Chasing Ghosts

by Dean Cole

  I thought coming out was hard. But coming out of the metaphysical closet was even harder. In the silence that followed you could have cut the tension in that coffee-smelling air with a knife. My secret might have been off my chest, but the two people staring at me with doubt in their eyes were now free to judge and ridicule me. Would they do that?

  Kat, standing in front of the open window with a freshly lit cigarette just shook her head wearily. The strain on Will’s face showed the patience he’d afforded me up until now was waning. Resignedly, he said, ‘And why would old Lurch want to kill you?’

  ‘I bumped into him yesterday and he threatened me, hit me with his cane even. I think he thought you and I were being intimate the night he saw us through the kitchen window. He’s homophobic. He said ‘my sort’ in a derisive way. And later, when he was arguing with the housekeeper, he explicitly shouted out an homophobic slur.’

  Will looked unconvinced. ‘So the old man was born when they were still stoning your sort. But I’m pretty sure even homophobic dinosaurs like him need a stronger motive for murder than disagreeing with a person’s sexuality.’

  ‘He has a shotgun,’ I said, trying to strengthen my argument. ‘I saw him holding it last night from the window, when you and Rufus went down to investigate the loud bang.’

  ‘You saw someone holding a weapon and didn’t tell me about it?’ Kat, having discarded her cigarette, had rounded the fourposter, her brow furrowed above wide eyes like an accusatory owl.

  I glanced up guiltily. I hadn’t told her for good reason. Her current reaction was one. Being too traumatised to mention it when I woke up because she’d startled me awake while sporting a very embarrassing erection was another.

  I said, ‘Listen, it isn’t just that Mr Crouch is homophobic.’ I got up and moved to the rug in the middle of the room, perhaps to shrug off the intimidating feeling of Kat’s eyes bearing down on me. ‘Mrs Brown is upset because she thinks Stan is losing his mind. The way he’s been acting — the creeping around, throwing accusations, the threats, firing the shotgun — she could be right. His behaviour looks delusional, paranoid. It isn’t completely unreasonable to think his condition could be distorting his rationality, that he plans to take his prejudices, this anger he has, out on me. He’s had his eyes on me from the second I arrived at the manor, staring at me like I’m vermin that should be put down. He’s already assaulted and threatened me. He clearly doesn’t want me here. I think I’m right about this. I think the vision was a premonition, shown to me to warn me —’

  ‘I’ve heard enough!’ Kat, pale and shaking, looked imploringly at Will, who was still sitting in the chair. ‘Can’t you make him stop? Hit him or something?’

  My eyes widened and I instinctively braced, expecting attack.

  ‘You have to admit it sounds compelling,’ said Will, his lip curling in wry amusement. He was finding Kat’s hysteria quite entertaining, even if I was not. I was genuinely concerned for my personal safety.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the story of the century and I’m the first journalist in the world to get the scoop on it,’ Kat snapped.

  ‘You’re not even happy that I managed to get those interesting photographs you were after?’ I said in a vain attempt to allay her distress.

  She made a sound similar to a horse snorting through its mouth, then, much like a toddler being forced to surrender defeat during a temper tantrum, swept dramatically to the door. She twirled when she reached it. ‘You two can talk about this stuff if you want, but I’m having no part of it. This place is cursed. Messing with its ghosts and its crazy old people is a death wish.’ She opened the door and stalked off into the corridor, slamming the door behind her.

  Will whistled. ‘And Hurricane Katrina has left the room.’

  In the ringing sound that followed from the door slamming shut, he rose to his feet, strode past me and unhooked his coat from the back of the door. He pulled it on as he slipped his feet into boots. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside.’

  He opened the door and crossed the threshold.

  ‘Will?’ I called out.

  He turned, adjusting the collar of his coat. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you believe me?’

  He hesitated. Then said, ‘You’re the real deal, Strange. I know that.’ A softness flickered in his eyes. Was he remembering last night, remembering the words he’d spoken while stroking my hair: ‘I like you, Quentin. There’s an innocence about you. I feel safe around you, like I can trust you.’ ‘Yeah. I believe you.’

  - CHAPTER TWELVE -

  Extrasensory Perception

  ‘I’M SORRY ABOUT Kat,’ I said. ‘I know she can be a bit … volatile.’

  ‘Don’t be. The harshness isn’t personal, it’s coming from fear. And at least you know where you stand with her. It’s the ones who conceal their true feelings you have to worry about.’

  Will led the way through a rusty door and up a cobweb-ridden stairwell tucked discreetly away from the house’s main staircases and draughty corridors. The grey coat swished behind him and the tread of his boots echoed as they trotted purposefully up the stone steps. Exiting another door, we came out onto the puddle dotted asphalt of the house’s open roof terrace. I paused in my tracks, stunned by the unrelenting panorama before me.

  A diurnal bird of prey soared across the slate-coloured sky, which stretched impressively for miles above the desaturated countryside. Winter was approaching early this year and it showed; all the usual colours of autumn — the reds, yellows, golds — were nowhere to be seen, just faded greens merging to white-grey as the rural land met the sky. I could see just how far we were from the bustling towns and cities in which I spent most of my days. Tolling church bells, the rustle of trees and that haunting quietness made up the sound of these remote lands, not the babble of people and rush of motorway traffic my ears were used to.

  Will, however, was in no mood for sky gazing. He glided over to the parapet, a cigarette already lit and trailing smoke in his wake. I scurried after him, wrapping my blazer tighter as a soft breeze whipped at my hair and face.

  ‘Why up here?’ I asked, drawing up beside him. No fan of heights, I stayed a safe distance from the rail, trying to ignore the mental picture my mind had just conjured of a fatal fall to the gravel driveway below.

  ‘The fresh air helps me think,’ he replied.

  Pity he couldn’t think in the comfort of the dining hall, I thought, imagining the hot cross buns and pots of warm tea on offer there. The sky was getting darker, the day drawing on — just how long had I been blacked out in that cellar? I still hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast and the grumble in my stomach had become a permanent ache.

  Will continued to gaze over the grounds, puffing on the cigarette, one knee protruding through the rail’s balusters. I debated taking more of the photographs Kat had requested as I waited for him to finish whatever it was he was doing, especially with the impressive view up here, and vistas being one of my favourite things to photograph, but it would have felt odd under the circumstances.

  ‘ESP,’ he said, finally. ‘That’s what you’re experiencing.’

  ‘ES what?’ I said, wondering if he’d just mentioned the acronym of a disorder I had hitherto heard about.

  ‘Extrasensory perception. It’s a widely reported phenomena. Ever heard of the four Clairs? It’s the French word for ‘clear.’ Clairaudience (clear sound); that’s the ability to hear what’s inaudible to most people. Clairvoyance (clear seeing); the ability to see into the future. Clairsentience (clear feeling); feeling and experiencing intuitively, including other people’s emotions. And Claircognizance (clear knowing); that’s knowing things without any doubt, and with no prior knowledge of the thing or subject. It’s been happening how long now?’

  ‘A few months,’ I said, my mind lagging as I tried to remember everything he’d just said.

  ‘Unusual. Most people exhibit signs from early age. You’re
sure you’ve never experienced anything like it before?’

  I combed my mind, looking out at the distant fields, the wind ruffling my fringe. Vague memories rose to the surface. That time, when I was twelve years old, at the fairground that came to Cricklewood every year. My friend, Evan Bradshaw, wanted to ride the Dodgems. But a feeling in my gut told me that if we did, something really bad would happen. I persuaded Evan not to go on the ride, and the next time the Dodgem cars set off there was a devastating crash that left a dozen youngsters with minor injuries and a nine year old with a collapsed lung.

  And there was that dilapidated house that stands on the corner of the road where I grew up. I knew when the old lady who lived there, Mrs Morton, had passed away. There was no reason for me to know it, no prior evidence; it was really odd, like I just knew she was dead. I told no one, brushing it off as a random thought, even when people showed up soon after to cart the body away.

  Then, more ominously, there was the sighting. On the way home from school I used to cross a small bridge that overlooked a stream. One day I had a strange feeling I was being watched from the trees that flanked the gushing water. I stopped and stared, squinting through my specs. There, between the spindly tree trunks, stood a boy about my own age. He had pale, bluish skin, the colour of a corpse, and his clothes were sodden, dripping at the wrists and streaked with claw marks of mud. Paralysed with terror, I watched as he just turned, unblinking, and disappeared into the trees. I couldn’t walk on that side of the road when I had to cross the bridge after that, and whenever I did I felt my entire body shiver as I imagined him still standing there.

  I was beginning to see that I wasn’t such a newbie to these experiences than originally thought. Esther’s words echoed in my head: ‘Until now you have feared that part of yourself, you have tried to push it away and suppress it.’ Might other occurrences have happened had I paid more attention to my unusual senses?

  ‘There have been times,’ I said. ‘Now that I really think about it.’

  Will nodded, blowing smoke through the corner of his mouth. ‘Thought so. The photograph part is odd, though.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, your photographs are the same as any other example of spirit photography, from what I’ve seen and read on the subject. But from what you’ve described there’s one main difference.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You,’ said Will.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Most spirit photography is taken by people who say they didn’t see anything at the time the photo was taken, but the camera still picked up the apparition. You, however, actually saw the apparition with your naked eye.’

  I pondered this. It had been the strangest thing about seeing the apparition. The way it was there one moment, then gone when I looked at it through the camera’s lens. A bite in the breezy air caused a head to toe shiver as I waited for Will to elaborate.

  ‘You’re not the first person to see something that looks like a ghost. But things seen with our eyes are subject to modification by our fears and beliefs. That makes sightings unreliable. You explained seeing the apparition exactly how it was captured by the camera. This tells me that what you saw was genuine. Images taken by the camera are captured exactly as they are, frozen, not distorted by our emotions or beliefs, making spirit photographs the most reliable evidence of ghosts we have.’

  ‘But I could only see the apparition with my own eyes. I couldn’t see it when I was looking through the camera’s viewfinder,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Isn’t that interesting?’ Will’s eyes glinted with fascination in the harsh light. ‘You saw what everyone else sees when they look through a camera’s viewfinder while taking a spirit photograph: nothing. And yet you still saw what was captured in the photograph with your naked eye.’

  ‘Well, what the hell does that mean?’

  ‘How should I know? I’m a writer, not an optician.’

  A pathetic sound issued from my throat.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ said Will, curbing an urge to laugh, ‘is that it’s a sign you have extrasensory abilities far above what’s normal. Especially with everything else you’ve described, like these ‘dreams’ you tell me about.’

  He lapsed into pensive thought again. I gazed worryingly at the grey clouds drifting across the sky, processing this deluge of information. Incongruously (because it didn’t seem like the appropriate time to be thinking about films), an image of the boy from The Sixth Sense came to mind. I refrained from quoting the famous line, ‘I see dead people’ and adding a question mark on the end, instead asking, ‘There hasn’t been anyone else who sees this way before?’

  ‘Oh, you can bet there has been. Extrasensory abilities are common, with new kinds of experiences being reported all the time. Seeing auras, remembering past lives, telekinesis to name a few. There’s a condition, Hyperthymesia, where people remember abnormally large amounts of their life experiences in vivid detail. Our retinas receive images and imprint them on our consciousness the way images are captured on the camera’s film. Who knows what the brain, that complex thing that continues to baffle us, is capable of recreating with a lifetime’s worth of imprinted memory?’

  ‘Do you think it could explain the dreams?’

  ‘It could,’ said Will. He lapsed into thought again.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I was reading about fibromyalgia recently, a chronic pain condition that creates head to toe pain in the sufferer, even when medical tests reveal no underlying physiological cause. Experts believe it’s psychosomatic, that their brains are responding to stressors on the nervous system to a much higher degree than most people, and there does appear to be a link to past trauma. It’s sort of like a physical PTSD.’ Will’s eyes, even bluer up here in the harsh daylight, studied me intently for a moment. ‘This is conjecture, but if the brain is capable of making people experience heightened sensations through emotional trauma, who’s to say it isn’t capable of making people experience heightened senses?’

  ‘You mean the way I’m seeing, hearing and feeling things that aren’t there?’

  ‘Maybe your brain responds to stressors by heightening your intuitive senses. Whether what you’re seeing and feeling is really there or not is another matter.’

  ‘But you said yourself that what I described seeing was the same as in the photograph, and photographs are the most reliable evidence there is.’

  ‘I know that, squire. But I’m not the one seeing ghosts.’

  Did I see that sceptical look return in his eye? I felt alone again. Then I thought about what Esther had said that first night in the torch-lit nursery room. If it really was the way our universe worked then it didn’t seem too crazy to assume that what I was seeing and feeling was real. If dimensions other than the one we could see existed, dimensions where energy went after death, yet everything was ultimately connected — Source, as Esther had described it — all it would take is for there to be a connection between the two, a way for them to become aware of each other. Was I that connection to another dimension? A spirit dimension?

  Will finished his cigarette, crushing the burning tip on the weathered parapet and flicking it into a puddle on the asphalt. As it fizzled out with a hiss, I recalled books I had read by some of the world's most original thinkers in the study of altered states of consciousness. I’d read about material reductionism, dark matter, dark energy and theories on the links between matter and consciousness. The topic is vast and complex, and much of it was too difficult to comprehend at the time. But it had always stuck with me that there was much about our universe that science was unable to explain or understand. Perhaps my extrasensory perception wasn’t so unbelievable after all, not when you consider the miracle of the universe itself.

  Will broke my musing by proffering a packet of mints. I shook my head and he tossed one in his mouth. His perfect hair rippled in the wind. The lapels on his coat fluttered like a boat’s sail. Those blue eyes were narrowed towards
the other side of the roof terrace now, at the rear of the manor. Saying nothing, he took off across the asphalt.

  Like a faithful dog I followed him, once again coming up beside him as he stopped and leaned against the rail. From here you could see the woodland that abutted the manor grounds, a small forest of dark canopies that appeared both oddly placed in relation to the location of the building and very uninviting.

  Remembering Annie’s tales I realised I was looking at the woods where crows had been found nailed to trees. What kind of person would do such a thing, all the way out here? And why? It was cruel and senseless, and deeply unnerving. I pushed the gory mental image away and looked at Will. The woods weren’t where his eyes were directed. They were fixed on the caretaker’s cottage at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘There’s one way to test if the vision you had about Old Lurch was real or not,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve got one evening left in this place. If he’s planning on bumping you off, it’ll be tonight. That’s our opportunity.’

  ‘Opportunity for what?’

  ‘To set a trap.’

  Stirrings of dread grew in my belly. I did not like the sound of where this was going.

  - CHAPTER THIRTEEN -

  The Drawing

  I COULD FEEL my body slowly thawing from the chill of the roof terrace as I walked back down the corridor, the radiators giving off a much welcome wave of heat. Will had gone back to his room to get ready for the evening and to think over how our plan was going to play out. My new mission was to find Kat, although considering how irrational she’d been before abandoning us, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d hopped inside Petunia and sped as far away from Hilderley Manor as she could get.

  Before that, however, nature called. Reaching the bathroom, I went to open the door, but it swung open before my hand had chance to touch the handle. Esther, looking like she’d just stepped out of a beauty salon and startled to find me standing there, let out a sharp gasp.