11. Wren
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WREN
When this all started, I should have known then. It was inevitable that we would end up at Bishop’s House.
Starling wailed in the group chat:
It’s Prom Night! We have to do something big for it!
Cuckoo replied with:
I know just the place!
And that was that.
Bishop’s House, so called because that was one of its original purposes.
The site was used in the medieval period as a bishop’s palace, and there are still a couple of old stones in the grounds from then.
Eventually, after the palace was left to ruin, a grand house was built during the Georgian period.
It was used during the First World War as a recruitment base, a civil defense center during the Second, and then was turned back into a house by a different rich family.
By the time the eighties rolled around, it lay abandoned again, eventually getting boarded up, the garden overgrown and its history confined to a Wikipedia page.
There are rumors it was once used as an asylum, and that it’s haunted, that anyone who visits sees the ghosts of past patients and soldiers and bishops, of sickly Victorian children who died of cholera.
Never mind that any Victorian children living in this house would have had a far better standard of living than most.
I walk past it every time I come home from school, the sight of it looming large at the top of the hill, closed off by high walls and an iron gate. All that’s missing is a flash of lightning and a spooky old lady and it’d be the perfect horror film mansion.
And now here we are, the five of us, heading straight toward it.
I tried to get out of this one. Pretended I had a headache. But they insisted. Which was nice for half a second, that they wanted to include me. But then Cuckoo said of course they needed me.
I’m the only one who’s been here before.
Mum and Dad are estate agents. It’s actually how they met.
Bishop’s House has technically been for sale for years, but no one is buying and whoever the owner is doesn’t seem to care that much.
When I was ten, Mum took me round while she checked the property over for security risks.
That’s when the windows were all boarded up and gates put around the perimeter.
It was even more spooky then, and I was convinced, so convinced, that I’d seen a ghost in one of the upstairs windows that I ran crying from the garden and stayed in the car until Mum was done.
I always avoid looking directly at it whenever I walk past. At night, coming back from sneaking out, I go the long way to avoid being near it entirely. I still feel as if I’ll look up, even though the windows are now all boarded shut, and find a ghost staring back at me.
“She’s a daydreamer,” my aunt Cherry said one Christmas. Mum had just finished shouting at me for not paying attention, and I was mortified, staring at the roast potatoes left on my plate. “She’s just like me.”
This cheered me to no end in the same way it irritated Mum.
I wasn’t really like Cherry. If anything, I was a mini-Mum.
I’ve had the same hairstyle as her, the wispy, mousy bob and fringe, since I was about five, and it’s not changed now.
She likes me to dress in younger versions of her same outfits too—sharply ironed shirts, all long sleeves and long skirts or smart trousers.
I’m not even allowed to have my ears pierced.
Cherry (not her real name either, which she decided was too boring for her) and Mum might be sisters, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Cherry says she works freelance, in what I’m not sure because whenever I ask she changes the subject and Mum snorts derisively, but most importantly it means she can travel the world however much she wants.
She’s always going off to or coming back from some grand destination.
She’s been to every continent except Antarctica. She’s even been to Japan.
“She’s nothing like you,” Mum had snapped. “She’s got her head screwed on right for a start. She’ll be off to university and in a proper job.”
A proper job, a proper job. It’s all they care about, Mum and Dad. The rest of the family are the same. I’m girl wonder, I’m so smart, I’m going to do the best in this family, take us right to the top. Never mind what I want.
But Cherry leaned her hand under the table and squeezed mine tight. You’re your own person, she mouthed, which is hard to trust when she’s not around. Without Cherry, my family is like old black-and-white films, and with her, the color bursts through and I’m not in Kansas anymore.
“Wren?”
I am suddenly lurched back into the present, to the front gates of Bishop’s House, to Crow and Starling and Cuckoo and Goldie staring at me.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “Did you say something?”
“I said,” Cuckoo says, “do you want to go first? Seeing as you know where you’re going.”
I didn’t tell them, obviously, that I ran away in tears. “Um . . .”
“And I said,” Goldie says, “don’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to do. I’ll go first.”
Maybe it’s because I was thinking of Cherry, or Mum and Dad’s constant pressuring, or the fact even my friends don’t believe I’m capable, but I shake my head.
“No,” I say, firmly. “Cuckoo’s right. I’ve been here before. I’ll lead the way.”
We had an original plan for Prom Night. We’d prebooked transport in February, before the world shut everything down.
It was a fantastic classic car to make us feel like duchesses.
Cuckoo and Goldie couldn’t pay as much as the rest of us, but that was alright, we made up their share, though Crow was reluctant at first. I even had my dress already, dark blue and sleeveless and falling to the floor.
I was going to have my hair and makeup professionally done.
There was going to be a huge after-party, and then we’d have one of our own at Starling’s house, and it was going to be perfect.
Instead I hitch up my combat trousers and scale the fence with a leg up from Starling.
We’re getting better at this kind of thing already.
When I jump down to the other side, my fingers are covered in webs that I brush urgently away on my thighs.
I avoid the piercing gaze of the house and wait for the others to join me.
Cuckoo is last, able enough to do a running leap and grab at the fence without someone there to help her. She heaves herself up and down with only a slight wince, but it vanishes as soon as she sees what’s ahead.
“I can’t believe we’re here,” she whispers, as if someone might hear us. “Bishop’s House, oh my God. Do you think the stories about it being an asylum are true?”
“Let’s hope not,” Starling says, but she’s as keen as Cuckoo. “This would be the perfect place to hide a body.”
“Lovely,” Goldie says. “Glad you two are here to keep things light.”
Nature has taken over every inch of the property, far more so than when I visited before.
There isn’t much of the dirt path anymore, overgrown with patches of grass the length of our knees.
Trees line the front gates, providing ample coverage from the view of the street.
Trees gather toward the back too, six or seven of them, large oaks with gnarled and twisted bark.
I wonder why so many are there, whether there was once a forest where we’re standing instead of someone’s home.
The grounds surround the house both front and back, the only house in the area to have so much land, sectioned off when there wasn’t such a premium on space.
It is large enough that after a few steps down the barely existent path, the road and the rest of the world become a distant memory, hidden from view, and instead the darkness increases, the silence ever louder.
I look back at where we came from, but the path has curved slightly, and the entrance is no longer in view.
If someone walked past the house now, they would have no idea we are here, not with all the trees and shrubbery and bushes and grass making their presence known.
Nature always reclaims its land in the end.
A little farther, and the house comes fully into view.
The house itself is made of red brick, and has three floors, not counting the attic, which has its own large balcony.
Grand stone steps used to lead to the front doors, but they’ve either crumbled away or had pieces taken from them, because they’re uneven and dirty and dented.
The boarded windows make the place look worse than it is, dangerous instead of Gothic.
I risk a glance upward at them, and there is no ghost waiting for me, to my immense relief.
There is a huge chimney, which towers over everything else, and ivy snakes its way all the way up and around the walls.
The whole house is covered with it, more green than red, more plant than brick.
The front doors are also boarded up, so there is no chance of getting inside.
“Challenge accepted,” Cuckoo says, staring at them too.
“Cuckoo, you can’t be serious,” I hiss. “It’s enough that we’re out here. You’re not really suggesting we break in?”
She turns to me, tossing her high ponytail. “Why not? No one lives here. It can be our place.”
“She’s got a point,” Goldie says. “We’re not hurting anyone by taking a look inside.”
“There might be all sorts of historical artifacts,” Crow concedes.
“If I were a serial killer,” Starling murmurs, “this is definitely where I’d lure my victims.”
“It’s okay, Wren,” Goldie says. She pats me on the shoulder, bracelet jingling. “There’s no one here. Just us.”
“Us and our house,” Cuckoo says. She heads around the side of the building and then calls us over. “Hey! Check this out.”
There is a small window, half the size of the others, which no one has bothered to board up. It looks out onto the ground level.
“A basement of some kind,” Cuckoo says. “Did anyone bring a torch?” Starling produces one from her bag to Cuckoo’s delight. She shines the torch in through the glass, but the reflection makes it difficult to see. “We can get in through here.”
Goldie is wearing a beanie; she takes it off and wraps it in her left hand. “Hold on. Everyone stand back.”
She bends down, picking up a rock lying in the gravel, and uses it to smash the window open, then kicks any remaining jagged glass with her boot.
“Be careful,” she warns. “But we’re in! Let’s go.”
She enters the basement. And everyone else is really following her, one by one, into Bishop’s House. Its cellar, where who knows what lurks.
My stomach churns.
“Wren, come on!” Starling whispers.
I am terrified, I want to stay rooted to the spot—but I move. With the same energy I took over the gate, I force myself to bend down and maneuver through the window and into Bishop’s House.
Pitch-black darkness greets me.
Someone grabs my arm. I scream.
“Ooooooooo!” Cuckoo turns the torch back on, holding it under her chin. “I’m a ghoooooost!”
My heart is practically bursting out of my chest, and all I want to do is run away, but I scowl instead. “Very funny.”
“Well, I do try.” Cuckoo pokes her tongue out. “Still, it is a bit eerie.”
A bit eerie is putting it lightly. There is a coldness down here, a stale scent of a place that hasn’t seen life in a long time.
Cuckoo moves the torch beam around the cellar, and any moment I’m convinced someone is going to really jump out at us.
Shadows flicker and dance, disturbed by the light, and dust hovers in the air.
I half expect the floor to be coated in it, but it’s surprisingly dust-free, cobblestones that are clean and yet the color of ash.
In the corner is an old kitchen counter, ripped from its proper place, and an old-fashioned candlestick, heavy brass, on top of it.
I am here. Standing. Inside of Bishop’s House.
Cherry would be proud of me.
Mum and Dad would be horrified, and that’s perhaps even better.
Maybe it’s not so bad. I look again, and it’s as if the cellar has morphed around me.
Starling has another torch she flicks on, and with both powerful light beams, the place brightens, becomes more welcoming by the second.
It is cold but not freezing, and with our breath and whispered excitement, the stale air is vanishing out of the broken window, fresh air coming in for the first time in what might be decades.
There are no ghosts, no spiders, no bugs, no rats, or anything unpleasant.
The walls are a faded peach color, an old painting of the countryside hanging at the far end, near the stone steps that lead up to the rest of the house.
The longer I stand here, the longer it feels like Bishop’s House has taken a breath, free at last.
The cellar is filled with old gardening tools. There are several shovels in a row against the back wall, and Goldie laughs.
“There you go, Starling,” she says. “You can hide your body here after all.”