by Tim McGregor
This was no simple ghost. She didn’t know what the damn thing was.
And it wasn’t finished with her yet, judging from the gritty crackling coming from the dark corner.
They came rolling across the basement floor, tumbling and undulating in the hundreds. Doll parts. Plastic arms and legs, headless torsos and china doll heads, rolling out like a wave of severed baby parts right toward her. Billie started for the stairs but the doll pieces flooded over her hands, her knees. The glass eyes of the doll heads looked up at her, their lashes unnaturally long. Their tiny cherub mouths opened and a legion of baby heads called out to her in crackly voices.
Play with me, they all cried. Billie, play with me.
That was when the naked bulb overhead winked out, plunging her into darkness.
Chapter 8
THE TAPEWORM TURNED. Eyelids heavy, drooping close to sleep before snapping open at something his ears had caught.
What did that bitch say?
He sat up, tilting forward on the rancid couch, and wiped the drool from his mouth. That blond chick was on TV again, the reporter who did weird news and stuff. Something in his morphine-addled brain was telling him to straighten up and focus. Pay attention, because this could mean work.
Tapeworm knew a lot of people. It was his business to know lots of people from all walks of life. None of them could be said to be colleagues, few operated in the same field as he did. The number of friends he claimed could be counted on one hand. And no one among the vast networks of people that he moved through knew what his real name was. He was simply The Tapeworm. A day-trader in information, distiller of rumours and gossip. Occasional police informant.
It was a tricky business to trade in. The key component was knowing which scrap of information to sell and knowing who was willing to shell out for it.
The blond reporter was yammering away on the TV, stinging his ears with peculiar phrases. Occult. Devil-worship. Desecrated church. Psychic. Rubbing his eyes to clear them, he squinted at the news journalist as she stood before a pile of burnt logs at the base of the Devil’s Punchbowl. When she began wrapping up her report, he leaned in to catch the byline.
Amanda Troy, Hamilton Bay News.
She looked like an Amanda, thought the Tapeworm. No matter. He had seen her reports before; the odd and the unexplained. The fresh-faced news reporter was scrabbling around in a very particular niche of the city’s scaly underbelly. A world that he knew intimately. Amanda Troy, the golden girl of late night news, was digging for a story. If she was hungry enough, she just might pay up for some particularly tasty tidbits that he kept hidden away in a tiny drawer inside his diseased little mind.
~
“Hey. Are you all right?”
A thin voice within the void, darkness all about.
“Billie?”
When she opened her eyes, Billie blinked at the face of the woman hovering over her. Grasped for the woman’s name. Robin.
“What happened?” Her voice was parched, brittle.
Pressing something cold and damp to Billie’s brow, Robin said, “I ran downstairs when I heard you scream. You were on your knees, incoherent.”
“I was?” The room spun crazily the moment she sat up. Her hand went automatically to the throbbing pain on her brow. “Ouch.”
“Go easy,” Robin cautioned. “You must have hit your head went the light went out. I’m sorry. The light always goes screwy down there.”
The sickening vertigo passed and as it fled, memory flooded back to fill the gaps. The spider limbs, the doll parts rolling across the floor. The shadow entity, whatever it was. The fear in her marrow, naked and raw.
Billie ran her fingertips over the tender lump on her forehead. “I ran into something? I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“I refuse to go down there anymore,” Robin admitted.
Maya sat on the floor, watching them with her big eyes. The metal horse in her hand. Robin knelt down to tussle her hair. “Honey, go play in the kitchen for now. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Billie watched the little girl dart from the room and then said quietly, “The kitchen’s the safest room in the house.”
Fear crept back into the mother’s eyes. “Did you see something? It’s a ghost, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure what it is.”
Robin settled onto the couch next to Billie, her voice a whisper. “But you saw something. I’m not crazy, right?”
“You’re not crazy. There’s something here.”
“What is it? Or who is it?”
Billie tested the lump on her head again. Was it it swelling? “I’m not sure. Sometimes they’re obscure, or masked. But it’s here and it doesn’t want to leave.”
Robin’s hands covered her mouth, eyes glistening. “What do I do? Can you get rid of it? Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know if I can get it to leave.” Billie propped her elbows on her knees, waiting for the dizziness to pass, scrambling for some way to help the woman without alarming her. “Robin, do you go to church?”
“What?”
“Do you know a priest? Or a rabbi or vicar?”
Robin’s lip was quivering, her eyes darting about as her mind raced with questions. Worst case scenarios. “We started going to a church nearby. The Ministry of Eternal Salvation but I don’t really know the Reverend there. I’ve said hello, but that’s it.”
Maya’s voice called out from the kitchen. Asking for something to eat.
“Just a minute, honey!” Robin yelled back. She reached out and placed her hand over Billie’s arm. “Is it that bad?”
“Get the priest to bless the whole house. Top to bottom, every room. Especially the basement.” Billie tried to ignore the sting of the goose egg swelling up on her brow. She needed to think clearly. “He might have to come back a few days later and do it all over again. Is there anyone you can stay with for a few days? A friend or a relative?”
The tears that had glistened in Robin’s eyes finally spilt over. Her voice no more than a trickle. “Oh God.”
“Momma?”
The little girl stood in the doorway, watching her mother cry. Maya’s gaze hardened as it shifted to Billie, wondering why this stranger was making her mom sad. Robin wiped the tears away quickly and opened her arms to catch her daughter.
Billie stood up, gathered her coat from where it hung from a peg in the vestibule. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
“You don’t have to go,” Robin said, struggling to push herself up from the sofa.
“I’ll call you later tonight. We can talk more.”
She was buttoning her coat when the door pushed open and a man stepped inside. He looked at Billie with surprise. “Hi.”
Robin stepped into the vestibule, discreetly wiping her eyes dry. “Honey, what are you doing home so early?”
“Had some errands to run.” He looked at Billie again, held out a hand. “I’m Noah.”
“I’m sorry,” Robin said. “Billie, this is my husband, Noah. Honey, this is Billie.”
They shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Noah. I’m just on my way out.”
Maya clung to the door frame, watching them. “She’s the spooky lady.”
Billie’s cheeks flushed. Robin looked annoyed. Noah knotted his brow. “Spooky lady?”
“Billie’s a psychic. She just took a walk through the house.” Robin’s voice lowered by a decibel or two. “We need to talk.”
“Psychic?” The smile on Noah’s face dropped away, usurped by a pan of suspicion, bordering on hostility. He glared at his wife. “We discussed this already. We weren’t getting a psychic.”
“You decided,” Robin snapped back. Ire in her tone, an unfinished argument here. “Not me. I asked Billie to help us.”
Billie sighed inwardly. The last thing she wanted was to be the fulcrum of some marital dispute. “I should go. Nice to meet you.”
Noah didn’t budge, blocking the way out. He looked at the stranger in his home. “Psychic,
huh? Just how much is this costing us?”
“Pro bono,” Billie said, bristling at the aggression. “Goodbye, Robin.”
Noah opened the door for her and Billie walked out, pulling her toque over her hair. The door clicked shut behind her and as she descended the frozen porch steps, she could hear their voices yelling from inside, the dispute already breaking into a fight.
Marching briskly down the street, she wondered if Maya was stuck in the vestibule watching the couple fight or if she had fled to the kitchen where it was safe.
~
Southend-on-sea.
Christ.
In the warmer months, it was a bustling seaside town of amusement halls and beach-goers, a Ferris wheel rotating over the long boardwalk of tourist traps. In winter, it was a desolate strip of quiet streets washed in a grey sky that matched the hue of the sea. The parched loneliness of it suited John Gantry, sitting on a bench, looking out over the white-tipped waves on the estuary of the Thames. He needed quiet now, the emptiness of it, to get his head sorted.
Nothing had been the same since the night he awoke on a cold slab of metal inside the morgue. Everything seemed fragile, impermanent, now. The world, as it existed, stood on a thin layer of ice that, without warning, could snap and plunge it all into icy darkness. Or, he mused, it was just himself that skated the thin ice. Coming back from the dead had been a bumpy ride and he was afraid that not all of him made it back. His nerves were shot, his confidence withered and his heart a sucking wound that had him falling to pieces at the worst times.
Confidence was the currency in which he traded, the lingua Franca of the underground spheres in which he moved. Secrets, power, mystery, threats. Half the time it was simple manipulation, cracking the other bloke’s weakness and exploiting it until he broke. You needed balls for that, confidence to an almost pathological degree, to stay afloat in a shady web of occultists and self-proclaimed sorcerers and nutters mad for power or the end of the world. You can’t play the game with a trembling hand or a treasonous heart infected by the squirming worm of doubt.
“Face it, son,” he said aloud to no one. To the sea, the frozen Ferris wheel on the boardwalk. “You’re finished. Washed up.”
Fishing out another cigarette, he contemplated what was to come if he stepped out of the game altogether. Officially, he was dead. What better time to get out of the business than now? Let the world think he had died in prison and slip into a quiet life that had nothing to do with arcane knowledge and diabolical things that went bump in the night. But what then? Get a job? Get a twee flat somewhere, meet a nice girl and settle down? The horror of it chilled what was left of his blighted soul more than the agony of waking up on a morgue slab.
Flick-flick. The lighter was dead, empty of butane, leaving the cigarette dangling uselessly from his lips. Cursing, he flung the bastard thing into the street.
“Oy!” bellowed a voice. A constable stepping out of the chip shop with a greasy bundle of paper in his hand. “There’s a fine for littering, you know.”
“Piss off!” Gantry marched away. The last thing he needed was hassle from Old Bill.
Cutting through the narrow streets, he returned to the safety of his sister’s house, unprepared for the ballocking that awaited him.
“I have a bone to pick with you,” said Connie when he came through the side door.
“Take a number,” he grumbled. “You’re one of many, Con.”
“Enough cheek. This is serious.” Her arms folded, a flinty cut to her features. This was serious. “This way.”
Gantry followed her down the hall and they stood in Hannah’s room. The inner sanctum of a young girl, with pictures of pop stars plastered to the walls, the dresser a riot of nail polish, trashy magazines and skull-shaped candles.
“I don’t think Hannah’s going to appreciate us snooping her room,” he said.
“I normally don’t,” replied Connie, “other than to bark at her about cleaning up. But I was in here the other day, putting away the laundry and I found something.”
That didn’t bode well. Connie opened the closet and knelt down, digging her hands under a pile of old jumpers, pulling something out. Gantry braced for the worst. A few joints in a tin, a couple tabs of ecstasy. A bottle of gin.
Connie stood up with the offending items in hand. Books. Paperbacks, three of them.
“This is what you’re worried about?” He almost laughed. “Books?”
“Look at the titles, John.”
The Art of Occult Power. Secrets of the Magus. Conjuration and Manipulations of the Lesser Daemons. The covers were garish with pentagrams, skulls and medieval engravings of devils. Gantry stifled his surprise, not wanting to alarm Connie. These titles weren’t introductory texts or kid’s books. These were dense, scholarly works.
“Where did she get these?”
“Are you taking the piss?” Her tone was acid-etched, her eyes harder still. “I’ve a good mind to knock your bloody head in.”
Oh for Christ’s sakes. Gantry sighed. “Connie, give me some credit. You honestly think I would have given this shite to her?”
“Where else would she have gotten it?” Connie crossed to the window, unsure of what to do with her hands. “The way that girl worships you? Jesus, Johnny.”
“Con, you know I keep this stuff away from you. That hasn’t changed.” He fanned through the pages of Conjurations and Manipulations, written by one Edward Powell. He’d known Powell briefly, toward the end of his career. Before the mad bastard had taken a swan dive into the Thames. “Have you asked Hannah about this?”
“Not yet. Not until I figure out how to do that without murdering her.”
Gantry watched his sister stare out the window. The anger had boiled over, dissipating. Her lip was quivering slightly. “You’ve never told her about me, have you? About what I do?”
“What do you think?”
“Then how does she know?”
Connie took the books from his hands and knelt down to shove them back into their hiding spot. “I don’t know. Maybe her friends know. They know that you’re a wanted murder suspect. Rumours swirl up about that sort of thing.”
Gantry propped an arm over the dresser. He desperately needed a cigarette. “Let me talk to Hannah about it. I’ll get it sorted.”
“Do more than sort it, John,” Connie said as she straightened up. Eye to eye with her brother. “Scare the living shit out of her so she never touches this bollocks again.”
~
“Where are we going?”
Mockler smiled at her, his face lit green in the light of the dashboard. “I want your opinion on something.”
Billie watched Cannon Street zoom past outside the window, then a turn onto West Ave. Snow was falling again, swirling around like dust motes in the headlights. Mockler had called while she was walking home, said he’d pick her up on the way. A playful tone to his voice. She’d reminded him that she wasn’t fond of surprises.
“Did I tell you we found a buyer for the house?”
She looked at him. “That was fast.”
“They’re eager to buy. Apparently the housing market is hotter than I thought.” He scrutinized the houses on their left, slowing down to see the numbers. “They put in an offer. The realtor wants us to come in and take a look at it.”
Billie felt herself stiffen up, tried to hide it. “You and Christina?”
He nodded. She turned away, gazing at the houses passing by. A queasiness erupted at the thought of it and she pushed it away.
“We’re here,” he said, pulling the car over. “Come on.”
He led her up the porch stairs of a brick house with a long front yard and through the front door. The foyer was small, two doors.
“An apartment?” she asked.
“More than that.” Opening the right hand door revealed a set of stairs. He flourished for her to proceed. “Come have a look.”
An old house, divided into two apartments. Billie topped the stairs and strode down t
he hall to the kitchen. New appliances and a nice countertop but the character of the original house shone through in the old window, the crown moulding and tall baseboards.
“It’s nice,” Billie said. “Updated but you can still see the older charm. Pricey?”
“Within the budget. I saw it this afternoon and fell hard. The owner was nice enough to leave it unlocked so I could show you.” Mockler nodded at the window. “There’s a huge deck out there.”
“One bedroom?”
“Two,” he answered. Taking her hand, he led her back into the hall. “Come see the rest.”
The rest of the apartment held even more character than the kitchen. Dark oak wainscoting along the hallway, black and white tile in the bathroom with an original bathtub and sink, weathered with time but still functional. Two narrow bedrooms on the south side, the former master bedroom acting as a living room off the front of the house. A bay window with mullioned glass. Refinished hardwood floors. Her guess was cherry, with an oak inlay. She had to stifle her flat-envy.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “The second bedroom can be an office or something. Is there parking?”
“Tight, but enough for two cars.”
Billie circled the room, her heels clomping the wood floor. She loved the emptiness of the big room. “Great find, honey. Sign the lease, before someone else does.”
“It’s not for rent right now.”
“Huh? Then why are you looking at it?”
Mockler leaned against the wall. “The house is for sale. My real estate agent tipped me off to it. They haven’t listed it yet, so she suggested making a pre-emptive bid.”
“Are you sure you want to do that? Buy another house so soon?”
“Not really,” he shrugged. “But this came along. There’s a tenant downstairs, so that would offset the mortgage. And with the sale of the Bristol house I can foot the down payment. Seems too good to pass up.”
