The Patchwork House Read online

  I lifted it out and took it to the bed. Before sitting down, I was careful to make sure I was the only one there. I removed the band and opened the first page.

  The paper had, “Percy Logan’s Journal”, written on the cover. I recognized the handwriting from the library earlier.

  Was the man I’d seen Percy? If it was, that meant the entity outside the room was someone else. So if it wasn’t Percy and it wasn’t his grandfather then who the hell was it?

  I wanted to read some of the journal, but not here. Escape was still foremost in my mind.

  I put the book down on the bed and moved to the casement window. I tried sliding the bottom frame upwards but it wouldn’t budge. I strained against it for about a minute but only succeeded in wearing myself out more. I checked all around the edge of the frame but I hadn’t missed a latch anywhere. The window was stuck closed. I looked around for something heavy enough to break the glass, or bludgeon the frame with, but all I could see that might do the trick was the chair wedged under the door handle. I wasn’t about to remove that.

  Clearly I wasn’t going anywhere right now. I sat down on the bed again, took out the candle and matches, wedged the candle into a standing position between a small bedside lamp and an empty vase, and lit it. The candle sputtered and then filled the room with a soft, flickering glow.

  I turned off my torch. No sense in wasting the battery.

  Then I picked up the journal again. I glanced nervously at the door before starting to read. I was hoping Percy would mention the entity or the clock, or the number four. It might shed some light on how to find the others or even get rid of the entity. Knowledge is power and all that. Clearly Percy, if it was really him, had wanted me to read this. I wasn’t going anywhere for the time being. I had all the time in the world.

  That’s when the connection hit me. Number four. The clock. The fourth clock face didn’t correspond to Chloe. Instead it was tuned to Percy’s ghost. Percy was number four. When Percy held his wrists together he was trying to tell me that he was a prisoner. Percy was as trapped here as me. The old man was number four! So that meant the first three clock faces must represent the drummer, the lavender woman, and Percy’s grandfather. The fourth was Percy himself. And that left one more. The fifth ghost. The black mass. The entity that could mimic voices, could crush a car with a bookcase hurled out of the window, and could make people and things move around in time. It was the last one in.

  It was in control.

  I opened at a random page and started reading. Percy’s handwriting was very neat, almost serial-killer-neat in fact.

  Sunday, December 5th

  I can’t sleep. The banging keeps me awake every night now. It drives me to distraction. I am tired all the time, I cannot get any rest. As soon as my eyes close, Grandpa starts up his racket again. The old bastard will not leave me alone. He’s been dead for forty-five years and he still will not leave me alone. Some nights I wake up and he’s sitting by my bed, staring at me. He calls me useless, tells me I’ve wasted my life and amounted to nothing. The family line will die with me and he’s ashamed I’ve not found a woman to help me pass on my cursed genes. He never lets up.

  I rubbed my eyes, which were still stinging from the burst of light. It was hard to read by the candlelight but this was fascinating stuff. It seemed the original ghosts of Binsham House were not as benign as Arthur had made out.

  Many entries said much the same thing, they outnumbered the mundane accounts of Percy’s participation in the village choral society or his outspoken opinions on tourism in the area (he was dead against it, refusing to open the house and grounds to visitors even to raise money for his church).

  But most of the entries were about the regular torture Percy suffered at the ghostly hands of his dead grandfather. Before tonight I would have assumed his writing was that of a delusional geriatric, but now…?

  Monday, February 15th

  I spoke to Father Jeremy again today about my predicament. He is friendly but young, and thinks me a doddering old fool. I asked him to come up to the house, to see for himself what goes on here and the nightly abuse inflicted upon me. He simply smiles and says of course, but not tonight. Always not tonight. Always got something more important to do. I hate his smugness and his youth. He thinks he’s above everyone in this village despite the fact that the estate makes me worth one hundred times his value. Nobody wants to hear my opinion these days. All in too much of a hurry to modernize everything.

  And Grandpa? Yes he visited me again last night. I am not afraid of him. He does not usually try to hurt me. But he is disruptive. He shines lights in my eyes. He bangs things in my room. He shouts and yells and screams at me. He even once threw a glass at me. I told him he could have killed me and if he did, I would haunt his buggering arse for the rest of eternity. He didn’t like the sound of that but he didn’t throw anything at me again.

  But as I grow older I know inevitably I will be joining him one day. My Lord in Heaven, I beseech thee not to abandon me to such a fate as this.

  As time went on, it was obvious the lack of sleep and peace was affecting Percy’s sanity. His entries became less coherent and more sporadic. Months would go by with no update, followed by rambling pages cursing everyone he came into contact with and calling his grandfather dirty names that belied his intellect and education.

  What I held in my hands was quite simply an account of one man’s descent into madness. Before tonight I would have dismissed it as the ramblings of a deranged lunatic, conjuring the image of his dead grandfather in order to focus and justify his rage.

  Now I knew better. I’d heard his grandfather in the lodge, confirming what Percy himself recounted in the book. After my encounters with the entity tonight, I was ready to believe anything.

  I flicked through more pages, scanning the odd sentence here and there and finding much the same, yet making even less sense as time went on.

  And then suddenly, one year ago, everything changed. The journal entries became lucid, much more mundane and far less disturbing to read. There was not a single mention of the abusive grandfather. When had everything changed?

  I flicked back some pages, then some more, until I found the last rambling account of sheer hell at the hands of his ghostly ancestor. And one word leapt from the page immediately.

  Clock.

  I scanned to the start of the entry and began to read.

  Thursday, July 3rd

  My salvation is at hand. Greg from the antique shop called me. He says he has something that can help me. He has no idea if it will work, but he’s been worried about me for months, especially after Father Jeremy told him about my story.

  I headed down there after lunch. It is hard for me to drive these days, my eyesight is deteriorating, but this was worth it. As soon as I saw the clock I wanted it, regardless of its more unusual properties. I have never liked clocks that much, don’t keep many around the house, but this one spoke to me. It is beautiful. It stands on a tall column and has five clock faces all grouped together on one side. It is quite exquisite, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

  And this clock is going to save me.

  Greg explained how it works. There are five faces, he said, and the clock is able to ‘capture’ five spirits. The final spirit, the fifth one, would gain control over the other four, and over the entire house, able to control every aspect of it. I found this fascinating. It had been sold to him by a traveller who had unwittingly released its previous occupants and had tried to recapture them within the clock. He had failed, so instead he moved on, but he took the clock with him. He said the part he got wrong was to not physically connect the clock to the house itself. The clock must become part of the very foundations. He had ignored that part and he had released five very angry spirits in his house.

  I brought the clock home and have read the little note he placed inside it over and over again. This could be my salvation.

  Monday, November 18th

  Construction on m
y new wine cellar is nearly complete. Grandfather is mad as hell at me about it, but I do not care. This whole house has been torn down, rebuilt, burned down, reorganized, rearranged and rearchitected so many times in its potted history, digging a cellar will make no difference. I have bought a case of wine and intend to order more. It is something I have a passing interest in. The real trick is connecting the clock directly to the foundations of the house. This is a unique building, in that what still stands today is not what originally stood on these foundations, so I pray this will work and will bring me peace.

  Thursday, November 28th

  Tonight I started the clock. There are three ghosts in this house. When I die, I need to be the fifth. I am missing one. If I am not the fifth, I will not be in control. I must be in control. Grandpa is asking about the clock. I don’t know or care if he understands what it is for. It is part of the house now. There is nothing he can do about it. Maybe he sees the future. Maybe he knows what’s coming. All I know is, as soon as I have a fourth ghost, I can send my grandfather away and never suffer another night’s unrest for the remainder of my years.

  Tuesday, December 1st

  I have done what I needed to do. Last Sunday I finally convinced Father Jeremy to come to the house tonight. I told him to tell nobody, lest they fill his head with more stories of my insanity. I told him that only he could save me, and as his parishioner it was his duty to attend to me. If he saw or heard nothing unusual I promised never to mention this again. Reluctantly he agreed, probably just to shut me up.

  I am not proud of what I did tonight, but I did what I must do. I now have my fourth spirit. I regret that I did not have time to give Father Jeremy last rites nor did I bury him on sacred ground. But thanks to his sacrifice, when I die, I will be the fifth ghost and I will be in control. I will shut my grandfather out of the house and I will reach back through time and ensure that from the moment the clock is started, he can no longer bother me. I will not suffer his abuse any longer!

  Seeing Father Jeremy’s spirit absorbed into the clock was truly remarkable. It took time for the good priest to find his way to it, and all that time the clock remained open to receiving new guests. But after about an hour of searching, the spirit found its way to the clock and was safely ensconced within. It was fascinating and disturbing. I hope that I will not have to carry this guilt for much longer.

  Perhaps, once I am gone, someone will discover this diary and remove Father Jeremy’s remains from the hidden space behind the wine racks, accessible from the corridor to the left of the ballroom stage. His body is safe there until such time as our spirits are released from this realm. I apologize to his parishioners. He was a good man, if naïve, and he did not deserve what happened to him. I am a desperate, old man and I need to ensure that I do not end up in this house with my grandfather for all eternity. I will make my peace with Father Jeremy on the other side.

  And that was it. After this entry there was no more mention of Percy’s grandfather, or the terrible thing he had done. It was just Percy’s regular everyday life for several months following the starting of the clock and then no more. The last entry was from just over a month ago. And now Percy was dead.

  I reread December 1st’s entry again and shuddered. Percy had created his own ghost in the house. Was he really admitting to murder?

  Was there a sixth ghost in the house?

  And that’s what didn’t make sense. If Father Jeremy had become the fourth ghost because Percy murdered him, then Percy should be the fifth ghost. Why then, was the black mass so firmly in control? Why had Percy held up four fingers to me? Why did he hold up his wrists as if they were bound? Why had his plan failed so spectacularly?

  Maybe time was mixed up in this hell house and Percy had occupied the fourth slot while the priest he murdered became number five. Was the black mass, the entity that had been terrorizing the four of us all night, the ghost of a murdered priest?

  I’d be pretty pissed too, if I’d taken the time to visit a parishioner’s house late one evening and then been murdered. I might take it out on the next four people to spend the night at the house.

  Frankly, Percy’s ghost scared the shit out of me too. He’d sat right here beside where I was sitting now, and shown me where his journal was and complained mutely that he was a prisoner of the man he killed. And that was the point, he’d killed a man. I saw no remorse in the words of the journal. I saw no begging for forgiveness from the phantom locked away in this room. It was as if the murder was just something that he’d been forced to do to rid himself of Grandpa’s spirit. Maybe Percy’s grandfather was right to be pissed at his descendant. Maybe the real monster in this house wasn’t the entity after all. What hell would Percy have unleashed if he had ended up linked to the fifth clock face? I still didn’t quite understand why that had gone wrong for him, but maybe I was glad it had.

  “Ghost number four, your time is up,” I muttered to myself. I switched on one of my torches and blew out the candle. Cooling the wick with wetted fingers, I made sure it wasn’t going to ignite anything. Then I put the candle back in my pocket.

  I removed the chair from the door, took a deep breath and stepped out into the corridor.

  CHAPTER 11

  My fear mounted as I moved towards the stairs, torch beam swinging from side to side. But at least now I understood the entity’s pain and why it was lashing out.

  I had no idea whether I was in the past or the future relative to Beth and Derek. The library window was not yet broken so it appeared as though our group had not yet arrived, which in theory meant I could leave a message for when we did get here. Perhaps I could wipe out this time stream altogether and find myself in the car leaving the house before night fell, having received a clear and precise warning not to stay the night.

  To do that I needed something to write with and I needed to leave the journal somewhere we would find it as soon as possible after arriving.

  I knew exactly where to place it.

  I entered the library with trepidation. After all, this was the first place I encountered the entity. Or perhaps it was Percy who had walked in, crossed the room and walked out again while I was cowering under the table. Either way, I knew I would be there, and I knew it would be a good place to leave the journal.

  I hurried over to the unbroken window and looked down at the driveway, angling my torch to try to see if the car was there.

  It wasn’t.

  It made sense. Either we’d left or we hadn’t arrived yet. Either way, the car wasn’t there tonight, whenever tonight was. But here was concrete evidence that we had moved in time, more compelling than the disappearance of the others, or Beth’s phone showing an impossible time. The car would take a lot of work to move from the driveway in its wrecked state. It would have taken heavy equipment. Loud equipment.

  If I thought about it, the entity had been moving us around in time all night. How else to explain why Derek didn’t hear Chloe just before she disappeared? It had been playing games with us from the moment we arrived.

  It wasn’t hard to get disoriented, especially if different parts of the house could move around to different points in time. This was just too weird. I needed a white board to work it all out. Or perhaps a whole bunch of string.

  I noticed there were no other clocks in the house. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it was true. The only clock we’d seen was in the wine cellar, and clearly that one wasn’t keeping regular time on any of its five faces. Percy had said in his journal he didn’t like the things, but without them it was impossible to tell where and when he was.

  Everything, it seemed, was intended to put us off guard, make us unsure and scare us shitless. Ghosts usually wanted to move on, or to get intruders off their territory. This entity seemed to want neither of those things. It just wanted to fuck with us. Maybe it wanted revenge but had selected the wrong targets. Maybe confining Percy’s ghost to his room for all eternity wasn’t enough for it.

  The library had a sma
ll bureau tucked in behind the door. I opened it and quickly found a pen. I started writing in the front of the journal.

  The ghost is a priest murdered by Percy! I wrote. Then I listed the dates of the pertinent entries. Then I added, Do NOT stay in this house after dark. Weird shit will happen. Jim from the future signing off (don’t ask!)

  I looked at what I’d written and it bothered me. If I read this note, I’d have more questions. Was I really writing it in the future? I’d want to stay and find out the answers. Maybe this was a really bad idea. Maybe I was in the future anyway, so leaving the journal for me to find soon after arriving here was a waste of time.

  Too late to worry about that now. I heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside. They were different from the entity’s steps. It was hard to put my finger on why. Were they lighter? They were certainly irregular, almost shambling. I didn’t know who this was but it was abundantly clear to me that this was not the entity walking towards the library.

  I stepped back, away from the door. Was this Derek coming? Or Beth or Chloe? It didn’t sound like them. Was the entity screwing with me again? I kind of hoped it was. I wanted to talk to it, tell it I understood how unfair it was that Percy had murdered this innocent clergyman who was simply doing his duty.

  I stood with my back to the centre table, light shining towards the open door. Whatever it was would see the beam illuminating the landing wall opposite, but I wasn’t about to turn it off. I had a feeling it would find me anyway, and I wanted to see what I was facing.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Was that my heart or the stranger?

  Finally, a figure appeared in the doorway. I gasped, nearly dropping the torch. Somehow I managed to keep hold of it. The figure turned and I saw its face. Fear gripped me like never before. My guts twisted and a low whimper escaped my lips.