The Patchwork House Page 12

  Derek opened the door to the wine cellar, which creaked appropriately, doing its best to add to the creepy atmosphere. The offbeat ticking greeted us, just as understated as before and no less unsettling. It was cold again in this part of the house. The air outside was pretty chilly, but in here it wasn’t refreshing or bracing. It was a stifling cold, like being inside a tomb of ice.

  Derek was already descending by the time I reached the doorway. Beth was at the top of the stairs, about to follow. I hesitated, struggling to cope with going down there again. I tried to think happy, comforting thoughts as I followed Beth. It didn’t work. I wanted to sit down on the steps and close my eyes. Fuck that, I wanted to run out into the fresh night air. I guessed Beth was feeling the same way. She may not show it, but I suspected she drew strength from her anger at my willingness to abandon Chloe. So be it.

  The wine cellar was just as it was when we’d first come down, except for the broken lamp on the floor and the single pile of dust covers instead of two. The uncovered clock stood in the centre of the space still ticking away. As we approached it I could see that the three faces in synch with each other all said it was nearly midnight. Beth switched on her phone and checked the time, showing it to me. I could see that they did indeed match.

  “So I think these three are us,” said Beth, pointing to the three clocks running at normal speed. She indicated the top face, currently showing a time of 3.30 AM. “That one is our murky friend, given that it ran backwards.”

  “So the fourth one must be Chloe,” said Derek. The last clock still wasn’t moving but was now showing 1.15 AM.

  Beth nodded. “So all we have to do is wait for an hour or so and we’ll catch up to her.”

  “No way am I just going to sit here and wait. What if she moves again?”

  That was a good point and Beth didn’t have an answer. Perhaps the entity was moving Chloe back and forth in time to keep her away from us. That’s assuming we weren’t all insane for even contemplating a time-travelling ghost in the first place.

  Maybe this was all a drug-induced hallucination.

  Derek was prodding the pile of dust covers with his foot. Eventually he plucked up the courage to lift them. There was nothing of note underneath, just more covers. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  “Look at this!” Beth said. She was behind the clock now and had opened a hatch at the back so she could access the inner workings. The wooden backing swung on little brass hinges. The ticking was louder with the mechanism exposed. The letters AW were clearly etched into the brass frame of the uppermost clock.

  We peered inside. There was a piece of paper tucked in between the outer casing and the brass frame of the clock itself. Beth used her nails to tease the edge of the paper, slowly working it free until she held it in her hand. It was a neatly folded piece of notepaper. When she opened it out, one side revealed handwriting in neat rows.

  The writing was in English, but much of it didn’t make any sense. It seemed to be instructions for using the clock, but for what purpose it was hard to tell. There was no context to the writing, so if you didn’t know what you were trying to achieve it was impossible to tell from these instructions.

  Beth read them aloud. “Ensure the clock base is connected directly to the foundations of the building. Wind the clock, set all five faces to the same time, some five minutes hence. Then wait for that time to arrive. Just remember, only the last in has mastery over the others.”

  “What does that mean, last in?” Derek asked.

  I didn’t have a clue. Clearly neither did Beth.

  “Now we know why the clock is in the wine cellar though,” she said. “So that it can be connected to the foundations of the house.”

  I took the paper from Beth. “Only the last in has mastery. That’s an odd statement. So whoever is last in will have mastery over… which others?”

  “Those who were first in?” Beth said.

  “First in where?” I asked, peering inside the clock. “It’s pretty cramped in there.”

  “Maybe we should try setting the time ourselves,” Beth said.

  We stood in silence and let that sink in for a moment.

  Slowly, we all moved around to the front of the clock. Nobody made the first move.

  “Are you going to do it then?” I asked Beth.

  “The one that hasn’t moved is the fourth clock, right?” Derek said, his hand reaching out to touch the immobile face. “If the top one is our friendly visitor, and the first three are us, then the fourth one must be Chloe.”

  I nodded. “Makes sense. Also, it fits with what’s on the paper. The last in has control, which is true if the last in is represented by the top clock, which corresponds to the ghost and…”

  “I’d say he’s in control of all of us,” said Derek.

  “Assuming it’s a ‘he’,” Beth said.

  “Didn’t you say you thought the other ghosts were trapped in the clock?” I asked Beth.

  “It was just a theory. I’m just guessing. Maybe the clock isn’t anything to do with what’s happening.”

  I coughed. “Whatever it is, it’s got us where it wants us down here. So let’s try this and then get out of here.”

  Beth reached out and tried to change the time on the fourth face. She pushed the hands as hard as she could but they would not move. I gave it a try, and then Derek, but impossibly the hands didn’t shift by a millisecond.

  I tried preventing the hands of the other clocks from moving and they were just as stubborn. “I guess the only thing that’s moving these clocks is time.”

  Beth returned to the back of the clock and shone her torch inside. “I don’t see a pendulum,” she said. “I could stick something in and try to jam the mechanism.”

  We searched our pockets but none of us had anything suitable.

  “Maybe if we could remove the clock…” Beth suggested.

  “Chop it down?” I said.

  Derek was hesitant. “We could lose Chloe forever.”

  “We’re never going to find her while that thing is in control,” Beth said. “I say we try.”

  I glanced nervously at the fifth clock, as if expecting the very mention of such a thing would bring the entity hurtling towards us.

  “Okay,” said Derek. “Let’s do it.”

  The three of us hurried up the stairs and went outside. The night air and the lack of ticking was a relief. I locked the outer door behind us so nothing could come through and then we crossed the path to the garage. The access door was locked too so I fumbled with the keys before settling on a longer one I’d not used for anything else. It was the right key.

  The door came open with a tug. The hinges creaked so loudly the sound carried out over the grounds and the lake, echoing into the distance. It was agonizingly loud.

  We’d not had a chance to look inside during the day. Now it occurred to me that there might be a vehicle in here. Unfortunately, the garage was empty of cars or motorbikes. I would have settled for a mobility scooter at this point. There was a bicycle in one corner but it looked pretty old and both tires were flat. It was better than nothing. A wheelbarrow stood upended against one wall.

  There was a large amount of gardening equipment. No ride-on mower, unfortunately, though that would make a useless getaway vehicle anyway.

  Derek went straight to the equipment. I saw him pick up a large axe and examine it with his torch. Then he spotted an item that made him drop the axe and hurry over to it. It was a chainsaw.

  “This should work,” he said, hefting it. It was big and powerful-looking, but also old. I’d noticed a chainsaw on the back of Arthur’s truck as he left the grounds, so likely this one had sat unused for a while.

  Derek checked there was gas in the tank and then tried it. He yanked on the chain several times but produced only a cloud of debris and the smell of burnt oil.

  He didn’t give up though. On about his fifteenth try, amazingly, the saw roared into life. The noise was staggerin
g, like a bunch of cats thrown into an industrial blender. The air filled with the acrid smell of ozone and more burning oil.

  Derek turned it off and the blade sputtered to a stop. The garage hung heavy with dust, soot and sudden silence.

  “Let’s get back to that clock,” Derek said.

  I was extremely nervous about entering the house with potentially deadly weapons. There likely wasn’t much we could do to the entity, and if it could throw a heavy bookcase out of a window then there was plenty it could do to us. I hefted the axe anyway and dutifully followed. Disconnecting the clock from the house really did seem like our best option. I just hoped it wouldn’t result in poor Chloe being even further removed from us in the process. I shuddered again when I thought about her. Assuming she was conscious, she must be going out of her mind with terror. The only thing keeping me sane was that I had Beth and Derek here with me. I still didn’t know why Derek was so pissed at me, but at least I felt more secure as part of a group.

  We crossed the path and paused at the door to the house as I took out my keys. With the axe in one hand it was hard to select the right key with my free hand, so Beth took the keys from me and quickly found the right one. She opened the door.

  That cold dread gripped me again as we walked back into the house. Derek went first, the chainsaw empowering him somehow, like he was now the one in control. Good luck to him. His attitude wasn’t rubbing off on me. Beth too seemed more determined, now that we had a mission and a possible end to this nightmare in sight.

  I was more skeptical. I’d come face to face with this thing twice now and I knew what we were doing was going to bring it back for a third go around. I didn’t want to see it again. Already I knew that for the rest of my life, should I survive the night, I would see that thing every single time I closed my eyes. I would never get a good night’s sleep again. Right now though, that was the least of my worries. If the ghost wanted us dead it probably would have finished us off hours ago, but who the hell knew what it wanted?

  We descended the steps once more, torches sweeping the wine cellar for any possible appearance from the entity. I illuminated the clock and noted that the time shown by the top clock face had not changed much since we were last down here. The ticking was as bad as always and it set my teeth on edge. For the moment at least, we had not attracted the entity’s attention.

  I had a feeling this was about to change.

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked.

  Derek answered by firing up the chainsaw. If the machine was deafening in the garage, down here it was ear-bleedingly loud. I clutched my hands to my head as the roar of the power tool reverberated in the confined space. Beth staggered back, hands also clamped to her ears. Derek was laughing. I couldn’t hear him, but my torch lit up his face enough to know he was almost maniacal. Beth managed to keep her torch on the clock long enough for Derek to aim the roaring blade.

  As he connected with the clock though, something in the chainsaw went CLUNK and it whirred to a halt.

  “Shit,” said Derek. He tried to start it again but it was having none of that. “Shit shit shit!”

  “Is something jamming it?” I said, struggling to hear anything over the roaring in my ears. .

  “No I don’t think so.” Derek’s voice strained with frustration. “Fucking thing is just old. As soon as it hit resistance…” He tossed the power tool to the floor where it clattered loudly.

  “Try the axe,” Beth said.

  Before I could protest, Derek grabbed the long-handled weapon from me. He directed Beth to shine her light at the clock again, then planted his feet and made ready to swing.

  “Hello?”

  It was very distant, but we all heard it.

  “Hello, is anyone here?”

  Someone else was in the house. It was a man’s voice, but so soft and muffled I could only just make out what it was saying over the incessant sound of the clock and the ringing in my ears. We strained to hear for a moment longer.

  “Who is that?” Beth asked.

  Derek dropped the axe and pulled out his torch. “Come on,” he said, switching it on.

  He and Beth headed to the stairs. I lingered for just a moment, wondering. I shone my light at the clock face. To my horror, the fifth clock face was showing the same time as the first three. I knew what that meant.

  “Guys, wait!”

  I ran after them, taking the steps two at a time. Already they were hurrying through the corridor.

  “Stay together,” I pleaded with them. “Wait up, please.”

  But Derek was too busy calling out, Beth right behind him.

  “We’re here,” Derek yelled. “We’re coming.”

  “Guys, there’s nobody there. It’s a trick. Guys?”

  I was at least three seconds behind them. I had to catch up before they crossed the ballroom. Why were they ignoring me? Did they think I was calling out to the new arrival too?

  “Derek? Beth? Wait up.”

  Beth turned back to me, not slowing her pace. Both had reached the door to the conservatory. They were about to step over the threshold.

  “Hurry up, Jim,” she called, and then turned to face forward again, never once slowing.

  I burst into the conservatory and halted, my torch flicking this way and that.

  The room was empty.

  Sure there were plants everywhere, and the air was thick with humidity, but there was no sign of Beth and Derek.

  I had known it, deep in my heart. I dreaded this. I told them we needed to stay together at all times but here I was, alone anyway. I knew that nobody had come to rescue us, and I cursed Derek and Beth for falling for such an obvious trick. But then they’d not heard the entity mimic someone else before. I couldn’t be certain that’s what had happened, but it seemed likely. Clearly it had been a trick when I’d heard Derek screaming in the kitchen and I lost the girls upstairs, and now we’d fallen for it again.

  And here I was, in the conservatory, alone. The entity had pulled his time switcheroo on us when for just a second we were in different rooms. And now Beth and Derek were as lost to me as Chloe. I had no idea what time it was, or even if it was the same night. I didn’t know if the entity was in here with me or terrorizing Beth and Derek somewhere—or sometime—else.

  I started crying. I hadn’t cried in a long time but at that moment I couldn’t help it. I sank to my knees and sobbed.

  I’d lost Beth. I was on my own.

  CHAPTER 9

  There was only one thing to do.

  I wiped my face on my sleeve and stood up. I wasn’t beaten yet. I charged back to the ballroom, crossing the room as fast as I could. I didn’t look back. I didn’t look to the sides. I kept my torch beam focused on the door to the back corridor and I kept running. I passed through the doorway, ran to the stairs and plunged down into the wine cellar again.

  And stopped at the bottom.

  I searched furiously with my torch, shining it into every corner. The broken chainsaw was gone. The axe was gone. A dust sheet covered the clock, which was still ticking like an explosive device, ready to go off. I pulled the sheet away and shone my light on the plinth. There was no sign of any damage inflicted by the chainsaw. I moved to the back of the clock, forcing it open and reaching inside. Sure enough, my fingers connected with the piece of paper. I pulled it out and unfolded it, and saw the exact same message as before.

  Again it was like we’d never been there. The entity must have sent me back in time, to a point before we found the wine cellar.

  I really was alone.

  Quickly I checked the clock faces. The first three clocks still all read the same time, which I found surprising. Maybe they didn’t represent the three of us after all. The top clock was showing a different time from the others. That meant the entity wasn’t around right now, but I knew all too well how quickly that could change.

  I had to get out.

  I turned and ran back up the stairs. Once in the corridor I turned and practically fell
upon the outer door.

  Locked.

  We hadn’t locked it when we arrived here. We left it unlocked in case we needed to make a quick getaway. How come it was locked now?

  Of course, I was in an earlier time before we unlocked it.

  I reached for my keys, but they weren’t there.

  I’d given them to Beth.

  I turned very slowly, my torch shining down the corridor and my breath coming in ragged gasps.

  My grip on sanity lost a couple of fingers at that point. I had intended to return to the lodge. There I would wait the night out until the sun came up, and only then return to the house or try to get help. But with this door locked, my escape route was gone. I’d lay odds that all the other doors were locked too.

  I could still try the front door. Maybe I could unlock it from the inside without the key. I struggled to remember the configuration of the lock from the inside of the door, but I hadn’t paid enough attention earlier and now I couldn’t recall if I needed a key or not.

  I hurried back into the ballroom at a brisk walk. It was as fast as I dared go. If I ran I might trip, and the idea of twisting my ankle all alone in this place made me sick to my stomach. I could not resist shining my torch around the room and wished I could stop. The shadows lurched as my torch beam moved, and with every single movement I thought something was coming at me.

  I couldn’t take much more of this. My nerves were already in tatters and now I had to find a way out of here on my own? It was too much for me to take. I felt dizzy and nauseous. As I reached out to grasp the door handle to enter the conservatory, my hand trembled so much it was hard to grip.

  I fumbled with the door handle and nearly fell into the conservatory. Maybe Derek and Beth would jump out at me any moment, now that their little joke was over. We could all have a good laugh and go find Chloe and get the fuck out of here. But they didn’t. I dared not even call their names in case something else heard me. That was ridiculous, because whatever was in control here likely knew exactly where I was and how pant-wettingly terrified I felt.