Chapter Three: The Ghost Room

It was now night and Amanda having been given the tour of nearly every nook and cranny of the Manor and Moonbeam having retired to her artist’s studio situated in the garage, stood with her father at the bottom of the hall stairs, holding a plate of cheese sandwiches in one hand, her small suitcase in the other.

Every creak of the old empty house was amplified to the point of distraction. Heard through the open kitchen doorway, the strong wind whistled down the chimney chute, making noises like a secret language.

The expectant fear that was now firmly wedged inside Amanda’s breast had been growing ever since meeting her father and his girlfriend in the library. Not since she was a child had she felt this apprehension about the encroachment of night-time.

This surprised her, thinking that she had outgrown such infantile fancies. When she was five or six years old she had picked up a book of supposedly true but uncanny tales left by her mum, her real mum. Being a precocious child she had read one story, a tale of a little boy who had wandered out into the winter night and was never seen again. What was left of the boy was a row of his footprints implanted in the compacted snow that his mother had desperately followed, only to find that they had come to an abrupt end. What came directly after these footprints was pristine virgin snow. The trepidation this narrative had created in her childish mind was the same as she felt now.

For all of her fascination with the darkest elements of the supernatural, the monsters and demons of the horror movie, she realised that she was a rationalist at heart, never really taking what she saw or read seriously. But the shock in the greenhouse, the mirrors in the library, the unnerving hints of her father and not forgetting the general threatening aura of the house, had sent her imagination into overdrive. Of course it could all still be just that, her imagination. Maybe her dad was right, she had watched too many scary films.

“This place is too big,” she said, staring up the paisley carpeted stairs to the blackness at the top, a blackness like an eternal void. “The house from outside seems small but inside it seems so huge. It’s so isolated and lonely, I am going to hate living here.”

Jonathan throw up his arms in exasperation. “Please lets not start this argument again. Give it some time and when the place has been lived in a bit I think you are going to love the place. The band will be coming down to record a new album and all our friends will be staying, including that new signing to Darkcore Records you rave about so much, so don’t worry about being lonely.”

Amanda had the childish urge, automatically rejected the moment it came into her mind, to cling tightly to her father and tell him about the thing she had witnessed in the greenhouse and at the same time urgently requesting permission to sleep in his room like she used too when she was little. Instead she moved a few steps up the staircase like someone under the influence of an alien force, towards the darkness. She almost felt the tentacles of carved shrubbery enclosing around her ankles, wanting to push her further up the stairs towards the landing.

“See you tomorrow, her dad said smiling now, “and pleasant dreams.”

“Yeah see you,” she sighed, walking quickly up the steps, facing the inevitable.

Putting the suitcase on the floor at the top of the stairs, she reached out to her left and throw a switch. The engulfing blackness was suddenly vanquished and the contrast of the light was for a few seconds dazzling. But when she timidly gazed towards her room, she found the glow emitted from the fake gas lights, attached irregularly along the corridor, extremely dim, accentuating a pervading gloom. The wood panelled walls, seemingly coloured black instead of a homily brown, seemed to stretch in both directions into another bottomless pool of darkness. She knew it was an illusion but the sense that this corridor continued forever into an utter stillness was overpowering.

A sudden pang of irrational dread, almost like a punch in the stomach rooted Amanda to the spot. There was a complete lack of sound, of the strongly gusting wind or creak of old timbers, when only moments before these sounds seemed to dominate. She desperately wished that her dad’s room (and Moonbeam’s) was directly opposite hers instead of being at the other end of the corridor. She was alone and isolated, at the mercy of any spectral terrors that might creep up on her.

More babyish feelings she thought as she made the arduous and slow effort of getting a grip on herself; the reason these noises had ceased was because they were confined to the Manor’s entrance, that was the explanation.

Taking a deep breath she turned in the direction of her bedroom, her footsteps on the uncarpeted wooden floorboards echoing loudly. It was not long before she reached her destination passing two adjacent doors leading to other rooms. Directly in front of her door was an identical one, once again dark brown, panelled and faintly whorled.

At last Amanda opened her bedroom door and stepped through the threshold.

If it was not for the faint light coming from the corridor the room would have been as dark as a windowless dungeon, thick curtains covering the one small bay window. But soft illumination soon seeped from a bulb screened in a purple lampshade with dangling cloth tassels, revealing the space of a teenager’s bedroom, now as neat and tidy as a company directors office but soon to revert to the condition of adolescent chaos.

No wood panelled walls here but plain dark blue wallpaper, ready for Amanda’s lurid metal and goth band posters to be blue tacked into place. Her single bed was pushed hard against the left wall, covered in a black duvet with matching black pillows; the top of the bed near the window, where the ceiling sloped down in the corner. Hanging over the bed was a long line of shelves, four in all, holding well thumbed paperback horror novels, fantasy stories, books on vampires, the occult and the supernatural, some classics (Frankienstien and Dracula), and what she called miscellaneous weird stuff (Burroughs and Kathy Acker).

The right wall also had shelves, next to a stereo system and speakers, wedged with shinning CD cases and some vinyl, decorated with figurines of classic movie monsters, a human skull, a coffin and a blood thirsty looking rubber vampire bat (that she would eventually get around to hanging on the ceiling).

Near those shelves was her computer standing on a polished enamel desk, glaring black, fitting in neatly with the dark coloured decor of the rest of the room. The place also contained a large widescreen TV and DVD player with a huge lived in armchair angled towards the screen (a long line of DVD’s ran the length of the wall behind the TV) and a modern dressing table with mirror and chest of draws that would contain her clothes and other oddments; the boxes of clothing left by the removal men lying unopened near the door.

Hurling the suitcase roughly onto the bed, to relieve the tension if nothing else, Amanda lowered herself into the armchair and took a bite out of a cheese sandwich, surveying her new abode. As the layout was almost exactly like her old bedroom in San Francisco, the unusual nervousness she felt was replaced for a fleeting moment by a feeling of coming home. It was her domain, her space, a place to retreat to when things got a bit too much, a sheltering womb.

But then it returned quickly to her mind that once, admittedly a long time ago, that ancient monstrosity of a mirror once hung on these walls.

She got up and closed the door slowly, the fear prominent once more. It made a slight click when it finally shut, but to Amanda it sounded like the heavy iron doors of a tomb closing forever.

Standing very still, staring at the closed door, Amanda wondered what to do next. She realised that she was very tired; it had been a very long day and she had very little sleep on the aircraft. The obvious idea of curling up underneath the duvet and finding rest was appealing but the thought of turning the light out and releasing the ever present darkness into the room was a huge deterrent.

It was no good she said to herself, she had to face her fear as the old house was her new home and there was no getting away from it. She reached out to her bedside light residing on a low table and turned it on. She then went to the switch next to the door and flicked it off.

Suddenly everything was dimmed even further and like black holes in a comforting reality, the shadows stepped out to obscure the far corners of her room. She walked slowly to the window as if stealing herself to commit a terrible act and quickly pulled back the black curtains.

The view that confronted Amanda was partly obscured by the weak illumination, so with a deep breath she turned the light out. Ivy, too much like the artificial vines and creepers enwrapping both the looking-glass and the banisters, clustered near the window’s edge, seeking to stealthily invade her insecure but only sanctuary. The obscenely profuse garden, its incredible chaos of life and the stagnant pond were covered in the murkiness of night, but at the far end of the wilderness she could just make out the dilapidated greenhouse, the moonlight unveiling it sporadically each time it escaped from its cloud cover. She shivered slightly as she thought of what was contained in that darkened shell once roofed with glittering glass; that unholy mirror.

Far clearer were the silhouetted outlines of the suburban houses, distant island cliffs of normality, their lighted windows shining like beacons above the desolate garden. In between two houses she could just glimpse the river Thames, its service rippled with the silvered reflection of the moon.

Startled by the cackle of an urban fox like a witches laugh coming directly from the garden, she almost toppled the night light in her haste to turn it on. She backed away further into her room, clasping her body with her arms, her heart suddenly at her throat.

She mumbled a swear word as she stood paralysed with fright, never before having heard the cry of a fox.

With a massive resolve she threw her self between the enclosing arms of her armchair and curled up into a ball, her knees near her chin.

After a while the death like silence became too much. She plugged in the hi-fi, grabbed a CD at random and fumbled it into the machine, pressing the play button on the remote. A solid unyielding wall of distorted guitars, drums, and yelling vocals made the speakers shake, striking her in the ears and making her flinch. Disparately grappling for the remote that she had allowed to fall on the floor in her shock, she eventually found it and turned down the volume.

Letting the powerful noise of the music wash over her, calming her with a familiar, repetitive but evolving intensity, drowning out the oppressive silence which clung tenaciously around her, she drifted into uneasy sleep.

Awaking as if crawling from a retreat of safety, Amanda found her self surrounded by silence once again, overlaid by the returning sounds of the wind and minute shifting of timbers; but what must have awoken her was the incredible rise in temperature. It was absolutely boiling, her body, still clad in jeans and sweat shirt, drenched in perspiration and her clothing sticking to her as if she had a fever. She looked at her watch; it was about twenty minutes past two in the morning, over four hours had past since she had first entered the bedroom.

Why was it so hot?

She leapt from her armchair, pulled of her sweat shirt and wiped the sweat from her face with her hand.

The fear like a briefly forgotten enemy had returned to her, heightened by the strange conditions reigning in the room. Her fright was raised to near panic levels by the fact not only of the unnatural heat but of the sudden arrival of the noises of the house.

She was immobile, unsure what to do next, when, beneath the sounds of the creaking and flexing of the Manor, she heard a soft, hardly perceptible sound of scratching coming from the wall that her bed was against.

It was regular, persistent, with a dying rhythm like the last exhausted efforts of a condemned prisoner clawing at the brick walls of its prison. It was issuing from low down, near where the wall meet the floor and it must have been coming from outside. The scratching had to be caused by a vine or a creeper moving in the wind, she desperately rationalised. If not…

Her curiosity overcoming her apprehension, she slowly moved towards the wall. Her concentration in keeping the paralysing anxiety at bay was so strong that she did not perceive that the gleam emitted from the bedside lamp had mysteriously diminished, shrinking into a tiny spark, allowing the black shadows to emerge menacingly from the corners.

When she finally reached her destination the scratching had ceased but something even more disturbing had replaced it, bringing a breathless gasp from her lips.

A softly spoken but horribly bleak female voice , fading in and out of hearing as if it came from a faulty radio, was speaking from the other side of the wall.

It whispered pleadingly, repeating its garbled message over and over, but most of its words were inaudible. She did manage to extract from the confusion, the sense that the despairing voice was calling for help and she caught the words ‘my child’ and ‘the eye, the eye,’ but beyond that no meaning could be discerned.

Amanda believed she had never felt so frightened before. She had enveloped herself in scary imagery, in the darkly supernatural, had lapped up the terrifying, immersed herself in the frightful, but these had now intruded into real life, challenging her conception of what was reality and what was imaginary. She rushed headlong, slamming the door behind her, still clutching the sweatshirt as she ran unthinkingly towards her father’s room.

Passing the stairs with their exotically carved banisters she reached the end of the corridor, still lit by the fake Victorian lamps, blocked off by a ubiquitous wood panelled wall. The terrible warmth had dissipated leaving behind the normal heat of an English summer’s night, but this observation was right at the back of her mind as she fixed her eyes onto the door of her father’s bedroom.

As she stood there numbed, a random thought involuntarily came into her mind of her dad lying in bed with Moonbeam beside him. She suddenly felt deeply uncomfortable, angry and childish all at the same time. Here she was having run away like a six year old from ridiculous terrors of the night to wake her daddy with a nonsensical tale of spectral voices and rises in temperature. She could well imagine the reaction she would get.

She felt frustrated tears streaming down her cheeks and she quickly stifled a sob. She liked to think of herself as tough, unsentimental and rebellious, a flouter of convention, someone who revelled in the horrible to shock her elders, but here she was crying like a baby.

Having calmed herself slightly, her tears drying and putting the sweatshirt back on, the thought of losing control and blubbing like a scared child now made her angry. Even so she could not face sleeping in her room. She would return and pick up her duvet, go downstairs and sleep on the settee in the sitting room. She began to step slowly down the corridor in the opposite direction.

Coming to a complete halt as she passed the landing, her eyes were on the door to her bedroom, but her mind was wondering what was wrong with the scene directly in front of her.

It came to her like a flash. The side of the passageway where her bedroom resided had transformed itself. The corridor had lengthened; on her right hand side instead of three doors there now was four. Her bedroom door had a companion, a doorway that logically must lead onto a chamber that was certainly not there before. The manor, like in a dream, had been expanded impossibly by at least four metres. There was no corresponding entrance on the opposite side of this new door and thus the wood-panelled wall which marked the end of the corridor was now at an abrupt angle.

Amanda felt giddy with bewilderment, but then the crippling and immobilising terror clutched at her insides once more, intense and physical. There was no doubt now that she was witnessing an intrusion of the supernatural, a breakage of the barrier that separated the mundane and everyday from the unfathomable. The extreme temperature, the eerie pleading voice, the cackle coming from the garden might all have some natural explanation, but this…

All her instincts told her to flee, to run, to get as far away from this situation as she possible could, but an overriding curiosity burned just as strongly. Her need to know what lay behind the phantom door was powerful, a compulsion to unveil the unknown, to stare at the forbidden.

Moving like a somnambulant she reached the entrance to the ghost room, observing that the oaken whorls on this door were older, less polished, diseased by some deforming sickness and scratched with marks.

The door was locked and no matter how hard she jiggled the doorknob, pushing her shoulder against the besmirched wood, it would not budge. Droplets of perspiration were beading on her skin once more, for this end of the corridor had deposited her back into the zone of humid temperatures. She thought she could detect a smell; an unpleasant scent of rotting wood and dying vegetation, arboreal decay like inside the greenhouse.

The instinct for flight was an imperative command screaming for attention in her head.

Deciding not to enter her room to pick up the duvet but to walk as fast as she could to the staircase, she observed a keyhole beneath the doorknob, quite large enough to be able to see what lay beyond.

As if she was a voyeur she lowered her head and peered, squinting her eye, through the hole.

She was looking at what she thought was a Victorian bed chamber, its walls smoothed over with interwoven floral patterned wallpaper, lit by a ghostly radiance of flickering candle light. An ornate brass candle stick with four prongs, hot wax running down its edges, resting on an old style dressing table, produced the illumination, vaguely revealing a sturdy looking iron bedstead in the centre with frilly, fluffy feminine coverings. A flowered china bedpan and a metal bedwarmer with a long wooden handle could just be seen poking out underneath. A window, the same as in her own room, looked out on complete darkness but for the reflected spectral shapes of the interior.

But what drew or rather tore Amanda’s eyes as if from their sockets was a mirror, the looking glass found in the greenhouse, now nailed to the right wall, immaculate and undamaged. Its every insidious detail was as clear as if an unseen bulb lit it from within. Its carvings were in ghastly motion; the tortured human shapes wroth like mutating worms, the abominable foliage wrapped around itself, moving endlessly, the fruits like overripe bags or lungs inhaling and exhaling.

Most monstrous of all were the twin eyes, at the top and the bottom of the looking-glass. They were shockingly alive, both of them bulging and pulsating, the horrid inner ichor spasmodically vibrating and gyrating in the eye sockets. The top eye burned with hatred, the bottom shook in abject fear, that if it had been attached to a mouth would be hopelessly screaming.

But it was the hate filled eye that held its slight female victim in its baleful gaze.

A young girl, not much older then Amanda, wearing a white rumpled chemise, stood barefoot before the vile glass. She was extremely thin, except for the bulge of her belly, protruding with budding new life, and her hair, blonde but unwashed and greasy, hung grass like over the mound of her pregnancy. The shape of her lips deformed by a nightmarish compulsion, her face soaked in sweat, she held shaking in her hand a surgical knife, its sharp silver blade pointed menacingly at her heart.

Suddenly reacting, her absolute terror banished for a fraction of a second by an impulse to rescue the girl from her suicide, Amanda gripped the door handle, shaking it violently, cursing loudly, while kicking viciously at the locked door. She failed in her attempt, unable even to create a dent, and exasperated, filled with total helplessness, she at last fled but tripped over the uneven surface of the floorboards, knocking her head painfully.

Getting up and clasping her head she looked back. The corridor had returned to its normal dimensions. The spectral door had vanished.

With an irritated scowl on his features, her father, tightening the belt of his silk dressing gown, came forward hurriedly. Moonbeam’s head peeked around their bedroom door, hiding her nakedness.

“What’s all this noise for Amanda, it’s nearly three in the morning!”

But she did not reply, her mind reeling. There was something else bothering her about the hellish scene in the haunted chamber, picking at the battered defences of her mental security.

She had gazed briefly into the further recesses of the mirror and behind the reflection of the tormented girl was not the expected image of the bedroom but an expanse of muddy green stone; a primeval fortress with a lofty roof made up of arched vaulting, broken by gaping holes, through which huge tropical fronds reached their swollen limbs to the cracked flooring. Black tunnels lead away on each side; a crumpling staircase, more ruin then actual stairway, rose diagonally to a tiny archway high on the wall. There were pictures directly painted on the walls, the designs of which were obscured by livid growths of fungus, pictures of grotesque monsters, reptilian and insectile. And the whole forbidding interior was awash with jungle flora; bristling vines and creepers clinging on the vertical services and clustering ferns springing from the cracks in the stone work.

Her father came closer, disturbed by her silence. Standing up, she forced back tears and brushed past him, walking rigidly to the staircase. Her dad stood still, too dumfounded by her expression to act.