“But you’re real, this city’s real, what’s happening is real, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is, but you and others like you are stuck between two worlds; this one and the next level of existence. There are several realms a spirit must visit before it can enter into heaven. Each one serves as a cleansing process for the soul. Those who have led a relatively blameless life can sometimes skip those realms that have nothing to teach them.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The gift you gave me eventually enabled me to speak with my spirit guide, and it’s through him that I learned these things, and also where to find you. I’ve helped many lost souls pass over into the light because of it.”
“Is that why you’re here now; to help me cross over?”
“Yes. I think you’ve suffered enough Little Ears. But first you have to witness the things you’ve been running from all these years. Don’t be afraid of what you see. They’ll seem very real to you, but they’re only distant memories.”
As they resumed their walk, Jamie announced, “We’re almost there.”
Little Ears could feel a panic welling up inside her. “Where are you taking me?”
“To the place of your death,” he replied.
They walked in silence until they reached a grove. Ahead of them, a cinder track branched off into the trees.
Jamie came to a halt. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to a small brick building at the end of the track.
“A public toilet? I died in a toilet?” Little Ears gasped.
Jamie nodded. “You won’t be disturbed by anyone. They were closed down a couple of years back?”
Reluctantly, she moved toward the derelict building, then suddenly realised Jamie wasn’t following.
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“I can’t,” he said, “The place is locked up. Only you can enter.”
“But I don’t think I can do this on my own.”
He smiled at her reassuringly. “You have to be brave, Little Ears. All you’ll see is a reflection of your passing – the unveiling of a suppressed memory, and nothing more.”
After a few brief moments she turned her back on him and walked into the grove, passing through the dank cold walls and into the interior.
*****
On entering, she felt the cold penetrating damp and began to shiver. Being in spirit form meant that she would normally have been impervious to the physical effects of the natural world. Yet, there was no denying the evidence of her own eyes and senses. She was shivering uncontrollably and goose bumps had appeared on her bare arms.
A large, rectangular skylight, let in the orange glow from the cinder trail lights outside, affording little illumination. Ahead of her lay four cubicles. Their doors were open. They were empty. As she approached she caught the unpleasant smell of stale urine. She walked tentatively toward the first cubicle.
Crack!
Something gave way beneath her foot. She looked down to see a broken tile.
Fear began to reassert itself.
“It’s just an illusion, Ellen,” she reminded herself, “nothing more than an illusion.”
Then came the unexpected sound of sobbing.
Her skin crawled as though a thousand insects were scurrying across her body, and she shuddered. She stood, frozen to the spot.
The pitiable weeping was now more than she could bear. “Please stop!” she cried out, holding her hands to her ears.
But there was no respite from the sounds and visions inside her head. She was beginning to remember.
A sharp stinging pain in the crook of her arm made her wince, followed quickly by the tinkle of glass on the tiled floor as a bloodied syringe rolled from the furthest cubicle.
The pitiable crying suddenly ceased.
One moment she had been standing in a dilapidated toilet, staring down at the instrument of her death. The next, she was in the back of a brightly lit ambulance as it hurtled through the city streets, looking on as the medics struggled to save her.
This was the first time in years she had seen her full countenance, and it appalled her. What she saw had little in common with an eighteen-year-old. Emaciation and years of self-abuse had taken their toll.
“My God! What have I done to myself?” she murmured, “How could I let myself sink so low?”
Suddenly, the monitor she was attached to began to beep loudly.
“Christ, we’re losing her!” the attending medic called out to his partner.
In the blinking of an eye, Little Ears found herself hurtling through a dark tunnel toward the sound of childish laughter. She exited into broad daylight, recognising instantly the group of teenagers congregating around an ice-cream van outside the school gates, the place where it all began.
She also recognised the cocky eighteen-year-old ice-cream vendor, with the shock of curly red hair that ran to his shoulders. His liking for young girls was well-known to those who had fallen for his obvious charms. They were drawn to him like moths to a flame.
Capitalising on his notoriety, in ways his employers were unaware of, he supplemented his meagre wage by selling small wraps of cannabis to his more than willing customers. Like many of her peers, Little Ears was about to be seduced into his web of deceit.
As the group drifted back into the school yard only one female remained. Little Ears watched as they chatted for a while before he eventually served her. Though she could not recall the exact details of the conversation, she knew that he’d made a date to meet her at the local carnie that weekend. It was a rendezvous that would alter her life in ways she could never have imagined at the time: she would become a woman and smoke her first ‘joint’ at the age of fifteen.
She wondered if she had known back then of her addictive nature whether she would have taken him up on his offer, but she hadn’t and there was no way of turning back the clock.
Moving forward through time on an emotional journey of sadness and regret, she witnessed her first run in with the law, the anguish of her parents, the rows and upsets she caused within the family, the lies and deceit, and her increasing need to find a better ‘buzz’, and the debasing lengths she went to in order to attain it.
Though remorseful of her acts, she no longer hated herself, and understood for the first time that she had been the victim of the greed of others and her own adolescent immaturity. Weakened by her dependency, she could not overcome her addiction as she grew into adulthood.
Now she had to return to the place of her death to witness her ultimate act of selfishness.
In the half-light of the toilet, blinking the tears from her eyes, she stared at the empty syringe lying at her feet, then into the cramped cubicle where her inert body lay wedged between the toilet bowl and wall. Round her left arm was a tourniquet. Directly beneath it a rivulet of blood tricked down from the collapsed vein where the needle had been inserted, and suddenly she remembered the terrible choice she had made.
She sank to her knees and wept.
Looking up through the skylight she begged, “Please forgive me! I just want to go home now!”
A sudden burst of radiant light cut through the darkness, warming her face. It was intensely bright yet did not hurt her eyes. An overwhelming feeling of love reached out to her from within, calling her, bidding her to follow. Then slowly she began to ascend.
Jamie looked on at the delicate, golden lit form as it rose into the heavens, to be lost amid the pyrotechnic display.
As he made his way along the cinder track a familiar voice whispered out to him, “Thank you, James.”
He smiled. Pulling up his collar against the cold he whispered, “Happy New Year, Little Ears.”
Birds of Passage
The Cormorant was an enduring mystery to the folk of Stanelaw, in northeast England. For more than twenty years the derelict fishing trawler had sat on common ground, miles from the nearest port or harbour or, for that matter, the sea. Time and neglect had taken their toll on the ageing craft,
its sun bleached timbers and buttressed hull starkly contrasting the lushness of its surroundings.
Its keeper, ‘Mad Pedi’, was also something of a mystery to the village children and the subject of much speculation as to whether it was she who was seen roaming its deck in the dead of night or some frightening phantom laying in wait for those foolhardy enough to enter its domain. Whatever the truth, none dared visit the site after sunset.
But Tommy Brice, unlike his young peers, was not so intimidated by the old woman. His most recent run-in with her had resulted in a serious loss of face for the fourteen-year-old, making him more determined to circumvent her ongoing vigil. To that end, he had come up with an audacious plan.
An impenetrable fog had rendered his torchlight almost ineffectual as he stumbled through the early morning brume with his classmate Sarah Elliot and his new-found friend, Robbie Lewis, in tow.
Sarah, who had been happy enough to go along with his scheme, was now entertaining serious misgivings. That she had snuck from her bed at such an ungodly hour and had risked the wrath of her parents was bad enough, but now it appeared they had bypassed the boat altogether and were hopelessly lost in a peasouper.
Robbie pulled up short, his cry echoing through the early morning stillness as out of the grey shroud the forbidding sight of the boat’s mouldering hull loomed suddenly into view. Perched against it was the self-same ladder ‘Mad Pedi’ had confiscated from Tommy and Sarah the previous day. It seemed that the crude grappling iron Tommy had so painstakingly fashioned was no longer required.
Sarah was nonplussed, “How’d that get there?”
“Who cares?” Tommy replied, tossing aside the iron and beginning his eager ascent.
Robbie hesitated. The ladder’s appearance had unsettled him almost as much as when he had first clapped eyes on the wreck, moments earlier. An unreasonable fear gripped him. He wanted to turn and run. But what horrors, if any, could possibly await him here that he had not already seen elsewhere.
The hurricane lamp Sarah had stolen from her father’s shed sputtered into life illuminating the musty interior of the wheelhouse. Even by torchlight its denudation had already been made apparent. Only the wooden helm remained, overlaid by the same thick matting of dust and cobwebs that were prevalent throughout. Long since disconnected from the rudder, it spun freely beneath Tommy’s eager hands and whatever thoughts of exploration they had entertained were quickly overtaken by the free range of their imaginations.
Their self-appointed leader took to his role as the infamous pirate, Blackbeard, with gusto and he was snarling orders to his motley crew of cutthroats when a distant, mournful drone brought their seafaring adventure to an untimely end. They listened, pricking up their ears at the slightest sound.
“What was that, Tommy?” whispered Sarah.
“A foghorn!” Robbie replied.
Tommy laughed. “Don’t be daft. There aren’t any around here.”
“Well it does smell like the seaside in here!” the youngster then announced, picking up on the growing scent of ozone-enriched air.
Sarah sniffed the dank atmosphere. “He’s right, Tommy!” Spooked, and clinging to him as though her very life depended on it she whimpered, “I wanna go home. Let’s go home.”
“It’s too late for that,” warned Robbie.
Both followed his wide-eyed gaze and, horror-stricken, they watched as the sudden appearance of a spectral-like image of the wheelhouse began phasing in and out with its physical surroundings.
Timeworn timbers, seemingly transformed to new, groaned in sympathy as it began to pitch back and forth, the forceful illusion of movement compelling them to brace themselves against the cabin walls. The encounter was short-lived, however, seconds at most.
Though he had never actually seen one, Tommy held an unquestioning belief in ghosts. People had ghosts, and probably animals, too, but a boat? That was stretching things too far.
Something else also bothered him. What they had seen was not a true representation of the boat as it was now, but had appeared fully equipped and well maintained, as it might have been long ago.
“Let’s get out’v here!” he ordered, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling sharply.
His companions were way ahead of him. They were already scrambling out onto the deck, where yet another startling discovery awaited them; the ladder had vanished, and just when they thought things couldn’t get much worse they heard the sound of lapping water against the unseaworthy hull. They were trapped, seemingly becalmed in an unearthly fogbank, on a sea that had literally materialized out of nowhere.
Back in the claustrophobic confines of the wheelhouse tensions began to surface, the creeks and groans of the boat’s less than seaworthy keel serving to magnify their desperate plight.
“Shut up, man!” Tommy barked in response to the girl’s none stop questioning about what the hell was happening to them.
She fell silent, affording him time to collect his thoughts.
“Well it looks like we’re stuck here - wherever here is - so I guess we’ve just got to make the best of it,” he said, at length.
“But we could all starve to death,” mewled Sarah.
“This is a fishin’ boat, isn’t it?” Tommy reminded her.
She nodded, nervously twining a lock of her hair round her finger.
“Then all we have to do is find a fishin’ net!” he told her.
Heartened by the gangly youth’s reasoning, and finally calming down, she added, optimistically, “Uh-huh, and maybe a ship will come along and we could signal it.”
Tommy just stared at Sarah and rolled his eyes.
Robbie remained silent throughout. He, alone, knew they were powerless to influence the unfolding course of events. Whatever was going to happen would happen – had already happened – and nothing on Earth could prevent it.
Wraith-like eddies of fog flowed and shifted as the boys half-heartedly combed the deck for remnants of netting, partly to appease Sarah’s starvation fears but mainly to help keep their minds off just what was happening to them. The discovery of a hatchway beneath a heavy tarpaulin had offered a glimmer of hope, though all too fleetingly. It had been securely battened down with a heavy-duty padlock that was so filth encrusted that even with a key it would have been impossible to open.
“Hell’s bells!” scowled Tommy, “Now what are we gonna do?”
Realising there was little that could be done the boys kept watch at the bow, hardly a word passing between them, as Sarah sat in the wheelhouse once again wondering how they would survive.
Tommy spent most of his time studying his freckle-faced companion, the youngest and latest recruit to his gang. He had taken it upon himself to educate the former ‘townie’ in their provincial ways and had made some headway in that regard. But Robbie had come across as a troubled kid even then, overly preoccupied with his thoughts and with little or nothing at all to say for himself.
Endeavouring to make light of their situation, Tommy quipped, “Is this straight out’v the X-Files or what?”
“It’s worser th’n that,” Robbie gravely replied, “It’s for real, and it’s all my fault. I shouldn’t ‘ve come here.”
Tommy looked askance at him, “What are ya talkin’ about? It was me that brought ya here. If it’s anybody’s fault it’s mine,” he said.
The youngster knew his friend could never understand the dark and personal history he kept from him. How could Tommy, though older than himself, yet still a mere kid, fully comprehend what a team of scientists had failed so miserably to do? Even they were at a loss to fully explain or prevent the strange goings-on at his former home, and now it was happening all over again.
The cold and inexplicable cold spots around the house were just the beginning. Loud raps, footfalls, the sound of slamming doors and breaking crockery became commonplace, despite there being no physical cause for them.
Then, on one particular night, he was awoken by the sound of agonising groans coming from o
utside his bedroom door. Fearful for his recently widowed mother’s well being, he stepped out onto the landing and was met by a sight so appallingly grotesque that at first he thought he was dreaming.
Sprawled between the bathroom and his room lay the dishevelled figure of a white-haired man, his wildly glaring eyes ballooning out of their sockets from a face so savagely deformed with pain that he looked almost inhuman. Gobs of spittle spumed from his mouth in long, glistening threads onto the carpet. One mind numbing seizure after another racked his body as it arched impossibly from the floor, before slumping back and issuing a low, deep-throated gurgle.
But for his timely scream, Robbie’s mother might have missed the sickening spectacle of the wretched phantom evanescing into thin air. That night she broke a lifelong vow and allowed her son into her bed.
Throughout the following days things steadily worsened. Angry, disembodied shrieks turned the air blue with their foul outpourings, occasioned by disturbing visions of a shadowy form stealing through the house. Robbie’s mother knew that this thing – whatever it was – wasn’t about to leave them in peace. It was then she determined to seek the aid of professionals.
During their initial investigations, the assigned team of parapsychologists uncovered a disturbing secret concerning the house and one of its former tenants, Jacob Dewberry. His history of mental illness was well known to his beleaguered neighbours, as were his violent outbursts. It came as no surprise, therefore, to learn that following a particularly frenzied flare-up their neighbour had taken to his bathroom and had drunk the poison that ended his unhappy existence.
The property had changed hands several times since; yet nothing untoward had ever been reported by any of its tenants. So why, after such a lengthy period, had the apparent earthbound spirit of Jacob Dewberry suddenly chosen to manifest itself?
Strange Dominions: a collection of paranormal short stories (short story books) Page 2
