Six Steps Down Read online

  'What's that?' asked Aisley warily.

  'It'll make it dead easy to find excuses to have Chandra hanging out at yours on a regular basis.' Cate smiled angelically.

  Aisley blushed, 'Why on earth would I want him hanging around the house?'

  'Hmm, let me see,' Cate mused, tapping her lip. 'Oh, I don't know … Maybe 'cause you've got it bad for him.'

  Aisley grumbled and slapped at her, and then they both laughed. Cate was right about it being a bonus and although she'd rather die than admit it, Aisley agreed totally.

  Chapter Three

  Sheldon's Seat

  That evening

  When Aisley got home, their dog Ellette came running out to greet her. Aisley scooped up the slippery fox terrier, giving her a cuddle and a smooch. Once she'd been loved enough, Ellette wriggled out of Aisley's arms and ran back up the driveway, scattering gravel as she went. She disappeared around the rear of the large, dilapidated house. Aisley followed her.

  The back entrance was currently the only entrance. There was a front door, apparently, somewhere under the jungle of creeping ivy and wisteria vine that covered the sprawling front veranda, but her parents hadn't tackled it yet. It was somewhere way, way down on the list of things that needed doing.

  Brand new, double french doors led from the back paved patio straight into a bright and airy kitchen. Aisley's father Grant had only hung them the week before. Built for a time when entertaining on a grand scale with lots of servants was common, the kitchen was huge and almost medieval in its style. The kitchen had a smaller room coming off one side that would originally have been a scullery, but Aisley's dad had recently turned it into a wine cellar. Stone steps led down into it. Since the walls were also stone, it was always cool even on the hottest summer day. It was Ellette's favourite place to lie down in the hot weather. The large flagstones that made up the floor of the kitchen were worn smooth with age. Grant was thinking of putting down some underfloor heating one day, just to take the chill out of them. The same flagstones were on the floor of the wine cellar. But they were uneven and rocked a bit, no matter how much Aisley's father had struggled to level them out.

  Aisley's mum, Shay, was chopping up vegies near the sink. She smiled as her daughter came in. 'Ah, there you are, Ais. I was just about to text you.'

  'Thought you might be,' said Aisley, sticking her head in the pantry. 'Sorry I'm late.'

  'It's just that your dad and I have to get to our course straight after tea,' Shay explained. 'You're on babysitting duty for an hour or so.'

  Shay and Grant were attending a weekly restoration course in the village town hall.

  'As if Wade needs a babysitter,' said Aisley, rolling her eyes.

  'Well, you know what I mean,' said Shay comfortably. 'So, why are you late? Is it school stuff?'

  'Yep.' Aisley ripped open a packet of chocolate teddy bear biscuits. 'Our Humanities teacher has us working in groups. We have to research an historical landmark in Seamere, so we got together at Melba to try and decide on a location.'

  'Don't eat too much right before tea, Ais,' Shay warned her gently, dumping carrots and broccoli into a sizzling wok.

  'Okay,' replied Aisley, settling for four biscuits instead of six.

  'So did you decide on a landmark then?' asked her mum as the delicious aroma of cooking garlic and olive oil filled the kitchen.

  Aisley nodded, biting a teddy bear's head off. 'You'll be pleased to hear this, mum. Our subject is …' she struck a pose, 'Ta da … Sheldon's Seat!'

  'Really?' Shay stopped stirring and stared at Aisley. 'Our house?'

  Aisley nodded.

  'Well, that is a good choice,' Shay looked proud.

  'Lucan thought of it,' Aisley said, leaning on the kitchen bench. 'He's clever. He's one of those still waters that run deep. He doesn't say much but when he does it's usually worth listening too.'

  'Your father can be a bit like that sometimes,' replied Shay. 'Well, you should know then that there are tonnes of boxes in the front room you guys could go through. They were all there when we arrived and I just haven't had the time or the enthusiasm to touch them. I bet you'll find a lot of useful information in there.'

  'Thanks mum, that's cool,' Aisley headed for the door. She stopped and pecked her mother's cheek as she went past. 'I thought we'd just use Google and go to the library. I didn't know you had all that stuff.'

  'We oldies are useful for some things,' Shay chuckled.

  Aisley grabbed another biscuit on her way out and smiled cheekily at the look on her mum's face.

  'Ten minutes until tea,' said Shay. 'Do not go too far.'

  Upstairs in her room, Aisley kicked off her school shoes and pulled off her stockings. She turned on her iPod and shoved the buds into her ears. While being serenaded by her favourite song, she felt around under her bed. She came across Mrs Fluff Butt, her well-loved stuffed rabbit that she'd had since babyhood. 'What are you doing under there?' Aisley asked, putting her on the bed.

  Resuming her search, she found what she was after, emerging with her current school yearbook. She climbed onto the wide window seat and sat cross-legged on the cushioned sill, enjoying the feel of the late afternoon sun, warm and friendly, on her bare legs. She didn't even need to search for the page with Chandra's profile on it. The book fell open of its own accord because she must have looked at his page a thousand times. Secretly, Aisley also liked to think it was down to fate. She knew the words by heart but read them anyway.

  Hi guys!

  My name is Chandra Sarin. I'm in year 10 at Seamere Secondary College. I was born in Salbury, Victoria and I am third generation Australian. My grandparents came from India in the late 1940s.

  I have a half-annoying/half-okay older sister named Aasha and we share an ancient, totally neurotic cat called Pippin who won't go outside EVER and likes to eat nectarines.

  I love surfing, swimming, and hanging with my friends. I'd really like to travel one day, especially to some of the great surfing beaches of the world, like those in Costa Rica and Brazil.

  I guess, if I HAD to pick a favourite subject at school, it'd be PE.

  When I leave school, I'd like to be even MORE awesome than I am now. Maybe I could be a PE teacher or something, but not until I've had some fun and seen the world!

  Below this was Chandra's school photo. At first glance, he appeared to be quite presentable, but if you looked closer you noticed his shirt collar was all crooked and rumpled. He wore his hair very short, spiked up in front, and he had an insolent smile on his face … like he was up to no good. Best of all, he had a tiny Bart Simpson toy poking out of the top of his jumper!

  To Aisley, that plastic Bart just summed Chandra up. She smiled and touched the tips of her finger to his picture. Sometimes she liked to imagine … splat! Something cold, wet, and horrid hit her cheek, rudely bringing her back down to earth. 'What the …' she looked about in alarm. Another damp splotch hit her forehead and a tiny, wet ball of soggy toilet paper fell into her lap. Aisley ripped out her ear buds and glared at Wade. Her younger brother stood in her bedroom doorway, his shoulders rippling with suppressed mirth as he attempted to reload his "gun" — a drinking straw — with another loo paper bullet. Aisley screamed and launched herself at Wade who rapidly decided that shooting a third time might spell doom for him.

  He took off down the hall and across the bridge, yelling over his shoulder as he went. 'Mum says to tell you dinner's ready!'

  Aisley grabbed the closest thing at hand, her stuffed penguin Gloria, and charged out of the room. Wade had just reached the bottom of the stairs when Gloria hit him on the top of the head. He screamed like a girl.

  'Shot!' yelled Aisley, punching the air.

  'Live on it,' Wade yelled back as he disappeared down the hall. 'It's your last, sister!'

  Aisley stood victorious on the wooden bridge for a moment and basked in the glory that sweet revenge brought. Then the carvings distracted her, as they always did, so she crouched down to study the faeri
es and elves expertly carved into the wood. They were so beautiful and Aisley never tired of looking at them.

  Shay had apparently been spending time meticulously cleaning some of the carvings because many of them stood out far better than they did when the Brannon's had first moved in. All at once, Aisley realised she could see letters carved here and there in the detail. An elf was sitting on top of an ornate letter "L" and there was a letter "M" caught in the branches of a tree. The more she looked the more "Ls" and "Ms" she found. By the time her mother stepped into the hall below to tell her if she took any longer Ellette was going to get her dinner, Aisley had counted sixteen "Ls" and fourteen "Ms".

  At the dinner table, Wade, who was in sixth grade, was regaling his parents with a story about one kid who had punched another kid during cross-country practise that day. 'Jacob did not even see it coming,' he said, eyes all wide and dramatic. 'He was sprinting along trying to beat his PB … he's always trying to beat his PB … and Hamish stuck out his fist and Jacob just sort of ran in to it!'

  'Jacob?' asked Aisley, joining in the conversation as she sat down and pulled in her chair. 'Isn't he that kid who kicked Rosie Fry?'

  'That's him,' Wade rolled his eyes. 'He's a real loser.'

  'Was he hurt?' Aisley asked, helping herself to some bread and butter.

  'Hell yes!' Wade cried. 'He stopped dead and fell flat on his back. I think he was unconscious because Mr Callahan had to carry him to the medical centre. Nyle and I saw the entire thing because we were running by at the same time. It was most sincerely cool!'

  Nyle Bevin was Lucan's younger brother and Wade's best friend.

  Shay frowned. 'Punching someone is not cool, Wade.'

  Wade rolled his eyes again. 'Just because I say that, mum, doesn't mean I'm going to do it. Jeeze!'

  'This Jacob sounds like a troublemaker, yes?' Grant reached for the tomato sauce. 'A punch was way out of line, I agree. Maybe pretending to trip him would have sufficed.'

  'Grant!' Shay frowned at her husband. 'There's never an excuse for violence.'

  Grant pretended to look suitably chastised then winked at Wade when Shay wasn't looking. Wade grinned, vindicated.

  Aisley took advantage of the pause in conversation. 'Dad, what was the name of the man who built this house?' she asked quickly, before Wade could get another word in. 'I'm researching our house for a Humanities project.'

  Grant smiled. 'Oh, really?' He looked as pleased as Shay had earlier. 'Well, the fellow who built this house, and owned half the town as well by the way, was an English lord named Michael Sheldon.

  'Sheldon! As in Sheldon's Seat,' remarked Aisley, delighted.

  'That's right,' said Grant as he buttered some bread. 'He owned the whole of Loch Hill all the way down to the beginning of Main Street as well as half of the businesses in town. He donated the funds to build the hospital, the Anglican Church, and I'm sure he was involved in lots of other projects too.'

  'He had a wife too, right?' Aisley prompted.

  Shay took up the story. She leaned her elbow on the table and propped her chin on her hand. 'His wife was much younger than him. I'm not sure of the exact age gap, but you'll probably find something about that in those boxes of paperwork. Her name was Lily. The local legend goes that Lord Michael built this house as a replica of the home they'd left behind in England. But the general opinion was that Lily was very unhappy and suffered terribly from homesickness. She was apparently a sick, frail person and died in childbirth trying to give birth to their first baby.'

  Most of this information was not new to Aisley, but she listened closely.

  Grant took up the thread once more. 'Many women were not as strong in those days and medical intervention was not very successful. Lots of women died in childbirth. Lord Sheldon was obviously a broken man after that, so he immediately put Sheldon's Seat on the market and sailed back to England as soon as he could, never to return.' He smiled and took another bite of his dinner. 'Or so the story goes.'

  'Maybe it's her ghost that's been seen here,' whispered Wade gleefully, peering about as if Lily Sheldon might come floating through the wall at any moment.

  'Why would she be here, you dufus,' said Aisley. 'It's not as if she died here.'

  Wade looked disgruntled. 'Dad just said …'

  'Dad said she died in childbirth so she would've been in the hospital,' Aisley said, picking up her glass of water. 'Everybody knows that ghosts haunt the place where they died.'

  'She probably did die here, Ais,' said Grant. 'Most women had their babies at home back in those days.'

  'Oh.' Now it was Aisley's turn to peer about the room.

  Wade looked rather pleased with himself. Maybe the stories about Sheldon's Seat being haunted weren't so far-fetched after all.

  Shay began to clear the table. 'Well if the ghost of Lady Lily Sheldon is still here,' she said, 'I hope she approves of the colour schemes we've picked out for her house.'

  Later that evening, Aisley said goodnight to her parents and climbed the stairs to bed. She crouched down on the mezzanine bridge again and ran her hand over the letters in the carvings, frowning thoughtfully. "M" and "L" obviously stood for Michael and Lily. What a classically romantic story.

  Aisley stood up and gazed out across the double height reception hall spread out below. It had once been grand, but was now in a sad state of disrepair. There were three, stunning stained glass windows set high up on the far wall. The moonlight shone dimly through them, casting beautiful rainbow shapes across the wooden floor below.

  When they'd first moved in, she and Wade had spent a fair amount of time searching the house's many nooks and crannies looking for evidence of the supernatural, but to no avail. All the same, there had been plenty of occasions when Aisley had fancied she might have seen a fleeting something from the corner of her eye or heard an odd, out-of-place creak. She was sure that sooner or later she'd get some hard evidence about something paranormal in Sheldon's Seat.

  'Lily,' whispered Aisley, half hopefully and half fearfully, 'Are you here?' She waited, holding her breath. 'If you are here, I'm glad.'

  There was no reply. Just the familiar little sounds of the house settling down for the night. After a moment or two she gave up and went on to her bedroom to start getting ready for bed. All of a sudden the Humanities project about Sheldon's Seat seemed very personal.

  Chapter Four

  Chilly Research, Warm Gossip

  Five days later

  The following Saturday afternoon was wet and cold. Sheldon's Seat stood solidly against the weather as it had done for the last hundred years. The wind whistled through the many cracks that Grant Brannon's putty-gun had not yet filled up, making the old house creak and groan.

  Aisley, Cate, Freya, and Archie were in one of the semi-derelict front rooms of the house poring through the first of the many boxes her mother had told her about. The room was literally full of them, some in great, teetering piles that reached halfway to the high Victorian ceiling. There was no mains power in this part of the house yet so they'd managed to run an extension cord all the way down the hall from the living room to enable them to plug in a fan heater. Anything to take the chill out of the room was welcome. But due to the colossal height of the ceiling, the little heater wasn't making very much difference … unless you sat right on top of it, which Freya was.

  The room was formerly used as a library and dark, empty bookshelves lined two thirds of the panelled walls from floor to ceiling. A musty, closed-up smell filled the cold air. To top it all off, because there was no electric light it was exceedingly gloomy. A little natural light filtered in through the enormous ornate window, but the ivy growing up the outside blocked most of it out.

  Hence, Aisley and her friends all had torches. Archie had even brought along his battery-powered camp light. He sat hunched over it, wrapped in Aisley's doona and muttering to himself like an old fortune-teller performing a tarot reading. They were also expecting Lucan and Chandra to appear at some stage. Both b
oys had promised to come, but neither of them was answering their texts. So the others could only assume they'd see them when they were looking at them … if at all.

  Lucan would most likely have a good excuse. But privately, Aisley thought Chandra was probably just slacking off. It was an unkind thought but she couldn't shake it. His reputation preceded him, unfortunately. She pulled the lid off a small tea chest she'd found in one of the piles of boxes and peered inside. 'Bingo!' she said. 'I've found some photos. This should be good.'

  Cate drew closer and looked over her shoulder. The photos were all sepia tint, which was typical at the time they were taken. Aisley flicked through them. Some images were easy to distinguish, like pictures of the mine workers and the coal mine itself. Others were of particular pieces of equipment and were not so easy to understand. Aisley looked at the back of each picture, but most had no information about dates or names documented on them. She systematically made her way through them, thinking that the Sheldons had really boring taste when it came to photography.

  Then just as she was losing interest, Aisley came across a beautifully clear photograph of a brand new and magnificent Sheldon's Seat. There was a garden party happening on an immaculate lawn, with women sitting beneath frilly parasols, holding teacups and champagne glasses. Men with large moustaches stood behind the women's chairs and stared solemnly at the camera. Behind the party-goers stood the house; two levels of amazing Victorian architecture that spread and rambled across the hilltop in a way the current bedraggled building could only dream about. On the back of the photo, a description was written in an old-fashioned copperplate hand.

  Seamere Town Hall Benefit

  Sheldon's Seat

  March 1902

  'Check this out,' Aisley passed the picture around.