* * * *
27
Perfect Sense
She felt fingers encircle her wrist, and she started in fear, trying to yank her hand free from whoever had her in their grip. But the hand was fastened around her slender wrist like a steel manacle.
‘Who are you?’ she screamed. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ She tried to prise the fingers away but she could not. She slapped at the arm that held her. The bare flesh made a curious clapping sound, but there was no reaction to the beating.
Susan could not see a thing and her terror mounted till she felt she would be sick.
Was this even real? No, it wasn’t real; it just another dream.
The pull was gently insistent, so she allowed herself to be led out of the chamber, down the tunnels. A strange yet familiar sweet smell pervaded the earthy atmosphere. She recognised it as the smell of Becky’s hair.
‘Becky, is that you?’
There was no reply.
They moved down the tunnels at a pace, till she thought she saw light. At this the grip vanished and she stopped, rubbing the spot on her wrist where the hand had been. It felt cold to the touch.
She blinked, unsure whether she was awake or asleep now.
But the light was still there.
She inched her way down the black tunnel towards it.
Am I dead? Is this death?
But the tunnel suddenly spiked steeply upwards and there was a chink of light spearing through rocks, as bright as a star in the night sky. She pushed against the rock and earth and the hole widened and she felt the cool, refreshing touch of a breeze on her cheeks, the sweet scent of heather and grass filling her nose. She cried out in joy and punched a hole large enough for her to clamber out of the tunnel, and she flopped out onto the damp grass, her chest heaving to her sobbing.
She sat upright. The cliffs and the sea were some distance away. She wiped her face with the palm of her hand and shakily pulled herself to her feet, setting off immediately in the direction of the house.
She pushed at the door. It swung open.
Susan held up the axe she found in the yard and entered the house. But all was silent. She padded quietly through the various rooms, till she came across the large swathe of blood on the floor, and put her hand to her mouth when she saw the splashes of red that had dripped down the wall opposite.
But there was no one inside and so she went out to the yard, round the back to the shed. A small fibreglass boat had been dragged out front and left there.
‘Hector!’ she shouted. Her words were lost on the wind.
She opened the shed door, and by the rusting old diesel-fired generator she saw the mounds of canvas, lined up like something she’d seen in TV pictures from a war zone. She carefully peeled one of the flaps back and dropped it down again when she saw Helen’s white hand under there.
‘Oh my God!’ she gasped. She went outside, having checked the remaining bundles. Annabel’s and Alex’s bodies were also there, but Hector, thankfully, was missing from the gruesome haul.
‘Hector! Hector!’ she yelled.
But then her thoughts turned to Silas Blake and she dashed back to the house, searched the rack of keys for the one to the lighthouse door, but it was missing. She all but ran down the path towards the coast and the promontory on which the lighthouse stood.
Breathlessly she paused before the old lighthouse door. Turned the iron handle. Surprisingly, it was unlocked.
‘Silas!’ she called up the flight of stairs. ‘Silas, are you there?’
‘Susan…’ came a weak voice from the shadows.
She snapped her head round to the sound. There, cuddled up beneath a mound of sacking was Hector. He looked pale and drawn, dark bags beneath his eyes. She went over to him, and as he sat up the sacking fell away to reveal his bloodied shirt.
‘What happened?’ she said, lifting back the cloth to examine the wound. She grimaced on seeing it.
‘My father shot me…’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I was coming to save you. The dinghy sank and he thought I’d drowned, but I managed to swim to the jetty and hid there till he’d gone. I went to the house afterwards and got the key for the lighthouse. I was afraid he might still come looking for me.’ He looked down at the wound. ‘Is it bad?’ he said gravely. ‘It feels bad.’
‘Not as bad as it looks,’ she said. ‘We’ll patch it up in a while. Get you to a hospital as soon as we can.’
‘Where’s Paul and my father…?’
‘Don’t worry about them,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s a boat back at the house. Can we use that to get to the Maid of the Storm?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess so. Can you row?’
‘I once hired a boat on the Serpentine,’ she confessed lamely.
‘It’s not going to be easy, what with the swells we’ve got.’
‘I’ll manage somehow. Can you pilot the Maid of the Storm if I get us to it?’
‘I can try.’
‘We have to tell the police about Sylvester Copeland. Tell them about all this. But before we do anything else I’m going to check on Silas,’ she said urgently, and leapt up the stairs before he could say another word.
She found the room he’d been kept in and pushed open the door. The smell of damp and decay was overwhelming, but the room was empty. Her eyes narrowed, and she was drawn to the tin mug and plate of bread on the table. She went closer. The bread was a black, mouldy, stain-like mush and she frowned.
‘He’s not in here,’ said Hector at her back. She hadn’t heard him mount the stairs.
‘So where is he?’ she said quickly.
‘He’s dead…’ he said quietly.
She closed her eyes. She was too late. ‘Where is his body?’
‘Down in the cellar.’
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘Why are you bothered? You can’t do anything for him.’
But something was nagging at her, forcing her. She had to see him. ‘Take me there.’
He expelled a forlorn breath and said, ‘Follow me.’
He led her down the stairs, to the ground floor where he’d been hiding. He pulled away a cracked sheet of linoleum to reveal a wooden trapdoor fastened with a hefty iron bolt.
‘He’s down there,’ he said, lifting the hatch. Steep wooden steps plunged down into the moist, foul-smelling darkness.
She descended into the gloom, the steps wet and glistening. The cellar was a large, square room, the walls constructed of immense blocks of algae-green stone. Stuffed against one wall was yet another canvas bag. She approached cautiously. ‘That’s Silas?’
‘Yes,’ he said, choosing not to follow her down into the cellar.
She crouched down and teased away the canvas sheet. Underneath was a skeletal head, its sockets empty, the remnants of skin pulled taught across it, its mouth open in a wide, silent scream. ‘You’re mistaken. This can’t be Silas,’ she said.
‘That’s Silas alright. I was forced to help put him down there.’
‘But this body has been here ages…’
‘He’s been dead about eighteen months. At first Helen was reluctant to have him killed, though my father badgered her to do it. So they kept him locked up here as a prisoner in the lighthouse for about a year. In that room upstairs. Eventually father got his way. Brought him down here, murdered him, and then dumped him there. Helen had been on at my father to remove his body from the lighthouse, dump it at sea now it’s well rotted, but he hung back. He got some sort of pleasure out of seeing how she hated having his body here.’
Susan lifted the canvas sheet away. Silas was dressed in the same suit she’d seen him in, but it was filthy and rotted. Her fingers went inside one of his pockets and pulled out a gold pocket watch on a chain. She covered her mouth with her fingers, gagged. It was the one she’d seen him use.
It all made sense to her now. Everything.
Silas had been dead for eighteen months. What she’d seen hadn’t been the real Silas at all. All along it had
been his spirit, his soul. That’s why she never heard him when he visited her, like he appeared to come out of thin air. She shook her head. Now it made sense why nobody seemed to notice Silas in the house when they first got to Connalough Point, when he was standing right in front of them by the fireplace. Helen hadn’t been introducing Silas, but referring to the portrait of him. Neither Paul nor Helen had seen him.
Silas Blake, she realised, had enlisted her to help, because she was the only one he could approach, the only one with the true gift of speaking with the dead. And by uncovering their murderers she had set all the victims’ souls free, Silas included.
That’s why she had seen two Becky’s on the night of the séance. One had been the idealised version she always kept in her head, dragged out by Annabel’s hypnotism; the other really had been her daughter. Which explained why she saw Eddie Hull, too. Paul had murdered them both. Neither soul could move on till the true nature of their deaths had been revealed.
Susan Carmichael sank to the wet floor, her head in her hands.
Everything she’d experienced – the dreams, the visions, sensing someone was there, being guided to Iris Donovan’s jewellery – it was all real. Perhaps her skills, her sensitivity, had been heightened by the island’s mysterious and inexplicable powers. She’d never know for certain.
She touched her wrist.
Then it truly had been her daughter that led her out of the burial chamber.
Yes, it all made perfect sense now.
Annabel wasn’t the soul fixer.
Susan Carmichael had been the real soul fixer all along.
* * * *
THE WOMAN FROM THE BLUE LIAS
____________________
A novel by D. M. Mitchell
THE WOMAN FROM THE BLUE LIAS
Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013
The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organisations, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Agamemnon Independent Publishing
By D. M. Mitchell
Max
Silent
Mouse
The Soul Fixer
The Domino Boys
The King of Terrors
The House of the Wicked
The Woman from the Blue Lias
Pressure Cooker
The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
Please check the D.M. Mitchell Author Page at Amazon for details of all his latest releases
CHAPTERS
1: Famous
2: Long-dead
3: The Woman from the Blue Lias
4: Reflections
5: A Girl, a Long Time Ago
6: Empty
7: The Beautiful Mouth
8: Madeline
9: Missing
10: My Special Kind of Madness
11: The Hangdogs
12: Chester Lee Holberg
13: Feeling Better About Things
14: Happy Forever
15: The Land of the Living
16: Parasite
17: Lost, Confused and Desperate
18: Later
19: Very Much Alive
20: The Rabbit Hole
21: Carol
22: Hello
1
Famous
There are two things I never expected.
I never expected to find a dead body. Me, of all people.
I never expected it to happen in Lyme Regis, of all the places.
Thinking about it, it’s not going to be an exclusive club. Someone has to find dead bodies, and over the years that must run into hundreds of thousands of people who have stumbled unexpectedly upon one (or two, think of that!), but it’s not something you ever hear about while going about your ordinary life. I have never, for example, had someone say to me during a conversation at a dinner party (OK, so I admit dinner parties for me have been far and few between, so let’s take it as given you understand what I’m getting at), ‘Oh, by the way, just the other day I happened upon a dead body.’ It just doesn’t happen. So who exactly are these hundreds of thousands of unfortunate, stumbling people?
Well I’m one of them now, and I can safely say I don’t know of another one.
I know this because I asked around. No one else in my immediate family, distant relatives, close friends, not-so-close friends, has ever found a body, and I don’t mean instances like my Uncle Harry who found Aunty Bernadette dead on the toilet seat from a heart attack, grisly and very upsetting though that must have been for him. I mean finding a body that belongs to a complete stranger. Someone you never expected to meet even in life, let alone after their death.
The macabre honour of being the first in my family to find a body fell to me.
I realise I’m jumping ahead of myself. Before I tell you about the poor young woman, I really ought to put her body and its discovery in context, because, ironically, finding it changed my life completely, and changed forever my until then superficial beliefs about death, life, the universe and everything, as they say.
Going back to those two things I never expected is probably a good place to begin.
Why did I never expect anything like that to happen to me? Precisely because nothing ever happens to me. I have self-labelled myself as being one of the most boring people I’ve ever known. OK, scratch that; my girlfriend-cum-fiancé (we’re not sure which yet as she’s still deliberating whether she wants to marry me or not) told me so to my face. And I mean so close up to my face I could feel her breath hot on the tip of my nose.
‘God, you have got to be the most boring person I’ve ever known!’ she said. ‘All you ever think about is this damn bookshop.’
I couldn’t really argue there. I’ve been running the bookshop for three years now. It’s called Page Turners, a play on words because my name is Toby Turner. OK, so it was chosen after I’d had a couple of beers with my best friend, at which point it sounded like the most excellent name for a bookshop ever. But it stuck even when I was sober, having failed to come up with anything better.
It’s a small shop in Lyme Regis, Dorset (more of that when I come onto the second thing I never expected), two floors with wall-to-wall bookshelves crammed with second-hand books; in truth, it’s the kind of shop I dreamed about owning ever since I was a young boy. I just love the smell of old books, so much so my mother used to think there was something medically wrong with me when I used to pull an old book off the shelf and stick it under my nose before I even opened it up.
‘Must you, Toby?’ she said, her disapproving face on the verge of becoming the sort of face that has discovered her son doing something you wouldn’t want the neighbours to hear about (use your imagination). ‘Can’t you simply look inside them like normal people?’
She used that term ‘normal people’ an awful lot when talking to me, I noticed. I used to think I was normal, but hearing it for so long during my formative years I’m not so sure that I am anymore. That’s a dubious legacy I have to live with. Still, without wanting to trash my well-meaning mother or to labour a point, I loved books. I love books. So, at the age of twenty-eight I gave up a well-paid full-time job to sink all my savings into a run-down shop and start my own business among the comforting smell of them. What could be better for someone with a book-smelling fetish (that’s really what my mother was saying in her head when I told her, she doesn’t fool me.)? I sourced a suitable property to let in the middle of the high street in Lyme Regis, which is a small but beautiful seaside town in Dorset that I’d visited many times as a boy during our regular summer holidays in the South West. It was a dream come true.
Or it should
have been.
The first customer who entered Page Turners, an elderly man called Bertram Moffat (who still comes in regularly every Tuesday afternoon with his dog-ugly labradoodle – no pun intended), told me that I was either very brave or very foolish opening up a bookshop when all the ones he’d known were closing down due to people reading books on Kindling and the like. I told him it was Kindle – kindling is what you set fire to. Kindle, Kindling, it didn’t matter, he said; all those electronic readers should be set fire to or very soon real books would be dead and gone. Bertram loved books so much he didn’t buy a book from me then, and he hasn’t bought one since. He tells me he hasn’t time to read but that he likes to browse. I get a lot of people doing that. It’s become so commonplace to watch them come into the shop, browse the shelves for ages, take down a book or two, put them back then leave, that I have called this sad state of affairs Bertram’s Law of Diminishing Expectations.
I said I loved books. I didn’t say I was any good at running a business. I guess I should have done my research, but I’m not that kind of guy. So I live a hand-to-mouth existence making just enough to cover overheads but not enough to make a profit. I’ve given myself another year to reach this nirvana-like state. My girlfriend-cum-fiancé is getting frustrated by the day with my ‘grubby, moth-eaten fetters’ as she calls my stock, and threatens that she cannot stand living the life of a nun for another month let alone another full year. By living the life of a nun she means not doing the sorts of things couples usually do, like go out for meals, take trips abroad, choosing a nice new car together. She’s got a list full of things that we don’t do and should do, things we should be able to buy and things we can’t because of my tightfistedness. The list changes from acquisition to vacation depending on her mood.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 21
