“All I know is, this one is menacing. There’s so much hatred in it and it’s fighting to get into my body. Not only to share it, but to take it over and control every thought and every action. But more than that….”
“What?”
Carol bit her lip. She was finally going to voice her fear to another person. “It wants my soul, Joanna. And not just mine either.”
Joanna blinked and dropped her hands.
“You think I’m crazy too, don’t you?” Carol asked.
“No. Far from it. Everything you’ve said adds up. You’re psychic, that’s for sure. Spirits find it easy to connect with you. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but other times, like now…. Well, let’s just say the bad ones are good at grabbing opportunities.”
“And you think that’s what’s happening here?”
Joanna nodded. “What do you feel right now?”
How to describe the sudden change in the air around her. “The atmosphere in here. It’s as if there’s a fog even though I know there isn’t.”
“I’m relying on you to tell me if anything changes. I can’t feel anything. I don’t have your powers.”
“Powers? I’ve never thought of it like that.”
“You’d better start because you undoubtedly have them. Let’s begin with the wardrobes.” Joanna opened the first door of the fitted units that ran floor to ceiling all along one wall.
Carol opened the one at the far end. “What am I looking for?”
“I’ll be honest, I don’t really know but I think it might be better if we worked together.”
Carol closed the door and joined Joanna, who had engaged in removing her clothes from the rails, laying them carefully on the bed. Carol helped her.
“I think,” Joanna said. “We need to look for anything that doesn’t quite fit. The rear wall, for example. Is there part of it that’s hollow? That sort of thing. Any anomaly, however small, that could indicate that something has been covered over at some stage. It might conceal an old entrance. Something that a spirit from the building’s history could use to get through.”
Joanna climbed in the now-empty wardrobe. She knocked along the wall. Only the sound of solid masonry. She peered down at the floor and stamped her feet. Nothing.
“I’ll get out now and you get in. See what you feel. Tell me if anything changes.”
They swapped places. Carol did exactly as Joanna had done, with the same lack of result. She peered up at the top of the wardrobe. Nothing unusual. “But the entrance wouldn’t still be here, would it? They wouldn’t just cover it over. They demolished the old building, didn’t they? Twice, I believe. Once, after the bombing and then again later. All of this is relatively new.”
“So is the hospital, but you went through into the tunnel there, didn’t you?”
“But when I went back the second time, the wall was solid. For me at any rate.”
“I know it’s a long shot, but let’s at least give it a good go. Let’s try the next one.”
That was easier. The wardrobes, apart from the first one, were empty except for a few pairs of well-worn shoes. Knowing how different these must be from Joanna’s smart belongings, Carol felt a wave of shame and embarrassment, but Joanna gave no indication of surprise at Carol’s evident relative poverty.
They repeated the tapping, knocking and stamping but nothing happened.
“Let’s check the rest of the room.” Joanna led the way.
Still nothing.
“Okay, now the hall.” She crossed the threshold.
As soon as Carol put one foot out of the bedroom, her nerve endings fizzed. She gritted her teeth and hugged herself.
“What is it?” Joanna asked. “What are you feeling? Can you see anything?”
Her voice faded into the distance.
* * *
Carol looked out of Lydia’s eyes at the assembled hushed audience, but this was no theater. A courtroom. The bewigged judge was reading a slip of paper. Sitting behind desks, a number of well-dressed and important-looking men listened, legal papers and books piled in front of them. Carol’s hands gripped the wooden rail of the dock. The judge set the paper down. He reached forward and picked up a piece of black material, which he set carefully on top of his head. Members of the all-male jury whispered to each other, their voices mingling and drifting toward her like leaves tossed in the wind.
The judge stared directly at her. She felt his eyes boring into her. The court fell silent.
“Prisoner at the bar.”
All heads turned toward her. Carol felt a sickening palpitation.
“You have been found guilty of the crime of murder. The sentence of this court is that you will be taken from here to the place from whence you came and there be kept in close confinement until a date yet to be determined, and upon that day that you be taken to the place of execution and there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.”
Each word stabbed her soul. Carol’s knees buckled and the crowd gasped. Two female prison warders manhandled her down the steps and straight down into the bowels of the building.
A murderer. They had found her guilty. No mitigating circumstances. No self-defense. In their eyes she was a cold-blooded killer. Or Lydia was. She must remember, she was Carol Shaughnessy. She closed her eyes and prayed. Take me out of this body. Take me home.
A mist descended in front of her eyes. The sound of horses’ hooves, the lurch of the prison carriage faded away and when her sight returned, time had passed.
She stood on a small wooden platform. Somewhere a bell tolled and next to her a priest was reciting the 23rd Psalm. A stocky man placed a noose around her neck. The rough fibers of the crude but sturdy rope stung like an army of red ants as it cut into her throat, and warm blood trickled down her neck, splashing her dress, even dripping onto the floor beneath her shaking legs.
She could smell the stench of death from the black hood they put over her head, hear her own shallow, feverish breathing as she waited for the trapdoor to open. Waited for death to claim her, when finally her legs would stop quivering and her neck would be broken or she would be strangled from a short drop.
The woman whose body she occupied spoke in her mind. I am Lydia Warren Carmody. I am innocent of the crime they say I committed, but life means nothing to me anymore. Death, come to me…come now….
A sudden glimpse of a man, broken, bleeding. Lying on the floor. Dead. A man who wasn’t Roger Carmody.
Jonah….
A scurrying. A door banged and a male voice boomed out, echoing off the walls. “The woman has been spared. Take her down and return her to her cell.”
The words reached Carol through the hangman’s hood. Someone whipped it off her face and she blinked at the sudden bright light. The same person relaxed the noose around her neck and dragged it off and Carol collapsed into the arms of a wardress who half-carried her out of the death room and into a side room.
“Someone will come for you,” the rough woman said. “They’re taking you to the loony bin. That’ll be your home for the rest of your life.”
Carol overbalanced and fell to the floor. The door slammed and the iron key clanked in the lock.
Using the one battered chair for support, Carol struggled to her feet and sat down at the poor excuse for a table. She put her head in her hands and wept. How had it come to this? The Lydia within her had killed her husband or he would have killed her, but a jury had found her guilty of murder and a judge had wanted her to hang. She almost had. She touched her stinging neck and her hand came back red with her blood.
Someone had intervened mere seconds before they would have executed her. Which member of her family would have done that? They had all disowned her. So many memories filled her brain. Faces, people, events. All her memories, yet all unfamiliar to the part of her that was still Carol Sh
aughnessy.
A distant, half-overheard conversation between two older men swam into her brain. The language was strange, as if they were talking in some kind of code.
“I see you are a traveling man, Brother.”
“As are you, Brother.”
“Then naturally it is incumbent upon me to take care of that for which you solicit.”
“I pay homage to your judgment.”
“The question of your daughter’s guilt in this affair has been determined but I have reflected upon your plea and am prepared to show mercy. Furthermore, I will vouchsafe that no records of her trial shall be released. None shall be shewed for one hundred years or more. And may the great Architect of the Universe protect us all.”
“So mote it be….”
The voices faded.
A sudden knife of pain seared through Carol’s stomach. She bent over. Another stab of pain made her cry out. She doubled up, slid off the chair and passed out.
* * *
Carol opened her eyes. Somehow she was back in the dingy old corridor, with no recollection of how she got there. The old wall lamps flickered their gas flames. Murmurings of conversation wafted past her, before becoming more distinct. Shadows writhed in the gloom, and took form. Women dressed in drab, ankle-length dresses, patched and rusty with age. Body odor, ammonia and other smells Carol was unfamiliar with assailed her, while the now all too familiar lingering stench of boiled cabbage reminded her how much she hated the stuff. One of the foster mothers had forced her to eat it when she was seven years old. The memory flooded back. But something else overtook it.
“You will come with me. You are to be examined.” Hester, in her Victorian guise, had appeared from nowhere, her eyes boring into Carol’s with no trace of humanity in them. She grabbed her arm so firmly, her nails dug into Carol’s flesh, half dragging her down the corridor. The other women, milling around, took no notice of her. Maybe they couldn’t even see her.
Hester pushed her into a side room and closed the door behind them. Dr. Franklyn stood waiting. Next to him stood a rusted iron bed.
“Now that your stomach malady has been cured, we must address the real cause of your dementia. Lie down,” he ordered, his voice emotionless.
“My name is Carol…. Carol….” But she couldn’t remember her surname. It had been there, but in a second, had drifted off somewhere into the darkness of her mind where a black curtain descended, keeping her from memories she knew she must have. The curtain rolled forward and expanded, robbing her of more and more until she could protest no more. She no longer had any idea what she was protesting about.
The doctor’s face loomed closer. She tried to move, but her wrists were tethered – tried to kick out, but so were her ankles. Tried to scream, but they forced a leather gag into her mouth.
“Hold her steady.”
Hands pushed down on her shoulders. Someone she couldn’t see behind her held her head.
The sound of a drill.
Coming closer.
No. They couldn’t.
Excruciating pain in her head. The sound of bone crunching….
Chapter Seven
“Carol. Carol!”
She opened her eyes and found herself lying on the floor of her hall. She sat up and a fierce headache pounded, sending white hot shards of pain through her brain.
Joanna helped her stand and steered her into the living room, where she sank down gratefully onto the settee.
“I thought you were having a fit. I was about to call an ambulance but then you came out of it. What happened?”
For a moment, Carol could remember nothing, and then it gradually came back to her. She told Joanna as best she could, but her words seemed jumbled, garbled. “I’m not making any sense.”
“Oh you are, don’t worry. And it’s all sounding a little familiar. Firstly, that odd, archaic conversation you heard. I believe that gives us the answer as to why the records of Lydia Warren’s trial were kept secret for so long. Those words and some of the phrases? They’re Masonic. I reckon you heard the judge and Lydia’s father speaking and both were Freemasons. The judge decided to show leniency to help a fellow brother out. I’ll bet he made sure that jury were contacted individually and warned to keep their mouths shut too. It was a different age then. People were more deferential. Any scandal that had crept out would soon die down. It’s not like today when everything you do stays online to haunt you forever. With no official records to refer to, it would be yesterday’s forgotten gossip in no time. The newspaper barons were all Masonic brethren so they could be relied upon to quash any reporting. Just that one junior reporter who couldn’t resist keeping his notebook.”
“But what about anyone else there? Members of the public?”
“Did you see anyone there apart from the judge, jury, lawyers and court officials?”
Carol went over every detail in her brain. The courtroom hadn’t been full. Everyone there seemed to have an official role to play. She shook her head.
“There you go. The judge excluded members of the public from the hearing, knowing her father was a fellow Mason.
“As for the rest of it, when I was doing my research, I came across an account of a woman in Wales – Rhian somebody. She found herself somewhere she couldn’t possibly be, where everyone she encountered recognized her as another person entirely. In her case, the time frame was the present day, but it was as if she had somehow slipped into a parallel universe. It reads like the stuff of science fiction, but it really happened. To cut a long story to the quick, the incidents stopped when she found out that her alter ego actually existed and was having similar experiences. Only in her case, she was finding people recognized her as Rhian. They had somehow managed to swap identities. They had never met and the other woman lived in Chicago. They were no relation to each other and this was in the 1980s so they couldn’t have even met on social media because there wasn’t any.”
“But you say they were in the same time frame. My experiences aren’t. What happens to me is happening in the nineteenth century. The real Lydia Warren Carmody, whoever she was, must be long dead by now. But what happened out in the hall? What did I do?”
“One minute you were following me, the next you let out a cry and fainted. You tossed and turned a bit, then went quiet, and I was about to phone for an ambulance when you came round.”
“How long was I out for?”
“Not long. Maybe a minute?”
“Time isn’t the same then because I was there longer than that.”
“Time isn’t linear.”
“Sorry?”
Joanna shook herself. “It’s a theory I heard. There are people who believe that time isn’t as straightforward as we think. It doesn’t relentlessly move forward, ticking away the seconds hour after hour, year after year. It can be bent, twisted, coiled round even.”
“That sounds weird.”
“I agree. But in your case, it would be a possible answer to at least part of what you are going through during these episodes.”
“But I become her and she doesn’t become me, because you were with me and she didn’t manifest herself.”
“That’s true.” Joanna frowned.
“What is it?”
“Oh nothing. It’s nothing. I think we can safely say we have found the hotspot in your apartment though.”
“But there isn’t a doorway.”
“Isn’t there?”
“I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed here. Physically at least. You were here with me all the time. In the hospital, I actually went through the door in the wall. So did Hester…and Susan Jackson.”
“There was no one else with you at the time so you can’t actually be certain you did go through an entrance, although, admittedly, it does seem likely simply because when you ‘returned’ you weren’t in the same place as when you crossed over, i
f I can use that term. Whatever the truth of that, we do know that when you followed Hester and Susan Jackson you couldn’t see or find the door in the wall through which they disappeared, and I believe it’s because you weren’t meant to. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, only that its existence was being withheld from you by someone or something.” Joanna looked thoughtful for a moment. “It might help if we knew where Lydia Warren Carmody died. And even where she’s buried.”
“The Warrens seem to have been a well-respected family,” Carol said. “Her father was an alderman and doctor. He laid the foundation stone here. Wouldn’t they have had a burial plot somewhere?”
“I’ll see what I can find out. The trouble is so many cemeteries have been remodeled and gravestones removed, including the graveyard here of course. We can only hope they had a mausoleum or that at least some family members survive who would have ensured their ancestors continued to rest in peace where they were originally laid.”
Joanna went shortly after, leaving Carol to her thoughts and fears. It took her two hours to pluck up the courage to cross the hall into her bedroom, and then only to remove all her things and transfer into the spare room. As possibly the least ‘active’ room in the flat, maybe she would be safer here.
* * *
She lay in the darkness, her head cradled by the soft pillows in bed in her new room. Peace. Quiet. Tranquil silence. She drifted….
Outside, something scratched at the window. Insistent, persistent, like a cat’s claws.
She shot awake and snapped on the bedside lamp. She gave a start at the figure in the mirrored doors of the fitted wardrobes.
Stupid. Jumping at my own reflection.
Carol pushed the duvet aside and lowered her feet to the carpeted floor. She padded to the window and gingerly tugged the curtain aside a few inches.
A white face stared at her. Ghostly yet solid. Hair in an outdated bun. Hester.
Carol cried out and jumped back, letting the curtain fall. Through it she saw a shape move. It stopped. Disappeared. Carol panted, every nerve on edge, scalp prickling with fear. But she had to know.
In Darkness, Shadows Breathe Page 9
