13. Wren
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WREN
I am no longer afraid of Bishop’s House.
I am no longer afraid in general, it seems!
The routine of leaving home is easy now.
I don’t worry that Mum or Dad will wake up anymore, and I’m able to walk down the alley at the back of the house without fearing someone behind me.
Bishop’s House is not an unpleasant silhouette on the horizon to be avoided, but our usual destination.
Even Crow can’t bother me tonight. She’s in her usual outfit, dark hair even more of a blanket around her face. She’s gone to the effort of painting her nails black. When we enter the hallway from the basement, she frowns, staring about the place like it’s her first time here.
“What’s up?” Goldie says, noticing her expression too.
“It’s just . . .” She points to one of the chairs that sit near the staircase, a group of three of them, two stacked together. “Weren’t all three of those chairs stacked together before? Hasn’t one been moved?”
The others stare as blankly as me at them. I don’t remember that. But then, I wasn’t really looking at them very closely.
“No one else comes here,” Starling says. “You’re remembering wrong.”
“Right.” Crow nods, though she doesn’t seem convinced. “That has to be it.”
I am not scared or bothered by things because tonight we venture upstairs and I am excited.
I am expecting them to creak, make some kind of announcement that we are venturing farther than before, but they are silent, only the gentle thudding of our footsteps audible.
When we reach the landing, straight ahead is a small stained glass window, boarded up on the outside, but Starling shines her torch at it, and we see the green-leaves-and-red-flower pattern and a cobweb in the lower left corner.
Beneath the window is a cabinet, doors ajar, and on top are two china cats, white with dark flowers painted on them, and a blank photo frame.
Crow bends down to investigate the cabinet, which is filled with, bizarrely, china teacups with Peter Rabbit on them.
“My mum loves Peter Rabbit,” Starling whispers.
You should take one for her, I think, but I don’t say it. That would be a stupid idea.
We walk into a bedroom, which was clearly once for a child. There is wallpaper with fairies on it, a small wardrobe, and several toys scattered about. Goldie opens the wardrobe, and it has dresses, shirts, and trousers inside, but all adult-sized, which confuses us.
“Storage, I guess?” Cuckoo says, but the image is unsettling, so we quickly move on.
Another room is entirely empty, walls with cracks and carpet torn up.
It feels as though something has been ripped from this space.
The windowsill is thick with webs. But as we turn to leave, there is a velvet jacket hanging on the back of the door.
It’s remarkably red and bright and looks almost brand-new.
“Do you think we’ll find another golden toilet up here?” Cuckoo asks. “Let’s go searching for one.”
“I’m going to look in more of the bedrooms,” Goldie says. “This place is huge.”
Starling and Crow follow Cuckoo; I follow Goldie.
We break off into opposite ends of the hallway, the various doors leading to who knows what.
Resting against the wall is a stringless guitar, battered looking.
There are stickers across it, but they’re rubbed down and faded and difficult to make out.
Goldie and I enter a room toward the end of the corridor.
It’s the smallest room we’ve been in so far, apart from the bathroom. A box room, Mum and Dad would call it. There is a circular table with a bowl of seashells in the center, and underneath a toy rabbit.
“What a weird room,” Goldie says. She’s focused on the seashells.
The discarded bunny makes me feel sad. I can’t leave it on the floor, upturned and forgotten. I pick it up, resist the urge to hug it into my chest, and put it carefully on the cabinet.
Goldie smiles. “You’re such a softie, Wren.”
“Did you have a toy like this as a kid?” I ask, then regret the question as soon as it’s out my mouth.
Goldie’s face clouds for a moment; then her smile returns. “Still do. He’s a teddy bear. He has a little pink bowtie, and nowadays he’s looking a little worse for wear, but he’s—he was a gift from my parents when I was born.”
“I had a bear too,” I say. “All of my toys are still in boxes under my bed. I don’t have the heart to get rid of them.”
“Like they’re real, with feelings,” she says.
“Exactly.” I stroke the bunny, feel its rough material, and wonder whether to take him home. Did he have a name once? Did a child leave him behind?
The others burst into laughter at something out in the hall. Goldie turns to the open doorway. “We should go join them. We’re obviously missing out.”
I leave the bunny behind. Cuckoo is trying on an old-fashioned hat, huge and purple with netting covering her face, and considering how tiny she is, it really overwhelms her.
She does look funny, but it’s even better when a spider decides to suddenly crawl down her forehead and she tears the hat off with a scream, brushing the spider off and jumping away as it runs along the corridor, eventually disappearing into the shadows.
Starling is just as terrified, pinning herself to the wall to try and avoid it, but Crow is oddly calm. She gives us a grin when we appear.
“Did you see that?” She chuckles. “Cuckoo and Starling being total babies when it comes to spiders.”
“I hate them too,” Goldie says with a shudder. “I would have died if that crawled on my face!”
“Let that be a lesson,” Cuckoo says. “No trying on the clothes!”
The hat is left on the floor, none of us keen to pick it up again.
We carry on with our exploration, sticking together this time.
There is a loft, one of those squares on the ceiling with a hatch that can be pulled down.
Something about this place means we take it in stages, never too much in one go, so we ignore it for now.
I can’t help glancing up at it as we walk past though.
It is calling out to me almost. If I believed in things like that, I’d say something important was up there, but I’ve run away from here once before, and I’m determined not to do the same again.
I’m not scared anymore. This is meant to be fun.
The door at the end of the hallway is wedged shut. Goldie and Cuckoo try their best, shoving it with their hands and turning the doorknob, but it doesn’t budge.
“What do you reckon is inside?” Crow asks.
“It could be anything,” Starling says. “Maybe it’s where the previous owners kept a safe filled with a million pounds.”
“It is weird it’s the only locked door,” Cuckoo says.
Goldie tries the handle one more time. “Maybe it’s not locked, there’s just a load of stuff piled up on the other side.”
“How would they get out then?” I ask.
“Secret entrance!” Starling squeals. “Imagine, some kind of mystery door or staircase. If we take one of those leftover books off the shelves downstairs, they could reveal all sorts.”
“This place is wild,” Cuckoo says. “I love it. Don’t you?”
Yes. I can’t believe I agree with her, but I do. Bishop’s House is weird and wonderful and magical. It has become the place we retreat to each time we sneak out. Somehow, this has become a safe space, a fact I never imagined.
We pile into one of the bedrooms and collapse onto the double bed.
It has been covered over with a large sheet, but dust still springs into the air as we land on the mattress.
There are still two pillows at the top, which Goldie and Cuckoo rest their heads on, lying back and staring at the ceiling.
I stretch out at the bottom and do the same, taking in the hairline cracks and peeling paint.
There is no mold, which surprises me. Do big, empty houses get mold, or does mold need life to grow?
I think of Cuckoo’s flat, which has mold in the bathroom and above the windows in the bedroom she shares with her sister.
There’s the stubborn patch in Goldie’s room too, black and festering and persistent no matter how many times she rubs it away or sprays it with chemicals.
Her window is blocked by Patricia’s desk, so she isn’t able to open it for fresh air.
But fresh air doesn’t exist in Bishop’s House either; the windows are boarded shut and we can taste the staleness.
Perhaps it’s the luck of the draw. Starling bunches up next to me, while Crow squeezes herself between Goldie and Cuckoo.
We’re a tangle of limbs, crossing over each other, but it doesn’t matter.
“When Crow becomes a bestselling author and Goldie becomes a supermodel, they can buy this place for us,” Cuckoo says. “Then we can each have a room, and we can do whatever we want.”
“I’ll be traveling the world too,” Starling says. “World-class journalists are busy, globe-trotting people, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
And I’ll be in Japan.
We lie in silence with this image for a while, the five of us living here. Being successful adults. The idea still feels so far away, like we haven’t really left school for good. That university isn’t waiting for us. Cambridge for me. My stomach twists again, far more unpleasantly.
A thud from downstairs interrupts our peace, making not only me jump but Starling beside me.
Crow sits up, frowning. “Did you all hear that?”
“The wind,” Goldie mutters, unbothered.
“There is no wind,” Crow points out. “Everything is boarded up.”
“Well.” But now Goldie sits up too. “Something must have dropped then.”
“Or someone is here,” Starling whispers, and she is winding us up, I know that, but my heart still bursts into rapid-fire, squeezing my chest and making me bite my lip hard. What if Crow was right about the chairs?
“For God’s sake,” Goldie snaps. “No one else is here.”
“Should we check?” Cuckoo asks. She twists her body, leans up on her elbow.
“That’s exactly what a horror film would want us to do,” Starling says.
“We’ll all check, and we can see quite comfortably there’s nothing wrong.” Goldie hops off the bed, brushing dust from her clothes, and snaps her fingers. “Come on. All of us. Wren, don’t look so worried.”
“I’m not worried,” I insist, though I take my time getting off the bed, waiting until I am the last one. “Any noise is a bit scary, that’s all.”
“I’m here to prove it’s not scary in the slightest.”
Goldie leads us downstairs to where we think the source of the noise is.
The room directly beneath the bedroom we were in is an old dining room.
Chairs are stacked in a row in the corner, and there is still a long table in the center, covered in various objects.
Behind the table, the marble fireplace gives us our answer.
At the bottom, where wood once burned, is a bird’s nest. It must have fallen down the chimney.
There are four eggs that have hatched, a few feathers left behind. And an egg that never hatched at all.
Goldie is triumphant. “See. I told you it’d be nothing.”
“The chimneys aren’t blocked up then?” Crow says doubtfully.
“I guess not.”
“Will this egg hatch?” Crow asks, kneeling down to study it.
Cuckoo shakes her head. “Not if the others already have. It probably didn’t have a chick in there to begin with.”
“Or the chick couldn’t make it,” Starling says, earning her a frown from Goldie.
“What about the fledglings?” Crow persists. “Where are they now?”
“Off living happy lives,” Goldie says. “They’ve long since flown out of here. They could be grown up by now. For all we know, this nest is decades old.”
Crow nods, but she is still looking at the unhatched egg. As if, now that it has finally been noticed, it might spring to life at last.
Nothing happens.
I feel an itch on the back of my neck, like someone is watching me, but when I turn, there is, of course, no one there.