‘What the hell is going on?’ I said, bending to him and screwing up my nose at the smell of alcohol, vomit and stale sweat. It wasn’t a pleasant cocktail.
‘Hey, mate!’ he said, grabbing hold of my arm and pulling me closer. ‘You’re my mate, aren’t you, mate?’
‘God, you stink,’ I said.
I’d known him get drunk before. He tended to rely on the booze a little too much for my liking, but we all have to cope somehow, I thought, trying to lift him up to the sofa.
‘You’re my mate…’ he said, though it sounded painful.
‘Yeah, sure I am.’
‘I can tell a mate anything, right?’
‘Tell me why you’re doing this,’ I said.
He clutched my arm again, digging his fingers in. ‘I can tell you, can’t I?’
‘You can tell me what you like, but first I’ve got to get you cleaned up. What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could kill yourself.’
He shook his head, and it looked like it might wobble off his shoulders at any moment. ‘That might be good…’ he said.
‘Don’t talk rot, Mark.’ I let him slip back to the floor as he was too heavy and too filthy to touch. ‘Let’s get this damn shirt off you for starters, then clean you up a bit.’
I stripped the shirt off his back and screwed it up into a ball. Then I left him and found out a bowl which I filled with hot, soapy water. I returned minutes later and set about swiping a flannel around his unresponsive face.
‘You’re a good man, Toby…’ he said. At least, that’s what I thought he said. I couldn’t be sure.
‘And I’m washing you like you’re a kid,’ I said. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
He shook his head. Looked me straight in the face, and then bent over and threw up again. After he’d finished, his head slumped onto his bare chest and he began to snore loudly. I slapped him around the face to try and revive him, but he was out for the count. I groaned, and set about washing up the wine-coloured puke. There was no way I was ever going to get him upstairs, so after I’d finished making things smell a little sweeter I went upstairs to one of his many bedrooms and grabbed two pillows and a duvet off one of the beds. I figured all I could do was see that he was comfortable till the morning.
Making sure he was all tucked up I decided, reluctantly, that I ought to stay the night so I could keep an eye on him. Working out which of the many sofas in the room would be the most comfortable, I went back upstairs to grab myself a few pillows and a duvet. Given my obsession with turning out all the lights, I went around and did the same for Mark, swearing at the amount of lamps and things he’d turned on, as if afraid of the dark, not only downstairs but upstairs as well.
It was when I went into his study to turn off the desk lamp that I noticed the cardboard files.
Ordinarily, I would have simply ignored such things. After all, this was Mark’s private stuff. But it was a photograph of a young woman on a news clipping that made me tease the paper out. The heading read ‘Missing.’ It was one of those small local papers by the looks of it, from Manchester and dated November 1995. It gave the woman’s age as sixteen. She looked younger.
But there were more newspaper clippings, some of them actual, others photocopies, yet more printed onto A4 paper, predominantly black and white, one or two in colour. Different girls, mostly looking to be about the same age, some a little older maybe, but not by much. Girls missing from Manchester, Chelsea, Cardiff, Leicester – I counted twenty in all – the latest being on A4 and scrawled on the top with a black pen in Mark’s unmistakable handwriting, ‘January, 2012.’
I was dumbfounded. What on earth was Mark doing with a file on missing young girls?
As if he’d suddenly walked in and caught me snooping, I hurriedly put the file back where I found it and turned to leave. It was then I saw the map of the UK taped onto the wall, coloured pins stuck into it. Antique fairs or auctions, I said to myself. That’s all they represent.
But on closer inspection I found that beside each pin was a tiny date written in pencil. 1993, 2001, 2005, 1994, 1996, and so on. Beside some of these dates appeared what looked to be indiscriminate words in block capitals: DELIVERANCE, GROUNDLESS, BENEDICTION, FORTITUDE, BLANDISHMENTS. They didn’t make sense, but I soon realised the dates seemed to tally with the cuttings about the missing girls.
What on earth was all this stuff? Why would Mark catalogue such things?
With my head in a whirl, I left the study lights on so that he wouldn’t suspect I’d been inside, and I went back downstairs. I sat on the chair opposite Mark and watched him as he lay breathing gently but noisily on the floor. I covered myself with the duvet, but I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t, because I was kept awake by the many thoughts that were flitting through my overworked mind.
10
My Special Kind of Madness
He looked a sorry sight in the morning. I call it morning, but it was nearer midday when Mark prised his eyes open and gave a heartfelt groan as he sat upright clutching his head. He swore, profusely, and then saw me staring at him from my place on the chair.
‘What the devil are you doing there?’ he said, his eyes narrowing as the sound of his own voice drilled into his sore skull. ‘Oh Christ!’ he said, sinking down to the pillow. ‘What hit me?’
‘About six bottles of red and a couple of scotch, as far as I can see. And that’s only the visible bottles. What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’ I was annoyed, more because I’d not managed to sleep a wink all night in spite of my tiredness, and I hated not sleeping. But also because of what I’d found in his study. It had grown in proportion during the night, but in the cold light of day it didn’t seem quite as bad or as weird, but it was still pretty bizarre. I wanted to get straight to the point and confront him about it, but I held myself in check. ‘You could have done yourself some real damage drinking all that stuff.’
‘What are you now, my mother?’ he moaned. ‘Who invited you anyway?’
‘You did,’ I said shortly.
He opened one eye and looked across at me. ‘I did?’
‘You left me a message. Two actually. You wanted to speak to me and you sounded like shit. I got here last night and you looked like shit.’
He looked under the covers. ‘You undressed me?’ he said incredulously.
‘I only took your shirt off. It was covered in puke.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Whose?’
I batted away his attempt at humour. ‘You had me worried. You were in a bit of a state on the phone, and you were close to comatose when I got here.’
‘Don’t exaggerate.’
‘You said you wanted to tell me something,’ I persisted.
‘Did I? I can’t remember. I was drunk.’
‘You know you did. What was it?’
‘Like I say, I was drunk. I must have made the call and not known about it.’
‘I was your mate, you said. You can tell a mate anything. What was it you wanted to tell me?’
‘It can’t have been anything important,’ he said, his face clouding over.
‘It sounded important. Like it was something you wanted to get off your chest. So is there something you need to tell me?’ the images of the missing young women flooded into my mind’s eye.
‘Jesus, Toby, are you trying to be my bloody nursemaid now? Get off my damn back, will you? I tell you it was nothing. I don’t want to tell you anything. I was drunk. People say all kinds of stupid stuff when they’re drunk. Now piss off and leave me alone.’
I regarded him for a few seconds, rose to my feet. ‘You want breakfast?’
‘You serious?’ he fired. ‘Just go, eh, Toby? Leave me alone.’
‘Fine,’ I said evenly. I went silently to the drawing room door. ‘Clean up your own puke in future.’
As I was putting my hand on the door handle he called out weakly. ‘Toby…’ I stopped and turned. ‘
Thanks…’
‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk when you’re sober.’
I didn’t open up the shop that day. I went straight up to bed, thoroughly exhausted. I was aware I was becoming increasingly tired, feeling totally wiped out all the time. Something was sapping my energy, and naturally I put it down to mental exhaustion, what with one thing and another happening to me. Life was getting crazier and I was letting everything get to me. I was seeing things that weren’t really there in more ways than one.
What was I really thinking about Mark? That he might be connected somehow with lots of missing young women going back one and a half decades or more? Seriously? Mark was many things, but he was not…
His sister-in-law’s story about Mark’s involvement in his young girlfriend’s murder haunted me still and would not go away.
Think about it, I told myself; what if he had done it? Just supposing it was true, no matter how absurd or how unwilling you are to want to believe it. Just suppose he really did kill his girlfriend…
If so, could he have had a hand in the disappearance of those other girls?
Christ, Toby, I told myself; what are you thinking? Are you completely off your rocker? Your best mate – are you really saying that he might have done something awful?
He had a file on them, a map on the wall.
So? Some people collect coins, stamps, bus numbers, or spot Eddie Stobart trucks. It’s a hobby.
Some hobby! A bit weird, don’t you think? It’s hardly stamp collecting, is it? And admit it; he wanted to confess to something, that much was obvious. He was in such an emotional state over it he had to get drunk to blot it out. You don’t get that with stamps.
So?
So what if that something was…?
Was what? Go on, say it.
I couldn’t. Instead, I put my head under my pillow and tried to block out the world.
It turned out I was being haunted by many things.
The light slanting in through the gaps in my thin bedroom curtains kept me awake even though my eyes were sore, aching and red. I demanded sleep, but it would not come.
I saw her again a few hours later. I saw Madeline standing at the foot of my bed.
I rose tiredly from my pillow, but it turned out it had been a dream. Or at least I thought it had been. I couldn’t be sure these days when the real world ended and the dream one began. The two were becoming melded together into a semi-trance like state of being. It frightened me. Frightened me because I wanted to see Madeline again, relished the visitations, feeling already that I could not imagine living without her; and yet knowing that I might be going mad and I didn’t want to live with that terrifying knowledge either. I had to do something about it.
I went downstairs without even getting dressed, grabbed the phone book and looked up Gabrielle Elizabeth Norton. She answered like she’d been expecting me. I arranged to meet her later that evening and put the phone down, wondering what I was doing. Did I really want to speak to a woman who chaired the local spiritualist club? A woman who had been feeding off an unhealthy diet of M. R. James and Fifty True Tales of Terror all her life? And was that really going to help me if I was going mad? Wouldn’t a doctor be better?
A doctor really would think you were mad, I thought, if you came clean on everything that had happened to you. He’d have a field day with the heady cocktail of dead bodies, ghostly visitations, murdered girlfriends and hoards of missing young women that my life had suddenly become.
Gabrielle Elizabeth Norton was a start, I said, desperately trying to convince myself. A halfway house for cowards, I guess.
I was nervous, far more than I expected to be. How can you be nervous about ringing the doorbell on a small terraced house that looked so innocuous, friendly, ordinary?
Gabrielle Norton answered the door and greeted me warmly and with a beaming smile. The smell of cooking wafted down the hall to me. Something homely and filling. Very fitting, I thought. I had pictured in my mind that Mrs Norton would act faintly supercilious, fix me in an I-told-you-so stare, but that was just me building things up in my mind to be something that wasn’t ever going to happen. Mrs Norton was an affable woman, and I later found out she was a member of so many local community groups that I wondered where she found the time to fit them all in. The Lyme Regis Spiritualist Club was just one of many interests that fired up this energetic little woman. The way she fussed over me when I was shown into the living room, offered tea and cakes, made me feel really depressed about my own lack of energy.
‘You look tired,’ she said as if reading my mind. ‘Are you sleeping well?’
‘Hardly at all,’ I admitted.
She nodded sagely as she pushed a plate of cake over the coffee table towards me. ‘Go ahead, fresh today and they’ll give you some energy.’
I picked up a piece of chocolate cake and nibbled at it, but I had no appetite. She watched me carefully.
‘I’m so glad you could see me,’ I began, then trailed off into silence and pretended to nibble at the cake.
‘Is it about the woman?’ she said.
‘The woman?’ I said, acting dumb.
She shook her head and smiled. ‘My husband has been dead three years now,’ she said out of the blue.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘These things happen. You think you’re going to be together forever. We loved each other a lot. I was devastated when he died. You are when you’re so much in love with a person.’
‘I can imagine,’ I sympathised, not really being able to imagine that as I had never felt like that about anyone before. The only person I felt like that about was already dead.
‘I was so upset I didn’t want to believe he was dead. I tried to contact his spirit. That’s why I became interested in the spiritualist club.’
‘So did you, make contact, I mean?’
‘Oh no,’ she said brightly. ‘I never have been able to.’
‘That must be a disappointment,’ I said, not quite knowing how to answer.
‘Yes and no,’ she said, cocking her head thoughtfully. ‘You see, I saw other dead people.’
‘Oh…’ I put my cake down. Ordinarily I’d have laughed out loud and dismissed the entire notion. There was something inside me that was trying to do just that, but that would have been plain hypocritical. ‘What kind of people?’ I put forward speculatively.
‘Women, men, children, ordinary folks. All dead,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘We have regular séances at the club. No one else can see what I see, I realised that a long time ago, and I never really let on that I was seeing anything either. I used to think I was going mad.’
I nodded. That was very familiar territory for me. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to the others?’
She pursed her lips. ‘I’ve no idea why. I wanted to see my husband. I didn’t want to see other people’s dead folks. So I just kept quiet in the hope that he might turn up one night. He never did. But he was like that in life, too. Never entirely dependable. I thought it was quite natural at those kinds of things for people to see spirits and the like. You read about them all the time, don’t you? But the truth was, while everyone was dead keen on the idea of conjuring up the dead and communicating with them, they couldn’t really do it. They’d no idea who they’d brought from beyond the grave and into the room because they didn’t know they were there. All except me. I could see them. I was quite amazed at the time that the others were blind to them. Anyhow, I did think about leaving the club. What use was it to me if I couldn’t summon up my husband? But their poor faces? Those poor lost spirits. They were looking for something and I took it on myself to see if I could find it for them. I would talk to them in my head and they’d answer me. We’d have silent conversations. Some of them found peace, others did not.’
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. She appeared to be telling me the truth. Or maybe she was deluding herself so much that in her mind it was the truth.
‘So you’re saying you c
an see ghosts?’ I said.
‘I can see something. They might not be ghosts, because ghosts might not exist.’
I frowned. ‘You just said there were spirits…’
She nodded. ‘I did, that’s true. I use the word as a certain catch-all. I’m not sure what I’d call them otherwise.’
‘So they’re not ghosts?’ I was getting confused again.
‘If you mean are they lost souls condemned to wander the world of the living and failing to pass on, then I’m not sure that kind of thing even exists. It presupposes a soul, which may or may not exist, a belief in an afterlife, again which may or may not exist.’
‘You’re baffling me,’ I said. ‘Do you believe in ghosts or not?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, chuckling, which I admit I found a tad irritating. I needed answers to the question of my encroaching madness. ‘If I knew that I’d be worth a fortune!’
‘So what are we seeing?’ I burst.
Her mouth was wreathed in a soft smile. ‘We? So you admit you’re seeing something?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t say that…’ I said defiantly. Then I relented. ‘Yes, I’ve been seeing something and I want to know what it is.’
‘The woman in your shop?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Brown jacket, long flowered skirt…’
I nodded compliantly. ‘OK, you got me. Yes, her, the woman from the Blue Lias.’
‘Oh,’ she said, raising her brow. ‘You think she’s the woman you discovered on the beach?’
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 28
