by Tim McGregor
Pushing the squeaky cart into another aisle, the bakery section loomed ahead. Trouble.
“What about the gypsy connection? Is that part of the bad rap, too?”
“I think so,” Kaitlin said. “It’s certainly where we get the cliche of the fortune-teller from, with all the bangles and head scarves. But I think the prejudice against gypsies has tainted the idea of psychics as frauds.”
Billie stopped the cart. “Robin?”
“Who?”
“The woman I told you about. Here, take the cart.” Billie pointed at a young mom pushing a shopping cart further down the aisle, a little girl dragging her heels behind her.
“Robin?” Billie called as she caught up to the pair. Mom and daughter turned to her. “Hey. How are you?”
“Oh, hi.” Robin’s eyes darted about, as if desperate for an escape route.
“Hi Maya,” Billie said to the little girl. Maya clung to her mother’s knee. Turning back to the mother, she said, “I left you a couple messages.”
“Yeah, sorry. Things have been a bit crazy.” The mother’s response was muted, distracted. She inched away, the way one does upon confronting the contagious.
“How are things at the house? Any better?”
“Not really,” Robin said. Her eyes flashed suspicion as Kaitlin caught up to them, as if she’d been ambushed.
“Oh. I’ve been digging into the history of the house,” Billie went on. “It might help if we knew more about it. To help clear the place.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Robin said. “We don’t need your help anymore.”
Billie registered surprise. The young mother seemed even more drained than the last time she had seen her. Weary and defeated. “So, it’s gone?”
“I have to go.” Robin pushed her cart away. “Come on, Maya.”
Billie exchanged a glance with Kaitlin, who shrugged. She ran after the woman.
“Robin, hang on,” Billie said. “What’s going on? Has it gotten worse?”
Again, Robin’s eyes flitted about, skittish as a bird. “You angered it.”
Billie took it on the chin. Maybe she deserved that. “I didn’t mean to. Let me try again. I’m sure I can get it move on. Or at least—”
“No. We have someone to help.”
Another psychic? “Who?”
“A reverend. He’s helping us now. He said bringing in a psychic just made it worse.” Robin brushed her hair behind her ear and, as she did so, a mottled patch of purple was visible in the hairline.
“Robin,” Billie said, fixating on the bruise, “did you get hurt? Did it do this to you?”
“Please. I can’t talk to you anymore.” The woman hurried on, tugging the girl after her.
Alarmed, Billie was about to run after her again but felt Kaitlin tug her back.
“What was that all about?” Kaitlin asked.
“I wish I knew.”
They watched Robin scuttle up the aisle, hurriedly tossing things into the cart like it was a race.
“That woman is absolutely terrified,” Kaitlin pronounced.
“You mean…?”
Kaitlin nodded. “I could feel her terror from across the room. She’s the woman with the bad spirit?
It didn’t make sense. Robin had been so keen on enlisting her help but now she wanted nothing to do with Billie. Had the haunting gotten worse or was something else causing the woman to tremble so?
At the end of the aisle, a man stepped out to join Robin and Maya. Noah. Robin took his arm and hurried him along, glancing back quickly at Billie before corralling her small family through the checkout counter.
~
Dinner was a joke. After gnoshing on the junk food when they got back to Kaitlin’s apartment, neither of them were in the mood to cook anything. When the wine came out, they opened the package of rice crackers and the tub of hummus and made do with that. Settling onto the sofa, Kaitlin flicked on the TV and skimmed through a few screens to find the movie she had already chosen.
Seeing the title sequence unfold, Billie turned to her. “The Craft? Are you serious?”
“What? I love this movie!” Throwing a blanket over both of their knees, Kaitlin elbowed her friend’s ribs. “Don’t pretend you don’t love it, too.”
Cheesy as it was, they both basked in it, revelling in Faruza Balik’s teethy ferocity. When it was over, Billie took up the wine to refill the glasses but the bottle was empty.
“I can open another.”
“That’s okay,” Billie said. Kaitlin was the only friend who kept a fully stocked wine rack. “I should go.”
Kaitlin glanced at the time on the television. “Is the boyfriend coming home soon?”
“I don’t know. His schedule is all over the place these days.”
Kaitlin waited by the door as Billie shrugged back into her gear for the dreary walk home. “Do you think he hit her?”
Billie frowned, recalling the movie. “Who, Skeet?”
“Your friend in the grocery store. That bruise on her head. Do you think her husband did that?”
“It crossed my mind,” Billie confessed. “But I don’t know. He was a dick to me when I met him but I didn’t get a violent vibe off him.”
“The ghost, then?”
“She said it had gotten worse. Or I made it worse.”
Kaitlin frowned with doubt. “How could you have made it worse?”
“Dunno. I might have provoked it. Like poking a hornet’s nest.”
Kaitlin asked what she planned to do but Billie didn’t have an answer for her. A quick embrace before marching out into the bitter chill of a midwinter night.
Her feet were frozen when she made it home, like dead clubs inside her boots. But her man was there.
“Hey,” he said, coming to the door. “I thought you were at work tonight.”
“Geoff wanted to switch shifts. I was at Kaitlin’s. God, I’m freezing.”
He stifled any comment about her duffel coat as he helped her out of it. Instead, he wrapped a blanket over her shoulders when she dropped onto the lumpy sofa and went to put the kettle on.
With her hands wrapped around the warm mug, she told him about meeting Earl. The history laid out in the photo albums.
“He’s such a sweet guy,” she said. “And he’s a wealth of knowledge about the family. Weird as they are.”
Sounded dubious to him. “Are you sure you want to know all that stuff?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Mockler glanced around the room but nothing skulked in the shadows, nothing skittered over the ceiling. “Because of what happened to the boy. I’m not sure I’d want to know more about the family history.”
“I need to.” Her feet were still numb, she wiggled them into his lap. “Especially now.”
“You mean since, uh,” here he paused, “your eyes were opened? To whatever is out there?”
She nodded, scowling as she tried to put it in words. “I’ve drifted through my own life for so long, never knowing where I was going or what I was meant to do. But now I’ve been pushed into this bizarro world. It’s like, I need to know where I’m from before I can go forward.”
Mockler nodded sagely. Set his cup down.
“Am I making any sense or are you just being nice?”
“I’m just worried about what you’ll find if you keep digging. That’s all.”
Her turn to skew a dubious glance. “Says the man who keeps his dad at arm’s length.”
“That’s different,” he countered.
“How?”
“The man’s a prick.” He said this as if it couldn’t be any simpler.
“But he’s still here,” Billie suggested. She knew this was thin ice but it had been nagging at her since the night he had taken her to the nursing home. “There’s still time to mend things. Or at least call a truce.”
“I got him into that home, didn’t I? He’s looked after. It’s more than he deserves.”
“Okay.” Billie pulled back, t
he ice cracking under her. “No need get mad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, cowed. “It’s complicated, that’s all.” He draped a hand over her cold foot and gave it a squeeze.
“Ouch!” She flinched and pulled her feet away. “The feeling’s just coming back. It’s all pins and needles now.”
“I have something for you.” Ejecting himself from the sofa, he dug into the pocket of his coat and held out a large envelope. “Almost forgot about this.”
“What is it?” she asked, opening the flap. A document slipped out. Photocopied, typewritten.
“It’s an incident report from the police archives. A suspicious death at the address you gave me.”
“An old one.” Billie scanned the date at the top. September 13, 1959. She located the person’s name. “Charles Taylor?”
“Thirty years old,” Mockler said. “Found at the bottom of the stairs with his neck broken. No one else in the home at the time.”
She pointed out the small, blotchy print. “Does that say ‘inconclusive’?”
He nodded. “The coroner doubted his neck would have broken from the fall but the police couldn’t prove anything at the time. Taylor lived alone. When his neighbour found him, he’d been dead for almost a week.”
There was something else inside the envelope. Smaller. She wedged her hand back inside.
“One crime scene photo,” Mockler said.
Black and white. Like the photos of her family in Earl’s albums. The body at the landing, crumpled into an unnatural twist of limbs. A dark pool of sticky blood around the head which, fortunately, was not facing the camera.
Was this who was haunting Robin’s house now? The restless spirit of this Charles Taylor, who may have been thrown down the steps? She didn’t know. The entity that had accosted her didn’t even look human, much less like the twisted man in the photograph.
“Does it help?” A hopeful lift in his eyes.
“It’s a starting point, for sure. I won’t know until I go back.”
He met her gaze with a sobering cast to his eyes. “You sure that’s a good idea? You can just say no.”
“I know, but they need help.” The image of the bruised flesh purpling Robin’s hairline flashed up. “Ray, what do you do if you think someone might have been assaulted? By a partner, I mean.”
“You report it to the police.”
She shook her head, as if to clear her thoughts. “I phrased that wrong. How do you find out for sure, despite the usual denials?”
“My experience? Just ask them flat out.” He stated this bluntly, as if frustrated by prior experience in the matter. “Don’t be coy. Ask them if someone hurt them and watch for the tell.”
“Tell?”
“The give-away. Don’t listen to what they say, just watch their face for cues when you ask them straight out. If they avoid eye contact or bite their lip or twitch, squirm in their seat. That’s the tell. Body language gives it away, no matter what the mouth is telling you.”
Billie tilted her head, reflecting on it. “What if they have a good poker-face?”
“Dig deeper. Be direct.” He reached for his mug again. “Do you think this woman is being abused?”
“I don’t know,” Billie confessed. This whole business was too messy, too much guesswork. “There’s just too many unknowns. I need to see her again. And see the house, now that I might be able to call this spirit out by name.”
“You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?”
She wasn’t, to be honest. Billie had no want of going back to that house, but something in the young mother’s skittish behaviour didn’t sit well. There had already been a few ‘tells’, as Mockler called them. Odd tics from Robin that reminded her of her mother; the twitchy gestures of someone trying to hide a secret.
~
The closet door was open. The old shoe box lay on the bedroom floor, its contents scattered. Noah didn’t see it until he flipped on the light. His anger was immediate.
“Maya!” he bellowed out into the hallway. “Get in here!”
Light footfalls darting up the stairs. The little girl already afraid, forewarned by his harsh tone.
He pointed at the mess on the floor. “What have I told you about playing in here? Or going through the closet?”
“I’m not supposed to,” she said.
“Then why did you? Not only did you make a mess, you’re supposed to respect other people’s things.”
The little girl kept her eyes down. “I didn’t do it.”
“What? So this stuff just jumped out on its own?” He went down on one knee and gathered up the paper and trinkets. “If you make a mistake, you have to own up to it. Lying about it is worse.”
“I’m not lying.”
Robin appeared at the door. “What’s all the yelling about?”
“She knows she’s not to play in here,” Noah gruffed. “We’ve told her before that she can’t mess around with other people’s stuff, to respect privacy. Look at this mess.”
“What is all that?” Robin asked. The idea of kneeling down to help clean it up was out of the question, not with the basketball tummy.
“It’s just old stuff. Doesn’t matter.”
Robin touched her daughter’s shoulder. “Help Noah clean it up, honey.”
“Don’t.” Noah’s hand went up, warning the child away. “Don’t even touch it.”
“It wasn’t me,” said the little girl.
Robin settled her palm over her daughter’s hair. “Then who did it, sweetheart?”
Maya looked at her shoes. “You know who did it.”
A vein pulsed on Noah’s neck. “Oh, how convenient! Blame it on the—” He cut himself off, unable to even utter the word.
He stuffed the contents back into the old Adidas box. Robin shooed Maya from the room, telling her to go downstairs. When the girl was out of earshot, she turned back to him.
“Don’t yell at her like that.”
“I didn’t yell.”
“Yes, you did,” Robin said. “I want you to discipline her when she does something wrong, but do it calmly. Yelling never helps.”
“Fine.”
She left the room. Noah fitted the top back on and slid the shoebox back onto the top shelf inside the closet.
Chapter 13
THE HOUSE ON Rommany Road remained empty, a hollowed-out shell of dingy brick and blistered paint peeling from the window trim like festered lesions. Three years since he had lived here with Ellie and, judging by the listing notice in the dusty window, no one willing to buy the place. A typical two up, two down, it wasn’t fancy by any stretch but in this market, highly desirable. The place was corrupt, the timbers reeking of its putrid stench. Any potential home-buyer would have turned and walked right back out at the clammy feel of the place.
Gantry stood across the street, eyeing his old house, while a damp wind pushed at his back, as if wanting to shoo him away. Flinging his cigarette into a dry rattle hedge, he strode up the walk to the front door. The latch clicked before he touched the handle, the door creaking open on its own.
Welcome home.
Christ, he thought. The place had to be empty. After all this time? Maybe, he reckoned, the wind had pushed it open.
“No chickening out now, son,” he muttered.
He closed the door behind him and lit the camping lantern he’d borrowed from Connie. The house, having sat empty for so long, had been misused in the interim. Trash on the floor, graffiti on the walls. Normally, a place like this would have been a squatter’s dream but even they stayed the hell away.
No wonder, really. Holding the lantern up by its handle, its glowing orb expanded across the filthy floorboards. The pentacle was still there, burned black into the hardwood.
The sight of the immense circle and strange glyphs brought it all back with a terrifying immediacy. Ellie screaming and writhing on the floor, him holding her still to keep her inside the protective circle. A handful of ancient texts open before him as
he tried every cleansing spell and rite of exorcism that he knew. Her eyes, red from the burst capillaries, wept tears of blood. The terrible things she said to him as the abhorrent thing inside her fought for control. Laughing at him as it manipulated his wife like a puppet. She tried to gouge her own eyes from their sockets.
Gantry flinched, shaking off the memories. Looking down at just a floor now, charred and singed from the past. Nothing but ghosts remained. Ghosts and old sins and the lingering stench of brimstone. Easing his back against the wall, he slid down the cracked plaster until he sat on the dusty floor. There was nothing to be gained from coming back here. Nothing but old pain and the sting of his fall.
The hubris. He almost laughed. How many tales have been spun around that old cracker of a sin? The fall of Lucifer and the expulsion from Eden. The tower of Babel and Prometheus. Frankenstein and Oppenheimer. Too many cautionary tales to count, all of them useless as actual cautions. No one ever learns.
“Just leave, son,” he muttered to himself, to the stagnant air. “Get out of here before you crawl into a hole you’ll not come out from.”
The bottle of Irish whiskey slid from his coat pocket. Like the torch, it had been packed in preparation.
That was the problem with hubris, wasn’t it? No fairy tale would do when it came to that lesson. Each has to learn it the hard way. And by learning it, he meant paying for it. The dead albatross strung from the neck of the creaky mariner.
The whiskey was dark and foul as it gurgled down his gullet, like the bitter tears of some syphilitic saint, wept for the waiting cups of the devoted masses. All ceremony and no cure.
She didn’t deserve the torment she’d suffered. He wouldn’t wish that upon his worst enemy. It should have been him, not her.
Ellie Orton was no saint. She’d led almost as wild a life as he had. She had scars and she had stories to tell. Stories of victory and failure, of humiliation and exultation. And she wasn’t shy on sharing them when she stumbled upon a kindred spirit.
And stumbled they had, right into one another. A party at some poncy manor out in Highgate, thrown by a prat executive at some record label. When the music became too risible, he stepped out to the gardens to get some air and tripped over something in the dark. Ellie had wanted to look at the stars. She came to the party hoping to meet a certain record producer but had found only sleazy executive types. Bored, she told her bandmates to come find her when they’d had enough.
