by Tim McGregor
“Stars?” he had said, rising up from the flowerbed he’d fallen into. “You can’t even see the moon in this cesspool of a city.”
Ellie, flat on her back and eyes on heaven, had said, “If I concentrate really hard, all the sodding pollution will blow over and Cassiopiea will open up before me and twinkle out my fortune.”
So much conviction in her voice. Gantry tilted his head to the night sky to see if it would happen.
“Do you have a car?” she asked, minute later.
“No. But I’m sure we can nick one from the wretched executives types inside.”
“Need to get outside the city to see the stars.”
She turned her head to look at him, her face mottled from the dim glow of the patio lights. All it took. Three days in a ‘borrowed’ Mini, tearing across the countryside. They ended up at one of the stone circles in Avebury, lying in the dewy midnight grass, eyes up to the stars. Ellie claimed the energy of the pre-Christian site made the stars twinkle all the brighter. He’d laughed. A fortnight later, they’d moved in together.
Ellie was in a band, vocals and guitar. They set up a rehearsal space in the backroom for her, while he kept his dodgy gear in the garden shed out back. Parallel pursuits, she the music and he the dark arts.
The whiskey sloshed in the bottle as he guzzled more down, the empty house around him silent and dead. Scanning the crumbling walls with their scrawls of mindless graffiti and holes kicked through the plaster, it was hard to remember that this had been their home. Had been the place that he’d been happiest. All that was left was the blasphemous circle on the floor and the blackened char to the wood where she had been dragged down into Hell.
She had screamed the whole way down. Old Scratch leering at him with a pervert’s grin of smug victory.
Firing another cigarette, he contemplated the teardrop of flame on the lighter and considered burning the rotten house down. With himself inside it. How quickly would the dark things below come for him? At the very least, he could keep Ellie company in Hades.
“All right,” he said to the dark room. “That’s enough of the pity party.”
Taking up the lantern, he crossed into the kitchen and went out the back door. The terrace was a tiny box bordered with a brick fence, the garden a riot of damp, brown weeds. And the dingy garden shed tucked into the corner where he kept all of his nasty things, Ellie never wanting any of it in the house. The poor man’s version of a sorcerer’s cave.
The lock tore away easily, the mounting plate shearing off from the rotten wood of the door.
The interior of the shed was a shamble of broken glass and moldy books. Picking through the loose paper and rusting instruments, he scrounged up an ancient book bound in leather only to have the pages tumble out onto the floor, the delicate paper mottled with black mold. The entire shed stank like a pestilence tent, ripe with disease. There was nothing to be salvaged here. What hadn’t been stolen had been smashed, left to rot.
A corkboard hung from the back wall, tacked with a jumble of notes and strung with a few pendants. A pink rabbit’s foot on a chain, a prize from some tacky fair they had visited years ago. Ellie had slipped it into his pocket for good luck, saying he needed all the luck he could muster considering the dodgy shite he got up to. In retrospect, maybe she should have been carrying it.
Pulling it down, he slipped the rabbit’s foot into his coat pocket. The thumbtack it had hung from fell and with it, a torn scrap of newspaper. Retrieving it, he scanned the article. A small notice about a construction crew unearthing a tomb under a crossroads in King’s Lynn. This is where it had all started, with dirt being trowelled away from something that had been buried long ago.
Maybe it was time to pay another visit.
~
“Mom? When is it gonna stop?”
Maya’s breath misted in the air as she spoke. Huddled against her mother for protection, for warmth. So cold inside now.
“Soon, baby,” Robin whispered, faking confidence as best she could. And not just for her daughter’s sake. Her own heart was thumping like a jackrabbit, her vapoured breath mingling with Maya’s in the air before them. “Just close your eyes to it, honey.”
The utensil drawer flung open violently, knives and forks spilling out and tinkling crazily against the floor.
The kitchen was safe. That’s what the psychic had said. Robin winced as the drawer slid out and crashed against the floor. Had Billie lied or had something changed? No safe room anymore? The whole house had become a bedlam of slamming doors and shifting furniture, forcing the family to retreat into the kitchen. But now it was here, too.
Maya screamed, flinching at the metallic riot of noise as the utensil drawer sprawled its contents over the tiles. Robin cupped her hands over her daughter’s ears.
The pantry door swung open with a creak. Cans of beans tumbled out, rolling across the floor. A tin of chickpeas collided into Maya’s foot and she squealed, kicked out. The cupboard where the dishes were kept clapped open and banged shut, as if worked by some unseen, invisible hand.
Noah hovered over them both, hands draped over his wife and adopted daughter. Like he could protect them. Eyes closed, praying silently.
The sight of him praying in the chaos infuriated her. Robin snatched his arm, digging nails into his flesh. “Do something!”
“We have to pray harder,” he hissed, but there was a deficit of conviction in Noah’s strained eyes. “All of us, together. “Our Father…”
“Who art in Heaven,” Maya recited, eyes shut tight.
The chaos stopped. The cupboard doors went still, the racket from the other rooms ceased. Robin swept her gaze over the kitchen, gasping for breath. Her daughter peaked through one slitted eye.
“Hallowed be thy name,” uttered Noah, shuddering in relief. His eyes shot to Robin’s, held them fast. Waiting.
“Thy Kingdom come,” Robin faltered, her voice catching, but the words were there instantly. The cadence of the rhyme bringing it all back, allowing her to continue. “Thy will be done…”
Nothing moved. Not even a mouse.
“On earth,” Maya whispered, “as it is in Heaven—”
The squeal of a sticky hinge cut her off as the cupboard under the sink swung back slowly. The trio huddled together on the floor turned slowly to the sound. Nothing out of the ordinary besides the swinging cupboard door. The curled piping of the sink trap, the garbage bin, a jug of bleach.
A challenge. Noah went on with the prayer, rising to it. “Give us this day our daily bread…”
The bleach jug toppled over, loose bags rippling as if a raccoon was rummaging the cupboard. Noah’s voice clipped short.
Something tumbled out of the space under the sink and rolled across the floor. It bumped up against Robin’s shin.
The head of a doll, with it’s pouty lips and unnaturally long eyelashes. One eye had been lost, punched out long ago. The remaining orb was glassy and blue and lifeless as a marble. It blinked.
Momma…
Robin screamed, kicked the horrid thing away. Maya whimpered, burying her head against her mother’s side. Then Robin shrieked as Maya was snatched away.
The little girl slid across the kitchen floor, snatched from her mother’s arms, and pulled to the darkness under the sink.
Robin and Noah lunged for her, snatching the girl’s arms and pulling her back. Maya screaming the entire time.
It relented, whatever the thing was. The little girl catapulted into the arms of her mother and step-father. But she kept screaming, the tone altering to shrieks of pain as she clutched at her ankle.
The sickly stench of burned skin poisoned the air. Clawing the girl into herself, Robin lifted her daughter’s leg.
The singe mark on Maya’s ankle was red and blistering, as if slapped by a hot iron.
The raw flesh blistered and reddened, taking on a shape. A tiny slash of fingers, a palm. The mark of a small hand, scorched raw into her daughter’s ankle.
“We have to
get out of here,” Robin stammered, her voice thin as paper.
“No!” Noah protested. “This is our home! We’re not leaving.”
“Then call the Reverend.”
“He was just here,” Noah said. “We have to learn to fight this without him.”
Robin pulled her daughter closer. The little girl was trembling all over, her face buried in her mother’s chest to keep from witnessing anymore. Terrified as she was, Maya draped herself over her mother’s protruding belly, as if to shield her unborn sibling from the horrid banging and clanging.
Robin, crying now as she rocked back and forth over her quivering daughter. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.”
Chapter 14
“ROBIN! PLEASE, LET me talk.”
The door remained latched. Billie stood on the porch, shivering in the cold. She banged on the thick door again, rattling it in its frame. Through the lace curtain in the window, a globe of light warmed the front hallway. No movement inside, no shadows casting about.
“I know you’re in there,” she hollered. “Give me five minutes. Please.”
The plan was dead simple. Go to the house and address the ghost by name. Names have power. Gantry had told her that once. She would make the restless spirit of Charles Taylor listen to reason, make it understand that it had to move on or, barring that, at least stop harassing the family.
She knew that Robin would refuse, claiming they didn’t need her help but Billie would insist. The pregnant woman’s about-face still perplexed her. So keen on Billie’s help at first, only to change her mind and brush her aside. What had changed? The husband, Noah, seemed a bit domineering. Was it just him, bullying her to get his way? There was also the bruise on the woman’s scalp, which she couldn’t help but think was his doing.
The latch sounded as it clicked back. There was no one in the hall but the door swung open all on its own. Billie girded herself, firing up her senses for whatever was opening the door.
Maya looked up at her with droopy eyes. The child looked worn out.
“Maya,” Billie said, bending down. “Remember me?”
“You’re the spooky lady,” said the little girl.
Close enough. Billie smiled. “Is your mom home?”
“She’s sick.”
That couldn’t be good. Billie looked past the girl to the hall but there was no sign of Robin. “Can I talk to her? Maybe she needs help?”
Maya stepped aside to let her in. “She’s just lying on the couch. Crying.”
Slipping out of her snow-crusted boots, Billie skirted around to the living room. The television was on, turned to a cheery cartoon. Robin was prone on the sofa, buried under a blanket. Her eyes on the TV screen but watching nothing, barely aware.
“Robin?”
“You can’t be here,” the woman said in a low tone. She looked as drained as the little girl. “You’re just gonna make it worse.”
Billie knelt down on the floor before the couch. “I don’t mean to. If I did make it worse, I’m sorry.”
The woman didn’t even look at her.
“Are you ill?” Billie asked. “What happened?”
Maya had gone back to her nest of pillows on the area rug. Turning to Billie, she said, “The ghost got mad. It burned my—”
“Maya!”
The little girl clammed up, looked back to the TV.
“Hold on,” Billie said, playing referee. She moved closer to the girl. “It burned you? Where?”
The girl’s eyes clamped instantly onto her mother’s. Robin let out a defeated sigh of consent.
Maya reefed up her pant leg and pushed her orange socks down. The skin was raw and puckered in blisters. Billie let off an unintentional gasp before composing herself. No need to frighten the girl any further. Taking Maya’s foot gently, she turned her leg to the side to get a better look at the odd shape of the burn mark. Turning it back and forth until she was sure of what she was looking at. A hand print seared into the flesh. Small, like that of a child. Smaller than Maya herself, the red finger marks not closing all way round.
Billie let go. “Does it still hurt?”
“Yes.”
A shudder itched down Billie’s spine at the sight of it. The burn held an eerie similarity to one that she had received when she was Maya’s age. Back in the old house, hiding in the crawl space the night her mother had disappeared from her life. Same spot, too.
“I have one just like it,” she said.
“You do?”
Billie sat back and pushed the sock down on her left ankle. A faint discolouration from where something similar had gripped her. “See? It’s faint now. Happened when I was your age.”
The girl’s eyes widened at the scar before shooting up to meet the woman’s gaze. “Was it the same ghost?”
“No. A different one. Sometimes they don’t mean to hurt us but they don’t know their own strength. Here, give me this.” She peeled Maya’s sock away and tickled her fingernails against the sole of the girl’s foot, making her giggle. “Keep the sock off. Let the air heal it up.”
Robin observed the two of them but said nothing.
Billie scanned the room. Untidy and chaotic, she had first assumed that Robin had let it all go to withdraw onto the sofa but it was more than just messy. Paintings hung cockeyed on the wall. The framed photographs on the mantel had all fallen face down, a book splayed open on the floor near the shelf. The signs of paranormal activity, the havoc from an angry spirit.
She racked focus back to the pregnant mom on the sofa. Robin wasn’t ill, she had simply given up. Unable to cope. Who could blame her?
“Robin,” Billie cooed in a soft voice. “I think I know who’s causing all of this.”
The woman flinched, her gaze lifting from their stupor. She looked to her daughter but Maya was glued to the cartoons.
Billie leaned closer, whispering to stay out of earshot of the girl. “Someone died here back in the fifties. A young man. I know his name and I think he’ll listen to me now. Let me try.”
“Noah’s gone to get the Reverend,” Robin said. “If he finds you here, he’ll flip out.”
Billie reached out and brushed the hair back from the woman’s face. The bruise under the hairline had lost some of its colour, fading to blotchy mauve. “Robin, did Noah do this to you?”
A flash of momentary shock flared in the woman’s eyes. Then it settled. “Noah’s never laid a hand on me,” Robin exhaled. “Or Maya. He’s not like that.”
Billie scrutinized the woman’s face. Calm, no tics. If there was a ‘tell’, she had missed it. Her knees clicked as she rose to her feet. “Stay here. Keep Maya with you.”
Robin lifted her head. “What are you going to do?”
“Evict the unwanted guest.”
There was no point going through the house again. She knew where the thing dwelt so she went straight to the cellar. The naked bulb clicked on by a pull-chain, emitting a greasy light that deepened the shadows in the basement. The only window was a sheet of white, buried under a snow drift outside.
Billie stood under the bulb, where it was safe, and opened herself up to the other side. It was here. It never left. But it was wily, this one. It liked to mask itself in other guises, like the giant spider legs or the grotesque doll parts. Its anger was strong, the basement swollen with it.
Why the masks? What was it hiding?
“Charles Taylor,” she said aloud, the words tumbling into the empty space. She had done this a dozen times over but it still felt silly addressing an empty room. She hoped Robin and her daughter couldn’t hear her through the floor joists. Especially Maya.
“I know you died here, Charles. I know you don’t feel time anymore but it was long ago. A lifetime. Things change. It’s time to move on now.”
A cobweb wafted from the bulb, billowed from a draft in the boards.
Stubborn.
“Come out and talk to me, Charles. No more hiding. No more masks. You’ve been alone long enough. Come talk to
me.”
She took a few steps toward the back of the cellar, away from the pretend safety of the 60 watt light. Charles would need some prodding. Why wasn’t he responding?
“Charles,” she said flatly. “I bet your mom and dad called you Charles. What did your friend’s call you? Charlie? Chuck?”
A shy crunch sounded behind her, like grit under a boot heel. She turned around slowly, unwilling to let it see her frightened.
Something blacker than shadow hunkered in a dark recess behind a stack of cardboard boxes. Not big, but pulsing, the way spirits would do. More a sense of something present than anything visual, like a fire that crackled with light but gave no heat. Dangerous if you weren’t careful.
Billie lightened her tone, more casual, hoping to coax him out into the open. “I like the name Charlie. I always wished I had a friend with that name. I used to know a Charlotte. I tried calling her Charlie. She didn’t care for it.”
The dark mass shifted, amorphous as smoke. Bleeding into the cheap light.
Keep talking.
“My name’s Billie. Well, it’s really Sybil, but I never used to like that name so everybody called me Billie. I don’t mind it now.”
It didn’t step out of the shadows so much as simply appear in the light. But it wasn’t what she had expected. Charles Taylor was a young man, tall from the looks of his splayed legs in that awful photograph.
A little girl stood on the cold slab floor. Dark locks that contrasted with her translucent skin. Frail little hands, a dun-coloured dress and bare feet. A spiderweb network of veins visible through flesh that had the appearance of damp paper.
Another mask?
“Charles,” Billie said. “No more disguises. No more games. Just show yourself.”
