The Apparition Phase

by Will Maclean

  I looked at the illustration, and it seemed to telescope away from me, downwards, into a place where there was only blackness.

  I recalled now my train of thought before I had been interrupted by my fight with Cliff Lang. I remained motionless, staring down into the depths of the illustration, and considered the unthinkable.

  A perfunctory police search notwithstanding, Abi’s room was almost as she’d left it the morning she’d gone out and not returned. Her schoolbooks were on her desk; an olive-coloured cardigan hung on the brass bedstead. Abi would have found comparisons with the Mary Celeste trite, so I considered instead that I was entering her room in the service of an investigation, like a detective, a scenario she would definitely have approved of. Nevertheless, I felt very much like an intruder, as I always did in Abi’s room. I was suddenly worried about how I would justify being in here when Abi found out, and this thought made me laugh, cheered me, and – worse still – gave me hope. We would laugh about this one day. We would.

  Her desk drawer was locked, but the key hung on a ribbon round the neck of a porcelain Siamese cat that had sat on her desk for as long as I could remember. There, inside the drawer, amongst other things – letters, a diary, some photos – was her owl notebook. I locked the drawer again and replaced the key.

  Crossing the landing, it suddenly hit me. The last person to lock that drawer had been Abi. She had locked it, and I had opened it. It was odd, but that fact upset me considerably, and made the unthinkable feel suddenly very real. Children and teenagers went missing all the time, the papers were always full of such stories, and the narratives, as far as I knew, always went the same way, without exception. A child went missing. A family was distraught. There was a space of time – a week, two weeks, a month – where the hope that they might turn up alive burned and guttered like a candle. After a time, and usually not very much time, a body would turn up. And that would be the end.

  I had done my best not to think about the situation that we were all – my mother, father and myself – trapped in. However, suppressing it only made it stronger, and now it broke over me like a vast black wave. A living hand had opened the drawer, but in all likelihood the hand that had locked it was now dead. And in that second of absolute isolation, of the utter undeniable truth that we now inhabited – I knew. I knew that Abi was dead. To deny it would be to deny all the things that Abi held dear – pragmatism, method, the necessity – the duty of facing facts in life, no matter how unpleasant they may be or how we might wish things were otherwise. I would never see my sister again.

  I went to the attic and sank numbly into an armchair. I didn’t have a desk, but it hadn’t felt right to stay in Abi’s room and sit at hers. I stared at the owl notebook in front of me. I realised I would never have opened it if I thought Abi was still alive. In its own way, this was a test. I opened the book.

  Much of the book was beautiful. She had written poems, a great many of them, and she had illustrated each one with a large illuminated letter, or a floral border, or a one-page illustration. I flicked through the titles. Mercy Me. I am the Owl. A Test of Faith. Other pages had sketches, some of them simple – the Uffington White Horse, with which she had covered two pages – and some very complex, such as a series of geometric solids that she’d drawn in order to understand how light and shade fell on such things, until the maths of it eluded her and mistakes overwhelmed order like flames leaping from a burning building.

  Eventually, I found what I was looking for. My own handwriting, looking undisciplined and childish next to Abi’s: ‘The Compleyte Prophecies of Janys Tuppe of Thisse Parishe’. It seemed a lot less amusing now than it had then. Janice’s words came back to me, with unexpected force: You two think you’re clever, but you’re not.

  I read over Janice’s words from that afternoon, beginning with those she’d spoken whilst pointing at me.

  I see you. I see the broken house, with all the broken people in it. I see it coming back for you. I see four halves and two quarters. I see it returning, and it will never let you go. It will always be with you.

  Apart from the bit about the broken doll’s house – which actually seemed more like a lucky guess now than ever – this all seemed reassuringly gibberish. Delivered cold on the page, in Abi’s still-comforting handwriting rather than Janice Tupp’s hissing rasp, it seemed risible, foolish even.

  I read the next line. A cold, tight panic gripped me.

  Twenty grins all grinning back at you, salt in the wound, and you break.

  I was out of the armchair now, standing up – totally and completely afraid. For this line was entirely, chillingly precise, and had come to pass. An image in my mind, terribly vivid, of the rows and rows of newspapers before me, and from each one, the same face grinning back at me, the picture of Abigail that had become the symbol and icon of her vanishing. Twenty versions of the same picture, grinning up at me from the newsagent’s rack.

  If this was right, what else was right?

  Trembling, I read the part Janice had directed at Abigail.

  I see you too. I see you there but you can’t see me. Grinning away again, showing your teeth, saying nothing but sand. And you can’t stop it now. What else is there to do? What good is being clever now? Here? And you can’t stop this.

  He’s coming for you. He has eyes but no face. He’s near.

  Any observer who chose to watch me in the attic at that moment would see a boy, almost sixteen, behaving with virtually preternatural calm: sitting down very precisely, smoothing out the thighs of his corduroy trousers, inhaling and exhaling very deliberately, before holding the book up to eye level and reading the words carefully, over and over.

  I see you but you can’t see me.

  Abi was dead.

  What else is there to do?

  Nothing.

  What good is being clever now?

  No good. No good at all.

  He’s coming for you. He has eyes but no face.

  I had construed this as a reference to our fake ghost that had scared her so much, whose chalk eyes burned out of his formless face like a threat. At the time, I had thought it was pathetic. Now, however, I held up the newspaper where the police sketch of Mister S – from the scant details given by Mrs Lacey – was printed.

  Long, lank hair framed an empty space. There was no mouth, no nose. But there were eyes. Two dark eyes, with a defiant, amused look, their glare burning out of the sketch.

  Eyes. But no face.

  And then the words that Janice had practically screamed at us: He’s near! He can’t be stopped!

  My sister’s transcript ended there, but I knew it was incomplete. After informing us that he can’t be stopped, but before Abigail had doused her with water and slapped her into submission, Janice had said something else. The same word, twice. Elongated into a thin hiss. As if she were about to utter a name but couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. Abigail, whose memory was even better than mine, would no doubt have recalled this, but had clearly deemed it irrelevant and not written it down. I was surprised that I recalled it at all. But, now, I found that I remembered it very clearly.

  ‘Esssssss …’ Janice had hissed. ‘Esssss …’

  I discovered I was crying again. I forced myself to stop, and the attic fell silent.

  My mother was ironing, mechanically pressing and folding sheets and napkins. My father was simply sitting, and either thinking or daydreaming, staring at the pattern on the wallpaper as if it were a scrying glass, and might tell him secrets. They both, in their separate ways, looked defeated and reduced, eaten away by the corrosive, inescapable now, the unendurable situation that nonetheless had to be endured.

  I stood with my back to the mantelpiece, until I had both of their attention. My mum set the iron on its base and looked at me searchingly.

  ‘What is it?’

  I cleared my throat. There was no point in trying to dress this up.

  ‘Abi is dead.’

  II

  * * *

/>   13

  On the first anniversary of Abi’s disappearance, I sat in Mr Henshaw’s room, the one with the large bay window, and talked, for the hundredth time, about my feelings.

  Although I didn’t like talking to him very much, I quite liked Mr Henshaw. ‘You can call me Neville, if you want to,’ he had said, during our first ever appointment. I had not wanted to, so Mr Henshaw he had remained. This call-me-by-my-first-name business was typical of Mr Henshaw, who was at pains, always, to appear sympathetic to me, on my side, just as baffled by the big old crazy world as I, a person twelve or thirteen years his junior. Mr Henshaw’s consulting room was the front parlour of his large Victorian house. Apart from the chairs we sat in, there was only one piece of furniture, a bookshelf filled with psychology books called things like You – Me – We, and The Path of Progress and The Listening Cure. An acoustic guitar lurked ominously in a corner; I was perpetually afraid that Mr Henshaw would one day be moved to strap it on and express himself in song, but he never did. Mr Henshaw himself – with his shoulder-length brown hair, tidy beard and bead necklace – had undoubtedly been ‘in a band’ at some point: folk-rock, most likely. The songs would be called things like ‘The Ballad of Pippin Took’ and ‘Vinegar Tom’. The second side of their one and only LP would conclude with a cover of a folk standard: ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, perhaps, or ‘The Barley Grain for Me’. Mr Henshaw had probably always been too serious to be anything as strident or frivolous as lead singer, though he’d probably written the songs. My guess was he’d been rhythm guitarist, whilst his more charismatic friend, who had a hairy chest and an Eye of Horus pendant, was lead singer, and got all the girls, who he naturally called birds, including the blonde keyboard player, who Mr Henshaw secretly—

  ‘Tim?’ I became aware of Mr Henshaw’s face, creased in a frown, staring at me. ‘Are you all right? I asked you a question.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about something.’

  Mr Henshaw’s face looked even more laden with concern than usual. ‘What were you thinking about, Tim?’

  It was, as always, easier to lie. ‘I was thinking about how unfair the world is,’ I said. In this place, with this audience, I found I could play the petulant teenager indefinitely, railing at gigantic, nebulous issues – society, violence, man’s inhumanity to man – all day, to absolutely no avail, moving the therapeutic process on not one jot. Indeed, this was what I had been doing for six months.

  Mr Henshaw leaned back in his wicker chair, hands clasped around one thin knee, in a way that looked incredibly uncomfortable. However, once settled, he did not move.

  ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘Is there any reason you can think of that you might be thinking that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘The abduction and murder of my sister, perhaps?’

  Something flashed in poor Mr Henshaw’s eyes, something intimately connected to kindness and empathy, and I felt very, very bad for hurling this rock at him so brutally. Whatever else Mr Henshaw was, he was genuine in his concern for me. He cared. I was immediately gripped by a small passion of adolescent embarrassment, replaying my last spoken sentence over and over again in my head, listening to how spiteful and juvenile it sounded. My face became hot.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, eventually.

  Mr Henshaw smiled a brave smile.

  ‘That’s fine, Tim. If I were in your position, I expect I would be very angry. Very angry and upset.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A terrible thing happened, to someone close to you. It’s only right you should feel anger sometimes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are no wrong feelings, Tim. Just feelings.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have a right to be angry, Tim. A perfect right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But,’ said Mr Henshaw, his voice soft, ‘you have to remember that the world is, at its root, a good place. A place where good people live, and good things happen. I mean, yes, bad things too, but those are the exception, rather than the rule. The basic law of the world – I believe – is love. Wouldn’t you agree, Tim?’

  I looked out of the bay window. The pathway to the house was edged with large stones, all covered with green moss, apart from one. This one was dusted with large and small fragments of the same material, patterned brown on one side, pearl-white on the other. I had half-noticed it this morning, although it was only now I realised what it was. Every so often, a song-thrush would come to that stone with a live snail it had caught, which had retreated into its shell. The thrush would then batter the snail against the stone. When the shell had collapsed to the thrush’s satisfaction, the bird would clutch it with its clawed foot, then extract the ruined mess of the snail with its beak.

  ‘Tim?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Outside Mr Henshaw’s enormous house, I felt the same numbness I always felt after our sessions together, as the effort of carefully managing an entire hour of conversation in order to avoid discussing anything of consequence came to a close. Part of me wished Mr Henshaw was more aggressive, that he might one day just grab me by the shoulders and shout at me to pull myself together. I was aware that I permitted myself this fantasy safe in the knowledge it would never happen.

  At the gate, Tony Finch lurked, smoking. He smiled when he saw me.

  ‘How was the shrink, psycho?’

  ‘Great. You’ll be glad to know I’m still dangerously insane.’

  He grinned sloppily and gave a thumbs-up. ‘Nice one.’

  There were just the two of us now. We constituted Tony’s gang. Cliff Lang avoided us, if he knew what was good for him, and enormous, stupid Gary Fisher had also departed, sloping off in the face of my constant mockery to find something new to do. It was just Tony and me now.

  Without talking, we headed off. Words were unnecessary: we knew where we were going. We traversed the posh, dilapidated suburb inhabited by Mr Henshaw, and people like Mr Henshaw, until the enormous, crate-like houses abruptly gave way to the sand-coloured brick and white window frames of the 1960s development, still referred to by everyone in the locality as ‘the New Houses’, even though their roofs were by now spotted mustard and white with lichen. Skirting the New Houses, we took a path of orange mud into the woods, where fly-tippers had dumped sofas, fridges and car parts. Past the ancient oak where someone had written BARRY IS A SEX MANGANAC on the trunk, in green gloss paint. Down into, and up out of, a ditch which might have been an Iron Age earthwork once, now merely a piddling brook of milky industrial run-off from somewhere. And, finally, to the slatted concrete fence, six feet high, topped with barbed wire, a hole gaping in one of the bottom slats. Tony kept lookout whilst I fetched the car jack from its hiding place in the hollow of a dead tree, and wedged it under the hole.

  Ten or so pumps of the jack, and the stack of concrete panels rode high enough in their vertical concrete runners to open up a space of about 18 inches at the bottom, the top slat above us leaning dangerously against the coils of barbed wire, almost falling out of its setting. Tony lowered himself to the ground and scrambled through first; I followed. Once inside, Tony wedged a breezeblock under the concrete panels and retrieved the jack. I pulled the breezeblock carefully towards me, and the stack of panels clapped back down with all their weight, like a great stone guillotine.

  And then we were in. And the entire factory was ours.

  The factory, as far as we could tell, had made some kind of industrial machinery, and had closed sometime in the mid-60s. It consisted of a large red-brick warehouse, a workshop, and an administrative block with many rooms, most of which were locked. These buildings were clustered round a square courtyard, which was steadily crumbling away, and by spring would be a riot of ragwort and rosebay willowherb. In fact, the factory was overgrown on all sides with thick brambles, and when we’d first arrived last autumn, we had to hack our way through with sticks.

  Over the months we’d been coming here we�
��d gone through many different phases of activity. Initially, we had smashed the windows, but this rapidly became tedious, as there were so many of them that the project stopped feeling transgressive and felt instead like a chore. After that, Tony had brought along his brother’s air rifle and we spent a couple of weeks shooting tin cans, oil drums, and, eventually, pigeons, who nested by the hundreds in the iron rafters of the warehouse, streaking the walls with their droppings. We found a sack of clothes pegs and hung our kills by their wings from ropes stretched between the walls, where they dried like smoked herring. The smell was transcendentally appalling, and we were pleased with our work. From there, we graduated to arson, and set a variety of fires inside and out, though we stopped after one of these blazes – in one of the wooden sheds by the warehouse – became almost too large for us to stamp out, coughing and red-eyed.

  Currently, our favourite activity was tearing open the locked rooms of the administrative block, a project which took real work. Shortly after the factory had closed, it had become a well-known hangout for what my father called ‘dossers and druggies’; in this case, hippies, who had squatted the place. As far as Tony and I could tell, the squatters had inhabited all the rooms in the administrative block, which was why these rooms had since been padlocked shut.

  In the three rooms we’d so far managed to open, the traces of the former occupants were everywhere. Like the vanished Neanderthals, we knew our forebears largely by their wall art.

  In the first room, vast swathes of green and yellow climbed in waves, engulfing all of the fixtures: architrave, light switches, ancient fire safety notices. The green and yellow waves, far from being tranquil, were troubling in their mindless multiplication. The second room had been painted in pink and turquoise blotches, and in the limited light the room looked as if it were succumbing to some exotic disease, an impression heightened by the stalagmites of fossilised candle wax dripping over desks and chairs.