GHOSTS AND HAUNTINGS
Being the two story collections
THE ODD GHOSTS
&
A HAUNTING OF GHOSTS
MAYNARD SIMS
The Maynard Sims Library
Volume 7
Copyright Maynard Sims Limited 2014
www.maynard-sims.com
[email protected]
07801 472554
The Odd Ghosts was originally published as an Amazon exclusive e-book in 2011
A Haunting Of Ghosts was published by
Enigmatic Press in 2012 as a limited edition hardcover with photographs
First ebook and paperback publication Enigmatic Press 2014
3 Cutlers Close, Bishops Stortford, Herts, CM23 4FW England
www.enigmaticpress.com
[email protected]
This is a work entirely of fiction and all the names, characters, events and places portrayed are either fictitious or are represented entirely fictitiously.
Typesetting and design by L H Maynard & M P N Sims
Cover design by
IAIN MAYNARD: MAD: Maynard Art and Design
THE ODD GHOSTS
CONTENTS
1: SLEEPING
2: MAGDALENE
3: STAR
4: PRICE
5: DIFFERENT
6: NIGHT
7: FACER
8: STORIES
A HAUNTING OF GHOSTS
CONTENTS
9: THE MAN WHO WORE THE WRONG COAT
10: WHAT LAY HIDDEN
BEHIND THE WHISPERING WALL
11: THE HOUSE WITH TOO
MANY WINDOWS
12: LOVE LIES FLOATING ON THE WATER
13: THE CHURCH WITH THE
TOWER THAT MOVED
14: THE HOUSE THAT WAS TOO GRAND FOR LAUGHTER
SLEEPING
His brain was restlessly active, although his body was motionless, breathing slow and steady. He wasn’t sleeping.
Outside, beyond the double glazed sealed windows, the small professionally tended garden that nudged next to the visitors’ car park was quiet, currently home to a middle aged weeping woman and two elderly men smoking and regretting.
It was warm outside, a summer sun free and unfettered from clouds. Grass was green and tidily clipped, sky was as blue as it should be. In his room the temperature was maintained at a constant that was healthy but some degrees below the natural rhythm of the day.
‘It was a lovely day like this the day he was born.’
The younger woman looked up from the hard uncomfortable chair she had been sitting in for three hours. ‘Did you have an easy labour?’
The older woman made a noise that might have been a laugh, half strangled at birth which is what she had on many occasions wished she had done to her son. ‘When did he ever do anything easy?’
‘That’s a no then?’ Everyone was tired and irritable from the waiting around.
‘Fifteen hours I was pushing him out. Cut from here to there when he finally made an appearance. I was so out of it that when they put him in my arms, the cord still attached, I thought it was his thingy, you know.’
‘You thought he had a big cock?’
When she was growing up you didn’t use language like that and she was still sensitive to most crudity. ‘I’m his mother. You’d know more about that than me.’
‘Me and half the women in town.’
‘He always comes home to you, always home to his wife.’
‘Usually because he needs an alibi.’
His mother turned away from the windows. She was already over familiar with the view, by day and by night. Eight days. It was a long time to wait but in all honesty she had been waiting for her son in some way or another all his life.
That was another pattern of thoughts linked in to join with the others spinning around his brain. He would have thought that the monitors would have picked up the activity, the ceaseless exhausting jumble of thoughts that were colliding around inside his head.
His parents had told him so many times about the night he was born, he had seen so many photographs of himself as a baby and as a child growing up that he almost felt as if he could remember that night in hospital when his mother had endured the lengthy pain of labour to give him life.
Now his mind was repeating the events of that night over and over, the memories mixing with the thousands of thoughts already fermenting inside his head.
‘I think I knew even then, when they first put him in my arms, that he’d be trouble.’
‘Don’t talk soft, what are you psychic now?’
‘Hardly, if I had been I might have stopped that oaf of a husband of mine knocking me up in the first place.’
The younger woman smiled at the thought of trying to stop Frank Anderson doing anything if he didn’t want to. She’d seen the photos of May Anderson when she had been a younger woman, around the time she would have become pregnant with Jamie, and she was an attractive sight. Frank would have been proud to show her off at his clubs and to his business associates, as he liked to call them. If he wanted to make her pregnant there was little or nothing May would have been able to do about it.
‘What was he like as a baby?’
‘Truth be told he was as good as gold once I got him home. He fed well, slept through most nights.’
‘I bet you breast fed him.’
May looked at her daughter in law and her surgically enhanced chest. ‘What makes you say that?’
Debbie Anderson looked at her mother in law, opened her mouth to fire back a caustic comment, then noticed the smile simmering on her lips and decided to accept the gentle leg pull. ‘Bought, paid for and enjoyed, May.’
‘Bought with the proceeds of one of his jobs, like everything else.’ And enjoyed by many more than just her son she had no doubts.
‘You don’t hear me complaining.’
That was something May had to concede about her long suffering daughter in law. She took the problems her son gave her, and there were many of those, as stolidly as she welcomed the rewards.
He wasn’t sure how much more he could take in. He had so many memories of his father, from the occasional fleeting days spent together when he was a boy usually playing football in the park, to the irregular prison visits when he was older and his mother deigned to take him along with her, through the beginning of their working life together.
Emotional pictures of his father began to churn over and over with the flashes from his birth and his mother’s obvious love for him. Then his wife made an appearance in his thoughts, her dyed hair, her fulsome body, and the scenes and phrases began to chase each other around his mind, tripping over one another in their speed to gain prominence.
It was like one of those old fashioned tape loops with the pictures and sounds repeating over and over, the same memories swaying back and forth in front of his mind’s eye.
Debbie was at the window now. ‘It was a clear fresh day like this when we got married, remember?’
‘I should do the amount it cost Frank and me.’
The younger woman shot her a look and May held up her hand in surrender. ‘Just tired that’s all. We never begrudged you your big day you know that.’
Debbie shrugged. It was true enough. The wedding was a big showy affair that her parents would never have been able to afford. The Anderson’s, Frank and May, especially big Frank, were the main attraction of the day, and yes she did resent that, but it was a small price to pay for the wedding of her dreams.
It was a former priory in mid Essex with beautiful grounds and a collection of buildings that dated back five hundred years or more. Jamie was totally besotted with her that day.
Frank spent most of the occa
sion receiving guests in a small side room. It was like that wedding scene in The Godfather her dad joked, but no one laughed because that was pretty much the truth about the day. May made Debbie’s parents a full part of it and she was grateful for that. The presents were lavish, each guest trying to outdo the next to keep in favour with Frank Anderson.
‘It was a good day,’ Debbie moved away from the window. An ambulance had just pulled up outside and she had no wish to watch another sick soul brought inside. She had enough grief of her own.
‘It was. You looked beautiful, love.’
‘Thanks. It was everything I could have wished for.’
‘You’ve been a good wife, Debbie, I’ll give you that. He couldn’t have asked for better.’
‘Blimey you’ll have me in tears next.’
May looked at her son and his immobile face and body. ‘You never know when we’ll need one another.’
‘He’s not dead yet.’
‘And neither will he be. Not today. Not any time soon. He’ll soon be out of the coma, you’ll see.’
Both women had stood but they now shuffled back to the institutional hard chairs that weren’t designed for long term sitting.
He remembered the wedding day as if it was yesterday. Him and Debbie stayed in the hotel part of the venue that night and had a great time. Earlier in the day he’d taken his cousin Val up the room and practiced some moves he used on Debbie later on.
For a second he was back in that room with it’s arch shaped windows and the four poster bed with the deep red drapes. It was almost peaceful.
Then the restless thoughts and recollections came rolling back. Spinning and turning behind his eyes. His father, his wife, the wedding speeches, the swing in their back garden when he was six, images and voices pinballing around his brain.
He was so tired with it. The constant activity. Not being able to switch it off, and if anything the myriad of thoughts were getting faster. There were certainly more and more of them all the time. Every sound he heard triggered more images. Listening to his mother and his wife talking was like being plugged into an electric socket feeding more and more into his mind.
There was a knock on the door and a blue uniformed nurse entered the sterile room.
‘How’s he doing today?’
‘Shouldn’t we be asking you that?’
The nurse smiled at May. ‘I’ve only just come on duty. Let’s have a look at the charts.’
‘That monitor hasn’t dipped or moved at all,’ Debbie said. She had been watching the ICU monitor for eight days now and she had become alert to the slightest degree of variance in the bleeping lights patterns. They were depressingly constant.
The nurse put the chart and graphs back in the holder, after initialling the time and date. ‘No change.’
May snorted. ‘We could have told you that.’
‘Once we’re happy he’s stabilised we can think about moving him out of the Intensive Care Unit. Until then…’
‘How long can he stay like this?’
‘In a coma?’
‘He looks like he’s sleeping.’
The nurse half opened the door and pulled a small trolley into the room behind her. ‘Coma patients do look as if they’re sleeping but they’re not. Their brain activity is still to some extent normal but slowed right down. The monitor…’ She pointed to the all too familiar machine at the head of the bed. ‘This monitors all the activity of his body but especially his brain. Any changes, anything that indicates he’s coming out of the coma, and we’ll know straight away.’
She set about changing the nearly empty Intravenus drips of fluid and pain relief for new ones. The drips fed into his right hand, the one with the tattoos of a lizard and a lion. The IV lines dripped slowly but constantly.
No! He wanted to shout at the nurse that she was wrong, so wrong. His brain activity hadn’t slowed down. It was getting faster by the minute. Why couldn’t the fancy monitors show that?
Every thought he would normally have, no matter now small, even thoughts that wouldn’t usually register, everything was playing out like a DVD movie playing scenes at random, continuously.
He was having thoughts about the nurse putting the cannula into the back of his hand, the way her mouth twitched disapprovingly when she saw the tattoos. The same way people reacted when they knew who he was, what he did, what his father and his family were.
The nurse was wrong. It was all wrong. He couldn’t lose a single miniscule thought. Each wave in his brain stayed at the forefront, and it was getting crowded, it was getting painful.
‘There are two gentlemen to see you,’ the nurse said as she pushed the trolley out of the room.
May looked at her watch, they weren’t expecting anyone until the evening when Frank himself was coming. He had to visit late at night, after official visiting times. It was dangerous for everyone if he was seen too often in the hospital.
The nurse looked at her shoes. They needed a polish. ‘It’s the police again.’
May looked at Debbie and an unspoken bond passed between them. Silence was the natural order of behaviour for any family member or anyone associated with the business.
‘You’d better let them in then. Don’t want to keep the long arm of the law waiting around do we?’
The nurse was glad to be out of the oppressive room. Outwardly professional she read the news, she knew the stories, knew what the Anderson family was capable of. The police were welcome to them.
Detective Chief Inspector Ralph Wood had plenty of places he would rather be. He had crossed swords with the Andersons for over twenty years. Frank mainly but recently Jamie had shown every sign of being vicious enough to take over the family business completely when the time was right.
‘I hate these places.’ Detective Constable Radash Patel said,
DCI Wood looked at his colleague and wondered what could have affected him in his short life to make him averse to hospitals. What was he? Twenty three, four? Mind you a lot of people disliked hospitals; there was a natural aura about them, by association and by fact being linked forever with illness and death, and every permutation in between.
‘I mean there’s this smell about them isn’t there?’ Radash said.
Wood was sure he saw him shudder but he might have imagined that part. ‘Never mind about that for now, keep your prejudices well buttoned.’
‘I’m not…’
‘Enough. Listen to me. He might be wired up like a Christmas turkey, he might be sleeping like a baby on a whisky drip but that bastard in there is the nastiest piece of humanity you’ll have the misfortune of meeting. Don’t forget that. His mum and his wife will hate you for being a copper and hate you for being Indian.’
Radash didn’t ask why. He was momentarily grateful his boss didn’t share the same deliberate mistake so many of the Hendon training college officers regularly made and called him a Pakistani. Small things like that endeared him to Ralph Wood. He would learn a lot from the older more experienced DCI.
‘They hate me for putting Frank Anderson away. Not for long mind, not long enough but it slowed him down for a few years and that was a cause for celebration.’
Radish nodded. ‘Actually this place is so new it doesn’t smell too bad.’
‘It’s too quiet.’
‘That’s because it’s the ICU. Try A&E on a Friday or a Saturday night and you’ll not hear yourself think.’
The door to the room they wanted opened and a nurse stepped out, a trolley pushed in front. She looked at Wood and nodded. ‘He’s still comatose. Mrs Anderson, mother and Mrs Anderson, wife are with him.’
‘Thanks.’
‘There are no other visitors planned for at least four hours.’
Wood held the door and indicated for Radash to go inside. ‘I can’t think who you mean, nurse.’ The smile barely reached his eyes.
When Wood went into the room the first thing that struck him was how cold it seemed. He expected a frosty welcome from the two women bu
t the temperature in the room was far lower than the corridor outside.
Radish had positioned himself at the foot of the bed and was making a decent enough pretence at reading the medical charts.
‘I doubt he understands any of that any more than I do.’ It was Debbie Anderson who spoke.
‘May as well be in a different language the sense it makes to me,’ Wood said affably.
‘Perhaps that’s why he can read it then,’ May said and started defiantly at Radash.
‘That’s not very PC, May. Times have moved on for the rest of the world even if it’s still 1970 in your little corner of it.’
May opened her mouth but thought better of it.’
Debbie pushed her chair away from the bed. ‘He’s totally out of it. What do you think you’ll get out of him?’
‘And we’re telling you nothing,’ May said. She unfolded two sticks of gum and started chewing, her mouth open, the motion furious.
Wood looked at Radash and smiled. He walked over to the monitor and tapped it.
‘Oi, careful.’
‘Wouldn’t want poor Jamie to suffer would we, May?’
‘You can’t intimidate people any longer, Mr Wood…it’s not the 70’s you know.’ She smirked.
‘I used to like The Sweeney, did you May? These two are probably a bit young for it but I used to watch it. Every Monday night.’
‘What do you want, Wood?’ Debbie said.
Wood looked surprised. ‘Didn’t DC Patel and I mention? My apologies ladies.’ He leaned over the bed and picked up Jamie’s right hand, the one the IV drips were attached to. ‘The driver of the security van, the one Jamie here shot, he’s died.’
‘We’re here to charge him with murder.’
His flickering thoughts suddenly exploded with vivid images in high definition.
He had planned the old fashioned job as a kind of homage to his father, the sort of job Frank cut his teeth on when he was clawing his way to the top. A couple of the boys he commanded tried to talk him out of it, get him to change his mind. To be fair that was brave of them, and he wouldn’t forget that.
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