The Lingering

by SJI Holliday

  Yet he doesn’t see me.

  He blinks and the expression on his face changes for a moment and I wonder if maybe he has felt something, senses me somehow. He takes a step forwards and instinctively I step out of his way. I still have no idea if that theory about ghosts being able to pass through solid forms is true, and I know that I don’t want to test it out right now. He passes by me without stopping. He walks back along the corridor, hesitates around the corner from his office then seems to change his mind. He turns the other way and marches along the bottom corridor. I try hard to force my feet to make noise on the cracked lino, but they don’t. I stare up at the lights, and to my delight, they start to flicker. He pauses briefly, glances upwards. Shakes his head. He is still convinced that the lights just have an electrical fault. Maybe they do. I wonder if he will mention it to Ford again, ask him if he can have a look. He doesn’t believe any of my theories about the energy in this corridor, despite me trying my hardest to make him believe it right now.

  I follow him into the library. He leaves the door open just a crack, just enough for me to sneak in there behind him. Then he notices and closes and locks it. But he doesn’t notice straightaway. He sees the paper sticking out of the typewriter first, and I know I didn’t leave that there. I’ve written myself various notes on the typewriter, over the time I’ve been here. I’m always careful to remove the paper and take it up to my room. I’m sure Smeaton knows I’ve used the machine more often than strictly permitted, but he’s never said anything. I replenish the pack of paper with a few sheets from Mary’s shop every so often, just to keep up the pretence. He’s peering at the paper, rolling it out. He frowns and lays it on the desk, so I position myself behind him so I can read it over his shoulder. I can’t believe it!

  Except I can.

  This is exactly the kind of thing that she would do. I wonder if Smeaton will be able to tell that it’s not me behind these words … but to give her credit, she has made it sound like me. There was I thinking she didn’t listen to me, but she clearly did. She has picked up the rhythm of my speech perfectly, even in written form. She has even mentioned Mary, and that upsets me.

  Mary will be destroyed by all this, when it comes out. When they realise what’s happened to me. When they realise who Jack and Ali are. What they are.

  Smeaton folds the paper and slides into his pocket, then he walks over to shut and lock the door, and close the curtains. I have no idea what he’s doing … and then I see. All this time I sneakily spent in here, and I never properly explored. I thought I had taken every single book off the shelf, but clearly I was wrong.

  He slides the bookcase back into a small connecting corridor, before opening the room behind, thankfully he leaves the door open, and I follow him straight in. I am amazed. Files. Hundreds, thousands of them. Things I’m sure I would love to have read. Things that he has chosen to keep hidden from us all. Then he takes out something that looks like a small journal, and he carries it with him as he goes out.

  I hurry out behind him before he can lock me inside. I have no idea yet if I would be able to get out such a place. I don’t know when he might come back in here.

  He locks the hidden room and lets the bookcase slide back into place, then he replaces the books from the desk onto the shelf, opens the curtains and peers out of the window for a moment before shaking his head and unlocking the door. He glances around the room once more. Then he slips out into the corridor again. He pauses at the fire entrance, which has been left open slightly, and stares outside once more. There is nothing to see.

  I’m not there, I whisper into his ear. But he doesn’t hear me.

  I follow him back to his office. There is a piece of paper stuck to his door, announcing a guided meditation session for the previous night. I missed that. I used to enjoy those, that weird feeling of drifting off while wide awake, the dull, muted clang of the gong to wake you back up. Maybe I’ll go to the next one. I wonder if I can still enter a trance. He locks the small journal in his drawer. Then goes to collect the key for the north wing that I know he wanted earlier, but it is not there.

  He sits down at his desk and drops his face into his hands. He’s muttering something under his breath, but I can’t quite hear him. Eventually he picks up the phone, dials a number that I recognise. I hear her voice and I feel the heavy weight of sadness wrapping me like a cloak.

  I can hear her smiling, even down the phone. ‘Smeaton, twice in one day? I’m guessing you’re calling to let me know that Angela is safe and sound?’

  Smeaton says nothing.

  I’m here, I say. As loudly as I can. I’m standing right next to his desk. I try to pick up a pen, but it just slips through my fingers. I’m here, I say again. I hear the voice at the end of the phone, the smile gone now, ‘Smeaton? What’s going on?’

  A tear rolls down Smeaton’s cheek, and still he can’t find any words.

  I need to go to the village. I need to find out if Mary can hear me, or even better … if she can see me.

  34

  Ali

  ‘Come with me, Jack.’

  He’s sitting on the side of the bed, rubbing his hands on his knees. Then he lifts his hands to his face, rubs at his eyes, pulls his hair. She has not seen him this agitated for weeks.

  ‘Come on, please. I’ve got the key to the north wing, let’s go and have a proper walk around there. Everyone is looking for Angela. They’ll just assume you’re doing the same. Smeaton won’t mind that I’ve got his key once he realises what I am doing. I took the chance to go get it during the commotion. I just get the feeling he’s hiding something from us. I don’t know what. I don’t even know how it can help us. But I can’t keep running around the rest of the building looking for Angela, knowing that no one is going to find her.’

  Jack stops fidgeting and rubbing, and stares at her. ‘We shouldn’t have done that, Ali. She’s not like the others. We shouldn’t have done it. Why did we do it? I don’t understand anymore.’

  ‘I told you … she was working things out. She was going to get us into trouble. Ruin all our plans.’ She clenches her hands into fists. She wants to punch him. Why doesn’t he get it?

  Jack shakes his head and laughs, ‘Plans? What, like our new life? It’s a disaster. We can’t stay here.’

  ‘Just come with me, come on. Get out of this room for a bit. Let the others see that you’re willing to help. They were getting suspicious earlier.’

  He nods. Stands up. She looks at him, and what he’s become. Those weeks of fresh air and exercise – all that heavy manual work. For a while they’d given him a rosy glow, brought some light back into his eyes. But it has gone again now, in the days that he has spent barely leaving his bed. His eyes are flat, dead. His skin is pale. And no matter how many times he might’ve cleaned himself, he still smells unwashed, different. That weird scent coming off him, like before. The way he was when he had to give up work.

  She offers him a hand, and he takes it. He seems smaller, his shoulders slumped. He is shrinking in on himself somehow. She can let him go on. Not like this. It’s no good for either of them. She guides him out of the room and locks the door. They walk along the corridors, out one of the back entrances that she has seen before, and around the side to the entrance of the north wing.

  It is dark now, and the air is heavy. Just the gentle whump whump of the wind turbines in the field nearby. She has remembered to bring a torch, just a small one that she collected from the sitting room. There’s a basket of them there, for anyone to use. The kind of thing you probably need in the country, she supposes. She switches it on now and they follow the beam of light through the corridors, which seem darker and narrower than she remembers from her time here before in the daylight. She is not really sure what she’s doing; she just feels an urge to visit this place now. She thinks about Angela, all her talk of spirits and ghosts. Witches in the village. Ali shakes her head; tries to shake out the creeping madness. The madness that she knows is starting to cloud her thoug
hts, despite what she might want to believe. The hallucinations … the accusations. She is struggling to keep control of her own mind, let alone Jack’s. There is a stale smell in the air, a faint hint of something charred and old. She grips Jack’s hand tighter and he grips hers back.

  ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ he says. ‘Why are we even here? This place gives me the creeps.’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I just – I don’t know. I felt that I had to come in here. Something to do with Angela. I don’t know. Something lured me, I suppose. Besides, it’s the best time. I can’t see why Smeaton would come in when it’s dark, and anyway, he can’t because I have his key.’

  She walks along the corridors, shining the torch over the various doors. Something stops her from opening the small hatches and shining the torch inside. She seems to be dragging Jack along behind her now, his feet shuffling.

  Her mind flashes to how she imagines this place must have been in the past. The sounds of shuffling feet, the smell of grim hospital food wafting down the halls, the squeak of the lino. The other noises: clatters and shouts. People locked in the cells.

  What happened here? she thinks. Something happened here.

  At the end of the corridor there is a room with double doors and a white plastic plaque still firmly in place: Electroconvulsive Therapy Room 1. Not such a common procedure now, but it’s still in use, for extreme situations. Not like in the sixties, when it was used far too much. Both of her parents had been treated with it, she’d found out. Her mother, when she was pregnant. It was said to be safe, apparently. She’s not so sure about that, often wonders about the effects it might’ve had on her mother’s unborn child. Her mother’s only child.

  She pushes the door and it swings open. Jack protests, doesn’t want to go in, so she tries to drag him over the threshold, but he lets go of her hand and backs away. He seems terrified, all of a sudden, and she doesn’t know why. She walks into the room and immediately the atmosphere changes. Faces seem to swim in front of her, open mouths screaming.

  Shaking, shuddering. Sighs.

  She blinks, and it all goes away. Her heart slows. The room is stuffed full of equipment. A reclining bed with stirrups sits in one corner, but there is stuff piled up all over the place, thrown everywhere. Discarded. Why has no one taken it away? Has it all been left here since they shut down the hospital? Surely there are uses for these things. Something that they can do with it all. Why can’t they strip it down and sell it? Smeaton mentioned that they needed some sort of income stream. There are all sorts of things in here, and she’s surprised that no one has thought to make use of them.

  She walks over to a piece of machinery, a white box connected to various wires. She touches it, and jumps back as if she’s been electrocuted. This is what she came in here for. This is what she needs to be able to deal with Jack – because if she can deal with Jack, then surely her own mind will quiet down once more and she can try to live in some sort of peace. She picks up one of the cables, careful not to touch the electrode. Will it even still work? She’s about to flick the switch, when a sound from behind startles her. She turns, assuming that Jack has come in behind her, but the light is dim and she can’t make out his features. There is definitely a figure by the door. ‘Jack?’ she says, under her breath. She shines a torch at the door and the figure disappears. She tries not to panic, convinces herself that it was only a shadow. Just a shadow. Not another vision – hallucination – not another being trying to shatter her increasingly fragile mind. She pushes the door open and walks back out into the corridor. Jack is crouched down opposite, leaning against the wall, hugging his knees.

  ‘Please Ali … please take us away from here. I can’t stand it. I keep seeing them all – their faces – taunting me – reminding me of what I did … I need to face up to it all. I need help! Let’s just go home. Let’s go to the police. Let’s tell them everything. Please…’

  The treatment will have to wait a little longer.

  Ali finds a new resolve. No. She can’t have this. She’s not letting Jack go to prison. He’d never survive in there.

  And there’s no way she’s going there herself, either.

  It’s time to put an end to her experiment, once and for all.

  Dr Henry Baldock’s Journal – 17th July 1955

  I can barely believe I am writing this, but I am. The entire hospital – three hundred patients and fifty staff – was evacuated today due to a fire in the north wing. Thankfully it didn’t spread far, but the signs are that it was started deliberately. The firemen told me there were smears of cooking oil found on the outside walls, and they suspect that someone took some into the wing – into Ward 3 – and set fire to it. Was it luck or accident that the patients from that ward were all in their various treatment rooms at the time of the fire? We won’t know for sure. Sadly, there were three fatalities. Two being the nurses that I’d had to reprimand that day for the barbaric water treatment, and the other … There were no other serious injuries, although many were affected by smoke in the other wards and rooms nearby. It’s a miracle that all of the patients were led to safety. I wasn’t aware of it until I heard the screams coming from the lawn. Some had thrown themselves into the pond and, after the recent tragedy there, it’s nothing short of another miracle that none of them drowned. The pond is so deep.

  No doubt we will have to drain it soon. Too many bad memories.

  I knew what had happened before they told me. I knew who had started the fire, and I knew it was deliberate. I also knew there would be no way she could have survived it.

  They carried the charred remains of Jessie out into the waiting ambulance, taking her to Cambridge I assume, although why it was an ambulance and not a mortuary van I’m not sure. They took the nurses away separately. I don’t know why.

  That poor, poor woman. Again, I can’t help but feel that I failed her. That we all failed her. She should never have been able to get her hands on that cooking oil, much less a box of matches. I can’t help but wonder if maybe someone helped her along. I am convinced that the poor woman was targeted for some reason – her mistreatment, her son – and now her apparent suicide. I don’t for a minute think that she would have intended to hurt any of the other patients.

  But I realise that I don’t understand what is going on here at all, and I suspect that no one will be willing to tell me.

  35

  Angela

  I want to see Mary, but I can’t seem to pull myself away just yet. I wait with Smeaton, in his office. He seems at a complete loss as to what to do about me. I move around as much as I can, sitting near him, standing behind him – then sitting on his couch, standing by the door. I try to pick up one of the little angel cards from the bowl by his door, but I can’t do it. My fingers just slip through as if they are made of air. Nothing I do seems to cause any reaction in him.

  So much for my theories about electrical energies in the atmosphere.

  It seems that the naysayers might be right after all. There are no such things as ghosts. But then – what am I? I know I am here, at least I think I am. I can see him; I can hear him. The only things that are missing are my abilities to smell and to touch. Plus, of course, there’s the absence of my physical being.

  As far as Smeaton is concerned, I am gone.

  Despite the absence of physical sensations in my non-existent body, I feel sad. It manifests itself as a darkening of the scene in front of me, as if someone is slowly dimming the light. Smeaton’s world shrinks into a vignette before me, the edges creeping inwards until it is just him in the middle and nothing beyond. I try to think of nice things, to make the blackness dissipate. I don’t want to disappear into a nothingness. I can’t believe that that is all there really is for me now. I start to wonder about that research into the consciousness of the soul and I wonder if this is all there is – if it is now up to me to decide whether I continue to exist in this limbo or disappear altogether, to accept my fate along with the realisation that there is nothi
ng beyond.

  I try to focus on happy things: the first day I came here, when Smeaton showed me to my room – the biggest bedroom I had ever had, with a huge window overlooking the bright green of the lawn behind the house. I found out soon afterwards that I had apparently hallucinated the colour of the lawn, imagining what it once was – when they told me this, I saw the reality. Soil and patches of yellowed grass. Weeds. Not now, though; now it is a lawn again. Thanks to Ford. What else? Mary. Mary has always made me happy. Giving me gifts, showing me love. Then there’s learning to bake delicious carrot cake with Fergus. Discovering the Taizé chants and feeling the deep sense of grounding and warmth that they bring to the whole room. Growing my own herbs: thyme, lemon verbena and rosemary, and sprinkling them on salads and having Julie tell me how difficult it is to grow good herbs and how I was a natural.

  The vignette shrinks away, and the room swims back into focus. But I realise I have been carried away with myself for a while, because Smeaton is no longer in the centre, at his desk. He is no longer in the room.

  I hear the sounds of an argument outside and I am thankful that Smeaton has left the door to his office open or I’m sure I would be trapped in here. I head out, and see that there is a small congregation outside the front door. I slip out, and stand close to the building, watching. Listening.

  ‘It’s not right, Smeaton. We all know that Angela hasn’t done a bunk. It’s not like her at all, is it?’

  I recognise Chris, Mary’s son, and several of his friends. The same men who were here only a couple of weeks ago, chased away by Ali. Robert still looks furious at being smacked with the bat.