The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (6 page)

A hand patted his shoulder. Popule’s. The man’s eyes shone crystal blue; the soot covering his face was streaked by sweat.

Popule fed a fresh cartridge into his revolver and spun the barrel shut. Ailen was glad of the backup as he stepped out of the shadows.

“You all right there, Thom?”

“They’re very sad, Mr Savage,” he replied. Ailen felt the familiar twinge of regret not to be recognized as anything more than the boy’s employee. But his own feelings were secondary to the boy’s safety.

“The real sisters are buried miles away, Thom. At peace, let’s hope. Our poltergeist here likes the way their monument looks and has bedded down there. Now I want you to tell your friend it has the choice to leave or we can exorcise it.”

Thom bit his bottom lip. “All right.” He turned back to the girls, who had crawled close, their opaque white eyes rolling.

As Thom spoke to them, Ailen felt the atmosphere still like the surface of a millpond. When the ghost girls started to fade, he felt a tinge of relief. Had Thom really talked the poltergeist into leaving?
Wonderful, kind, accident-prone Thom
.

A wall of flames rolled around them in seconds, firing off a heatwave. Both girls opened their mouths unnaturally wide and the screams of Lichfield’s martyred issued forth. Ailen steeled himself against the noise as Thom backed away.

The poltergeist had no intention of losing its new friend. The girls’ heads morphed into a mess of silvery, mouth-tipped tentacles while the bodies remained separate. It crawled towards Thom, a crablike Medusa.

“Get away, Thom.” Ailen stepped between the boy and the poltergeist, causing it to rear up on its back limbs, tentacles hissing. “Start chanting, Willy! Popule . . . keep the air full of salt!” he demanded, and put his lips to the reed of the dragon pipe.

Rock salt burst overhead like fireworks and Ailen began to play. The poltergeist tried to sink back into its marble tomb. It tugged at itself as if attempting to prise itself free from thick mud. Ailen quickened his tune and bit out at the spirit with the steaming jaw of the dragon pipe. The poltergeist arched away, a serpentine movement at odds with its crabbed lower limbs. Seconds later, it had scrabbled around to the opposite side of the chalk sigil marked out on the flagstones.

Wind blew in – red hot and scented with decay. Willy’s chanting grew weaker; Ailen suspected the man’s palms were freshly aflame. Blinking against the ash and snow whipped up by the vicious spirit alongside Popule’s salt sprays, he fought to put one foot in front of the other. Blood trickled from his ears, his nose. Ailen pressed on against the tremendous volume of suffering and the searing heat of the funeral pyre from many centuries before. One thought gave him strength – some ghosts stay to ease the agonies of those left behind while others stay to torment those who live on. Unlike Thom, the poltergeist belonged to the latter category and needed to be put back among the demons.

Ailen ran the last few steps, lungs baking against his ribs. He grasped the neck of his dragon pipe, burned the tips of his fingers on the glowing nodules and clamped the steaming jaw around one misty tentacle. The poltergeist writhed, but Ailen held fast this time. Hearing Willy’s voice harden, those ancient, occult words seeming to pepper the poltergeist’s surface like hot coals, Ailen moved to the sigil’s edge.

“I make you an offering. Pieces of death for peace inside this hallowed hall.” Retrieving the voodoo necklace from his belt, he tossed the offering into the chalked circle. Arching at the spine, he cast out with the dragon pipe and released the jaw.

The poltergeist streamed into the sigil, a bolt of silver ether. Writhing and whipping against its bonds, it found itself dragged down over the symbols, one tentacle at a time. As the last thread of it was engulfed, the screams of the martyred ceased. The wall of flame around the men brightened then went out.

A month passed before the large man came to call at The Deanery. Mrs Rook the housekeeper would later describe the pains she was put to, trying to place the gentleman. His suit was of cheap cloth but cut well enough, while a starched collar hugged his neck. But the face – a mask of steel with scars aplenty!

The man’s voice betrayed him. Nicholas recognized its deep tone from his place before the fire and on instinct gripped the blanket tucked over his legs. He forced himself to let go and call, “Mrs Rook! Show Mr Savage in. He and I have business.”

Nicholas heard the housekeeper falter, perhaps afraid of the name. But then she must have ushered in their visitor because the front door closed and heavy footsteps sounded across the hallway.

A man like Ailen Savage didn’t wait to be shown the way. He materialized in the doorway of the sitting room, blocking out what lay beyond.

“Canon Nicholas.”

“Mr Savage. Come in, do. Sit by the fire. Mrs Rook says the weather is unseasonably bitter.”

“I won’t stay long.” The man approached the hearth nonetheless and stood before it, arms crossed, his face looking more weathered in its light. “I didn’t call earlier as I was helping Naw get back on his feet. I see that you too have been nursed back to health,” he said after a few moments.

“Dean Richards has gone to the seaside to continue his recovery. Very kindly, he installed me in the house under the care of Mrs Rook until his return.”

Ailen’s lips curved. “Seems you and the Dean had use for those herbs I gave you after all.”

Nicholas shifted in his seat. “If you are asking if my mind has been opened up to the existence of the supernatural, and to magick worked outside the power of prayer, then the answer is yes, Mr Savage. And, yes, the spirits have left their mark on me.” He touched a finger to the fresh scar in one eyebrow, trying to control the tremors in his hand. When the man opposite him nodded gravely, Nicholas knew he understood that the true scar lay inside.

Keen to change the emphasis of their conversation, he asked, “How did you dispose of the remains of the spirits?” Nicholas’s mind had buckled in the aftershock of events. Glimpses of them came to him occasionally – the cathedral’s fixtures sparkling with salt as if in a new Ice Age . . . Naw collapsed at his feet . . . the air laced with the stench of burning.

Mr Savage kept up his unwavering stare. “We washed the sigils away with holy water. Helps to have an ex-man of the cloth in the form of Popule. He blessed a good few buckets’ worth and we baptised God’s house anew.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” Nicholas liked the sound of the cathedral being newly sanctified, even if at the hands of one of the mummers’ troupe. He retrieved the package tucked in beside him for safekeeping.

“The second half of your fee, Mr Savage. And thank you.”

Washed clean of rags and soot, the chief mummer looked even more intimidating. His large hand took the package and pocketed it.

“You aren’t wearing your costume. Has the mumming season ended?” asked the canon, unsure how to close the conversation.

The man dipped his great head. When he glanced up, tears glistened in his eyes.

“Anniversary of my son’s death. I like to clean myself up once a year, to pay my respects at his grave.”

“I am sincerely sorry to hear of his passing. May the Lord keep him.” Nicholas felt a twist of sorrow in his gut for this strange giant of a man.

“He ain’t ready for the Lord yet,” said Mr Savage. He shook back his shoulders, shrugging off the mantle of mourning.

Nicholas peered quizzically at his guest. But the mummer seemed all talked out. He walked away and filled the doorway once more.

“Goodbye, Canon Nicholas.”

“Goodbye, Mr Savage.”

Heavy footsteps crossed the hall. The canon heard the front door open and felt a blast of cold air across his exposed skin. Seconds later, the door slammed to.

Outside the evening air was sharp and pure. The cathedral loomed before the Spirit Catcher like a rock of ages. Sculptures burgeoned. Stained glass burned like jewels, lit by internal light. Lichfield slumbered all around.

“Come now, Thom. Let’s go and meet the others,” said Ailen to the ghost boy at his side.

“Yes, Mr Savage,” Thom replied.

Together, father and son stepped out into the night.

Sarah Pinborough

In the end, there was only one person Lee could call. It was, after all, the only number he knew by heart.

He gave it to the operator and waited for the connection to be made. The line crackled. He tapped his fingers on the worn surface of the phone booth wall and breathed into the handset as the line rang. It pealed out to the point where Lee was beginning to think it would just be his luck that today of all days there was no one home, when finally someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, sir, we have a Lee Moseby on the line. Will you accept the charges?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

The line cleared as the operator clicked off, taking the unpleasantly sharp crackling sounds with her.

“Dad?”

“Lee?”

Another pause. This time caused by his own awkwardness. It had been a long time.

“Look, this sounds stupid, but I’m at this phone box in the middle of—” he looked out at the hick town that crept into life on the other side of the dusty road “—nowhere, and I – well – I couldn’t think of who else to call.”

“Do you need me to come and pick you up?”

“Yes,” Lee said, surprised to find how relieved he felt. “Yes, please.”

“Stay by the phone, son,” his dad said, as if Lee were a teenager again. “I’ll be there before it gets dark.”

“Thanks. Look, I know—” A crackling dead tone that made his ears buzz cut him off suddenly, and he hung up. His dad clearly had at the other end.

It was a hot day and the booth was like a sauna. He pushed the door open, the squeal of its hinges loud in the quiet afternoon, and stood by the roadside. He guessed he’d been lucky the phone had worked at all. Despite the heat and the still air, he wasn’t thirsty. He should have been – it felt like he’d been walking all day – but his mouth was moist. He wondered about the time and glanced down at his wrist, but his ever-dependable Timex wasn’t there, just the tan line, built up nicely on the golf course, outlining its ghost.

No watch, no phone, and no wallet. Thank God for Dad. Thank God for the days of actually remembering numbers instead of storing them into BlackBerrys or iPhones or whatever the next big thing was. He looked back at that empty space on his wrist. He never took his watch off.

A short burst of wind gusted from across the street and he looked up. Although the sun was still relatively high in the desert sky, dark shadows were stretching out lazily between the tired, abandoned buildings whose glass eyes glinted at him. He hadn’t seen a town sign on his walk in, and he wondered if maybe it had been blown away in a sand storm. A lot of the road had been hidden by dust blasted across it and there had been no tyre tracks at all that he could recall.

The dead buildings were still in relatively good condition. Had this place been a salt mining outpost? It might not be the largest of towns but even from where he was, on the other side of the wide road, he could make out streets that went quite far back, and he was sure that one of those signs read “Diner”, although his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. It was a garish shopfront, at any rate, with what looked like a Betty Boop-style cartoon woman running down one side. Even under the thick layer of filth her red dress was visible.

His eyes ran over the outlines of each store and house. There was a lot of dirt. The sidewalks were lost. Most of the buildings were a uniform brown as if they really had grown out of the desert earth rather than been built, in different-coloured wooden façades, by the hand of man. The winds must blow strong through here to get that much grime embedded. Either that or the town had been empty for so long that the sand had simply claimed it, inch by inch.

The sun beat on the back of his neck as he squinted. He’d burn if he wasn’t careful. He was probably burned already. Some of those shadows across the way were really quite dark. It might be cooler over there, he decided. He’d still be able to see the road and he wouldn’t burn. He glanced up. The sun had moved another few inches across its playground of the sky. How long had he been looking at the ghost town? No more than ten minutes, surely? He glanced down at the space on his wrist with mild irritation. He never took his watch off. It bothered him that he wasn’t wearing it.

A breeze gusted sand across his shoes and he took the first step on to the road. Something scurried in the shadows on the other side. He paused, suddenly tense. What had that been? A piece of garbage, perhaps? Probably a rodent of some kind. He looked again at the buildings that stared back at him from within their strange shadows. Out here, so far from any big city, who knew what the town was now home to? Rats and probably worse. He didn’t know much about the desert. What lived out here anyway?

He took a step backwards and was sure he heard the wind moan in disappointment as it slashed its way through the streets opposite. At least he hoped it was the wind. He almost laughed. He wasn’t a child to be scared by dark shadows and the things that might live in them, but for a moment it had seemed as if those dark patches had stretched out suddenly towards him, as if they could grab him back. It was ridiculous, he chided himself. Simply a trick of the eyes.