‘Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.’
‘Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.’
‘Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’
‘Guess your mum would feel at home here,’ Wrigley says, idly poking his finger in a hole in the wall and dislodging a small pile of rubble.
‘I doubt it,’ Flo says, snapping some of the pictures. ‘She doesn’t like to bring her work home with her.’
In fact, Flo thinks, without the dog collar, you’d never guess Mum was a vicar. Sometimes, Flo wonders how she ended up getting into the priesthood. Mum doesn’t talk about it much, usually brushing it off with talk of a ‘calling’, but once she let slip that she didn’t have a great childhood and someone from the Church had helped her.
She wanders across to the window and peers out. She can just make out the well, a gaping mouth at the very far edge of the overgrown garden. Beyond it, the shadowy woods lurk. From here, they look even closer to the house. Like the trees are creeping up when no one is looking. She fights back a shiver. Something white catches her eye near the trees’ dark folds. A figure? She raises the camera again. Click, click.
‘So, ready to see what’s behind the final door?’
She jumps. Wrigley stands behind her, jittering.
‘I’m breathless with anticipation.’
He smirks. ‘It’s good. Trust me.’
She isn’t sure she does, but she follows him back across the landing to the second bedroom. Wrigley pushes open the door.
She steps inside and looks around. ‘Holy fuck.’
The room is large. A bed still stands in the centre, topped by a stained and mouldy mattress. Flo doesn’t like to think what might have taken place on it, fuelled by cans of cider and the numerous discarded joints lying around.
But that’s not what makes her gasp. It’s the walls. Covered in flaking wallpaper and plastered with graffiti. Not your usual ‘Kerry is a slag’ and ‘Jordan fucks bumholes’ graffiti. This is far weirder.
Pentagrams, upside-down crosses, evil eyes, weird inscriptions in what looks – to her untrained eye – like Latin, as well as strange stick figures, goat’s heads, the Leviathan cross. A lot of it is crude, but the effect, over and over again, covering every wall and even some of the floor, is skin-crawling in its sheer magnitude.
She walks around the room. Up close, you can see that the drawings and inscriptions are layered, newer ones overlapping older, more faded ones. People, kids, have been doing this for years. And taking it seriously. No one has interspersed the symbols with an errant penis or a jokey scribble.
‘Totally Blair Witch, right?’ Wrigley says, and reaches out a hand to touch the walls. Flo has the strongest urge to tell him not to.
She fumbles for the camera again.
‘So, what is this? Satanic worship? You come up here and sacrifice goats?’
‘Not me. I like goats. I come up here to draw pictures.’
‘Then who did all of this?’
‘Dunno. This stuff has been appearing here for aeons. More keeps getting added.’
‘But why? Did something bad happen here?’
He wanders around, kicking up dust with his boots. Then he sits down on the edge of the stained mattress.
‘Okay, story is that the family who lived here, the daughter disappeared. Along with her best friend. Some reckoned they ran away, some reckoned they were murdered. But no one could ever prove it.
‘Then, like, a year after the girl who lived here disappeared, so did her mum and brother. Just vanished one night. Poof! Never seen again, and the house was left to rot.’
‘A whole family just disappeared?’
‘Yeah. A few years ago, another family were going to buy the house, but then their little girl died in an accident. People say that the place is cursed, haunted, jinxed. Call it what you will.’
Flo snorts. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s anything to do with the devil.’
‘Don’t you think that some places are just rotten? Like black spots in the earth. Bad stuff keeps happening there.’
Flo lowers the camera. She wants to say no, she doesn’t believe in any of that crap, but actually, she remembers an occasion when she was taking some photos in the Rock Cemetery in Nottingham.
She’d walked around it before, but this time found herself in a different part, an area shielded by trees in the shadow of a small rocky outcrop. It was a pretty spot and yet something about it just felt off. She had taken a couple of photos, but all the time she was aware of the offness, like an itch at the back of her neck. She left more quickly than she intended, but the feeling clung to her, like the dregs of a nightmare.
The next day she had mentioned it to Leon, whose eyes had widened. ‘You know, a girl was murdered there a couple of years ago.’
She had called bullshit – Leon had a taste for the melodramatic – but later googled it to see if it was true. She found the story. A sixteen-year-old girl had been raped and murdered on her way home from a night out, her body dumped in the cemetery. The photo showed the same distinctive rocky outcrop.
She shrugs now. ‘I’m not really superstitious.’
‘I think some kids come up here, hold seances, do Ouija boards, all that sort of shit.’
‘Not you?’
‘I’m not first pick for any club, not even the worshippers of Beelzebub. Besides, that stuff is rank. Treating death like it’s a game. If someone you loved died, you wouldn’t want a bunch of drunk morons tormenting them for fun, would you?’
She thinks about her dad. She was just a toddler when he died, and Mum never really talks about him. She guesses it’s still too hard. But she gets what Wrigley means. Death isn’t something you play with. The dead deserve peace and respect. She feels herself warming to him again.
‘I guess not,’ she says.
He rises abruptly. ‘So, you done?’
‘Err, yeah.’
She’s barely replaced the cap on her camera lens before Wrigley is stomping downstairs. She gives the bedroom a final glance and starts after him. Something crunches underfoot. She looks down, expecting to see a bit of broken bottle. Instead, she realizes, it’s a photo frame.
She bends down, curious. The frame still holds an old picture, weathered and faded. She can just make out two children. A dark-haired teenage girl and a younger boy. She stares at it for a moment, and then a sharp crrrack makes her jump. Shit. What was that? Another crrrack, this time followed by the thunder of wings and a chorus of harsh caws. Gunshots, she thinks.
‘Wrigley?’
She hurries down the stairs and out into the sunshine, the bright light momentarily blinding her. She blinks and then spots him, crouching down, holding something in his hands.
‘What’s going on?’
He turns, and she recoils. He’s cradling a large crow. Its feathers gleam like oil in the sunlight, sharp beak gaping slightly. One eye has been blown away, the socket a raw mass of gore. The other still gleams with a faint, terrified light. As she watches, the bird twitches and the eye dims to darkness.
Wrigley stands, whole body jittering with anger. His face is pale and taut. He yells into the woods: