‘Nicely done,’ I said.
Frank wouldn’t be able to hold the bastard for long, though. I had to act fast. From the inside of my jacket I removed a claw hammer, specially treated for my phantom hands. I don’t like to carry a shooter unless it’s absolutely necessary, but it never hurts to have a bit of iron in your pocket. The hammer wasn’t for the revenant, though, it was for the remains it had left behind. From another pocket I produced a nail. This wasn’t the sort of hardware you’d find at B&Q, mind you. This was an ancient relic, a holy nail, the kind the Romans used to pin Jesus to the cross.
Now, you might think—top whack—there’d be maybe three holy nails in this world, four at a push, but you’d be wrong. Just like Christ’s foreskin, there are double digits scattered among various monasteries and cathedrals around the globe. What this says about organised religion I’ll leave you to figure out. For my purposes, the authenticity of the holy nails wasn’t all that important. The fact that they were venerated and sanctified provided them with an Uncanny potency that served my needs perfectly.
I pinched a nail between forefinger and thumb, raised the hammer above my head, and pounded it into the top of the skull lying amongst the rubble. The effect was instant. The second the nail drove home, the revenant Frank was pinning transformed from a feral monster into a person. A young woman. She looked to be in her late teens and was dressed like someone from decades ago.
‘Let her go,’ I told Frank.
He took his weight off her and she scrambled backwards into the corner of the room, leaving behind a pitter-patter of ethereal tears. She shivered and shook, a bundle of frayed nerves.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘What about him?’ she said, pointing at Frank, who stood there like a loyal attack dog awaiting a command.
‘Don’t mind my partner,’ I replied. ‘He’s harmless.’
Frank would never hurt someone who didn’t deserve it; he had too good a heart. Technically, it was my heart, but it didn’t burn with the same world-weary cynicism as the cold stone I carried around these days.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked the girl, still keeping my distance.
‘Mary,’ she replied, avoiding my gaze. ‘Mary Connor.’
‘Nice to meet you, Mary Connor. How did you end up here?’
Her eyes stayed anchored to the ground. ‘I got stuck. In the wall.’
I brought myself to her level, sinking down beside her whilst maintaining a respectful span between us. ‘I see. And how did that happen?’
‘Something went wrong. I went in but I couldn’t get back out.’
‘Hold your horses…’ I said, realising that “I got stuck” implied some degree of culpability, ‘... are you saying you went into that wall voluntarily?’
She stashed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I was an assistant.’
‘An assistant what?’
‘Spiritualist. I hid in there while my partner held a séance out here. It was my job. The punters thought they were talking to the dead, but it was just me knocking on the wall.’
Frank gave me a look. He knew how I felt about spiritualists: con artists, one and all. But I had a job to do, and I couldn’t let old animosities cloud my judgment. I gave Frank a nod to let him know I had this.
‘When did you pass?’ I asked the girl.
‘It was January 26th, 1946 when I got trapped.’
That tracked. The spiritualism racket had been about since the 1800s but membership really swelled after a big dust-up. The aftermath of the Great War and its sequel, WW2, were boom times for wall-rappers and table-knockers. Shameless hucksters would use their wiles to fleece war widows and milk grieving parents. Like I say, nasty pieces of work.
‘How did you manage to get stuck?’ I asked.
‘We were in the middle of a session. Betsy was using the ruler hidden in her sleeve to make the table jump when the rozzers kicked down the door and carted her away.’
‘Betsy being your partner?’
A shallow nod. ‘That’s right. Cleared out the punters too, they did. They would have had me away an’ all, but I was hidden in the wall.’
‘I don’t get it. Why did you stay there after the pigs left?’
‘I tried to get out—course I did—but the door was stuck.’
I figured it must have jammed somehow and stayed that way while her body turned to bones. The remains probably went unnoticed and got plastered over by the folks who moved into the property next.
‘Go on,’ I urged her. ‘What happened then?’
For the first time since she’d appeared in her earthly form, the girl raised her head to meet my gaze. Her stare went right through me.
‘I shouted for help but no one came. I screamed the place down. There was no food, no water. Eventually, I just went to sleep and that was the end of me. I’ve been stuck in this place ever since, trying to get the people who pass through to listen, but only scaring them away.’
‘And that made you angry.’
‘Yes. And then it made me something else.’
A revenant.
A ghost can only stay sane for so long beached on the material plane. I seem to be the exception to this rule, but there’s no telling when I might go ballistic and start clawing people’s eyeballs out. I just had to hope I could get right with Him Upstairs before that happened, and freeing this tortured girl of her Earthbound shackles was a step towards doing that.
‘What happened to Betsy?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t she come back for you?’
‘That’s what I want to know,’ she said, lips stretched thin, her eyes burning with the same otherworldly glow they had before I hammered a nail into her bones. ‘We were a team. Why did she leave me to die?’
‘Calm down, okay?’ I said, fearing I was about to lose her. If she gave into rage with the holy nail in place, she’d be snuffed out like that. I needed her at peace if I was going to walk her to the next step. ‘I’m here to help you, but I can only do that if you work with me. Understand?’
The embers in her eyes cooled and were replaced by silvery tears that welled up and spilled down her cheeks. ‘I understand.’
A raw sobbing shook her whole body. Frank pulled a hankie from the top pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. She took it with a crooked smile and dabbed her wet cheeks.
I couldn’t say for sure what had happened to Betsy, but I had a pretty good idea. Her profession tended not to attract the most trustworthy of people. When their operation was busted and the dust finally settled, I expect Betsy made for the hills and never looked back.
‘You have to help me,’ pleaded the girl. ‘I can’t stay here any more.’
Despite being the architect of her own downfall, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
‘It’s hard, I know,’ I said, doing my best to empathise. ‘I mean, talk about unlucky. You pretend to be the voice of the dead and end up becoming exactly that.’
‘Is that supposed to help?’ she asked, giving me a look that could have curdled milk.
I held up my hands in surrender. ‘Not knocking you, luv. I’m no stranger to irony. I used to be an exorcist and now look at me,’ I pointed at myself, then at my reanimated corpse. ‘My own worst nightmare.’
The girl sat up sharply. ‘You were an exorcist? Then you can help me. Help me pass through. Help me get to the other side.’
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. If I exorcise you, you’ll be obliterated. I’m talking permanent midnight. Trust me, I learned that the hard way.’
‘Then why are you here? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m not going to do anything. Your fate isn’t up to me. If you want into Heaven, you’re going to have to talk to the Governor.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Yeah. Go to Him willingly, ask for absolution, and who knows, you might just get the key to the clubhouse.’
The girl looked at me as if I’d asked her to join me f
or a quick dip in a slurry tank. ‘You’re asking me to face The Almighty? Do you know what the Bible says about spiritualists? Leviticus 20:27: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death”. Does that sound like I’d see a fair trial?’
I took a shuffle in her direction, closing the gap between us. We were navel-to-navel now, just an arm’s-width apart.
‘There’s a lot of iffy stuff in that part of the Bible. You know Leviticus also forbids drinking alcohol in holy places? If that’s gospel, that’s every churchgoing Catholic on the planet fucked.’
She laughed.
‘Look, all I’m saying is, maybe the Big Man’s chilled out a bit since then. Could be He was having a bad day when He passed those little nuggets along. Point is, your choices are: confess your sins to the Almighty, or spend an eternity here as a tormented poltergeist. So what’s it going to be, Mary?’
She folded her arms. ‘I don’t get it. You’re dead, too. If Heaven’s the place to be, what are you doing down here?’
I sketched out a smile. ‘Me and the Author have a deal: before I get to go Upstairs, I have to clear some debts. That’s what this little visit is about, the latest stop on my Road to Redemption tour. If you want atonement, you’re going to have to ask for it, and I recommend asking nicely.’
She hung her head. ‘How would I even get His attention?’
I gave her a paternal cheek-cup. ‘If I were you I’d start with the Lord’s Prayer. After that, you’re on your own.’
She looked to Frank as if he might provide a second opinion, but my partner had nothing to offer but a sympathetic nod.
The girl’s shoulders sank and her face assumed a frown so pronounced that it appeared to end below her chin. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I hear what you’re saying and I’ve made up my mind. Thank you.’
‘No need to thank me,’ I replied, ‘just make sure you—’
That was as far as I got before she made the lunge past me, past Frank, and across the room to the dusty cranium with the holy nail hammered into it. Wrapping a dainty fist around the nail, she wrenched it free and instantly reverted to the howling monster that had emerged from the ruined brick wall.
The revenant spun about to face me, a venomous hiss unravelling from its coal-black tongue, its eyes two windows of a burning building.
‘Fine,’ I said, taking a step back and removing a fresh tool from my pocket. ‘Have it your way, Mary.’
She came at me shrieking and I met her with my crucifix.
The light had dimmed significantly when I returned downstairs, shrouding the lounge in thick drapes of shadow. The sun was heading for a lie-down, bringing us to the close of another dog-end day. The old lady was where I left her, sank into the sofa; two sad old pieces of furniture fast becoming one.
‘Well?’ she said, clasping a glass of tap water between two shaking hands. ‘Is it gone?’
Reunited with my physical form, I took a spot in front of her and nodded.
She placed her drink on the floor and lowered her wrinkled head into her hands. Weeping came next. I knew what for.
‘You lied to me, Betsy.’
Tears cut rivers through the old woman’s caked-on makeup. ‘I’m not a bad person,’ she said, her voice dry as bone dust. ‘That’s the God’s honest. I only meant to give those poor sods who lost their boys a bit of comfort, a bit of closure.’
‘What about your partner?’ I snorted. ‘What about Mary? You didn’t give her much closure, did you? I told her she had two options—she could stay here or ask for forgiveness—but she found a third. She chose oblivion, and I don’t know that I blame her. The person who let her die didn’t repent her sins, so why should she?’
I tossed the spent crucifix and it landed with a dull thud at her feet, same place I was laying blame. It sat there, warped from use, curled up like a demonic talon with smoke coming off it.
‘It weren’t my fault. None of it was. When the coppers turfed me out, Mary got left behind. I didn’t know she was stuck in the wall. How could I?’
If Betsy was looking to me for forgiveness, she was looking in the wrong place.
Her hands came together, steepled in an unconscious prayer. ‘Far as I was concerned, Mary was the lucky one. I got hauled over the coals but she didn’t even get collared. Good for her, I thought.’
‘And you never considered that she might be in trouble? Never thought to tell anyone that the last time you saw her she was sandwiched in a crawlspace?’
‘And grass on my partner? No, never.’
I stared her down, expecting her eyes to track sideways, but she kept her cool.
‘What happened after they arrested you?’
She kneaded her temples, to focus her memories or stem a sudden headache, I couldn’t be sure.
‘I spent a week in the clink before they put me in front of a magistrate. In the end, they let me off. I only got a warning on account of my age and my barrister doing a good job, but by then it was too late.’ She shuffled awkwardly on the sofa. ‘I got word from Mary’s folks that she never came home after the raid, so I came back here, snuck inside, and went looking for clues. I saw a chair lying on its back, knocked over when the police stormed the place, blocking the secret door that led into the hidey-hole. I figured the rest out by myself. Mary was done for. Sealed up inside the wall and left to die.’
‘How could you know that for sure?’
‘Because I heard it. Heard this awful moaning. I don’t know how to talk to the spirit world—that was all make-believe—but I knew in my guts that the sound coming from behind that wall didn’t belong to anything alive. Mary was dead and her ghost was angry. So I ran, and I’ve been running ever since.’
‘What changed?’
She leant forward to better show me her age-ravaged face. ‘I got old and I got tired. That’s when I decided to put an end to this. That’s why I bought this old place and called you.’
‘To do your dirty work.’
She shook her head like her brain was an Etch-a-Sketch and the truth was a doodle she could erase.
‘I was just a girl back then,’ she said. ‘Mary was like a little sister to me, and I let her die all alone. At least now she can have some peace. We both can.’
Her eyes cut left to something beside her lap. Wedged between her thigh and the arm of the sofa was a small orange canister. I snatched it up: painkillers, strong ones, and none left.
‘Thank you, Mr Fletcher,’ she murmured, her eyelids drooping as the drugs took effect. ‘Thank you for lifting my burden.’
She slumped forward, her head sagging between her knees like she was bracing for a crash landing, which, in a roundabout way, she was. She didn’t speak again, and I didn’t stick around to see which direction her spirit went. I already had a pretty good idea which way she was heading, and it wasn’t Heaven for Betsy.
Chapter Three: The Beautiful Dead
Frank and I arrived back at the office feeling despondent. The day had been a write-off. A total non-starter. No money, no karma, no nothing. This business of ours needed to start taking off in a big way, because being stuck here in this quasi-alive state was doing nothing for either of us. If we didn’t get some halos hung on our heads soon, our conjoined soul was in danger of drifting away on the celestial ether.
There was nothing else for it. We desperately needed to earn some Brownie points and get right with God. So what did we spend the rest of the night doing? Shooting scrunched-up paper balls into the office bin, that’s what. Yeah. Instead of chasing our next case, Frank and me spent the wee hours in heated competition, luzzing rubbish across the room and cheering our athletic prowess.
‘Scooooooore,’ Frank gurgled, sinking another basket.
I grunted with frustration as I retrieved the paper ball from the bin, which sat elevated on a filing cabinet.
‘Yeah, well, it’s a whole other game when you’re working with these things,’ I said, holding up my traitorous phantom hands, which were il
l-equipped to handle physical objects. Don’t get me wrong, I can perform basic manoeuvres and manipulations with solid matter, but counting on them to score three-pointers was optimistic at best.
I parked a cheek on the edge of the desk I shared with Frank and folded my arms. ‘If you want to make this a fair game, you should be playing with a handicap,’ I argued. ‘Shooting hoops is a lot easier when you have an actual body to work with. Ask anyone.’
Frank’s head swivelled and cocked to one side. At first I thought he was looking the other way so he didn’t have to engage with my call for sportsmanship, but it wasn’t that. Something had pricked up his ears. Something outside the room.
An intruder?
I cut a glance to the office door and saw a dim silhouette appear behind the frosted glass bearing the Fletcher & Fletcher logotype. Someone had broken into the building, but who? I had so many enemies by this point that I was starting to lose count; an endless conga line of bad bastards eager to do me wrong. Or was the intruder of a different bent? Had the Almighty tired of waiting for me to settle my balance and loosed one of his God Squad on me, another angel come to deliver judgment upon my eternal soul?
Before I could reach for my trusty enchanted hammer, the shadowy figure went from being a silhouette outside the office to a presence in the room. I felt the world slow down as the stranger stepped through the door, walking through solid oak to emerge into our place of business.
‘Oh, thank Christ,’ I said, sagging with relief, ‘you’re just a ghost.’
The spectral stranger was a young woman dressed for a night out on the town. She was as tall as she was dark, with skin like black silk draped over glass. Streetlight cut through the Venetian blinds, falling on her in stripes and giving her the look of a stalking predator. The effect was only exaggerated by her gait: shoulders back, eyes fixed straight ahead, her steps long and confident. She walked into my office like a lioness walks into a sub-Saharan orphanage, but the thing that struck me the most about her—the thing that dwarfed everything else—was the bullet hole in her forehead. The one peering at me like a third eye.
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 2
