Thirteen Days of Midnight (7 page)

“Very nice dog. Anyway, son, we had a look around, and there’s nobody here. Your mum’s asleep, seems like. Perhaps these blokes left when they heard us come in.”

There’s something in his tone that makes me think he doesn’t believe there was anyone in the house and is on the verge of delivering a lecture about false emergency calls, but I think he can also see I’m genuinely upset about something.

“Must have,” I agree.

“Anyway,” says the policeman, “I know it must have been a scare, two strangers in your house. You said they were friends of you dad?”

“They said they were,” I say. “They were a bit . . . odd.”

“Well, you give me their descriptions and we’ll keep an eye out for them. And make sure to call if they come round again. Have they threatened you at all?”

“No,” I say. “They’re just really weird.”

I give the policeman a fairly accurate description of the Judge and the Vassal, which to his credit he records without raising an eyebrow, and then he closes his notebook and tells me to stay safe and leaves me alone with the dead.

“Bit of a rat, ain’t you?” says the Judge. “Getting all talkative with the coppers.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be my servant?”

“Speak me mind,” he says and shrugs. One of the policemen shuts the door with a bang. Their car growls in the driveway. The ghosts look at me expectantly. I put my hands over my eyes for a few moments, but when I take them away, the ghosts are still there. The trees outside nod in the wind.

“I’ve got a lot of questions,” I tell them after a moment. “Seems like I’ll be missing school again today.”

“Understandable,” says the Vassal.

“Could . . . could one of you make me a cup of tea?”

Unfortunately, my burning question — what it’s actually like to die — goes unanswered by the ghosts. They don’t remember the actual dying bit, and apparently once you’re dead, it’s difficult to even realize what’s happened to you. Some ghosts never work it out. Not all dead people, as the Vassal explains, are equally cognizant. Souls are as varied in death as they were in life.

“The Judge and I,” he tells me, “have retained the majority of the soul, our animus. We still have a strong sense of time, self, and place. We know that we exist only in spirit. Not all of our colleagues were so lucky.”

“You said there were how many in the Host?”

“Eight. A full Host of eight.”

“So do they all have names like you? Are they all ‘the Something’? Do you have real names?”

“Lost my proper name when I died,” the Judge tells me. “Can’t remember it.”

“As I say, I am not an expert,” the Vassal says. “From what I understand of the process, when a spirit is bound, it must be titled, given a bond name, so that the commands that are given to it cannot be resisted. There are certain positions within a Host that must always be filled. I and the Judge fill two of those roles.”

“So there’s always a Vassal and a Judge? Why?”

“The purpose behind our titles is explicated in the Book.”

“The book?”

“The Book of Eight. An infernal tome. The Book contains the rituals of binding, and much else besides.”

I keep my expression calm. I have a good idea what might be inside the little green book Dad left me.

“What are the others like?” I ask. “Why aren’t they here?”

“They’re shirkers,” says the Judge. He’s making my tea, leaning against the counter, waiting for our kettle to boil. I get a sudden rush in my head when I look at the steam condensing on the window near the kettle. The kettle really is on; it’s really boiling. If this is a hallucination, it’s a very good one.

“I mean, they’re around and all that,” the Judge continues. “They’re in L.A., most of ’em.”

“Los Angeles? Why?”

“Discussions was being held with your dad.”

“A motion picture,” says the Vassal.

“Really? I thought he died in England.”

“Foreign soil, I’m afraid,” says the Vassal, bowing his head.

The kettle boils, and the Judge picks it up and pours the water into my mug. If I look out of the corner of my eye, I can see the kettle floating in midair. When I look straight at him, the Judge comes slowly into focus, blurry at first before adjusting into a bright, sharp figure.

“So you were all in Los Angeles, and Dad died. Have the others just stayed there? Are they going to come back?”

“If you call them,” says the Vassal, “they must come. All of them.”

“How long would that take?”

“Call them right now? A day, maybe,” says the Judge.

“But . . . you’re ghosts. How can it take you time to go anywhere?”

“I didn’t realize you was now an expert on being dead, boss. How does it take us time to go anywhere? Same as it takes you bloody time.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I say.

“We enjoy certain advantages due to our incorporeal state,” says the Vassal. “We can travel as the crow flies, so to speak. There are limits on where and when we may voyage, but they are not the same as those that limit the living. Walls and flames, mountains and oceans: such things pose no boundary. We are restricted by the movements of the stars, the music of the spheres. When the planets are in the wrong configuration, there is very little we can do.”

“So you can’t just go back to say, America, right now?”

“There is only one who can be in all places at all times, and we are not he.”

“Like God?” I ask. “Are you saying there’s a God?”

“That all right for you, boss?” asks the Judge, thumping the tea down at my right elbow.

“I know that there is,” says the Vassal, “although this heathen may tell you otherwise.”

“It don’t seem very likely,” says the Judge. “I been dead near thirty years now, and I ain’t got one sniff of a pearly gate.”

“And by whose judgment is that counted as evidence?” asks the Vassal. “You have not been to the other side, colleague. None of us has.”

“The Shepherd’s been,” says the Judge. “Went to the other place and came back, too. Told me about it.”

The Vassal stares at the ceiling.

“The Shepherd?” I ask.

“Another of the Host,” replies the Vassal finally.

“We ain’t speaking ill of the dead,” says the Judge.

My head is starting to hurt.

“Listen,” I say, “can you all, like, take another order or whatever?”

“Of course,” says the Vassal.

“Take a day off. I’m sure normal service, whatever that was, will resume . . . soon. I would think. But for now, you can all take the day off. Look around the town, or something.”

“Our gratitude is boundless,” the Vassal says.

The Judge gives me a crooked grin, then nods.

“You want supper made?” he asks.

“I’ll get a pizza. Just, like . . . enjoy yourselves, I suppose?”

For the first time the ghosts are genuinely smiling. They bow to me and then walk out through the wall and into the garden. The Vassal keeps walking, toward the town center. The Judge lingers, as if deciding what to do. When he sees that I’m still watching, he grins before vanishing, like someone switched him off.

I take a deep breath and walk upstairs with my cup of tea. Ham is in my room, wrapped up in my duvet. He grunts anxiously.

“It’s all right, boy,” I say. “They’ve gone.”

I sit and rub his head, running my fingers through his tangled fur. I don’t know what to think. When the dead were here, in my kitchen, it was easier. I couldn’t doubt myself, because it was happening to me. Now that they’ve gone, the doubts come flooding in. This is just stupid. There is no such thing as ghosts, because — well, there just isn’t, no matter what the ghosts themselves might tell you.

But this has been too orderly for a hallucination. I think when you go insane, it tends to be things like hearing voices from the TV telling you to assassinate the president. I don’t know how convincingly my mind could create different people, but the ghosts seemed unique and distinctive, and they were lucid, making a twisted kind of sense. Neither of them was anything like people I’ve met before. The Vassal doesn’t seem like someone from this century, even. He’s dressed like someone who really is from the past, rather than an actor playing someone from the past.

Assuming this is real, I don’t know what to make of Dad anymore. He had ghosts bound into his service? It makes sense, I suppose, of the time I saw him talking to himself: There was someone else there, someone I couldn’t see. What kind of person gets himself into this? Why? Were all the ghosts on his TV show real? Does this tie in with his surprisingly large fortune? All this time, I realize I’ve been wondering why he left, why it was so sudden, what happened between him and Mum. Now I’m starting to wonder if there wasn’t something else, something neither of us had any idea about, pulling him away.

I open the door to Mum’s room and shuffle in, bowl of soup in hand. Her room is dark: moss-colored carpet, wooden tribal masks glowering from each wall. She’s lying in bed, hand over her face, duvet rising and falling. I put the bowl on her bedside table.

“Mum?”

“Yes, love.”

“How are you today?”

“I’ll be fine . . .” She waves one hand at the soup. “Is this for me?”

“No. I just felt like carrying it up here. It’s for the dog.”

Mum doesn’t even attempt to laugh. I wondered if she’d ask why I wasn’t at school, but I don’t think she even knows what time it is.

“That’s very kind of you,” she says. She hasn’t sat up, and I know that she wants me to go away, but I have to ask something first.

“Mum, does Dad believe in ghosts?”

“Love, please speak quietly.”

“Sorry . . . but, Dad’s show was . . . I mean, is, about ghosts. He’s a ghost expert. Does he actually believe in them?”

“Your father is very spiritual. He read my aura when we first met.”

“Did he ever talk to you about ghosts?”

“Sometimes. He said they were like . . . light, is what he said. Energy. The ones that stay around on earth, they’re lost. He helped them.”

Or kept them captive. Somehow I’m thinking he didn’t mention that part to Mum.

“Did you ever see any in our house?” I ask. “A skinhead? A guy with a blotchy face?”

I watch her face when I mention the Vassal and the Judge, but there’s no flash of recognition, no surprise. She just frowns.

“It’s not really about seeing them,” Mum says. “It’s more about believing, being open to experiences? Being attuned to the energy of the other world. I never
saw
anything, exactly, love. I never needed to. Why are you asking now?”

“I had a look at his TV show. I wondered if you believed in it or not.”

“I think it’s good to keep an open mind,” Mum says. “Your father is very much in tune with the universe. He sees further than some people. Scientists think they’ve got all the answers. But they don’t.”

A few hours ago I would have strongly disagreed with this, but now I just nod.

“You should call him if you’re really interested,” she’s saying.

“What?”

“Call him. I know he’d like to hear from you.”

“Maybe.”

“I know you’re . . . angry. But he’s not as bad a man as you think.”

“All right, sure.”

“Now I’m really very tired, love,” she says.

“Try and eat something,” I say, and leave her room. I don’t know what to make of that conversation. Mum believing in ghosts isn’t a surprise; she believes in anything you can find written up in a spirituality paperback. She doesn’t seem to have ever seen one, let alone had a conversation with one, so it seems like Dad was keeping her in the dark about a lot of stuff.

I decide to take Ham for a walk across the fields behind our house. The hedges shiver in the wind. Ham trots around, sniffing the damp earth. Other than seagulls squabbling above a newly sloughed field, we don’t see anyone, alive or dead.

I spend the afternoon alone. My secrets are multiplying. The world as I understood it to exist last night is no longer relevant. There is an afterlife. I don’t have to take it on faith: I know. Mark texts me, reminding me about practice. I ignore it. I’m going to work even harder on pretending to be normal, but I don’t know how right now. I watch TV, play with Ham. Mum stays in bed. The Judge and the Vassal don’t come back, and I make my own supper.

In the evening I’m doing my homework and hear someone screaming.

As I push the bedroom door open, meat skewer in hand, it occurs to me that this has something to do with the ghosts and there’s probably nothing I can hit with a weapon anyway.

The screams are louder now. They’re definitely male, so they’re not coming from Mum. The screamer gasps, shouts indistinguishable words, screams some more. Standing in the corridor outside my room, looking at the landing, I see something strange. There’s a source of very bright light at the bottom of the stairs. Deep yellows and oranges pouring up from the hallway, casting huge flickering shadows around the darkened landing.

“Hello?”

I’m answered by more shrieks. I’m poised to take the stairs two at a time, then stop.

Standing in my hallway is a blackened human skeleton cloaked in flame. Scraps of flesh and hair are still clinging to the bones. There are stringy globs of fat dripping down the skeleton’s ribs and legs, pooling on the floor. The skeleton turns and looks at me, raising its arms up into the air. The blackened jaw falls open and fire streams around the thing’s head.

“Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum!”

“Who are you?”

“Adveniat regnum tuum!”
shouts the thing. The jaw swings open and shut dramatically as it shouts, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The thing is grotesque but not exactly frightening. There’s something dismayed-looking about its posture, like it’s as confused as I am.

“Are you always on fire?” I ask.

The skeleton bellows with pain, the noise reverberates throughout the house. Ham starts to bark in the kitchen.

“Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra! Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris!”
the ghost shouts, jaw flapping madly.

“I’m six feet away from you. I can hear you fine.”

“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo!”