If it’s still start-of-the-working-day sort of time, the lift can be packed with a bunch of the Internal Revenue birds from the fourth floor but it was already gone half nine when I got in it so my only fellow passenger was Toni from our mob, on her way back up from Records in the basement. She’d fetched a folder that must’ve been down there since before Victoria died—yellowed, damp-stained, all-but-cobwebbed—and was holding it face in as per policy. Surprising how a glimpse of file-names like Necromancy/Mossley Hill/1897 can start rumors among the civilians.
Toni, who I’m not sure was even twenty yet, wore her hair like Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire and dressed like it had never stopped being 1942. In Manhattan. But have a conversation with her and there’s no mistaking where she’s from. I’d once made the mistake of asking if her name was short for Antoinette.
“Antoinette?” she’d said. “What are you, fucking stupid? Me mum likes Toni Braxton.” Winsome and delicate, these Liverpool girls. It’s why we love ’em.
“Mornin’, Tone,” I said now.
She tutted at me. “Could’ve worn a tie,” she said. “Top Brass coming in special to see you. What’re you like?”
“I don’t think I own a tie,” I said. “Tell you what; give his mobile a jingle. Ask him to pick me one up on his way in.”
“He’s already here,” Toni said, and I resented the hushed and impressed tone in her voice. I’d met James Arcadia before and I was a lot less fond of him than he was.
The parlor—that’s what the old lady called the front room, like me Nan used to—was clean and tidy but it had a bit of a musty smell like it had kept its windows closed on the world a little too long.
Her mantelpiece ornaments—probably only Woolworth’s to begin with but chosen with taste and now improved with the accidental gravitas of age—sat below a big oval mirror in a genuinely impressive gilded frame. Between the ornaments and the mirror, tacked across the wall in a ribboning sprawl, were dozens of postcards.
“Our Carol,” she said, when she saw me looking at them. “She’s in the diplomatic service. All over the world, she’s been.”
“Very nice,” I said. “She ever anywhere long enough for her Mum to visit?”
“Ooh, yes, luv,” she said, and I could hear the pride and wonder in her voice at what her daughter’s life had allowed for her—world travel hadn’t been for the likes of her when she herself was young. “I’ve been to America, you know. And Sardinia. Very nice. Most recently the Caribbean. That was probably me last trip though. Can’t take those long flights anymore, I were running a fever all the way back on this last one. Ooh, and Berlin. Had a lovely time there, I did. Almost forgave ’em for the Blitz. I don’t know if—”
“I don’t mean to cut you off,” I said. “But you know what it’s like—they’ve got me on a clock back at the office. Can we get back to this Banshee you mentioned?”
“Well, I thought you’d know all about them,” she said. “You’re here to take care of it, aren’t you?”
“Well, possibly, luv, possibly,” I said. “Look, I’ll be honest with you.” I lowered my voice a bit like I was letting her in on government secrets. “We have had a few . . . well, I don’t want to say complaints . . . let’s say expressions of concern. From the neighbors. About the noises. But I don’t think anybody said Banshee, specifically.”
“Well, perhaps they’re not as well read as me,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not sure some of them can read. That Mrs. Bennett in number forty-seven, she—”
“Again,” I said, as gently as I could. “If we could stay on—”
“Isn’t it Banshees that howl?”
“Aye, I think so.”
“Well, something’s howling,” she said, as if that was that. “So what do you do?”
“Eh?”
“With a Banshee. What do you do? What’s the procedure?”
She didn’t come over as pushy, just interested. And she seemed much more alive than when she had opened the front door. Like most civilians, she found this shit fascinating as long as it stayed on the other side of scary.
“Well,” I said. “It’d be your garden that’d be the issue. If it was a Banshee, I mean. And I’d . . . well, I’d spray it. The bushes. The hedgerows.”
“Spray it?” she said, all disappointed, like her date had shown up with a tandem instead of a Bentley. “No bell, book, and candle and all that stuff?”
“Well, it—”
“Spray. Tch. What sort of spray?” she asked. “Is it like poison? Like rat poison?”
“No,” I said. “It’s—”
“ ’Cause if there’s something dead there in the morning, I won’t be the one shifting it.”
“There wouldn’t be anything dead,” I said. “It’s not poison. It’s more like a warning.”
“Oh,” she said. “Keep off the grass sort of thing?”
I smiled at her. “A little more aggressive,” I said. “Get out of Town sort of thing.”
“How does it work?”
“Can I be indelicate?”
“I was a nurse, luv. Seen it all, heard it all.”
“Fair enough. It’s like piss-marking territory. Spraying the area to tell a smaller predator that it’s had its fun. That it can sling its hook now, because something bigger and nastier is claiming the manor.”
She gave me a pointed up and down. “You don’t look big and nasty,” she said.
“Day’s not over,” I said, and winked.
When the lift opened on the seventh floor, Arcadia had been standing there. Three-piece suit. Pocket watch. Trademark gray leather gloves. That handsome forty-ish face, and those ancient eyes within it.
“Antoinette,” he said, as if just the sight of Toni had saved him from suicide. “As radiant as ever.”
Not a word of objection from not-Antoinette. Just a smile that was almost a simper and a little wiggle that was almost a fucking curtsey. He took her hand, raising it to his lips as he glided her elegantly out of the lift and gestured her down the corridor.
“Go and further brighten the lives of your lucky colleagues,” he said, “while I take our young friend here topside.”
He stepped into the lift with me and we rode to the top floor, or to what I’d always believed to be the top floor until—via an obscure door that looked like it should lead only to a closet and the spiral staircase that actually lay behind it—we came to a small circular room that I guessed was inside one of the towers that, from the street twenty flights below, appeared to be purely ornamental.
“One of my favorite rooms in the place,” he said.
“You’ve been to Liverpool before, then?” I said. Which was really stupid. He’d obviously been to Liverpool before; he apparently knew Toni well enough to get away with shit that would have had some poor local bastard up on sexual harassment charges.
“Oh, many times,” he said. “I was actually based here for nearly a year.” He paused for a half-smile. “During the War.”
I nearly bit. I’d heard what he’d said—the War, not the Falklands War, not the recent unpleasantness in Iraq, just the War—but I was buggered if I was going to play his let’s-flirt-with-my-legend game this early in the day.
Apart from a couple of chairs, the room contained only a large circular white table set below a brass and mahogany contraption that disappeared into the ceiling.
“It’s a Camera Obscura,” Arcadia said. “A shadow cabinet. Do you know what that is?”
“Of course I know what that is,” I said. Bit of a spin on the tone, I admit. I hadn’t liked the way he’d used a foreign accent for the Latin phrase. Bad enough when people do that with French or Spanish, but at least we know what they sound like. Nobody knows what Latin sounded like so, you know, fuckoff. It annoyed me that he could well have been simply making the accent up, confident that no one up here in the barbarous north would challenge him on it, him being such a toff and all. But it annoyed me more that he might not have been making it up, that he might ve
ry well have heard it spoken and spoken it himself.
“A device to capture images via light,” he said, like he wasn’t going to let the inconvenience of any pre-existing knowledge on my part slow his gallop. Arcadia’s one of those blokes who regards a conversation as a good lecture spoiled. “The name came from Kepler, of course, but the Chinese and the Greeks knew the principle long before.”
“Shame they had to wait two thousand years for someone to invent celluloid,” I said.
“That was inconvenient,” Arcadia said, and I could tell from the delight in his voice that I’d just played straight man to his coming punchline. “Of course, not everyone was as patient as they should have been. Chap who made this one, for example.” He patted the curved housing of the device with the kind of proprietorial affection a well-heeled Victorian roué might have shown a chorus girl’s bottom. “It’s from the early Seventeenth century,” he said. “There’ve been whispers it was once owned by John Dee, but we can’t be sure.”
His eyes lost focus for a second or two, and I knew he was remembering the old days when, if the fancy took him, he could have popped off for a minute or two to find John Dee and just fucking ask him. But Mr. Sweets was dead and, though Arcadia still had plenty of tricks up his impeccably tailored sleeve, Time was as closed to him now as it was to the rest of us.
“So it’s a magic Camera Obscura,” I said. “It takes pictures. Well, no offense, but these days so does me fucking cell phone.”
“No, it doesn’t take pictures,” Arcadia said. “Not as we understand it. But, still, it’s unique.”
“So what does it do?”
“It remembers,” he said, and my eyes snapped back instantly to the machine.
“Ah,” said Arcadia. “There it is.” He was looking at me rather than the machine, and he sounded genuinely pleased. And not just with himself for once.
“There what is?” I asked.
“The first of my three Cs,” he said. “Curiosity.”
“Oh,” I said. “Cars? Cancer?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are we not playing Things that Killed the Cat, then?”
“No, we’re playing things that make us good at our job. Not, you understand, things we need to do the job. Lots of people can do the job. The three Cs are what I consider vital to doing it well.”
“Oh, aye?” I said. “So what are the other two?”
“Well, the second is Competence. You’ve already demonstrated that. I read the report on that mass clearing you did in Wavertree Playground a couple of weeks ago.”
“The Mystery,” I said, and then, off his questioning look, “nobody local calls it Wavertree Playground. It’s The Mystery.”
“Oh,” he said, like he’d just had a hit of something good. “How . . . apt.”
“Aye,” I said. “What’s the third C?”
“The most important one of all.”
“Which is . . . ?
He gave me his half-smile again. “That would be telling,” he said.
“So these noises,” I said. “This howling. Is it constant?”
She pursed her lips, thinking about it. “No,” she said. “No, not constant.”
“Is it daytime, nighttime? Both?”
“I’m not sure. I hear it sometimes, but not others.”
“Are you hearing it now?”
“Eh? Don’t be daft. Are you hearing it now?”
“I’m asking if you are,” I said, and glanced around the room as if only now appreciating its architectural splendors. “From the thirties, isn’t it, the house?”
“Aye,” she said. “Just like me.”
“But you weren’t born here or anything,” I said. “Weren’t here as a little girl?”
“Oh, no. No. Me husband bought it just after the war—he were a bit older than me, been gone near enough twenty years now—and just moved me in once he’d made an honest woman of me. Our Carol was born here. Well, I mean, she was born in the hospital, but we were living here when—”
“But the house is as it was?” I said. I didn’t like to keep interrupting her but, you know, meant to be working here.
“How d’you mean, as it was?” she said, ready to be insulted, like I was saying she hadn’t once redecorated or something.
“No, I just mean, you know, original features and fittings and things.”
“What, like banisters and windows and stuff?”
“Like the coal cellar,” I said.
“Coal cellar?”
“Yeah. Is there still a coal cellar down there? Hasn’t been bricked up or anything?”
“Coal,” she said, like I was an idiot. “It hasn’t had coal in it for forty years.”
“Then what has it got in it?”
“Eh?”
I stood up. The racket was getting fucking unbearable. “What is it in the coal cellar,” I said, “that’s making all that noise?”
Arcadia hadn’t had a lot more to say. Pulled a few further details out of me about the job in The Mystery, congratulated me on it again, handed me the file on the Woolton Road semi, and that was it.
“Off you pop then,” he said. “Got everything you might need?” He raised an eyebrow and mimed an example, his left hand sketching in the air in a way that no passer-by would have put down to anything more than an unusually elegant Tourette’s spasm but which I recognized as an Assyrian scattering spell known as much for its difficulty as for its usefulness. I suppose he wasn’t just showing off, but it’s so fucking hard to tell with him.
“Well, I’ve got me charm and me good looks,” I said. “See how far they get me, eh?”
“Quite,” Arcadia said, and smiled like he was comfortable with a certain degree of humor from among the enlisted men. I was just turning to go when he spoke again.
“Actually,” he said. “There’s something else I think you should take.” He reached into a desk drawer and handed me something from it.
I weighed it in my hand and gave him a look. “Hardly standard issue,” I said.
He shrugged. “I just have a hunch about this one,” he said.
The roars from below only increased in intensity and ferocity as I approached the little three-quarter door at the top of the steps that led down to the coal cellar. But the second I slammed back the top and bottom bolts that had been holding the door shut, the sounds stopped dead. Something knew I was up there and had no wish to discourage my descent.
Banshee, my arse.
I suppose the old lady had been technically right to have called them howls, but howls always suggest an element of the plaintive to me, dizzy young romantic that I am, and these things hadn’t had a trace of melancholy in them. They were feral, angry, and—not a comfortable concept as I made my crouched way down the cramped wooden stairs—hungry.
The cellar was long but low—its ceiling not even high enough to let me stand upright—and if there’d ever been a light down there, it was long gone. There was a little residual spill coming down from the house, but whatever it was that was in the cellar had moved way back into the shadows at the rear. Its silence and its retreat didn’t mean that it was hiding, though. They meant that it was trying to draw me in.
Fuck. I froze for a moment, trying to get my breathing under control and pondering my choice of career, and then I stepped in. One yard. Two. A third, and suddenly the thing lurched out of the shadows and came at me.
It was the old lady from upstairs. Or used to be.
The rot of the dead flesh had left one hand entirely skeletal and half the chin was naked jawbone. From what I’d heard, these things didn’t breathe but I’d swear those gray desiccated nostrils twitched as if catching a whiff of the warm meat I was wearing on my bones.
It raced towards me. Not graceful, but fucking fast. Much faster than the manual says. I thought about writing the editors a stern letter, but I didn’t think about it for long.
Fuck knows, if I’d come here with just the standard issue kit, this undead thing would have had ha
lf my face off while I was still trying to weave a circle round it thrice and say something in Phoenician. But Arcadia’d had a hunch. I was pissed off that I owed him one, but I can’t deny the tingle of gratitude and admiration I felt as I lifted the ancient service Webley and aimed for the head.
She was sitting on the couch looking up at her postcards from abroad when I came back into the parlor.
“Everything all right?” she said.
“It will be,” I said, and sat down next to her. I took her hand and closed mine around it gently. Still stuns me how solid they can feel.
“Ooh,” she said. “Getting a bit familiar, aren’t we? It’s not grab-a-granny night down at the Grafton Rooms, you know.”
“The Grafton Rooms?” I said, smiling. “Before my time. Been closed for nigh on thirty years now.”
“Christ,” she said. “That long? It all goes so fast.”
I gave her hand a gentle pat. It was a little more yielding now, like water within a thin membrane trying to maintain a half-remembered shape.
“Are you starting to get a handle on what’s going on, luv?” I asked her.
She sighed. “I think I knew as soon as I bolted the cellar door on it,” she said. “I just didn’t want to admit it to meself.”
She looked up above the mantelpiece to the postcards from her daughter again and was silent for a while. I kept stroking her hand, less substantial by the minute.
“Downstairs,” she said, suddenly. “Will someone tidy—”
“They’ll send a team,” I said.
“When?”
“Once I call them.”
“You should call them,” she said. “You’re on the clock.”
“Bugger the clock,” I said, still holding where her hand used to be. “I’m right here. You just relax, luv. Take as long as you need.”
She didn’t need long. And I had nowhere better to be.
Peter Atkins is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV, and Wishmaster. His short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, Hellbound Hearts, Gutshot, and The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes. His most recent book, Rumours of the Marvellous, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award. “Postcards from Abroad,” set in the author’s native Liverpool, was written for the 2013 performances of The Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual folly he commits with Glen Hirshberg. He blogs at peteratkins.blogspot.com.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 19
