House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  We always used to meet in The Intrepid Fox, even when we’d been ghost-hunting all night. Me, Shape and Ali would bed down for a long session with bottles of cider, and argue about London’s pagan history, but as we got progressively more drunk the discussions about Wiccan mythology and Aleister Crowley and spirit dowsing would get blurred together with complaints about slashed student funding, climate change and the Labour party’s lost ideologies. By the end of our evening nothing made sense any more, and we would totter back to our respective flats.

  Shape was always finding a new crusade to fight, and this month was no different. He’d heard that Ali and I sometimes went ghost hunting and announced that he wanted to join us. Having Shape on your side isn’t always a good thing. He gets excited for a while, but his enthusiasm ebbs just as fast and you get left with the wreckage he’s created. As soon as he heard about our trips out to country houses, he wanted to find a revenant in a London house.

  “Why is it that only abbeys and castles get visited by ghost hunters?” he asked. “Forget the rich, we need to liberate the spirits of the poor and do some good in the world.” And for once he had an idea about how to find such a place. He had decided that spirits were probably most drawn to properties built on ley lines, those tracks of spiritual energy that supposedly attract strange occurrences, and as there was a massive crossover point behind Euston Station which made the ground there more susceptible, that was the place to start looking.

  So on Friday night, somewhat against my own will, the three of us met up and headed to Euston station.

  Shape was striding ahead in his strappy Camden boots and long black leather coat, and Ali and I had to almost run to keep up with him. Now that he had joined us, he automatically assumed leadership.

  “See, the area has always been really poor because the government needs to contain the working classes and deliberately trapped them here by forcing rents up in the surrounding areas so they couldn’t move,” he reckoned, zooming along the centre of the pavement. “And the poor are more prone to visitations by past spirits.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ali, “why would they be more likely to see ghosts? I thought ghosts appeared because of an injustice.”

  “No, it’s because the working classes are traditionally more superstitious,” Shape explained, as if talking to a child. “The streets of ancient London followed the leylines, and they were traced over by hedgerows and canals. The low marshlands were poor areas largely because they flooded regularly. Water and fog brought illness, deaths created superstitions; that’s why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End and the areas around railway termini rather than the city’s prosperous North.”

  “Wow, I never thought of it like that,” said Ali. But she was always the first to admit she wasn’t much of a thinker.

  “I have some questions,” I said, because I knew how Shape got if you let him have his way. He needed to be challenged, otherwise he would just walk over us. He was like that all through school, and he was like it once we were together on the same course at St Martin’s. He’s probably even worse now that he’s in banking. We don’t speak any more.

  Shape sighed in annoyance. “You always do have questions, Max.”

  “First, how are we going to find a house with a revenant, and second, how do we gather the physical evidence we need?”

  “Look, are you on board with this project or not? You could get amazing material for your degree show.”

  “Yeah, I’m on board. But I just don’t see how we’re going to pull it off from a practical point of view.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to work out the physical side of things later. First we need to find the right house.”

  I liked Shape then because I thought he cared about the world. He helped set up an innovative fund for earthquake victims at St Martin’s and started a huge viral campaign to save the sacred white rhino – okay, so neither of those projects actually worked out, but the ideas were there. He always said he wanted to do some good in the world, like Bob Geldof and Bono. Shape’s parents were uber-rich, but he said he never took a penny off them because they voted Conservative. They wanted him to go into banking right from the start but he defied them by taking up textile design, and now they were really angry with him, which made him really happy.

  We were walking down Coburg Street, going towards Starcross Street. There were Indian restaurants and corner pubs, and rows of low two-floor Victorian houses with their ground floors converted into shops. I looked at the upstairs windows and saw dirty net curtains, rain-stains, ragged lines of washing on blue and red nylon lines, bicycles on balconies. Quite a lot of Indian kids. There was a big council estate just behind them, ugly modern utility buildings sticking above the slate roofline of the terrace.

  “According to the book, this is the spot where seven separate ley lines cross,” said Shape. “We should start here. Ali, go up and ask those kids if they know of any strange occurrences happening in the houses around here.” He pointed to a hoodie gang in shiny blue track suits loitering outside a halal butchers.

  I watched Ali hesitate. She didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of Shape, because she was kind of in love with him even though he barely noticed her, so she went over to talk to the kids. We watched her talking to them for a minute or so. She came back.

  “I couldn’t understand a word they said,” she admitted. “They have this funny accent.” Ali was quite posh and hadn’t spent much time in London before she got accepted at St Martin’s. She probably never had much of a chance to talk to Asian people in Norfolk, where her folks lived, not unless they were her mum’s cleaners or something.

  “That’ll be the working class slang they use. You fail, Ali. Three fails and you’re off the team, okay?” She looked shamefaced at Shape, and mumbled an apology. “Okay, I can see I’ll have to sort this out. What we’ll do is look for the houses that sit exactly on the confluence of ley lines. That’s where the presence of revenants is strongest.”

  It was grey and brown and drab around here, and just starting to rain, but I was intrigued about what we might find, and anyway we had nothing better to do today. We reached another row of houses (they all look the same), clean and still and quiet, but these ones had black iron railings and brown brick basements you could see down into. The corner sign said Phoenix Street. Shape raised his eyes at me when he saw that. There was a shop at one end selling weird fruit and fat knobbly vegetables, most of which I wasn’t familiar with.

  “Go in there and ask the guy if they’ve had any spectral activity in this zone,” said Shape.

  Spectral activity? I thought. Suddenly he’s the expert on ghost-hunting, and designating tasks out to his employees? Where was he when Ali and I spent a freezing night in Lesnes Abbey waiting for the ghost of a monk to appear? This is how it always was with Shape. The night in the Abbey hadn’t gone well. I thought the cold air might drive Ali into my arms for warmth at least, but all she talked about was him.

  Shape peered through the window at the shopkeeper. “He looks Indian, which means he’ll be more spiritually in touch with such things,” he told us. “There’s no point in asking white people, they no longer have access to their souls.”

  So I went into the Am-La Grocery Store. It was the most cluttered, overstocked store I’d ever been in. The bored boy behind the counter was barely visible under red and silver lottery tickets and chocolate bars. He was watching a blurry bootleg Bollywood film on the tiny monitor above his head. I bought a packet of mints because I felt a bit embarrassed, and asked him. “Excuse me? We’re doing some research for a student project? And we were wondering if you ever heard about there being any ghosts around here?”

  He turned to me with sleepy eyes and realized he’d been asked something unusual. “Ghosts?” he repeated, like he was trying out the word.

  “Yeah, we heard there’s a ghost in one of the houses.”

  I had trouble understanding what he was say
ing because he had a strong accent and spoke so fast, but part of it was (I thought): “The house down the street, man, the empty one. There’s some old lady who haunts the place.” And he pointed back along the street. “She’s down there,” he said, emphasizing with a jab of the finger. “We see her at the window sometimes. In the basement. Real scary.”

  I was pathetically excited; I’d found our first lead. Why did I put so much store by winning Shape’s approval? I went back out, where Shape and Ali were sheltering from the rain. “He says there’s the ghost of an old lady that appears just down here, they see her sometimes and she’s really scary.”

  “Well, of course I knew we’d find her,” Shape said casually. “Doesn’t he know which house?”

  I didn’t want to go back in the shop and ask him again, so I said “Let’s just take a look. Where are the ley lines the strongest?”

  Shape took out his book and followed the scribbly map he’d made. “Two houses from the end,” he said with absolute certainty, so that’s where we went. We peered down into the basement but the room was dark behind the curtainless window and we couldn’t see in.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s living there,” said Ali.

  “Maybe the living residents couldn’t handle it,” Shape replied, opening the gate and going down. “The manifestation probably drove them out. They didn’t tell anyone because they were scared of looking crazy. That’s what usually happens in these cases, you know.”

  Shape always acted like he was the only living authority on these things, even though he was new to ghost-hunting. Ali and I had been doing it for ages, while Shape was off getting involved in lots of other stuff, student activism that mostly involved wildly unmanageable plans and half-hearted complaints rather than anything that instigated positive action. “I must challenge the lies and expose the truth because I’m the only one who cares.” That was his mantra, but he never seemed to expose anything except his own inability to finish what he started. Basically he would try anything if he thought it would annoy his parents.

  “What if it’s got a burglar alarm?” I asked, worried.

  “Max, these are working class people who haven’t anything worth stealing, why would they have an alarm? All they have left is their dignity.” He reached the bottom and peered in through the dirty glass. He checked his book again. “Yeah, this is definitely the right house.” He wiped the window with the end of his scarf. “The rooms are empty, probably between tenants.”

  We ventured down the stairs behind him and looked in. I could see a room lined in brown wallpaper and dirty wall-to-wall reddish carpet. A fireplace. Some cardboard boxes and dirty rags on the floor. A ratty-looking sofa. An open doorway led into something darker, a hallway I guessed.

  Shape was trying the front door, but of course it was locked. He shone his key-ring torch through the gaps. “It’s bolted. We’d have to go in through the window. That’s just got an old-fashioned catch.”

  “That’s breaking and entering,” said Ali, concerned.

  “No, not if it’s empty, it’s squatting and that’s completely legal,” Shape told her. “Besides, if there’s a problem with the police I’ll just tell them who my father is. We’ll need some tools. We can come back another time for that.”

  “We need to hold a proper watch first,” said Ali. “We don’t bring equipment for that because we need to verify the site. In other words, we have to see or hear something that will convince us the place has a spirit connection, otherwise we could waste weeks just hanging around at a dead venue.”

  “Okay, we do that, then if there’s any evidence of spirit manifestation, we come back and break in, yes?”

  And suddenly we had a plan. We returned the same night at nine, went for a few beers in the corner pub and then headed back down to the house in Phoenix Street. A couple of Indian teens were hanging on the opposite pavement as usual, looking like they were waiting to pull drug runs. Shape opened the gate and we went down to the basement. We had these green nylon tripod stools that looked like small umbrellas but folded out, making it easier to sit for ages; the main part of ghost hunting is sitting around.

  We were in the greatcoats we took to Glasto last year, so we’d be warm and dry if the rain started up again. We set a small pocket torch beside the window and angled it so that the beam was shining into the room. Then we settled down to wait. It smelled of rotting vegetables down in the well of the basement, and I could hear rats snuffling about somewhere.

  Nothing happened for the first half-hour. Then Ali said she saw something. “Where?” asked Shape.

  “Just in the corner, like a change of the shadow or something.” She tilted the torch and tried to see, but whatever there was, it wasn’t there now. “See, it was lighter by that wall and it went dark for a moment. Really, I saw a change,” she told him, anxious to be believed.

  The thing about ghost-hunting is, just as you’re about to give up for the night you always think you’re about to see something, and you end up staying one more minute. You become convinced that if you pack up to go, you’ll miss the moment. And that’s what nearly happened here. Shape was bored, I could feel it, the rain had started up again and the last Tube was going soon. Ali kept moving the torch around, and Shape kept telling her to leave it alone, and something caught Shape’s eye. “Turn off the torch,” he hissed at Ali, and leaned into the window, searching the room. And we unconsciously mimicked him, one on either side.

  And then, suddenly and shockingly, we saw it. A woman’s ghostly face, impossibly drawn, blank and paper-white, right in front of us, just an inch the other side of the glass, its mouth a dark ‘O,’ hair wild, mad eyes wide – a textbook ghost. And something more – a sense of ancient tragedy, there for a second only and then gone, vanishing into nothing.

  “Whoa!” We fell back off our stools, then packed up and shot up the stairs so fast that we embarrassed ourselves. We were shaken, but after a minute Shape was jazzed and wanted to go back down. “We all saw it, didn’t we? The manifestation? We should go and take another look.”

  “No,” I said, “we have to get the equipment. We can come back tomorrow night.”

  “But what if she doesn’t reappear?” Ali twisted her rainbow-coloured braids anxiously.

  “They’re drawn to the life-force of the living,” said Shape, suddenly the expert again. “Max is right, we’ll come back tomorrow.”

  We returned home and over the next day we collected what we needed. Infra-red equipment, night-vision digital recorder, barometer, EMF detector, hydrometer, spirit wind chime, motion detector, talcum powder, a decent clock. We’d have liked a thermal imaging scope to find cold spots, but they were too expensive. Shape was impressed.

  We arranged to meet at 11:00pm outside Euston station. Ali and I got to carry all the equipment. The rain had died down to a thin, greasy drizzle that made the sodium-yellow pavements slippery. We headed over to the house, and noted that neither of the houses on either side had their lights on, which was a good thing if we were about to take up house-breaking. Luckily, the bad weather had forced the hoodies off the streets.

  Shape had brought a crowbar with him, and led the way down into the basement. He pushed one end under the rotting wood of the window sill and the catch popped, that easy, although we knew it would be harder to shut again. He had trouble opening the window, though, because the wood was damp and swollen, but eventually the three of us managed to work it up a little so that we could slither inside.

  There was enough ambient light from the street to let us see the room in dim form. We put our bags down and took a look around. The basement had been divided from the rest of the house – the whole building had probably been sliced into flats. There was a rank-smelling galley kitchen still filled with dirty pots. No electricity, something green and reeking in the dead fridge. Further along the corridor we found two bedrooms, one devoid of any furniture, the wallpaper damp and hanging down in swathes. The other had a single bed with a pile of eiderdowns on it,
and although I couldn’t see much here at the back of the house, it looked like there was something shifting about.

  “Rats,” said Shape. “Don’t go near them.”

  In the main living room (the one by which we entered) there were a few odd items lying around: a khaki bag full of old toys, some framed photographs of a man in uniform, a box of mildewed newspapers, more photos, some women’s clothes.

  We set up the equipment. It was cold in here. “Too cold,” said Shape. “We’re going to have to buy the thermal scope. I need to isolate the low temperature spots.”

  We arranged the motion detectors (which we had swiped from the college) on either side of the lounge, and set two digital cameras in position. We tied the wind chime to the bulb flex hanging from the ceiling rose. Finally, we spread talcum powder over the floor. Then we popped open a few beers and settled down to wait.

  After a while, inevitably, we fell asleep. But it was okay because the motion sensors were alarmed.

  The next thing I knew, Shape was shaking me. “What’s happening?” I whispered.

  “Listen,” said Ali.

  Faint but clear, a small bell was ringing. I sat up. “Is that the chimes?”

  “No, it’s coming from further away,” Shape whispered back. “A classic sign of spirit arrival.”

  “I don’t know, it’s sounds like it’s coming from outside. It could even be an office alarm.”

  “The room’s got colder – can’t you feel it?”

  “Christ, what’s that awful smell?”

  I looked across to the red digital readout on the clock. Midnight. I tried to see into the thick shadows, but maybe one of the street lights had gone out, because it seemed darker in the room now. I had brown spots swirling in my eyes, removing the distinct edges of the room. Ali was kneeling, straining to see. Shape was slowly rising, moving in a careful way that would not disturb the presence. He reached out and turned on the digital cameras. Then we waited. We waited for what seemed like twenty minutes, straining our ears, but nothing happened.