Really Weird Removals.com

by Daniela Sacerdoti

  Phew. My mum and dad are allies again. Things are back to normal.

  My dad turns his back at us. He’s gazing out of the window. The day is turning into night, and the sea is getting angrier as the wind picks up. The snow keeps falling, falling.

  “Luca.” Dad takes a deep breath. He’s not looking at me. I instinctively feel that what he’s about to say hurts him deeply. “My parents… your grandparents… disappeared. They went, just like that…” The music. St Anne’s Reel. It’s starting again. “…Your Uncle Alistair did something thoughtless and stupid; he used them as guinea pigs for some crazy experiment of his, and they were gone. Forever. We don’t know where. We’ll never know.”

  The melody is twirling, full force inside my head, the fiddle and the piano, over and over again.

  “He says that they asked him…” I protest feebly. I hate to see the pain etched in my father’s face.

  “They were dazzled by him, Luca! The prodigious boy, the boy with the Sight! The boy with powers! They would have done anything to allow him to shine! And he loved it!” My mum gets up and puts a hand on Dad’s back, her head on his shoulder, her soft brown hair covering him like a shelter. Part of me want to go and cuddle them both, but I’m so angry, and the music is so loud…

  “Uncle Alistair is trying to put it right!” I blurt out, above the din in my head. “Will you let me do this? Will you let me be part of the RWR?”

  “Never. I won’t let anything happen to you, Luca.”

  “You can’t stop me!”

  “What are you going to do, run away? You’re only twelve!”

  I’m about to say, “Yes, I will!” when I look into my mum’s grey eyes.

  I can’t do this to her.

  I bow my head. The music keeps playing, full blast, and my thoughts are all over the place.

  “I’m going to my room.”

  “I’ll bring you some dinner, tesoro…” My mum tries to stroke my hair, but I recoil. I’m leaving, too furious to speak. Dad is looking at the floor.

  “Luca?”

  I stop in the doorway.

  “Your diary. You write very well,” he says quietly.

  25. MUSIC FROM LONG AGO

  Alistair Grant’s Scottish Paranormal Database

  Entry Number 58: Merry ghosts of Culzean Castle

  Type: Ghostly apparition

  Location: Culzean Castle

  Date: Christmas Eve, every year from 1818 to the present

  Details: Ghostly music can be heard in the grounds of Culzean Castle on Christmas Eve every year. Occasionally, dancers and musicians have also been spotted, making merry. (See Podcasts and Recordings, file number 34.)

  A couple of days later, Mum comes into my room to have a chat.

  “I know your diary is private, I know I shouldn’t have read it, but I needed to see for myself what your dad told me.” I hung my head. The last thing I wanted was to upset her. “The things you’ve seen, Luca… the things that you can See. It’s amazing. I never knew about all this… about the Sight. Your father never told me about any of that.”

  “Mum, I can’t pretend I don’t have this gift. I can’t just waste it.”

  “I know. I know.” Our eyes meet. “I cannot tell you how proud I am of you.” I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak right now. “What you did was wrong, what your uncle did was wrong. Lying to us… putting you in such danger… but… well, I want you to know that I understand why you did it. The call must have been impossible to ignore.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She understood!

  “I couldn’t stop. It was all too… amazing.”

  “I know. And I think your dad was wrong when he said he wanted you to forget about the Sight. You’ll never be able to forget, or to ignore this gift… You shouldn’t.”

  “You think I should use this gift I have? Then why did you agree with Dad?”

  “Because you’re too young. Too young, too vulnerable. You’re just a wee boy…” she said, touching my face gently.

  “I’m nearly thirteen!”

  “When you’re a man, you’ll be free to make your own decisions.”

  “I want to make my decisions now!”

  “Luca, listen. What your uncle does is extremely dangerous. And Valentina is even younger than you. You both must wait before you do what your Uncle Alistair does. But your dad thinks you have to give it up completely…” she looked determined, like she’d made up her mind about something, “…and I disagree.”

  “I could never give it up.”

  “I know. I’m just asking you to wait. Then you can make your own choices. Your dad will have to understand.”

  “Thank you, Mum.” We smile at each other. Dad always says I’m a chip off my mum’s block. Still, she’s always surprising me.

  ***

  What else. Things at school have been… ok. Boring, but ok. Gary is nicer than ever before. Well, not nice as such, more like scared. He avoids me, but when our paths cross, he’s so sweet he’s actually servile. I feel a bit sorry for him. Then again, it’s easy for people to fall back into old ways. The other day, I saw him trying to torment a boy who recently moved from the mainland. Gary doesn’t like newcomers. I went up to him and the new boy, and said hello. That was all.

  It was enough. After that, Gary left the boy alone.

  Valentina is doing ok too. She plays her fiddle, reads her crazy magazines, hangs out with Camilla, the usual. She is busy ignoring Adil, who has taken to stammering and tripping over his own feet every time he sees her. Embarrassing. She misses the RWR, I can tell. Terribly.

  Valentina and I have been expecting to bump into Uncle Alistair, even though he’s been banished from our house and we’ve been told we are absolutely not to go to RWR HQ. Eilean is a small place. We walk home extra-slow from school, looking around us, hoping to spot him in the bakery, or the bookshop, or the tiny supermarket on the corner. But we never do.

  Then one afternoon he steps out of the post office, a package under each arm, both wrapped in brown paper and covered in stamps. We stop in our tracks.

  He looks like he hasn’t slept for days: his hair is sticking up, he’s wearing a dirty shirt covered in green stains, and his eyes look swollen and small with exhaustion.

  “Uncle Alistair!” calls Valentina. He turns towards us, giving us a haunted, regretful look – for a second, I’m sure he’s about to stop and speak to us… but he doesn’t. He strides on.

  “Valentina, he looks terrible! We have to do something!”

  “We need to go and see him,” she says, resolutely.

  “We’re not allowed. We’ll get into terrible trouble!” It feels like we do really need to talk to him, but the idea of my mum getting upset again…

  We watch from afar as Uncle Alistair turns the corner – even from behind he doesn’t look right. We owe this to him.

  I’m about to chase after him, when I hear my name being called.

  “Children! Luca! Valentina!”

  It’s Mum! She’s waving from the other side of the road. The smile on her face tells us she hasn’t seen Uncle Alistair. We change direction and she crosses to meet us.

  “It’s nearly four o’clock, Luca. You’ll be late for shinty.”

  Valentina and I look at each other.

  “Yes, Luca, come on. Let’s go and get your strip, I’ll come to shinty with you and see the practice,” Valentina replies quickly.

  I instantly know her plan. We’ll go and get my strip, then run straight to Weird HQ. We’re likely to get away with it: Mr MacDonald only contacts parents if players miss three practices in a row, and I can phone Adil and let him know I’m not going, so he won’t come looking for me at the house.

  The idea of defying Dad and Mum again makes me feel a bit ill. But Uncle Alistair needs us – things just seem terrible whenever I think of him.

  “Good idea, Valentina!” I say brightly.

  We walk home with Mum, run straight upstairs to get my strip and we’re out
again, each clutching a chocolate cookie she has insisted on giving us.

  Standing by the road, I use Valentina’s phone to leave a message for Adil saying I won’t be at practice and I’ll explain later.

  “Sorted?” Valentina asks.

  “Sorted.”

  And then I see Mary running towards us in her slippers, her hair flowing behind her, looking frightened.

  That moment, I know we’re too late.

  “He’s gone!” she says. “Disappeared! Something’s gone wrong. I don’t know what to do.”

  We grab her hands and rush back with her.

  The floor of Uncle Alistair’s laboratory is covered in shards of glass and flooded with a green, seaweed-smelling liquid. The ceiling light bulb has exploded, along with every single beaker, bottle and petri dish – everything in the room that could shatter has shattered. The big clock on the wall has stopped, its face split in two by one single crack. The curtains are flowing gently inwards – there’s no glass left in the window. Uncle Alistair is nowhere to be seen.

  We stand in the doorway, speechless. It’s Mary who breaks the silence.

  “I just heard a terrible noise, like an explosion. And Alistair was gone! His beans and sausages were in the microwave; I was expecting him to walk into the kitchen at any moment for them…” She’s so distressed her eyes are full of tears, and her hands are shaking.

  “What was he trying? What has he been working on?” I ask.

  “I have no idea. Since you came back from Loch Glas he’s spent day and night in his lab. He’s been completely consumed by his work. He hasn’t stopped for long enough to speak about it.”

  “Alistair!” A disembodied shocked voice resounds in the room, then a glowing blue hovering form takes shape. Her small, see-through hands are clasped on her mouth.

  “Camilla!”

  “Mary! What happened?”

  “Alistair is gone,” Mary says miserably, and Camilla flows into her arms, enfolding her into an incorporeal cuddle

  ***

  We’re all sitting in the living room at Alistair’s, trying to make sense of what’s happened. He’s definitely not here in the house – we looked everywhere. His clothes are all there, his suitcase is still tucked under the bed: he certainly disappeared in a hurry.

  “We just saw him coming out of the post office. He looked awful. We were going to come straight here and check on him, but Mum saw us and we had to go home,” Valentina explains.

  “We thought something was wrong.” I add. “We didn’t see him for days.”

  “He was holed up in the lab. He came out for beans and sausages a couple of times a day, but that was it.” Mary’s black eyes are huge in her pale face. “I asked him what he was doing, but he said he’d show me when it worked…”

  “Do you think he might have just gone off by himself, to get away from Eilean? From Dad?” I ask.

  Mary shakes her head. “No. Something strange happened this afternoon. He came back from the post office – he always got these parcels, I don’t know what was in them – and he went straight into the lab. I called him because his beans were ready, and he said he’d be out in a little while. Ten minutes later I heard a terrible noise, and… well, you saw what it was like in there.”

  “Wait a minute…” mutters Valentina, and springs out of the room. After a few seconds, she comes back clutching an alarm clock. “Look. This is Uncle Alistair’s. It’s stopped, like the clock in the lab.”

  Mary looks at her wrist. “My watch has stopped too,” she says, tapping it gently.

  “There’s another clock in the kitchen – the oven one,” says Camilla, and sticks her head through the wall between the living room and the kitchen. “Stopped too,” she reports, her voice muffled by the bricks and plaster.

  “Oh!” All of a sudden, the music in my head starts again. Usually it starts soft, barely audible and interrupted, a few notes here and there, and then gets louder and clearer when I concentrate on it. But this time is so loud, so clear – clearer than I’ve ever heard it before.

  “Luca? Luca?” Valentina’s voice seems to come from far away. “Are you ok?”

  “Yes. Yes, sorry. I’m ok. It’s the music in my head. It started again.”

  “Can you hear it now?”

  “Yes. St Anne’s Reel…”

  “St Anne’s Reel? I know that tune. I can play it. It was one of Granny’s favourites Dad told me.”

  “Uncle Alistair said that too. You can’t hear it now, can you?”

  Valentina closes her eyes for a second, than shakes her head. “I can’t.” She sighs. “So did you talk to Uncle Alistair about it? The music, I mean.”

  “Yes. I told him a while ago. He seemed shocked, and all… intense, looking at me hard, and speaking like it was something very important.”

  “Oh. And what did he say?”

  “Well… he told me to… umm, listen carefully, to concentrate on the music.”

  “What happens when you do?”

  I pause and give my mind to it for a moment.

  “It gets louder. It sort of starts taking over. There’s a tingly sensation. And a strong… something… that I don’t quite like. It’s a feeling like just knowing that there’s something dangerous near you.”

  “Something dangerous? And if it is, why would Uncle Alistair want you to concentrate on it?” Valentina is frowning like she’s thinking hard. I am wondering whether she’s trying to hear the music, when she says, “We know he was trying to put right losing Granny and Grandpa. That’s what he was desperate about. Luca, do you think he’s vanished the same way they vanished?” I feel tight in my tummy. She’s still all focused. “If he’s stuck somehow, he’ll need our help. Who else knows he’s gone or what he does? Who else could rescue him? Who else has the Sight like we do?”

  “But we don’t know how to help,” I say. “And he would never talk about what happened with our grandparents, so we don’t know where to start.” We are all quiet, sitting on the sofa.

  I try to think along with Valentina.

  “Remember when we saw a… a helmet thing, and a shield, and he was trying to hide them? Do you think they came from the place our grandparents are stuck?”

  “What were his weird experiments about?” she asks, “And why have the clocks stopped?”

  “He was always adding to the database.” I’m desperate for something concrete rather than all this worrying and asking and confusion. I pull up a chair and sit at Uncle Alistair’s computer. As I turn my mind to the screen and take it away from the music, it stops.

  “I’ll go and clean up the lab. You see what you can find…” says Mary, and disappears. We pile around the computer.

  Our website, reallyweirdremovals.com, comes straight onto the screen. I click on the link to the Paranormal Database.

  “Let me see… m-u-s-i-c.” I type into the search box. An endless flow of information floods the screen.

  Valentina gasps. “Too much! We’ll never get through all this… Try ‘ghostly music’.”

  “’Ghostly music’… let’s see… Oh, an awful lot for this too… Right, let’s get to work.”

  Half an hour later we’ve gone through pages and pages of sightings – well, hearings – but there’s nothing we can use. Nothing seems significant.

  “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place,” says Camilla.

  “What do you mean?” I turn my head – Camilla is floating right behind us. “Is there another website…”

  “No websites. No computers.” She shrugs. “Maybe the answer is here…” She touches my forehead gently. “And here…” Her hand points to my heart.

  “Of course! Camilla is right!” exclaims Valentina.

  “I don’t know…” I hesitate. What am I supposed to do? Will I be able to do this? Without the Paranormal Database, without Uncle Alistair?

  On my own?

  “Give it a try anyway. Let’s switch this thing off. Now, Luca… Please, see if you can stop worrying. Close your
eyes. Concentrate. Listen…”

  “Valentina, I don’t…”

  “Try. Come on, close your eyes.”

  “Ok. Ok.” I do what she says. When she has her Bossy Voice on, no point trying to do otherwise. As soon as I close my eyes the music starts twirling again, as loudly as before.

  “Can you hear it, Luca?”

  I can’t reply. I can’t speak. Along with the music there is something new, something different.

  Something I couldn’t anticipate.

  I don’t only hear the music, I see it. I See the musicians, right in front of me.

  They aren’t ghostly at all. I can’t see them clearly, but they look solid, not transparent like Camilla. The music is strong and present, and so are the people playing it. It doesn’t feel like the memory of something gone – it’s happening now.

  Uncle Alistair’s house, Valentina and Camilla have disappeared. All I can see now are the musicians – a piano player and a fiddle player, blurry, but here with me… And real. I feel a wrench, as if something is tugging me away from where I stand and towards the musicians – like a whirlpool pulling me in. The force is incredibly powerful, almost irresistible, so that I have to fold myself in two to avoid being dragged away. I open my eyes, gasping – the musicians disappear and the music stops at once.

  “Luca! Are you ok?”

  “I… I’m ok.” I’m struggling to catch my breath. I realise that I’m not sitting at Uncle Alistair’s computer anymore, I’m kneeling on the wooden floor with Valentina, Camilla and Mary beside me.

  “What happened?” exclaims Mary. “I heard an awful noise! I thought you had gone too!”

  “I’m here… I’m ok…” I pant. “I heard the music. And I Saw the musicians…”

  “You Saw the musicians?” Valentina cries out.

  “They were blurry, but right in front of me. And the funny thing was… they were in our living room.”

  “Our living room? As in… in our house?”

  “Yes. I recognised the curtains, and the picture on the wall, you know Aunt Shuna’s watercolour, the dandelions?”

  “Weird.”