A Spookies Compendium

by David Robinson

  Scanning the religion and philosophy sections, she found many works on mainstream theology, and to her surprise and delight, a good number on the occult and paranormal.

  Turning away from the shelves, she found a single volume left on a table, opened at a picture, a caricature of a dwarfish man, dressed in medieval garb, a chaperon hat covering his flowing, flaxen hair, and a tiny, goatee beard on the end of his chisel chin. Lower down, his boots were thigh length and the overall impression was one of mischief.

  “Mr Punch,” Pete said, looking over her shoulder.

  “It’s a depiction of the Norse god, Loki,” Sceptre corrected him. She closed the book and studied the front cover. The Pagan Cults of Ancient Britain, she read, by Norman Trent. She turned the book over in her hands, opened it at the back and read the brief author bio inside the dust cover. “Look at this,” she murmured. “Trent is not only an old boy, but an authority on pagan religions, too.”

  “Come again?” Kevin asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Talking to myself.”

  “I used to do a lot of that when I was community constable on Cranley,” Pete commented. “At least it felt like I was talking to myself.”

  Kevin patted the camera. “We’re done if you are, Sceptre.”

  Closing the book, tucking it under her arm, she followed them from the library, out onto the corridor and watched as Pete ran the cables back to the switchboard by the landing camera.

  They were a matter of concern for Pete. “We’ll have to be careful moving about during the night. With all these cables scattered about the floor, one trip and you’ll break your damn neck.”

  When everything was rigged, the cameras wired to the mains, they ran more AVA cable, down the staircase, along the ground floor and into the dining hall, where Kevin sat at his computer to commission the system.

  Sceptre looked over his shoulder as he opened the software. The screen was divided into nine small squares, the central one a control area. Of the eight surrounding ones, four remained blank, with only the four corners showing views from the cameras, all which were set to night-vision, lending a pale green/white tint to the pictures.

  One by one, selecting each camera from the control area, Kevin tested them, adjusting the focus, panning left, right, up, down. He ran through the PIR checks on his control screen, ensuring that every sensor was active and, according to the computer at least, working. At last, he declared himself happy with the system.

  “I’ve reset all the counters to zero, so even if we miss something on the computer, it’ll show up on the cameras.” He checked his watch. “Not bad. Only quarter past ten and we’re in business. All we gotta do now is wait for the ghouls to turn up.”

  In deference to them having done all the physical work, Sceptre made tea for them, and they sat at a table by the service counter. Kevin played games on his mobile phone, Pete went back to reading the Ashdale Evening Chronicle, and Sceptre opened the pages of her A4 pad and the book preparing to make notes.

  “Nicking books, Sceptre? Not like you,” Pete commented as he turned to the sports pages.

  “Borrowing, Peter,” she said, “not stealing.” She tapped the book. “You never know when references to a volume like this might come in handy.”

  “As long as it keeps you awake, Sceptre,” Kevin said.

  “Which is more than Sceptre’s ghosts are doing,” said Pete with a yawn. “I’ll grab some shuteye. Wake me about eleven fifteen.”

  Chapter Six

  Pete’s watch read 11:45 when he walked back into the school after his second round with the swipe card. Outside, the temperature had dropped well below zero. It was not much warmer inside, but the school policy of leaving the heating on a low setting, even during the holidays, allowed him to thaw his fingers on a radiator.

  Waking into the dining hall, he was not much surprised to find both Sceptre and Kevin asleep. Sceptre had been nodding off before he left and although it was Kevin’s watch, his portly pal’s eyes had looked heavy.

  The computer screen was flashing. Sceptre’s head rested on her arms across the open book, while Kevin sat slumped in his chair, his head cranked back, mouth open as if he were waiting for someone to pour food and drink in.

  Grinning to himself, Pete nudged Kevin’s chair. “Hey, tubby, you dropped a fiver.”

  Kevin jumped. “Huh? What? Where?”

  Sceptre stirred and Pete laughed. “The computer’s flashing at you, which to be fair is as close as you’re ever likely to get to a flasher.”

  “You nearly gave me a rotten heart attack.” Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Kevin half turned in his chair and checked the monitor. The border around one of the mini-screens was flickering, and in the central control area, a red warning flashed: Zone 4 alert! “Something’s triggered the system in the library,” he reported.

  Pete tossed his keys on the table. “I’ll go. You two stay here.”

  “Wait, Pete,” Sceptre ordered. “I’ll send Fishwick.”

  “Now there’s a thing,” Pete speculated while Sceptre talked to her butler. “How come Fishwick doesn’t trigger our systems?”

  Kevin’s fingers danced across the computer keyboard, killing the alerts. “I have said this before. I said if all we needed was proof of ghosts for the TV people, why don’t we get Fishwick to pull a few stunts for us? Like, y’know, showing up in a corner of the living room, or making the table rise during a séance, or summat.”

  “Fishwick doesn’t manifest,” Sceptre explained, having spoken with her butler. “I am his medium and most of his interaction with our world is through me. He will manipulate matter occasionally, but that’s all. Besides, Kevin, as I’ve explained on many occasions, video evidence alone is not enough. You keep telling us that you can manipulate recordings to prove whatever you want. We need solid evidence that will convince the toughest sceptic.” She laid her eyes on Pete.

  “And they don’t come any tougher than me,” he responded. “What does old Fishwife have to say?”

  “He assures me there are spirits about, but he has not noticed any particular activity in the library.”

  “Ooh,” said Pete, mock scared. “Does that mean we’ve got a real live ghost on our hands?”

  “As opposed to a read dead ghost?” Kevin too dripped sarcasm. “Do we want to wait here until Fishwick deals with them?”

  Pete stood. “You can suit yourself. I’ll go up there, see what’s going on.”

  Sceptre, too, stood up. “I’ll come with you. You staying here, Kevin?”

  “Oh naturally.” Kevin dripped sarcasm. “The minute you said you were both going, I thought what I need to do is stay put, on my own so the sky pilot can throw his two shilling piece at me.” He stood up. “You lead, I’ll follow.”

  “Sky pilot?” Sceptre asked as they walked along the corridor.

  “Local slang for a vicar or priest,” Pete translated. “Anyone who makes with the dog collar.” Turning up the staircase, he reminded them, “Watch the cables. We don’t want anyone tripping over and breaking his neck.”

  “What about her neck?” Sceptre asked.

  Reaching the first landing where the stairs levelled off for two or three yards, Pete faced her, leaned on the banister and gave her his most charming smile. “If you hurt yourself, Sceptre, you don’t have to worry. I’m here to kiss it better.” He grinned at Kevin. “On the other hand, if he needs the kiss of life, I’m afraid he’s a goner.”

  Sceptre pushed him ahead. “Get a move on.”

  When they reached the upper corridor, they found it as barren as before. Sceptre nodded Pete ahead. “Library.”

  Pete took a pace forward and tripped over the cables, spinning the camera through 180o and yanking the jacks out of the camera.

  Kevin tutted. “You big-footed berk. You just warned us to watch for the cables and now you trip over the bloody things. Why don’t you watch where you’re walking?” He lifted the cables and showed them one jack that had come adrift from the wirin
g. “Not only that, but you’ve broken it.” He dug into his utility belt, coming out with a cable stripper and a small screwdriver. “It won’t take a couple of minutes.”

  “We’ll go on to the library,” Sceptre said.

  Kevin nodded.

  “Oh, Kev,” said Pete, “if you see anything of the man in black, tell him I want a word.”

  With a grin, Pete walked off. Sceptre gave Kevin an encouraging pat on the shoulder and followed. At the second door along, they turned into the library.

  “Everything just as we left it,” said Sceptre.

  “Not quite everything,” Pete said, checking the timer on the camera. “Kev told us he set them all at zero,” he said, “but this has recorded for ten seconds.” Taking his eye from the viewscreen, he asked, “Does he download all the footage from all the cameras.”

  “As far as I’m aware, it happens automatically,” Sceptre said. “The cameras are on standby most of the time. They only begin to record when something triggers them, and the images are automatically transferred to the laptop.”

  “I don’t know how I would have got through the night without learning all that, Sceptre.”

  She ignored his sarcasm and let her eyes roam the room.

  “We need to check the computer when we get downstairs,” she heard Pete say.

  “Look at this.” Sceptre’s voice had a distant quality of wonderment.

  She had moved across the room, to a table on top of which was an open book.

  Ready to leave, Pete did not see the problem. “There are some untidy sods about, and they’re not all me and Kevin.”

  “But this wasn’t here earlier. I’ll stake my life on that.”

  “Sceptre. You’re imagining things, again.”

  “Pete,” she insisted, “this was not here when we left the library.”

  “I’m not gonna argue about it. We’ll know for sure when we check the footage,” he said.

  Sceptre picked up the book. “All right. Have it your way.”

  Pete watched her read the first few lines and then, her thumb marking the page, she closed it to check the title. Her eyes widened.

  “What is it?” He asked

  She held the book up for him to read the title: My Scrapbook of Ashdale; Oliver Henderson. “Probably some fourth former,” she speculated, “but look at the page it was open on.”

  She showed Pete the page, to which was glued a clipping from the Ashdale Chronicle. Wicked Witches commission Arena Time Capsule, read the headline, and beneath it was a photograph of the sisters smiling into the camera and stood by a large diameter cylinder.

  “Must be the only time in their lives that they’ve smiled,” Pete said.

  “Peter,” Sceptre said, the use of his full name signalling her seriousness, “why would the spirits leave this book for me to find, open at this page?”

  Pete snorted. “You do talk some twaddle.”

  “Pete, I …”

  “Sceptre, Oliver Henderson is not just some fourth former. His dad owns Ashdale Construction and Demolition, the people who built the Arena. That’s why the kid kept that clipping. And he was probably a fan of the Wicked Bitches.”

  “Witches,” Sceptre corrected him. “That does not explain how the book came to be …”

  A cry from the corridor cut Sceptre off and made Pete’s heart leap.

  *****

  If you see the man in black, tell him I want a word. Pete’s last words rang in Kevin’s head as he worked on the cables.

  “All right for him,” he muttered. “Six foot nineteen, all muscle and no bloody brains, he could take a dozen men in black. Bloody galoot.”

  Kevin’s chubby fingers worked with an accuracy that few would suspect he possessed, stripping back the insulation, slotting the fine cable into terminals, and bringing a screwdriver, so slender that it was not much more than a jeweller’s blade, to the screws.

  “And it was him who broke the damned cable,” he grumbled.

  A chill came over him.

  “What a way to spend the night,” he grumbled on. “Sitting in a draughty school, playing ghost hunters. And she knew I’d had enough in the rotten crypt just now.”

  His work finished, he tested the connection, gripping the cable and tugging on the jack to ensure that it would not break, then plugged it back into the camera.

  Switching the machine on, he pressed his eye to the viewfinder.

  “Vali.” The voice was a soft whisper.

  “Stop messing about, Pete,” he ordered, and swept the camera side to side, ensuring that the auto-focus was working.

  Putting the camera on standby, he walked across the front, making sure the PIR system was working, then returned to the rear to reset everything. He shivered. It really was getting cold in here.

  “Vali.”

  “I’ll not tell you again, Pete. Knock it off.” Getting more annoyed with his best mate, he called up the settings menu on the viewscreen. “Always the same, always gotta wind me up.” He shivered again. How come he hadn’t noticed the cold before?

  He could hear Pete and Sceptre talking in the library. From here it was incoherent muttering but it comforted him. At least he wasn’t alone. He could not think of anything worse than being alone in a place like this.

  He recognised the same schism in himself that was probably a part of most people. He loved horror movies, he loved ghost stories, but he was terrified of being alone in a dark and empty building.

  “It’s like I’m scared that all those yukkies out of the movies will come to get me,” he muttered.

  Not everyone was like that, of course. Pete wasn’t. Pete had more balls than Wimbledon.

  Kevin called up the recording counter. Odd. It read eleven seconds. He’d set them all to zero on the computer. How could…?

  He grinned at his own stupidity. Pete and Sceptre had triggered it when they walked to the library …

  “No that’s not right, you berk,” he said to himself.

  Pete had tripped over the cables and yanked them out, disconnecting the entire system. The Parachute Regiment could have marched across the corridor and neither the camera nor the PIR would have triggered.

  If it wasn’t Pete and Sceptre, then who?

  “Vali.”

  “Shut it, Pete. I’m trying to think.”

  Kevin turned the problem over in his mind. How could the camera begin recording with the automatic systems disconnected? He grinned. Simple. Battery backup.

  The chill swept through him again, and this time he was sure it had nothing to do with the cold of a winter’s night.

  “Vali.”

  “Pete …”

  Hadn’t he just heard Pete and Sceptre talking in the library? It couldn’t be Pete.

  Fear crept into his heart. He recalled the scene of an English pub he had witnessed in the crypt when he gripped that old coin. Right now, he was not touching anything other than the camera and he had owned it for at least a year. If he was going to get any visions off that, he would have had them a long time ago. Not that he had had visions off anything until a few hours ago but …

  His hair tingled, his steady hand trembled and he felt an urgent need of a lavatory. His eyes focussed on the viewscreen menu and he dare not look anywhere else. With a shaking finger, he pushed the button to commission the settings. The system came alive, the camera switching into record mode, the auto-focus tuning the lens, and the whole machine turned through a few degrees.

  “Vali.”

  Dragging his eyes from the view screen, looking down at the tripod feet, Kevin shook. He tried to remember when he had last been this scared, and he couldn’t. He decided it did not matter. Now was all that concerned him.

  And yet, he had to know. He had to know what had brought the camera into action. Of course, it could just be a mouse. A living creature, it would be sufficient to trigger the PIR and bring the system on.

  The PIR beam tracked the corridor at waist level and above. “It’d have to be a bleeding big
mouse, Kev,” he said.

  “Vali.”

  And mice didn’t talk about valleys.

  Kevin drew in his breath, filling his tobacco depleted lungs with as much air as he could draw in. He forced his eyes up, through the tripod geometry, past the motor drive, to the body of the camera, skimming over the cable arrangement at its back, and the buttons and switches on its side, to the viewscreen. Even here, he paused as if admiring the smooth lines of the hinged joint. Finally, he dragged his eyes to the screen and focussed.

  His heart leapt!

  The corridor was the same. Nothing had changed. There was no sign of Pete or Sceptre and there were no giant mice. But at the far end, stood a figure. He was dressed from head to toe in black, looking straight into the lens of the camera.

  Kevin pulled his head away from the camera and stared down the corridor for real. Nothing. He breathed a sigh, and put his eye back to the camera. There he was.

  As Kevin watched, an intense chill came over him and the man in black moved towards him until it filled the tiny screen.

  “VALI!”

  Kevin let out a cry and his eyes glazed.

  *****

  They stood in a circle around him, their blood red robes a deep umber in the night. Up above, the standard flew, a garish yellow, with the cartoon face of their deity emblazoned on it.

  The High Master, the yellow slash of his robes distinguishing him from his disciples, looked down. His face was hidden by his hood but when he spoke, his voice betrayed no emotion. No pity, but no rancour. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You, of all people, should understand.”

  “If I’m so important, maybe I should be wearing those robes.”

  “Swede, you should know that I seek only to serve.” The High Master bowed his head.

  “False piety. This is not how it’s supposed to be,” snapped Swede. “I’ll have no part of murder, especially not hers.” Emotion brought his Scandinavian brogue to the fore. “I love her.”

  The High Master shook his head. “We’ve come too far, Swede, and I cannot allow you to jeopardise our work. I’ll give you one last chance. Change your mind, change your heart. Come back to us. Where you belong.”