Now We Can’t Sleep At Night (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 2)

by Robert Wilde

  “Ooh, excellent!”

  “But I’m going out soon anyway…”

  The man took the hint and left, allowing Dee to come back into the lounge. “I know you’re dead, but why do you still have to watch Dr Who every evening?”

  “I’m dead, not in a coma,” Joe shot back.

  “Right, I’m taking a piss, then Nazir should have arrived.”

  The hacker was right on cue, and Dee knocked on Pohl’s door, the professor emerged, and the group headed out.

  “Yunno,” Nazir began, “when we were offered a free tour we should have checked it was during regular opening hours, and not after it’s all shut.”

  “It’s nice, all private, just us and an expert.”

  “Joe, with all due respect, if there was an expert in that place all they do is cry at the horrors around them.”

  “I love Dino Mania!”

  “You are nostalgic about Dino Mania, which means you can’t tell it's shit.”

  “A quote for the advertising posters,” Pohl remarked.

  The group were soon parked up, ushered through the entrance, and told to wait by the door marked ‘Staff’. There they stood, Joe talking about the ‘wonders’ of the park, the others certain being dead had addled his brain. Eventually Nazir said “I’m bored of waiting,” and opened the door to the Staff area.

  “Don’t do that!” Pohl shrieked at the broken rules, and then Nazir slammed the door shut again.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Err, Dee…”

  “Yes?”

  “You know how Joe can’t see through doors yet?”

  “Yes?”

  Nazir opened the door, and all four looked through. The problem wasn’t so much the long stake they could see which had been driven into the packed earth, it was the fact Jeremy Smuts was impaled on it.

  As they walked closer, they could see the details.

  “It’s the classic image of an impalement,” Pohl said.

  “You know about impalement?”

  “I wrote about it for an encyclopaedia once.”

  “Right, classic?”

  “A stake with a curved end inserted into the anus and driven up through until it comes out of the mouth.” They all looked up, and there was a curved wooden top sticking out. “The really horrible thing is…”

  “It gets worse?”

  “…it was possible to insert the stake and leave the victim alive.”

  “Gross,” Nazir commented, just before Jeremy Smuts’ head turned as much as it could, fixing them with desperate eyes.

  “Okay, we need an ambulance, and a really fucking fast one.”

  To be fair to the ambulance services, once Dee had managed to get across the concept of ‘impaled through the arse but very much still alive and in agony’, a horrified dispatcher got an ambulance to Dino World in record time, and soon a very much pale and horrified group of staff were watching their brand new boss be cut down and taken to hospital with a sheet awkwardly placed over the sight. The group decided to drive after the ambulance, and they arrived at the same time thanks to Dee’s driving, which was about the same time Jeff arrived.

  The group briefed him fully on what they knew, he turned pale, and then he moved swiftly: cameras were to be checked, staff were to be questioned, the stake was to be sourced. They were to find this second killer, and they were to do it that night. As the police roared into action, Joe had an idea.

  “We should have asked his dad, the ghost might still be around.”

  “Fucksocks.”

  A very swift drive later and they were back at the park, where they discovered the father was angrier than normal.

  “How could those fucking police miss the accomplice!”

  “We appreciate that, but do you know who the accomplice was?”

  “No, can’t see a fucking thing from here!”

  “We really have to work on getting you to see through walls and shit,” Nazir sighed.

  “Do you have any idea at all?”

  “I’ve seen all the staff walk about. I didn’t see any with a stake.”

  “Not a victory for psychic technology.”

  “Can’t win them all.”

  “You lot are fucking rubbish.”

  “All right, no solidarity among the dead?”

  “Fucking amateurs.”

  “And what would you suggest?”

  “Haha, you tossers, I had to install a close circuit system that would detect every last dormouse, the cops must have caught him. They’ll be kicking a door down right now.”

  The police certainly did go through the records, and the video footage narrowed the suspects down to a list of, well, one. The plan was the same as last time: raid the house, apprehend the attacker quickly, but this time Jeff had ordered the entire place torn apart if necessary to find any and all connections between the attackers. Clearly hearing voices was a bullshit excuse. They would not fall for that again.

  The team had a different person enter first, and they were soon rushing through the house, guns raised. The woman who’d led the first time entered after a few others, rushed up the stairs, and entered a bedroom, finding… the suspect, sitting in a chair. She was relieved to find he wasn’t crying this time, and then very alarmed to find him grinning. Smile wide, teeth revealed. With no obvious signs of weapons he seemed to be subdued, but she had to ask, just had to.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “He’s gone! He’s gone! He’s left me alone!”

  Jeff came out of the interview room, walked like a zombie through the department, and collapsed into the chair in his office. This was not happening. This really could not be happening.

  Normally, when a police officer is presented with two people who both claim to hear voices, you bought the psychiatrist in and they decided if both were making it up or whether reality had conspired to bring two mentally ill people. The first gave you two people trying to hide their plan, the second gave you people needing a very secure unit. No one else in Jeff’s unit had any idea, none, that this wasn’t the case here, despite the fact that no connection between the two killers could be found yet beside the fact they nodded at each other a few times a day at Dino Mania. To them it was clear: a hidden relationship would be found, or they would pursue the first murder setting off the voice’s murderous demands in the mind of the second. Then everything would be okay.

  Not Jeff, who knew, just knew in his guts, that this was going to get silly very quickly, because let’s fucking face it, he’d lived in the world of High Strangeness for a year now, in fact he’d vomited in the bushes of High Strangeness as he staggered through it to his rented home, and there really was going to be a voice wasn’t there, an actual fucking voice, which, he presumed, could talk to anyone. What he needed was some sort of way forward, and that meant ringing Dee and having his pizza delivered to the abyss.

  “So, are we going to conclude that the voice is actually the same demon and it moved on to another weak minded victim?” Pohl had her finger in the air as she summarised.

  “That sounds logical,” Joe replied.

  “No, no,” Dee protested, “you absolutely cannot use ‘logical’ when it comes to fucking demons telling people to kill over shitty looking dinosaurs.”

  “Alright, but it does seem to be what’s happening here.”

  “Well I’ll grant you that.”

  “I presume this demon has never seen Jurassic Park 2,” Nazir added.

  “Jurassic Park 2 was amazing,” Joe protested.

  “The T Rex creeps up on someone. The T Rex. The glass shaker. Which, I should add, my student flat called me thanks to my sex moves.”

  “Can we focus on the demons and not your own claim to be an Incubus?”

  “Well thank you Miss Nettleship.”

  “Dear god.”

  “If we accept that as our conclusion, the question becomes, what do we do about it?”

  “Do about it? I’d put money that the next person to open that park get
s killed too, and so on until the world is out of people with no attention to detail.”

  “That,” Pohl smiled, “is exactly what I think will happen.”

  “Okay, now you’re looking very sinister professor, what have you thought of?”

  At this point Dee’s phone rang, so she snatched it up. “Hi Jeff, how are you?”

  “Please tell me you have an idea. Please.”

  “Well, actually...”

  The camera crew checked their equipment, gave a thumbs up, and all focused on the subject sat before them. In this small room in a regional television studio, the lead presenter on the nightly news was sat opposite Jemma Smuts, a woman who bore such an uncanny resemblance to her father and brother that she might have been cloned as part of a Jurassic Park spin off project. She hadn’t, but she really liked to pretend that she had.

  “Hello Jemma, we’ll be spending five minutes on this interview, have you ever been on television before?”

  “No,” she said smiling very nervously indeed.

  “Well, it’s just like having a conversation, and we’ll be doing some work in the edit for the evening repeat if needed, so don’t worry at all. Now, I believe you’re here to tell us all about how you’re adopting the mantel of your father and brother and reopening the Dino Mania exhibit?

  “Yes, although we will be rebranding ourselves in the near future, because we’re not very comfortable with the mania at this point.

  “Entirely understandable. Now, what’s the bulk of what you want to get across?”

  “Well, we have started a fund to help my brother…”

  “Is it true he’ll live?”

  “Of a sort, but yes.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear that, truly I am.”

  “That he’ll live?”

  “No, err, about the injuries.”

  The interview passed relatively painlessly, and soon Jemma was driving herself back to the park, where she slipped inside, went into the office buildings and sat alone in her father’s old office. There was a computer, but she distracted herself by taking her phone out and playing one of the many games she had tucked away on it.

  As the day faded and the high score increased she began to grow hungry, so put a jacket on and picked up her keys, intending to go and get some take away and return to her vigil. She opened the door to the office, stepped out, let it swing shut behind her, and stepped out into the park, at which point a figure loomed up to one side and clamped a hand around Jemma’s mouth.

  The door to the office surged open as Jeff and Nazir rushed out, barrelled into the attacker, knocking them to the ground as Jeff made sure he’d grabbed the wrist of the knife arm and kept it under control. As the group all looked at each other, a horrified Jemma, a worried Jeff, a stunned assailant, Nazir called out “wait, please, wait, we just want to talk. Come inside and talk to us. Please, talk, don’t go to someone else!”

  The attacker looked at them, and they saw she was a sturdy woman in her forties who seemed to be listening to a voice in her head, which was all part of the plan. Then she just nodded and said “he says he’ll listen, but he won’t go far.”

  “Inside is all we want. Thank you.”

  The attacker was guided inside, and was soon sat in the main office chair with Nazir and Jeff to either side, and Dee and Pohl had also emerged from their hiding places, along with the box. However, Jemma objected to any of these killers sitting in her father’s place, and soon the guest chair had been moved into a corner and they stood in front of that.

  “We’re a group of psychical detectives,” Dee began, “and we know the voice in your head is a real being. We know you are a real being, and we wish to ask you a few questions.”

  “It says… it says if only you knew the truth you wouldn’t be so smug.”

  “I see, well, I’m Dee Nettleship, do you have a name?”

  “He says his name is older than your kind, and wouldn’t come from my mouth.”

  “Has he thought about taking a useful name?” Jeff coughed, Dee tilted her head and changed tack. “We’d like to know why the voice hates the park so much. What has he got against dinosaurs?”

  “He’s, he’s horrified. He says those aren’t dinosaurs, they’re abominations, they’re a slur on his kind and he wants this park shut.”

  “Can he be any more specific?”

  “He… he wants to make a deal.”

  Dee looked at Jeff, who added “well we can’t take it to court can we.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “The terms are, he will tell you what is happening in return for the closure of this park and your help in closing one other. Then he will leave the owners alone.”

  “He’ll leave? Why do we believe that?”

  “He says he knows you’ll honour your part as monkeys are oddly keen on fulfilling petty agreements. Whereas he would like to conserve some energy.”

  Dee looked at everyone, who nodded. When they got to Jemma, she paused, and then did too. “This place is a curse on my family.”

  “Tell us.”

  “I am a spirit of great age, and even greater intelligence. What would you expect when we’ve evolved over at least sixty six million years, and for some several hundred million more.”

  “Sixty six million…” Joe said, thinking.

  “Now we exist in your era, amusing ourselves, and you call us angels or demons, where as we are the next stage in evolution and you are just preening monkeys.”

  “Sixty six million!” And Joe has worked it out. “That’s the extinction of the dinosaurs!”

  “Dinosaurs?”

  “Dinosaurs!”

  “Dinosaurs?”

  “Dinos?”

  “Are we just going to repeat dinosaurs all the time?”

  “Wait, wait, you’re telling us that you’re a dinosaur, who died and whose soul evolved?”

  “Yes young woman. And this park is an insult to our memories.”

  “All the demons, they were dinosaurs?”

  “Why do you think the devil has horns?”

  “I didn’t see that coming,” Pohl noted. “I really didn’t.”

  “So, will you help me destroy this betrayal of our memories?”

  “I think we can do that. Just give us a few seconds to adjust, it’s a little bit of a shock.”

  “That’s a fucking understatement.”

  Two men walked in front of the group, carrying each end of the Dino Mania sign which had hung over the entrance.

  “There is no chance we’re having that in my flat,” Dee said out loud, seemingly to no one, but actually to Joe who had demanded they come along and watch the sad sight unfold.

  “We could prop it against a wall?”

  “No chance.”

  Jemma Smuts had allowed the group to sit on a large rockery and watch what was to happen, and so the trio had organised a picnic. Even now a hamper was sat on one rock, as the humans were sat on others, and Joe was propped up in front.

  “Are we allowed to drink wine on a building site?” Pohl asked.

  “It’s private property, we could have a strip show. No Joe, we are not having a strip show.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” he protested to Dee.

  They all heard a large engine start up, and they looked at the huge yellow digger which came rumbling towards, not them as they were a fair bit behind, but to a concrete dinosaur which stood in between. As they watched the digger raised its hydraulic maw and began attempting to push the dinosaur off its supports and over, ready to be smashed up and taken away.

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it,” Joe opined, “the end of an era, the true end of an era.”

  “Joe, it was shit.”

  “It was not shit, it was a wonderful happy place, and now we’ve arranged for it to be destroyed.”

  “I realise you’re worried Joe, but two people died here, and we couldn’t easily stop a third. The best solution for the Smuts is closing this place, sealing the memory of their m
urder away, not wiping the dinos down and letting kids swing off it a month later. The park had to close, the fact we were able to sort a deal is just a bonus.”

  “Well I’ve got plans.”

  “Plans?”

  “Yes, when we get back, Nazir, I want you to create a Facebook group for me, Remembering Dino Mania, where all the fans can come together and record their memories.”

  “All the fans?” Nazir wasn’t convinced.

  “Yes, all of us, post pictures of our guidebooks, or photos of our visits. It will be a great resource, and a great memory.”

  “As long as people can still knock the place down,” Nazir said in agreement.

  “I suppose we’ll have to let that happen won’t we.”

  “Yes, yes we really will.”

  “The sign would look really good on the group?”

  “Try it again with the sign and I’ll throw your box into the tar pit.”

  Nazir coughed with laughter. “You mean the shitty hole in the ground they painted black?”

  “You really are a group of philistines.”

  “We’re a group of people who appreciate dinosaurs who look like real dinosaurs. I think you’re the philistine here.”

  “Bugger. Can I at least have one of their heads?”

  “No!”

  Jeff had gone into his office, closed the door, and waited until his team had all moved into different parts of the building. Then he pulled his wallet out, looked at the piece of paper, sighed heavily, and used his mobile to dial it. There was a ring, just the one, and a voice answered. “Yes?”

  “Hello, is this Peters?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Jeff Maquire, a police detective who has worked, still does work with Dee Nettleship.”

  “Ah, yes, Jeff, I remember her talking about you.” Jeff was pleased at this for a moment, and then realised it probably wouldn’t have been good. He decided to go on.

  “So is this Peters?”

  “Yes, yes it is. What are you after?”

  “I was hoping we could talk.”

  “Okay, why not, I’ll get back to you with a time and a place.”

  Jeff’s phone received a text fifteen minutes later, and it was two days later when he was sat on a park bench holding a coffee feeling like a fucking cliché. As he stared out at the squirrels he felt a shadow over him looked up, and there was a man standing there.