The Girl in the Woods
A Ghost’s Story
Michael Robertson
Contents
Edited and Cover by …
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Prologue
Twenty-Four Hours Earlier
Epilogue
Reader Group
About the Author
Also by Michael Robertson
Email: [email protected]
Edited by:
Terri King - http://terri-king.wix.com/editing
And
Pauline Nolet - http://www.paulinenolet.com
Cover Design by The Cover Collection
The Girl in the Woods - A Ghost’s Story
Michael Robertson
© 2019 Michael Robertson
The Girl in the Woods - A Ghost’s Story is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, situations, and all dialogue are entirely a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously and are not in any way representative of real people, places or things.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Prologue
Bart had offered to drive, but Liz preferred him in the passenger seat, focusing. Doing his job. She’d given him control of her car once. Never again. Maybe they were already there and she hadn’t noticed, but the morning after, she’d discovered several more grey hairs.
Useless as a driver, Bart was a great help otherwise. The kid showed initiative and, most importantly, he had the gift. If he worked hard on his personal development, he’d become a truly great medium.
For a lot of the journey, Bart closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. When he straightened up, Liz eased off the gas. The way of his gift, Bart thrust an arm across her, pointing at a secluded driveway on the right. “In there.”
“There? Are you sure?” The track looked like a bridleway.
“Stop testing me, Liz. You already know where we’re going. I got it right, didn’t I?”
“This is certainly the right area, but are you sure that’s the best route?”
“Yep. They said it was an abandoned building, didn’t they?”
Bathed in shadows, the small road would even have appeared hostile in broad daylight. Liz shook her head. She flinched when Bart laid his hand against the top of her left arm. “It’s okay to be scared of the dark, you know.”
“But I’m a medium!”
“A medium who’s been briefed about what we’re heading in to. There’s things much scarier than ghosts out there.”
Liz sighed, indicated, and then guided the car into the narrow turn.
The tyres crunched and popped as they trundled over what had once been an asphalt driveway. Years of neglect had turned it in to a crumbling mess of small black rocks. The large pool of white from the car’s headlights showed the tufts of grass stubble pushing through the cracks. Long branches leaned over them, the canopy forming a natural tunnel and turning the already dark night darker.
The muscles in Liz’s right leg tensed, but she fought the urge to accelerate and kept the car moving at around ten miles per hour. No plans on slowing down, but any faster and she might do permanent damage to her vehicle. An inky blackness on either side because of the thick woodland, she stared straight ahead. “It’s been a long time since this driveway saw regular use.”
“They might be less than useless most of the time,” Bart said, leaning forwards as if it would help him see better, “but at least the police have been down here before us.”
“If you’ve guided us to the right place, and if they came in this way.”
A few seconds later they emerged from the dark woodland tunnel. Liz gasped and pulled her foot off the gas, slowing them to a crawl.
“Are you okay?” Bart said.
“And I thought the driveway was bad. How did we not see this building from the road?” An old institution made from crumbling red brick, it looked like it might have once been a school, a hospital, or …
“It used to be an asylum,” Bart said. The glow of a screen lit up next to her, and Bart read from it. “It’s been abandoned for—” he paused, his mouth playing out the mental arithmetic “—thirty-eight years.”
“Longer than I’ve been alive,” Liz said.
“Is it?”
“I’m not that old.”
“I’m sorry, when people get over thirty, I can’t tell anymore.”
Liz stabbed the brake, sending Bart lurching forwards. “Next time you say something like that, I’ll bury your teeth in the dashboard.” Back to a slow crawl, she leaned forward to look up at the tall building, the moon running a silver highlight across the crumbling ruins.
Four police cars sat in front of the grim institution. They were all turned sideways, their spotlights angled at the building. While illuminating some parts of it, the shadows by comparison turned tangibly dark.
“I hope the others leave us alone tonight,” Liz said. “I could do without having to counsel centuries’ worth of tormented souls. The one we’re about to meet will be bad enough. What was his name?”
“Andy Stick.”
“Sounds like a character from a nineteen forties comic strip.”
Bart laughed.
The squeaky brakes wound Liz’s shoulders tight as she stopped the car. She and Bart got out and approached the nearest police officer.
A short and squat man in his mid to late forties, he had the appearance of someone who still considered himself a young buck despite his double chin, crow’s feet, and flecks of grey at his temples. Standing with a board-straight back and raised chest as if the world watched him, his top lip raised, hanging somewhere between a snarl and a sneer, he looked Liz up and down. A misogynist and a sceptic: the worst kind of combination. “I didn’t call you in, you know?”
“I know, calling me in is well above your pay grade. I’d imagine someone like you would have to put in a written request just to get a new pencil. Do you still put your hand up when you wanna pee-pee?”
The officer’s face flushed red and Bart giggled. “You got a problem, boy?”
Liz stepped between Bart and the officer. For what good it did. With Bart being six feet and four inches tall and her only five feet two, the officer didn’t have to break eye contact with him.
At least a minute passed before the officer finally put a leash on his ego and fixed on Liz. “What are you, some kind of ghost whisperer?”
Liz drew a deep breath, dragging in the reek of autumn. Dead leaves, wet mud, rotten wood, and something else. The metallic tang of blood? Or maybe just the memories of it. Hard to tell which timeline her senses were tuning in to. Now she’d made him wait, she returned her attention to the policeman. “You seem to have a lot of questions, Officer …” She looked down at the badge on his breast and smirked.
If he’d been red before, Officer Cock turned several shades deeper. “Yeah, whatever. Laugh it up, why don’t you?”
Bart peered over Liz and laughed too.
Liz didn’t think he could stand any straighte
r until he did. An even more erect Officer Cock drew in a sharp sniff. “How old are you both? Twelve?”
“Look,” Liz said. “As much as I want to help you work out whatever issues you have going on”—she looked down at her wrist despite there being no watch there—“how much longer will this take? We’re being paid by the hour, and I’m sure your boss would love to be invoiced for a hefty amount because Cock wouldn’t let me in.”
“Because you’d been Cock blocked,” Bart said and they both giggled.
Where he looked like he might have said more, Cock tightened his jaw as if clamping onto his response. A second later, he stepped aside.
Despite the heat of open hostility burning into her as she passed, Liz didn’t give Cock the satisfaction of looking back.
Nearly every window along the front of the old institution had either been smashed or was covered in an impenetrably thick layer of dirt. Vines clung to the walls as if they kept the building upright. The gaping entrance must have once been barred by a large door, but not even the hinges remained. It left a yawning mouth, inviting them to enter the gullet of the beast. Liz bit down against the chill running through her, the night colder than it had been a few seconds previously. Small clouds of condensation spread from her nostrils.
Bart turned on a torch and handed it over before he flicked on another one for himself.
The crack and pop of breaking glass beneath her steps, Liz entered the building, trying to see more than her torch would allow as she ruffled her nose against the damp smell of rot. “Watch where you step. It sounds like there’s a basement beneath us, and these floorboards don’t smell too stable.”
Like with most abandoned buildings, the old asylum seemed to be holding its breath as if in preparation to show Liz everything it had to offer. The hairs lifted on the back of her neck and she blinked against the darkness. Spirits could be shy, but when they came, they often came in waves.
A few metres along the first corridor—their steps still issuing the same hollow thud from the space beneath them—Bart pointed his torch into a room on their left. Darker than many of the other rooms and filled with the rusty remains of bed frames—the skeletons of a long-abandoned ward—he said, “He’s in there.”
A shake of her head, Liz snorted a laugh. “I suppose he would be, eh?” After a deep breath, the dust motes in the air dancing in the torch’s beam and turning her throat dry, she said, “There’s no point in putting it off. Come on then.”
There were many windows in the room, all of them covered in sheets save one. A bar of moonlight shone through the dirty glass. It revealed the corpse and the extent of his fatal injuries. Liz’s stomach turned. “I’ve never seen someone who’s been cannibalised before.” Her mouth dried and the slightest tug of her gag reflex lifted in her throat. A large hole in his stomach, the edges of it had small arches made by human teeth. “He’s covered in other people’s DNA, but they can’t find a match on their system for any of it.”
If Liz looked at him for much longer, she’d vomit. It always helped to understand how the victim had died, but she’d not come here for that. The spirit of the man stood beside his inanimate physical form, staring down at what he’d once been.
“Um,” Liz said and the man looked up at her, his eyes widening. “Andy, is it?”
Andy fixed on her. It had taken some time for her to get used to them never blinking. But why would they? Dead eyes never dried.
“I’m Liz, and this is Bart.” The boy waved. “We’re paranormal investigators and we’ve come to speak to you. Firstly, I’m sure you’ve worked it out by now, but you’re dead.”
Although Andy’s eyes couldn’t glaze, a deep sadness swelled within them as if they had. He frowned.
“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “But we want to help you.”
Andy scowled.
Liz pressed her palms together, imploring him. “Please let me explain.”
But Andy wasn’t listening to her anymore. Staring through her, his mouth fell open, he shook his head, and his legs buckled at the knees, throwing him to the floor.
“Andy, please,” Liz said and stepped forwards.
“Um, Liz,” Bart said.
“Not now.”
“I don’t think being dead is what’s upset him.”
“What are you talking about?”
When Bart pointed behind her, Liz turned. The curious spirit of a small girl stood just metres away. She couldn’t have been any older than ten. Words abandoned Liz as she looked into the girl’s cold and listless eyes. The girl stared straight back.
Twenty-Four Hours Earlier
Twenty-Four Hours Earlier
Andy used to have a rule that he didn’t drink coffee after midday. Disciplines that were once important seemed so trivial now. The smallest splash of milk turned the black liquid dark brown. The action of stirring it sent him into one of his many daydreams. So dark outside, the bright glare of the kitchen lights turned the window in front of him into a mirror. A fatter and more jaded man than he’d been three years previously stared back. The eyes he recognised; he connected with their sorrow every waking moment. The wrinkled and slightly chubby face that housed them could have belonged to anyone. It would have been easy to draw the blinds, to rid himself of the repulsive reminder of what he’d become. Instead, he sighed, sat at the breakfast bar, and toasted himself by lifting the steaming mug to his lips.
Since they’d renovated the kitchen, Andy spent most of his time in there. Like many of their friends, they were in their forties and deep into a mortgage they somehow paid as if in defiance of mathematical possibility. The extra work they’d done inside the house had given them debts that would probably outlive both of them, but at least they had black marble worktops, an Aga, and white tiled flooring. When they bothered to tidy, it looked like it belonged in the glossy brochures that had convinced them of the need to spend thirty grand in the first place.
Andy’s back tightened and his shoulders lifted to his neck at the sound of Chesky’s approaching footsteps. Not that she’d bring any expectation with her. She’d come in, get what she wanted, and leave again. No eye contact and no conversation. At least, that was how it normally played out. But there was a difference today. The heels of her flat shoes reported a purposeful click. When she entered the room, she opened and slammed shut several cupboards. When she’d gone through what felt like the entire kitchen, she hovered nearby.
The hard press of Chesky’s stare boring into the back of his head, Andy glanced at her in the window’s reflection as if his wife had become the Gorgon he now imagined her to be. Her wavy blonde hair an approximation of Medusa’s snakes. But she couldn’t turn this already granite man to stone. “Just say it. Whatever it is.”
The reflection in the window stepped back. She’d clearly come into the room intending to initiate the conversation. After all, experience had given her that expectation. It took a good twenty seconds before she finally spoke. “My patience has run out, Andy.”
It didn’t come as a surprise, yet her words still tied a knot in Andy’s guts and his breathing caught in his throat. Maybe the worst way to calm his stomach, he took a sip of his bitter and scalding coffee. It stung his mouth, and when he swallowed, the muscles in his neck tightened from the strong bitter taste.
His attention back on his mug, it took for the screech of the stool opposite him for Andy to look at his wife. No more than two feet of black marble separated them. They hadn’t been this close in a long time other than in passing. At first they’d opted for separate beds in the same room. Then separate rooms. Now they couldn’t even bear to look at one another. Had they been able to afford it, they would have probably gone as far as living in separate houses, pretending nothing was wrong while they did their best to ignore the other’s existence. Instead, they spent everything they had and more on a new fucking kitchen. Like that would fix everything. And whether it had taken three years or thirty, the inevitable moment had finally arrived.
Chesky shrugg
ed. “I’ve tried as hard as I can. I’ve done everything our marriage counsellor suggested.”
Where his image had stared back at him from the window, Andy now looked at his wife. A face he no longer loved housed eyes that could have been his own. The reminder that she hurt just as much. He dropped his attention to his coffee.
“I think I’m finally admitting defeat?”
Definitely a question. Should she admit defeat?
“It’s ruined us, Andy. I promised myself I’d give it a few years. I mean, we were bound to be fucked up from it. Who wouldn’t be?”
Another sip of the strong coffee.
“But I’ve given three years of my life waiting for you to open up. I’ve dealt with what happened on my own. I figured you needed to do the same. I’ve given you space, but you’re no further along than when it happened.”
There were words in his head. A whole host of words so loaded with poison and toxicity they’d corroded his insides. If Andy let the dam break now, he’d lose his sanity with the outpouring. The nonsensical babble would push everything in his life away from him. Further away than they already were. She was right; he’d held on to it all for the past three years. He hadn’t known where to start then, so how could he possibly know where to start now? Another deep gulp of his scalding drink.
“No matter what I try or say, nothing is moving us forward. We’ve stagnated for the longest time. Actually, you’ve stagnated for the longest time. I can’t wait around anymore. I’ve given you everything I can, and now I need to look after myself.”
The Girl in the Woods: A Ghost's Story (Off-Kilter Tales Book 1) Page 1
