Eglantine by Catherine Jinks Read Free Book Online Page B

telling you. It’s been getting worse and worse.’
    ‘But there’s too much. It will be impossible to monitor.’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    Richard explained that they had been intending to make a record of any paranormal activity in Bethan’s bedroom using infra-red video cameras and time-lapse photography. They had been hoping to film at least one line of script appearing on a stretch of white wall.
    ‘If we take a wide shot of this ,’ he said, gesturing, ‘it will be difficult to see any new writing against the old. If it was clean, we wouldn’t have any trouble.’
    ‘We’ll have to paint over it,’ Sylvia declared. As everyone looked at her, she continued, ‘Tomorrow, Richard. We’ll get a can of white paint and you can paint over the walls. Not the ceiling – just the walls. Then we can start from scratch.’
    ‘But we’ll have to photograph everything first,’ Richard insisted.
    ‘Oh, of course. That goes without saying.’
    ‘Uh – excuse me.’ Mum sort of put up her hand, like a kid at school. ‘You’re going to paint the room , again?’
    ‘If that’s okay with you, Judy.’
    ‘Well . . . I guess so.’
    ‘Richard will do it, won’t you, Richard?’ Sylvia went on. ‘I can’t, tomorrow – I’m booked up until the evening. And that’s when we’ll be wanting to come back.’
    ‘Will the paint be dry , by then?’ Mum inquired doubtfully.
    ‘Oh, I think so.’
    ‘Unless you need two coats,’ said Ray. ‘You probably will.’
    ‘We’ll see what happens,’ Sylvia remarked. Then she picked up her tape-recorder, and her infra-red camera, and her electromagnetic field detector, and went home.
    Richard went too, though not before photographing every square centimetre of Bethan’s bedroom. He spent about two hours doing that, and left at nine forty-five. The next day he returned at eight-thirty in the morning, with two cans of white paint, a drop-sheet, a camera, a paint-roller and a pair of overalls. He was very enthusiastic when he discovered that the walls were messier than ever.
    ‘So it didn’t work – taking the book away,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ I replied. I hadn’t bothered trying to copy out the new lines of text. They were impossible to read, you see.
    Bethan and I watched Richard for a while as he took another roll of photographs. Then Bethan wandered away, and I started to help with the painting. It quickly became obvious that Richard needed a lot of help – more help than I could offer. He didn’t seem to know much about painting.
    ‘I borrowed all this equipment from my dad,’ he admitted, after realising that he had forgotten to bring a tray for the paint-roller. Fortunately, Ray had one of those. He also had a ladder, and a bottle of mineral turpentine, and some paint-spattered old trousers.
    By ten o’clock, Ray was working beside Richard while Mum went off to do the shopping. I helped clean the brushes and listened to Richard’s stories. One was about a haunted post office, which somebody had turned into a guesthouse. Several visitors had reported going to bed, switching off the light, and feeling the weight of a person sitting beside them. When the light was switched on, however, there was no one else in the room.
    Another story was about a house where the doors kept slamming, where ghostly footsteps were always being heard, and where the crockery in the kitchen kept rearranging itself. Close investigation revealed that draughts, rats and a naughty grandchild were responsible for these ‘paranormal activities’.
    ‘You have to keep an open mind,’ Richard revealed. ‘It’s no good coming in with your own ideas about something. You have to set aside your beliefs before you walk through the door.’
    ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I asked, and he laughed a little.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘honestly. I’d like to believe in them. I haven’t seen anything so far that’s really convinced me – but on the other hand, I’ve heard some