Harriet flinched – Norma really didn’t regret a thing.
“But I suppose it was all Norma,” her gran continued. “I had no idea I had ever been anyone else when I killed your parents.” She smirked at Rufus. “I guess it was natural talent.”
“You’ve always been precocious!” Rufus said. “Barely seventy years old and you were already taking the initiative. So admirable!”
Harriet rubbed her eyes. How was any of this real? Could this be happening? “You just … killed them, then? There was no special ghostly reason for that?”
Norma waved her hand airily. “It was a long time ago. If I’d known that ghosts existed, I would hardly have killed them in some little house in the suburbs of Coventry. What use is that? They’re still stuck there on their own. I’d have put them somewhere they could have been useful. I killed them because it had reached the point where they were refusing to do what I said any more. They had to go. They were taking you away from me, Harriet. You’re the only one of them who listened to me. My little protégée.”
Harriet blanched, acid rising in her throat. So she was just easily influenced? She’d been indoctrinated since she was a child.
“Tell us what happened after your real memories came back,” Rufus said.
Norma patted his hand, which rested on her arm. “Well, I remembered how strong and powerful I’d been here, ruling unchallenged for so many centuries. After that, I couldn’t be happy any longer in this body.” Norma gestured down at herself. “I was frail and weak, disrespected and ignored. I wanted – needed – to be my old self again, reunited with my dear brothers. Even if that meant becoming a ghost.”
Harriet had been so upset when Norma died. It had seemed such a pointless accident, just tripping and hitting her head. Was she saying that it wasn’t an accident at all? “You committed suicide?” Harriet gasped.
Norma sniffed. “I don’t like that word.”
“But you killed yourself? You hit your head like that on purpose?”
“Well, yes. I wanted to be back with you all! My loved ones!” When she held out her arms, Vini tucked himself under her armpit and squeezed her waist. “Now we can all be together for ever. A family again,” Norma said, in satisfaction.
This wasn’t right. Norma wasn’t telling them the whole story. If Norma had planned to kill herself here, then it must have been a huge surprise to find out that Harriet had died here only days beforehand.
Unless…
Now she thought about it, Norma had been the one who suggested that Harriet come to Mulcture Hall to take photographs of the abandoned building in the first place. Otherwise, it would never have occurred to her.
She had been on the phone with Norma just before she’d tripped and fallen. What if it had never been an accident? What if her ankle had caught on something – some kind of tripwire, maybe – left by her grandmother? The hazard signs had been hidden out of sight, too. She’d only noticed them afterwards. Had they been deliberately moved?
Norma kept saying that she wanted to spend eternity with the three of them. Not just her brothers, but Harriet, too. She could have killed herself here on the day of the tour when her memories returned, over a year ago. But she’d waited until Harriet was here.
Norma had killed Harriet. Just like she’d killed her husband, her son and his wife.
“Did you set up my death?” Harriet asked politely, suddenly completely calm.
“Not at all,” Norma said, sounding surprised. “I would never do that to you, Harriet.”
Vini looked at Rufus, mouth tightening.
Harriet asked him, “Did she visit you in the basement? Before she set up the wire?”
Vini looked somewhere over Harriet’s shoulder. “What?”
“She must have done, you were expecting her today! And – Greg told me that you were looking up a woman online using my phone. That was her, wasn’t it? You were talking to her. She planned all of this with you two. When did she come here? Was it this summer, before uni started? Before she ‘broke her ankle’?”
Norma snorted. “Oh, tell her whatever she wants to know. She’s too clever for her own good.”
Given permission, Vini said, “That all sounds right.”
Rufus elaborated. “She came down to the basement a few months ago. We thought she was some old lady at first. We were about to take her energy and kill her when she started speaking out loud. She said that she was Fabian, and she hoped that her brothers were listening. She explained who she was, and what she was planning. She told us that her memories had only just returned, and she really missed us.” He was getting teary-eyed as he recollected this.
“You knew all along that I was Fabian’s granddaughter, then?” Harriet asked, feeling breathless. “From the first time I came to the basement and traded my phone for information, you knew I was your great-niece.”
“We didn’t expect to see you that soon,” Rufus said. “You surprised us. You definitely have the family blood. Fabian told us that she’d leave a few days between the two deaths, to make sure they looked like accidents. Otherwise the building would have been overrun with police for weeks and weeks. So once you died, we started preparing for Fabian. But you turned up in the basement the very next day, asking us for a trade. We took the opportunity to get things ready for him.”
“Her,” Norma interjected. “If you please. It has become a bit of a habit. It’s been a long time since I was a man, now.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rufus said. “For her. We decided to use you to make a bit of a disturbance upstairs. You did very well, Harriet. Even without any training, you were more trouble than we could have ever imagined.”
“We’ve been guiding you from the very beginning, so you were ready when the time came. We made sure you knew how to kill and take powers, how to fight back. You’ve made us so proud.”
Harriet rubbed her temples. They’d been systematically stripping away her humanity ever since she’d arrived in the building, turning her into the monster that Norma had been crafting since Harriet was a child.
“You’re just like Fabian, you know,” Vini added. “You’re definitely one of us!”
Harriet went cold.
“I am not,” Harriet said severely. “Not in a thousand years.”
Norma had been smiling at Rufus. At this, her smile turned thin as she looked at Harriet. “Oh, dear. Well, it seems that a decision needs to be made now, doesn’t it?”
Chapter 25
RIMA
Hidden in the rafters of the roof, Rima couldn’t believe what she was hearing. They had crept through the walls of the building, searching each floor until they found the Tricksters on the rooftop. To her surprise, Norma had appeared, hugging Rufus affectionately. Harriet was there too, standing by her grandmother with a fraught, terrified expression.
“Let’s attack them,” Kasper hissed, lunging forward like he was about to leap out onto the roof.
“Wait!” Rima said, grabbing his arm in exasperation. “Let’s just listen first. I want to hear what they’re saying.”
“I want to fight,” Kasper mumbled.