The Apparition Phase

by Will Maclean

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tony grinned broadly – not his normal grin – and a faraway look came into his eyes. ‘You missed out, Tim.’

  ‘I – I just couldn’t stay in that house. Not with her there. You know.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was her either, Tim,’ said Tony. ‘But I didn’t mind. She’s all right.’

  ‘She is not,’ I said hotly.

  ‘She gets things, Tim. She knows who you are. And me. She knows a lot of things.’

  ‘Does she?’ I said flatly.

  ‘She talked me down. Looked after me … where were you?’

  ‘I couldn’t stay.’

  ‘Right.’ Tony ran a hand carefully through his hair. I had seen this gesture before. ‘See you around, Tim.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘See you around.’

  And off he went, through the woods. I watched his silhouette slip through the trees, sadness hardening in my stomach, as if I had just returned some untameable beast that had become very dear to me back into the wild.

  ‘Hello, is that Graham Shaw?’

  ‘Speaking. Is that Tim?’

  ‘It is. Hello, Graham.’

  ‘Hi, Tim. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, Graham. How are you? How’s the ghost hunt?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you remember the séance we held last weekend?’

  I sighed. Had it really only been a week? ‘Yes, of course. You don’t forget something like that.’

  ‘Well, we’ve tried to repeat it every day since, and the fact is, that first séance constitutes our one tangible result in this whole endeavour – the rapping on the table. And afterwards, when we listened to the recording of the session, we discovered we’d captured some Raudive audio.’

  I sat up. ‘Really? What did it say?’

  ‘One voice only, I’m afraid. It’s not exactly crystal clear, but it appears to say “Never”.’

  I shuddered. I remembered a detail from last night. The squat that Kevin lived in, where I had left Tony. Painted on the wall of the stone landing at the top of the steps, the word NEVER in red paint. A meaningless coincidence, but an unsettling one.

  ‘The point is, Tim, that since then we’ve recorded absolutely nothing at all. Our sessions have proved absolutely fruitless. My study is up in two weeks, so I was wondering … if you’d like to come up and join us for our final fortnight?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Our only remarkable results happened whilst you were here – the furious banging on the table, and the voice on the tape.’

  ‘Mr Henshaw was there too,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Tim, but he didn’t participate. You did.’

  I thought of what Mr Henshaw had said, in the car on the way home. I was concerned you might get it into your head that you were – making contact. With Abigail, I mean.

  ‘This voice,’ I said carefully. ‘What did it sound like?’

  ‘Well,’ said Graham. ‘It’s quite hard to describe. But I think it’s a male voice, or certainly a deep one.’

  Intense disappointment and intense relief is a strange combination of feelings. I slumped against the wall; my head swam a little.

  ‘Sally assures me that these things are very dependent on the different personalities present, and the mix of those personalities,’ Graham went on. ‘So she thought it would be a good idea to ask you back up here. I mean, I know it’s a tall order, Tim. You’re probably busy, and—’

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said instantly. ‘What should I tell Mr Henshaw?’

  Graham coughed and fumbled with the receiver a little. ‘Well, Tim, to be honest, I’d rather you didn’t tell him, if that’s OK. He’ll only object. We had a very long telephone conversation on Sunday where he made his feelings about my experiment perfectly clear.’

  ‘I understand.’ I really believed I did, too, at that point.

  ‘How soon can you be here?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Great. If you get the two-thirty from Liverpool Street, then change at Ipswich. I’ll come and pick you up at the station.’

  Mum and Dad raised the requisite token objections.

  I think they did this primarily because they vaguely remembered, somewhere deep in the fug of their separate and profound miseries, that parents are supposed to object to things their children want to do, and therefore they should object to me going away, almost as a reflex. They were performing a ritual, having long ago forgotten what the ritual meant. Mum asked questions, but she was playing a role, rather than expressing real concern. Ultimately, she didn’t have the energy to object to the fact that I would be taking part in a study so clearly inappropriate for someone who was in the process of recovering from a traumatic event; she merely asked me for an address and a phone number and insisted that I call to let her know I had arrived safely. Dad’s disapproval was more overt, and for a few moments I was reminded of that far-off day he fought with Abi and me, in this very living room, challenging us to drop our strange and macabre interests. Then, all of a sudden, he seemed to lose interest in the discussion before it had really started, and bade me goodbye, whereupon I had to remind him that I wasn’t leaving immediately, but was heading off the next day.

  I packed a bag in my room and, on a whim, decided to take a bottle of whisky with me from my parents’ drinks cabinet. I wrapped it in a towel and placed it deep into my rucksack. I wondered why I was even bothering with subterfuge: neither Mum nor Dad would mention it, if by some miracle they even noticed it was missing. I, too, was performing a ritual that circumstances had made obsolete.

  That night, I dreamed I was back in the filthy squat, with Tony. Only now it was labyrinthine, never-ending, the same filthy rooms infinitely recursive, a sickness that had infected the whole universe. Music was playing in one of the rooms, but it was impossible to tell which room. ‘Can you hear the music?’ I asked Tony. ‘I can’t hear any music. Is he here?’ said Tony. ‘Already?’ And then the power cut and the lights went out, and I was standing in the filthy kitchen. And there was Janice, her head out of sight, poking around in the fridge, but when she stood up, clicking to a standing posture with the inhuman, hydraulic fluidity of a machine, her face was a mass of buzzing flies, swarming over some unseen obscenity.

  24

  The next day was sunny and bright, conditions which were wasted on our dark and gloomy house.

  Mum gave me an awkward hug, where her forehead hit my chin. Dad was fitting skirting board in the front room, his jumper patterned with clinging sawdust. He shook my hand as I left, as if I were an employee whose name he couldn’t quite recall.

  I travelled into London, and, at Liverpool Street, boarded a blue-and-red InterCity, train, bound for Suffolk. I felt grown-up, charged with purpose, doing perhaps the one thing in the world I was uniquely positioned to do. Only Abi herself might have been more qualified. I thought of Sally, too, more and more; how she might look when I saw her, what she might say, what I might say in return.

  One change of train, at a nondescript platform in Ipswich. From the second train, the countryside flattened, as if the sky were stretching, rising, leaving human notions of scale behind. At eye level, bland fields and squat churches were the only features. Something silent and predatory moved across the sun in an effortless arc, searching the fields below. This was Suffolk, seen from the train, not glimpsed from a passing car, and I saw it as if for the first time, and felt its depth and age.

  I was the only passenger to disembark at the station, which consisted of nothing more than a pair of narrow platforms and a ticket hall and general waiting room with a large fireplace. Walking out into the bright sunlight, I immediately saw Graham and Sally. They waved enthusiastically, and the idea that anyone was pleased to see me almost took my breath away. Graham wore a dark orange corduroy jacket, and smoked a pipe like a man thirty years his senior. Sally wore a long summer dress, and a thin leather circlet around her head that let a small blue jew
el rest in the centre of her forehead. Graham smiling and pointing with his pipe, Sally showing off her beautiful teeth; I almost wept with gratitude. We climbed into Graham’s ancient brown Vauxhall, Sally in the passenger seat and me in the back.

  ‘Any breakthrough in the search for Tobias Salt?’ I said. I had intended the word ‘breakthrough’ to be a subtle yet clever allusion to the book by Konstantin Raudive, the discoverer of electronic voice phenomena, but the car was very noisy, and any subtlety I was aiming for was lost under the sound of the engine.

  ‘Not yet,’ Graham shouted back. ‘Only what I told you.’

  ‘We’re hoping your presence will shake things up a bit,’ said Sally, smiling back at me. ‘New blood and all that! Plus, you’re part of the only definite result we’ve had in this experiment so far.’

  There was that curious turn of phrase again. ‘Why do you keep calling it an experiment?’

  ‘Oh.’ Sally seemed unaware that she had been doing so. ‘Well, that’s what it is. An experiment to see if we can raise a ghost.’

  ‘Sally,’ Graham admonished, ‘I don’t think it’s wise to talk too much about it at this stage, do you?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. I forget sometimes, how unique what we’re doing here is.’

  I had questions – many questions – but I didn’t feel like bawling them over the car’s engine. I settled back into the rear passenger seat and watched the hedgerows swell and sink around me.

  The village came first, of course, with its war memorial and parish notice board and medieval church, knapped flint walls glistening in the sun like the skin of some colossal reptile. There, too, was the shop, the pub and the tiny, lopsided bookshop, crammed with stacks of volumes. Then there was the B-road, and the long avenue of trees. And there, far too quickly, it seemed, was Yarlings again, crouched behind the vast lawn, ivy spreading to mask the scars between the original house and the Victorian wing. The two almost-halves looked even more mismatched now than when I first saw them, the sunlight emphasising every irreconcilable detail, so that the place seemed less a clash of styles than a clash of philosophies, rendered in stone.

  Graham parked his car next to a sky-blue Rover, and a bright red Triumph Stag.

  For the first time, I felt a strange thrill of fear, looking at the house, a thrill that had been absent from my first visit. The house and its warring elements were nonetheless unified in purpose by – something. Was that something, even now, waiting? Waiting for me to join the others, for six to become seven? Seven souls, their little human essences glowing dimly in a grey wash of static, like distress beacons, broadcasting their vulnerability to anything that has eyes to see. There are seven of them now, I thought, and the circuit is complete.

  III

  * * *

  25

  It seemed that, no matter how bright the day outside, the interior of Yarlings was always dark, always gloomy, always permeated with a troubled air, as if overthinking its presence. My vision greyed momentarily as we plunged from the day’s brilliance into the dark hallway. Summer’s heat drew the signature churchlike smell of Yarlings from its ancient timbers, of dust and disquiet, and for a second or two, until my eyes adjusted, the aroma was all I was sensible of. I followed Sally’s shadow deeper into the house.

  ‘Graham and I have a few things to sort out,’ Sally said, as I blinked away the last of the daylight. ‘But everyone else is in here.’ And with that, she headed off towards the kitchen. ‘See you later!’

  ‘Tim!’ Polly’s smiling face shone warmly in the darkness of the Great Hall. She and Neil had been sitting by the windows, reading, and she immediately got up, came over and gave me a hug, hands bunched in the sleeves of her cardigan, and asked how I had been. Neil, however, looked up with the slow reluctance of a tortoise waking from hibernation, restricting his welcome to a single grunted syllable.

  Seb lounged at the table nearby. ‘You again,’ he said, and grinned at me. I suddenly saw why girls might find him attractive. There was something roguish, almost dashing about him, something usually entirely absent from boys our age. It was certainly entirely absent from me. Although he was about the same size as Tony Finch – that is to say, big – Seb carried himself completely differently. Where Tony’s demeanour was a kind of furtive insouciance, Seb’s was brazen, unapologetic. His feet were up on the glossy black wood of the dining table, boots resting on what was almost certainly a valuable antique. He had also been reading.

  ‘Do you bring news of the outside world? Has President Nixon been impeached, or impounded, or whatever it is they do?’

  ‘I haven’t really been following the news,’ I said. This sounded immature, and probably was. Part of me, answering the call of impending adulthood, was starting to feel perennially guilty that I didn’t engage more with the world, rather than with my own strange and highly specific enthusiasms. I knew everything there was to know about Gef, the talking mongoose of Cashen’s Gap that had baffled the nation for two weeks in the 1940s, for instance, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  ‘Oh,’ said Seb. ‘Well, anyway. Take a look at this.’ He tossed the book he had been reading onto the table, and I realised what it – and the similar volumes that Polly and Neil were reading – was.

  In the time since Abi had vanished, three separate books had come to my attention that aimed to document all the major hauntings of the British Isles. There was Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British Ghosts, a compilation of sightings, investigations and urban folklore. There was Andrew Green’s Our Haunted Kingdom, which came in a dark purple jacket, with a picture of the famously haunted house at Montpelier Road in Ealing in wraparound. In the first-floor window at the back, something – Green is careful not to definitively say what – can be seen, either a trick of the light, or, if you prefer, the face of a ghost girl, staring out at our world from the cage of bricks and mortar she presumably cannot leave.

  Best of all, though, was Antony D. Hippisley Coxe’s Haunted Britain, an exhaustive county-by-county guide to the haunted places of the United Kingdom, irresistibly categorised with a system of symbols denoting which type of strangeness abided at a given location. It was the definitive survey, fully indexed with maps and references, rescued from repetition by both the sheer variety of stories and the author’s pithy opinions on them. All three books were superb, however. I longed to show them to Abi, and my stomach knotted whenever I remembered the impossibility of this. Seeing them gave me that feeling I had had the Christmas before Abi vanished – that the world was catching up with our interests, and that the mystery of what ghosts actually were might very soon be solved.

  Seb sniffed. ‘You’re familiar with these, I take it?’

  ‘I am.’ I had read all of them, but didn’t own them. They were expensive – Haunted Britain alone was £4, and Our Haunted Kingdom was a whopping £4.25 – and I had only been able to order them through the public library. Tony Finch had, of course, offered to shoplift them for me, but I had politely declined. I began to thumb through Haunted Britain.

  ‘I got my mum to send them over,’ said Seb. ‘Thought I’d better do some research, finally. About this place.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Not in there,’ said Neil, from the window.

  ‘Really? What about the other books?’

  Seb shrugged. ‘Nope. Not a dicky bird.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘No,’ said Polly. ‘This place doesn’t appear to have troubled any of the standard refs. Weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s weird?’ said Graham. I hadn’t heard him come in.

  ‘Your haunted house,’ said Seb. ‘It isn’t in any of the guidebooks.’

  ‘Guidebooks? Oh. These.’ Graham peered down through his thick glasses at Haunted Britain. ‘Yes, I’m aware of these. Sensationalist claptrap. Scary stories spiced up for a credulous public.’.

  ‘Wow,’ said Seb. ‘Not your cup of tea, then?’

  ‘No. And it’s unsurprisi
ng that Yarlings isn’t in any of those books – in fact, I would be annoyed if it were. I chose this location precisely for the unknown nature of the haunting. Apart from the locals, no one else really knows about this particular phantom.’

  ‘How did you find out about it?’ asked Polly.

  ‘A mixture of hard work and happy accident. I discovered the story of Tobias Salt after many days perusing parish records. I was looking for a haunting that no one could know by reputation, or read about, thus prejudicing their observations. It seems I was wise to do so, Sebastian.’ Graham rapped his knuckles on the cover of Haunted Britain. ‘I warned you about this kind of thing.’

  ‘Sorry, chief!’ said Seb, and saluted sloppily. ‘Won’t do it again!’

  ‘I also desired an environment where scientific research wouldn’t be overturned by sightseers, gawkers and the tinfoil hat mob who generally come in search of spooks.’ Graham smiled. ‘Anyway, if you’ll forgive me, Tim, I still have a couple of things to attend to, then I’ll take you to your room, and give you the full run-down of what we’re doing here.’

  ‘And I’m going outside,’ said Polly, slamming Our Haunted Kingdom shut. ‘Stupidly long time to spend indoors, on a day like this. Anyone else for fresh air?’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Neil.

  Seb tapped a cigarette out of a soft pack of Lucky Strike, watching them leave. I had never seen a soft pack of cigarettes before. In my world, cigarettes always came in large, robust cartons of twenty, like the blue-and-white boxes of Player’s No. 6 that both Tony Finch and my mum smoked.

  As he lit up, he smiled a Cheshire Cat smile through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I asked.

  ‘About this situation? Everything. Particularly Graham lecturing us about scientific impartiality as we attempt to talk to a bloody ghost.’

  ‘You can always leave if you find it ridiculous.’