Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes

by Jack Lewis

  Jeremiah started to walk. He was quicker than I expected for someone who carried a bit of weight, and his strides were much bigger than mine.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Where do you think?”

  I looked at the village in front of me. It was laid out haphazardly, with the buildings dotted in a strange formation. It was as though people just built wherever they felt like. Sometimes the buildings were put next to each other and you’d get four or five in a row, but often they were all isolated from each other. I got the sense that the villagers kept themselves to themselves.

  A cobbled stone pathway ran through the village and it also served as the only road, not that many cars drove down it. It ran in twists and turns from building to building, the only thing I could see that connected the whole place together. Through its mazy run there was the pub, a general store and chemist, some houses, a post office, more houses, the town hall, a church and a graveyard. Given that we wanted to find out about a fairly recent death, or whether there was one, the town hall seemed a good choice. There would be a census or some sort of record kept there.

  “We could check out the town hall.” I said.

  Jeremiah followed my gaze and saw the two story building a few hundred metres away. Then his eyes moved passed it.

  “It’s too early for that. No-one will be in. First we’ll go to the graveyard.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You think they ever bury someone here without giving them a plot in the graveyard?”

  I thought about it. Probably not.

  “They could cremate?” I suggested.

  “Do you see anything equipped for cremation? They bury their dead here,” said Jeremiah.

  The graveyard was next to the church. It was a plot of land a few acres long, and it stretched outside the boundaries of the village. There were rows upon rows of headstones, which seemed like too many for a village of this size. There could be fifty odd people here, tops, at any one time. Yet there were hundreds of graves.

  “You take the east side and work your way in, I’ll take the west. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  I looked at the rows of headstones as they sat in the grim morning light. The east side seemed much darker than the west.

  “We’re splitting up?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Look for a girl buried here. Check the birth and death dates for a seven year old, or someone around that age. There will probably be some sort of poem carved into the head stone too. You find that with anything this tragic.”

  Jeremiah walked away from me and toward the west side of the plot, scanning the graves as he went. I pulled my hood down from over my head and let it rest on my shoulders. The wind bit my ears and made them raw, and I felt my nose getting bunged up. But having the hood up drowned the outside world and blunted my hearing, and I felt like I needed all my senses intact in this place.

  I walked from grave to grave. At first the ages and descriptions made me sad. Loving father, husband, wife, mother. Died aged 50, 48, 39, 20. After walking passed a few hundred, I developed a mental callous for it. They became just words and numbers, and I was looking for two; 'daughter' and seven.

  It seemed strange that a little girl could be buried here, surrounded by the bodies of people much older than her. People who had been given a shot at life, had been given a chance at living some sort of existence before they ended up in the ground. But the little girl didn’t even have a decade to her name. No chance to develop her own thoughts about things, her own ideas, carve out some sort of life for herself.

  I got the stupid idea that maybe the girl would wake up in her coffin six feet under and wonder where the hell she was. Or that maybe dying aged you beyond normal comprehension, and that in death this girl took on wisdom beyond her years. That she knew something I didn’t.

  There was a faint burning smell as though someone had lit a fire. I glanced back at the church and saw who must have been the caretaker burning a pile of twigs. As I smelt the smoke from the fire I realised I would have loved to have the heat from it too.

  I walked through my section of the graveyard but I didn’t see anything. I doubted Jeremiah had either, because surely he would have shouted me over. He walked slower than me, taking time to read every gravestone thoroughly as though it was a respect he owed the dead.

  I looked across to the church. The fire still burnt, but I was too far away to feel it. I could do with some of that heat, I thought.

  The caretaker looked up as I approached. He was evidently not used to seeing people at this time in the morning, because he had a look of shock on his face.

  “Morning, didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.

  He wore blue overalls and muddy wellington boots. These were not just flecked, they were absolutely caked, as though the onslaught of mud on them was inevitable and he had long ago given up washing them. His face was red from the fire, or possibly through embarrassment, and his cheeks stretched gauntly up to his ears. He didn’t look like a guy who did well in social interactions, which was maybe why he was burning twigs behind a church at this time in the morning. He took a glove off and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Didn’t scare me, lovey,” he said.

  “I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

  “Not from round ‘ere, are you?” he said. He bent to his side and picked up a pile of twigs. He saw my eyes follow him, and he gestured toward me with twigs. “Want a go?”

  I shook my head.

  He threw the wood on the fire. The heat felt good on my face, comforting somehow. I remembered being at a bonfire with a foster dad, one of the good ones. We stood thirty metres back and watched the giant pile of furniture and tree branches as they were enveloped in fire. It grew until the flames reached up into the sky. A wretched Guy Fawkes doll drowned in fire, the orange spikes of heat going down his throat. Foster dad and I stood well back, and we knew the fire couldn’t reach us. I enjoyed the warm tickles on my face and felt the glow spread across my cheeks.

  “I’m from Manchester,” I said.

  “Manchester?” The way he pronounced it made it seem like a foreign city, somewhere in Eastern Europe.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alec,” he said.

  “Can I ask you something, Alec?”

  He picked up another pile and threw it into the fire. His stock was diminishing, and soon the fire would run out of fuel.

  “Aye, go on then.”

  I mentally rehearsed what to say, so as not to come off insensitive about such a touchy subject.

  “Have there been many new plots here over the last few years?” I asked.

  “Plots?”

  “Graves, I mean.”

  “No, lass, not many. And I’d know. ‘Cos I’d be the one to dig them.”

  I could tell from the tightness of his shirt that his arms were used to a lot of physical labour, so I had no doubt that it would be him.

  “Have there been any at all?”

  “Aye.”

  He reached into a big pocket in the middle of his overalls and pulled out a pouch of rolling tobacco. It looked nearly empty.

  “You could use a new pouch” I said, hoping to find a bribe point.

  “Got plenty at home.”

  He wasn’t giving much up. I didn’t know if it was through social ineptness, or because he just didn’t want to tell me anything. Maybe it was because I was an outsider, someone not from the village. Someone from a big place called Manchester that he’d probably never been to but he’d heard about. And was suspicious about.

  “Alec.”

  “Aye.”

  I decided to get straight to the point with him.

  “Have any little girls in the village died over the last ten years?”

  He looked shocked.

  ”No lass,” he said.

  7

  It was completely light outside now, but it wasn’t what you’d call a nice day. The sky was a milky colour, co
mpletely covered in clouds that seemed to hang so low that they touched the peaks of the hills that enclosed the village. There was a little bit of life in the streets now; a milkman drove a small milk float door to door, two women stood chatting outside the post office, no doubt waiting for it to open. A man walked down the cobbled streets with a florescent satchel on his back. At first I thought he was the postman, but I realised that he was posting newspapers through letterboxes rather than mail, so he was an adult paperboy. A connection fired in my brain.

  “You don’t see many kids round here,” I said.

  Jeremiah walked with the collar of his coat pulled up passed his mouth, so I couldn’t see his lips move when he spoke.

  “A place like this, no kid will stay around for long. They probably hit eighteen and leave for the city. Glasgow’s only a two hour drive.”

  I’d been to Glasgow once to visit a friend who used to be in my class. Not my favourite city by any means, but at least it had the amenities of modern life; internet, supermarkets, bars, cinemas. Here you got none of that, it was like living thirty years in the past. Strange that a city could be only a two hour drive away but seem like it was a lifetime.

  “But there are no kids under eighteen either.”

  “Schools in.” said Jeremiah. He pointed over to a building on the east side of town. Black railings stood on top of a small wall that stretched around the perimeter. I could see an adult stood at the gate saying hello to a group of children as they trudged into the school.

  “Take it you didn’t find it,” I said.

  “Nothing on my side.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I know.”

  You’re dying to know, I thought. He had surely seen me talking to Alec the caretaker, and he was desperate to know what he said. But he didn’t want to ask me. He didn’t want it to seem like I was actually of some use to him here rather than some annoying girl who was pestering him for a story.

  “So what next?” I asked.

  “Town hall’s open. We’ll go check the census.”

  It was only a short walk to the town hall, but it was made longer by the difficulty I had in keeping what the caretaker had said from Jeremiah. I knew he wanted to know, but he was putting on such an air of indifference that I almost doubted it. And now I found myself wanting to tell him, wanting him to ask. I realised it was because I wanted to prove myself to him, to this fifty year old lonely man who didn’t care enough about himself to stay in shape. I realised I had a respect for him.

  “Don’t you want to know what the caretaker said to me?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well he said that they haven’t had any deaths like the kind we’re looking for.”

  Jeremiah didn’t show anything on his face but his eyes seemed to stare passed the town hall and over the hills, to wherever he did his thinking. I stupidly felt a small pleasure in giving him information that made him think.

  The town hall resembled more of a school assembly than an official office. There were a couple of cramped offices hidden away through doors at the side, but the main part of the building was a large space with wooden tread boards and cheap plastic chairs arranged in rows. These pointed at a stage, on top of which was a piano. I guessed that the town hall doubled as a place for official business and one that was hired out for village plays and social club meetings.

  The official that met us was called Murray. He didn’t offer a hand shake. Instead he talked to us as he guided us through to his office. His eyes were intense and they darted everywhere, and his body seemed to pull in all different directions, as though he needed to be in a hundred places at once. He wore green felt pants, and a white shirt with the sleeves folded up to his elbows. His short hair and moustache were ginger, though not quite the deep red of Jeremiah’s.

  Inside his office he offered Jeremiah a seat. There was only one, so I stood. There was no point waiting for Jeremiah to offer me his.

  “I’d offer you a cup of tea but I haven’t even had chance to pick up the milk.”

  “You should have said, we could have brought it in for you,” I said.

  Jeremiah shot me a look that said I’d just be a listener in this meeting.

  “I’ll keep it short,” said Jeremiah. “We want to check the births and deaths register.”

  Murray’s eyebrows tightened.

  “Something wrong?” he said.

  “It’s for research. I’m a professor in Manchester, and Ella here is one of my students.”

  Murray cleared a tiny portion of the corner of his desk and sat on it.

  “Are professors in the habit of going on trips to Scotland with their students?” He said.

  Jeremiah ignored the remark. “The census is public record, and I want to see it.” There was a tone of authority to his voice, a sense that he’d get what he wanted.

  Murray sighed. He rolled up his left sleeve an inch further above his elbow, revealing part of a skinny pale bicep. He rubbed his index finger back and forth across his moustache. Ginger hair curled over his top lip.

  “I guess I can dig it out” he said.

  We waited in Murray’s office while he fetched the file. I took his place at the corner of his desk and drummed my fingers up and down the wood. Jeremiah sat with his legs crossed and his right cheek propped up on his elbow.

  “What an arse” I said.

  Jeremiah looked at me but didn’t say anything or change position.

  “He really couldn’t be arsed helping us, and he didn’t even bother to hide it. Hate people like that. Tosser.”

  Jeremiah straightened up.

  “That’s something you’ll have to get used to, because it doesn’t change. Go anywhere in the world and you’ll find people who don’t like their jobs, don’t feel they should have to help you. The trick is to know what you want and believe that you’re entitled to it.”

  Murray walked into the room, gave us the file and then left. He had a hundred errands to run, and he was happy for us to look at the census and then just leave it on his desk before we left.

  "You can do the monkey work," said Jeremiah.

  He got out of the seat and then gestured toward it. Part of him must have been enjoying having an assistant. An underling there to do the jobs he didn’t want to. I sat down. The chair was hard on my bum. If Murray ever spent any time in it, I'm sure he'd have replaced it by now.

  I sat with the book in front of me.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Try deaths first,” said Jeremiah.

  He paced back and forth behind me.

  I opened the second half of the census, which was a record of all the reported deaths in the village. The first page began in 1946. Presumably the one for the years before that had been filled. We were looking from the late nineties to present, to make sure we took in the biggest catchment area possible. I flicked to ninety nine without waiting for Jeremiah to tell me.

  “What information does it give?”

  “Name, address, age, cause of death.”

  “Okay, look for anyone under ten and read them all out to me.”

  Ignoring his ordering tone, I flicked through the pages and scanned the age column. The handwriting of the census stayed the same apart from rare patches where a record was written in a different hand. Murray had probably recorded them, and the different hand was from when he took a holiday. I imagined Murray as the kind of guy who had taken the town hall job when he was sixteen and would stay in it all his life.

  I went as quickly as I could, looking for the death of someone under ten years old. Unsurprisingly, they were rare, and after twenty pages my concentration started to lag. Then I saw something.

  “Got one!” I said. The enthusiasm of my voice broke the stillness of the office, and when I realised that I was talking about the death of a young child I lowered my tone.

  “What is it?” said Jeremiah.

  I looked at the name. “Thomas Wells, aged seven. Cause of death unknown.”

/>   “Not our kid. Carry on.”

  We were looking for a girl, I knew. She should have been seven years old, but I looked a year either side. The cause of death had to be suicide. My stomach lurched when I thought about it. It was something I didn’t think I would ever get my head round, the idea that a child was capable of committing suicide.