Hauntings

by Ian Whates (ed)

  Now I understand what I have to do. I’ve waited too long for this.

  ~*~

  I see Alvaro in the park, riding the roundabout, oblivious to the figure following him. Next I see Alvaro in the dirt, his tattered, bruised body crammed into a small cavity in the ground overgrown with weeds – it has been that long. I feel his last moments, struggling for breath as the earth buries him. His broken fingers reach out in desperation, blindly grasping at the bones of another child – Annie’s remains. I recognise the hand that had saved me.

  They are not alone. A myriad of broken bones and decayed frames twist in the darkness with them. A hill of bones rising above the mud in the cavern we used to play in.

  I know this place. It’s where the lavender grows. I’ve always been drawn to this spot. Did I always know she was here?

  ‘Shh, it’s all right, it’s okay, I can tell them where you are’, I whisper, tears dribbling into my mouth, making me retch, ‘It won’t be long now’.

  The icy grip in my chest eases just a little and I smell the lavender again. I can breathe. I’m ready to make the call.

  I pull out my mobile and punch in the number.

  ~*~

  A million questions –

  After they found the children, the police wanted to understand how I knew where they all were.

  Who am I?

  Most of all, was it me that murdered all of those poor children?

  Luckily I have alibis. I’m always home; cooking, cleaning, fawning over Mike. Entertaining his friends.

  If I had been born before it all started I probably wouldn’t be safe now. I’m not sure they would’ve given me the benefit of the doubt. But they keep asking; How do I know?

  It’s the ‘things I see’ I tell them, ‘If you saw, what I saw . . .’

  They look at me strangely, disbelief etched onto their faces.

  But it doesn’t matter what they think.

  Annie and Alvaro can rest now; and their parents can move on.

  So can I.

  Presence

  Paul Kane

  Life is sweet; that’s what he used to say.

  He’d borrowed it from his grandfather, who said those words on his deathbed. What Terry used to say, but couldn’t anymore. He was gone. Had been gone for a good three months – not that any week, day, hour, minute or second of those months had been what you could call good.

  Not for her, not left behind like this. Annette Griffiths gave a small laugh, which held no humour at all. Left behind; what a strange phrase. Like she was the loser in some kind of race. Or, more accurately, a marathon – where the runner in front had suddenly sped up; then turned a corner, out of sight.

  Would she ever catch up to him? Perhaps, someday. But not in this life, because it wasn’t any kind of race you wanted to finish, let alone win.

  Annette stood and stared at the boxes and bags in front of her on the landing. Not much to show for a life: a person’s belongings reduced to so much detritus waiting to be taken to charity shops. Although it was nice to think that someone, somewhere, would get the benefit of clothes and books that were of no use to her.

  Just reminders of the stabbing pain she still felt.

  Of no use to Terry, either. Not now. Not anymore. Never again... She bit her lip, fighting back tears that were threatening to break free from the corners of her eyes. Annette shook her head. She’d done enough of that; too much. Time to pull herself together, be strong. Become the person that she’d pretended to be since –

  She’d played the part in public, and especially for little Hayley. There was no sense both of them being in bits; Hayley had always been a daddy’s girl, Terry’s little princess. In a lot of respects his death might even have hit her daughter harder than it had Annette, but then she’d always been quite a nervous child. Annette had only got her back to school a couple of weeks ago, and only then by bribing her that they might venture to Central Parks when the weather finally turned warmer. It would do them both good to spend more time together, especially away from here. To try and get back to some kind of normality, whatever that meant.

  There you go again, sorting things out, she said to herself. Trying to fix things.

  Terry had always called her the practical one, while he was more emotional – probably where Hayley got it from. He’d often go off in a huff if they had an argument – which only happened rarely, it had to be said – while she’d want to just fix things again, but finally resorting to tears when she got nowhere.

  Not many got to see the softer side of Annette. Perhaps only Terry had really seen it.

  Her eyes pricked again.

  Try not to think about it. Think about something else, like the day you met – introduced by a mutual friend at Uni – or your wedding day, how handsome Terry had looked with his wavy brown hair, how beautiful he said you’d been in your dress.

  Try not to think of that other day, try not to hear the phone’s shrill ring. And, of course, suddenly she was there again, picking it up, questioning the sense of the caller.

  “No... That can’t be... You’ve got it wrong... He was only here half an hour ago...” As if that made a difference, as if you couldn’t be here one minute, gone the next. It was the way of the world. Life and...

  He’d gone out for a walk to the shops, that’s all. He got so bored these days since he’d lost his job and couldn’t find another. He’d been a salesman, used to travelling, so being cooped up indoors for too long drove him crazy.

  It had happened as he’d been about to cross the street to the newsagents, to pick up one of his monthly magazines. One of those writing ones, a life-long ambition (in a life which hadn’t been that long) he was hoping to turn into a profession now he had some time on his hands. Always the creative soul. Not that he’d done any actual writing yet, just read about it, just talked about it. Well, no writing that she knew about anyway... “I want to help bring in some more money,” he’d told her, the redundancy package he’d got being what it was... and almost exhausted. “Then you wouldn’t have to do so much of that book keeping stuff of an evening.”

  She’d always been good with figures, always seen them in her head, been able to work out sums. Solving problems. But old school, jotting things down on paper – actual book keeping, in an actual book. In spite of the fact she knew how to use them, she had no time for computers and programs that would do this for her. Where was the fun in that? It was something... there was that word again... practical she could do.

  But Terry had found a way to help with the money, hadn’t he? In a roundabout fashion. A life insurance policy that meant he had to be –

  She’d pictured the scene in her mind so many times, like something out of a medical drama. Terry lifting his foot, about to take a step off the pavement, then screwing up his face, clutching at his head, doing a swan dive any premiere league footballer would be proud of.

  The reality was almost definitely much, much worse. Terry had probably vomited – one of the early signs, apparently – maybe even fitted. Nobody would tell her. Not the owner of the paper shop, who’d eventually spotted Terry – how many people had simply walked by? – not the paramedics who were summoned. It was something she really didn’t need to know, but which she would often wonder about.

  She’d always imagined they’d go together. Old farts on a beach, sitting on a bench, watching the tide roll in and get sucked back out again. And waiting, simply waiting. Or in bed, a kiss on the cheek, a switching out of the light. A closing of the eyes. Then both waking up in... wherever it was you ended up. If you ended up anywhere. In her fantasy, they’d both go to that place together. Heaven possibly, where they’d sit on clouds and drink champagne with the angels all day, who’d congratulate them on lives well led. Tell them what good people they’d been, how they’d helped and cared for others... Well, done what they could. They gave to charity when they could afford it...

  Gave to charity shops. Annette’s eyes found the bags and boxes once more.

&
nbsp; No, don’t think about that. Think about... Too late, her mind had spun on – fast forwarding that replay of the day it happened. The day. The only day... Now she was with the fat, balding doctor and he was telling her all this stuff about brain haemorrhages, preparing her, she guessed. Saying it was more common than she thought, that they accounted for 13% of all strokes (unlucky for some, eh?); that people like President Roosevelt and Richard Burton had died of the same thing (she remembered thinking What? And then what?); saying it could happen at any age, that any of us could go just like that. And he’d clicked his fingers, actually clicked them. She could still hear that noise, same as she could the telephone.

  Click!

  Oblivion. Nothing on the other side. There couldn’t be. If she wasn’t with him, hadn’t gone at the same time to that paradise land up above, then how could she believe in –

  “Are you all right?” he asked her. The most stupid question in the history of stupid questions. How could she be all right? How could she ever be all right again? Yet she’d found herself nodding. The tears hadn’t come then; not yet.

  Not even when she’d had to identify the body, been ushered inside that cold room which looked as if all the colour had been leeched from it. She walked stiffly, like a zombie. No, no zombies. There was no coming back from this; her husband wasn’t going to sit up and try to eat her brains. This was real life. Real death, too.

  They’d opened that metal door, and she remembered thinking it was like some kind of huge filing cabinet for corpses. “Griffiths, Griffiths... give me a second, ah yes, here we are, under the G’s. As in G for Gone.”

  Even as they pulled back that cloth covering his face, right up to the last second, she’d hoped they’d made some kind of mistake. That this was somebody else’s spouse, someone else’s problem to fix.

  “Is this your husband, Mrs Griffiths?” the man had asked – she couldn’t even remember what that one looked like.

  She’d wanted to shake her head. Of course this wasn’t Terry, because her husband was alive and well. She’d only seen him a couple of hours ago, called goodbye to him as he’d gone out through the front door – oh, how she wished she’d gone downstairs, left what she was doing (she couldn’t remember what it was now, nothing important, certainly not as important as seeing your husband alive for the last time, kissing him, holding him while he was still warm). Wished she’d rushed downstairs and begged him not to go: “What do you need that stupid magazine for anyway? I need you more.”

  But it wasn’t the leaving that had done this, not the leaving of the house at any rate. Could have happened while he was sitting on the sofa. She couldn’t blame that; couldn’t blame anything. There was nothing to blame.

  People just don’t die like this, she remembered thinking. They die in car accidents, of terminal illnesses that drag on for months, years even. They’re stabbed by muggers. Or lost at sea. But not this, she couldn’t get her head around this.

  Again, she’d found herself nodding. It was him, even though it wasn’t. Even though the colour had drained from him, just as it had the room.

  The rest had been a bit of a blur: being driven home, sitting with a neighbour who’d been dragged into this – old Mrs Bell, who’d rubbed Annette’s shoulders and said “There, there” at regular intervals; then Hayley arriving home, having walked with her friend and her mum, as per usual on Thursdays, Annette still not crying even as she had to break the news to her daughter about what had happened.

  Next all the arrangements for the funeral, done on autopilot – the service itself at the local church, during which she remembered picturing God, white flowing beard like Father Christmas, hand curled into a gun shape and pointing, aiming at Terry, then thumb coming down like a hammer...

  Going through the motions.

  She remembered the snow on the ground, though. A watery sun straining to break through the clouds above, but offering no warmth even if it could. A handful of friends and relatives stood around the grave. And the coffin, so small she wondered how Terry could possibly be inside that box...

  How his stuff could possibly be inside those in front of her now.

  It was a couple of weeks after that, on Terry’s birthday (as opposed to his much more significant deathday), that she began to cry. Inevitable really; sooner or later something had to give. She’d waited for Hayley to go into a coma at last, after crying herself to sleep again. It had finally sunk in that Terry was never coming back, that she couldn’t fix things no matter how practical she was. And she’d wept all night, then been forced to put on the act for Hayley the next morning – everything’s okay, you can break down but not Mum – and so it had gone on for a month or more until she thought there were no tears left in her.

  The pricking again; there were tears left. Perhaps it had still been too soon to clear all this stuff away. And she still had a few bits and bobs left in the room Terry liked to call his study – really it was the little bedroom. A room she hadn’t even dared enter until today.

  No, the time was right. There were too many reminders, too many things to trip her up – making her more likely to cry in front of Hayley. Annette went back into Terry’s study, started to clear the last remnants of him from the room. Not in the spiritual sense, because she didn’t believe in all that; if his physical form was no longer here, that meant he wasn’t here; if he wasn’t around to touch, to hold, then how could she truly ‘feel’ him?

  In the study, especially, there had been so many things associated with Terry. He’d spent so much time in here since they’d ‘let him go’ from work.

  Was that what she was doing? Letting him go? Or trying to?

  As she was flitting about, however, she caught the corner of the desk. There was a beeping noise, and she realised she’d knocked the mouse sitting on top of the mat. Suddenly Terry’s computer had sparked into life. Annette started, then frowned. It took her a moment to realise that the thing must have been on standby all this time, that Terry had never had a chance to switch it off. Why would he, when he was only intending to be a short while?

  Annette couldn’t help herself, she sat down in the chair and gazed at the screen – wondering whether she might find something, the last thing he wrote perhaps, a story he might have been working on and never told her about, let alone showed her. But instead she found herself looking at a page on a website.

  Terry’s page on a social networking site – something he’d set up when he decided to begin writing. “Says here it helps to have some kind of online presence,” Terry had told her, looking up from his magazine one day.

  A photo of him taken on holiday several years ago – when Hayley was just a toddler – stared back at her. He looked so happy, so at peace.

  Her eyes were misting again, but she fought it. In spite of herself, Annette took hold of the mouse, clicking the link that would take her to his wall. Perhaps he’d been on that before he –

  The browser took her to the login page. The site had obviously logged Terry out after a certain amount of time. Annette struggled to remember his email and password, but it didn’t matter because the computer had remembered them. She logged in, navigating to his opening page, then clicked on his wall.

  The saltwater was welling as she saw some of the messages, from well-wishers hoping Terry’d had a nice Christmas with his family, hoping he had a lovely birthday. Virtual friends from various parts of the globe, who didn’t know Terry wasn’t around anymore to read their posts.

  She continued scrolling downwards, then stopped. There was the final message from Terry, left on the day... On the day, the only day.

  It’s so cold and dark now. I don’t like it.

  It had been at the beginning of winter that day, it was true. Temperatures were plummeting, the nights were drawing in. Several of Terry’s friends – he had thirty or so, she noted, though no family – had liked this comment, some had even agreed that they didn’t care for the new season very much either.

  The only thing was that Terr
y had gone out for his final walk mid-morning. Okay, it hadn’t been bright sunlight, but you could hardly describe it as dark. Then Annette noticed the time, and a breath caught halfway up her throat.

  The message had been left around midday, around the time she was identifying Terry in the morgue.

  There was a pinging sound and Annette jumped in her seat, the breath suddenly shaking loose, but another catching again just as quickly. When she’d had a second or so to compose herself, Annette traced the source of the noise. The messages part of the taskbar had lit up, flashing excitedly, finally gaining someone’s attention now that she’d logged in.

  Annette hovered over it with the cursor, half of her wanting to see, the other half terrified of what might be in there, lurking. A message from a secret lover, perhaps? No, Terry wasn’t like that; never had been. She could have put him in a room full of naked women and he’d just have tried to cover them up because he thought they were chilly.

  So what...?

  Annette could stand it no longer: she clicked on his messages. There were several, but not incoming as she might have thought. These were all in his outgoing folder. Who the hell had been using her husband’s... her – yes, say it – dead husband’s account? She’d get to the bottom of it, whatever happened. Personally see to it that they hurt as badly as she did right now.

  They were messages from Terry, but then they would be if someone had hacked him. And they were to her account, the one he’d insisted on setting up for her so she could be his first friend on there (“It’ll be like a snowball effect, you’ll see...” not much of a snowball, thirty people). She clicked on the first, dated a day after he’d suffered the collapse: