‘The cellar?’
She nodded. Her lower lip trembled. ‘Sometimes I think I’m still locked in it. The cold, the damp, the dark – sometimes I want to scream…’
I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I said in my head. I’m sorry that you’re going to have to leave me. I hope you can forgive me. It’s for the best.
But she was unaware that our time together was fast coming to an end. She watched TV with her sad, dead eyes.
My attention was drawn to the news report. At first, what was being said by the newscaster didn’t register with me. I’d not watched TV in ages, and I’d only put it on tonight as some kind of background noise. But I sat upright when the newscaster reported that the police had at last managed to identify the body of the woman found in the Blue Lias cliffs at Lyme Regis.
I turned up the volume.
‘Madeline,’ I said, ‘they know who you are…’
But the police spokesman said, ‘DNA tests and examination of medical records on a broken arm, which she sustained as a child, prove without a doubt that the body of the woman found on Monmouth Beach in Lyme Regis is that of Shelly Morden, who went missing in August 1978 aged nineteen.’
I was stunned.
The slightly blurred and faded photograph of the young woman they put up on screen was not Madeline.
I turned to the ghost of the woman sitting beside me. She stared at the screen blankly, as if not really seeing what was on it.
Madeline was not, after all, the woman from the Blue Lias.
16
Parasite
I’ve never liked Fridays. Some people have a dislike for Mondays, and even Sundays. But unlike most people, I don’t like Fridays.
Have you noticed, throughout history, how many Black Fridays there have been? Take a look. It’s quite surprising. This Friday was to be my own particular Black Friday, because that was the day we agreed to rid me of Madeline.
Rid me – that sounds so cruel, especially to a woman who had shown me nothing but tenderness and love the likes of which I had never quite experienced before. I spoke to Gabrielle about the news report. She hadn’t seen it, but picked up a paper the next day. Not surprisingly it made the local headlines, and the face of Shelly Morden, the real woman from the Blue Lias, stared out from every newsstand. Gabrielle was as shocked as me.
So who was Madeline?
I had spent so long believing she was the woman I discovered on the beach that to think of her as someone – or something – else was difficult, if not impossible. Gabrielle was at a loss to explain it. So she insisted I meet Quentin Farnham as soon as possible. He came that Friday.
Black Friday.
Quentin Farnham was a tall streak of a man, in his mid-fifties, I guess, maybe older; pale-faced, serious, with a bony handshake I found disturbing. He wore a long raincoat, a red scarf wrapped round his neck. He came into the shop carrying a large old-fashioned suitcase in each hand, as if going on holiday somewhere. After he’d put them carefully down and gave me a cursory greeting he looked about the shop. It was late evening. He went about turning on all the available lights.
‘So who do you think Madeline is?’ I asked Gabrielle, watching as Quentin Farnham poked his nose into every crevice.
‘Quentin and I have been discussing this. Madeline could be malicious after all,’ she concluded.
‘No she isn’t!’ I defended.
‘A spirit that is pretending to be someone else. I’ve seen it before.’
‘So have I,’ said Farnham without looking at us. He was opening the door to the tiny kitchen at the back of the shop, turning on the light.
‘Why would she pretend?’ I asked.
Farnham came back to us, stood with his hands in his raincoat pockets. ‘To draw out your energy. It’s like a parasite, living off you.’
‘Madeline is not a parasite!’ I said.
‘Like a tapeworm of the soul,’ he said.’ But of course, you have to believe in a soul, and that’s debatable. What we have here is what I call a malicious transreceiver.’
‘What the hell are you going on about?’ I said. ‘A malicious what?’
Farnham lifted one of the suitcases onto my desk and unfastened it. He threw back the lid. Inside it was an array of crudely fashioned electrical equipment, square boxes made out of rough-hewn wood, stripped-down radios, a mass of coloured wires and fragments of what appeared to be computer motherboards. ‘A malicious transreceiver,’ he said. ‘It both transmits a signal, which you pick up, and receives the power to do so from a source, which is you, Mr Turner. I believe Gabrielle has explained her belief about ghosts. In part they mirror my own. At their heart I believe what you see and experience is a series of powerful electrical-like disturbances.’
I wasn’t buying any of that. ‘So what causes the disturbances in the first place? Something has to cause them.’
‘I have no idea, Mr Turner,’ he said unequivocally. ‘All I know is how to get rid of them.’
‘Is this man for real?’ I said to Gabrielle.
‘Trust him, Toby,’ she said.
‘That there might be the spirits of the dead causing such things, or evil spirits, call them what you may, is not for me to say,’ said Farnham, taking a box out of the suitcase; it looked like an old radio with its back removed and a complicated mass of wires hanging out. ‘All I know is that whatever they are causing the disturbances, they can have a profound effect on people, and invariably it is not a good effect. In some cases it might be construed so bad as to be evil, but I distance myself from talking about good and evil, much preferring the words benign and malign. You, Mr Turner, are suffering the influence of something malign and it needs to be dealt with before the damage becomes irreparable.’ He set the contraption down on the desk and inserted a wire or two, flicking on a switch. There was a tiny electrical hum.
‘Microwaves…’ said Gabrielle thoughtfully.
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘Your computers, TVs, no end of modern gadgets, use the same microwaves to transmit the wireless signals as your microwave oven uses to cook your food, but we’re not cooked using our gadgets because the levels are so low…’
‘Where are you going with this?’ I said, watching intently as Farnham moved about the room setting up pieces of crude machinery high on shelves.
‘If the levels of microwaves reached a point where there was real damage being done…’ she said.
‘That’s what’s happening to you,’ said Farnham to me. ‘We all live with incorporeal disturbances and yet are unaware of them. Like we live with the unseen colours in the spectrum, or the sounds pitched too high for us to hear. Or weak microwaves from your broadband connection, for that matter. Some people are tuned into these incorporeal disturbances more than others. It is often said of them that they have a gift; I just think they’re better receivers of weak signals. Some individuals act as such powerful receivers, boost the signals so to speak, that other people are able to see and experience what they see. But every now and again something causes a really significant surge. They tend to be short-lived. But for some people the surge stays switched on. We get a haunting so intense and over such a long period that it starts to have a very real physical and mental effect on the people experiencing it. Someone like you, Mr Turner.’
‘So you’re likening me to a television?’
‘If that’s what works for you.’
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m setting out my equipment. It will neutralise the signal. Switch it off. You’ll be free of it and your life can return to normal.’
‘You expect me to believe all that makeshift crap you’re cluttering up my shop with will have any real effect?’
‘I don’t expect you to believe anything, Mr Turner. I am doing this as a favour to Gabrielle. If you wish me to pack it all away then you only need say the word and I will do so. It is no skin off my nose one way or the other.’
He stared hard at me, waiting for an answer. �
�So you’re saying I will never be bothered by this transreceiver-thing ever again?’
‘I can’t promise you’ll not be bothered by something else. But what I can do is tune into this particular apparition and try to turn it off. You are a natural receiver, Mr Turner. There’s no telling what other things you might inadvertently tune into. We have to take it one apparition at a time.’
‘So you think Madeline’s bad for me?’ I was even then reluctant to let her go.
‘Only you can decide that,’ Farnham returned. ‘But listening to what Gabrielle has told me and looking at you now, I would way she’s very bad for you.’
‘Maybe Madeline is a spirit that really does need help…’ I said.
‘Maybe. Can you afford to risk another few months trying to find out?’
I shook my head. ‘Go ahead, set up your equipment.’
Gabrielle Norton came to me and put a comforting hand on my arm as Farnham continued placing the equipment around the shop, trailing wires over the floor, over bookshelves, connecting them up to myriad pieces of crude-looking electrical circuit boards and boxes. He took out a laptop from the other suitcase, and pieces of black cloth with wires attached. He pulled out the chair from under my desk and placed it in the centre of the room, lining it up carefully before telling me bluntly to sit down. I did as I was told.
He strapped the cloth to my left arm, a large strip being placed around my chest, another around my head. I stroked away a stray wire from my eyes. Gabrielle helped Farnham finish things off, eventually standing back and taking a look at me.
‘There, you look beautiful!’ she said, trying to make light of things.
‘I’m not going to be fried or anything?’ I said, lifting up a mass of tied wire that rested on my lap.
‘You’ll not feel a thing,’ said Farnham. ‘Perhaps a slight tingling sensation. Some people report that.’
I looked into Gabrielle’s eyes. ‘Am I doing the right thing? I love her.’
She shrugged. ‘Only you can decide. There’s still time to back out.’
‘Right, we’re ready,’ said Farnham, standing over his laptop. He glanced across at me. ‘Are you set, Mr Turner?’
Both Gabrielle and I glanced up together, because at the far end of the shop we saw Madeline appear. She came out of the kitchen, gliding silently towards us. Farnham was obviously unaware of her presence.
She was so beautiful, I thought. And instantly I felt that inexplicable high coming over me again, felt the effects of that strange drug which coursed through and ignited my system whenever she came to me. I felt Gabrielle touch my arm reassuringly.
A parasite, I thought. She was a parasite.
I closed my eyes. But I felt her presence coming ever nearer.
‘Hit the switch, Farnham,’ I said.
If I expected the crackling sounds of electricity pulsing wildly through wires and arcing noisily across gaps, the strident hum of machinery, the heavens being torn apart with thunder and lightning – everything, in fact, I associated with Baron Frankenstein awakening his creature – I was going to be sorely disappointed. There was a barely audible hum in the air, and I indeed felt a slight tingling sensation in my hand.
‘Rusty…’ said Madeline.
I opened my eyes. She was standing right in front of me. ‘Rusty?’
‘Steel…’ she said. Her voice appeared to be growing thinner.
‘Rusty steel?’ I said. ‘A rusty steel what?’ Her figure rippled, as if I saw her through a heat haze. ‘Tell me what you mean, Madeline. Rusty steel? Is that important? I don’t understand…’ Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear anything. I turned to Farnham. ‘Stop what you’re doing – I need to speak to her.’
But it was too late. She blinked out like a light.
‘That’s it,’ said Farnham. ‘It’s done.’
‘Bring her back. She was trying to tell me something,’ I said, ripping away the wires attached to me.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘You called out too late. It’s all finished. You’ll never see Madeline again.’
17
Lost, Confused and Desperate
If I had to be honest, I didn’t expect Farnham’s eccentric Heath Robinson setup to work. Who knows, maybe that’s why I agreed to going ahead with the weird exorcism in the first place. The early indications, however, were that it had.
Did I feel instantly better? No I did not. I felt worse. As indeed so must anyone coming off a drug that has long infected the system. I suffered terrible headaches and nausea, which, Farnham assured me, would pass in a day or so, and he even prescribed paracetamol like he was a doctor or something.
Did I think that Madeline was a parasite, an evil spirit, call it what you will? No I did not. But I was no closer to knowing who or what she was, or why she’d chosen to come to me. A dreadfully huge chasm had opened up in my life that I did not begin to know how to fill. And that first night without her, lying in my cold bed with the knowledge that she was finally gone forever, was perhaps the worst I have ever had to go through.
But when I awoke the next morning the headache and nausea had subsided. For the first time in ages I felt energy flowing through my system, and, ravenous for food, I got up to make breakfast. I ate with gusto. It was Saturday. The sun appeared to want to shine and was trying to break through a gauzy strip of grey cloud. After eating, I went down to my shop, lifted the blinds and gazed out onto the street beyond. The morning sunlight speared through the begrimed window and landed in a hot band across my desk like a burning omen of sorts. I breathed in deeply. I began to feel well again, as if finally emerging from a long, debilitating fever. My mind was clearer than ever. I went to the door and set my sign so that I was open for business.
My first task was to move all the Thomas Hardy books back to where they had been before Madeline had suggested I move them to the front of the shop. To give her credit, I hadn’t had the shop open long enough to try the move out, but I was doing this to purge myself of her, trying to make it appear as if she’d never entered my life, removing traces.
Removing traces…
How could I ever remove her from my heart?
I shrugged away the damaging thoughts. I would get over this, somehow, in time. One day I will look back at this strange, melancholic episode in my life, I thought, and I’ll laugh about it. A moment of inexplicable madness and delirium when I believed I was being haunted by a woman whose body I’d found on the beach by the Blue Lias cliffs. How crazy is that?
For the moment, it was time to forget Madeline and get back on with my life. She was never coming back, of that I was now certain. Whether Farnham’s work really had sent a ghost packing or had simply had a placebo effect on a temporarily sick mind, I didn’t care. She wasn’t coming back. And neither was the old Toby Turner. He had vanished with her. I vowed that from today forward I would live life to the full. Live for life, not for death.
I rang my friend Mark Boothman.
There was no reply still. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only 9.15 a.m., and I doubted he would be up and about even if he had been home. I left a message saying I’d like to talk to him. It was time to get things in order. I sat at my desk and took out my accounts, which I’d neglected for so long, and set about working things out and attempting to get a plan together. Yes, I was feeling much better about things so long as I kept myself busy, my mind focussed on anything other than Madeline.
But events would make that impossible.
I never look forward to winter evenings. It’s almost as if there’s a trace of something ancient lurking inside me, when nightfall meant retreating to your log fires and never venturing too far from their heat and light, the dark land beyond their small, crackling rings of safety filled with unimaginable horrors, with wild creatures, with the roaming spirits of the dead, with demons and trolls and creatures of the night.
The short day gasped its last and I sat alone in the glare of my lamps, trying to watch TV for a while to fight back a fe
eling of dread at what the coming night held in store. So what did I expect exactly? I couldn’t explain it. But something was coming, a thought that continued to intrude against my better judgement, and brushing away the lingering optimism of the day.
I fought it off by getting ready to go out with Trisha that evening, as promised. My heart wasn’t in it, as it had been earlier. But all the same I showered and found out my denim coat and jeans which Trisha insisted I wear. Strangely, I found myself looking back over my shoulder as I closed the shop door to go out. I stared into the dark space. Was I expecting Madeline to appear? Was I hoping she would? Or was I confirming she had gone forever? I’ll leave that for you to determine, because I had no idea.
I picked Trisha up at 7.30 p.m., as arranged. She was bright and bubbly, looking forward to going out. She’d paid special attention to making sure she looked the part, dressed in a one-piece 1970s-style jumpsuit in pale blue, with a zip up the front and wide lapels. She looked so different, so alluring, and yet so distant.
Are you happy because you’re no longer with me, I thought?
I envied her. I didn’t love her, I knew that much now. But I did envy her. She had a simplistic view of life filled with simple pleasures (though often expensively so), and no real ambition, no real awareness of what the future held – a future that she measured in weeks and months, not years and decades. It did not bother her that she was going out with someone who, only a week or so ago, she’d been set to marry and had dumped for an engineer with, quite frankly, a big nose. She had already moved on to whatever joy was imminent. She was infinitely happier than me and I was envious to the point of unreasonable anger.
I drove to Exeter along the M5, hardly aware of driving at all, the lights from cars on the opposite carriageway scratching across my vision like shooting comets and supernovas. Trisha’s shrill voice intruded every now and again, and I nodded and said an appropriate word when I needed to, but I was gradually drawn into the black world outside the windows. A dark world of wild beasts and trolls and demons and the walking spirits of the dead.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 34
