The Abbey Farm Curse.
Chapter Five.
Tuesday night, the night that Angie and I ended up in bed together and the night we had our joint "hallucination", was one of very little sleep for me (I'm saying "hallucination" in inverted commas because I had no other word for it even though it doesn't seem to fit quite right). It wasn't just that I'd had sex with someone I'd been warned to leave alone, although that in itself might well have been enough, given my experience of my mother's temper, but it was what had happened afterwards that gave me such insomnia. That was something I just couldn't figure out, and I went over and over it trying to find some logical explanation.
I still wasn't sure if it had actually happened or if it had been a dream or really had been an hallucination. Maybe we had actually travelled back in time as Angie had first believed, or maybe we only thought we had. Perhaps the events we'd seen, or thought we'd seen, had been echoes of real events, things that had actually once happened in our new home, although more than likely they were nothing more than the product of imaginations fired by the history that seemed to seep from every stone of the house. But although I was into history Angie wasn't turned on by the past in any sense of the word, so perhaps that was unlikely. There was something else I kept thinking about too. Why weren't we scared witless? Yes, we'd been a little frightened initially, but when that first shock had died down we seemed to take it all as a matter of course, especially Angie, who didn't seem fazed at all. Why weren't we both absolutely petrified and refusing to spend another night here? Why hadn't we run screaming from the building? We hadn't even felt the need to wake Willow and tell her.
I tossed and turned, going over everything that had happened, trying to find a connection between anything that had happened that day that might have triggered a dream or something to apparently make us able to see people in the past. The only thing that seemed out of the ordinary was my making love to Angie, and that certainly qualified in that respect. But how can having sex with someone trigger that sort of vision, or hallucination, or whatever you want to call it.
Come to that, why were we so incredibly horny anyway? Was it possible it was because of where we were? It didn't sound very likely, but then neither did being able to have either a real or imaginary post coital look around the house as it had been two or three hundred years or so ago. The only valid but unhelpful conclusion I eventually came to was that I really didn't know. I figured it was likely that our view of the past must have been an hallucination, but then how had we both had it at the same time? What if Angie was right and we really had taken a look backwards? I didn't have any real evidence for any of the theories that pushed and hustled their way through my mind, and so in the early hours of the morning I finally gave up, purposely trying to clear my head of thoughts altogether and get some rest. Sleep must have come eventually I suppose, because suddenly it was morning and time to get up again.
Having dragged myself out of bed I showered, had a lonesome breakfast, neither girl having surfaced, and prepared my list for the plumbers merchants where I had to go for supplies. I must admit I was quite glad Angie wasn't up, because I don't know if I could have looked her in the eye. But I needed someone awake in case the workmen turned up to install the damp course, so I was pleased when Willow rose before I had to wake one or the other of them. I wasn't sure if the foul look she gave me was down to my asking her to look out for the workmen or for something rather more personal. Maybe she'd heard us in bed and maybe not - I wasn't going to ask. I was just glad to escape the house for a little while.
When I got back I was knackered, mentally and physically exhausted, my lack of knowledge of plumbing had been laid bare and I was pretty sure I'd been sold things in my ignorance that we didn't actually need. I'd found it difficult to concentrate and to keep my mind on what I was doing, and so I'd pretty much taken the salesman's word for what I needed. I parked the car and then before I even got out I started going over events from the night before in my mind again, and the more I thought about things the weirder and more unlikely they seemed. At first when we'd moved into Abbey Farm I thought we were naturally feeling a bit frisky, but things had gone a long way past that point. I couldn't cope with the way I felt at all, especially with what it had led to. And that was something I had to face up to in the immediate future. I leaned back in the car seat trying to get myself psyched up to face Angie and the consequences of last night, but with no longer concentrating on actually driving I was having trouble even staying awake. In the end I levered my eyelids back open and forced myself out of the car and into the house.
Lady Luck, it seemed, had not yet discovered my shortcomings, because a note informed me that the workmen weren't coming until Friday and the girls had gone into town. I breathed a sigh of relief and, with the day now clear of appointments with surveyors, workmen, officials, or any other of the hordes that seem to descend on any renovation, I did the few things I absolutely needed to do and gratefully went back to bed.
I think I'd probably slept for about at least two or three hours before I awoke with a start from a dream in which it was raining. I opened my eyes convinced for some reason I was not alone and looked around to find Angie standing beside my bed, wearing just a bath towel and with her hair wet from the shower. She was leaning over me and gently shaking my shoulder. Well, at least I knew where rain in that dream had come from.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I know you didn't want me to wake you, but you had left your door open and I needed to catch you on your own while Will's busy in the kitchen getting lunch ready.'
Still only half awake, I looked at her in confusion and, thinking that she probably wanted me to explain our vision, asked with a certain amount of trepidation. 'What for?'
She took a deep breath. 'How do you feel about what we did together?'
'You mean about us going to bed with each other?'
At least I wasn't going to have to broach that subject myself now.
She nodded. 'Yes, does it bother you? You know, with us soon to become related?'
That, more than anything was what bothered me, it felt like incest even though it wasn't.
'Yes, it does a bit,' I admitted. 'It shouldn't really have happened.'
She looked downcast as I struggled for the words to explain properly.
'Look, I know there's no real reason why we shouldn't, legally or morally, but it just doesn't seem right. And you know that your father and my mother are not very happy about us being on our own here in the first place. So we mustn't keep doing it.'
'Why not?' she asked quietly. 'Wasn't it nice enough to take a risk?'
I reached out and took her hand. 'Hell Angie, of course it was, but...'
'Why, don't you want to?'
I did, I did, but....
'Of course I do, it was fantastic, but....'
There seemed to be so many objections and yet none of them seemed that important. But we had to act responsibly.
'Why then?'
I tried to organize my thoughts into something simple. 'Two reasons. Firstly, we can't start up a proper relationship because our folks wouldn't let us, and trying to keep it quiet for long would be impossible.'
I looked up at her and took a deep breath before saying what was tiptoeing unwelcome into my mind. 'And what about what happened afterwards? Did we see the past because of what we did?'
'I don't think so. I know I thought it might have at the time, but not now I've thought about it. It wouldn't make sense.'
'So us having sex had nothing to do with seeing other people having sex, whether it was an hallucination or whatever.'
