Echoes

by Iain McLaughlin

  • You’d be better off talking to them yourself, dear.

  • You know them. I don’t.

  • That doesn’t matter. Not here. Most of them will talk to you.

  • And the ones that won’t?

  • I …

  • Joan?

  • This isn’t an easy place to live – or whatever you would want to call it. Everybody deals with it in their own way. Some of us talk.

  • And others don’t?

  • Some just listen. The ones who don’t talk are usually past being able to communicate. It gets to them. All this …

  • Nothingness?

  • Yes. We don’t know for certain, but we’re fairly sure some of those women who’ve been here longest have gone completely mad with it.

  Joan Barton’s favourite table was shoved unceremoniously aside, and Lechasseur strode back into the dusty hallway. He wasn’t sure if he was surprised or not that it was exactly as he had left it.

  ‘How did that happen?’ Tess asked, following him out of the cellar. ‘When I tried the stairs, there wasn’t even a door.’

  ‘I don’t doubt you,’ Lechasseur answered. ‘But I think then and now are two different places.’

  ‘Nah!’ Tess was inspecting the walls and the layout of the house, getting her bearings. ‘I know this house. It’s the one over the top of Chang Wu’s place.’ She indicated along the hall. ‘You come in through the back door there.’ She inspected the pictures on the walls and let her finger trace the fading pattern on the wallpaper. ‘It’s changed a bit, though.’

  Lechasseur rattled the handle to the back door, but it stayed resolutely shut. ‘We’re not leaving that way.’ He tried the kitchen door, but that resisted stubbornly as well.

  ‘You could try kicking it,’ Tess offered helpfully.

  Lechasseur offered a rueful smile. ‘Tried that last time,’ he commented. ‘If I’m lucky, my leg should stop aching by the time I’m forty.’

  ‘How long’s that, then?’ Tess asked. ‘Couple of weeks?’ She smirked cheekily. For the first time since he’d met her, Tess actually looked like a sixteen year old girl. Hardly more than a child.

  ‘Smart kid,’ he grumbled gruffly. ‘Don’t let the grey in the hair fool you. I’m not thirty yet.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Tess smirked.

  ‘And I don’t look it, either,’ Lechasseur added.

  ‘No,’ Tess agreed. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Good,’ Lechasseur muttered, and turned his attention to the door to the smaller parlour, where he had found the radio.

  ‘Older, maybe,’ Tess said, apparently to herself. ‘Fifty if you’re a day.’

  Lechasseur stopped and glowered at her, but couldn’t hold the expression. He smiled. ‘If you’re done making fun of your elders?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Tess nodded. ‘But I might start again later.’

  ‘Great,’ Lechasseur grimaced, though he noted with satisfaction that the girl’s manner towards him had become noticeably more trusting. He pushed at the little parlour’s door. Like the others, it stayed firmly shut. ‘I’m not shoulder-charging this one, either,’ Lechasseur told Tess. She had opened her mouth to answer when a creaking sound cut her off. Further along the hall, the door to the main parlour swung slowly open. Through it, Lechasseur could see only a thick, ominous darkness. He pushed an unconvincing smile onto his face.

  ‘I’ve wanted to see in there ever since we arrived,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’ Tess asked, nervously. She wasn’t taken in by Lechasseur’s composed act. ‘Why should I be interested in what’s in there?’ She folded her arms and planted her feet, clearly indicating that she had no intention of moving.

  ‘You’d rather stay here on your own?’ Lechasseur asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Tess retorted. ‘Better than walking into who knows what in there.’ She tilted her bony chin defiantly and waited for Lechasseur to argue.

  ‘It does feel like that old rhyme again, doesn’t it,’ Lechasseur said thoughtfully. He peered into the darkness, weighing up the alternatives. ‘Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.’

  ‘Spider?’ Tess asked nervously.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared of spiders.’

  ‘No,’ she replied quickly – too quickly. ‘I just don’t like them, that’s all,’ she admitted. ‘Horrid things, always scuttling about.’ She shuffled her feet slightly, embarrassed by her confession. ‘I just don’t like them.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Lechasseur owned up. ‘But I always guess they’re more scared of me than I am of them. I hope so, anyway.’ He offered a half-smile. ‘I’m kinda bigger than they are.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Tess conceded.

  ‘And I can always take a newspaper to them, but I never once saw one coming at me with a rolled up copy of the Sporting Life. So,’ Lechasseur pointed to the open door. ‘Are you coming in or staying here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tess said hesitantly. ‘I’m not sure.’

  On cue, a gas lamp at the far end of the hall flickered and died, and darkness immediately filled that space. Tess moved nervously closer to Lechasseur. They watched as, slowly, the darkness began moving along the hallway towards them, gradually engulfing the hall and its contents. Its movement was steady and fluid, like matt-black oil. It looked unstoppable. The table, a chair, walls and pictures all disappeared from sight as the darkness moved relentlessly towards Lechasseur and Tess.

  ‘I’m guessing somebody really wants us to go into this room,’ Lechasseur said softly.

  Tess just nodded, unable to take her eyes from the flowing void moving towards them. Ten minutes earlier, she would have given anything to be back in the safety of the darkness. Now, she would give anything to stay clear of this black threat that was approaching. This felt anything but safe. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘All right.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lechasseur grasped Tess’s hand, and they stepped through the door into the dark room. Before they could react, the door swung shut behind them. ‘Right,’ Lechasseur mumbled. He took another step forward, pulling a reluctant Tess along with him, and suddenly they stepped from the darkness into a great, brightly-lit stone hall.

  The hall was dominated by a huge wooden table covered with food and drink, above which hung an enormous wooden chandelier. A dozen or more men, dressed in Regency-style clothes, were seated around the table, and all of them were loud and drunk. Serving girls hurried around, bringing more wine and food, doing their best to avoid falling into the clutches of any of the revellers. Seated at one end of the table was a startlingly attractive young woman in her early twenties. The deep burgundy of her long, flowing dress contrasted starkly with her pale complexion, but despite her best efforts with face-powder, she had been unable to disguise completely the dark circles under her eyes. The smile on her face was obviously forced, and the way she wrung the neck of the pewter wine goblet before her showed the anxiety she was trying to hide. Her eyes flashed around the room nervously. To Honoré, it was obvious that she was hating every minute of the banquet, but that she was too afraid to say anything. Banquet? Make that orgy, he thought. He wondered briefly why she was so familiar to him. It didn’t take him long to spot the source of her fear. As the woman’s eyes scanned the hall, they always returned to the figure seated at the far end of the table. In his late forties, he didn’t look particularly tall, but he was broad and powerfully built, though just beginning to run to fat. His chair was pushed back from the table, and his belly hung over the top of his trousers. He might have looked comical, but for his face. His jowly chin glistened with a mixture of sweat, spilled wine and fat from the chicken breast he was eating, but it was his small, dark eyes that told Honoré that this man was trouble. His eyes watched everything, took in every detail, working out how to use it. Most of all, he was enjoying the discomfort of the serving girls as his guests grabbed and
groped at them. One girl, the same age as Tess at most, managed to avoid one pair of clutching hands but walked straight into the grasp of another drunk. Without a moment’s hesitation, he pushed his hand roughly under her skirt. She screamed and struggled, finally managing to break free of her captor’s grip, and lurched to the side of the hall. The man at the head of the table laughed, and threw the chicken breast at the drunk from whom the girl had just escaped.

  ‘Useless,’ he laughed. ‘Too drunk even to hold onto a girl. What would your parishioners say, dear Reverend Keating?’

  The Reverend belched. ‘What do I care what that sort think?’ His unfocused eyes ran their way blearily round the room. ‘I want that girl. Where did she go?’ Another serving girl, passing with a large pitcher of wine, moved too slowly to avoid the Reverend’s grasp. ‘Or maybe this one will do.’

  ‘Not her,’ the man at the head of the table said sharply.

  ‘Here, Honera,’ Tess tugged at Lechasseur’s sleeve.

  ‘Honoré,’ he corrected. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Why ain’t they seen us?’ Tess asked. ‘We been here a good minute or two, and they ain’t said boo about us.’

  ‘I was wondering about that, too,’ Lechasseur pondered. ‘It’s not as if we’re exactly hiding in a corner, is it?’

  ‘Be a big corner as hid you,’ Tess muttered.

  Lechasseur took a step closer to the table. ‘I don’t think they can see us,’ he said, and then, raising his voice, he spoke again. ‘I don’t think they can hear us.’

  For a moment, Honoré thought he was wrong and had indeed been heard. The hall had suddenly fallen quiet. But the eyes of the revellers weren’t on him and Tess but on the Reverend and his host. Their confrontation had become very tense, very quickly, though the Reverend was too drunk to notice. He was the only one in the room unaware of the change in atmosphere. The other men were sitting back in their chairs, either waiting for the show or trying to keep as far away from any coming violence as they could.

  ‘I said, not her,’ the host repeated. ‘I think you could do me the courtesy of listening to me when you’re a guest in my home.’

  The Reverend slammed a hand on the table. ‘I want her, Squire,’ he repeated. ‘And I’ll have her.’ He grinned, showing crooked, brown teeth. ‘Or I’ll damn her soul.’

  The Squire leaped across the table, moving with remarkable speed for a man carrying so much girth, and swung his arm downwards, embedding a long-bladed knife into the wooden surface – straight through Reverend Keating’s hand. ‘I don’t think you’ll be able for any sport tonight, Reverend.’

  It took Keating’s wine-addled brain a moment to register what had happened. And then he screamed.

  The Squire twisted the knife through a quarter turn. ‘And when I tell you to do something in my house,’ he hissed, ‘you do it, or man of God or not, I’ll cut your throat out and send you to Hell where you belong. Now shut up your noise, or I really might hurt you.’ He yanked the knife free, and Lechasseur winced, hearing the blade scrape bone as it came out of the Reverend’s hand.

  With every ounce of willpower he could muster, Keating cut off his screams. He looked at the Squire in terror as his host waved the knife back and forth in front of his face. ‘That’s better,’ the Squire said appreciatively, and wiped the blade clean on Keating’s shoulder. ‘Now go and get that hand bandaged, before you spoil the party.’

  Keating nodded, and all but ran from the room.

  The Squire turned to the serving girl who had been the unwitting cause of the trouble. ‘This one’s mine,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you, Mary? A healthy little bed-warmer.’ He turned his eyes sourly to the woman at the head of the table, who had remained seated impassively throughout. ‘Better than my beloved wife there, anyway.’ He snorted. ‘But a dead sheep would be better than that lump of meat.’

  His wife simply stared back, and said nothing.

  ‘I’ve seen her before,’ Lechasseur murmured. He moved closer to the table. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  Tess looked round the hall nervously, expecting to be spotted at any time. ‘Where?’

  ‘In the reception of the tower block,’ Lechasseur answered. ‘She was the ghost. I’m certain it was her.’

  ‘A ghost? Let’s have a look.’ Tess peered past Lechasseur at the pale, fragile woman at the table. There was something familiar about her that Tess recognised. ‘I think I know her an’ all.’

  ‘You recognise her?’

  ‘Not the face,’ Tess answered. She racked her brain for a way to explain what she wanted to say. ‘I just know her. Who she is, I mean. It’s Patience, the snooty cow I never got on with in the … well, the whatever the place is.’

  ‘She’s one of the people you’re trapped with?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Tess pointed a skinny finger at the serving girl now seated uncomfortably on the Squire’s lap, her face as miserable as Patience’s own as the Squire’s hand crept inside the front of her dress and squeezed one of her breasts in full view of the guests. ‘And so’s she.’

  ‘The serving girl?’

  ‘Her name’s Mary,’ Tess carried on. ‘I always wondered why them two never got on. I thought it was because Patience was a toff and Mary wasn’t.’

  ‘Now you know.’

  ‘Yeah, now I know,’ Tess said sadly. ‘Poor cow.’ She looked from Mary to Patience and back again. ‘Poor cows, both of them.’

  Behind them, there was a click. Lechasseur turned, half expecting to see Reverend Keating returning. Instead, a door was open, and beyond was Joan Barton’s hall. ‘I think we’ve seen everything we’re supposed to see here,’ he said.

  Tess nodded, and followed him towards the door. She looked back briefly at the scene in the hall, now beginning to fade. As she became transparent, Patience’s head turned away from her nervous surveillance of the men in the room. Just for a moment, she seemed to lock eyes with Tess, but then she became indistinct and faded away, along with the rest of the room. Tess picked up her pace and hurried after Honoré.

  Chapter Six

  • Your name is Sandi?

  • Yeah, hon. Sandi with an ‘i’. An eye for a good-looking man and an eye for a score, that’s me.

  • I’m not sure I know what that means. The last half, anyway.

  • It means you’re from a stuffed shirt era before my time, hon. I guess that’s what it means.

  • Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  • Too bad. I was hoping to find someone else from the sixties I could talk to. When are you from?

  • That’s a more complicated question than you might imagine, Sandi.

  • Zatso?

  • Pardon?

  • I mean, is that so, Emily? Your name is Emily, right?

  • Yes. I came here from 1995, though I normally live in 1950.

  • That’s not the weirdest thing I heard recently.

  • Though I have no idea where – when – I really come from.

  • Nope. That’s not the weirdest either, babe. Sorry. Must try harder.

  • Are you always so flippant?

  • Given the situation we’re in, it’s either be glib or go nuts. I guess you’ve already noticed that some of the girls here aren’t paddling with both oars in the water.

  • Yes. Though I wouldn’t have put it in quite that manner.

  • Hey-ho. You know.

  • What were you doing before you found yourself here?

  • Does it matter?

  • It might. Do you remember, Sandi?

  • Listen, hon. You really don’t want to get into my past, okay?

  • Don’t I?

  • Hell, I don’t even know if I want to get into my past.

  • You mean that, don’t you?

  • Some things are best left alone.

  • Hiding from them won’t make them go aw
ay, Sandi.

  • But it’ll stop them hurting for a while.

  • What are you hiding from?

  • Leave it.

  • No. You had a problem before you came here.

  • I said leave it!

  • You may be happy to spend the rest of your life stuck in some kind of limbo, but that’s far from being what I have planned for myself. If I am going to find a way out of here, for all of us, then I need to know everything, whether it’s easy for you or not!

  • There isn’t a way out of here.

  • I’m becoming rather tired of hearing people say that. Now, what were you doing before you came here? Please tell me.

  • Fine. Whatever. You want to hear my sob story, I’ll tell you. Okay. Me and Joe, we had a place. Not a palace, but it was good, you know?

  • Joe?

  • My boyfriend.

  • You lived together?

  • Yeah. And us not married either, huh? Go figure. We had a place, we even had jobs. Nothing heavy, just jobs to keep the cash flowing. Enough to buy food, keep the rent paid and get us a few scores.

  • Scores? I don’t understand.

  • Scores. Drugs, okay? Pot, maybe some acid if we were feeling like it. You still don’t get it?

  • No.

  • These drugs were more opium than aspirin, okay? Got it now? Illegal drugs that screw with the brain. Jeez, even Tess got that idea.

  • Oh.

  • Yeah, oh. We were doing okay, me and Joe. Then we lost our place. The landlord threw us out when Joe got busted for possession.

  • Possession of what? Drugs?

  • Yeah. He only had weed on him, as well. Didn’t matter, though. He was guilty, and the landlord put us on the streets. It’s kind of hard to find a place at short notice, so we wound up in a squat with some people Joe knew. Before you ask, a squat is an empty house where people stay without paying rent, okay?

  • Yes. I understand.

  • It was cold and damp, but at least it had a roof, and that was something. Joe lost his job after the bust. He spent a lot of time with a couple of the guys at the squat who were really into tripping. That’s taking acid. They were major on that.