Page 28 of Crazy Spooky Love

Girls? For a second I’m confused, and then the mist clears. Nikki and Vikki have locked us in the cellar.

“Leo’s out there?” I’m genuinely shocked and more than a little bit hurt. Despite Gran’s stunt with the armor, I thought we had more respect for each other than this.

Isaac frowns. “I didn’t see anyone else but those women. I don’t think the one with the hair is here.”

Marina, on hearing my words, barges up the steps and bangs hard on the door. “I’ll kill you for this, Leo Dark. Open this frigging door this minute, and then you better hope you can outrun me!”

“I’m not sure he’s here, Marina,” I say quietly. “Isaac seems to think it’s just the twins.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She hammers her fists against the thick old door, furious. “I’m seriously losing my temper in here! You two are so dead when you open this door.”

To be absolutely honest, I don’t think she’s helping our cause. If I were one of the twins, I wouldn’t let her out for fear of what she’d do tome.

We freeze, waiting. Deathly silence. We wait some more. Still nothing.

“Isaac, go and find out what’s happening.”

“I’m not sure I appreciate being used as a go-between,” he grumbles.

“Well, I can’t exactly do it myself can I?” I hiss. “Please?”

“Fine,” he relents ungraciously. “Wait here.”

“I’m hardly likely to go anywhere else, am I?”

I stand back as he disappears through the door and let Marina and Artie, who are by now sitting on the stairs, know what’s happening.

“Can you believe those two?” Marina says, sticking three tabs of gum into her mouth at the same time and chewing aggressively.

“Honestly? No. I really can’t,” I say. I find it hard to imagine the twins doing anything without being expressly told to.

I’m guilty of assigning them no free will at all.

In my head, they’re Leo’s glamorous autobots, as if he switches them on and off as required.

I have underestimated them at my own peril.

Lloyd strolls through the closed door, looking far too smug for my liking. He’s clearly enjoying this.

“Is this a bad moment to mention that those two ladies are leaving and they appear to have taken the key with them?”

“Leaving? They can’t leave us down here!” I practically shout, and Marina and Artie both jump up at the same time.

“Get your scrawny identical arses back here and open this fucking door this instant!” Marina lets rip, but all we hear is the resounding slam of the front door echoing around the high-ceilinged hall.

“Oh shit,” I whisper, clutching my face between my flattened palms. “They’ve actually gone and bloody left us.”

“I wish I’d brought my lunch box with me,” Artie says, and we both stare at him, incredulous.

“Sorry.” He looks crestfallen. “It’s egg sandwiches, my favorite.”

“I think that’s my cue to leave you all to it.” Lloyd gives me a superior little smile before he disappears, marking himself as a member of “Team Leo,” or more likely as “Team Lloyd.” He doesn’t seem to really have much in the way of empathy for anyone.

“Phone reception?” I say, and we all click our screens to check.

“Nothing.” Marina shakes her mobile as if it might help.

“I’ve got one bar,” Artie says, and then his phone promptly dies. “And no battery.”

We all look at my mobile, now officially our last hope. The signal is flickering between no service and one bar when I move my hand around in big circles.

“Okay. I might be able to make a call,” I say calmly. “But who to?”

“The police?” Marina jumps rightin.

“Anyone without sirens?” I’m really keen not to make a scene that will draw Fletcher Gunn’s attention.

I fully expect that he has a hotline from the police station set up to give him the juicy goss on all incoming emergency callouts, and there’s no juicier bone for that man than a Bittersweet in distress.

“Well, we can safely cross Leo off the list,” I say. I have no way to know why his minions were here without him or if he even knew anything about it, but he’s the last person I’m going to call right now.

“Your mother? Your gran?”

I consider it: my mother and grandmother closing up Blithe Spirits early to come over here and rescue us. This is my first official case for the agency. Am I really so inept that I need to call my mum?

“Any other suggestions?”

Unusually for Douglas, he hurtles into the cellar at a dash, straight through the locked door, rather than his usual relaxed stroll. “You can get out through the coal chute,” he says quickly. “I snuck out of there enough times to know.”

I stare at him, hopeful. “The coal chute?”

He nods across the darkness of the cellar. “Over there to the left of the chimney breast.”

“Coal chute over by the chimney,” I relay to the others, using my phone as a torch again to scan the wall. We all squint as we bump and squeeze our way across the dark, cluttered room.

“There, look,” Artie says, pointing up toward the ceiling. “Is that it?”

“It latches from bolts on the inside, I think,” Isaac says, frowning. Artie stretches up, but his fingers are a good few inches short.

“Thereused to be an old red ladder around here,” Douglas says, surveying the walls behind the heaped-up crates, the tea chests, and the old suitcases.

“Ladders?” I use shorthand to pass the message on, but none of us can see them anywhere. Douglas died in 1910; it was a big ask that they’d still be down here.

Artie drags a wooden tea chest over, huffing and puffing as he goes round the other side and shoves it into place beneath the hatch.

“This is heavier than it looks,” he pants, then clambers up on it and reaches for the bolts.

“Got it,” he says, quiet and triumphant at finding the hatch, then works the old bolts free and shoves both of his hands hard against the closed trapdoors.

Sunlight floods in, making us all blink furiously, and a second later the tea-chest lid creaks and Artie’s foot goes straight throughit.

“Crap. Artie, are you okay?” Marina and I leap forward and grab an arm each to steady him, but he just grins, one leg buried up to the knee in the wooden chest.

“I did it, didn’t I?” His smile outshines the sunbeams shafting across the cellar.

“You did,” I say softly. “You’ve earned that egg sandwich, Artie Elliott.”

“I might even make you a cup of tea without grumbling,” Marina adds.

I look around the cellar, which isn’t anywhere near so frightening now that it’s not pitch black. “We’re going to need something more secure to stand on than that chest.”

Artie wriggles his leg free, and as he begins to push the chest out of the way I glance inside it at the exposed contents. Dropping to my knees on the cold flagstone floor, I pick out the pieces of shattered wooden lid and lay them aside.

“What’s in there?” Marina says, peering over as I lift out several beautiful encyclopedias.

“Books,” I say, piling them up carefully beside the crate.

“And these.” I pick up a stack of smaller books tied together with packing string.

The dark blue snakeskin-effect cover of the top volume is made from fine, paper-thin leather, faded gold numbers stamped on the front.

1908. Diaries. My heart starts to thump as I look at the bundle.

Ten years’ worth, probably more. Isaac’s words come back to me about Lloyd. “Quite the obsessive diarist…”

Back at the office, I get straight on the phone to Leo. It comes as little surprise when it goes straight to voicemail. I’m about to leave a furious message when someone taps the door, and Artie opens it to reveal the creepy twins standing outside.

Marina’s out of her chair and across the room in a flash, so I click my phone off and make a dash to hold her back. Artie and I link arms with her on either side in the doorway, and I can’t be certain but I think her feet leave the floor for a few seconds and cycle in the air.

“Ladies,” I say.

Their eyes flicker nervously from one of us to the other. “We’re sorry,” says the one on the left, wringing her hands.

Marina surges between us with her fists balled and we struggle to keep hold of her.

“Really, very sorry,” the other twin says, batting her outlandishly long false lashes and sounding anguished. “We did a bad thing.”

“A very, very bad thing,” Twin One adds more gravitas.

“We could have died down there!” Marina growls. “I could be…I don’t know, I could have diabetes and not have had my diabetic stabby thing with me! And Melody’s afraid of the dark! You could have given her an actual heart attack.”

I waver. I’m not entirely sure I appreciate being made to sound like such a scaredy-cat but I hold my tongue because she plainly isn’t finished yet.

“And Artie could have…fallen down the steps and broken his leg! In fact, he very nearly did. Show them, Artie, show them your limp!”

Artie looks conflicted. He clearly wants to back up Marina, but when he lifts his trouser leg it’s obvious that the tiny skin graze is not going to trouble him much.

“You two did that. Are you proud of yourselves now?”

The twins shake their heads and look at the floor, and a tear drips from one of their faces onto the cobbles outside the office door. “We went back an hour later to let you out again but you’d gone,” one of them whispers.

“That’s quite lucky for you, to be honest,” Artie says, without a hint of malice. “Because Marina wanted to wring your turkey necks until your eyes popped out of your heads.” He glances down at Marina. “Did I get that right?”