Page 58 of Breaking the Dark

“Yeah.” He clicks both pairs of fingers and thumbs. “Arfur. That’s it. Used to hear him crying all the time. And then there was this one time…” He sucks his breath in through his teeth. “He brought a mate home? Heard all sorts that night, banging, shouting. The kid crying. Shit.” He sucks his breath in again.

“So did you call the police?”

He looks at her in amazement, and then around his drug den. “Are you actually kidding me?”

“Oh, yes,” she says, realizing the stupidness of her question. She glances through the window at the other chalet. “Who lives there now?”

“Nobody. Empty. Has been since they left.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Seriously. Think it needed too much work, management decided it would be cheaper to leave it. Plus, hard to rent out given the, er, next-door neighbors, y’know.” He grins sheepishly. “So why all the questions?”

“No reason. Just bumped into the son in town the other day. Seemed nice, but remembered you’d said stuff about them.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t touch them lot with a barge pole, to be honest. Wouldn’t go anywhere near ’em. Bunch of freaks.”

Polly nods, stifles a smile.

He doesn’t know the half of it, she thinks. He does not know the half.

Polly gets to her feet, dusts down the knees of her jeans, tucks her hair behind her ears, and looks around. The inside of the old chalet is as bleak and unhomely as the house Arthur’s family is looking after in the town, colder inside than it is out, and wall-to-wall grubby carpets and a smell of meat and mildew. The place has been stripped bare: just mattresses in each of the two bedrooms, scuffed-up hippie rugs on the laminated wooden floors, a dreamcatcher, a cardboard box full of old school textbooks, an old cat food bowl.

But even through the emptiness, Polly can feel something—something alive, something demanding, an energy that seeps through her, unpleasantly. She pulls the box of textbooks towards her and leafs through them. As she would expect, it’s mainly computer studies stuff, plus maths, science, a few word puzzles, comic books, a few magazines about UFOs. But there, towards the bottom of the pile, she finds something unexpected and unsettling. She slowly pulls it towards her.

It’s a sketchbook, small in size, with a black cover. On the inside page is Ophelia Simms Age 13, written in old-fashioned cursive ink pen, and there, on the first page, under a sketch of two children playing with a ball on a beach, are the words Magnus and I, Eastney Beach, 27 Oct 1812.

Polly shakes her head slightly, then starts to make sense of it. Ophelia must have been named after a relative. But on the next page there is a photograph; it’s a tiny portrait in black and white, printed on thick card, and it’s of a beautiful young girl with black hair, a knowing smile, a lace-collared jacket, and it’s her. It’s Ophelia. Except it can’t be Ophelia, because Ophelia is only about fifty and this photograph is dated 1822. Polly pockets the photograph and keeps turning the pages. More sketches of family scenes, scraps of poetry, shreds of news from yellowing newspapers. And then there’s a strip of passport photographs from an old-fashioned booth, and it’s the same girl, the young Ophelia, but this time with black eyeliner and a flicked-out bob, and underneath it says Me, 1963. But in 1963, Ophelia should barely have been born. She slips the strip into her bag alongside the black-and-white photo and carries on looking through the book.

About halfway through, the tone of the book changes; the images are of pop stars, faces that Polly recognizes vaguely. There’s one that looks like Morrissey, another that looks like the lead singer from the Cure. There are articles taken from old music magazines, one dated 12 January 1983, another dated 20 July 1984. And then—Polly’s breath catches—an article photo torn from the NME. It’s about a British band called the Diagonal, which was touring the US for the first time, and there’s a review of their first gig, at a venue in New York called the Upside Down. And there, underneath the review, is a photograph of the band after their performance, posing with sweaty hair and beers in their hands next to the manager of the bar, a man called John Warshaw.

Polly pulls the article closer to her and tilts it towards the windowlight.

She peers closely at the photograph and then gasps softly when she realizes that the man in the photograph, the manager of the Upside Down bar, photographed many years ago as a young man, is none other than Arthur’s father.

TWENTY

JESSICA STOPS AT the gates of the Old Farmhouse and blinks at Belle. “I’m sorry?”

“Am I definitely real? Do I look real?”

Jessica pauses. Here it is, she thinks. Here is the weird stuff that she’d come all this way for. This is it.

“Well, yeah. You look real. Extremely real. Why do you ask?”

“I dunno. It’s just sometimes, when I’m here, in this place, everything feels a bit…hazy? Like it’s not real? Then when I get back to school it feels like I was never actually here. But then I start getting this feeling that I want to come back here. All the time. And that doesn’t feel real either.”

Jessica considers Belle for a moment, her thoughts spinning wildly, aware that she needs to tread so carefully right now, that this moment is as delicate as blown glass. “Back in there,” she begins. “Just now, when we were talking about Sebastian Randall’s house. About ghosts. You looked like you wanted to say something. What was it?”

Belle smiles sadly. “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s the thing. I keep losing myself. It’s like there are two stories running through my mind all the time, they keep overlapping, winding and twisting. I can never get them straight. And when you mentioned Sebastian’s house, it made me think of something. Ghosts. Dead people. But now I can’t remember what it was.”

“Belle. Do you know someone named Miranda?”

Belle furrows her brow. “Miranda? No, I don’t think so. But then, maybe I do. I don’t know. I just really don’t know.”

“Do you feel safe, Belle? With Debra?”

“Yes. Always. Debra takes care of me. Debra loves me. I feel really safe with her.”

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