by Gareth Otton
“Tony!” Stella couldn’t help herself and apparently neither could Miriam and Tad. The admonishment came from all three at once and made the teenager blink in surprise.
“What?”
“Sorry about him,” Tad said whilst ignoring Tony’s question. “He said you were waiting for them?”
She nodded. “I was. In light of recent events, I had no choice but to come back here. I knew it was a long shot, but I thought someone might turn up.”
Tad was shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
“I’m Emily Jordan. Gideon is my grandson.” She looked like she was about to say something else but then shook her head and changed the topic. “I think we should go somewhere we can talk. I have a lot to tell and you will have many questions, I promise.”
“Okay,” Tad said. “Before we go anywhere with you though, give me the short version.”
Stella could tell by his tone that Tad didn’t trust Emily. With all that had been happening lately she didn’t blame him.
“Alright. As I said, Gideon is my grandson. He’s in danger from the same man who has been seeking you. Now that his hunter has been taken into police custody, I knew it was only a matter of time before either you or one of his people would come for my Gideon. I came here to see what I could do to keep Gideon safe.”
Tad was still frowning. “How do you know all this?”
“Because my Proxy is the man who hunts you. I know him better than anyone and if you want even a hope of stopping him, then you need to hear what I have to say.”
Silence followed her statement. The news shocked them all, but it seemed to affect Tad and the ghosts more than it did Stella. She recovered quicker and asked the question she had wanted to know since she first started this case.
“The man behind it all. Who is he? What’s his name?”
Emily hesitated and looked a little pained as though she didn’t want to answer. Finally she took a deep breath, straightened herself out and spoke.
“He is without a doubt the most dangerous man you’ll ever meet. You have no idea what the cost would be if he knew I was telling you this. But, I have no choice. Not when he’s coming after Gideon.”
She took another deep breath and said, “The man you’re looking for, the man hunting you, is called Joshua King.”
The name sounded familiar to Stella, but it stunned Tad. His ghosts also had a strong reaction, and she wondered if maybe it was a ghost thing.
“Who is that? His name sounds familiar.”
Tad turned to her, his eyes wide, and said, “He’s the man who’s been paying off the corrupt police that Kate arrested the other day. He’s the one that Kate thinks has been killing people and having the police cover up his crimes.”
Suddenly his surprise made sense. Stella had been following Kate’s case if only to see how her rival was getting on.
“Are you ready to talk now?” Emily asked.
Tad and Stella both nodded. It was time for answers.
28
Saturday, 25th December 1982
14:33
Poison.
It was the only explanation why everyone else was dead save for Emily and Joshua. Twelve people who had been breathing, eating, and laughing just five minutes earlier were now lifeless corpses scattered around the table.
So why was Joshua still eating?
Emily was shaking as she stared at the chubby, blonde boy. He was calmly cutting chunks of chocolate cake with his fork and putting them into his mouth. The look of rapture as he took every bite didn’t belong amongst such carnage.
“If you’re not going to eat yours, can you slide it down?”
They were the first words since it happened and they made Emily jump.
“What?”
“Your cake. I want it. Pass it down.”
“But what if it’s poisoned like the rest?”
“It’s not. Please pass it down.”
None of this made sense. Confusion had never been a feeling Emily enjoyed. People with minds like hers didn’t get confused. Slowly the pieces fell into place.
“You did this?” she asked, knowing the answer before she finished speaking.
The boy laughed around a mouthful of cake as he scraped the residual fudge and cream from the plate.
“There’s that big mind at work,” he teased. “Took you long enough. Now Emily, please pass me your cake.”
Emily still didn’t move. He had killed them all, his entire family. He’d been teased and belittled all his life, but enough to prompt this?
His left arm was ruined when he was dropped as a baby. To people like the Kings, a cripple had no worth and they no longer cared about him. Emily cared though. She always thought he could be sweet when he wanted to be. She cared as that sweetness left him thanks to years of neglect. He had grown to be a loner, preferring his own company more often than not. She’d even seen him talking to himself.
She worried about him, but she never thought she’d have to worry about this.
“Emily. I’m losing my patience.”
Emily recognised that it was best to do as he asked. She got up, taking her cake with her and stepping over the bodies of her old employers as she moved down the table.
Joshua smiled as he watched her approach and he pushed his own plate aside. He was graceful, almost reverential, as he took the plate from Emily’s hand and laid it on the table before him.
Emily didn’t know what to do. She wanted to leave, to go get help, but doubted he’d let her. Instead she turned and walked toward her seat.
“Don’t be silly, Emily.” The voice stopped her cold. “Don’t go all the way back there. It’s hard to talk to you from that far away. Sit here.”
He nodded to the chair to his left. Emily hesitated. That chair was still occupied.
Talia King had been beautiful in life. She was slim, confident and loved by anyone who met her. She was his only sibling, and it was no secret that her parents considered her the future of the King family.
The figure that Emily had to manoeuvre from the chair was no longer beautiful. Her eyes were open and lined with red where they had bulged in her struggle to breathe. The strain on her face was still evident and her grimace was horrifying.
Emily tried not to look at that face as she half dragged the young woman from the chair, laying her next to her father.
“There, isn’t that better?” Joshua asked between mouthfuls as Emily sat in the now vacant seat.
She didn’t trust herself to answer.
“I suppose you’re wondering why you’re not dead with the rest of them?” he asked before scooping yet another fork full of cake into his mouth.
Yes, Emily wondered that. She was also wondering why the rest of them had to die.
“You might think it’s because you’re not like them,” Joshua answered his own question. “But that’s not the reason. I know you aren’t family, but you might as well be. You’ve been living in this house longer than I’ve been alive.”
It was true. Emily had been brought to England nearly twenty years earlier when she was fifty. She liked to tell herself it was her choice, and she had accepted a job offer, but the truth was that she was a prisoner.
In spite of being born in a time when those of African descent were not entitled to an education, Emily discovered she had a talent for numbers. She’d been taught to read secretly when she was younger, and a job working at a library at night had given her plenty of time to hone that skill. She used the time to further her education, and when she encountered mathematics she had discovered her true purpose in life.
She had no future academically. She was a black woman and no matter how much their world evolved she had doubted she would ever be accepted. She had tried to keep her talent a secret. It didn’t last.
She had been discovered by a young man from Brooklyn. He was a small-time player in several illegal enterprises and he realised how someone with her talents could help ma
ke him a much larger player. He got leverage on her by threatening her husband and children, and she had no choice but to work for him.
She’d been twenty-one at the time and over the next twenty years her skills earned her the attention of five different men who each killed or paid a handsome price for them. Her final employer had been the one to set her current lifestyle. Samuel Delacross was so appreciative of her skills that he treated her like royalty, almost as though she was a member of his family.
She had helped grow his business at the expense of her family who had long since emigrated to the UK to be as far away from her as possible. She remained with him and grew comfortable until his youngest daughter married ten years later.
She married Francis King who spent a lot of time in England trying to grow Samuel’s business interests across the ocean. Samuel gifted Emily to Francis as a wedding present and Emily’s time in the United States was up.
In the nineteen years since that day, she helped grow a thriving empire, watched over the King children who became almost as close to her as son and daughter, and made no move to reconnect with her old family. She willingly gave up ties to her old life to keep her real family from harm. She threw everything she was into the King family. Now they were all dead.
“The real reason I left you alive is because you have something I want.”
She started to feel a little more comfortable. She had spent her whole life dealing with people who wanted her for her skills. She knew how to deal with that.
“You want me to work for you like I worked for your father?” she guessed.
He laughed, spraying crumbs and pushing the second empty plate away. “Something like that.”
His eyes moved around the large room, resting on places that held nothing of interest that Emily could see.
“I’ve been planning this for a long time. This isn’t the only scene like this today. All over the country, there should be ten other Christmas dinners that have gone exactly the same way.”
He chuckled, and the sound made Emily go cold.
“Today will be remembered in certain circles as proof that with patience, anything is possible.”
“Why?”
“Why what? Why do this? Isn’t that obvious?” Emily shook her head. “Because I can. I’ve spent my entire life being looked down on by these people. All because my stupid slut of a mother was too clumsy to keep me from falling to the floor. I’ve been overlooked because of a crippled arm. I think we can all agree that was a stupid thing to do.”
“All of this is because you were overlooked?”
He laughed again. “You still don’t get it. I didn’t do this because I was overlooked. I did this because I could. Darwin was right, it’s the strong who survive. Because of this,” he motioned to his arm again. “I have always been thought of as weak. But there are different kinds of strength. You of all people should know that.”
He tapped his head with his finger. He had always been clever, not on her level, but he was brighter than the other members of his family.
“They couldn’t conceive that I was ever strong enough to do something like this, so they let their guard down. Tell me, when everyone around you is dead and you stand alone, who is really the strongest in the room?”
She didn’t answer. He wasn’t talking to her, he was just showing off.
“You said there were others massacres like this?”
He nodded eagerly. “Ten at least. The rest of the down trodden took little persuading. The girls who want to be taken as seriously as their brothers, the geeks, the infirm, and those otherwise deemed weak. Every family has someone who feels like they’ve been put down their entire lives. All it takes to show them the light is to prove to them how their supposed weakness can be their greatest strength.
“Them being invisible to their families is exactly what allowed this to happen.” He leaned closer and said, “Right now they’re sat at their own dinners and each of them are talking to one lucky dinner guest who is also not dead. They’re making this same offer to those talented individuals on my behalf.”
“What offer?”
“I want you to join me. I don’t mean as my accountant. Look at you, you’re so frail you might die any day now. Actually, no matter what comes of this conversation you will die today.”
Emily’s blood ran cold and she had to fight to keep herself from shaking.
“What do you mean? I thought you wanted me to work for you.”
“I do, in a way. The truth is, I want you to work through me by proxy. This won't make much sense until you’re dead. However, I need to talk to you now because I need you to stick around when you are dead. I can’t have you moving on before we have chance to talk.”
“What are you on about?”
“Like I said. That will soon become clear. What is important is that for now you know the stakes. When you’re dead, I want you to know what will happen if you move on to the next life.
“I’m aware of your family, the one you thought we didn’t know about anymore. I know they live in Pembrokeshire, how many of them there are, and even what they do for a living. I know that even though they haven’t spoken to you for a long time, you’d still do anything for them. Isn’t that right?”
Emily nodded, her mind racing as she tried to contemplate how he not only knew of her family but had found out where they lived. It had been so long since she had seen them that she thought no one knew of them anymore.
“The good news is that they’ll be fine. However, how much longer they continue to survive is up to you. Now, I’m going to kill you in a minute. When I do, I need you to remember not to move on. You’ll want to, trust me, but you need to remember what happens to your family if you do.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Like I said, because I can. I have learned that a common trait in those who succeed in life is that they take what they want, they don’t wait for it to come to them. You have a talent I want. I intend to take that talent.”
Emily opened her mouth to ask another question, but he spoke over her.
“I’m sorry Emily, but I’m in a rush. I have ten other places to be today, ten other souls to collect. The families that have died today make up the leadership of everything you and my father have built over here, so once I have collected my souls I have to act quick to take control of everything before it collapses.”
He leaned back in his chair and reached under the table. Emily had to fight back a scream when his hand emerged with a black pistol nestled in his grip.
“Okay Emily, be brave. This will all be over soon.”
She opened her mouth to speak, to beg for him to spare her life, but she never got the chance.
As calm as if he were doing the most normal thing in the world, Joshua raised the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.
Friday, 16th January 2004
23:29
All Emily sensed from him these days was pain. Nothing had ever pleased her more. Finally he was getting what was coming to him. He was dying a long and painful death. It would be a fitting end for Joshua King.
Of course, it was too early to count him out yet.
She had seen too much to think anything was impossible for him. Once upon a time she was naïve enough to think she was smart, that she knew everything worth knowing in the world. Nothing prepared her for Joshua King’s reality.
His was a reality of ghosts, nightmares and unlimited power for those with the stomach to take it. She hoped for different, but doubted even cancer could stop him. Since he learnt about it, his twisted mind had constantly been seeking answers. It was what brought them to Cardiff.
Joshua didn’t bother picking the lock, he simply pressed his hand against the door and pushed. With more than a hundred ghosts in him at all times, the casual strength of Joshua King was staggering. The lock didn’t even have chance to groan in protest before it snapped and the door swung inward.
Hopefully, he had left a fingerprint on the now broken doo
r so the police could arrest him. It was unlikely, but it was one of a million fantasies about his downfall that played through her mind.
The reception beyond the door was dimly lit by the glow of an exit sign. King looked around with eyes that were more than sharp enough to peer through the gloom and was unimpressed. It was like the reception of any other office block with nothing special about it. Emily sensed his anger rise. It was not a good thing for his prisoner.
“Well, where is it?” he demanded.
The cringing woman who followed him in flinched as he looked her way. She had been proud when they first met her. She was young, pretty and had seven ghosts of her own. Emily had learnt that this was a lot for normal Proxies.
Joshua was not normal.
He barely broke a sweat as he annihilated her ghosts. One by one he destroyed them until she was begging him to stop. Once he was done, he turned his attention on her. By this point she was little more than a weeping a mess, no longer possessing any strength beyond that of a normal woman. It helped humble her which was always good in Joshua’s presence.
“Well?” he asked again, his patience all but gone. “If you’ve brought me here for nothing, then so help me—”
“It’s here,” the woman blurted. “Surely you can feel it.”
He was about to answer when suddenly he did feel something. Through him Emily felt it as well. It was a strange sensation. It felt like the chill of death that accompanies a mad ghost, only it was more widespread. It was a weak feeling, but in spite of that she knew it was massive. It was just a long way off.
“I do feel it,” King whispered, his creepy smile back. “This is the place. I should never have doubted you.”
“Then I can go?” the woman asked hopefully. The poor thing. She had no idea that the moment she laid eyes on Joshua King her life was over.
“Do you know why I needed to find this place?” he asked instead of answering. She hesitated before shaking her head, no. “It’s the second part of a puzzle I’ve been trying to solve for a year.”
