Answer me, I beg of you. Please.
No one answered him. William didn’t even have the words to explain, nor the energy to fight against the clashing energies that the living had brought into Hanbury.
Mike was taken from Hanbury next, alive but gravely wounded.
William’s corpse was the last to leave Hanbury.
He sat on the bottom step of the stairs, hugging his knees to his chest, as he watched a swarm of officers enter his home, some dressed in strange hazmat suits, others wearing masks and gloves. In a way, William was almost sure what they’d find when they opened the basement door.
His dead body was laid out on the ground at the bottom of the steps, head cracked, skin bloated like playdough, blood staining the cement floor. What he thought had just been a bad dream was, in truth, a terrible reality. The broken step, the fall, the pain – and the nothingness.
It all made sense now.
The night he ran away from Robert Thomas’s ghastly portrait, and the entity in Archie’s red coat, had been his last night as someone who breathed, someone who had fresh blood pumping through his veins.
One of the police were interviewing Stephen in the drawing room, his sobs the soundtrack for William’s new existence, as he watched the bag containing his body be carried out from the cellar, and put into the back of an ambulance.
“Three days, at my guess,” one of the officers said. “It’s colder down there so the body is… it could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Should open some windows before we leave. Flies had a whale of a time. Stinks like…”
“Death,” another answered with an almost mocking tone. “No shit, Sherlock.”
“Poor boy, dying like that. Do you think it was the lad we just carried out? Edward, wasn’t it?”
William wanted to clap his hands over his ears and block out the conversations happening around him. On they went, talking about him like he wasn’t there, when he was. Wasn’t he?
“This house is in a terrible state, going to be a nightmare to piece this one together.Totalnightmare.”
“Once the other two survivors are seen to, and stable, we will arrange for statements to be taken. Get some answers…”
It continued until they left, closing the door on William, who still hadn’t moved from his perch on the bottom step of the stairs. There were no tears left to cry, no feeling except the hollow ache of being dead.
Knowinghe was dead.
William wouldn’t remember how long he sat like that, staring at the front door, waiting for someone to return for him – to tell him this was all one big joke, some nasty, cruel hoax or… literally anything.
Anything but what it really was.
No one came. Eventually, he found the energy to stand, walk up the stairs and crawl into Robert’s bed. He supposed it was his now. This was his house, after all, just as Archie wanted.
Forever.
Robert and Teddy had found their peace, and finally, William had worked out the cost to him.
Everything. It cost himeverything.
William Thorn curled beneath the sheets, closed his eyes, and imagined the pressure of the duvet was the arms of the man who’d left him. If he inhaled enough he could still catch his scent across the sheets, the very-real imprint of a body once laid out beside him.
Archie’s coat was still here, but William didn’t have it in him to reach for it.
Poetic justice.
William waited a long time for Edward to return to him. After all, Edward had promised. Except, as time went on, that promise seemed to fade away just like William did from memory.
Days felt like weeks, weeks felt like years, and to William, years felt like minutes. That’s how time worked for him now, unimportant as everything else. Except for Hanbury – he clung to it, his home, the promise of a future he, too, would never have. But he’d sunk the talons of his determination into the very foundations of this place and refused to let go – ever.
It wasn’t uncommon for strangers to break into Hanbury Manor. William would hear the giggles of teenagers coming in the dead of night on some drunken ghost-hunting expedition. Sometimes, he would give them the show of their life – scratching words into walls (they could thank Archie for that idea), throwing open cupboards, banging his feet on floorboards or whispering in their ears.
