Susan shuffled uneasily in her seat. ‘I know what it looks like…’
‘It looks like you’re going to be taken advantage of, that’s what it looks like. No way am I going to allow you to see that crank, or any other crank for that matter.’
‘Then I’ll have to go on my own. I thought you’d understand.’
‘It’s a show, Susan, plain and simple. I’ve seen them before. They throw out a load of generic questions designed to spark someone’s interest. They get hooked in and before you know it it’s the dupe themselves who are blabbing on about details of their dead relative or friend and believing the psychic really is in contact with the dead. It’s horrible and degrading, Susan. As your friend I can’t let you put yourself through the heartache and false hope they offer.’
‘Fine.’
‘Promise me you won’t go.’
‘I’ve got two tickets.’
‘Does Paul know?’
‘God, no.’
Rose grunted out her frustration. ‘You are so pig-headed, you know that?’
‘Takes one to know one.’ She reached out across the table. Touched her friend’s fingertips. ‘Please, Rose. For me. Just this once.’
She drained her glass and refilled it with neat vodka. ‘I refuse to sing or chant or say hallelujah, or whatever they try to get you to do.’
‘No hallelujahs.’ Susan took the bottle. ‘I think I’ll join you,’ she said, smiling.
Barnaby Williams was a small, bald-headed man with thick-rimmed glasses, a weak chin and dressed in a black suit. The theatre was half-full, surprisingly cool as if they were saving on heating bills, and the lighting suitably gloomy, trying hard to be atmospheric but appearing like cost-cutting, too. His only props were a chair and microphone, and a handkerchief he took out every now and again to mop his brow, more for effect, Susan guessed, as she doubted anyone would be breaking into a sweat anytime soon in that chilly building.
‘I see a white shape,’ he said, fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s coming into focus…’ The audience were hushed. ‘It’s a caravan… Yes, that’s it. It’s a caravan I’m seeing. The person I’m connecting with used to own a caravan. Is there anyone here who knew someone who had a caravan when they were alive?’
Three people put their hands up. Two women and a man. Barnaby Williams pointed and one of the women spoke.
‘My sister had a caravan,’ she said weakly, emotion bubbling up.
‘Quite a large one,’ said Williams.
‘It was only a two-berth,’ she admitted.
‘That’s right,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘The woman I’m connecting with says it was about twelve feet in length.’
‘Yes,’ said the woman, almost startled. ‘It was twelve feet exactly!’
‘With an awning,’ he went on.
‘That’s right. They used to put the dog in there to sleep at night.’
‘She loved her holidays in that caravan,’ said Williams.
‘Oh yes. They went away as often as they could,’ said the woman, blowing her nose on a tissue.’
‘And the dog, she says she was very fond of her dog.’
‘Buster. She loved it to bits. Mary would do anything for that dog. It was like a child to her.’
‘What’s that?’ he said, turning his head to one side, concentration screwing up his face. ‘I can’t hear you properly. Don’t go away just yet. That’s right, come back to me, Mary.’ He raised his eyes to the woman in the audience. ‘She’s wanting to tell you something.’ Frowning again. ‘She wants to tell you not to be so sad, that’s she’s alright where she is and that you shouldn’t worry about her any more.’
‘And Buster? Is he there with her?’ asked the woman.
Williams went silent. ‘Mary says Buster is with her, too. He’s happy.’
The woman’s face beamed and she swiped a tissue over her wet eyes. ‘Tell her I love her and I miss her,’ she said.
‘She says she hears you. Oh, she’s fading, fading fast. Come back, please… Ah, I’m sorry,’ he sighed, ‘she has left us.’
Afterwards, stood outside the battered dressing room door that bore a piece of paper with Barnaby William’s name hand-written in blue felt-tip pen, Rose turned to Susan.
‘Are you telling me you believe all that rubbish you’ve just heard? Take that caravan line – Jesus, how many older people have caravans? And what did he really tell her? Nothing, jack shit. Same as every other dumb punter. He fed off their responses like I told you he would.’
‘I take your point,’ said Susan, smiling gently.
The door opened and Barnaby Williams grinned inanely at them. He looked smaller, balder and less commanding than he did up on stage. He also smelled of deodorant soused with sweat, and his breath reeked of cigarette smoke. He invited them in.
‘Good evening, ladies,’ he said, his hand indicating two wooden chairs with the stuffing coming out of the not-so-padded seats. ‘I’m told you want to use my services privately.’
‘I want to contact my dead daughter,’ said Susan.
Rose rolled her eyes but remained silent and stiff-lipped.
‘I charge fifty pounds a session,’ he said.
‘I’m in the wrong business,’ Rose observed wryly. A sharp glance from Susan told her to keep her mouth shut.
‘I’m the best,’ he said. ‘In this business you get what you pay for. I make no excuses for needing to make a living.’
‘Could you do it now, right here?’ Susan urged.
‘In a dressing room? It’s hardly conducive to contacting the dead.’
‘They don’t mind the stage though,’ said Rose. ‘Guess everyone likes their five minutes of fame.’
The man glowered at her, then smiled broadly. ‘I can forgive your scepticism. I have to deal with it all the time.’ He turned to Susan. ‘Yes, if you like. Do you have the cash? I prefer cash.’
Susan reached into her bag. ‘I have an offer to make you, Mr Williams,’ she said, taking out her purse. She unclipped it, removed a wad of notes. She placed it on the dressing table by his packet of cigarettes. ‘There is fifty pounds, plus another two-hundred if you answer me one question. If you get it correct you keep the two-hundred as well and I’ll give you a thousand more for a follow-up session. Get it wrong, you only get to keep the fifty.’
‘Susan, that’s a lot of money…’ said Rose concernedly.
‘Fine, it’s a deal,’ said Williams, his eyes wide. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Contact my daughter first.’
‘I’ll try,’
‘Oh, come on, give it your best shot,’ said Rose with a smirk.
Barnaby Williams ignored her, creased his forehead and put fingers to his temples. ‘This is not as easy as it looks,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it works, other times…’
‘Seemed to work every time in the theatre,’ Rose noticed dryly.
‘Quiet,’ said Susan, ‘or wait outside. It’s my money, I’ll do with it what I like.’
‘Sure,’ she said, shrugging.
Williams began to breathe long and deep. His eyes closed. He started to sway a little. ‘I have someone here with me,’ he said painfully. ‘It’s a boy – no, wait, it’s a young woman. I sense a young woman. Tall, blonde…’ He grunted, grimaced. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Who is here with me?’
Susan’s face remained impassive. Rose shook her head.
‘Yes, your mother is here. A letter ‘E’ is coming to me… What’s your name?’ He opened his eyes and looked at Susan. ‘Does the letter ‘E’ mean anything to you?’
‘I want you to ask her one thing,’ said Susan.
‘She says ask her anything…’
‘What’s the name of her favourite teddy bear she had as a child.’
Williams hesitated, closed his eyes again. ‘What is the name of your teddy bear? Wait, that’s too faint. You’re fading. Did you hear my question? You did. That’s good. Can I have an answer, please? Your mother is wai
ting for an answer…’ He lowered his head, his chin almost on his chest. ‘A letter ‘T’ is coming to me.’ He opened his eyes, looked at Susan. She didn’t respond. ‘The letter ‘O’ – is that it? Do you recognise the letter ‘O’?
‘Does she know or not?’ said Susan.
‘I’m getting the name Oscar…’ he said. ‘Or Orville…’ Then he bit at his lower lip. ‘She’s becoming faint again but she says she loves you. She’d like to talk again but her spirit is weak. Weak. So weak…’
‘So lame, more like’ said Susan, standing up and taking the money from the dressing table. She peeled off a few notes and tossed them at him. ‘You’re a pile of crap,’ she said. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
‘We need another session,’ said Williams. ‘Sometimes it’s like that. You can’t summon up spirits on a whim.’
‘Another session?’ her eyes steeled.
‘Yes, that would be advisable,’ he said. ‘If you really want to speak to her.’
‘You cheap little fraud!’ she fired suddenly. ‘You godforsaken pile of shit!’ She lashed out at him, her fist catching him on the cheek, and he backed off, alarmed.
‘Christ, lady…’
Rose stepped forward, grabbed Susan by the wrist, but she yanked herself free and launched herself at the man, screaming and pummelling him with her fists. He cowered before the onslaught, covering his face with his arms.
‘You bastard!’ she yelled. ‘You sordid little bastard! Your kind makes me sick!’
Rose tried to drag her off him. ‘Susan…’ she said.
Susan aimed her finger at his eyes, panting heavily, her teeth gritted. ‘People like you should be shot! Feeding off misery, promising something you can’t fucking deliver!’
‘Leave him be, Susan, he’s not worth it,’ said Rose, pulling at her.
Williams managed an incredulous grin. ‘You’re fucking crazy, you know that, lady? I’m gonna sue you for what you just did; you could have bust my nose, you bitch!’
She made as if to strike him again. He flinched, but Rose had a good hold and pulled her back, out of the room.
They left by the theatre’s rear door, and once out in the alley Susan collapsed to her knees, crying, her head in her hands, her shoulders jerking.
‘I told you it was no good,’ said Rose, crouching down and putting an arm around Susan. ‘I told you what they were like.’
‘I lost my baby, Rose,’ she said through heartfelt sobs. ‘I lost my little girl and I wasn’t there to help her.’
‘It’s not your fault. You can’t blame yourself like this.’
‘Parents should die before their kids, everyone knows that. I should have died first. It’s not right.’
‘Sometimes things happen…’ was the only lame thing she could think of.
‘I have to help her, Rose. I know I do. I have to help my Becky. I can’t let her down a second time.’
‘Susan…’ she said helplessly. ‘You didn’t let her down. And she’s not with us anymore. She’s beyond help…’
‘You don’t believe me either, do you? You think I’m cracking up.’ She struggled to her feet, her legs shaking, trying to get her emotions under control. ‘Well you know what you can do, Rose. You can just fuck off and let me get on with what I have to do on my own.’
‘I’m your friend, Susan…’
‘Sure you are. I’ve got news for you; I don’t need friends anymore. Life’s not about me. My life ended the night Becky died.’ She walked away, her arms folded protectively around her. She stopped, turned to look back. ‘She needs me, and I won’t give up until I find out how I can help her.’
Rose shook her head sorrowfully and dashed after her, catching her up. She tried to link arms with her but she fought off any contact. They headed silently for the car.
* * * *
4
Silas Blake
The dreams stopped unexpectedly. Becky didn’t come to her anymore. Even though she thought about her hard and long before she went to sleep, her daughter appeared to have abandoned her. Soon she didn’t sleep at all, or only for minutes at a time. She slid into loneliness and depression again, and the more she fell under its dark spell the more she sought answers. She contacted every psychic she could find. But they all disappointed with their evasive answers and often ludicrously false assertions. Eventually she gave up on psychics. It felt easier to look around her for something real to blame.
‘I hate the city,’ she said.
‘It’s the suburbs,’ he replied.
‘It’s still attached to the city, and it was the city that did this to us, infected our lives with its evil!’
So Paul Carmichael agreed, for the sake of their marriage, to move away from the area. A new house in a new place. That’s what they decided they needed to start out afresh. After all, with hardly any friends or family to speak of, what was holding them back? She could write, he could still travel and sell whatever it was he needed to sell. Nothing tied them down except…
Except the thing he never wanted to talk about anymore.
They picked a village some sixty miles away, quiet, surrounded by green fields, and from their kitchen window they saw sheep and rabbits grazing on the hillsides and buzzards riding the thermals. They bought a dog, a two-year-old border collie called Billy-Joe they picked up from a rescue centre who soon displayed serious issues of his own, which Susan thought made him fit right in.
Perhaps, like Rose MacDonald had said, the dreams of Becky had been the by-product of grief. She read all sorts of things about it, how it affected different people in different ways. In truth she never expected to be happy ever again, but she wanted some relief from this crushing, debilitating swamp of emotions she could not see a way out of. At least the dreams helped, in some small way. But of course, the more time moved on the more she knew Becky was not some kind of spirit calling out to her. That was in her imagination. It wasn’t her dead daughter who was calling out to her mother for help; it was really the mother who felt like she’d died and had been calling out to her daughter. That was her way of working through the grief. Paul’s way was to clam up. He did it really well. But that didn’t help her any, having no one to talk to.
Six months swept by them. She wrote stories that nobody wanted to publish, but wrote them anyway. She walked the dog in the fields and he scared away the sheep and the rabbits, till he decided to run off and never come back. She was heartbroken, for a while, considered another pooch and decided even dogs didn’t want to be part of her miserable existence. She regularly went into the nearby town which was hardly big enough to call a town and wandered around the clutter of independent shops, bought cakes and bread at inflated small-town prices and sat in the local café by the window and ate hot buttered teacakes, picked out the currants and arranged them on her plate in the shape of a smiley face. She went in so often that the woman behind the counter eventually gave up asking what she wanted and instead had it prepared for her. Paul went to conferences as he’d always done, and he sold his garden equipment and made very little from it, but he carried on doing it anyhow. Habits, designed to keep them occupied, she realised; designed to make them numb and forced them to get on with life.
And just as she was beginning to feel that her curtain of grief was slowly drawing back a strange thing happened.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Carmichael.’
She was taken aback. She’d been so absorbed in making a few notes for her latest short story that she’d not seen or heard him sit down opposite her at the café table.
He was a portly gentleman, white hair, white moustache, pink face, watery green eyes that looked like they’d been a stronger colour but faded in the sunlight. He wore a three-piece suit in brown tweed, a checked shirt and a puce-coloured tie that didn’t match any of his outfit, his entire appearance one of rumpled elegance.
‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ she said, trying not to look unduly suspicious.
‘You don’t like currants,’ he ob
served, looking down at her side plate. ‘Or you like smiley faces. Which is it?’
‘Both,’ she said, frowning. ‘Can I help you?’
‘This is a pleasant little café, don’t you think?’ he went on. ‘Having said that, there isn’t a great deal of choice when it comes to watering holes in this place, is there?’
‘It’s pleasant,’ she agreed.
‘I’ve seen you come here quite often,’ he said. ‘A regular, is what they call it in the trade.’
‘Have you been watching me?’ she said, the first prickles of alarm causing the muscle in her temple to twitch. She glanced at the woman behind the counter, but she was occupied cleaning down a glass dome that housed a veritable rock garden of scones.
‘After a fashion,’ he admitted.
She closed her notebook and stashed away her pencil. ‘I’ve got to be going,’ she said.
‘Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a stalker or insurance salesman or anything horrid like that!’
His smile was so warm, so comforting, that she felt her body relax again. ‘Who are you? If you’re not selling me insurance, or stalking me, what is it you want?’
‘I want to help you.’
‘I don’t need help.’
‘Oh but you do, Mrs Carmichael.’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘Sorry, it’s been very rude of me not to introduce myself. You must think me quite mad. My name is Silas Blake.’
‘Well, Mr Silas Blake, how do you know my name? What is it you want?’ her tone was deliberately serious, though she did not feel in the least intimidated by him now. The opposite, in fact.
‘Actually, it’s not you who needs the help as such,’ he said.
‘So who does?’
‘Your daughter Becky.’
Her mouth hung open, a sigh of a breath being drawn over her lips and drying them out. ‘How do you know about Becky?’
‘You’d be surprised what I know, Mrs Carmichael. Your daughter is dead, is she not?’
THE SOUL FIXER (A psychological thriller) Page 3
