by Anne Brooke
She ran her hand over the object slowly, frowning when she reached the place on the knife where I’d grabbed it. Sometimes when anything passed over from the other side, you could do damage, and I had to admit I’d not been careful.
“You’ve given this a good dent,” she said.
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “I had other things on my mind apart from the care and maintenance of spiritual jetsam.”
“Flotsam,” Aaron said, sitting and running his hands through his hair. “If I’m going to experience the crazed world you two live in, then let’s get the terminology right. It was floating, so it’s flotsam.”
“But it’s not just floating. You could say it was washed ashore, in a psychic sense. That makes it jetsam.”
Aunt Miranda tutted. “You two. Can’t you give it a rest for a moment? I need to think.”
I let her have as much time as she wanted, while I wiped my hands and tidied up. Somehow the three half-empty coffee mugs had survived unscathed.
“The knife is being pulled between two different characters,” Miranda said at last. “Which is unusual, but it’s the only explanation I can think of for something so beautiful and so deadly. It’s not been used in our world, but it’s a symbol of something very violent, which did take place here. Look at the carving on the handle compared to the delicacy of the decoration. It’s as if two very distinct minds have fought over this in order to produce it.”
“My grandmother loved rubies,” Aaron said as he stared at the knife. “She wore them whenever she could. But she would never do anything violent. Never. In life anyway.”
He gulped and looked away, blinking hard. I laid my hand on his and kept it there, hoping the warmth would go some way toward comforting him.
“People don’t change much when they die,” I said. “They just move to another way of being. If your grandmother was a good woman when she was alive, then she’s a good woman now. I promise you.”
He nodded, but his face remained pale. “Why the knife then?”
“I don’t know,” Miranda said. “But with my nephew’s help, we’re going to find out. The question is: are you sure you want to be here if and when we do?”
My aunt’s question brought my eyes sharply up to her face. She knew something else, but didn’t want to say it aloud. Over the years we’d worked together, I’d learnt to read her messages, particularly those she didn’t want to say. This one worried me, and I reached again for the weapon. Now she’d had a chance to ponder it, the psychic energy would be clearer. Clear enough for me to read.
“Jack…” Miranda said in a tone ripe with warning, but it was already too late.
The knife was in my grip, and a riot of images tumbled through my mind, curving and slipping away from any control I might have: an old man shouting; the sound of a slap; a sharp slice of pain across my own cheek in empathy; the slash of despair across my gut; running footsteps; and finally the grief.
All these sensations rolled through me until I let the knife go and darkness descended.
When I opened my eyes, I was half lying, half sitting across the sofa, and Miranda was holding a cocktail of herbs to my nose. No wonder I felt bad. I wasn’t convinced the cure was any better than the disease. The knife lay quiet and deadly on the carpet, and Aaron reached for it.
I grunted a negative, and Miranda kicked it away with her foot.
“I’m just putting it out of harm’s way,” Aaron said, but I shook my head. A gesture I instantly regretted.
“No, I need it to have my imprint, not yours,” I murmured, trying to move my lips without waking my mind up again. “Because I have to use it now, while it has me fresh.”
“Nonsense,” Miranda objected, as Aaron cursed softly once more about the peculiarities of my business. “You need to rest.”
“No time,” I said, and was about to explain why, when an enormous crash from the kitchen shook the adjoining wall. Any moment now and I’d be too late. “Come on.”
I grabbed the knife from the floor and legged it to the kitchen, not looking back. I didn’t need to. I could hear Miranda and Aaron following closely on my heels. When I pushed open the kitchen door, I stumbled to a sudden and shocking halt as I saw the walls were dripping with red liquid. It wasn’t real blood, I knew, but it was the most vibrant example of psychic blood I’d ever seen, and the most worrying.
“Watch out!” I yelled, just as a mysterious force flung a handful of blood across the room. Miranda and I ducked out of instinct, but Aaron didn’t. Just before the psychic blood landed on his hair, I pushed him sideways and out of harm’s way.
The most horrible substance you could get in your hair was psychic blood. It wasn’t deadly, but it meant a two-week migraine, at the very least. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. And certainly not on Aaron, a man I wanted to get to know a whole lot better than I currently did.
“Don’t let the blood touch you,” I shouted, and he nodded his understanding. I hoped he knew how much I meant it.
Because I was already stepping into the kitchen, holding the knife in front of me like a threat. I hoped the combination of the weapon and I would draw the ghostly rage and pain rolling in vast waves across the room. It usually worked. The only problem with my plan was the worry I wouldn’t be able to control a haunting of this magnitude.
Still, no time to back out now. I’d just have to try.
The knife leapt in my hand, and I almost lost my hold on it. Miranda cried out a warning, but I didn’t need it. I wasn’t stupid. I knew perfectly well that if I let the knife go, all three of us would be fighting off the migraine from hell for at least a month. The fragile barrier of the knife and me was the only thing keeping the attacker at bay, and even this wouldn’t last long.
I had to persuade the ghost to reveal the place where its secrets lay before it discovered I wasn’t as powerful as it thought. Whatever it was. The question was how to do it.
In the end, I went with instinct, always a powerful driver. I took the knife and I shoved it as hard as I could into the place on the wall where the psychic blood was thickest. The plasterwork felt sticky on my skin and a sudden overpowering smell of dead flowers made me gag. More than anything, I wanted to run, as wave after wave of pain and terror swept over me. I was blind to anything else happening in the kitchen or the whole of the house. I could only hope Aaron and Miranda were still all right. I desperately wanted them to be okay.
A blast of heat from the wall told me I was on the right track: the combination of the blood, the knife and me was holding the attention of whatever was haunting the kitchen. And more specifically this particular part of the kitchen.
“Come on then,” I shouted to whatever the hell it was. “Come on then. Show yourself.”
As I shouted, I gripped the knife so hard a shaft of pain speared itself through my fingers. For a moment, nothing else happened and then my head was crowded with images I couldn’t run from: a slight woman crying; the feel of a slap over and over again so I could barely breathe from the assault; then a sensation of having my heart sucked from within me; a grief I could never dislodge; then nothing at all.
*
When I woke up this time, I was lying on something soft and staring up at a white, freshly painted ceiling. I didn’t recognize either of these things as I hadn’t wielded a paintbrush for too long and whatever the soft object turned out to be, it wasn’t familiar. I turned to the left and looked out across a double bed toward a window. Without moving my head any more—a decision seeming wisest—I could see a bedside table, a steel lamp and a pile of two or three books. Something about them released a memory, which wasn’t threatening and might even have been pleasant, but I couldn’t get a grip on it.
I took a breath and turned to the other side. Two pairs of eyes stared at me. Up until this moment, I hadn’t been overly concerned, but their level of worry galvanized me into action.
“What the hell’s happening, and where the hell am I?”
“My dear,” Aunt Mira
nda said, “your language is appalling. However, it’s certainly better than the rantings you were coming out with a few minutes ago.”
“Rantings? What rantings?” I tried to struggle upright, but Aaron pushed me down on the bed gently. A position I might have been willing to be in anyway, if it wasn’t for the presence of my aunt and the man in my head with the hammer. “What have I been saying?”
I looked at Aaron as I spoke, but he only frowned, and it was Miranda who answered me.
“Oh, nothing stranger than your normal conversation,” she said, with a shrug. “Just something about death and pain, how much you hate your family, and accusing all sorts of relatives of murder. Which to me sounds like the usual Sunday lunch with your mother, but far worse.”
She might have been right, but I didn’t have time to discuss it. Shaking off Aaron’s restraining hand, I swung my legs off the bed and stood up, as best I could.
“Wait,” Aaron said, his fingers still on my arm. “You need to rest. I don’t have a clue what happened downstairs, but you’re in no fit state to go anywhere.”
I looked at him and, for just a moment or two, it was as if we were the only two people in the room…and I wasn’t in the middle of a very difficult haunting case.
“Please,” I whispered. “I need to get back to the kitchen. We both do, believe me.”
“Why?”
I couldn’t tell him, not then. If what I thought had happened was true—if the ghosts were right in what they believed—then no words could explain it enough. He needed to see, just like I did.
“Trust me,” I said.
Shadows played over his face and then he nodded.
In the kitchen, everything looked as it should have done, as if this was a normal house and that it had had a normal life. But it hadn’t, and I knew it. Even so, the blood was gone, and the waves of grief I’d experienced were nothing more than a whisper. It was odd, and more than a lesson to myself, how this job I enjoyed so much could suddenly turn to a darker side in less than a moment. The past was never really far away from any of us.
I hunkered down next to the wall where the blood had been most obvious and ran my hand across it. Yes, I could still sense what had happened, though the knife and the terrible anger had gone.
I half-turned toward Aaron and Miranda. “Something happened here,” I said quietly. “I think it has to do with your grandmother, Aaron.”
His face changed. He had been pale before, but now even more so. “I don’t believe you. My grandmother would never have harmed anyone. Whatever madness is going on in my home, it’s nothing to do with her.”
“It’s something which affected her. It wasn’t her fault, but she wants it to be out in the open. She wants you to take this section of wall down, Aaron. You’re the only one she trusts.”
He took a step back. “That’s crazy. Even if I believed there was a pinch of sanity in all this madness, it’s still crazy.”
I stood and faced him directly. “Yes, you’re right, but I’m afraid it’s true.”
He laughed, but his eyes held no humor. “And if I do what you say, what am I going to find?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. She wouldn’t want me to. You have to find out for yourself.”
Aaron looked as if he was about to launch into more argument, but Miranda stepped between us.
“I know this is hard,” she said to Aaron. “But Jack is good at what he does, and I’ve never known him to be wrong. Besides, what harm will it do to remove this part of the wall? You’re renovating anyway. If there’s nothing there, at least we’ll have tried, and the builders won’t take long to replace it. We’ll pay for it, too.”
A moment more and then Aaron nodded. “All right. But you stay while it’s done. Understood?”
Neither of us had any issue with this. “Agreed,” I said.
While Aaron fetched the tools he needed from his garage, Miranda and I waited in the kitchen.
“Are you sure?” she asked me.
“Yes.” Would to God I wasn’t, but there was nothing I could do about it now.
“And have you thought about how this will affect Aaron and anything you’d like to go on between the two of you?”
Again, the answer was in the affirmative, but I couldn’t find the words to say it, so I just nodded. Miranda sighed and leant over to give me a quick but heartfelt hug. Something I very much needed. Who’d be an investigator of paranormal phenomena? Only a crazed idiot like me.
It didn’t take Aaron long to break down the wall fully. He didn’t say anything while he did it and neither did I. Only Miranda kept up a pretence of normality, bustling around the kitchen and making tea, which nobody drank. As Aaron worked, the sun slowly came up and the morning began. I could hear the sounds of the neighbors in the road waking up and starting their days, too: a child crying, a dog barking, a volley of laughter. I envied them.
Finally, Aaron stopped working. Over his shoulder, I could see the hole he’d made, but nothing beyond. He hunkered back and wiped one hand across his forehead. “There’s something inside,” he said. “A box.”
The fact he’d spoken unlocked the tension I’d been holding onto, without even knowing it. “Do you want me to help with getting it out?”
“No.” He shook his head, his answer too fast. “I’ll do it.”
More than anything, I wanted to touch him in some way, reassure him I was here with him at this point. But we hadn’t known each other long enough for such a gesture, no matter the level of intensity I at least had experienced in being with him.
I watched him as he levered out the box. It wasn’t big, but I’d known it wouldn’t be. Didn’t need to be. It was old and wooden and white. Behind me, I heard Miranda sit down and was grateful for the feel of her hand on my shoulder.
When Aaron opened the box, the child’s skeleton was obvious, even beneath the wrapping. Its mother had tried to offer comfort after her baby’s death, and it was this, more than anything else, which made me blink away tears. The things we did to try to stave off pain, when sometimes it just had to be lived through.
Aaron lifted the child out, cradling it as if it was still alive somehow and could feel his arms. The scent of lavender washed over me suddenly, and I knew his grandmother was here, bringing with her the sorrow she hadn’t been able to express in life.
Her presence held the darker figure beyond and all his rage at bay. Maybe it even cancelled it out. I hoped so.
“What is this? Who is it?” Aaron’s voice brought me back from my concerns, pointless when set against his own now. “How did you know this was here?”
“Your grandmother showed me,” I whispered and felt the reassurance of Miranda’s hand on my shoulder. “The child was hers. I’m sorry, Aaron.”
His face paled, and I could see him struggling with the sudden influx of information. I always thought it was hard having insight into the secrets of people I didn’t know and who weren’t even alive. For the first time now, I saw how hard it was to process the secrets of those we’d loved, too.
“How did the child die?”
I briefly closed my eyes while Aaron’s grandmother opened yet more of her past to me as her scent surrounded us. I hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying. I don’t want you to lie. Tell me.”
I swallowed, hard. “Her father smothered him. He thought it was for the best, I think. I’m truly sorry.”
A moment’s silence, then Aaron began to shout.
*
Two weeks after leaving Aaron’s home, I was still thinking about him and how I could have handled the whole situation better. This was my first experience of murder in the realms of the living and the dead, so I’d had nothing to fall back on. Even so, I should have been more sensitive or just kept my stupid mouth shut. I’d tried to call him after the whole disaster, but he’d returned none of my calls. I’d even written, with no response. I’d thought about searching for him on the internet or visiting his home, but imagined
the last thing he needed was a stalker. Especially not a stalker who worked with the paranormal. For heaven’s sake, if I were in his shoes, it would be the last thing I’d want, too.
More than anything, I could see how Aaron would need things to be normal, or as normal as possible. Which didn’t include starting any kind of relationship with a bloke who’d cut such a swathe through his family’s secrets. My ruddy loss, eh. In the meantime, I had to act like the kind of man who had a business to run and a life to live.
A mug of steaming coffee was placed on my desk with a thump. Not hard enough to spill any of the precious contents, but hard enough to get my attention.
“Have you finished feeling sorry for yourself yet?” My aunt’s voice, with its challenging tone, pounded at my ear.
“No, not yet. Can you give me five?”
“I gave you five about half an hour ago. You did the best you could with Aaron’s case, Jack. We’ve never come across an actual killing before.”
“And I hope we don’t again. Dead people are more than enough to deal with, let alone the crimes they’ve been victims of when alive. I’m worried about Aaron.”
Her face softened, itself a novelty when it came to my aunt. “You should go and see him.”
“I’ve tried.”
“No. You haven’t. You’ve emailed and called, in that very modern way people have these days. But you’ve not actually gone to see him, have you? Face to face.”
I thought about it for a moment. “No, I haven’t. I can cope, just about, with the dead, but the living baffle me every time.”
“Exactly,” Miranda said in an unmistakable tone of triumph. “But however hopeless the men in our family are at social interaction, it’s never too late to improve. So, if you want to get to know young Aaron better and aren’t simply pretending you do, then man up and go see him. At the very least, you can offer to perform a small cleansing ceremony. We didn’t get the chance to do it before.”
I snorted, causing the mouthful of coffee I’d just taken to explode from my nose. When I’d recovered, I couldn’t help laughing. “Man up? What on earth have you been watching on TV?”
