William nodded but feared that he’d spew sick across the table if he opened his mouth. He gathered himself, all whilst Edward studied him. It took a handful of deep breaths to steady the rocking in his stomach. “Of course you can.”
“Thanks.”
There was one more question that William felt the need to ask. “Do you know what happened to Robert Thomas?”
Edward blinked, but his expression was stoic. “I do.”
“He… killed himself, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
William felt the overwhelming urge to run. To run from the conversation, the manor, the secrets hiding in the dark corners. But he’d never outrun the secrets lurking inside of him. They were so knotted with this place that he would never get far from it.
“Part of me doesn’t want to know, but then another part of me does. Where… did he die?”
Edward seemed to ponder the question, his lips screwing closed as if the answer was too disgusting to say aloud.
In the end, he didn’t need to because the manor answered for him.
Not too far above them, floors beyond the kitchen they sat within, a bang cracked the stillness of the manor. It carved it in. A cold rush of dread weighed William’s body down, so much so that he couldn’t move a muscle. Although they hadn’t seen what made the noise, William’s mind painted a picture of a door smashing into a wall. It was one of those sounds so familiar he didn’t need to question it.
A door had opened.
Edward made a move for the stairs. Before he got a step away, William clutched his wrist, sinking fingers into skin, anchoring himself to the man. “Please,don’t.”
Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Don’t acknowledge it.
Edward looked between the doorway and to William, contemplating his choices. “If someone’s upstairs, I should go and see them out.”
The air reverberated with the bang of wood against brick. It took a few moments to settle, and the manor still seemed to tremble with the aftershock. All this talk of ghosts really had put William on edge.
“I want you to answer my question,” William demanded, refusing to break their line of sight. “Where did Robert Thomas take his life?”
Edward took a second to gaze behind him. When he faced William again, there was no denying the fear which seemed to cling to his hazel eyes, darkening them to pools of spilled ink. “The attic.”
Nothing was out of place within Hanbury Manor. William and Edward scoured every room, searching for doors opened when they shouldn’t have been.
At first, they found nothing out of place.
It was Edward who noticed strange marks carved into the doorframes first. It looked very much like a figure of eight scored from jagged lines. They’d been etched into every door frame, the place almost always the same.
Their search ended on the attic floor, only to find the door securely locked. Not open at all. William tried the handle three times, the cold metal almost burning his palm, only to give up when it didn’t open.
“I can’t say I’m not relived that the door’s still closed.” Respite came thick and fast but didn’t last long. “You heard it though, right? It wasn’t just me. I’m not going…”
William couldn’t finish that sentence.
“Oh, I heard it,” Edward answered, leaning over the banister and gazing down to the bottom floor. “Maybe it was a bird flying into the window or something. A big rat running about…”
Spiders and rats, William’s own personal evil. “Ghosts are one thing, but rats are another. If I see one, I’m out of here.”
Edward chuckled at that, the sound parting the heavy tension the banging sound had conjured.
Deep down, they both knew that rats or birds weren’t the cause of the bang, but then again, nothing else seemed to give them any answers. All William recognised was that he wanted to get as far away from the attic as humanly possible. Knowing what had happened inside of it made him feel sick.
Naturally, his frantic mind went back to last night when he saw the figure in his dreamless state, hanging mid-air behind the door he looked at now.
Outside the dirty window, the sky was darkening. Dusk was upon them. And with it, the realisation that William had another night to survive in Hanbury. There was no ignoring the sickening dread that clutched into his chest. It was so overwhelming that the request practically slipped out of his mouth before he could claw it back.
