The Patchwork House Page 20

  Something strange happened.

  I halted at the top of the stairs. A weird feeling came over me. It was like the world shimmered around my head. For a moment I thought I was time jumping again, but this felt different. What the hell was going on? Now, terrifyingly, I couldn’t move. I was stuck in one place, unable to even move a finger. What was it doing to me?

  Then I started walking.

  I cried out in shock, but my words sounded muffled and unreal. I wasn’t in control of my legs or my arms or any part of me. I was walking back to the library. I couldn’t stop myself. Visions crowded my head of pushing Chloe out of the window, or stabbing her with my knife, or some other terrible thing the entity was going to make me do to her. I couldn’t stop it. I was on a roller coaster just before the first big drop and I’d changed my mind, I wanted to get off. I felt sick, overcome with disgust at the lack of control over my own body. I was lurching like a fucking zombie and I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I’m coming, Baby” I said. Except, I didn’t say it. The entity surrounded me, I was sure of it. I felt like something evil, something utterly wrong, had invaded every cell of my body. I couldn’t stop talking.

  “Follow my lamplight, I’m here.”

  I raised the lamp to illuminate the library door as I approached. Behind me, I could hear Derek, still downstairs but close, trying to locate the staircase in the faint light from the drawing room.

  Chloe appeared in the doorway of the library.

  “It’s me,” I said, involuntarily. “It’s Derek! Oh my God, Chloe, you’re alive!”

  “Jesus, Derek, oh thank God, thank God.”

  Chloe rushed forward. I tried to scream, tried to tell her to keep away. I wanted to yell at her, I’m not Derek, I’m not him! Keep away! Keep away! Please…

  Chloe hurled herself into my arms. I enfolded her in a tight embrace, all the while saying things like, “Oh baby, oh my love, oh I’m so sorry I lost you.”

  And then she kissed me. She kissed me like she hadn’t seen me in years. Like she loved me more than anything else in the world at that exact moment. And despite everything, I sank into that kiss. I don’t think I had a choice, I couldn’t have resisted if I wanted to. But to have a living, breathing woman kiss me felt so good, it eased my panic and calmed my nerves.

  We parted. I parted from her. I felt myself in control. The lantern lit up our faces. The entity was gone. Chloe was staring at me in confusion, clearly shocked to see that my face had changed, from her perspective.

  I swung the lamp around.

  Derek stood at the top of the stairs. The real Derek. The living Derek. His expression was dumbfounded, totally blown away.

  “Oh no,” I said. “No, Derek, no. Derek it’s not what it looks like.”

  “You fucking bastard.”

  “No, Derek, no!”

  I could only keep protesting. I didn’t know which words would convince him. I didn’t know what to say. I felt guilt and self-revulsion and anger and hatred towards myself and the entity that made me do this.

  “I fucking hate you,” he screamed.

  And then he charged.

  CHAPTER 17

  He hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I slammed into the carpet, burning my elbows and nearly knocking myself senseless. The lamp rolled out of my grasp.

  “Derek, please,” I wheezed, my gasps barely audible. “You’ve been tricked!”

  But he didn’t listen. He rained punches on my face and chest like a man possessed. Pain exploded in my punished skull. I struggled to bring my arms up to defend myself.

  “No, Derek!” Chloe said, rushing forward.

  Derek ignored her. He hauled me to my feet.

  “So that’s why you were being so brave, eh? Couldn’t wait for a little alone time with my wife. Maybe you’ve spent hours with her up here, have you? You told me I was the ghost, well perhaps it’s you. Perhaps I murder you right now and you become the fucking entity, so you can get me out of the picture and give your living self a little time with my woman.”

  He was ranting, out of control, but at least he wasn’t hitting me. My ears rang and I saw stars. I wanted to go to sleep and let it all be over.

  Derek hit me again and I heard something crack. It might have been my nose. I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

  “Oh God, Derek, please stop hitting him!”

  “And you!” Derek roared, rounding on Chloe. “I can’t believe I actually risked my life to find you. I don’t even fucking love you, you bitch! But I’m your husband, and I stayed faithful to you all these fucking miserable years, and you repay me by sleeping with this loathsome pile of shit?”

  “It’s not true, Derek, please don’t say these things.” Chloe was a mess. I could see it even in my shell-shocked state.

  Derek raised a hand to strike her.

  From out of nowhere, I yelled something incoherent. Somehow I managed to get to my feet. Derek halted the punch and turned to me, a sneer of contempt writ large across his face.

  “Well look at that,” he said, pushing Chloe away. “Finally Jim-boy grows a pair. At last he takes a stand. Nobody to spoon feed you now. Nobody to tell you how awesome you are while you squander everything the good Lord gave you. You lazy sack of shit. Come on then. She’s my wife but you tainted her. Who knows what the hell you did to her while I wasn’t around.”

  I’d heard enough. My vision was clearing and my face was starting to hurt like daggers had been plunged into my eyes. It fuelled my rage. This fucker had to be taken down before he killed me and then turned on Chloe.

  I roared at him, like a wounded animal, and hurled myself forward with everything I could muster. He seemed surprised by the ferocity of my attack, stumbling backwards as I swung my fists at his face. I don’t think any connected. I was far too uncoordinated to avoid striking his arms as he raised them to protect his head. But it pushed him back, away from Chloe and down the corridor.

  He blocked one of my punches, grabbed my overextended arm and slammed me into the wall. I discovered that there were areas of my body that hadn’t been hurting before, because they hurt like fuck now. He punched me in the stomach four times. On the fourth punch, I heaved and would have vomited if there was anything in my stomach. I collapsed, gasping and choking. He kicked me, sending me rolling down the hall. I changed my tactics at that point. Escape seemed pretty sensible, before my brains were dashed against the wall.

  Dead-Derek stood at the top of the stairs. If the others could see him, they didn’t react. I guessed Chloe was too distressed and living-Derek was too rage-fuelled, but I saw him.

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  And he vanished.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Derek growled, clearly thinking I was the one saying I had to go.

  He picked me up and hurled me down the corridor, slamming me into the railing at the top of the stairs. The wood was already slippery with my blood. I felt consciousness slipping away. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t drag myself away. All I could do was wrap an arm around the railing and pull myself down onto the top step. Maybe I could slide down the stairs head first. Maybe I could haul myself up. Maybe I was a dead man. Maybe I would become the fifth ghost after all. Maybe I deserved Derek’s wrath. Maybe I actually enjoyed that kiss with Chloe. Maybe I didn’t deserve to live.

  I forced my head to turn towards him. Lights flashed around my peripheral vision.

  “Derek, please, you have to believe me.” I gasped. I spat out blood and perhaps a tooth. “It’s a trick! It wasn’t me kissing Chloe!”

  “How convenient,” Derek said as he approached. He grabbed a handful of my hair, forcing my head up. It occurred to me that with the entity gone, Derek probably wasn’t under any influence. This really was how much he loathed me. Years of boiling, bubbling, seething hatred finally surfacing in one moment of catharsis. He didn’t blame his father for beating him, he blamed me for causing him to fail, which led to the beatings. And now it
was my turn.

  I knew I couldn’t take much more. Consciousness was slipping away again. The pain morphed into a throbbing pressure around my skull. I had no idea if I was even capable of standing.

  I saw the foot come at my face. I don’t know how, pure self-preservation perhaps, but I managed to reach out and grab his ankle, deflecting the blow and causing him to stumble. He struggled to place his foot on something stable but I was in the way.

  At that moment my strength gave out. I let go of the railing.

  We tumbled down the stairs, he and I. There was a terrible crunch and then a sickening, ripping sound as we went down. I had no idea what the noise was.

  I landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs for the second time that night. I couldn’t move. Everything hurt. I latched onto the pain again, using it to keep myself awake. I lay there, gasping and trying to spit the pooling blood from my mouth. The glow of the lamp from the drawing room cast an eerie pallour through the hallway. From my twisted position on the floor I could see the door. Maybe I could somehow get in there and barricade it before Derek finished me off.

  But Derek hadn’t reached the bottom of the stairs.

  And then Chloe screamed and didn’t stop screaming.

  She stood at the top of the stairs, my lamp in her hand, shining yellow light down the staircase.

  Half way down, suspended on the railing I had broken earlier, was Derek. His lifeless eyes stared out over the hallway as he swung slowly back and forth. I peered at him, trying to focus in the half light. Chloe descended, whimpering in shock, desperately hoping he was still alive. As her lamp neared him, I could see that the broken railing had penetrated Derek’s back as he fell and had burst through the top of his skull.

  Blood dripped from his open mouth. His limbs twitched as his body caught up with the death of his brain. After a time his limbs went still but his body carried on swinging back and forth where it hung from the shattered railing.

  CHAPTER 18

  Chloe collapsed on the stairs, sobbing bitterly, the lamp forgotten on the step beside her.

  I couldn’t move. All I could think about was that I had killed him. I killed Derek. I made the entity. I was the ultimate cause of all the horror that we had been through tonight.

  And that meant I was responsible for Beth dying.

  I’d invited Derek here, and now he was dead because of me. I’d brought Beth along to keep me company on my assignment and now she was dead because of me. Poor Chloe was now a widow because of me.

  I felt like shit. I’d been beaten to within an inch of my life but it wasn’t punishment enough.

  I struggled to find something, anything, worth pulling myself out of this puddle of blood for.

  Chloe. She was alive and her kids needed her. Maybe I could pay my penance by helping Chloe.

  I tried to get up but my body was too exhausted and too battered to respond. I managed to move my free arm a little, and it hurt to do so. I dropped my hand back into the puddle of blood slowly forming there. Some part of my brain was alarmed at my blood loss, but as far as I could tell I wasn’t bleeding out. The blood was mostly coming from a gash on the back of my hand. It should have hurt but so many alarms crowded my brain it was hard to discern where any of the pain was coming from.

  “Chloe,” I said weakly.

  She ignored me, still sobbing over Derek’s corpse. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Chloe, please,” I said. “Help me! We don’t have much time.”

  In fact we had no time at all.

  The entity was forming before our eyes. It poured from Derek’s eyes, nose and mouth like someone had pumped him full of black smoke. In the lantern light, the fog looked like a lightning cloud as it reflected the glow from its billowing surface.

  Chloe recoiled in horror. I still couldn’t move. I just stared at it, watched as it issued from Derek’s broken body. It was like the house was on fire. The smoke collected around the chandelier in the centre of the hall ceiling, enveloping and obscuring it. Just like it had done in the drawing room the first time I had seen it. It looked formless, aimless, and I wondered if it was trying to work out what had happened to it. Regardless, I didn’t have long before it found the clock, gained control and came after me with a vengeance.

  I realized that at any time, Derek’s ghost from the future could return. But it told me it had to go, as if it didn’t want to be here at the same time as its own “birth”. If I was lucky, that meant I had around an hour before the clock sucked the new entity inside. Just an hour to find a way to destroy it. And the future entity shouldn’t bother me during that time. If I was lucky.

  “Chloe,” I croaked.

  She looked up, her eyes puffy and her cheeks streaked with tears upon dried tears upon ruined makeup. She’d clearly been pushed to the absolute limit of her sanity and was faced with the impossible knowledge that her husband didn’t love her and was also very, very dead. And also a violent, evil spirit.

  “Chloe, he didn’t mean what he said,” I lied. “The entity, the ghost, it possessed him. It possessed me when we kissed. It tricked Derek and it made him do nasty things to you. He loved you, Chloe, he told me. He cried out for you when he was scared. Chloe, please.” I was lying to her, but I didn’t have time for lengthy explanations and she was hardly in the mood to hear them. She needed to hang on to the one truth that might help her cope with Derek’s death, at least in the short term.

  “He loved you, Chloe. He wasn’t himself when he said those things.”

  She stood very slowly, turned to me and then descended the staircase. I tried to sit up without much success, wondering if she was going to pick up where Derek left off and start kicking me.

  She didn’t.

  Instead she helped me up. I leant heavily on her but I managed to stand. My spine felt like it had been run through a mangle. My head throbbed, my nose was probably broken and I was sure that more of my skin was covered in bruises than was left unblemished. The gash on my hand dripped more blood onto the carpet and I was pretty sure I’d cracked some ribs. But I was standing—with help—and I was able to talk.

  “When I kissed you, I thought it was Derek. I saw Derek.”

  “It was the entity tricking us. It had control of me for a time. I couldn’t stop myself from talking to you and kissing you back. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

  It was my fault but I wasn’t going to argue with her.

  “Chloe, you have to help me. We don’t have much time and we have work to do. We have a chance to finish the entity off for good but I need you. Will you help me?”

  She nodded, her expression blank. She seemed utterly numb, devoid of emotion now. At least she was functioning and responding to instructions. I could use her.

  “Go upstairs and fetch the book I dropped on the landing when Derek attacked me.”

  She nodded and, lamp still in hand, ascended the staircase. Her eyes flicked between her dead husband and the mass still swirling around the chandelier on the ceiling. If she realized now that Derek had become the entity, she didn’t say anything. She was likely too shocked to put two and two together. The foggy mass was sinking slowly to the floor now, still swirling but moving downwards.

  As Chloe ascended, I dragged myself to the drawing room, all the while clutching hold of the wall to keep me upright. With luck I didn’t have to worry about being time shifted and losing both Chloe and the book. With the entity staying away from its own creation, for the time being I believed we were safe. All that would change when the clock absorbed Derek’s ghost.

  I pushed myself into the drawing room and struggled my way over to the second lamp. I picked it up and headed back out to the hall. The entity was nearly at floor level, still unfocused and shapeless.

  Chloe met me at the bottom of the stairs. She handed me the book and then gave me a hug, clearly relieved to see that I hadn’t been whisked off to another time, leaving her all alone again. She had tak
en a big risk by leaving me to go back upstairs. I knew we were unlikely to be separated, but she probably didn’t. I admired her faith in me.

  “How much time do we have?” she asked, her voice still lacking emotion. Perhaps she had shut off that part of her brain and was dealing just with facts and instructions right now.

  “Not long. Soon the clock will turn that thing into Super-Specter and we’ll be in serious trouble.”

  “What clock, what are you talking about?”

  “In the wine cellar. I guess you’ve not seen it yet. It has five clock faces, like one of those airport clocks showing different time zones, but it’s old. When we first saw it, I think we were in the future, so the fifth face was already occupied. Right now it’s empty and about to receive its final guest. I think the clock is in a state of flux but I’m really only guessing.”

  “None of what you’re saying makes sense.”

  I wished Beth was here. She’d get it. Hell, she would have understood way faster than me and might have sorted this mess out hours ago.

  Chloe must have read my mind.

  “Where’s Beth?” she asked. “Is she lost too?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I didn’t need to. She could read my face even through the mess it was in. She gave me a hug and didn’t pursue the question. “Just tell me what to do,” she said. I had no idea how long she had been alone but she was clearly happy to be with another living person again, regardless of what happened to her husband. I guessed that she was thinking about her children, determined to prevent the loss of both their parents.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  Still leaning on her for support, I led her into the living room. It would be faster through the kitchen, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near the entity still swirling in the middle of the hall.

  Not saying a word, the two of us entered the dining room. I hesitated after entering, wondering who I would find in here. But the room was empty and the chairs were all back where they belonged. I felt a pang of loss.