Paranormal Investigations: No Situation Too Strange (2 page)

"Oh f..." I muttered.

"Breakfast" he said holding up the frying pan.  Some kind of eggs had been made into an omelette.  My basil and chilli plants had been left untouched but my peace lily looked as if it had gone ten rounds with an untamed kitten.  Bits of the peace lily were now infused into the egg mixture.

My stomach felt like a swirling pit of cream curdled in cheap alcohol.  Ah yes, that would be right. 

Memories of the previous night began to dribble back into my brain.  If the subject of those memories had not been standing in my kitchen, wearing my apron and holding my frying pan aloft, I would have thought last night to have been a rather odd dream.

My bloody father.  It was his fault.  He'd found me another of his projects.  Except this one was a man with goat hooves, horns popping out between tufts of his wavy brown hair and who seemed to think peace lilies were one of your five a day.

"Do you want breakfast?" the goat man asked.

I shook my head as I didn’t trust my mouth to open until there was something flushable beneath it.  I ran to the bathroom to evacuate the alcoholic poison from my guts.  Stomach empty, I peeled off my clothes and climbed gingerly into the shower.  The steam and hot water began to wake me up.

Wrapped in a large towel, I went to the bedroom only to find the goat man had found somewhere to sleep last night after all - my bed.  My lovely bed looked like a dog had slept in it, the sheets were trodden into an oval and littered with hair.  The room even smelt like a stable.  With an angry groan I pulled off the sheets, threw them onto the floor and bundled them up.  When dressed, I took the bed linen through to the living room slash kitchen to see the man sitting on my sofa, hooves up on my coffee table and eating a peace lily omelette.  The television remote was in his hand and he was flicking through the channels before settling on Jeremy Kyle.

"This is too much," I said, throwing the linen down by the washing machine and reaching for my car keys.  “I’m going out.”

"Whilst you're out," the goat man said without turning his head from Jeremy Kyle and the toothless man he was interrogating, "could you buy salt? I notice you don't have any."

"It's not healthy!" I muttered angrily before storming out and slamming the door behind me. 

I wanted to give my father a piece of my mind.  Unfortunately, my father did not possess a mobile phone so I couldn't call him and shout at him.  I didn't even know where he lived - he turned up in my life when he felt like it.  Damn him!

I drove like a typical Londoner the short distance to Cockfosters, I wouldn't let anyone in and I sat right behind the other traffic.  I was in a foul mood and needed space.  Since my personal space, ie my flat, had been invaded my only other option was my office.

My mood didn’t improve when I found myself stuck in traffic alongside a bus.  It wasn't the bus that was the problem, it was what was on it.  A large poster was pasted across the side - a new film release, the second movie in an action trilogy.  On the poster was a man in a white shirt, ripped to show his gleaming and muscular chest, holding a gun as if shooting at some bad guys attacking the bus.  A size zero blonde was curled up against his side, pouting out at all of London, her figure airbrushed into Barbie perfection.  I hated her instantly and felt a jealousy that was irrational and no longer mine to feel. 

It's a bit weird seeing your ex-boyfriend go past on the side of a red double-decker bus.  He didn't need airbrushing to look good, although it looked like they'd had a go anyway.

Jeremy Flynt, my erstwhile boyfriend and now Hollywood star.  Jeremy Flynt.  Jez to me.  Jiz to his friends when drunk.  You could say Jez was the one person in my drama school cohort who really made it, although Sabrine did quite well with that recurring role as a druggie on
Casualty
.  It really wasn't fair that you couldn't get over an ex because his face, gorgeous as it was, happened to be plastered everywhere.  I hadn't dared watch the first film for the feelings it might dredge up, although there had been a period of one fortnight where it seemed like Film 4 was conspiring to make me watch it by showing it repeatedly in different time slots.

I parked in the empty car park behind my office building, slammed the door and marched off.  Then I realised I hadn't locked it and marched back to do so, although it was doubtful anyone would want to steal a rusty, faded red Astra. 

The Paranormal Investigations office building, on a busy road leading up to the M25, was a typical seventies office gulag.  Although built on a curve it was no Royal Crescent. 

Inside the building, the lifts had long ceased to work so I had to head to the stairwell in order to climb to the seventh floor.   In the ground floor reception area, a familiar figure was working his way across the floor.

"Alright Reggie?" I asked of the man operating the floor polisher.  He ignored me.  As usual.  I never got one single word out of him and I'd never seen him do anything other than hoover and polish the floors.  I tell you - we have the shiniest surfaces this side of the Strictly Come Dancing set.

Our offices were off the main corridor on the seventh floor.  The lock on the door had been broken as long as I’d worked there, but no one came into the building anyway.  The door was one of those with a half glass panel, on which ‘Paranormal Investigations’ was daubed in gold paint.  Great Aunt Mildred had done it herself and it showed – the long letters had drips clinging to them that had long since hardened. 

I sighed as my hand rested on the doorknob, this was not my life.  Every time I crossed the threshold I got a sense of unease, as if my life had gone off track and was now veering out of control and I was not sure how to reclaim it.

As I entered the offices Rose's head peered out from behind a large pot plant, a pair of pruning shears in her hand.  With the other hand she picked up her glasses which dangled on a cord around her neck and pushed her glasses back on her nose.  She stared at me.

I once asked Rose why she worked for Paranormal Investigations (she had been another inheritance from Great Aunt Mildred). 

“Well it was this or down the Oxfam,” she had told me. 

"Any messages?" I asked, as I sorted through the post which sat in a tray on her desk.  Mostly bills and circulars by the looks of it.

Rose’s office was the main reception, through which I had to pass to get to my office.  You might almost mistake the reception for a garden centre as Rose had different varieties of plants in pots all over the place.  I suspected some were plastic, but I had no proof.

"No.  We're out of biscuits,” she said, “I need to go and buy some.  I've been waiting for you to come in so the phones wouldn't be unmanned."

"Yes," I replied, "it wouldn't do to turn on the answer machine.  It couldn't handle the weight of calls we get."

Sarcasm was wasted on Rose.

"I'll go get the biscuits then," she said as she picked up her coat and slid it on to her skinny frame, "any requests?"

"Bohemian Rhapsody?"

She blinked blankly.  "Custard creams it is.  I'll need some money."

I reached into my pocket for my purse and opened the coin section.  Rose stared at me until I closed that and opened the note section.  She was happy with a fiver.  I suppose it was the least I could do - keep her in biscuits.  It's not like I paid her a wage or anything and I didn't want to lose her to the Oxfam.  Who else would I find who could turn my offices into a garden centre and deal with such a hefty weight of calls and filing?

In my office I got out a blank notebook and tried to record what the goat man had told me.  I wrote everything I could think of in swirls across the page.  The more I wrote the more I feared for my sanity.  Seriously - the guy had hooves and horns?  Fairies are real?  I tried to eliminate the impossible - for, in the words of the great Sherlock Holmes, whatever remained - however improbable - must be the truth.  The problem was - fairies
were
impossible.  I knew they were impossible.  Weird things like that just couldn't exist.  However, despite that, there was a goat man staying in my flat and eating my peace lily.  And no matter what - he had asked for my help.

*

Brain buzzing with questions, I abandoned the offices and drove back to my flat as soon as Rose returned with her custard creams.  I had barely been gone forty minutes but that had been long enough for me to think clearly.  I had to treat this man like any other client and deal with his case as I would any other.  If he couldn't pay me, I'd sting my dad for it as it was his fault I'd gotten involved.

A strange sight met me as I re-entered my flat.  The goat man had discovered the Wii fit and was engaged in an on-the-spot jog.  The Wii remote was tucked into his baggy black trousers and his hooves were wearing a bald spot into my carpet.

"Did you get the salt?" he asked mid-jog.

"Okay mister," I said, "sit down and listen."

He turned around and blinked.  "Are you going to help me?"

"I'm going to take your case and treat it like any other."

He smiled and as he did so I realised he looked like a child, very young and innocent.

"Okay, sit down and let's start again at the beginning - and no - I don't mean with your birth."

I slung my jacket on the back of the sofa and emptied my pockets, purse, keys and phone, onto the coffee table before sitting down.  I reached for a pad of paper and a pen.

"Right - describe the people who you think have arranged for the hit on you."

"Well, they're not really people."

"For the sake of my sanity we're going to call them people - okay?"  I pressed a curling corner of a sheet of paper flat with my thumb.

"Very well... they're sometimes known as the little people - it's hard to tell what they really look like as they are given to enchantments and trickery.  They can move through the air on wings, they look like dragonfly wings - but bigger.  And they shimmer.  Most people only notice them as a blur of light, they never see the true fairy and they are so rare these days many don't even see that.  Sometimes they look like human beings, but only if they want to be seen that way.  Many of them choose this form to blend in."

"These fairies are rare?"

"You might call them an endangered species."

"Why?"

"They started dying out in the iron age." he said with a shrug as if it was a fact everyone knew.

"Why?"

He looked at me like I was an idiot.  "Because of the iron, of course.  They are allergic to iron."

I scribbled on my pad 'iron allergy'.  "Okay, go on."

"The fairy who got me involved was called Orla.  She did me a favour when I was younger, but of course it wasn't a favour and I was too young to know better.  Fairies lure people in with favours and then they are the slaves of the Fae for life - there is no way out.  The favour I owed her got sold on and being around fairies you get tricked into more things, before I knew it I owed debts to many of the Fae.  Then they started calling them in."

"What can you tell me about this Orla?"

He scrunched up his nose.  "She’s a fairy and her name is Orla.  And she's mean.  Really mean."

I sighed.  "How will they find you?  Are you safe here?"

He shrugged and glanced nervously at the window.  "I really do wish you'd bought that salt," he said, "I'd feel a lot safer."

"They don't like salt?"

"No, if you spill it or throw it at them they have to sit and count every grain - it's the only way to slow an attack.  They really do have very vicious teeth you know.  And it makes a good magical threshold – it’s very hard to cross uninvited."

I repressed a shiver.  "Okay, I'll get some salt.  Is there any way we can tell if they are coming?"

He shook his head.  "They might have called in a favour, it could be anyone." He gave a little shiver and then a sob.  He pulled his green kerchief off his neck and blew into it loudly, "I don't want to die!" he said plaintively, "I'm only young!"

Awkwardly I patted his hand.  "There, there."

"I need a protector, a bodyguard.  Will you find one for me?"

"A bodyguard?"

"There's only one type of creature that would never get involved with the Fae, they hate them.  Trolls.  I need a troll."

Oh of course he did.  A troll.  I had to find him a troll. 

Just then my phone rang on the coffee table.  The goat man reached it before me and answered it before I could whip it out of his hand.

"Hello?" he bleated, nodded and then held it out to me, "it's for you."

Frowning, I ripped it out of his hand and held it to my ear.  "Hello," I said tersely, "Paranormal Investigations, Leo speaking, how can I help you?"

"Leo?" said a voice like chocolate and I melted whilst simultaneously feeling as if I had been punched in the stomach.

"Oh, hello Jez," I said quietly.

CHAPTER TWO

Troll Hunter

There was a pause at the end of the line.

"Who was that?" Jez asked.

"Oh... er, Bob." I said, deliberately not looking at my uninvited house guest.