It didn’t take long to locate it. The mobile lay, face down, shivering as though it was possessed. The screen was lit up, casting the floor in a stark light. William bent down, knees creaking, and picked it up. It was no surprise the buzzing stopped the moment his palm touched it.
Odd wasn’t even the word for it. Everything about his stay here had been abnormal. More so that there was a notification waiting for him on his screen. He briefly noted the time as half past midnight on Friday morning. That only mattered because the notification waiting for him was timed from hours before, not recent.
No one had been calling him, and yet his phone rang like something possessed.
What waited for him was an email response from his solicitor. William could only read the first couple of sentences without the need to click to open it. The email started with a formal greeting followed swiftly with an apology regarding William’s call and the time that’s passed since. Something about her trying to call during the week but not getting through. Wanting to continue reading, William clicked on the banner and opened the email. It didn’t load. Low and behold, there wasnosignal. Only the continuous spinning bar as the phone struggled before flashing with a ‘sorry, try again’ notification.
He wasn’t about to give up. If the email could be received in the attic, there had to be some sort of service. Hyper focused on his screen, William paced, lifting the phone into the dark corners of the room, hoping that a bar would ping to life and the email would load–
Ice cold agony sliced up his leg. “Shit!”
Hopping on his good leg, William lifted his foot to find the cause. A shard of glass glittered, pierced in his sole. Without hesitation he plucked it out, the wet sap of flesh and blood made him feel faint. Luckily the wound was superficial, but the pain certainly made up for it. It hurt like a bitch, but there wasn’t much blood. He just hoped this wouldn’t be the start of an infection; it would only add to his list of bad luck since stepping foot inside Hanbury.
William flashed the screen down to reveal a bed of broken glass scattered across the floor. The glass from their makeshift planchet.
He backed up, the halo of light sweeping over the entire area. The floorboards had been carved away beneath the scattering of shards. Scratched over and over until the grain had come up, and wood shavings hid amongst the broken glass. But that wasn’t all his torch revealed. There was blood smeared alongside the markings. It was a violent red – fresh blood. Droplets led away from the scars on the floor, a trial leading back out of the attic.
William checked his foot again, making sure it wasn’t his. But his wound still wasn’t bleeding enough.
Then whose blood was it?
The answer came as sudden as summer lightning.
Edward.
The thought fuelled him to get up and hobble out of the room. Now that he was looking for more blood, he found it. Not on the floor, but smudged across the dark banister, half-dried but still vibrant in its colouring.
Out of the corner of his eye, William noticed something else wrong. Different. The already peeling wallpaper, its once royal blue colour now faded to a musky grey, was ripped in places and torn more than it had been. And like the floor upstairs in the attic, it had been scratchedrepeatedly.
William ran shaking fingers over the markings, noticing so many more the further the stairs led down. More blood, more gouges in the plaster. But this time, he recognised something else. A word, or at least he thought it was the beginning of one, hidden beneath the scratches.
Tell.
It was the same in the next patch of wall. And the next. And the next.
The more panicked the scratches became, the more blood was slathered on the wall. Handprints pressed beside the scratch marks as if someone had leaned in, using the full weight of their body to remove whatever had been there.
“Edward, can you hear me?” William called out, aware he couldn’t hear anything and hadn’t for a while.
If Edward was downstairs, he was surely ignoring William. He didn’t call back.
William shouted again, his voice cracking with panic. His feet moved quicker down the stairs, taking two at a time until he landed on the ground floor. “You need to see this!”
Still no reply.
William searched the kitchen and then the back living room, but both were empty. As he rounded back into the corridor, he heard something – scratching, faint and distant. But that wasn’t it.
Someone was crying.
For a moment of seizing horror, William was transported back to the night he heard the same sound from the attic. But this time, he wouldn’t run from it. He rantowardsit. William kept thinking of the blood, the countless patches of scratch marks across the walls, and then Edward.
Had he hurt himself? How… why?
William followed the noise, the entire manor seeming to tip and sway like it moved over water. William had to lean into the wall to steady himself, his head pounding the closer he got to the source.
It was coming from the drawing room – the room that displayed Robert Thomas’s portrait. The closer William got to it, the more he knew that Edward was inside. The door was ajar, warm light spilling out of the crack. He reached for it, noticing more russet blood smudging across the handle and the faded-white frame.
Slowly, he opened it. William half expected to find Robert himself standing in the middle of the room, ready to torment him more. But what he found was far more horrifying than any ghosts.
