Chapter 17
The house’s exterior looks almost exactly the same as it did the night Cordelia walked out the front door a hundred and fifty years ago, a frightened child cradled in her arms.
I look up and down the road. What had been a uniform row of Victorian town houses is now a street filled with more modern style homes. The judge’s house seems to be the only original property left.
“Are you alright, Prickles?”
“The houses don’t match.”
“What?”
“This used to be a Victorian terrace of townhouses. The judge’s is the only one left. All the rest of these are more twentieth century style homes. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That this was the only one that wasn’t demolished and rebuilt with the others?”
“Actually, Mr Hadley did leave a note in the file about that. This whole street was reduced to rubble during the Blitz. The judge’s house was the only one left standing after the bombs fell.
Apart from some fire damage to the roof and some shrapnel markings on the brickwork, it was largely intact.
The rest of the street wasn’t so lucky. It was all rebuilt after the war. ”
“His house was the only one standing?” Sam nods. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Or something was protecting it,” Sam remarks.
I release a slow breath and turn my attention back to the house. I’m not really sure how I feel at the moment. I’m not afraid to walk inside that house, but the memory of the carnage committed within its walls is still fresh enough to turn my stomach, and coupled with the memories of the boy…
I suppress a shudder. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part needs answers.
“You don’t have to go in there. I can do this on my own.”
“No.” I look at him sharply, then gentle my tone. “You’re not going in there alone, Sam. The house has borne the weight and magic of a demon, and who knows what his presence has woken up in there.”
His gaze searches my face. For a moment, I think he’s going to argue with me, even suggest that it’s not safe for me given my strange connection to the situation, but he seems to think better of it. Instead, his hand brushes against mine, linking our little fingers.
“Together then.”
I nod. “Together.”
We head up the path and Sam rings the bell. A moment later, the door opens and a woman not much older than us and wearing jeans and an old hoodie appears in the doorway. Her long dark hair is swept up in a messy bun and she pushes dark-framed glasses back into place as she looks at us curiously.
“Hi, we’re looking for Riley Tyldesley.” Sam pulls one of his business cards from his pocket and offers it to her.
“I’m Riley,” she says, her eyes wary. “How can I help you, Mr…?”
“Stone. Sam Stone, and this is Harrison Ames. I run a private investigation agency, and your case was passed to us by Mr Hadley at Hadley and Mason.”
“Oh, yes.” She leans against the doorframe, tapping the business card against her palm as she studies us both. “He mentioned he was referring me to someone who dealt with unusual cases.”
I nod. “We do. Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Her assessing eyes flick between us and then she finally nods. “Come in. Be careful, it’s a bit of a mess. I’m still renovating.”
Sam steps back to let me enter first and then Riley closes the front door behind us both.
I’m no more than five steps into the hallway when I stop and suck in a sharp breath.
An apparition has stepped through a wall where a doorway had been in my dreams. He’s almost transparent, with an eerie green glow to him, and wearing a Victorian evening suit.
A demonic mask sculpted into misshapen features and with tiny horns protruding from the temples covers half his face, leaving his unsmiling mouth exposed.
The surprised sound that comes from Sam makes me realise he can see him too.
“You can see him?” Riley whispers beside us. I turn to see her wide eyes trained on my face. “I’ve wondered if I’m going crazy so many times these last months, but you see him, don’t you?”
I nod. “Do you know who he is?”
She shakes her head. “I just see glimpses of him. And the others.”
“Others?”
She points to a door down the corridor, a door that the man now disappears behind.
I know exactly which room that door leads to.
Breathing deeply, I follow the path of the silent spectre into the parlour where Cordelia had Ishaan rip Judge Maycliffe into bite-size portions.
The room is empty. Like really empty, not a single stick of furniture, and the walls are partly demolished. The fireplace has been stripped back to bare brick and there’s a hole in the chimney breast.
The exposed floorboards creak under my weight as I step further inside, but as I do, the light flickers.
In the space between one breath and the next, a circle of high-backed, almost medieval-looking chairs appear, spaced around the circumference of the room.
Each chair is occupied by a man in evening dress and a mask, each of which is a different monstrous, demonic visage that covers only the top half of his face.
“Oh my god,” Riley whispers. “I’ve never seen them all together like this.” She rubs her arms through her hoodie. “It feels like my hair is standing on end. It’s never been this strong before.”
“That tends to happen around me,” I mutter. Sam takes a step closer to my side.
She’s right. The air feels charged with electricity, making my skin prickle with awareness. The figures don’t move, don’t speak, don’t give any indication of sentience at all.
“These aren’t spirits,” Sam rumbles in a low voice.
“No.” I study each face in the circle. “They’re echoes.”
“Echoes?” Riley replies.
“What these men did was so momentous that they must’ve left an imprint on their surroundings,” I explain as my gaze lands on one figure in particular.
“Like a camera recording everything and replaying it on an endless loop. People like you and me and Sam are able to see and experience those echoes.”
“But why?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Sam answers.
I continue to stare at the masked figure directly in front of me. I know exactly who he is. My gaze drops to his misshapen mouth with a chunk of his lip missing and the scars left from being unevenly sewn back together.
“Harrison?” Sam says quietly.
“That’s Dr Whyte,” I murmur. Then I turn my head and point to another man three seats down from the doctor. “That’s Judge Maycliffe, and over there is Bishop Fairchild.”
“Then this is?—”
I meet Sam’s gaze. “These were the members of Dr Whyte’s Demon Club.”
“This was where they met?”
“One of the places, yes.”
“Sorry, did you say demon club?” Riley says, and as I turn to look at her, my eyes are drawn to two figures standing beside her in the doorway.
She follows my gaze and yelps in surprise, hurrying into the room to stand beside Sam, who instinctively pulls her behind him.
“It’s alright, they’re only echoes too,” I tell her.
Both figures emit that same strange green glow and are semi-transparent, but they aren’t members of Dr Whyte’s club. I have no idea why I know that, but I am certain.
Neither of them wears a mask. The man standing in front is also dressed in an evening suit, but he seems to be watching the proceedings in the parlour with a kind of amused calculation. He holds a whiskey glass to his lips as if he’s about to take a sip, frozen in that one moment of time.
I think I recognise him. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Judge Maycliffe, to the extent that I’m willing to bet this was his brother.
Simon Maycliffe, I think Sam said his name was.
The one who inherited this house after the judge’s sudden demise.
If I’m right, that would mean he knew about the Demon Club but wasn’t necessarily a part of it.
The man standing behind him is harder to identify.
He’s dressed in black and his face is cast into shadow so I can’t make out any of his features, but he seems to be whispering in Simon Maycliffe’s ear.
Peeking out from beneath Simon’s cuff, on the hand that’s holding a glass to his lips, is a mark on his skin, something that looks like a cross, maybe, or an ankh.
I can’t really tell because it’s partially obscured by his sleeve.
“This is giving me the creeps,” Riley murmurs. “I’ve never seen so many of them at once.”
As the words leave her lips, the image glitches and disappears, leaving us once again in a gutted room.
“Fuck,” Sam mutters. “I think we should get out of this room before we trigger them again.” He turns to Riley. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
She nods, her eyes still darting around the room nervously. “The kitchen. It’s also a bit of a mess, but we can at least have a cup of tea.”
“Sam’s right,” I agree, considering. “We need to get out of this room.” There’s a good chance it’s my powers or my connection to Cordelia and her demon that’s probably turbo-charging the paranormal echoes here.
Hopefully, it might be a little quieter in another part of the house, one that hadn’t been the scene of a demonic club’s meetings and supernatural murder.
“Follow me.” She heads back out into the hallway and leads us to the kitchen at the back of the property.
There’s a makeshift table, a couple of chairs, and a paint-spattered stool set up in a space that holds a cooker, a fridge, a microwave, and only a couple of kitchen cabinets.
Everything else has been partially demolished—disassembled cupboards stacked in a corner, the tiled splashback smashed and scraped off the wall to fill a paint-stained bucket, and holes of varying sizes in parts of the plasterboard.
Riley insists we sit while she makes tea, and since the mundane task seems to calm her, we do as she asks.
The seat I occupy has me staring at a wall where a large hole in the plasterboard exposes a formerly concealed doorway.
I don’t need to ask what it is—this is the door to the cellar where the judge had kept Tobias chained to a wall.