” I said. “It’s getting late.” I shot her a stern look. “And don’t even think of saying ‘later than you think.’”
“All right,” said Penny. “But I’m thinking it really loudly.”
