The Face

Helen paused and looked around. Nothing had changed. The cottage was exactly as she remembered it from her last visit. Except that her father had been alive then and the place had not been so cold and empty.

To be honest she would not have been here now, if she had not had to sort out the place before putting it on the market. Closing the door behind her she made her way to the kitchen. Taking off her coat, she rolled up her sleeves and got the cleaning material from under the bench. By lunch the cupboards were cleaned and the contents packed in boxes. It was time for a break. Picking up the sandwich she had bought at the village shop. She went out into the garden. The sun was warm for the time of the year, the air smelt fresh and she could hear the cawing of crows, as she sat on the old garden seat.

Her dad had built the seat and it was where he used to sit to smoke his pipe. Somehow sitting there made her think of him happy and cheerful as he once was, not as she had found him on the day of his death, his face all twisted and his eyes staring. The doctor had said it was a massive heart attack, it would have been over in seconds and he wouldn’t have felt much pain. But she knew from the look on her poor father’s face it had been a horrible frightening death.

After lunch she stripped the bed and emptied the wardrobes in her parents’ room and moved on to the lounge. The ornaments and other remnants of the past were packed away by 8pm. She had done enough. The study, with all of her father’s books and mementoes, could wait until the morning.

Walking through to the kitchen she made herself a cup of tea and sat drinking. The silence in the cottage was so profound that she jumped when she heard the sound. It wasn’t loud just a soft fluttering that was unexpected. She glanced up at the light half expecting to see a moth trapped in the shade. The flutter-flutter sound receded then came again. This time a little louder, but still not a loud noise, more like the beating of tiny wings. It was coming from behind her. She stood and made her way into the lounge, thinking that maybe a small bird had become trapped in there. The sound flickered and died. Crossing the room she checked the window, closed the curtains and waited, willing the sound to come so that she could identify the source and settle her mind. But there was only an eerie silence.

After a while she turned and made her way towards the kitchen. As she passed the study door it came again, sounding as soft as the flicker of a butterfly’s wings, so soft that she only heard it because of the unearthly silence that filled the cottage. Oh my God, it was in the study. Her father’s study. The place where she had found his body! With trembling hand she gripped the doorknob and turned it. As the door opened a crack she slid in her other hand and clicked on the light. She pushed the door slowly open, the pounding of her heart drowning out any sound from inside. The door was now open, the fluttering had ceased and the silence was absolute. All she could hear was her own ragged breathing.

There was something wrong, but she couldn’t fathom what it was. Directly in front of her was her father’s desk, the Angle Poise lamp shining down onto the open book he had been reading the night that he died. She scanned the rest of the room and screamed, until she realised the figure at the window was her own reflection. With hammering heart she hurried to the window and began to close the curtains. The fluttering came again and she turned to see the pages of the book flicking over as if turned by some ghostly hand. She smiled relaxing a little, it was only a draught; she couldn’t feel it but there had to be a draught in the room and it was turning the pages.

 The pages stopped turning and the book lay open like a dead thing. Moving towards the desk she could see there was a picture on one page. Reaching the desk she looked down. The picture was in black and white and showed part of the interior of a room that looked vaguely familiar. She walked around the desk and stood behind her father’s chair. From this angle the picture was the right way up and showed the interior of the very room she was standing in – the bookcases on either side, the window with the party closed curtains, all of it the same. Wait there was something else. There in the space where the black night showed between the curtains was a white smudge. She leaned forward. The smudge came into focus and she let out a gasp. It was a face. She looked at the real window. There was nothing there. But she had the unnerving feeling that something had just disappeared.

That was it. She had had enough. She ran from the room, slammed the door shut, turned the key and went right through the cottage turning on the lights and closing all the curtains. Returning to the kitchen, she filled a glass with water and sat at the table taking small sips to calm her frayed nerves. Suddenly she sat up straight as she realised what had been wrong. The Angle Poise lamp had been on. Could it have come on automatically with the main light?  Well she certainly wasn’t going in there to check it out until the morning. She slumped forward again and took another sip of water.

In the study the book turned to another page. This one also had a picture, but this time it showed a brightly lit room with a woman sitting at a table. Behind the woman was a door with a glass panel in the top half; there was what looked like a white smudge in the centre of the glass panel. The Angle Poise lamp blinked out.