The Dark Water

by Helen Moorhouse

  “Less of your smartness, young lady,” he replied.

  They walked a further few steps in silence before Martha felt a huge arm go round her shoulders as Gabriel hugged her to him. He left his arm around her as they walked.

  “Loath as I am to be nice, thanks for coming to meet me today,” he said into the wind, but Martha knew it was sincere.

  “Gabriel, it’s the least I could do after the last six months,” she replied quietly, still ashamed of her reluctance to contact Gabriel for so long.

  “I didn’t know who else to contact,” he continued. “I mean it’s Will, really, I should be speaking to but I just cannot summon up the courage to ring him. I mean he’s furious with me and I thought you would be too but you’re not quite as scary as him so I went for the soft option.”

  Martha made a face of mock outrage and looked up at Gabriel who made an exaggerated face of embarrassment in return.

  “Well, I could take you in a fight is what I mean,” he said, by way of explanation and then grinned. Martha smiled back. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m not furious with anyone – and for what it’s worth, I don’t know what’s got into Will other than the fact that he’s a bit . . . driven, I suppose.”

  Gabriel squeezed Martha’s shoulders and then released her before putting his hands back in his pockets as they made the turn onto George Street. “Drivin’ me crazy, more like. He’s a bit scary when he’s cross, isn’t he?”

  Martha nodded and then giggled. “I guess so,” she replied.

  They continued in silence until eventually they reached Gabriel’s front door. Immediately a sense of dread filled Martha as he rooted for his keys.

  “Gabriel, why do you want me to go in? Are you sure I’m not going to see something I don’t want to see?” she asked nervously. “Only I don’t really do this sort of thing . . . live action, as it were. I mean, I still look at some of Will’s evidence and stuff but I don’t go actively seeking things out.” She peered nervously into the hallway, which was surprisingly bright, as Gabriel held the door open for her to enter.

  “I think you’ll be fine – I mean, I haven’t seen anything too scary myself,” he sighed. “But I do want a second opinion on a couple of things and you’re the best person for the job in my mind. You’re still rational enough not to believe everything straight away – aren’t you?”

  Martha stepped into the hallway and looked nervously around her. “I think so,” she lied.

  “Then please help me,” said Gabriel.

  It wasn’t a question, or a demand. It was a plea. His face looked almost desperate as he asked and glanced up the stairs in the direction of his apartment.

  “I just need to know I’m not going mad, and then I need to take action – I need to find out what the hell is going on before I lose my reason.”

  Martha glanced up the stairs herself and with another look at Gabriel’s pleading face – his greying skin, his tired and bloodshot eyes – sighed deeply and placed her foot on the bottom step of the stairs and silently began to climb. She heard Gabriel close the front door behind them and flinched a little as the sound of the heavy door echoed around her. What on earth was she getting herself into again? He was the one who should have known what he was doing, who should have been protecting her, who should know exactly what was going on – and instead here she was, leading the way to a room where events had been taking place that he didn’t seem to understand. That said, she owed him.

  Martha summoned all the courage she could find as she reached the front door of Gabriel’s apartment, thinking of the last time she had been here, armed with flowers and champagne. Her heart sank as Gabriel put his key in the door but she smiled bravely at him as he opened it and stood aside to let her in. Here we go, she thought. Again.

  Minutes later, Martha was sitting on the couch in Gabriel’s apartment, surveying the mess around her as he made tea in the kitchen. The disorder made her feel uncomfortable. However, there was something in the room which made her feel even more uneasy than the mess. It was a feeling with which she was familiar but hadn’t experienced in over a year. Her eyes were suddenly, inexplicably, drawn to a corner above the fireplace and she stared intently at it. There was nothing there. She shuddered as a chill ran down her spine. She felt as though she wasn’t alone, as though someone else was watching her.

  She looked around her, terrified in case she saw something or someone that she didn’t want to see.

  The room seemed empty and much the same as she remembered it from before – tastefully decorated to reflect a modern take on the Georgian era. The burgundy walls were dark, but the cream upholstery on the suite of furniture lifted the room and the two long sash windows filled it with the fading light of a winter’s afternoon. The furniture – Gabriel’s desk, covered in books and notepads, the coffee table, numerous side tables and a large bookcase – were all in a dark wood. Everything was covered with a layer of dust and they had already joked that Miss Havisham had taken up residence with Gabriel.

  The fireplace was a beautiful feature. It was tall, Martha noted. The mantel and outer surround was the same dark wood as the furniture while the inner surround was made of cast iron decorated with fluted columns, the panelled frieze dotted with urns and Grecian figures. The side panels were cream with ornate tiles depicting small figures and the hearth was also tiled but in plain red. She noted that the mantel was covered with bric-à-brac – an authentic Georgian table clock, small figurines, ornamental boxes – and at one end stood a photograph which she didn’t remember from her previous visit, incongruous because of the simple wooden frame amongst all of the elaborate and somewhat gaudy curios. Martha stood up to get a better look.

  The photo was thick with dust but she could tell it had been moved recently by the fresh thumbprint on its right-hand side and the clear swoop on the mantel underneath where it had slid along. From it, a fresh-faced boy beamed back at her and as she studied his features she could see a similarity to Gabriel in the grin and around the eyes.

  “Oh you’ve found Little Laurence then,” came a voice from behind.

  Martha jumped and turned suddenly to see Gabriel closing the door with his foot as he carried two steaming mugs and a packet of digestive biscuits. She exhaled with relief and took one of the proffered mugs, declining the offer of the plain biscuit. Judging by Gabriel’s current standards of hygiene, she didn’t really feel that eating and drinking was a good idea in the flat, today at least.

  Martha turned back to the photograph and studied it again. “I thought it was you actually – you’re so similar around the eyes and mouth.” She chuckled aloud. “Why on earth is he holding a building brick, Gabriel?” she asked, peering closer at the boy in his swimming trunks, with his medal held proudly aloft.

  Gabriel made a tutting noise. “Did no one else but us have swimming lessons through school in the Dark Ages?” he asked, outraged. “It’s a lifesaving medal he’s holding – part of their forward thinking in the olden days was to chuck a brick in the water and then send children in to get it – sometimes in their pyjamas even. I suppose if they made it out they got a medal for surviving.” Martha turned, even more confused. “They had to rescue a brick from the water?”

  Gabriel nodded and sipped his tea, grimacing as he did so. The small white floaters on the surface hadn’t passed Martha’s eye unnoticed and she reckoned that Gabriel had just discovered the hard way that he needed some fresh milk.

  “Don’t ask me what the logic behind it being a brick was, but our Laurence was apparently the wee man from Atlantis according to Ma. She never talks about him really but the one thing she told me is that he used to win medals all over the place, spent his life in the local baths splashing about from dawn till dusk and that he was a whizz at brick-saving. I found that photo at home and there’s something about his face that just . . . I dunno . . . reinforces the bond I have with him . . . probably because we look so alike in it. That picture was taken a few weeks before he died.”
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  Martha turned again to face Gabriel and was met with an expression of sincere sadness in his face. She was taken aback – he was usually so pragmatic about his brother’s death, as brutal as it all sounded.

  Gabriel went to take another mouthful of tea and thought better of it, placing the mug on the already overcrowded coffee table. “I suppose I miss him – as my spirit guide, I’ve felt like he’s always at my shoulder, if that doesn’t sound too strange,” he said simply.

  Martha nodded and turned back again to the photo of the boy. “You’ve been looking at this a lot recently, haven’t you?” she said, kindly.

  “What makes you think that?” asked Gabriel.

  She knew by his tone that the question was a leading one. “Well, not to cast aspersions on your housekeeping skills but we’ve already commented on the fact that your home looks like Miss Havisham lives here too. Therefore it’s easy, my dear Watson, to detect what one might call movement of things on account of the tracks left in the dust, and this picture has been moved very recently, am I right?”

  Martha saw Gabriel’s face turn to a frown and he stood up quickly and crossed over to stand beside her. When the medium saw the marks in the dust, he blanched and stepped back.

  “I missed these earlier. He’s been here again,” he said simply.

  The words chilled Martha to her bones. She shivered.

  Gabriel pointed to a section of the mantelpiece to Martha’s right and she moved over to see what he wanted to show her.

  “There’s more fingerprints here – the ones he left before,” he said, pointing at barely discernible shapes in the dust. “And on the coffee table.” He crossed back to the table in a single stride and searched the four corners until he found what he was looking for. He looked at Martha, almost breathless. “I keep finding them in the mornings when I come in – please tell me you can see these?”

  Martha peered down to where Gabriel was pointing, feeling increasingly uncomfortable as she did so. There was no mistaking the prints that she saw before her, as if the fingers of a hand – a right hand, she could tell – had been placed on the surface. She looked at Gabriel.

  “And you’re sure that you didn’t leave these?” she asked.

  Gabriel shook his head. Martha had known the answer already but had felt compelled to ask anyway. Gabriel held his own fingers over the prints as further proof of the contrast. They had been made by a much smaller hand – but not a child’s.

  Gabriel was eagerly studying Martha’s face. Her apparent discomfort at what she was witnessing made him almost tremble with relief as he realised that he wasn’t alone.

  “You think that this man you keep seeing is getting in here and doing this?” she asked, with a tone of incredulity to her voice. Always look for a rational explanation, she thought to herself, calming herself down as she did so, remembering what Will always told her to ask herself when spooked or scared.

  Gabriel sat down on the couch and reached to take Martha’s hands, drawing her into a sitting position beside him. She found it unlike him to do so, and felt slightly uncomfortable as he gripped her fingers.

  “I’ve felt him, Martha. He comes in at night-time when I’m asleep. I can sense him with me, but I can’t see him – can’t communicate with him. Then I get up and there are fingerprints, and the door to the living room is left ajar, even though I make sure it’s closed before I go to bed. And whoever it is isn’t getting in through the front door because firstly it’s alarmed and secondly I’ve left little booby traps in the hallway – just things like shoes or balled-up socks – and they’re completely undisturbed which wouldn’t be possible if the front door was pushed in.” Gabriel’s eyes were growing wilder as he blurted out what he had been experiencing. “And then there’s this . . .” he announced, dropping Martha’s hands and standing up suddenly, striding around the back of the sofa to his desk.

  As he passed the window, Martha became aware that the room had grown gloomy as darkness approached. She glanced at her watch – it was almost four o’clock on Bonfire Night and it would be dark soon. Her sense of unease grew as she watched Gabriel pick up a notepad from the desk and charge back to sit down beside her.

  “What do you make of this?” he demanded, breathlessly, thrusting the notepad at her.

  Martha took it, and held it toward the window to get the most of the light in the ever-darkening room. What she saw sent a shiver down her back. She knew that Gabriel hadn’t written this. In fact, she knew that no one alive had written this and it scared her more than anything else. On the page, she saw the long squiggle leading into two words and then the pattern of the pen trailing off the page. Below it, she saw the same again and again all the way down the page, the letters curling and looping until the page was completely covered with the same message over and over again.

  Martha threw the notepad on the coffee table as if she had been burned and pulled her hands back in toward her chest, as if to distance herself from what she had been holding.

  “When did that happen?” she asked nervously, turning back to Gabriel, who looked positively excited now that someone else was sharing in his experiences.

  “Och, a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “And then there’s been more of them most mornings since – I’ve slept on the couch a few times and even then it happens. I don’t hear anyone doing it – it’s just there in the morning.”

  Martha glanced back at the message gingerly, as though hoping it might disappear, or possibly might never have been there in the first place. It was still there, however, the writing veering between hard against the paper and the pen softly held, covering the page with the message to ‘do it’ over and over again, squiggles drawn over words, attempt after attempt to write the message over and over again. Spirit writing. She had heard Will talk about this phenomenon but had thought it a load of nonsense, until now, until confronted with the handwriting of a dead person.

  Martha shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut and stood up. “Gabriel – you’re a bloody spirit medium,” she said, suddenly annoyed. “How can you be telling me that all of this is going on without you having a clue what’s happening?”

  Gabriel looked at her as she walked around the coffee table and paced up and down in front of the fireplace, creating a physical distance between herself and the writing. There was silence for a while as she tried to take it all in. A silence broken by a strangled sob and she looked back at the sofa to see the imperturbable Scotsman crying openly, his face in a grimace and huge tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “I don’t knoow . . .” he wailed, prolonging the words like a crying child trying to make a point. He started to shake his head and held his hands in the air in a helpless gesture of defeat before gulping in air and starting to sob again. The tears ran down his cheeks, rolling down his chin and plopping onto his knees. Snot bubbled from his nose.

  “Gabriel!” gasped Martha. She had never seen him this upset before.

  She rushed to his side and threw her arms about his neck, allowing him to weep silently. They sat like that for a number of minutes before Gabriel sniffed and spoke in a broken voice through his tears.

  “I’m scared, Martha,” he confessed. “I try to talk to him but I can’t get through. I mean, spiders are scary. Clowns are scary – I even find something unsettling about moths –”

  Martha had to stifle a chuckle.

  “But what I don’t find scary are ghosts,” he said. “Except right now. You can see that all this stuff is going on round me and I don’t know what to do and I am not proud to say it but I am absolutely shitting myself at what’s going on here.”

  Martha nodded. “I’m sorry, Gabriel,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t appreciate what’s going on – I just don’t understand it.”

  Gabriel rooted in his pocket for a tissue and blew loudly into the small crumb of paper that he found. He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “You and me both, kid,” he observed. “Can you help me, though?”


  Martha looked up into his bloodshot eyes, puzzled. “How?” she asked simply. “I haven’t the first clue how to go about helping you with this.”

  Gabriel sniffed again, thinking carefully about what he was about to say. “Can you talk to Will for me?” he said in a tiny, pleading voice.

  Martha sat back from him and rolled her eyes. Of all the impossible requests!

  “He’ll know what to do but he won’t listen to me! He still likes you – he’ll hear you out – please, Martha!” he begged, a note of panic in his voice.

  Martha took a deep breath and closed her eyes before consulting her watch. It was fully dark outside now and, if she wanted to get back to her car and then pick Ruby up from the childminder, she’d need to make a move. She sighed, gathering herself together.

  “I’ll try, Gabriel, but I can’t guarantee anything,” she finally said.

  “Thanks for that,” he whispered, and gave a half smile. “There’s one more thing that might help – that might pique his interest,” he added, raising his forefinger in the air.

  Martha shifted in the seat. She was unsettled enough as it was – what was Gabriel going to produce now? She watched again as he reached under a pile of papers on the coffee table and withdrew a small envelope with which he fumbled, eventually withdrawing a card and a folded-up sheet of paper, the same thick, expensive quality as the envelope. Gabriel held up the card first for Martha to see. It was an invitation.

  Martha leaned closer to see the wording which was in gold on a simple white card and read aloud: “‘You and a guest are cordially invited to attend ‘The First Day of Christmas’ party at Dubhglas Castle, Scotland, on the evening of Saturday, December 1st. A banquet will be served, dress formal, RSVP.’”

  She sat back again and looked at Gabriel for an explanation but he was deeply intent on unfolding the sheet of paper from the envelope.

  “And now this,” he said, handing the letter over to Martha and looking around him as if finally he was taken by surprise at the fading light. He stood and strode efficiently across the room to switch on the wall lamps before walking back to plonk himself down heavily on the sofa beside her again. “That’s better,” she said. She held the letter closer to her, noting the use of a fountain pen, the curling script neat and precise, and began to read.