Chapter 22
SOPHIA
I spent ages looking through the sketchbooks, taking in every detail, every torn and rotten page.
A lot of them were damaged. They must have spent all this time in the room, locked away in these drawers hidden from sunlight, but in a perfect place for dust and mould to settle.
I’d rescued them. They called to me, drew me into their pages.
Each told a story, sketches of various sights around the village, most of them I knew well.
There were even drawings of people; farmers, shopkeepers, neighbours, but most of the portraits were of the same young woman.
The fact that my great, great, great grandfather drew them, told me the woman must have been Carys, my great, great, great grandmother. According to the family history, she was the person who found John hanging from the tree all those years ago.
Carys was never the same, and she died eight months later in childbirth.
She told whoever would listen there was no way John would have done that to himself, but no one believed her.
Back then, there was no way of gathering evidence to find out exactly what happened.
There was no investigation. It was deemed an obvious suicide and John Hammel was buried without a special funeral provided by the church.
In their eyes, he had committed the ultimate sin and didn’t deserve a proper burial.
No one came to pay their respects. That was why his grave was now overgrown and forgotten all these years later.
I was certain there was more to this story. The hidden room held all of John’s secrets and I was determined to uncover them. Someone needed to speak for him. His voice had been stolen all those years ago. Someone killed him. I was sure of it.
Putting down the sketchbooks, I decided to keep searching the room, eventually finding a damp box hidden under the bed.
I pulled it out and crouched next to it, opening its soggy, musty edges.
The majority of it disintegrated in my hands.
I gasped when I saw more books inside, but they weren’t filled with drawings.
They were filled with writing. Diaries, perhaps?
Not only was there writing, but also cutouts of newspaper articles, all to do with the village and its residents from nine decades ago. Obviously, they weren’t like the newspapers we had today, but it was fascinating to read. But the more I read, the more I understood why it was hidden.
John didn’t want anyone to find these for a reason. He’d been collecting and collating information about everyone in the village at the time.
Listed on one of the pages in a well-worn book was a list of names, none of which I recognised personally, but the surnames were familiar. The names on the page were from generations ago.
Davies. Bevan. Hammel. Griffiths.
Those were surnames of some of the members of the village committee. I had no idea their family names went back so far, or that the committee had been around for so long. I knew my family had lived here for generations, but not the others.
Why had John listed them like this?
Was he watching them, keeping an eye on them for some reason?
I flipped the pages faster, wanting to know the answers, but there was too much information here to absorb at once.
It would take me hours to comb through it all.
I dared not remove any of this stuff from the room.
I had to keep John’s secret, find out why he was compiling a list of information.
Was it to be used against the village committee somehow?
Then, words started jumping off the page at me.
Kill. Dead. Illegal. Underground. Heart. Human. Sacrifice.
Holy crap!
My eyes grew wider and wider the more I read. I was being sucked into the pages. Human sacrifice? Were the village committee into some sort of satanic ritual or something?
Then it hit me like a freight train.
John’s death wasn’t a suicide. I was right all along.
He was killed because he knew something; something the village elders didn’t want anyone to know about. Now, somewhere in these pages was the truth, hidden for almost one-hundred years.
I decided there and then that I was going to fight for John Hammel. I was going to discover what was going on in this village. Maybe it had ceased since his day, or maybe it hadn’t. For all I knew, my father was in on it. It was up to me now.
Those four families held the long-lost secrets of the village.
I decided to take John’s coat with me, along with a sketch of the tree. He would tell me what I needed to do next.