by Robert Wilde
Mary was feeling extremely happy. Not only was Tabatha out of her life, well, that wasn’t really a ‘not only’, it was more a ‘hallelujah’, the great success of this year. Second to that was the demise of Mr. Johnson, which meant father hadn’t felt the need to hire anymore tutors to come and pester her, and Mary had been allowed even more time off school to cope with the new fatality. But third to that, a glorious and quite close third, was the reaction of the newly named Mrs Moore, who Tabatha had hoped to get rid of, and who had been following the plan exactly.
Mrs. Moore had been understandably heartbroken to not only lose her daughter to such a vile crime, but to have found the beaten and exposed body too. She had retreated inside, and then to her room, leaving only for the funeral, and for the final day of the trial, when she had stared emotionless as Mr. Johnson was sentenced to hang and been dragged away as he screamed his innocence. Other than that she had lain in her sheets, or in her chair, eating there, sleeping there, and doing whatever else she did to kill the day, and Mary assumed it involved a lot of crying.
Mr Moore had felt unable to continue to sleep with his wife, such was her grief, and so he now occupied a guest room, which took him closer to Mary physically by being next to her room, but also spiritually, or so Mary assumed as the man drifted apart from his wife.
Inside that room, Mrs. Moore was currently propped up on her pillows, items which were dirtying and really needed changing. A meal was sat on the table to her right, and this was growing cold because all Mrs. Moore did was peck at food throughout the day, but the jug of water was half filled because she did, at least, consume that. She had a bible in her hands, and she reading and rereading words she hoped would provide comfort and understanding, to allow her to understand why god had taken her lovely child, and the only surviving offspring of her first husband.
When she heard a noise and looked up, she knew it was time to look outside. Going to the window, she resumed staring out in the direction of where Tabatha had died, a place she looked at for hours as she sat in her chair and prayed to see her daughter come over the crest and…
She was not surprised to see Tabatha stood in the distance. It was, after all, so hard to imagine she was dead, it was easier to think she was alive. But deep inside her head, away from her grief, a part of her realised this shouldn’t be happening, and her eyes looked again, seeing ever so slightly through her daughter’s ghost. Leaping up, slipping into her shoes, she ran out of her room, lightly down the back stairs and through the fields, until she saw her daughter, now by the river.
“Tabatha, Tabatha, why aren’t you at rest,” she cried, leaning forward, “they hanged him, they hanged him,” and the ghost drifted over to her as best it could, until it was close to her mother’s ear. Now she looked like she was whispering, although of course she couldn’t get her words through, but the mother watched the mouth move and was soon able to lip read the message. A simple, clear and starkly effective message.
Pohl was finding it difficult lying to Doctor Bhavsar and his wife. Okay, when he asked her if she’d seen anything, she’d said she had and recounted her first experience with the ghost. But she didn’t say she’d been seeing the ghost many times a day now, and how it seemed to be waiting, almost hovering, for her to discover something in the archive. She had been honest about her progress through the documentation in terms of volume and percentages, but she had outright lied about finding anything seemingly conclusive like a murdered girl. Given how much of the archive was concerned with Tabatha’s death, this was a bad lie.
But Pohl had noticed something else. At a certain point in the material she’d arranged chronologically, all the material ceased to mention Mrs Moore or Mary. Tabatha, poor murdered Tabatha, was continually spoken of, but Mr. Moore stopped talking about his wife or his other daughter. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to conclude something had happened to one or both, something so traumatic Mr Moore never mentioned it, but the key question was what. What?
It had to be in the archive, or else the ghost wouldn’t be watching them.
The breakthrough occurred late one evening. There was a pile of boxes in one corner, not on shelves, stacked in the gap and none of them were labelled. Pohl opened one, decided to spread them out and peek in them all, and in the one at the bottom she found a metal box. It wasn’t locked, but she realised why it was in use when she opened it and a smell of burnt paper came flooding out. Inside was a journal which had been badly singed around the edges, and suddenly the archive smelt of an archivist’s nightmare.
“Joe close the door.”
“Err, I’m a ghost?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” It was soon shut by her, and they looked at the journal.
“I don’t need to be Benedict Cumberbatch to know that looks like our answer,” Joe said.
“I know,” Pohl said, worried she was squealing like a fangirl. “Right, let’s get this thing read.”
If there was one thing a good historian knew how to do, it was sit and read, and so Pohl went right through the journal in one sitting, with Joe matching her. Finally, they leant back and pondered.
“So it’s a journal kept by Mary…”
“Which details how she killed Tabatha…”
“Which someone found and burned…”
“As this is Mr Moore’s archive, Mr Moore found the journal…”
“Which explains why he stopped mentioning Mary.”
“So what happened to Mary? Prison? Or did he hide it?”
“What else is in the box?”
Pohl looked in and found small notebook, which she flipped open. There was a translated news article, so Pohl scanned it and turned to where she imagined Joe was sat.
“Mary vanished just before her fourteenth birthday. No one ever knew where she went.”
“Well fuck. So… if the ghost we’re really is Mary, then…”
Mary looked up from where she was reading in the dining room window and thought she’d seen a ghost. As a second passed, she realised she’d been a little early, because the person in front of her was very much still alive, despite all evidence saying she’d have died of a broken heart any day now.
“Hello mother,” Mary hissed, annoyed at the thought of Mrs Moore recovering instead of dying. Then again the woman didn’t look well, in fact she looked downright ill. A face beyond pale, but green, hand and arms the same, still in a dirty nightgown which really needed a wash and air. Deciding she could push this as far as she wanted, Mary offered “you smell, you need a bath.”
“Come and help me in the kitchen Mary,” Mrs Moore said, turning and walking lightly to the door. “Come on Mary, help me.”
Mary, for her part, was confused. Why was ‘mother’ out of bed. Why was ‘mother’ wanting help, and why was it in the kitchen? Still, there was little else happening, and she was still playing the dutiful daughter, so Mary rose and walked behind until they’d entered the kitchen and… Mary walked over to the sink, looked in, and saw it filled with water. “What are you doing?” she asked full of boredom.
She didn’t have time to react as hands grasped the back of her neck, as a foot tripped her forward, and as her head was pushed under the water. She didn’t have time to remark on the sudden strength of Mrs Moore, a strength fuelled by a rage and anger she had concealed well enough to lure her ‘daughter’ here, a rage which began when her own daughter’s ghost had conveyed the true name of her killer, and which had led to another murder.
Mrs Moore kept Mary’s head underwater until the girl had stopped moving, and kept it there a further five minutes, until she let a cold, dead body fall onto the ground. A puddle formed, and Mrs Moore bent, picked the corpse up in arms still fuelled by anger and hate, and stuffed it into a sack. Then she walked through the house up to her own bedroom carrying the newly filled hessian, filled with something no one had ever intended it to hold. Here the body was lain down, a rug rolled back, and Mrs Moore use a pry bar taken from the garage to reveal a gap in the floorboards. Int
o this the corpse of Mary was rolled, the floorboards replaced, the rug put back, and Mrs Moore climbed into her bed.
Here, feeling comfortable in something which had adapted to her form, her anger began to subside, and she knew she had done all she had to do in this world and that death had been revenged. Then she picked the razor she had taken from her husband’s room, slashed her wrists deeply, and bled red all over the white sheets.
Pohl walked across the fields with her work bag, until she came to the river. The ground was dry, so she put the bag down, her hands on her hips, and asked aloud “is Tabatha here?”
“No. No this place is clear.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s as you suspected, Tabatha can’t haunt the house, too far, and if her ghost was here, it’s gone now.”
“So the person we’re seeing really is Mary, and she was killed.”
“Yes. We probably could have come here on the second day.”
“I’m a historian, you should be happy I came out of the archive at all.”
“We’re still not there though.”
“No,” Pohl said, picking Joe back up and walking back to the house. “We’re still missing something. Someone killed Mary, I know it, I just know it. Maybe her father?”
When they returned Pohl entered through the kitchen door, to find Mary stood there dripping onto the carpet. “Mary?” she said, and was pleased to see the ghost nod. Looking at the ghost, and around, Pohl concluded “someone drowned you in that sink.”
Mary’s lips curled up in an evil smile, and rather than vanishing she walked to the door, turned, and looked as if asking. Pohl knew she had nearly solved the test, and that Mary would reveal the truth if Pohl could prove to have solved it.
“The world thought you vanished, so someone hid your body. Your mother vanished from her husband’s accounts, but never featured in an article, so something else happened to her. But you wouldn’t have killed her and been killed, so I assume Mrs Moore killed you and hid you in this house.”
Mary smiled, a chilling look, and started walking through the property, so Pohl and Joe followed, as they went upstairs and into a spare bedroom. The room where Pohl had been staying.
“I’m not going to like this am I,” Pohl said, noticing that Mary’s drips appeared to be gathering around some floorboards.
“She’s under the floorboards?” Joe exclaimed.
“Can’t you check?”
“I can’t see through things!”
“Well while I go and find a crowbar, take lessons off her on how to be a ghost.”
Joe didn’t like the way Mary smirked at him at all.
Pohl returned soon after holding a bar, and the marked boards were heaved up. They went easier than you’d thought, thanks to them having been pried up before, and there underneath was a black mass with something in it.
“Wouldn’t this have stunk?” Joe asked, then added, “no offence Mary.”
Both were stunned when she used the box to say “Father went mad without us, he didn’t care about my smell as I rotted.”
Pohl probed the mess, and saw white bones within. “This is you then.”
“Yes, you have lived up to your billing as a professor.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you bury me?”
“Sorry?” Joe exclaimed.
“Will you bury me?”
“You killed your sister!” Joe was angry, “What the hell do you deserve!”
“Joe, please, calm.”
“Sorry professor, but she killed her sister.”
“That was a long time ago, and I have had plenty of time to reflect.”
“They all say that,” Joe replied to Mary, not at all convinced.
“Joe. I think we should bury her. And with all due respect, you don’t have to do anything to help, it’s I who will do it.”
“Thank you professor. There is a church near, perhaps it still operates.”
“I want to go down on the record as saying this is a bad idea.”
“Noted Joe, noted.”
“And how are you going to bury her?”
“Someone got her up here, I can get her down. Now, you can show moral support or I can turn you off.”
“Now that’s unfair.”
“Live with it ghosty.”
“You have spent far too long around Dee and Nazir. Far too long.”
That afternoon, Pohl went for a walk around the house, which took her past a church. This wasn’t just a wonderful example of Norman architecture, it had a wonderful old graveyard. However, this looked pretty full, but over the road someone had taken a field and turned that into a new graveyard, and as Pohl walked through this she saw two graves which had been recently used. It was thus a simple matter to put the bones in a new sack in her car while the house was empty, wait for night, and then creep into the graveyard, dig down into a fresh grave, deposit Mary, fill it in and sneak out.
Having returned to the house, Pohl went to the archive and sat amongst the records. “Mary? Mary?”
“She went with the bones,” Joe confirmed, “she’ll be in the graveyard.”
“Is that what she wanted?” Pohl checked.
“She wanted out of this house, away from the memories. She’s got it now, a graveyard full of people. Presumably people who won’t find out what she did.”
“I think everyone deserves peace.”
“I don’t agree. But you won’t have any, you’ve got to make a story up and tell Bhavsar not just who the ghost was, but how you got rid of it.”
“I’m sure we’ll make something up.”
“Oh, it’s we know you want help lying is it?”
“Yes, that is exactly it. If it helps I could pretend to be Dee and moan, drink a lot, and then do the right thing anyway.”
Joe laughed at the sheer surprise of the statement. “Well, that’s spot on, I’ll give you that.”
Five: Sex Yeah?
A man entered the foyer of the hotel, headed straight for the lift and discovered it was out of order. At this he had to pause to work out where the stairs had gone, and although this was achieved quickly it was enough of a pause for his eyes to see the bar and his heart to say ‘fuck it, let’s have a beer before we keep on with this shit.’ He thus went through, found the hotel bar relatively deserted, and ordered two bottles of beer which he took to his table. He promised himself he’d just have these two, then he’d get back to it.
She’d already been in the bar, dressed in a business suit and with a tablet on the desk in front of her, but she’d paid the screen no attention and instead looked at each of the clientele in turn, and having found them wanting waited, drank wine, and eyed up every newcomer. The man who’d just arrived was attractive, late thirties, and clearly stressed about something, which was an interesting combination. She saw him coast through two beers, saw the waitress approach and ask if he wanted anything else, and smiled when she ordered two more. Clearly, the man wanted to escape life. She could help with that.
He looked up, expecting the find the waitress offering food, and found an attractive businesswoman in her late thirties stood holding a glass of wine. “You look lonely, can I join you?” she asked, and he graciously said yes. They spoke for the next fifteen minutes, him keen to blot the business from his mind, her playing him expertly until she leant in and said “we’re both miles from home, why don’t we go up to your room and have a little fun?”
“I, err, sorry, I’ve never paid for sex,” he coughed out as a reply.
She laughed, even though something in her didn’t. “I’m not charging you silly, I’m asking. So, what is it, let’s black this world out?”
He considered it for a moment, allowed the booze to make the decision, and they were soon walking up the stairs, he was fishing his key card out, and they stumbled into his room. She pounced immediately, kissing him, holding him, and he joined in two, as they stumbled into the main part of the bedroom. Then she pulled back. “Ever had any of this?” she asked
, pulling a bag of white powder from her pocket.
“Yes, yes!”
They were soon in the bathroom, and she hoovered a line coke up from the counter in front of her, feeling that kick, feeling her heart go…
Feeling her heart go.
She put a hand up to her chest, knew something biological had gone terribly wrong, and she sank down to the ground, the body in rebellion and pain. She was, she decided, almost certainly dying, as you would after you spent all the money you could find on drugs, drink and sex. But no matter, because there was a fresh body standing over her looking very confused indeed.
A While Later
Jeff climbed out of the driver’s seat of his car and knew something was up. Not with regards the body he was going to, but by the way the uniform officer was already holding a tray filled with coffee. Sighing to himself, he walked over.
“What’s this,” he said pointing, “have we gone into the delivery business?”
“Nothing sir, nothing, just wanting to impress.” The officer smiled sweetly, and Jeff knew exactly what was up. For some reason people had started acting very nice around him, very nice indeed. It might be his good looks and charm, but he knew everyone wanted to be in the good books of the man who solved all the cases, because promotions would surely follow. It was a disturbing feeling. Still, he picked up a coffee and headed inside the hotel, where he was led through by another policeman. Staff were looking nervously from every angle, and Jeff soon went into an average sized hotel room where a naked man lay dead on a bed.
