The Abbey Farm Curse
Chapter Eight.
I didn't have a bad night's sleep all things considered. I had expected to have it disturbed from thwarting the intentions of whatever power it was that was trying to rule our lives, but in the end all that actually troubled me was a dream, though it must be said it was a strangely unsettling dream. I can only remember a fragment clearly, but in that fragment Angie was naked and lying on a stone slab with her legs apart. By her side was my mother pleading with me to fuck Angie but with me being unable to comply 'cos I didn't have a hard on. I've no idea how the scene proceeded, because that crazy fragment is all I remember of it. I had a feeling the dream meant something, but I didn't have a clue what, and I don't really think I wanted to know either - real life was rapidly becoming weird enough without adding any bizarre dreams to it. I told the girls about it at breakfast to see if they had had anything similar, but I'd been the only one to experience such a dream. And they did give me some funny looks as I related the experience.
But they had both heard someone asking for them before they went to sleep. Angie said she clearly heard me telling her to strip off and get ready for a good seeing to, which is not my way of saying things at all, and Willow was equally certain Angie had asked her to come and help her masturbate. We had, we all admitted, indulged in a little do it yourself and we had all enjoyed it, as well as getting a weird kind of satisfaction in defeating our paranormal adversary, which was how we now looked upon the force within the house. It was quite an interesting conversation, for it revealed just how surprisingly much we were now all on the same wavelength. It also revealed just how correct our assumptions had been and how powerful the house really was.
In the light of that I wanted to take the conversation further and to see what we thought might happen now, but just as I opened my mouth to ask the workman arrived early, knocking perfunctorily on the front door before marching straight in and manhandling drums of chemicals into the ground floor.
'Back in a minute,' I said with an angry and frustrated sigh, and stood up to go down and sort them out.
For one thing I was deeply annoyed at their untimely interruption, and for another I wasn't at all pleased at their walking in before being asked and I intended to tell them so. They needed to be reminded that this was not simply a building site but also someone's home, and I'm afraid they got both barrels complete with a sharp practical lesson in manners.
By the time I was back both Angie and Willow had finished and were clearing away the breakfast pots, and now I had something else on my mind. I stood with my back to the sink and gave them the bad news.
'They're going to inject the damp course this morning and they want us to either go out or seal ourselves into upstairs so we won't breathe in the chemicals, which would you prefer?'
I was pretty sure a way could have been found around that choice, as our vacating the premises had never been mentioned before, but my insisting the men go back out into the yard taking all their equipment with them and then making them knock on the door properly before being readmitted had probably not made them too cooperative.
'Out.'
They said it almost simultaneously, and I was of the same mind. The weather was far too nice to be cooped up for the morning.
'Okay, so where would you like to go?'
'Let's go over to the ruins,' Willow suggested. 'We've not had a proper look around since we got here.'
'Okay, but not to the church.'
She looked at me a little oddly as if to say she wasn't that stupid. Angie just chuckled quietly.
I thought I knew the best place for a quiet chat and I led them there. It was a shallow bowl shaped and nettle filled depression left by an old dried up pond where the twin forks of the ridge came together. With a bit of imagination it could be described as if a giant snake's tongue was scooping up a saucer. There we would be out of sight of the house and the ruins, with only the tallest part of the old church likely to be visible. We would have all the privacy we needed while in front of us would spread the entire countryside to the east, right over the village where June lived and as far as the nearest town.
As we walked across I gazed at the church ruins sticking up and wondered vaguely if that place had the same kind of time-portal powers as the bedroom hotspot, hoping that it didn't. It was a question that was to be answered more quickly than I could have expected. We dropped onto the grass under the depression's rim and above the nettle line, where we would be out of sound and sight of the house.
'We're not likely to be disturbed here, and we aren't in the house so we won't get sent into the past either.'
It was as if a switch had been thrown, the same roaring darkness closed in for a third time. 'But we haven't even touched each other' I remember thinking as the world closed down, then 'looks like it works anywhere'. It was as if the place was pointing out that, regardless of our wishes or intentions, it would send us spinning away whenever and from wherever it felt like it.
My first sensation when my mind began to clear again was one of utter peace, almost as if my surroundings were telling me not to be afraid when I opened my eyes. I'd not had any real sense of fear the other times, and I had even less this time, as if I knew, before even my sight cleared and I was able to see where I was, that I was welcomed, that we all were, and that we had nothing to worry about. Strange, isn't it, but the feeling was so strong that I was almost glad we'd been shifted again, even before I knew where to. I also knew now that the entire abbey site could play with time, not just the house.
'I wish you'd learn to keep your bloody mouth shut.'
Angie's muttered remonstration was the first thing I was aware of when my hearing returned and before I'd properly got my sight back. But, like the general feeling of tranquillity I was experiencing, it came across without malice, an affectionate dig rather than a genuine complaint.
The fog slowly lifted to give me vision again, and I became slowly cognisant that time had changed a lot this time, a whole lot. And I wasn't the only one to notice.
'Where the blue blazes are we now?' Willow sounded more curious now than scared, though a tremor of anxiety sounded behind the words. This was, after all, her first experience of the abbey's habit of time warping.
'The same place we were before clever-clogs there told us we wouldn't be taking this trip.' There was no such anxiety in Angie's scathing reply, consternation maybe, but no nerves.