by Tim McGregor
Chapter 7
THE PRESSURE ON his chest woke him up, hammering his ribs like it was trying to crush the breath from his lungs. John Gantry’s first thought was that his enemies had caught up with him, catching him helpless in sleep and determined to kill him. Old Scratch? The ghost of Crypto Death Machine or the cold hands of Cordelia? A countless others who wanted him dead?
Maybe, he mused in his foggy wakefulness, it was a simple heart attack? Years of bad living catching up with in a humdrum heart failure. Wouldn’t that be a kicker, laid low like that after all this time.
Blurry-eyed, he took in the sight of a plump housecat on his chest, stealing his breath like an imp from some old folktale.
“Ach! Get off ya mangy beast!” Jolting up, swatting the animal away. The cat waddled down his legs and curled onto a pillow at the far end of the sofa. Gantry swung his feet away from it. “Christ.”
“Morning sunshine.”
He looked up, saw Hannah standing over him, one fist planted on her hip. Connie’s daughter, his only niece. Thirteen years old and precocious as all get out with her lopsided grin, always ready for trouble.
He couldn’t be more proud.
“If it isn’t the lord of the manor,” he said. “All right, Hannah?”
“I knew you weren’t dead,” Hannah grinned. “Nevermind what the filth said.”
“Just a miscommunication.” Gantry squinted up at his niece, his brain still in a fog. “You didn’t believe them, then?”
“Never do.” Hannah set a steaming mug onto the coffee table and sat on the edge. “Coffee?”
He gathered the mug up greedily. “Cor. Ta, luv. I knew there was a reason why you’re me favourite niece.”
“I’m your only niece.”
“Same thing.” The coffee, although weak for his tastes, was as brilliant as the strand of sunlight burning through the chintz curtain. The morning couldn’t be finer, as far as he was concerned. He squinted at her. “Jesus, did you grow a foot since I last saw you? What are they feeding you?”
“Shite on a plate most days,” Hannah replied with a sneer.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The derision in her tone was venomous and it rang through as loud as bombs. “You and your mum not getting along?”
“You try having a Nazi as a mum. Bleeding commandant, she is.”
“Easy on the Nazi slurs, Hannah.” Reaching for his coat, patted down the pockets for his cigarettes. “At least learn some history before you go slinging that one about, yeah.”
The grin on Hannah’s face had withered into a proper grimace. “You don’t know what she’s like, John. I can’t turn about without her yammering orders at me.”
“She’s trying her best, luv.” Flicking the dented Zippo, he lit the first one of the day. Juggling a family crisis before the first ciggy was well and nigh cruel. Gantry flailed about for something diplomatic. “As we all are. Patience runs thin and we’re only human.”
Hannah nodded at the vapour trail of smoke threading up into the rafters. “She’ll have your head for smoking in the house, you know.”
“I’ll take me chances,” he said, puffing away and sipping at the brackish java. “Should I bother asking about school and grades or can we just skip that round of bollocks?”
“Consider it skipped.” Hannah folded her arms, harumphing over something unsaid. “Did you and granddad claw at one another, the way me an mum do?”
A long exhale, smoke blowing through his nostrils like some lesser dragon. “No.”
Hannah’s jaw dropped open, smelling a lie. “You got along with your parents at thirteen?”
“Nope.” The moment he’d replied, Gantry realized that she had cornered him. “Er, not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Hannah leaned in, co-conspirator against the everyday world. “You lied to ‘em?”
“No,” Gantry stated, one hand raised as if giving an oath. “I left home.”
Hannah’s eyes lit wide at the idea. Gantry back-pedalled hard. “Not that I’m recommending that, mind. So don’t get any crazy ideas.”
“That’s brilliant!”
“Don’t be a little shite-disturber. Different circumstances. Your mum’s doing all right by you.”
A tiny wedge had been lifted into the past, some dark secret and the girl was all for dragging it into the light. “How? How was it different?”
“We’ll save that horror story for another time, yeah?” Christ. The kid was sharp. He scoured the coffee table for something to ash the fag in.
A voice from the kitchen rang out, harsh and angry. “That better not be smoke in my house I smell!”
“Christ on a stick,” grumbled Gantry. He squinted up at his niece. “Can we say it’s you?”
“Why not?” Hannah said. “It’s not like my lot can get any worse.”
~
From the curb, the house on Cavell Avenue looked unremarkable. Shabbier and more weather beaten the other homes on the street. A detached bay-and-gable from the Victorian era with a deep yard sentried by an ancient chestnut tree. The trim needed painting and there was a crack in the upstairs window pane. Nothing sinister about the place that Billie could see from its exterior, but she remained closed to the spectral world. Her opinion might change once she opened up.
For now, the important thing was to keep an open mind while being quietly observant of everything. There could be perfectly reasonable explanations behind the home-owner’s insistence that her house was haunted.
The doorbell didn’t work so she rapped on the door, shivering as she waited. She really did need a better coat. The door swept back and Robin appeared, waving her inside.
“Come in,” she said, closing the door behind her guest. “Awfully cold out there today.”
“Dreadful,” Billie said, unwinding the scarf from her neck. “I can’t feel my toes.”
Robin took her guest’s coat and toque. “Did you walk all the way here? You must be frozen.”
“I’m okay. I like walking.”
“I just made some tea. Let’s warm you up first.”
The living room was large, the floor cluttered with kid’s toys and books, washed in the thin light from the bay window. Settled onto the sofa, Billie rubbed the feeling back into her feet while Robin brought the tea to the table.
“I’m glad you changed your mind,” Robin said. “I’m really at wit’s end here.”
Billie smiled, watching the woman closely. Robin seemed cheerier than their first meeting, the eyes brighter and fuller. The nose ring was still distracting. “Is your daughter here? Maya, right?”
“She’s here. It takes her a minute to warm up to strangers.” Robin called out her daughter’s name. Soft footfalls could be heard scampering from the other room.
“So,” Robin turned her attention back to Billie. “Can you sense anything?”
“Not yet. I need to open up first.”
Robin looked surprised. “You can do that? Wild. So is there anything you need me to do?”
“Not really,” Billie said. “Maybe you and Maya can stick to one room while I’m here. I’ll take a walk through the house, top to bottom. How many floors are there?”
“Just two. Plus the basement.”
The basement was where she would most likely sense the thing, if anything was here. For reasons she didn’t understand, the dead loved cellars. “Is the attic accessible?”
“There’s a panel in the hall closet. Will you need to get up there?”
“Probably not.” The hot mug was warming her fingers back to life. She didn’t want to put it down. “Is there any part of the house that’s worse than others? More activity?”
“The bedrooms,” Robin said. “Maya’s and the master. The stairs are bad, too.”
Billie looked up at the ceiling, as if able to see past it to the second floor. “Bedrooms are often bad spots for this kind of thing.”
Robin fussed with a ring on her finger, hesitant. “Can I ask you som
ething? How long have you been doing this?”
“Helping people? Not long.”
“No, I mean, seeing ghosts and stuff. Have you always been able to sense things?”
“Sort of. I blocked it out for a long time.” Billie watched the woman fuss with her ring, noting the downturn in her mouth. “Are you worried that Maya can see things?”
“She’s already seeing things. Sometimes she talks to them, too. To people who aren’t there.”
“Most kids can sense things,” Billie said. “But they grow out of it. About the same time they stop believing in Santa Claus.”
Weight lifted from the mother’s shoulders, relief settling in at the idea. A shuffling noise at the door and then a little girl appeared. Chestnut locks in two braids. A purple sweater with a picture of a pony, mismatched socks.
Robin waved the girl forward. “Come say hi to my friend, honey.”
The little girl scampered to her mother’s side, avoiding eye contact with the stranger.
“Sweetheart, this is Billie. Say hi.”
Maya offered a tiny wave. She was adorable and shy and Billie couldn’t stop smiling at her. “Hi Maya. It’s very nice to meet you.”
The girl gripped her mother’s knee.
“I heard that you like horses.” Billie reached into her sweater pocket to retrieve something. “I was at an antique store the other day and I found this.”
A figurine of a horse, die cast in metal, appeared in Billie’s palm. Rearing up on hind legs, the toy horse looked regal. Maya’s mouth broke into a smile.
“My shelves are cluttered with stuff and I have no room for it at my house,” Billie said. “Could you give him a good home?”
Maya gently took the toy horse and stood it in the flat of her palm the way Billie had.
“What do you say, honey?” prodded the mother.
“Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, Maya.” Still smiling, Billie got to her feet. “Well, I guess I’ll get started.”
Robin rose to meet her. “We’ll stay in this room until you’re done. Where do you want to start?”
“Upstairs. I’ll work my way down.” The basement would be done last. She’d need time to gird herself against whatever was down there.
~
The stairs creaked under her feet as she climbed to the second floor, opening herself up as she went. Hitting the top landing, Billie’s senses were on wide array and she could feel the chill from the other rooms. Robin’s fears were real, something was here. Maybe more than one.
Maya’s room was small but cheerful with colour and mad with horses. Horses on the wall, toy ponies spilling from a wooden chest under the window. The bed awash in plush ponies of every colour.
And a lingering tingle of dread everywhere she turned. Some spirit had been here recently. An angry one too. She felt her own anger rising in echo of it, then fear and anguish coming over her in waves. Turning slowly around the little girl’s bedroom, she stopped at the closet door. Ajar by a few inches, Billie already knew that it wouldn’t stay closed, no matter how many times Robin or her husband shut it. She pulled the door open all the way. A normal closet with clothes and toys, board games stacked onto the upper shelf, but it was never something seen that was the trouble. Whatever was haunting this house, it liked the closets. The way a rat loves its nest.
Crossing back into the hallway, into the master bedroom. Standing in the middle of the room, she felt a chill in the air that could only come from the presence of the dead. Like the girl’s room, the entity wasn’t present but it left a miasma of residual energy throughout the room. Cold and oppressive, a volatile mix of despair and rage imprinted on the room. So thick and heavy that it churned Billie’s stomach with nausea at the same time that it prickled her skin with gooseflesh.
It was elusive, this thing slithering through the house. Unable to lock onto any visual cue of what it looked like, all Billie could sense was its movements within the room. She could feel it hovering over the couple in the bed as they slept, pressing down on them, touching them. She felt its oppressive mood drenching Robin and her husband, poisoning their hearts with misery like a slow, malignant disease. The couple who slept in this room fought and bickered often. They withdrew inside themselves with despair or dread, infected by the entity inside their home.
Billie quit the room, heart pounding. She clocked the bathroom door to her left, so ill she feared she might lose her lunch. It was maddening, whatever this ghost was. Elusive and ethereal, nothing for her to latch onto or identify. She could, however, determine how it moved through the house from the residual slime trail it left behind. Not unlike the smears of phantom blood that Poor Tom left everywhere as he dragged his stumps along. The entity in Robin’s house moved through the walls, slipping under the old plaster and lathe walls, through the wall studs, inside the metal tunnel of ductwork. And the ductwork led down into the basement.
Coming down the creaking stairs, it pushed her.
A sharp thud on her back, tipping her forward, her hands clutching the rail to keep from tumbling all the way down. A smudge of darkness in her peripheral vision was all she saw of it before it vanished. Fast too, rushing her from behind like that before she sensed it. Had it meant to hurl her down the stairs or was this a warning? Get out. Robin had said that the stairs were bad. She’d have to ask her later if any other visitors to the house had been pushed here or was it just her. Did the elusive ghost see her as a threat?
Passing the front room where Robin and Maya remained, Billie faked a smile, not wanting to alarm them. She moved on. The kitchen was the calmest room in the house, clear of any of the sickly paranormal echoes. The entity didn’t enter this room, the hub of any family dwelling. Billie had seen this before, in other haunted homes, the kitchen free of any presence of a ghost like a shelter in a storm. She didn’t know why this was, but theorized that the everyday activity in any kitchen was not amenable to the dead. Was it simply the noise of banging pots and rattling dishes that kept the ghosts out or was it the basic camaraderie of a family breaking bread together? Probably both.
Collecting herself in the calmness of the kitchen, she continued on to the mud room at the back of the house and opened the cellar door.
Of course, the basement was unfinished. Bare floor joists overhead, shrouded with cobwebs, the stained brick walls damp with condensation. The only light was a dusty bulb that winked on by pulling a chain. The bad wiring and the old plumbing exposed, running the length of the ceiling. And a cloud of anger over everything, thick as a spring fog. It was down here, whatever it was, ghost or entity. It was present in the room.
Billie took a breath to shrug off the gooseflesh and push down the dread icing her guts. She shouldn’t be scared anymore, not after the things she’d seen, the terrors she had faced but the fear was always there. The unknown, the thing hiding in the shadows or creeping up at your back. She spoke quietly to it.
“I won’t take it personally, the shove on the stairs.”
Silence through the room. A tick-tick but that was just the old water heater.
“You’ve done that before, haven’t you?” Billie continued. “Pushing people on the stairwell. Is that just for strangers or do you push Robin and Maya, too?”
The utilities were on her left, the dusty furnace and the ticking water-heater, illuminated by the bare bulb overhead. The cellar opened up north, dark with shadows, the furthest from the light. It was there, deep in the shadows of the dirty brick cellar. It was slippery, this one. With most ghosts and spirits, Billie could sense them easily but this one was obscure. No more solid than vapour steaming from a kettle. It was going to take some coaxing for it to reveal itself.
“Was this your home?” Keeping her voice down, not wanting to alert the family above. “Did you live here before the current family moved in?”
Nothing. Stubborn. If anything, the presence in the room diminished. Was it leaving?
“I get it, you know. This was your home and you don’
t like the new people but, the simple truth is that this is their home now. And they should be allowed to live in peace.”
The stillness pervaded. A cobweb near her head billowed gently from a draft leaking in through a crack in the foundation, but that was all. Hopefully it was listening to her, hearing her out.
“So. That leaves us two options. You can stay, if you leave them in peace. That means no more pushing, no more touching them in the night. No more scaring them. Especially the little girl.”
She felt something shift in the shadows at the far end of the basement. Not so much a movement as a change in the atmosphere. Emotions churning, the air pressure intensifying.
“If you can’t do that, then, I’m sorry. You have to leave.”
It charged at her. Not from the dark corner where Billie thought it was but from underneath her. It erupted up through the concrete slab floor to swallow her. Long, spindly limbs spiked with thorns, like the legs of a spider, thrust up and curled over her. Their touch stung her, sharp barbs cutting her flesh, tearing through her thick sweater, slashing the fabric of her jeans to find the skin. Rather than the expected cold, the spider legs were hot, searing her skin as the thorns cut, piercing and cauterizing in the same motion. Its massive bulk broke through the concrete under her feet, a sooty tangle of bone and meat and wet sinew. She kicked at it, trying to get away from it but the spiky limbs coiled over her like a cage, pulling her down.
A grotesque popping sound issued from the dark mass, the bones shifting and sliding, the sticky muscle tissue slitting open until a gap yawned open in what she could only guess was a mouth. Wider and wider, gaping open under her kicking feet, eager to swallow her whole.
No!
Not so much a scream as it was a psychic refusal of the entity. The bones of the thing snapped under her, the spindly legs recoiling as if in pain. Scrambling hard to tear free from the limbs, she hoped her banshee wail hurt the bastard thing.
Hitting the gritty floor, Billie crawled away as quick as she could, colliding into the bulk of the furnace. Behind her, the floor was undisturbed, the monstrous spider thing was gone. Wincing, she looked at her hands, her arms. The cuts and slashes were still there, the thing’s bite was real enough and it stung like a son of a bitch.
