by Amy Cross
“It's not normal,” Joyce said firmly, as she lit another cigarette. “It's like a spirit from the world of the dead, breaking back through to terrorize us!” She slid some of the photos across the table. “Take a look at those if you don't believe us. The papers didn't print them all.”
“These are certainly -” Spotting an image that seemed to show Emily screaming as she was thrown through the air, he paused for a moment. There were no obvious wires, and the little girl's body seemed unnaturally arranged, as if some huge force was pushing on her torso, and he found it hard to believe that twelve-year-old could fake an expression of such absolute terror. “They're very striking,” he added finally. “I've seen photos from other cases, but never anything like this.”
“Have you ever met someone else who's had this happen to them?” Emily asked timidly.
“I've investigated a few cases,” he replied, “but they all turned out to be -” He paused, aware that he needed to be diplomatic. “Well, they -”
“Fakes?” Joyce asked. “Hoaxes? There's nothing fake about this, so don't you even start wondering, alright?” She grabbed another photo from the pile and thrust it into his hands. “Does that look fake to you?”
Looking down at the image, he saw that it showed Emily's face in close-up, with tears streaming down her cheeks. There was a bruise just to one side of her eye, too, but when he turned to look at her now, he saw that the bruise was gone. Still, there was a trace of fear in the girl's expression, and he found it hard to believe that anyone – let alone a twelve-year-old girl – could fake such stark emotion.
“Emily,” he said after a moment, “have you ever suffered any injuries as a result of what's going on in this house?”
She opened her mouth to reply.
“She's had lots of bruises,” Joyce interjected. “One cut, on her left arm, but it's healed now. That was when she banged herself against the wardrobe and there was a nail sticking out. Apart from that, nothing major.”
“And you haven't thought about just moving out?” he asked, turning to her. “I understand these events have been building since the first incident in September, and yet you're both still here?”
“Where are we supposed to go?” Joyce replied. “We can't just buy another house, you know. And this area... People aren't exactly begging to buy a place round here. My parents got it on Right to Buy.” She tapped her cigarette on the side of the ashtray. “Of course, when the money comes in from the papers, that's when we'll be able to afford a new place. That's one of the reasons we wanted you to come and see us. We need more evidence if we're gonna get a better deal from one of the big London papers. We need someone like you to say that this is real, so...”
Grabbing one of the photos, she placed it in front of him.
“If you could just do that,” she continued, “we can all be on our way.”
“I need to thoroughly investigate first,” he told her.
“Yeah, but... Do you really?”
“Our first concern needs to be Emily's safety,” he pointed out. “If she -”
“Obviously,” she replied, a little dismissively, “but after that, we need a good deal. We've got a real ghost in this house and sure, it's awful and all that, but we might as well make a decent -”
Before she could finish, there was a loud bump from one of the rooms upstairs.
Looking up at the ceiling, Robert paused for a moment, before turning to see that Joyce was watching him, almost as if she was waiting to see his reaction. He glanced over at Emily, who was now looking down at the table with a frown, as if the sudden noise had worried her.
“You wanna come upstairs and take a look?” Joyce asked. “I should warn you. I can't guarantee your safety.”
***
“Looks just like a normal little girl's room, doesn't it?” she said a few minutes later, leaning on the door-frame and watching as Robert made his way across to the window. “All the usual shit they want. Toys, books, dolls, clothes.” She sniffed. “See those yellow socks over there? Got ten pairs for a pound. Good deal, eh?”
Turning to them, Robert saw that Emily was holding back behind her mother, as if she was scared of entering the room.
“And all the activity in the house is focused on this room?” he asked.
Joyce nodded.
“Have there been any manifestations anywhere else in the house?”
“We hear stuff from other rooms,” she replied, “but no, most of it seems to be in here. It's usually when Emily's alone.”
“What's a manifestation?” Emily whispered.
“It's the ghost, dummy,” Joyce snapped at her.
“And how do you feel about all of this?” he asked, smiling at Emily. “Do you like being in your bedroom by yourself, or does it scare you?” He waited for a reply, but after a moment Emily simply stepped behind her mother, so he could no longer see her.
“She's shy,” Joyce said, rolling her eyes as she took another drag on her cigarette. “So what do you think, Doctor Slocombe? Can you help us? Are you ready to tell the papers that all the ghost stuff's real?”
“I definitely want to look into this case some more,” he replied, “and I'd like to start, if you don't mind, by talking to Emily alone for a few minutes.”
“Alone?” The suggestion seemed to concern Joyce a little. “What do you want to talk to her alone for?”
“It's standard procedure in these investigations. I want to hear the story in her own words, and I need to exclude the possibility of outside influences.”
“Are you accusing me of -”
“Absolutely not,” he replied, “never, not for one moment. I just need to hear Emily tell me what happened, just her and me. Do you think that's possible?”
***
“Tell me about the figure in this photo,” he said, as he and Emily sat alone at the kitchen table. “Is this the figure you saw in your room?”
Emily stared at the image, which showed a faint, blurry shape by the door in her bedroom. It wasn't possible to make out too many features, but the shape was clearly a figure, and dark shadows could just about be discerned on the face, where the eyes and mouth should be. After a moment, she looked down at the sticker on her wrist, which was attached to a couple of wires.
“I told you,” he continued, “that's just to measure your heart-rate. It's nothing to worry about.” Reaching over, he turned a dial on the machine, and for a moment her heart-beat could be heard.
“Is that mine?” she asked.
He nodded.
She stared open-mouthed, until he turned the dial back down.
“So you see,” he continued, “there's really nothing to be scared about. That's one of the reasons I like to study things. Once you study them and understand them, they're not scary.”
She sniffed, before looking back at the photo.
“How many times have you seen it?” he asked, still trying to get the little girl to open up. “It's quite blurry in this picture, isn't it? Have you seen it more clearly?”
“It's a her,” Emily whispered finally.
“It is?”
She nodded.
“And how do you know that?” Looking at the monitor next to his pencil and paper, he saw that Emily's heart-rate had briefly spiked before going back down.
“I've seen her face.”
“What does she look like?”
“She's...” Emily paused for a moment. “She's pretty. She's got long black hair, but she never smiles. She always seems tired.”
“And when do you see her?”
“In the dark.”
“In your room?”
She nodded.
“How does she appear?”
“You -” Again, Emily paused. “You know when your door's shut and you can see light on the edges, from out on the landing?”
“I do.”
“Some nights,” she continued, “I see something moving in front of the door, blocking out the light for a moment.”
“And th
at's how you know it's one of the nights she's going to appear?”
She nodded.
“And then what happens?”
“And then...” Another pause, as she stared straight ahead. “And then I start to see her face in the darkness. She usually starts on the other side of the room and slowly comes over to the bed.”
“She's looking at you?”
She nodded. Again, her heart-rate spike briefly, and this time she winced a little, as if she was in pain.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
“What does she do when she reaches the bed?”
“She looks at me.”
“Just that?”
“She looks down at me.”
“And do you hide your head under the covers?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because I want to see what she's doing.”
“That's very sensible. It's a bit like what I'm doing with all these machines and questions.”
“And then she starts knocking things over. That's when Mum hears, usually, and she comes through.”
“You don't call out for her first?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I'm too scared.”
“And when your mother comes in, she sometimes has a camera?”
“And there's a big flash,” Emily replied, “when she takes a photo.”
“But in some of these photos,” he continued, holding up an image of Emily being thrown through the air, “you're not in bed.”
She frowned, staring at the image.
“So does the lady pull you out of bed and do this?”
Emily paused for a moment, before slowly nodding.
“So she's angry?”
“Mum says she must want something, but we don't know what.”
“That's a possibility,” he replied. “So the -”
“Are you really an expert on ghosts?”
“Well... I've certainly studied them a lot.”
She paused, as if she wanted to ask something else but was a little scared. “Can we talk about the first time?” she said finally, with tears in her eyes.
“The first time you saw the woman?”
She nodded, and for a moment she seemed to be grimacing with pain, as if something was really hurting her.
“Okay. Why do you want to talk about the first time?”
“Because that was the only -” She paused again, as if she'd caught herself just in time. A tear began to run down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away.
“Was the first time the scariest?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
She glanced over at the door to the kitchen, as if she was worried about her mother overhearing. “I'm not supposed to talk about the first time,” she whispered finally. “Mum told me to talk about the other times.”
“Well, that's okay,” he continued. “You can talk to me about anything you want. If you want to start with the first time, then we'll do that.” He waited, but she seemed much more scared than before, even as she turned back to look at him. “You're completely safe,” he said after a moment. “Nothing's going to happen to you, Emily. I just need to know what happened, so that I can think about ways we can maybe stop it happening in future. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”
“I was in bed,” she continued, “and I heard something moving nearby.”
“Like footsteps?”
“A bit. And then I...” She stared down at the table for a moment, as if she was reliving the whole thing. “I looked over at the window, and I could see a shape in front of it, walking across the room.”
“Coming closer to the bed?”
She shook her head.
“Just... walking across?”
She nodded. “And then it stopped, like it was thinking. And then it turned to me.”
“Could you see its face?”
“Just the outline.”
Looking down at her hands, he saw that for the first time during their interview her fingers were trembling. Glancing at the monitor, he realized that this time her heart-rate was rising and rising, getting higher instead of spiking. For some reason, talking about the first night seemed to upset her a lot more.
“What happened next?” he asked, turning back to her.
“She walked out of the way,” she replied, her voice tense with fear now, “and I couldn't see her anymore.”
“But she was still there?”
She nodded.
“How could you tell?”
“I just could. I could hear her.”
“And the other times you saw her, she was always more direct?” He waited for a reply. “You want to talk about the first time some more, don't you?”
She nodded.
“So did you see her again on that first night?”
She paused, before nodding again.
“When?”
“She got onto my bed.”
“Onto the bed?” He made a note on his pad. “I don't remember reading that in the newspaper reports.”
“She got on at the bottom,” Emily replied, with more tears in her eyes, “and then she slowly started crawling up.”
“Why didn't you call for your mother?”
“I couldn't.”
“Why not?”
“I don't know, I just couldn't. I couldn't move.” She paused. “She crawled all the way up to me. It took a long time, she moved slowly. I could feel her hands on me, it was like...” Her bottom lip was trembling now, as if the memory was too horrific. “I could feel her skin,” she whimpered finally, “it was torn, like pieces were falling off. And then she put a hand on the side of my face and forced me to turn my head to one side and -”
He waited for her to continue. “And what?” he asked eventually.
“Her voice...”
“This was the first time you heard her voice?” Again, he waited for her to say something, but she seemed almost too horrified to go on. Glancing at the monitor, he was that her heart-rate was soaring, and he knew he should stop the interview but at the same time he felt he had to go on, just a little further.
“She asked my name,” Emily whispered suddenly.
“Did you tell her?”
She nodded.
“And then what?”
“She told me about the...” Another pause, as if the idea was too shocking. “She told me about the dead place, where she and the others...”
He waited for her to continue. “What dead place?” he asked finally. “What others?”
***
Today
“The place where she'd come from,” Emily's voice explained, sounding a little crackly on the twenty-four-year-old tape recording. “She said she was from a place where the walls were made out of the inside of people's souls, and she and the other dead people could look out through those souls. She said they could come out sometimes too, but that what they really wanted was to break through forever.”
The tape hissed and bumped a little for a moment.
“Did she give this dead place a name?” Robert heard his own voice asking.
“Just the dead place. She said she was trying to find a soul she could break out from. She said...”
Taking a drag on his cigar, Robert waited for the tape to continue.
“She said she thought maybe she could come through me,” the little girl's voice said finally. “She told me that of all the souls she'd found, I was the most...”
There was a pause.
“The most what?” his voice asked.
“Willing,” Emily replied. “I don't know what that means.”
Even today, twenty-four years later, he remembered the look on Emily's face as she told him about the dead place, and about the first time she'd encountered the presence in her room. After the whole haunting experience had been debunked, it was this recording that he kept coming back to, because it was this recording and only this
recording that still struck him as perhaps having a shred of truth.
Picking up the faded print-out from all those years ago, he saw the read-out from the heart monitor, showing how Emily's pulse had risen dramatically while she'd been talking about the dead place.
“So does she talk about the dead place every time?” he heard himself asking.
Silence for a moment. He remembered her shaking her head.
“Just the first time?”
“Mum says I'm not supposed to talk to you about the first time,” Emily whispered, her voice barely getting picked up by the tape. “She wants me to talk to you about the other times, the times in the photos.”
“Why is that?”
“I don't know. I think maybe she's scared.”
“Of the dead place?”
“She won't let me talk about it. Not even to her.”
“But she'll talk to you about everything else?”
“She...” Another pause. “She says...”
Suddenly he heard the sound of a door being opened, and he remembered the way Joyce had stormed in, having evidently overheard the conversation.
“Well, then,” she said, clearly trying to change the tempo of the encounter, “how are we all -”
Switching the recording off, Robert leaned back in his chair. The last thing he wanted was to listen to the sound of Joyce's voice, and he knew that everything Emily had told him with her mother in the room had just been part of the hoax. Still, as he scrolled the recording back to the beginning, he realized he couldn't quite get the nagging sense of doubt from his mind. Even though he knew he was just torturing himself, he began to play the whole thing again.
“Tell me about the figure in this photo,” he heard himself saying on the tape. “Is this the figure you saw in your room?”
Chapter Seventeen
“Mummy,” Lizzie said, standing in the doorway, “I'm tired. Can we go to bed now?”
“Sure, sweetie, I just...” Emily paused as she read the email again. It was short and to-the-point, and finally she sighed as she closed the laptop. Clearly Doctor Robert Slocombe wasn't going to be any help.
“You look sad,” Lizzie told her.
