Contents
Title Page
Also by F.R. Jameson
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
A plea from the author
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Ghostly Shadows Shorts
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Certain Danger
F.R. Jameson
Also by F.R. Jameson
Ghostly Shadows
Death at the Seaside
Won’t You Come and Save Me, Oh Soldier
Call of the Mandrake
Ghostly Shadows Shorts
Foliage
The Strange Fate of Lord Bruton
The Widow Ravens
Algernon Swafford: Private Investigator
Sacrifice at St. Nick’s
Screen Siren Noir
Diana Christmas
Eden St. Michel
Alice Rackham
Other Short Stories
Confined Spaces
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Prologue
A crackly old tape recording plays. Speaking is a young girl, probably no more than ten. She is answering questions from a man who elucidates in such crisp and clear tones, he should surely be on the BBC. There’s an echo to their voices, as if the two of them are huddled over a microphone in a small office.
“I honestly don’t remember anything about it, Doctor,” she tells him with a tremor.
“Come now, Alice. This process only works if we are totally honest with each other.”
There is silence on the tape for close to ten seconds. Maybe, if there was accompanying black and white film footage, we would see the girl tentatively shaking her head. “I’m sorry.”
“All right.” His voice is possibly as gentle as he can make it. “That’s fine. Do not fret, my dear. But perhaps, to help me, you could please articulate how you feel about all of this?”
“Feel?”
“Yes. That’s not too hard a question for you, is it? How do you feel right now?”
“I feel” – hesitation – “confused.”
“Why ‘confused’?”
“Because I don’t understand” – again hesitation, as if she’s trying to say what she wants to say, but is scared it will cause offence – “why I’m here. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. You say I haven’t been bad, but I feel like I’m being treated as if I’ve been bad.”
He grunts, possibly nodding. “You were silent for a long time, Alice.”
“I lost my voice.”
It’s clear that not only does he not believe her, he doesn’t think she really believes it either. “You genuinely have no recollection of the incident?”
“I don’t. It’s the truth!”
“You have no memory at all of being out there in the woods?”
“I really don’t!”
“You don’t remember what happened to…?”
She screams at him before he can finish his sentence, even though it seems to be trailing off of its own accord. “I don’t remember! I don’t remember any of it! I have no idea what’s going on!”
His voice is somewhat sterner, even as the girl’s weeping continues – but it’s stern in a way which is disappointed, rather than angry. “You really don’t remember what happened out there, do you, Alice?”
The young girl dissolves helplessly into tears.
“At the moment, you can’t help us at all, can you, Alice?”
Chapter One
Alice Whitstable was right there when Richie Clement died in that car crash. It literally happened a few feet in front of her.
To be honest, if it wasn’t for the page after page of press coverage immediately afterwards, she would never have recognised him. She had not, as far as she could recall, ever heard the name Richie Clement before. Of course she had heard of his rock band, Certain Danger, and had probably danced to their music on more than one occasion. But she had never been even remotely a fan. She’d never bought one of their records, or been to any of their concerts. True, she could remember that song of theirs going top five a couple of years earlier (although, even then, she couldn’t really remember what it was called. It was around the same time as Maggie May and Get It On, and she knew that she’d liked both of those a lot more. 1971, was it?) But really, she had no idea what this Richie Clement looked like or even really who he was.
That all changed on the day his girlfriend’s Mini Cooper shot through the red light. The day he dropped dead in front of her.
As these things often do, it happened so incredibly quickly. But in her remembrance of it, in her dreams about it later, it happened oh so slowly. Even the birds in the sky seemed to be beating their wings at a gentler pace. In truth, however, it was over in an instant.
A few seconds of time that completely altered her life. Destroyed it, even.
Alice worked four and half days a week in Rosemary’s Boutique on Central Road in Worcester Park, the quiet suburb in South West London. Wednesday was her afternoon off and that day, she’d decided to take a stroll up to nearby Cheam to enjoy the summer’s sunshine. Her dress was loose and floral, but still the heat was hugely oppressive – she felt like she was being baked in Bacofoil – and so she popped into the newsagent on Cheam Cross to get herself an ice cream. A choc-ice or a fruit lolly was what she had in mind, something that would cool her down as she strolled back home through Nonsuch Park. However when she got to the newsagents, his bloody freezer was on the blink. A handwritten note sellotaped to the front said they hoped it would be fixed soon, but what good was that to her? Alice sighed loudly and melodramatically right in the middle of the shop.
She supposed she could have gone across and up the road and found another shop where all was working, but impatience was getting the better of her and she wanted something now. So instead she went to the (still working) glass-doored fridge and found the coolest can of Coca-Cola they had in stock, then she paid for it and gave a full smile of thanks. Even if the Chinese gentleman behind the counter made no effort to smile back.
She was just walking out of the shop and having her first delicious sip, when she heard the roar of the engine. From the other side of Cheam Cross, so up towards Sutton, there was someone gunning the motor of a battered lime green Mini Cooper in a way that made the car seem both extremely powerful and incredibly ill.
Everybody out on the street must have turned their heads towards it – not that there were actually that many of them. The sound was loud and awfully aggressive. It was a much bigger noise than any Mini had the right to make. The car itself was the kind you purchased third hand from a man with a stringy moustache: in appearance it was nothing special, it just sounded like a tank.
The traffic light was still on red and the car had stopped at that instruction, but suddenly – inexplicably – it sped forward.
It was a detail that the papers latched onto later, that it was Richie Clement’s girlfriend, Samantha who was driving. That whatever had happened, it was her fault. (And
undoubtedly that led to more than one ‘women drivers’ joke.) Alice saw photos of Samantha in the papers the next day and she seemed to be a pretty, dark haired girl. She looked almost Indian, but no one explicitly said she was. What it did say in the papers though, was that she was drunk. That the two of them had been drinking all night long and right through the morning as well. One friend of theirs quoted in the papers, said it was amazing they could stand, speak or keep their eyes open, let alone drive anywhere.
Suddenly, as the roar of the engine became almost deafening, the car lurched forward. The lights were still against it, but it careered right across the junction. Diagonally scything its way over the crossroads. It just missed some teenager on a Vespa, who swerved out of the way with a foot or so to spare. Fortunately there were no cars going in the other direction, so there was no crunch of metal on metal. But the way the Mini was speeding up and skidding meant that it was going to hit something. It just got faster and faster, and louder and louder, until it came to a brutal, shuddering halt into a concrete bollard in front of the traffic lights on the opposite corner.
The corner Alice was now standing at, the can of Coke tumbling from her shocked hand.
Alice must have jumped back three feet as the noise of it rattled her bones, as the kinetic shockwaves of the crash punched forward. It was metal crunching and glass smashing and somewhere in there the two of them must have screamed, although if they did, she didn’t hear it. Certainly she screamed – her mouth opened and she felt the cry of shock leave her – but she didn’t think she heard herself either.
It was just the rev of the engine and then a boom of a crash. When people talked about what the doodlebugs were like during the War, it must have been a lot like that.
The whole thing happened so fast. It can only have been seconds since she walked out of the newsagent, but now there was a busted up Mini Cooper in front of her with its entire front end cleaved in half and dark, noxious smoke rising up from its engine. The remains of a car which had already thrown out one person.
At the moment of impact, the windscreen exploded outwards. A young man – she, of course, only learned later that his name was Richie Clement and he was famous – was sent flying across the bonnet. The Mini had been stopped by that solid concrete bollard, but the man’s body flew right over it. Smacking face first to the ground with an unholy crunch. It was hard to say if that sound was louder than anything which had gone before, but it was certainly more horrific. The man’s face landing with a splat and a pounding of bones on the scorching hot pavement in front of her.
His hands had flung up, some final seconds’ instinct trying to protect him. It didn’t work. His face mashed into the paving stones at speed. The papers later reported the coroner determining it was head trauma which killed him.
But, incredibly, Richie Clement was not quite dead yet.
Alice stared wide-eyed at him. There was a moment of stillness. A long, still few seconds when Coca-Cola flowed unnoticed back onto her sandals, and she thought she was certainly looking at a corpse. Suddenly though, his knees moved, jerked into motion. His arms, incredibly, pushing his face up from the ground. Then it was like he actually jumped to his feet.
Right then, in the fluidity of his movements, she could have believed this man was completely uninjured. As if a car crash like that was something he did for fun. A daredevil act he had performed a thousand times before – even including bashing his face into the concrete – and now he was going to get up, brush himself down and possibly do it all again.
Yet, clearly – obviously – that wasn’t the case.
Behind him, over his shoulder, Alice winced as she saw what had happened to the girl driving the car. Her head had buried itself into the steering wheel. Hitting it so hard, the rubber and plastic had cracked and broken – her face propelled straight through both. Her right eye-socket was now impaled on the steering column.
Despite that though, the man was still alive. A bloody miracle of some kind.
He staggered to his feet and stared away from Alice, looking down from Cheam as if curious about what might be happening in Worcester Park that sunny afternoon.
At first glance, seeing only his left profile, he appeared remarkably unharmed. Strangely beautiful, even. A pale, gaunt, but undeniably attractive man. His jaw and cheekbone carved from marble. With his leather trousers and vest, if she’d been given a test right then, she might have even guessed he was a rock star. That he was a man with that kind of raggedy charisma. His dark hair long and tied in a ponytail – which flicked behind him as he turned his head – helping to create that impression.
He was staring away from her and panting. Hyperventilating, no doubt in shock at what had just happened. His arms had a few dribbles of blood on them, though nothing that seemed to be life threatening. And apart from the smallest of cuts above his eye, the left side of his face was unharmed. Perfect, even.
Trying to gather herself, she shuffled her feet forward to help the man. To pull him away from the car before the engine exploded or something.
But, as if sensing suddenly how close she was, he turned his head to face her. And it was then, for the first time, that she heard her own scream.
Half of the man’s face was gone. The left side was perfect, but the right wasn’t just cut and bruised – it was like it had been ripped away. What was left was raw blood and bone and muscle, all pulsing angry and red.
Later she surmised that – as he was thrown forward out of the Mini – a jagged piece of glass had snagged onto the right side of his face and torn it completely away. It was literally like his head was bisected. One slip of skin was still flapping over his right nostril, but nothing else remained. His right cheekbone was smashed in and his right eye socket seemed elongated and warped, as if the impact had flattened it into his forehead.
He still had his right eye and the full orb – stripped of any semblance of an eyelid – was now staring out at the world. The white of it was the colour of blood, like every capillary behind it had burst. But still she could see the pupil moving. There amidst the various broken and angry reds, it was like his right eye was searching for something.
The two eyes moved independently. His good left eye staring out in shock, no doubt trying to process the pain he was feeling; while his right pupil – hard to pick out amongst the red of his face (though she found she couldn’t tear her attention away from it) – seemed to stare out at the whole world. As if taking everything in for the first time.
Standing only three foot in front of him now, Alice had her hand over her mouth and was trying to control herself. She was trying not to faint, trying not to turn and run, trying not to wet herself.
It lasted only a moment, but suddenly the two of them were staring at each other. She looking at him, his bad eye fixed entirely on her.
He was like half man and half demon. A member of the living dead suddenly in front of her in South West London. It was like something she had only seen in her worst, most vivid dreams.
And then he tried to speak to her. That broken mouth, his torn lips, they moved and from them came one word.
“Marrrsss.”
Just that one word, but like it was supposed to mean something. Like there was more there she was supposed to understand.
A tear rolled from his good eye, but it was the broken side of his face which held her. And terrified as she was, she couldn’t turn away.
Nothing important passed between them. His last word meant nothing to her. Nor did it seem to mean much to him. In those last moments, the good side of his face was little but incomprehension. It was like he had no notion what was going on and was looking to her for guidance. As if he wanted her to tell him what the hell had happened to him.
Possibly it was the realisation of the crash and how dreadful it was that killed him, or maybe he dropped down dead still without having a clue. But, in a heartbeat, it was like those faint embers of life within him – which had been strong enough to force him to his feet when
nearly every other man would have been dead already – suddenly had cold piss poured all over them. His knees gave way and he dropped face first again onto the pavement. Landing with a moist splat.
Richie Clement, lead singer of Certain Danger, father to three (illegitimate) children and internationally acclaimed musician died right in front of her.
And Alice Whitstable’s life was never the same again.
Chapter Two
She had to speak to the police for a long time afterwards. Two middle aged men in shirt sleeves (and with matching B.O.), repeatedly going through every detail of what had happened. They questioned her again and again about the aftermath of the crash, as if they thought she was making up the bit about him getting to his feet.
There was a paranoid part of her which wondered whether they somehow thought she was a suspect in it all. That was nonsense, obviously, she was just a witness. But, the lack of security in her childhood meant her assumptions always went towards the worst. She tried to keep herself calm. Her story did sound incredible – she knew that – and that’s the reason they were so desperate to get every detail straight. It was nothing else. Nothing more sinister.
They noted down all her details. Name: Alice Elizabeth Whitstable. Age: 23. Height: five foot four. Hair: blonde/brown. Eyes: dark brown. Marital status: spinster. Address: 42 Albany Avenue, Worcester Park. Place of employment: Rosemary’s Boutique on Central Road, also in Worcester Park.
And then, after leaving her alone for nearly half an hour in the beige interview room – so that all her worries leapt up and ran around and around the walls – they said, “thank you very much” and told her she was free to go.
Outside the police station, there were members of the press waiting to see her as well. Some grubby looking reporter from The London Chronicle, who was even shorter than her, was particularly insistent. Clearly someone in the station had told him who she was and what she’d seen.
Certain Danger Page 1
