by Lucy Banks
Above them, the floorboards knocked and clanked. Then, Kester heard a whispering noise, a scuttling, breathless sound, like velvet dragged across pebbles. It started from above, then moved closer, creeping slowly down the stairs, over the polished tiles. He felt every hair on his body stand to attention.
“I really don’t like this!” he protested, once again trying to compress himself as tightly as possible against the wall. “There’s someone else here, I can hear them!”
“Well of course there is,” Serena said from the darkness. “It’s her, sodding around and trying to get us scared, which in your case, is obviously proving highly effective.”
An ice breeze tickled Kester on the ear. He screamed, running blindly in what he hoped was the direction of the door. However, much to his horror, he ended up banging straight into something solid and rather warm, which turned out to be Mike’s chest. Mike patted him, before prising him off, like a fisherman prising a limpet off a rock.
“I tell you what,” Pamela suggested, “why don’t we try and switch on a few more lights. There’s only so many lightbulbs this spirit can break, I’m sure.” With a reassuringly confident step, Kester heard her pad off into the living room once more, where she not only switched on the ceiling light, but two lamps too, bathing the room in sudden, welcome brightness.
“Does anyone fancy a cup of tea?” Mike asked. “And a bit of cake wouldn’t go amiss, Jennifer.”
Miss Wellbeloved handed him the cake tin. “You may as well go and put the kettle on,” she agreed. “I think we might all need the caffeine.”
“In the meantime, I’m going to stay in here for a bit,” Pamela called out. “I want to see what I can learn from her.”
“Yes, okay, that is a good plan,” Dr Ribero said, as though casually discussing the weather, rather than the appropriate course of action for dealing with a deeply malevolent ghost. “You come and let us know how you get on.”
“Righty-ho then, leave me to it.” Without any further ado, Pamela closed the door behind her, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that she was shutting herself in a room with a very angry, unpleasant spirit.
Kester followed the others to the kitchen, and was relieved to see that the lights were working there too. Mike had already filled the kettle, which was already making a reassuringly jovial noise as it bubbled.
“Is Pamela safe in there?” he asked, looking down the hallway, half expecting her to come running out of the room at any second. He noticed that his hands were trembling.
“Yes, she will be fine,” Dr Ribero said, settling himself at the table. “Remember Kester, this is no big deal for us. This is what we do.”
“Though this is a particularly difficult spirit,” Miss Wellbeloved said as she pulled a chair across the slate-tiled floor with a screech and sat down. “I can’t make her out. Normally, spirits make it fairly clear what they want, but this one is giving us no clues at all.”
“Does she actually want anything at all?” Kester asked. “Doesn’t she just enjoy haunting people?”
“Absolutely not,” Miss Wellbeloved retorted, shooting him a disapproving look. “No spirit just torments people for the sheer fun of it. There’s always a reason.”
Serena perched on the edge of the table, taking the mug of steaming tea that Mike offered her without even the merest hint of a smile, let alone thanks. She yawned, looking up at the wall clock.
“You always say that,” she mumbled. “Kester, you should know that Jennifer is inclined to think the best of the spirit world. In her eyes, they can do no wrong.”
Miss Wellbeloved narrowed her eyes. “Don’t patronise me, young lady” she warned. “I know it’s late and you’re tired, but we’re not going to get anywhere if we can’t work together harmoniously.”
“See, there you go again,” Serena said before sipping her tea. “It’s always this left wing, softie approach with you. I’m not trying to patronise you. I’m just saying that you’ve got this very idealistic view of spirits.”
Miss Wellbeloved folded her arms, leaning across the table. “How many years have I been doing this?” she asked.
Serena shrugged.
“Let me tell you,” Miss Wellbeloved went on. “It’s been over thirty years now. Longer, in fact, if you count all the times I helped my father when I was a little girl. You seem to forget, Serena, that this agency was my father’s too. Not to mention my grandfather’s. I grew up playing with spirits. I knew all there was to know about them before I was even eighteen years of age.”
“Yes, I know all that,” Serena said, in the placating tones of a parent trying to mollify an unruly teenager. “I’m merely saying that—”
“You are merely insulting Jennifer’s wealth of experience,” Dr Ribero barked.
Serena crossed her arms, pouting. “I wasn’t at all. You’ve taken what I said the wrong way.”
“Can we have a bit of cake?” Mike said, ignoring them all completely and eyeing the enormous cake tin in the middle of the table. Miss Wellbeloved nodded, with a baleful glance at Serena, who pretended not to notice.
Suddenly, the bulbs in the mock chandelier over the table began to flicker. Kester, whose heart had nearly settled back into its normal rhythm, felt his chest go tight once more.
“What does that mean?” he asked, looking down the hallway in a panic. “Is the ghost annoyed again?”
“Yes, probably,” Dr Ribero said as he watched the ceiling light carefully. “Still, it is to be expected. The Green Lady, as we know, does not like people investigating her.”
“God, she’s like someone with a permanent case of PMT, isn’t she?” Mike said in a muffled voice, spraying crumbs all over the table.
Kester watched with fascinated horror as the chandelier began to slowly sway from side to side, gathering momentum with every pendulous movement.
“She’d better not break that bloody light,” Mike said. He took another bite of the cake. “I’ll bet that thing’s expensive. It’s a nice piece of equipment, that is.”
Dr Ribero looked at the ceiling and narrowed his eyes. “Aha,” he whispered. “I see what she is doing. Very clever. Very clever indeed.”
“What do you mean, clever?” Kester yelped. “It just looks very demonic to me.”
“I wondered how she was moving things, when she was tied into the painting,” Ribero explained, as the light swung more ferociously and clanged against the ceiling with every movement. “Now, I see that she is exerting a powerful energy force. That takes a lot of effort, not to mention skill, yes?”
“I don’t know, why are you asking me?” Kester said after moving away from the table. The chandelier looked about ready to fall down at any moment, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near it when it did. The crystal droplets looked suspiciously like glass, and, given that there were at least one hundred now swinging with wild abandon above his head, it didn’t look like the safest of situations.
He bit back a scream as a bang echoed through the hallway, then realised it was Pamela, who had slammed the living room door behind her.
“It’s alright! I’m leaving the room now, you can calm down,” she shouted, as she padded into the kitchen. Seeing the others, she shook her head. “Didn’t get much out of her, I’m afraid.”
Gradually, the light slowed its chaotic swinging, until it ceased movement with a tinkle of glass. Pamela pointed at Mike, then at the kettle. “Come on,” she said breathlessly. “I need a cup of tea after that.”
“Well, what did you manage to discover?” Dr Ribero asked, as he pulled out a seat for her to sit down. “Did you find out anything at all?”
Pamela slumped down like a sack of flour and massaged her temples. “Oh, it was all very jumbled. I picked up some indistinct words, but I’ve no idea what they could mean. She was clearly annoyed with me trying to access her thoughts, and once she realised what I was doing, she blocked me with everyth
ing she had. Pushed me clear across the room at one point.”
“Gosh, that’s awful,” Kester breathed, wide-eyed.
“All part of the job,” Pamela replied. “Anyway, Julio, all I got was a name. Well, a couple of names actually. Ransome. And Constance.”
“Could she mean ‘ransom’ as in holding someone to ransom?” Serena asked, leaning closer. “Ransome isn’t really a name, is it?”
“It could be a surname,” Miss Wellbeloved said. “However, it doesn’t give us much to go on. Whoever Ransome and Constance are, they’re certainly not living in this house now.”
“I got some other pretty nasty messages too,” Pamela continued. She glanced at Kester. “Perhaps you’d rather I didn’t say?”
Dr Ribero followed the line of her gaze to the quivering form of his son at the other end of the table, then slapped his fist on the table. “No, Pamela, the boy must learn if he is going to join this agency. Please, carry on.” He nodded, as though daring his son to contradict him. Kester wisely remained silent.
“Well, I kept getting real venom from her. The phrase ‘I’ll hurt you’ came up a lot, spat out like she was shouting, right in my head, like a steam train. Not to mention ‘I’ll cut you up’ and ‘I’ll see you buried.’”
Kester bit his lip. He wished he’d protested when he had the chance. I’ll be thinking of that when I’m next lying in bed trying to get to sleep, he realised with a sinking heart.
“See, this is exactly what I was talking about,” Serena said, standing and pacing around the kitchen like a restless cat. “This is why you need to take a tougher approach! When you go in all softly, softly, you just let them walk all over you.”
“Serena, don’t start this again,” Miss Wellbeloved snapped. “I don’t want the entire night to turn into a debate about how best to handle spirits. You haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Yes. Instead, we need to focus on how to address the problem practically, right?” Dr Ribero said firmly. “No more silly bickering. I think it would be best if I take Kester in now, see how he gets on, yes?”
“Er, no,” Kester spluttered, as he choked on his final mouthful of tea. He shook his head as resolutely as he possibly could without hurting his neck. “No, that doesn’t sound like a plan at all. No, thank you.”
“It was not a request,” Dr Ribero stated, as puff-chested as a circus ringmaster. “It was an order. Come on, up you get. Then after we’re done, Mike can see whether his equipment will do any good this time.”
“I really don’t want to go in there,” Kester protested, even as Serena slid behind him and pulled out his chair. “Remember what happened last time? I was no use at all.”
“Nice try,” Serena whispered into his ear, making him jump. “You’re not wriggling out of it. If you want to be one of us, you’ve got to do the job properly.”
“But I never said I wanted to be one of you!”
“I do hope,” Dr Ribero interrupted, his eyebrows bouncing up and down in a vaguely threatening manner, “that my only son in the world is not a coward. Kester, are you a coward?”
“Yes! Yes, I very much am!”
“That was not the answer I wanted to hear.” Without any further preamble, he grasped his son by the armpit and pulled him out of his seat and into the hallway. “We have a job to do, and you do not need to be frightened, okay?”
“I really must protest,” Kester trilled, looking over his shoulder plaintively, hoping one of the others would help him. “I’m not cut out for this type of thing at all, I can tell.”
“Ah, go on mate, you’ll be fine. Remember, she’s just a woman,” Mike said, with a grin. “Show her who’s boss.”
Kester just managed to catch the collective filthy looks fired in Mike’s direction by the others, before he was dragged into the living room like a naughty schoolboy being hauled into the headmaster’s office. He cowered, scarcely daring to look around him. His heart was pounding wildly, and he half-expected the spectre in the painting to leap out of the canvas at any moment. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to flee from the room, from the house, preferably from the entire city, if possible.
After a minute or so, he opened his eyes. In fact, he hadn’t realised that he’d shut them until now. He’d instinctively squeezed them closed and curled in on himself, like a frightened hedgehog. Now he felt a bit silly for doing so, especially as nothing even remotely sinister had actually happened. He looked around, and saw Ribero glaring at him disapprovingly.
“See, nothing to be frightened of,” the old man repeated, as he gestured around the room. Indeed, Kester could see that it looked gratifyingly bland. Even the painting seemed fairly mundane, though he didn’t dare look directly at it, in case he caused a reaction. “Now please,” Ribero continued, “shall we make a start?”
“What do you want us to make a start on?” Kester said anxiously.
Dr Ribero smoothed down his hair, before he settled on the opulent leather sofa. He looked instantly comfortable, like a lord relaxing in his manor, a super-abundance of refined limbs, curling moustache, and hair wax. “We are going to look at her,” he declared and patted the seat beside him.
“Just look at her?” Kester asked warily.
“Just so. Now come, sit down.”
Kester twiddled his fingers. “What if I don’t want to look at her?”
The doctor cleared his throat. His moustache looked even more authoritative in the artificial light of the room, curled pertly upwards like two attention-seeking caterpillars. “How are you going to help us then?” he enquired in a dangerously soft voice. “Your gift will not be much use if you continue to cower like a toddler afraid of his own shadow, will it?”
“I’d say this situation is a little different,” Kester protested.
Ribero shook his head in an elaborate show of disappointment. He shook his hands at the ceiling as though entreating the gods themselves to assist him, and grumbled in Spanish. “I do not know what your mother would think of this,” he said finally.
“I think she’d probably be very sympathetic!” he bristled. “After all, it’s not as if you’re asking me to pick up a spider or something. This is a dangerous ghost you’re talking about here!”
“Ah, dangerous, dangerous,” Dr Ribero said, waving at the painting as though it was a minor annoyance and nothing more. “This is not dangerous. We have had cases in the past that would make your hair stand on end, my boy. I remember the first time Jennifer’s father took me on an observation, now that was something to be scared about . . .”
Suddenly, an icy wind gusted around Kester’s ears. He froze, rooted with terror. Instinctively, his gaze travelled to the painting, then immediately he wished it hadn’t. The painting had changed. It was as though the lady herself had come to life. Although she hadn’t moved, her eyes burned out of the canvas, connecting with his own and pinning him in place, like a moth on a mounted board.
It was horrible—deadly horrible—though he couldn’t say exactly why. He felt mouse-sized under her malevolent gaze. Yet, at the same time, her beauty was overwhelming, all-encompassing, angelic. It was too much to bear. He tried to shout out, but the only sound that emerged from his throat was a half-strangled gurgle, like a baby choking on milk. Dr Ribero sat up straighter, his expression alive with excitement.
“Ah yes, now she is paying attention to us,” he said as he slapped his thigh. “My dear spirit,” he boomed, addressing the portrait as naturally as a real person, “thank you for joining us. Would you mind if we sat with you for a little while, yes?”
The answer was a horrible, rasping whisper that oozed all around them, seeping from the walls and through the air. Kester remained fixated upon the Green Lady, unable to tear his eyes away. She was beautiful, achingly beautiful, yet there was a mercilessness that chilled him. He began to think he might die here, pinioned in place
by those terrible, irresistible eyes. What a way to die, he thought, half-transfixed, half-terrified. To be killed by such gorgeousness.
“Kester, are you seeing anything at all?” the doctor asked from behind him. “Can you see the door? Kester, look away from her for a moment. Look around her, look outside the painting. Is the door there?”
“I can’t look,” Kester whispered, tears streaming down his cheeks. “She has me. I can’t look away.”
Dr Ribero muttered something in Spanish under his breath. “Kester,” he said in a louder voice. “I need you to look at me. Come now. Take your eyes off her, please.”
Kester opened his mouth to reply, but nothing emerged. His lungs felt frozen, his throat narrowing, becoming more useless by the second. Although he was more scared than he’d ever been in his life, he also felt a strange sense of calm begin to wash over him, a sweeping tide of indifference that numbed his senses. It’s alright, he thought serenely. Everything will be fine.
“Kester!” Dr Ribero shouted. Kester felt hands pulling at his face, mashing his cheeks, but he was unable to move. His head was fixed in place by an unseen vice, regardless of how hard the doctor tried to move him.
Dr Ribero cursed again, before pacing to the door. “Mike! Jennifer!” he shouted, though Kester was only dimly aware of the noise. The air felt as though it was thinning around him, making it difficult to breathe. Things were fuzzing at the edges, going greyer, and his ears began to ring, a torturous, high-pitched sound that squeezed out all rational thought.
A pair of arms seized him firmly about the middle, and he was yanked backwards. Again, he could just about make out the sound of someone shouting his name. As he was dragged out of the room, he closed his eyes, a desperate weight pressed against his chest. I’ve lost her, he thought as the living room door closed behind him. They’ve taken me from her.
A cacophony of voices buzzed around him as he slumped against the wall.
“Jeez, what happened?”
“I do not know! One minute he was fine, the next, he was crying and I couldn’t move him, you see?”
