Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Rats,’ said Shape. ‘Don’t go near them.’

  In the main living room (the one by which we entered) there were a few odd items lying around: a khaki bag full of old toys, some framed photographs of a man in uniform, a box of mildewed newspapers, more photos, some women’s clothes.

  We set up the equipment. It was cold in here. ‘Too cold,’ said Shape. ‘We’re going to have to buy the thermal scope. I need to isolate the low temperature spots.’

  We arranged the motion detectors (which we had swiped from the college) on either side of the lounge, and set two digital cameras in position. We tied the wind chime to the bulb flex hanging from the ceiling rose. Finally, we spread talcum powder over the floor. Then we popped open a few beers and settled down to wait.

  After a while, inevitably, we fell asleep. But it was okay because the motion sensors were alarmed.

  The next thing I knew, Shape was shaking me. ‘What’s happening?’ I whispered.

  ‘Listen,’ said Ali.

  Faint but clear, a small bell was ringing. I sat up. ‘Is that the chimes?’

  ‘No, it’s coming from further away,’ Shape whispered back. ‘A classic sign of spirit arrival.’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s sounds like it’s coming from outside. It could even be an office alarm.’

  ‘The room’s got colder—can’t you feel it?’

  ‘Christ, what’s that awful smell?’

  I looked across to the red digital readout on the clock. Midnight. I tried to see into the thick shadows, but maybe one of the street lights had gone out because it seemed darker in the room now. I had brown spots swirling in my eyes, removing the distinct edges of the room. Ali was kneeling, straining to see. Shape was slowly rising, moving in a careful way that would not disturb the presence. He reached out and turned on the digital cameras. Then we waited. We waited for what seemed like twenty minutes, straining our ears, but nothing happened.

  Ali rose and stretched her back. ‘Well, that was a waste of—’ she began when something rushed into the room with a banshee shriek, a white-wreathed, hunched apparition with a white screaming face and the wide black ‘O’ mouth and bony claw arms raised above its head, and all hell broke loose. The thing rushed up to Ali and she screamed and suddenly there was a slash and a shocking red cut had crossed the left side of her face, and Shape was backing up and knocking over one of the digital cameras. And then the apparition screamed something that sounded like words but its voice was so distorted that we couldn’t understand, and we were bricking it and just wanted to get out of that awful reeking room. And just as quickly the apparition vanished and we were on our knees shoveling everything back into bags, and clambering out of the window and gone.

  The next day we met in the student bar at St Martin’s and ran the camera footage, but the cameras hadn’t been pointing in the right direction and all you could see was a few frames showing a blur of white. The soundtrack picked up the creature’s voice though. We played it over and over, filtering it until we could understand. It was saying something that sounded like ‘Alanafga—terror’ again and again, until Shape’s shouting drowned it out.

  ‘We need to do some research,’ said Shape with an air of determination, ‘and find out what these words mean.’ Shape had a lunch date arranged at his father’s club so he couldn’t do the legwork, which meant that Ali and I had to head up to the London Metropolitan Archive in Clerkenwell to research the history of the house.

  The archive’s a great place. All the documents of London are kept there. There are medical records and high court rolls and maps showing where German bombs fell, but it’s always empty except for a few old dears researching their family history. People don’t seem interested in their own surroundings, or maybe they are but they’re too busy to ever get around to checking them out. We had to leave all our belongings in the red lockers on the first floor, but then we headed upstairs and started looking up the housing history of the Somers Town area behind Euston, where Phoenix Street was located.

  Turned out it was a weird old place. A long history of ghostly sightings in an area that had always been incomplete and on the move. Homes were always being torn down to make way for the railway. Even the newborn and the dead hadn’t been allowed to linger in their cots and burial plots as the train tracks advanced over the land. Graveyards and hospitals torn up, the poor routed, Victorian philanthropists always ready to preach to the unemployed, the elderly and infirm, dumping a few moralizing Christian tracts on them before shoving them into workhouses to die.

  No wonder the grey streets behind the station now housed a largely immigrant underclass. No gentrification here, no luxury lofts and gated communities for this chaotic backstage area of good old London Town, the part the tourists never saw.

  It was Ali who found it in an old newspaper, the story of the jilted bride. Ann Matilda Barbary, due to be married at St Pancras Old Church on July 10, 1856, waited in vain to be collected by her father for the short walk to the wedding service, not knowing that her husband-to-be had been killed in a drunken fight at The Tap Inn, Euston, that very morning. She and her husband were going to live and raise a family in one room. From the picture, it clearly could have been the basement room in Phoenix Street.

  ‘And that’s why she appears in white,’ said Shape. ‘She waits for her groom who’ll never come and she screams in pain when she finds out he’s been killed. This is dynamite stuff. We need to get better footage, though, if we’re going to upload it onto a website.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back there,’ said Ali. ‘There was too much anger in her spirit. It’s dangerous.’ The cut on her face was no more than a scratch, but looked livid and sore.

  ‘Then I’ll go with Max,’ said Shape. ‘It’ll be easier with just the two of us.’

  The next night was a full moon, and although I had no idea why that would make a difference, Shape suggested it was the best time to witness another manifestation. So we headed for Phoenix Street once more, taking only one digital camera with us this time.

  ‘If we can find out what the creature was trying to communicate,’ Shape said, ‘we’ll have documentary evidence of a link between this world and the next. We could set up a website and make a fortune.’ How he intended to do this remained an unexplored subject, but I went along with it.

  We climbed down into the basement area and found the window still open, so we climbed inside and set up the camera once more. The moonlight had increased our vision in the musty room, and while we waited for a manifestation I went through the photographs in one of the boxes. I turned over pictures of a couple married in the nineteen thirties, a man in a WW2 uniform, children, grandchildren—an entire family genesis left to warp and molder. The family name of Morgan kept cropping up in thin handwriting on the backs. Jack, Katie, Sally, Sam, Nick, cousins, sisters, aunts.

  ‘The magnetic lines of the earth are holding her here, trapped at the spot where she died,’ said Shape. ‘We have to release this poor woman’s spirit and set her soul free. Then we can blog about it.’

  I could never tell if he was joking when he said things like this. Shape hardly said anything that wasn’t intended as irony, so you never quite knew where you stood with him.

  I turned over more photographs, some clearly recent. Soldiers messing around with a football in a sharp lunar landscape, except that it was brilliantly floodlit. Mailed from—

  ‘I was raised an atheist but you know, we could find proof of Heaven, how cool would that be?’ said Shape, and suddenly I realised he was just doing this to try and upset his parents again. He was thinking how annoyed they would be if he turned in a project based on proof of spiritualism in his degree show. That was all he really cared about.

  I turned over another damp photograph of a young man in a sand-coloured uniform, squinting into harsh sunlight. Flipped it to the back and read; ‘Alan Morgan Territorial Army Afghanistan’. Alanafga—terror.

  ‘Shape, I think you should see—’

  A
nd here she was again, wrapped in white, hurtling into the room, disturbed from her sleep, screaming in panic. ‘Alan—Alan—my son is in Afga—’ but she couldn’t pronounce the word.

  ‘Your grandson Alan is in the Territorials,’ I said. But she couldn’t hear, whirling insanely around the room. ‘Mrs Morgan?’ And she was running back to her bed on crippled arthritic legs, half-blind and deaf and crazed with fear.

  ‘Not a ghost,’ I told Shape, ‘just an old woman. We’re in an old woman’s home. I think her grandson was looking after her but he’s in Afghanistan now.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Shape slammed the camera shut and grabbed his bag. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  ‘No, can’t you see she needs help? Something’s happened. For some reason nobody knows she’s here. Or if they do, they’re not doing anything about it. She’s been abandoned. Maybe her son failed to notify the Social Services before he left.’

  Shape brought his face close to mine. ‘Who gives a fuck? She’s just some old bitch. A waste of time, a fucking waste of time.’ He grabbed me and pushed me toward the window.

  ‘You’re the one who makes a big deal about caring,’ I shouted at him.

  ‘I don’t care about her, she’s alive. What good is that?’ He climbed from the window and headed back to the street.

  I wanted to stay and see that she was all right, but I didn’t.

  I didn’t.

  I couldn’t call the Social Services either, not without leaving some kind of trace. If they tracked us down we could be arrested. I didn’t know what to do. And in hindsight I did the wrong thing, I know that now. Instead of finding a way to leave an anonymous trail to Mrs Morgan’s door, I thought I’d help her directly. Every evening on the way home from the college, I stopped at the Indian takeaway in Phoenix Street and bought her a curry in a plastic tray, and left it just inside the basement window, together with a bottle of soda water. I pulled the window down as far as I could to stop the room from getting too cold, and every night when I came down again the tray from the previous visit had been emptied, so I just carried on doing it.

  One night, I waited by the window to see if she would appear. After a while she shuffled into the room, still wrapped in the dirty sheets from her bed, and grabbed at the tray. Her bony arms were covered with suppurating sores. She dropped the plastic knife and fork on the floor and ate greedily with her fingers. I could not bear to watch a second longer. I was ashamed and confused by my own inaction.

  Then, about a week after I had started bringing the food, the hoodie gang returned to the street and stood in front of me at the gateway to the basement, blocking my path. One of the Indian boys glowered from within his blue shiny tracksuit. He had huge brown eyes, and looked angry. ‘You’re not going down there with that,’ he said with soft menace.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, but they remained silent. ‘Why not?’

  Finally one of them spoke up. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘She needs the food, she’ll die if she doesn’t eat.’

  ‘Walk away, man, there’s nothing for you. Forget what you saw.’

  ‘She’s an old woman. What did she do wrong?’

  ‘Not her, the grandson, disrespectin’ us, innit.’

  ‘What did he do to you?’

  ‘Fuckin’ us off, man. Shouldn’t be here, should he. Wrong postcode for a white army boy, man. You shouldn’t be here neither. Less you wanna get cut.’ Their fists were in their pockets, but they were obviously carrying knives. I knew she was waiting in the basement room. I knew I was her lifeline. But there was nothing I could do. I could no longer reach her.

  I went home and tried to forget, to shut out the sight of her desperate face. I tried not to smell that awful smell. I tried to pretend I had never seen her. I told myself it was nothing to do with me.

  Two weeks later I picked up a copy of the local newspaper on the bus, the Camden Journal, and on page 14 I found a small article about her entitled ‘Wartime heroine found dead in flat.’

  The piece explained that Mrs Kate Morgan had been presented with an award for her outstanding work in a nursing unit of the WRAF in 1945 and had spent a lifetime caring for others. It said that her only living relative, her grandson, had recently been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. It went on to say that she had been dead for a week before her body was found. Local boys were being questioned. A woman from Social Services trotted out the usual line, that this was a failure of the system and must never be allowed to happen again.

  I left St Martin’s. I could no longer sleep. I dreaded the nights. Every time I lay in the dark and closed my eyes, all I saw was her terrified face. I never saw Shape or Ali again. If I’d have run into Shape, I don’t know what I would have done. Something bad. Later someone told me he was running his parents’ bank.

  I was twenty-one when this happened. I am thirty now. The nightmares have lessened, but they never go away.

  They say ghosts appear because of an injustice. Mrs Morgan was not a ghost before, but she is now. And all my life, she’ll continue to destroy my sleep.

  The Adventure of Lucifer’s Footprints

  I must say from the outset that the shocking business of Lucifer’s footprints is something I cannot fully explain. And although there was a solution of sorts, it caused a rift between myself and my old friend that may never be fully healed. To this day, it chills me to the marrow to think of our foray into the dark netherworld that lies beyond the reach of rational science.

  I have written elsewhere that although I recall the events laid out herein, I cannot place an exact date upon them, for I was not long married when I came to call upon Holmes once more.

  I do remember the gutters of Baker Street running with melted ice and snow, the sky a sickly winter yellow above the chimneypots, which tempts me to place my visit on a Saturday in the late February of 1888. Should I venture to the vaults of the bank of Cox & Co., Charing Cross, and unearth my battered tin dispatch box, I would find among the many papers some notes which might be constructed into an account of what happened during our time in Devon. But I can still barely bring myself to believe what happened. And indeed, there is no logical explanation—I can only set down the facts as they occurred.

  It began, as these things so often did, with a visitor to Holmes’s rooms.

  ‘This is really most inconvenient,’ said my friend when he heard the doorbell and peered down from his front window.

  ‘You don’t know there is a caller for you,’ I ventured, for it is true that my friend’s suppositions sometimes seemed to me a little glib.

  ‘Mrs Hudson does not take calls at this time,’ he replied briskly. ‘The butcher’s boy is not due this morning, and the lady standing on the step is dressed in a style of finery that was at its height in London two years ago, which suggests she is up from the country—not a social call, for she would visit her milliner first, but a matter of urgent business.’

  Moments later the door opened and Mrs Hudson requested to speak with Holmes. ‘Sir, there is a lady for you who will not be put off,’ she said. ‘I have asked her to wait—’

  ‘Mr Holmes, you are a consulting detective, are you not, and as such I should be able to call upon you as I would a doctor?’ said the lady, coming into the room and removing her gloves.

  ‘I have said as much myself, Miss—’

  ‘Woodham, Lucy Woodham,’ said the lady, as forthright as she was pretty.

  ‘Please, madam, take a seat and pray tell me what I can do for you. This is Dr Watson, a trusted friend and confidant. You may speak freely in front of him.’

  ‘I have travelled up from Devon today to see you because you came highly recommended to me by Miss A——-, for whom you handled a most delicate matter,’ she began. ‘My father is Major General Sir Henry Woodham.’

  ‘A most valorous gentleman, Miss Woodham,’ said Holmes, impressed. ‘A favourite of Her Majesty’s, I believe.’

  ‘Indeed, sir, although you might not c
redit it to see him now, for he is a broken man.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘It began three months ago, when the footprints first appeared. And it has recently culminated in death and madness.’

  I saw the sparkle in Holmes’s eyes and felt his excitement like electricity in the room. He knew the game was afoot. ‘Please be seated and tell me more, starting at the beginning,’ he said.

  ‘My father retired from the military world but found life hard to adapt to at Belstowe Grange,’ Miss Woodham explained. ‘He inherited the property from his grandfather, and upon his retirement we moved from Worcestershire to Devon, hoping to restore the house to its former glory. It wasn’t long before we heard the stories.’

  ‘What stories?’

  ‘You must understand that Belstowe Down is a close community, Mr Holmes. It centres around the rows of villagers’ cottages, the parish church and the Grange. It is quite ancient. There was supposed to have been a Roman encampment at the site. Storms often wash away the roads, keeping the village isolated and its residents prone to superstition. There is a legend that says when a terrible crime has been committed, the Devil sends his legions of the lost to take ghastly revenge upon the perpetrator.’

  ‘And your villagers have recently had reason to believe this has once more come about.’ Holmes tamped his pipe and sent aromatic blue clouds into the room. ‘Please describe the circumstances.’

  ‘On Sunday afternoon the head groom and his stable boy had been returning the horses from exercise when a sudden storm arose. The sky blackened and the wind howled, bringing squalls of rain that hammered at the house and flooded the grounds. I and my father watched from inside the Grange. When the tempest finally passed, the stable boy was discovered in a state of shock from which he has not recovered, and the groom was found lying in the middle of the lawn with his throat cut deep from ear to ear.’ Miss Woodham paused, quite overcome with emotion, but gathered her wits and continued. ‘But that was not the worst of it.’