The Shadows Call Read online

  There was also a dull throb at the base of my skull, but it was nothing compared to the burning sensation in my hand. I peeled open my fingers allowing the screwdriver to drop with a dull thud on the new carpet. My abraded palm had mostly healed from when I stupidly grabbed at the falling dumbwaiter rope, but my new exertions had reopened the graze, raised blisters, and the salt in my own sweat had invaded the wounds. Plasma oozed from the ruptured blisters. I shook my hand, ran it down my T-shirt to dry it and only then blinked in confusion.

  ‘What the bloody hell?’

  I’d been busy.

  The kids’ bunk beds stood against the wall, fully erected but for the mattresses yet to be placed in the frame. Flattened cardboard boxes and white polystyrene packaging was strewn around me. My toolbox was open, some random tools spread around it. I checked the time on my watch. I’d been very industrious in the – what? – two hours or so that I’d lost. Squinting in confusion, I checked my watch a second time. Two bloody hours!

  The beds were proof that I’d been hard at work, and yet I’d no recollection of building them. Hell, I must have completed the job lost in the murk of a fugue. My last waking memory was of rearing back from those snapping teeth, falling…bitter laughter.

  This wasn’t right. Worrying.

  All I needed on top of everything else was a bloody concussion. With some trepidation I touched the sore spot at the back of my skull, and winced at the size of the egg I found. As loath as I was to discover further injury, I gently pressed my skull around the bump, terrified that something would move. The distance I’d fallen, smacking my head against the bathroom door, I was lucky I didn’t smash my skull open, or break my neck. It was little wonder that I’d come round in a daze, and somehow found my way to the children’s room, applying myself to the task of erecting their beds.

  Earlier I’d lied to Daniel when promising to go to the doctor, but now I thought that I had a genuine reason to do so. For all I knew my skull was fractured, the bones pressing on my brain, suppressing my memory. Maybe I was bleeding inside. Jesus, I could be dying. A flurry of panic washed through me and I clutched at the bedframe for balance. To add to my concern, pain sang a lament from my damaged knee. I stood there breathing heavily, feeling sorry for myself.

  When I didn’t collapse it was a relief. It took a few more calming breaths before I was ready to test my legs for stability. I was OK, but for the fog when I tried to recall anything after my fall. Bending, I retrieved the screwdriver. Checking it over, I could dredge faint recollections of using it to fix the screws that held the spars on the uppermost bunk. I worked backwards from there, could vaguely recall splitting the cardboard packaging and disgorging the dozens of pieces of wood on the bedroom floor. Before that, there was nothing. But maybe it would come back. I was relieved that the motions I’d gone through were there somewhere, and would need a little teasing to bring to the fore, but at least I hadn’t been totally brain dead for the past two hours.

  A selfish, lazy part of me was smugly pleased that the beds had been erected. It wasn’t a task I was looking forward to, and I was happy that the mundane job was behind me. However the manner in which the task was completed remained troubling. Again I worried that I’d caused myself some serious injury. I touched my head again, hissing between my teeth. It wasn’t as sore as I told myself it was. Puffing out my cheeks, I laid the screwdriver down, and turned for the door, intending finding some painkillers. That was when I saw the walls.

  ‘Oh, fuck!’

  It was undeniable this time. The words written on the wall weren’t old graffiti, neither were they given a fresh look through the edge of a carpet scraping the loose plaster from their edges. These words were scoured a half inch deep into the wall, huge ragged letters a foot and more tall. Three words. Repeated time and again.

  I WANT YOU

  ‘Jesus, what the hell’s going on in this bloody place?’

  I was afraid to approach, but my feet had other ideas. I stumbled to the wall, goggling at the lettering gouged into the plaster. Fresh dust was on the carpet. I had an clue when this had happened, but not how. It was an illogical terror that held my fingers from the wall. If I touched the lettering would those crimson teeth again snap at them from the very fabric of the wall? Yes, my fear was idiotic, but it was there and I couldn’t shake it. I stepped back. In my mind there was only one person who could be responsible for the vandalism.

  Turning fast, I hollered through the door, into the hallway, down the stairs to the landing where last she’d laughed at me.

  ‘Naomi! Why the fuck are doing this to me?’

  When I’d begged her to give me a sign, when I was at breaking point and my grief was at it rawest, when I was destroying my marriage to Catriona, my ex girlfriend had kept her silence. Now she was being most vocal. Why now? What had caused her to come out of the shadows to haunt me like this?

  ‘Why, Naomi? Are you trying to punish me for some reason?’

  As ever when I demanded a reply, I got none.

  Exasperated, I grabbed the screwdriver, then in a fit of anger, I ran at the wall and jabbed the tip into the plasterwork. I began ripping and tearing with it, attempting to obliterate those infuriating words. I cut and slashed, wedged the tip under a loose portion of plaster and yanked it off the laths beneath. I dug in again, and something stayed my rage. The tip of the screwdriver fit neatly into the groove of a letter “I”.

  ‘Uh,’ I said, or something equally less than eloquent.

  The tip of the screwdriver was an exact fit, and when I placed it into other grooves it fit there too. I looked at the screwdriver, back at the wall, then at my trembling hands.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Dropping the screwdriver, I stepped away. I didn’t take my eyes off my hands. They were shaking. So were my insides.

  Naomi wasn’t the one responsible for scraping that phrase into the wall. How could she? That left only one other, and I was horrified at the realisation.

  What was worse: My dead girlfriend haunting me, turning her wicked poltergeist hands to leaving crazy messages on the bedroom wall, or that I, dazed after the fall, had scraped the words into the plaster, my hands guided by some impulse to torture me? In that moment I couldn’t really say. Both scenarios were equally as insane, and horrific. Marginally, cutting out those letters myself was preferential to the knowledge that my ex was back and she had brought a sense of misguided vengeance along with her. My excuse was that I was stunned from the fall, confused, disoriented. Maybe I’d picked up the screwdriver, read those other words previously scraped into the wall and simply copied them. Hell, it was obvious I’d no clue what I was doing. How could I be expected to act rationally in such a situation?

  I fled the room.

  But in the tiny hallway I paused. There was one act I remembered doing earlier.

  Entering my bedroom I stood in front of the wardrobe doors.

  ‘If that wasn’t you who wrote on the walls, Naomi, then it stands to reason you didn’t leave your voice for me to hear either.’ My words were a challenge of sorts, reverse psychology you might say. I opened the wardrobe and recovered the digital recorder I’d set running earlier. I fully expected it to have run its course, and it had. The batteries had died. I took the recorder with me and went downstairs where I searched for fresh batteries. I found some in the miscellany that I’d dumped in one of the kitchen drawers days earlier and fed them into the device. The read-out on the front indicated various time stamped files – those Sarah had recorded yesterday, plus the latest one I’d initiated. I ignored the first ones and brought up the file on mine. I clicked “play” as I went and sat in the parlour.

  For a few seconds all I heard was the soft hiss of white noise, then my voice, strangely distorted from the voice I recognised in my own head said ‘If you have a message for me, then speak into the device. Tell me who you are and what you want.’ Clunks and clicks followed as I closed the doors. A faint rattle I recognised as the door knocker, then the sounds of
my feet going downstairs to greet the deliverymen.

  There followed conversation too muffled to understand, me talking to the men. There then came the occasional indistinct click but that was probably nothing, just ambient noises made by us moving about on the lower floors, and then came more solid thuds and bumps as the beds and the boxed bunks were carted upstairs. The deliverymen talked to each other, but it was inane crap, nothing of value. But then there was a good half-minute of white noise.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice was faint, but I knew it was that of the younger deliveryman. ‘Hello? Missus? Anybody there?’

  The questions coincided with the boss’ story of having thought he’d seen an injured woman and searching for her through the house. He must have come again to the top floor because this time his voice was louder, and it had an uneasy tone to it. ‘Hello, missus? Do you need help? Should I fetch your husband? Uh…’

  Another voice joined his. The old guy’s. ‘There’s naebody here, Mike. I don’t understand it, man.’

  ‘Nah…neither do I.’

  There was one last attempt. Judging by the rise in volume, the young man had stuck his head in the bedroom itself. ‘Halloo? Nah, nobody there either. I don’t get it, Ronnie. I’m bloody sure I saw a woman.’

  ‘Wishful thinking, eh?’ replied Ronnie, his voice more distant. The men grumbled out uneasy laughter. Then Mike the boss said, ‘Never mind. I’ll mention it to the bloke downstairs, see what he says.’

  ‘Ask him if he’s gonna give us a hand while you’re at it,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘I’d rather he didn’t. He looks like a right divot.’

  Hearing that I leaned away from the digital recorder, giving it a hard glare. ‘Fucking divot? I’m not the one lifting and carrying for a living.’

  Speaking like that I almost didn’t hear it.

  Three faint rasps followed by a breathy exhalation.

  There was more noise as the deliverymen made their way downstairs. Muffled conversation from below. I ignored it, rewinding the recording to a few seconds before.

  ‘…like a right divot.’ The recording kicked in.

  Then the trio of faint rasps.

  I couldn’t make out what they were, but there was a cadence to them like spoken words. I rewound the recording, again hit “play”, then thumbed up the volume to its highest setting. I strained to listen, but when they came the words were easy to define.

  Not…safe…here…

  The words were spoken haltingly, as if delivered over a great distance. But there was no denying the message. Or in whose voice they were spoken. Naomi’s.

  22

  Chinks in the Crimson Glass

  I want you. I want you. I want you…

  The faint strains of my voice came from Sarah’s digital recorder. She was sitting with it in her lap, cupping a pair of earphones with her palms, dazed as she listened to my mantra. When I’d called her and asked her to come over on the Friday evening after work to listen to the EVP’s we’d captured this was not what she had expected to hear.

  ‘I promise you I’ve no recollection of saying that,’ I said for about the umpteenth time.

  At first she’d been sceptical, perhaps believing I’d made the recording knowing full well that she’d be intrigued by it. But after explaining my tumble down the stairs, the bump to my head, and my subsequent blackout for the best part of two hours she was now listening more keenly. I’d even allowed her to check my bump to validate my tale. Pressing me to go to A&E she argued I should have my head checked out: she feared I might have a concussion. I too had been concerned but had later decided not to go to hospital; what were they going to do? Tell me to take some painkillers – which I’d already done – and try not to fall asleep until someone else was around to watch over me? I just cut out the middleman.

  ‘I can’t stay over tonight,’ Sarah had said.

  Trying not to show my disappointment, I’d replied, ‘I’m sure I’ll be OK. So no worries.’ I’m only glad she couldn’t see the way I’d bit my lip as I said those words. ‘Are you off out tonight?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I just made the plans today at work. There’s a bunch of us going out for a meal and drinks.’

  ‘Daniel going?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Which means I can’t,’ I said. ‘Not after calling in sick and playing it for all it was worth.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have come any way,’ Sarah said, and it was the first real sign of reproof she’d shown me in days.

  I’d no argument. So I brought up the subject of EVP’s instead, steering her away from the jealous streak that threatened to consume me. I let her listen to the first EVP: the female voice saying “not safe here”, but then forwarded the recording to what had caused me such dismay when I’d first heard it. The recording had caught my tumble as a series of thumps. Silence had followed but for only a few seconds. Then there had come the dull creaks of me ascending the stairs and entering the spare bedroom. There had been another short period of silence, and then my voice had rung out. Considering the recorder was in the closed wardrobe in the adjacent room I must have been shouting as I scored those words into the wall with the screwdriver.

  ‘What, or who, is it you want?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘To be honest I haven’t a clue. I think I was just repeating what was already scraped on the wall.’

  Her look was one of consideration. It metamorphosed into one of concern. ‘It isn’t rational behaviour.’

  ‘I’d just knocked myself out. Hardly likely I was going to act rationally after such a bump to the head.’

  ‘That’s why you need to see a doctor. You could have done yourself serious damage.’

  ‘I’m fine now. The bump hurts, but only where it got scraped.’ I touched my head. ‘I’m all there, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  Normally she’d come back with a swift retort on the subject of my mental stability, but didn’t.

  ‘Really. I’m fine. OK, so I was dazed, but I’m thinking clearly now.’

  ‘You built a set of bunk beds in a daze?’

  ‘Yeah. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Usually I can’t follow those instructions for love nor money: maybe next time I’ve a chore to do I’ll bang my head on a wall first.’

  ‘You can laugh, but I don’t like it, Jack. You need to get checked out.’

  Rubbing my hands over my skull, then across my face, I said, ‘I need to get to the bottom of all this. We’ve established that was my voice while I was in the bedroom, but whose was it that answered the deliveryman?’

  ‘You said it sounded like your ex,’ Sarah pointed out.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just making her voice fit. It’s ten years since I heard Naomi speak. How can I be sure? It’s so faint, distant.’

  ‘Let’s listen to it again. Here sit down.’ Sarah adjusted the earphones so I could sit alongside her and listen. We propped our heads together, while Sarah took the recording back to the first voice.

  Not…safe…here…

  ‘Not safe here,’ Sarah repeated.

  ‘Some kind of warning?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah. Possibly. But for who?’

  ‘That’s what I wondered about. Did she speak to the driver, or because she knew I’d be the one to listen to the recording?’

  ‘So we’re in agreement it’s a “she” at least,’ said Sarah.

  The voice was barely more than a whisper, but the pitch was higher in tone, and sounded female, but could even have been that of a young boy. Hearing it again I couldn’t really say that it sounded anything like Naomi’s voice, it could equally be Sarah’s or of any other female or prepubescent boy. I chose not to dispute Sarah’s decision.

  We listened to the EVP again.

  ‘Wait,’ Sarah said. ‘I hear the three words, but what is that afterwards?’

  To me it was an indiscernible sigh or breathy exhalation.

  Sarah’s eyes were wide when she pulled away.

  ‘Did she ju
st say my name?’

  ‘No. It’s just a, uh, breath or something.’

  ‘Sarah shook her head, then leaned in so I could listen again. ‘There,’ she said as she replayed the EVP.

  ‘Sounds more like “essair” to me,’ I said.

  Sarah pulled off the headphones and handed them over. ‘Put them on. Listen again.’

  …not…safe…here….essair…uhhh…

  ‘Well?’ Sarah demanded.

  ‘I can’t make it out. Essair? Rewind it and let me hear again.’

  ‘Never mind. Let me listen.’ She took back the earphones and settled them into place. I watched her face. It grew stony.

  ‘It’s just an exhalation,’ I repeated.

  She shook her head, unconvinced. ‘Why would it be saying my name? Why warn me?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s your name,’ I said. ‘The warning was probably for me. After all, I’m the clumsy git who fell down the stairs shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah agreed without conviction. ‘You never really explained how that happened.’

  ‘I tripped.’

  ‘You said; but how did you trip?’

  ‘Kind of fell over my feet.’

  Sarah eyed me from the other end of the settee. Waited.

  ‘OK. I thought I could see that face on the landing wall again. You know the matrixing effect I told you about. I took a step back to get a different angle and slipped off the top step.’

  ‘You saw Naomi’s face again?’

  ‘I saw a face, yeah, but it’s nothing. Just the way the light comes in through the stained glass. I thought we’d already established that?’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence that her voice comes through warning you and then a few minutes later you take a tumble down the stairs.’

  Waving off her comment, I said, ‘It wasn’t her face and wasn’t her voice. It’s like I said, I just heard what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘And saw what you wanted to see,’ she finished for me. She shook her head in denial. ‘Nu-uh, I’m not buying it. I can’t say it was Naomi: I didn’t know her, haven’t seen a photo of her or heard her voice, but this goes beyond coincidence for me. I’m…I’m beginning to get frightened, Jack.’