Curse of the Stag’s Eye (Haunted Hearts)

14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

W hen we arrived back upstairs at the kitchen, Nikesh was still on a high. He told Rhys and Dawn all about the hammer and how it nearly took his head off, which was only a mild exaggeration.

“I don’t think Michael is coming back.” I watched for any reaction from Rhys.

He didn’t give much away. “I should text him and make sure he’s okay — later, though. My phone is switched off now. I promise.” He pulled it from his pocket to prove it.

Nikesh flashed his perfect white teeth as he spoke. “There’s something I want to try, if that’s okay. You’ve got walkie-talkies with you, haven’t you? Radios? Why don’t we try splitting up? There might be too many of us for the ghost to appear fully.”

“You think he’s a bit shy?” I asked.

Nikesh just grinned his perfect teeth. “Rhys, you said the ghost has been heard in the storerooms so why don’t we, like, wait in them? That’s what they do on all those ghost-hunting shows.”

Dawn’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Excellent idea, Nikesh. We can take it in pairs. Me and you, Rhys and Gaz.”

Rhys held up his little spiral-bound notepad. It flopped open, revealing his neat penmanship. “But my schedule. We should have finished and packed up five minutes ago…”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Come on, Rhys, live a little. And I thought your schedule was only for your fake haunting?”

He rubbed his beard. “Not entirely. I always make a schedule. It keeps things orderly.”

I crossed my arms. “I think orderly went out the window when a spooky ring of black smoke tried to electrocute us and a wet hammer tried to brain Nikesh.”

He sighed. “I suppose we could give it a go. I wouldn’t get your hopes up, mind. In my experience, things like this don’t work. You remember how to use the radio? Good. You two take the room on this floor, Gaz and I will take the one on the ground floor.” He took out his bundle of keys and tried several before finding the right one to unlock the little storeroom. A shoddy collection of cheap, plastic shelving held bottles of bleach, rags, and some cracked plastic basins. A mop lay against the wall, over a pair of thick pipes that passed through the room. “Try not to touch anything in there.”

Nikesh went first, checking out the little space. “It’ll be cramped in these. I hope you two don’t mind getting close!”

Dawn giggled and took the door by the handle. “’Course they don’t.” She winked at Rhys, who blushed.

My ears burned a little. Rhys blustered something and helped Dawn to close the door.

When he and I reached the ground floor, Rhys stopped. “We don’t have to do this. We can just tell them we did.”

After seeing the shape in the kitchen, my whole body had gone numb and not even the crisp, foggy air had woken it up again. “Let’s do it properly.”

He took out his walkie-talkie. “Can you hear me, Nikesh? Over?”

The radio crackled “… think I’ve got… hello?… button on the top… let go…”

Rhys sighed. “You have to keep your finger on the button, Nikesh.”

The radio popped. “Got it. Right. Yeah. I can hear you.”

“We’re just getting into the storeroom now. If you see or hear anything unusual, let us know right away. Over.” He unlocked the door and we stepped inside.

I’d been in lifts with more floor space. A stack of plastic storage tubs filled one wall. In the soft lantern light, I could just make out rolls of cable inside, with some gloves and what looked to me like plumbing parts. A bench strewn haphazardly with tools stood on the other side of the room. Rhys closed the door behind us.

He reached into one of the storage bins and withdrew a little grey plastic drum. He sheepishly slid a power button on the back of it. “This is the last speaker, I swear.”

We stood close to each other. Because we’d no other choice. I asked him what we were supposed to do.

“Just wait, I suppose.” He set the lantern on the bench and took out his notepad. “I hadn’t planned for this. My schedule will be totally messed up now.” He crossed a couple of things out on his list, then fidgeted with the aerial of the walkie-talkie.

I didn't know how long we'd be in there and my mind raced with ideas on the many ways he and I could pass the time. My fingers flexed. “Listen, I wanted to—”

“I’m sorry for—” He stopped. “You go on.”

“No, you first.”

“I’m sorry for lying,” he said. “I’m sorry about the speakers. I should have known better. It was stupid.”

“Have you ever done anything like that before? Faked a haunting?”

He shook his head, vigorously. “Never. Never ever, I swear. I promise. God, my palms are sweating.” He rubbed them on the legs of his jeans. “I wish I hadn’t done it. I’m not a liar, not usually anyway. I’m not a conman or a scam artist, honest, I’m not.”

I wiped my mouth with my hand. “You were trying to give us value for money. I get it. And I may have overreacted. What was that thing, in the kitchen?”

Rhys held his hands up. “I’ve read about shapes like that appearing in haunted places. Darker than dark, formless but contained. I think it’s the beginning of a manifestation. An apparition trying to, well, appear.”

“Could it have been a kind of… mass delusion?”

“I don’t see how,” he said. “We all saw the same thing, felt the same thing. It came and went so quickly. I can’t speak for you but I’ve never had a hallucination before. And what are the chances of us having one at the same time, right here, in a haunted lighthouse, for the first time ever?” He gave a little smile that dimpled his cheeks and melted my heart.

When I found the speaker in the kitchen I’d been so angry I thought I’d pop a blood vessel but then that thing, that shape, that ghost appeared and everything else melted away. The shock we all felt when it touched Nikesh was real. It had been like touching a live wire. The whole world tilted after that and being mad about a little, well-intentioned lie was no longer important. And I believed him when he said he’d never faked anything of that kind before.

“Did Michael say anything to you?” His eyebrows pinched in the middle. “Outside? Before he left?”

I cleared my throat. “He told me he never really believed in ghosts. He only pretended he did so he could get into your knickers.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his upper arm. “Dawn was right, then. He did like me.”

I swallowed a laugh. “Didn’t you already know that?”

“Not a clue. I’m not very good at picking up on that sort of thing. If someone is flirting with me they practically need to be holding a placard and ringing a bell announcing the fact. Otherwise, I just assume they’re being nice.”

“When you said you had dinner with a man from the Trust, you didn’t mention that he was a gorgeous, six-foot-two hunk. Were you attracted to him?” I don’t know why I asked that.

“He’s okay, I suppose. I thought you fancied him actually. I thought that’s why you two had been sparking all evening.”

“He’s bloody sexy. That face. Those arms. Those thighs. Shame about the personality.”

Rhys shrugged. “He’s not really my type. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed, like, but I prefer a man with more meat on his bones. And he was a bit too abrasive for me.”

“You prefer someone easy-going?” That didn’t bode well. After my temper tantrum in the kitchen, he would have every right to never want to speak to me again. I would have imagined being stuck in a glorified airing cupboard with me was akin to torture for him but if it was, he never let on. “Do you have a boyfriend? Or a husband?”

Rhys blurted out a laugh. “Where did that come from?”

His voice was deep but not overly so and his accent made me a bit weak at the knees. I’ve always had a thing for the Welsh lilt. “I can't just wait here in silence, it’ll do my head in.”

“I'm used to it, I suppose. I spend lots of time sitting quietly in dimly lit rooms. It's probably why I'm single.” He twisted the aerial. “My last boyfriend thought all this was a silly waste of time. He tried to convince me it was all in my head. Then he tried to convince me that I was imagining the money disappearing from my wallet. He’d lie to me about where he’d been, who he’d been with, and about things that happened between us. He tried to make everything my fault.”

I frowned. “What an absolute bastard.”

He sighed. “I know. And I put up with it for far longer than I should have but I didn’t feel like I had much choice. For a long time, I thought I needed to be with someone else to feel complete. Like I needed someone to be my other half. But after a while of being mistreated by him, I realised that I was enough. I wasn't half of anything if I wasn't with someone, I was whole in and of myself. Together, he and I should have made something new and exciting but, instead, we just made each other miserable. Now, I'll admit, I get lonely sometimes, but who doesn't? The difference is I'm not looking for a piece of me that's missing.”

“Because there isn't one.”

“Exactly. I eventually saw sense and left him. What about you?”

I leaned my shoulder against a wall. “I find it hard to keep a relationship going, to be honest. I'm prone to dropping everything and taking off for a few weeks. Hiking, or travelling, or just...getting away. A change of scenery. I can't bear being bored and I don't do well with routine. I'm amazed that I've stuck with the fundraising job for so long. I think it's the kids that make the difference. Talking to them, hearing what they're going through. And knowing that I can help them. It wouldn't be right to just take off and leave them in the lurch. And it feels nice to do something that matters, for a change.”

I rubbed my nose. “I suppose I've lived quite selfishly for most of my life. I've never really thought about it before. See, this is what happens when I sit around in silence, I start to stew in my own thoughts.”

I started pacing as best I could. I could feel the walls closing in on me, a shortness of breath. My heart was pounding, my fingers tingling. I thought about the remarks Nikesh and Michael had both made. “Look,” I said. “I don’t have a placard or a bell but for the avoidance of doubt, I do—” And then suddenly Rhys was in front of me and I didn’t need to say another word. He pressed his lips to mine and held me in his arms. In the cold, in the dark, his warmth gave me life. He nuzzled at my neck, nibbled my ear, I rubbed my hand through his hair, into his beard, and I kissed him, deeply, passionately, I ran my hands down his back, I squeezed his big, firm bum, he grabbed my hips and pulled me in tight. I wanted to tell him everything but I couldn't bring myself to break the spell, to ruining the moment. And I didn't have to. The lighthouse did it for me.

The walkie-talkie hissed and stopped. Then another hiss, and then a click. A hiss, then a click, then a pop. A hiss that ran on and on. I waited for Dawn's squeaky tones or Nikesh's excited questioning. But neither came.

Rhys held the walkie-talkie closer to his ear, straining to make some sense of the static. The hiss continued, growing louder and louder until it burst into a voice, a man's voice, speaking, shouting, a garbled sentence and then one word, loud as thunder.

“LEAVE .”

Rhys dropped the radio as he quickly covered his ears.

I winced. The radio cracked open on the tiled floor of the storeroom. I grabbed the two halves and clicked them back together. It switched on. “Maybe we’ve picked up on a local signal, some fishermen out on the water or something.” I pressed the button. “Hello, Dawn? Nikesh? Did you hear that?”

The radio hissed. “Hear what?”

I stood up straight. Rhys bit his lip. We waited for a few seconds but the radio made no more noise. I pressed the button. “Stay there. We’re coming up to you.”

After locking the storeroom door behind us, Rhys took a couple of steps up the staircase and stopped. Ahead of us, something rattled. Dawn and Nikesh were two floors up but the noise was much closer. Another rattle, then a tapping. I brushed past Rhys and ran up the stairs as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast at all, if I was being honest. I was built for comfort, not speed.

Rhys hissed at me to wait but I ignored him. I rushed into the first bedroom to find books strewn on the floor and the papers from the writing desk flying through the air. In the middle of it all came a deafening shriek and then a guttural squawk as something flew past my face on the way to the window, knocking me on my arse.

Rhys arrived and quickly slammed the window closed.

“That was a bloody big and very vicious seagull,” I said.

Rhys locked the window. “There’s no such thing as seagulls, remember.”

“Very funny. Help me up.”

He reached out and pulled me up. We stood face to face. "You can't always just blunder through life, Gaz. You need to think things through."

He let go of me and I brushed myself down. "How did it get in? Did you open that window?"

“Not me and I didn’t see the others near it.” He bent down and scooped up the scattered pages. “We’d better get up there before something else happens.” He returned the pages to the table and the books to the shelves. “But promise me you won’t go running off towards any more scary noises?”

I grinned at him. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were worried about me.”

“Could be.” He cupped my elbow and kissed me again. “Or it could be that I don’t have any insurance for this tour.”