We gave him a tour of the house. Nick paused in each room to read the
machines’ numbers and note them down. “So far, we’re not getting any
response from the gas reader, which is a good sign. You don’t want to be
living in a house with a leak.”
We looped through the downstairs rooms then made our way up the
groaning stairs. Nick paused on the landing and made a low humming noise
in the back of his throat.
“What is it?” Lucky asked.
Nick ran a finger around his collar. “Ah… I’m not fully sure. Give me a
moment.”
His pace slowed as he moved along the hallway. For the first few rooms,
he held the readers out ahead of himself, but he gradually lowered them as he
progressed. I knew what had attracted his attention before he even reached it.
Nick pressed his hand against the door at the end of the hall and steppedinto the blue room. He stared around the space, his eyes vacant and his jaw
slack. Ruby stepped closer to me, and I put my arm around her shoulder for
comfort.
“She was here…” Nick’s voice had taken on a strange lilt. He reached
out a hand and pointed shaking fingers towards the wall. “That’s where he
chained her. Bolts in the wall. It took her a long time to pull them out.”
My stomach flipped. I looked towards the patch of blue wallpaper where
Nick pointed to. There were two tiny dark holes in the paper near the floor.
“She didn’t want him to take something…” Nick’s breathing increased.
He turned away from the wall and looked at the window. “Something
precious. Something she loved, that he would have broken. So she leapt. It
was be tter to lose herself… to lose what she loved… than to give it to him.”
Nick turned towards us. His face was blanched white and covered in
perspiration. When he spoke, his voice was raw and shaking. “I need to get
out of this room.”
“Okay.” Lucky took Nick’s shoulder and guided him back to the door.
Ruby and I moved aside to make way for them, pressing our backs to the
dark-red wood cladding to make room in the narrow space. We exchanged a
look before following the men downstairs.
So Rohit kept Shreya a prisoner. And so she took her own life. But what was
the precious thing Nick was talking about? Her sanity, maybe? Her free
will?
I stopped at the end of the hallway. I’d felt eyes on the back of my head. I
turned back to the blue room, just in time to see the door groan closed.
Lucky took Nick downstairs to the kitchen, where the older man bent
over the sink, breathing heavily and splashing water over his face. He took a
few minutes to turn around, but when he did, his face had recovered some of
its colour.
“Sorry about that.” He dried his glasses on a little cloth from his pocket.
His smile was shaky. “I don’t often get impressions in that way. My
grandmother was better at it. Sometimes, she could walk into a room and
instantly know what had happened in there. For me… they just come out of
the blue sometimes and hit me like a freight train.”
“That must have been Shreya,” I said. “She fell to her death from that
window. Her husband buried her in the backyard, but then he hung himself a
few months later. Some people think Shreya haunted him to his death.”
“The vengeful bride. It’s a common trope.” Nick carefully replaced his glasses. “Do you know the place she was buried?”
“We’re not a hundred percent sure, but we have a pretty good guess.”
We led Nick into the back garden. Thick low-lying clouds dampened the
sun, and a cold breeze wormed its way under my jacket, making me shiver.
We stopped under the old tree at the back of the house, and I pointed towards
the clump of slightly raised dirt. “That’s where we found all of the animal
bones.”
Nick closed his eyes, and his bushy brows pulled closer together.
“Yes… yes, I can feel something here. Just a moment, please.”
He circled the space, one hand held towards the ground, his lips
tightening into a line. Then he abruptly staggered back, his hands clamped to
his stomach as though he’d been punched.
“Nick?” Lucky started towards him, but the spirit medium held up one
hand. He doubled over and retched, but nothing came up.
“Do you want to go back inside?” I asked.