Urban Occult

by Various

  But I couldn’t bring myself to rush. I had a shower, puzzling at the pine needles clogging the drain. I kept thinking of Thane, wondering whether I should call him. This wasn’t terribly professional of me, but of all the folks I’d interviewed, he seemed… nice enough.

  Damnit, what was I thinking?

  It was still raining by the time I got to town. I slunk into the newsroom but mercifully my late entry wasn’t noted. Bodhan was fairly chilled, but I needed to pull a serious rabbit out of my hat to get the piece filed for tomorrow’s papers. Thank God for sub-editors who’d catch my grammar gremlins on rushed editorial. Sure, Sue would be glaring daggers at me in a bit, but I’d buy her coffee to make up for any sloppy writing on my part.

  The door to Bodhan’s office was closed, which meant he wouldn’t bother me just yet, and I could make inroads on that piece. I had no idea what angle I’d take yet. I needed to listen to the interview. It was simply a case of plugging in earphones, pressing play and…

  Frogs. The glasslike notes of a stream cascading into a pool.

  My stomach lurched and I fumbled at the recorder, skipping ahead.

  More frogs. A nightjar, in the distance, exactly as I’d heard it last night. Skip ahead.

  A man spoke, his voice a rich baritone, “I am your shadow. I am because you are.”

  I swore and jabbed the power button, then sat there staring at the recorder. Bodhan’s door opened and two of the other journos exited, laughing loudly and trading banter with Bodhan, but I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about.

  My boss made eye contact with me and approached. “Hey, Lucinda. How was the interview with our friendly resident devil worshipper?”

  I swallowed, my skin gone cold and clammy. “He stood me up.” The words tripped over my lips with little consideration on my part.

  Bodhan wasn’t ready for the truth.

  Neither was I.

  The End

  The Other Woman

  Chris Barnham

  “You’re being haunted.”

  When Kim says this my first instinct is to laugh, but I take a breath and think for a moment. Maybe she’s right, maybe I am being haunted. That would explain a lot.

  Right from the start friends said the house in Kent was perfect for a ghost movie. On the brow of a hill outside Broadstairs, it had a view of the North Foreland lighthouse and the sea beyond. The garden brimmed with weeds and some of the rooms hadn’t seen daylight since the previous owner waved her sweetheart off to war. It was too big for me and Becky, but we had visions of doing it up ready for the children who never came. We got the place cheap and worked hard on it for six months until it began to look habitable and the talk of ghosts faded away.

  Becky never lived in the house. We were trying for a child that year and she went for some tests that picked up a lump in her left ovary. It turned out that wasn’t the only lump and in a few short months I was holding her hand in a hospice as she floated away from me on a tide of morphine. I held her hand for long time; until a nurse gently eased open my fingers and I went back to our big house alone.

  People told me I was mad to live in the house once Becky was gone. On dark nights the wind whipped the trees outside into a frenzy and I walked through the looming dark rooms with a glass of whisky in my hand, wondering where my life had gone. But time passed and things got better. It was a good place to work and I now had time without interruption. A year after Becky’s death I sold my first script, quickly followed by two more, and within another year my growing success tempted me back out into the world, able to meet people without glazing over or embarrassing them with my silent tears. That was when I met Kim.

  It never came easily to me, meeting women. I had been with Becky for nearly ten years, since we were at college. Before her there were very few others, and none serious unless you counted my months with mad Ivy. That was a narrow escape; Ivy Florence Elizabeth Crowley, or as my friends called her, Poison Ivy. I hooked up with her in my second year at college and I must have been suffering from stress or something because we had nothing in common.

  Meeting Kim was unexpected, but just what I needed when it happened. I was in the Beach Parlour café one afternoon with my laptop, working on a new outline. I became conscious that someone was watching me and when I looked up I met the eyes of the darkly attractive woman sitting at a table a few yards away.

  “Your cup’s empty,” she said. “And you look like you could do with more coffee. Or something stronger.”

  We got talking and quickly moved on to a pub down at the harbour and things just went from there. I wouldn’t have said I was ready to get involved with another woman after what happened with Becky, but things seemed right with Kim. She didn’t crowd me, and didn’t rush things. She knew when I needed to be alone, and when to shake me out of silence. I felt like I knew her once, like she was an old friend come back from years abroad. This sense of familiarity was so strong that I questioned her a lot on her past; sure we must have met before.

  She didn’t move in with me. The house still had too much of Becky in it and Kim didn’t press the point. But before long we were together most of the time and Kim often stayed over. I was pleased she did. When things started happening I was glad I wasn’t on my own.

  I don’t know when it started. I remember a couple of times when Kim stayed and I woke up in the night with a powerful feeling that someone else was in the house. I lay in bed with Kim silent beside me and I could feel someone watching me, staring out from some part of the darkness. And there was a feeling of hostility, that’s the only way I can describe it. Like someone was staring in at me and Kim in bed and wanting us out. At first I dismissed these feelings. I told myself it was part of adjusting to being with someone after so long alone. If that was all that happened I would have forgotten it. The cat changed that.

  One Saturday morning I was in the kitchen making tea. Kim was still in bed. It was early, not yet light and the garden outside the kitchen window was a pool of shadows. I had a pedal bin next to the door that led out into the garden and I remember fishing the tea bags out of the cups and bending over the bin to get rid of them. My head was very close to the lower panel of the door.

  There was a loud thump on the door, inches from my ear, a blow so hard I expected the wood to splinter. I spun round and recoiled away from the door, my arm flailing sideways and knocking the two mugs of tea off the counter to shatter on the floor. I stared at the door for a few seconds as hot tea spread in a pool around my feet. I thought I heard a faint sound. It must have been the wind in the trees outside but in that moment it sounded like some kind of urgent wordless whispering, close by, as if someone unseen was in the room with me. Gooseflesh corrugated my bare arms, every hair ticklingly erect.

  “What is it?”

  Kim was behind me in my dressing gown. The breaking cups must have drawn her downstairs, although her eyes were fixed not on the tea pooling on the floor but on the silent back door. We opened the door together. There was no sound now in the house or beyond, but I still had that whispering in my head and I felt an odd reluctance to unlock the door, as if something might slip inside.

  Fat drops of dew dripped from watchful trees and at first glance the still-gloomy garden was empty; until Kim looked down.

  “Oh gross!”

  A dead cat, its head twisted unnaturally and its eyes blank like mother of pearl buttons. It had black fur, shiny in places with blood from invisible wounds. Above the cat a dark smear of blood marked where the body had struck the kitchen door. I stared hard all around the empty garden, looking for some clue to explain a dead cat flinging itself against my door.

  I cleaned things up and buried the cat as far away from the house as I could. A few days later I had the burglar alarm system serviced and new deadbolts fitted on all the exterior doors. It made no difference.

  Every night Kim stayed with me I was awake alone in the small hours, imagining movements in the quiet house. Sometimes I got up and walked through all
the rooms, turning on lights to scare away the shadows. I noticed in a way I had ignored before how bare some of the rooms were, as if they still waited for Becky to come back and fill them up the way she planned.

  One morning I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel round me as I stood in front of the basin to shave. When I looked at the mirror I dropped my razor into the sink. The glass was misty with condensation and someone had written the word ‘LEAVE’ in crude block capitals. I thought Kim was playing a stupid trick on me and called her into the bathroom. The expression on her face quickly put me right; she hadn’t written it.

  Another time I was upstairs, working in the room I used as a study, overlooking the back garden. I felt tense and gritty from lack of sleep the night before. I heard Kim come in the room behind me, her bare feet slapping softly on the wooden floorboards. Her hands kneaded my tight shoulders.

  “That’s nice. Just what I needed.”

  I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling. We stayed that way for a few minutes, her cool fingers massaging my neck, and then I heard her walk back out of the room. I stayed where I was; head down on my arms, eyes still closed. I heard Kim moving around behind me in the upper floor of the house, going in and out of rooms and walking several times past the door of the room. I could still hear these sounds when I opened my eyes and lifted my head to see Kim outside in garden, bending over a flowerbed with a small trowel in her hand. She looked up and saw me at the window and waved. Behind me, someone padded softly along the hallway.

  It took an age for me to turn and look behind me. There was a taste of ashes in my mouth and my shoulders itched where those hands had touched them. The doorway was empty, as were the few yards of the hallway visible beyond. But still I heard footsteps.

  When I was a few feet short of the door, it swung swiftly on its hinges and slammed shut, with a crash that I felt through the floorboards beneath my feet. There was a brief silence as the house drew breath and then I heard the door to the next room slam shut, followed—bang, bang, bang, with the rhythm of a steam hammer—by every other door in the house. I turned back to look behind me and caught a brief glimpse of Kim running towards the house, looking fiercely up at the room I was in, before the window shattered outwards in a glittering spray of glass.

  “You’re being haunted,” Kim says the next evening. We’re drinking red wine in the kitchen with wind rattling the branches of the trees outside. There have been no more mystery noises or doors closing themselves. When I cleared up the broken glass in the garden I found the words, ‘GET OUT’ scrawled in dirt on the path. I rubbed it away and didn’t tell Kim.

  “There was this girl I knew. When I was at college.”

  I don’t believe in haunting, but I find myself telling Kim about Poison Ivy. I don’t know how we ever got together, I say. It never could have worked. Kim just looks at me over the rim of her glass. Ivy was attractive, long-limbed and feline in the way she moved. The sex was fantastic, I say, and obviously that counts for a lot with a young man, but in every other way we were incompatible. There were the trivial things, like her annoying habit of calling me ‘honey’, which began to grate after a while. Then the serious things, like the fact that she was into everything I wasn’t; drugs, fucked-up eastern mysticism, crystals and Tarot. Early on I thought it was a laugh, but she took it seriously and the more time we spent together, the more I sensed a deep pool of darkness beneath her eccentricities. Sometimes that darkness swallowed her up and I grew afraid it might swallow me too.

  Ivy had a terrible temper, and I confess I probably stayed with her longer than I should because I was afraid of what she might do when that rage took possession of her. In the end I took a coward’s way out. I stood her up one night when I got chatting to a pretty girl in the college bar. Ivy and I were meant to go to some boring party she was keen on, some kind of witches and warlocks disco. Instead I ended up going out to dinner with the pretty girl. Later that night, Ivy hammered on my door in the early hours in a rage but I wouldn’t let her in. The pretty girl I met that evening was Becky. I didn’t dare open the door to Ivy because Becky was in bed with me. I didn’t know what Ivy would have done.

  She cursed and swore and kicked the door but I ignored her and in the end she went away. I never saw her again. She just disappeared and it was only after I left college that I found out where she went. A petrol tanker ran her down on the road about a mile out of town. The driver said he never had a chance to stop; she just appeared in front of him out of the dark. I never found out exactly when it happened, and I didn’t want to enquire. I didn’t like the thought of her walking away from my door in her storm cloud of anger and going straight under the truck.

  Kim says nothing for some time after I tell her all this, until finally she says: “Have you considered that it might be me?”

  I don’t even reply to that. Now that I have remembered Poison Ivy, I know that if anyone is being haunted, it’s me, not Kim.

  “If she believed in witchcraft, maybe you have to take some action to stop her haunting you,” Kim says. “Some kind of exorcising spell.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Kim was serious. I didn’t see her for a couple of days. While she was gone there were no more upsets in my house and my sense of dread faded a little. Becky’s photograph in my study seemed to smile a little more warmly at me and I told myself these few troubling events had been and gone and they were all that would happen.

  “I’ve done some research. I know how to stop it.”

  When Kim returns I don’t immediately understand what she is talking about. We’re sitting at my kitchen counter, empty Indian takeaway cartons shoved to one side. Kim pulls a chunky notebook from her bag and opens it. Later, I remember this notebook looks old and well used. Not like she just bought it to write down stuff she found out in the past couple of days. But I don’t think about this at the time.

  “How to exorcise an unfriendly spirit.” Kim runs a finger along the page as she reads.

  I don’t know her well enough to be sure if she’s joking. She seems earnest enough as she tells me about the spell she has found to end a haunting. I don’t listen very closely, but I remember it involves soil from the grave of the dead person doing the haunting. And blood from the person being ‘visited’.

  “Or semen will do, apparently,” Kim says. “I could help you with that.”

  “I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”

  I shut down the conversation and Kim puts the notebook away. She looks annoyed, but she doesn’t press it. I never ask her where she found the spell.

  That night I wake up again when the rest of the world is asleep. I get up and the house holds its breath around me as I walk through the dark rooms one by one. There is something here. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how I know. But I realise I have known for some time. I live here, and Kim is here with me. And something else is in here with us.

  I stand in the dark kitchen for a long time, and as well as listening I try to open up my other senses in an effort to pin down what it is I feel about the house and the presence within it. There’s something, not hostile exactly, but troubled. Watchful. I start to walk back upstairs and there is a loud crash from the top of the house followed by a woman‘s voice, shouting something indistinct.

  The door to the bedroom sticks for a moment and I fear I won’t be able to get it open. I call Kim’s name but she doesn’t reply. All at once the door flies inwards, hitting the wall and rebounding slightly. The bedroom light is on and Kim is on her knees on the far side of the room, scrubbing at the wall with a flannel. Something is written there, in jagged red letters.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. I didn’t want you to see it.”

  There are two words, I’m sure of it. The first is ’FEAR’. Kim has already wiped the second, and she won’t tell me any more. Fear? Fear what? Was the second word ‘HER’, which makes no sense? In the morning we eat breakfast in the kitchen. Neither of us
breaks the foggy silence until at last I say: “Okay. I’ll give it a try. What have we got to lose?” Kim squeezes my hand. There’s another photo of Becky in this room. She smiles the same as she always did but today there’s something cold and empty in it.

  Kim didn’t tell me where she was going, but she wasn’t around the next night. I was worried about another night alone, but nothing more happened. I dreamed I woke up at one point in the night, and there was a quiet voice near my bed, singing very softly. After the earlier upsets it was a nice dream to have and for the first morning in a long time I woke up with the kind of feeling I used to have with Becky; the house had nothing but love in it and it was worth facing the day.

  In the study next to my bedroom there was a photograph of Becky on the desk, smiling at me from the warmth of a day we spent together walking on the North Downs four years ago. Behind Becky the sky was a deep crystal blue, above a thick line of mist. The low hump of a distant hill poked above the mist like the curved back of a whale. Becky squinted slightly against the sun and her eyes met mine. I had the feeling that if I stared at the picture long enough she would tell me something important.

  Kim reappears the next evening and there is something different about her. I can’t pin it down. She looks pale and a little breathless, like she has been doing something exciting. She has a canvas holdall, which she puts on the kitchen table. She opens it and pulls out a plastic supermarket bag. It thumps on the table with a dull thump; sounding like it contains a few pounds of turnips.

  “I got it,” she says. “The soil from her grave.”

  “Who? Ivy?“

  “Who do you think?”

  “How did you find it? Where is her grave?”

  “You don’t need to know.” There’s something unreadable in Kim’s dark eyes. “It’s not as if you’ve taken any interest all these years, is it?”