The Patchwork House Read online

  The figure was that of a man, tall and thin. He wore a blank expression, regarding me with hollow eyes. His neck was slashed open, causing his head to loll unnaturally to one side. The cut was deep and ran from one side of his neck to the other. There was no blood. The torchlight caught fragments of internal muscles, arteries, windpipe.

  The gash was just above his dog collar.

  I backed away, moving around the table, never letting my torchlight leave the figure for a second as it stumbled into the library. It stared at me, making some godforsaken hissing sound as it tried to speak. It could not. Its vocal chords were cut. I could not tear my eyes away.

  It reached out to me. I had run out of space to retreat. My back was now against the window. I started to move to the side as it lurched around the table. It wanted to get to me, I didn’t know why, but I knew with absolute certainty that I did not want those pale, lifeless hands to touch me.

  I was in the corner now, with no escape. I started to sob, couldn’t help but think about how it would kill me. I didn’t want to die.

  Oh God, those hands on me. Cold, so cold. I kicked out, struggled to get free but it would not let go.

  “Get off me!”

  Still it held on. The dead priest’s face was just inches from mine, its cold dead hands clamped against my arms, pinning them to my sides, the torchlight angled upwards making its face and neck wound even more horrific. The smell was rank like rotten meat left in the sun for days. It pushed its dead face even closer. I felt like I was going to black out.

  And then it spoke.

  It managed to say just one word. One simple word was all it could manage. It rasped and gargled the word, mangling it almost beyond comprehension as its torn throat tried to spit it out.

  “Three.”

  And then it let me go. I huddled in the corner, crying and gasping for air. The dead priest turned and walked from the room. Once out in the corridor it turned left, heading back towards the stairs. Then it disappeared from view.

  I gasped and choked in the corner, listening to its receding footsteps in between my own uncontrollable heaving for breath. I threw up against the wall, violently. Then I crashed into one of the chairs, unable to remove the dust cover before I fell into it. I sat there for some time, the acid taste of sick in my mouth and the smell of the dead priest lingering in my nostrils. My arms hurt like hell where it had grabbed me, and I was shaking uncontrollably.

  It took me a long time to regain any semblance of composure. For a moment I considered following the priest to see where he was returning to, but the thought of that vile corpse coming anywhere near me a second time… it made me want to throw up again.

  Eventually I stopped hyperventilating. I needed water so badly, but I didn’t really want to go downstairs right now. I could make my way to the bathroom along the corridor.

  Drinking could wait a minute.

  I kept the torch focused on the doorway, but there was no sign of movement. I couldn’t hear anything now, except my own breathing, which was a relief.

  Concentrate on putting it all together.

  I worked hard to slow my breathing and tried to think about that one word the priest had said. Clearly I had been wrong. The fifth ghost, the one in control, wasn’t the priest after all. Father Jeremy was trapped by the clock before Percy had died. The dead priest was number three. Percy was number four.

  So who was in control? Who was making my life such hell? Who was number five?

  I heard the distant drumming again, just like before when we were in the lodge. I shone my torch out the window but I couldn’t see anything. It definitely sounded like it was coming from outside. So I tried something else. I switched off the torch and just stared into the darkness.

  There, down in the herb garden, a small figure moved along the path, casting a faint glow on the plants on either side. A little boy with a tin drum.

  And then I realized Percy’s mistake.

  The old man assumed he would take the fifth face of the clock when he died. He thought he would be the one to take control of the house and of the other ghosts. The original three ghosts, plus the dead priest, and finally Percy himself.

  But the mistake was easy to see in hindsight. While the lavender lady and Percy’s grandfather both haunted the house, the little boy with his toy drum was only ever seen outside the house.

  The little boy was free. He wasn’t held in the thrall of the clock. The entity had no power over him. Percy had miscounted, and when he died there was still one more space in the clock’s rogues’ gallery.

  Somebody else had died in this house. Between Percy’s death and our arrival, someone else had passed away in the house and was rewarded with mastery over everything.

  So I was back to square one. I had no idea who or what I was dealing with.

  But the priest’s visit to the library wasn’t a coincidence. The entity had wanted me to see it. It had wanted me to hear its torn throat struggle to tell me it was ghost number three. It wanted me to work out who it was.

  Somehow, that chilled me even more. It shouldn’t have been a surprise—the entity had been toying with us all night. Knowing however that this thing, this being, was intelligent, insane and powerful… I realized there was no way for me to win. My only option was to try and escape again.

  So I rose shakily to my feet. I stumbled out into the corridor, trying to keep my balance. By the time I made it to the top of the stairs, I was ready to collapse. The encounter in the library had drained my strength and whatever resolve I still had left. It was a struggle just to put one foot in front of the other. So I stopped for a moment and listened. There was no sound of footsteps. No signs of movement at all.

  I hurried down the stairs, turning right at the bottom into the living room. I didn’t stop to look around, just went quickly into the dining room.

  My heart sank. The window was unbroken again. I would have to try to break it once more. The heavy chair I had used wasn’t there either, just leaving the lighter ones. I might be able to break a window using one of those, but it would take a few tries. So this room, the dining room, had moved in time to a point either before the window was broken, or after it was repaired. Since the big chair was gone, that implied that my breaking of the window was in the past. If it hadn’t been broken yet, the chair would still be here.

  I remembered back to when Beth and I spoke to Arthur. He had warned us about recent events when vandals had broken a window at the back of the house. Could this be what he was talking about? Was I the vandal?

  I moved over to the window and felt around the edges. The caulking was dry but pliant, which confirmed the recent replacement of the window.

  So now I knew two things. This room was now in the future, after the breaking of the window. It was also in the past, relative to our arrival at the house. Since Arthur said the vandalism was recent, that meant the chunk of time between my breaking the window and our arrival was likely not very long.

  So all I had to do was break another window and then leave the room. The entity would then move the room forward in time again to a point where Arthur had called in the repair people to replace the glass, so at least one day closer to the day of our arrival.

  Eventually, the entity would take me back to Beth and Derek. Of course that was assuming it didn’t work out what I was doing and send me back to 1966. It also assumed that Beth and Derek were still in the house on the same night of our first arrival.

  I took a deep breath. Too many assumptions…

  Arthur had said that the vandals broke the window on Wednesday. That meant that today was probably Thursday. I had to get back to Saturday, which meant two more time jumps. I figured the rest of our equipment had been moved to Friday, so I could assume the entity would skip that day and I only needed one more time jump to get back to Saturday. This theory included a whole heap of guesswork, and it made my head hurt, but it was all I had to go on. Chloe was hidden somewhere in all these days as well, and I had no clue where she was.


  I froze. I could hear something. It was so faint I almost dismissed it. A moment’s pause confirmed what it was: the ticking of the clock. It was gnawing at my brain again, seeming to grow louder now that I was aware of it. Could I really hear it from here? That irritating anti-rhythm, setting my teeth on edge and unsettling my frazzled nerves.

  I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the incessant noise. I had to concentrate. Trying to work out how to get back to Beth was making my head spin, and the unnatural ticking was freaking me out. I tried to concentrate on the task at hand. All I had to do was trick the entity into making me jump in time. Simple, right? But what could I do to prompt the entity to make me time travel?

  As far as I could tell, the entity would cause a time jump for three reasons. The first reason was to split us up. Since there was nobody else to split me up from, I couldn’t exploit this to trigger a new jump.

  The second reason was to prevent an escape. I could go smash another window, but Arthur said there was only one recent case of vandalism. If I caused another, would I change history? Would the entity send me into next year to avoid a contradiction? If I did enough damage, would the police come? Should I set a fire? What if nobody saw the fire and called for help before I had burned to death? Yeah, maybe not. Feigning escape was an option, but perhaps not a very good one.

  So that meant I would try the third method and see how that went. The third reason for a time jump was to separate us from our equipment.

  I was about to take a huge gamble. Just thinking about it made me nauseous. But if I got this right, I’d be back with Beth. Perhaps I’d be back in Chloe’s time instead, or back with all the equipment. My mobile phone, the camera, the charger, the lamps…

  If I got it wrong, I’d end up in the middle of an entirely different night, all alone, with no light. Or worse. The entity seemed to be able to move parts of the house forwards and backwards in time. Perhaps only the room with my equipment would jump and I’d be left exactly where I started.

  I could still escape. I could smash another window and leave immediately. I could hide out in the lodge until dawn. Then I could run away and never come back.

  But what about Beth? I’d spent my life running away from women as soon as they got close, treating them like shit. Before, it didn’t bother me. Now I cared. I cared about Beth. She was everything I could possibly hope for and then some. She was smarter than me, better looking than me, yet she wanted to be with me. How could I let her go? The old me would feel threatened, would feel that there was too much pressure. I would throw it all away because of some misguided sense of self-importance. That was the old me. I wasn’t like that anymore. I had changed.

  Or at least I told myself I had changed. If I ran away now, I would simply prove that the selfish, egotistical little shit I used to be had not changed one bit.

  If I ran away now, Beth and I would be over – assuming she ever got out too. If I didn’t at least try to rescue her, there would be no future for us. To leave her here, to make her suffer when I could have at least tried to find her, I just couldn’t do it. She had probably also worked out the triggers for the time jumps—maybe she was in the process of trying them out herself. I knew she wouldn’t give up on me, so I wasn’t going to give up on her.

  I left the dining room and returned to the hall via the living room. Once again I didn’t let my torch waver from the direction I was heading in. I even resisted looking up the stairs as I passed by. I hummed Ode To Joy under my breath, mostly to drown out the ticking.

  I headed straight for the drawing room.

  As I entered, I looked around, just in case all our equipment had magically returned. It had not. The room was as untouched as it was the first time we’d entered the house.

  I checked that I still had my matches and candle stowed away. Then I placed both torches on the table in the middle of the room, both still on.

  Then I left the room.

  I stood in the hallway, the light from the drawing room casting a dim glow. I closed the door.

  And I waited.

  There was no sound. No movement. I was alone in the dark

  I could see the outline of the door in front of me, lit from behind. It was pretty faint and cast no light into the hallway.

  “Come on. Come on!”

  I was waiting for the light around the door frame to go out. When that happened, either the room had jumped in time or I had.

  The glow refused to disappear. It stubbornly stayed on.

  I banged my fist against the door.

  “Come on, you fucker,” I yelled.

  Still nothing.

  I turned towards the stairs, or where I thought they lay.

  “I know you can’t resist this. Take my torches you bastard. Leave me in the dark. You can do it. Go on.”

  I turned back. The glow was still there.

  And then something occurred to me.

  Every time there had been a time jump–that I was aware of–we had been in a separate part of the house. Not just in the next room but a different section. The house was a mish-mash of different architectures, built in different eras. Perhaps the entity was able to make sections of the house jump but not individual rooms. Perhaps the very fragmentary nature of the house itself was what gave the entity the ability to move pieces of it around in time, rather than the whole building jumping together.

  It was just a guess but it fit with my experience.

  The drawing room, hall and living room were all in one section of the house. The oldest part built in the Gothic style. The kitchen and dining room were in the part of the house that had burned down and been rebuilt.

  I had to leave the oldest section of the house. And that meant going further from the torches and the meager light.

  I wanted to light my candle. I didn’t though. If the entity knew I still had light, it might not bother to separate me from the torches. It probably knew anyway but I couldn’t bring myself to give everything up just yet.

  Tentatively, my ears straining to hear any unusual sound while my eyes showed me absolutely nothing, I walked away from the drawing room. I moved slowly, mindful that I could veer off course and walk into a wall. Or, worse, I might bump into the stumbling corpse of a dead priest wandering about in the dark. But there was no sound, just my own footsteps and the creaking of the boards beneath my feet. I kept going, assuming I was walking towards the kitchen. I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was absolutely, completely and utterly dark.

  I struggled to control my breathing. With every step I felt more and more panicked. I fought down the urge to turn and run back to the drawing room as fast as I could, to grab the torches and to find something to smash a window with, to run and run and never come back. I thought of Beth. I pictured her in my mind. I stopped, turned and checked that the glow around the drawing room door was still there. It was, and my eyes drank in the light greedily. I had to tear my gaze away from the dim rectangle. I positioned myself once more so that the drawing room was behind me and I kept moving forward.

  Eventually, I stumbled down the slight step into the kitchen.

  I felt the air change behind me. The hairs on my neck stood up. It was a feeling I was familiar with, even though I’d not noticed it before because I’d been running or shouting or just plain terrified. It was a feeling that seemed to accompany shifts in time, or at least that was my guess.

  I turned.

  The light around the drawing room door was gone.

  The entity had taken the bait.

  And now I was in the dark, with no torches, and still completely on my own.

  I strained to listen. Not a sound.

  I could resist no longer. I pulled out the matches and I struck one. I expected a spectral face to loom out of the darkness but none came. Instead I could make out the parts of the kitchen nearest to me, and I could see the reflection of the flickering match in the window. I couldn’t see very far into the hallway. I took out the candle and lit it, shaking the match out befor
e it could burn my finger.

  Now I could see further. There was no light coming from the drawing room, so that part of the house must have time-jumped. A day–maybe more–separated me from my torches.

  But the ghost wanted more. It wanted every source of light I had. I could feel it. I knew that my strategizing about numbers of days and how many jumps it would take to get back to Beth were completely worthless. What mattered was whether or not I was willing to trigger the jump. Could I really go through with it? Could I take that final step and leave myself completely vulnerable.

  I’d come this far. I wasn’t going to run away now.

  I found a stand in one of the cupboards and placed the candle into it. Then I put the only source of light down on the floor of the kitchen. The flame glowed against the tiles, casting a flickering pool of light across the floor. I put my matches down nearby, not close enough for the candle to light them, but near enough that I could find them in the dark if I had to.

  I took a deep breath.

  I stepped over the threshold, back into the hallway.

  The atmosphere shifted again.

  I was plunged into darkness and thrown into hell.

  CHAPTER 12

  This latest jump changed everything. I could hear it coming from above. I stepped back into the kitchen; the room felt different now than just moments ago. The candle and my matches were gone and it was pitch black again, but above my head there was noise. Creaking floorboards. Running feet. Wailing and screaming. Something bad was happening, upstairs in the apartment.

  I wanted to run away and hide somewhere. Instead I stumbled forwards, hands outstretched, blindly making my way towards the apartment door. I scuffed my shoulder and elbow against the wall first, then moved along until I felt the indentations of the door frame. I located the handle and opened the door.

  A gust of cold air blew outwards, surprising me. I took a step back, my hand still holding the door, straining to see anything at all. I heard someone at the top of the stairs crying in pain. The sound twisted my guts with anxiety. It could be Beth. It sounded a bit like her, though I’d never heard anyone make such a twisted, tortured noise as this before.