by Chanel Smith
His continuous monologue had made the walk from the Nine Elms Station to where it crossed under the Vauxhall to Stockwell line seem further than the trip we had taken to Stonehenge the day before. In fact, the continual drone and the focus that Ellen and I both were putting into blocking out and ignoring him made us walk right past the site.
“That’s odd,” Ellen said. “Shouldn’t we have felt a chill and known that we had arrived? The other day, it was close to freezing.”
“You know something, you’re right,” I replied. “The last two times we came down here, I hadn’t located the place by physical features so much as by the temperature drop. I think we walked right past it without feeling a thing.”
Our conversation had brought on the first pause in Ewen’s oration since we had met him at the Nine Elms Station entrance. But it was short-lived. “You know, I just hate it when you misplace your ghosts.”
Not only was it an irritating comment and another one spoken by a voice that we had been attempting to block out, but it was my line. I glared at him. Shit! I’m turning into Ellen.
“Where are the numbers?” Ellen asked.
The day that we had made our first visit to the tunnel with Mister Hayford, we had learned that the numbers on the tunnel walls were reference points for maintenance crews. I looked both ways, up and down the tunnel, but couldn’t see any numbers.
“Let’s backtrack until we find a number,” I suggested.
We started back from whence we had come until we encountered one of the numbers on the wall.
“5656,” Ellen said aloud, reading the number. “Do you remember the number where we met the spirits?”
I did, actually. Though I’d been a little bit too busy with Jackson Hayford being possessed and the body being flung at me to comment about it at the time, I had felt that it was sort of fitting that the number on the wall was 5666.
“We were at 5666,” I replied. I expected another comment from Ewen, but none was forthcoming and we continued back to where we saw the number 5666 stenciled on the wall.
“Okay?” Ewen said when we stopped and started looking around. “What do we do now? Do we hold a séance? Is there some sort of call that we use?” Obviously, though he was well versed in Druidism and Celtic culture, he was entirely lost when it came to dealing with paranormal activity.
“Damn! I wish I had my equipment. If I could take some readings, it might help us figure out where to go or what to do.”
“There are no readings to be taken, Monty,” Ellen replied. “There’s nothing here.”
“But I know this is the right place,” I replied.
“Every inch of this tunnel looks exactly the same to me,” Ewen put in. “You’re certain that you have the number correct?”
“Very certain,” I said, through clenched teeth. I had moved beyond loathing Ewen and was ready to go into beat-down mode. I glared at him instead. He caught the hint and kept his mouth shut while Ellen and I tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
“Should we search the entire tunnel until we find something? Maybe they are wandering in a different place now?” Ellen was grasping at straws. She had wrinkled her brow to the point of looking as though she was in pain. None of it was making sense to her.
It wasn’t making sense to me either. The thought of walking all of the way to the Oval Station, which would be the next place that we could exit the tunnel, was not ranking high on my list of things to do while in London, especially when it would likely mean listening to Ewen droning on about his great accomplishments in life. However, we were professional investigators and continuing forward until we either encountered the ghost or reached the Oval Station was the right thing to do.
“I guess that’s what we have to do,” I sighed.
We continued on in silence, Ellen and I in deep thought as we wondered what had taken place and Ewen likely loading up his verbal arsenal. The silence didn’t last long, as Ewen launched into telling every ghost story that had ever been told in England since the beginning of time, or at least that is what it seemed like.
The long and short of it is that we walked from the Nine Elms Station to the Oval Station without any drop in temperature or any other indicator of paranormal activity from Ellen’s more highly accurate psychic senses.
By the time we reached the Oval Station, I was seriously considering the human sacrifice option. I would have eagerly sacrificed Ewen, for any reason in particular; however, when I remembered that the one being sacrificed did so voluntarily, I was ready to step up. Anything to escape the continual racket of his voice would have been preferable to another minute of listening to him.
Ellen and I had given up discussing the case any further. Neither of us wanted to hear Ewen’s comments, nor were we entirely certain what to discuss. We were both stumped. In all of our previous cases, none of the ghosts had simply vanished into thin air.
When Rochester arrived with the car, we thankfully avoided the uncomfortable prospect of giving Ewen a ride home. Ewen was content to ride the North line back to his home near the Balham Station. We also had a message given to us by Rochester that had come from the man who was paying us for our work.
“Mr. Black would like to know, if it isn’t too much trouble, would you be available to meet with him and Mr. Hayford in his office after lunch?” Rochester asked, after closing the door behind us and sliding into the driver’s seat.
“No trouble at all, Rochester,” Ellen replied.
We weren’t going to have a great deal of time to put together an explanation for the sudden disappearance of the ghosts from the Tube, but it had been several days and it was time for an update.
Rochester made the call to Mr. Black and then looked in the mirror awaiting instructions. When neither of us answered, he cleared his throat to get our attention. “Lunch? Madam? Sir?”
Neither of us was quite ready to form a reply. “I’m not sure where to go.” I looked at Ellen and got a shrug in response.
“Might I suggest a place?” Rochester asked. “It isn’t far from Mr. Black’s office.”
“Yes, please, Rochester; that would be lovely of you, thank you,” Ellen replied.
After a few moments of riding in the car, I broached the subject that was working both of our minds into overdrive. “What do you think happened?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Would they have moved on to a different location or suddenly found their way toward the light?”
“It’s highly unlikely.”
“Do you suppose they relocated to another part of the Tube?”
“I don’t think that the Tube was necessarily significant. The excavation was, but for the most part, they had stayed pretty local to that particular crossroad, so to speak.”
She was technically right; but like she had already expressed before, nothing about this case had been normal and she hadn’t understood it from the very beginning. “So, what do we do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do we say to Mr. Black and Mr. Hayford?”
She only shrugged.
“Should we try to call Henry again?”
“It’s worth a shot, I guess.” She took out the phone, dialed Henry’s number and waited. I heard the sound of someone answering the line, but couldn’t make out the actual words.
“Ma’am, this is Ellen again. Have you heard anything from Henry yet?” She paused while she listened. I was hopeful that we were finally getting some sort of explanation. “Thank you, no, there’s not much point in leaving another message.” A short pause. “Yes, a very pleasant afternoon to you as well.”
She disconnected the phone and looked at me, shaking her head. “We’re not the only ones trying to get into contact with him, evidently. They are growing concerned.”
“Me too.”
“I guess all we can do is tell them what we know.”
“Tell who what we know?” Ellen’s ability to think about two or more different things at the same time often lost me.
I typically only think about one thing at a time, and I was thinking about Henry.
“Mr. Black and Mr. Hayford. We’ll give them a run down on what we found, the research we did and tell them that we simply lost them.”
“I don’t think that we should say we lost them just yet,” I replied.
“What do you want to say, then; that we ‘misplaced’ them?”
“You know you and Ewen are beginning to get on my nerves.”
“How?” She was confused that Ewen was even mentioned in the reference.
“You two are stealing my lines.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I understand that the two of you were privy to seeing Mr. Hayford receive a scare that he won’t be forgetting anytime soon,” Mr. Harold Black stated, not long after we had taken our seats in his office. The overall tone of the room was very grave. Ellen and I were squirming in our chairs. We weren’t exactly sure what to expect from the visit, but it certainly hadn’t started off well.
“I assure you,” I began, “we had no intention of giving Mr. Hayford a scare. In fact, we ourselves were taken somewhat by surprise by the turn of events.”
There were a half dozen, long beats and then a smile cracked open upon Mr. Black’s face. He looked toward Mr. Hayford and winked. “I told you we’d give them a bit of a start. Do you see the look on their faces?”
Mr. Hayford, completely out of character from what we had seen of him before, began to laugh heartily. “You’ve given them a scare indeed.”
Ellen and I, well behind on the joke finally began to come around as the two men slapped their knees and made merry at our expense. It was really quite odd after the very serious meetings that we had held with each of them not more than a week before. However, feeling the tone in the room make a dramatic switch, we soon joined in, not quite sure what was going on, but willing to participate as long as it continued to be light-hearted.
“Actually,” Mr. Black said after we had all regained control of ourselves, “we brought you here to congratulate you on a job well done and to issue you a check for the promised sum.”
Ellen and I both looked at each other with shocked expressions. We had finished the job? How had we finished the job? We hadn’t removed any ghosts? We didn’t even know where they were.
After several moments, I couldn’t hold out any longer. “I’m… we’re not sure that we understand.”
“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” Mr. Black said. “Do you see what they’re doing, Jackson? They’re trying to turn my own joke back on me. It won’t work. You’ve accomplished the task and we couldn’t be happier. There is no telling what sort of catastrophe you have helped to avert by removing those menacing spirits from the Tube. You both deserve a hearty well-done.”
“We appreciate your compliment,” Ellen said. “But we’re not quite certain the job has been finished.”
“Oh, Mr. Hayford and I believe that it has. You see, for several weeks, we were receiving news of at least one incident on the Tube involving the mysterious opening of doors, screams, cold chills and what have you; often several each day. It was driving us mad, you understand. Without any control, we were set to have to close down the line until we could come up with a solution. The liability of an accident… Well, you understand.”
“We are going on day four without a single incident,” Mister Hayford added, beaming with delight.
The complete turnaround of Jackson Hayford was enough to make us wonder if an entire legion of spirits from the loony bin hadn’t possessed the man; it was utterly perplexing. I was about to object, but was cut off when Mr. Black punched the intercom button on his phone.
“Penelope, bring in that check.” He beamed.
Ellen and I could only stare at each other as Penelope came into the room with a sheet of paper in her hand. She placed it on Mr. Black’s desk and turned to walk out. Mr. Black took a pin from the holder on his desk, rapidly scratched his signature to the bottom and handed the page with the check attached to the bottom over to me.
I was speechless. Ellen had only told me that it was a tidy sum that we were to get for doing the job, but I hadn’t expected to see the fourth zero in the total. “I… I’m not sure we deserve…”
“Nonsense, old man, you deserve that and more. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hayford?”
“It is, indeed. The two of you have done my firm, TFL, and the citizens of London a tremendous service, not to mention some poor mother who might have lost her son when the doors to the train suddenly snapped open at the wrong moment. Please accept it as a small token of our gratitude.”
Our hands were shaken and we were thoroughly patted on the back and ushered out the door before we had a chance to protest further. It didn’t seem to do any good whenever we tried. As we stepped out of the office, Penelope was waiting with airline tickets to fly us back to LA. We were dizzy in the confusion. Only hours before, we had discovered that we had lost the ghosts completely and had no idea how to explain what had happened. We believed that we had utterly failed, only to discover that we were now leaving England with a sizable check for services that we weren’t entirely sure we had rendered.
The confusion did not fade during our trip back to the hotel. Neither of us was sure what to say, nor were we sure what to do. When we had left our room that morning, we were certain that we had failed to do our jobs and that we were stuck in an impossible situation that might take weeks to unravel. When we returned to our room, we were a good deal richer, had successfully completed our job, and were on our way home. If those circumstances weren’t enough to leave us dazed, sitting neatly beside the dressing table in our room was our luggage.
The night was spent sorting through things and trying to contact Henry once more. We wanted to at least say goodbye before we returned to LA. However, he had neither turned up at the museum nor called. They had begun to look into his whereabouts, assuming that if he was at an archeological site, he might have been out of reach by cell phone or any other means.
The following morning, after eating breakfast in the hotel, I snatched a London Times off of the rack and dropped my coins in the hopper. It would help pass the time on the plane. We were packed, ready to go and waiting by the concierge desk by 9:00 a.m., when Rochester pulled up in the Rolls, helped us in the car, placed our luggage in the boot and started off toward Heathrow.
We were each saying our silent goodbyes to London and still sorting through what all had happened along the way to the airport. Rochester was once again very solemn whenever he looked up in the mirror. I wondered if the old boy had sometimes gotten attached to the people that he shuttled around and had formed a sort of shell around himself to avoid the heartache.
I wasn’t sure how Ellen felt, but I was going to miss the old bugger.
As he helped us out of the car at the airport and took our luggage out of the boot, there was a nervous silence surrounding us.
“Well, Rochester,” I said, extending my hand. “It has been a true pleasure.”
“Indeed it has, sir,” he said, accepting my hand. The tiny bit of mist in his eyes caused mine to draw toward the surface and I stepped away, blinking back tears.
Ellen stepped in, giving me a reprieve from possible embarrassment, wrapping her arms around the neck of the startled chauffeur and planting a kiss on his cheek. “I’m going to miss you, Rochester.”
“As I will miss you, madam,” he said.
With our goodbyes said, we stepped back into the chaos that was Heathrow International Airport. After enjoying a couple of beers in the lounge and purchasing a couple of bottles of duty free, single-malt Scotch, we made our way to the gate where we sat down in the slings that passed as seating in the world’s airports to await our flight. I reached into the outside pocket of my carry-on bag and extracted the London Times that I had bought earlier and smoothed out the creases to start to read. My eyes were instantly drawn to one of the headlines:
HISTORIAN FROM BRITISH MUSEUM MISSING
I scanned the
article quickly and then began reading it aloud to Ellen.
“Authorities and the British Museum are expressing a great deal of concern over the whereabouts of Dr. Henry Agness Wandsworth, who had reportedly left for an archeological dig in Wales earlier in the week. The sixty-two year old historian was scheduled to either call in or return within three days after his departure, but failed to do so. Museum officials contacted the authorities yesterday in order to investigate whether the historian ever arrived at the dig site in Wales. Authorities in Wales confirmed that he had not.
“Dr. Wandsworth is a descendant of a prominent member of the London community and an extremely prestigious academic, having published numerous journal articles on topics concerning ancient Britons before, during and after the Roman invasion of the British Isles. Henry was living alone in the family’s aged estate home at the time of his disappearance. Neighbors who had been questioned about his recent activities say that he was rarely active in the neighborhood and that he might have gone months without being seen by them.
“‘We (London Police) are flummoxed by what has happened to Doctor Wandsworth and are chasing down every possible lead that might lead us toward any information regarding his activities in the past week and any possible connection with foul play,’ the London Police spokesperson said. ‘At this point in time, he seems to have completely vanished.’
“The investigation is continuing today as authorities are still piecing together some explanation as to the whereabouts of Dr. Wandsworth and hoping that a possible lead will soon turn up.”
Ellen’s eyes were wide with shock when I finished reading and turned to look at her. “You don’t think?” she breathed.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the watch that I’d found at Stonehenge. A sinking feeling went through me as I opened it up to check the time and discovered that once again, all three of the hands had stopped pointing straight up at the twelve. I snapped the watch shut and turned to look at Ellen. There were tears threatening to spill over the rims of her eyes and the sight of them drew mine up as well.
