The Shadows Call Read online

  ‘Sarah!’

  She placed her free hand over her mouth. Stifled her chuckles. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just, ehm, nervous laughter.’

  ‘Now you’re taking the piss.’ I pushed her hand off my knee, but in a way that told her I didn’t really mean it. She slapped her hand back in place, digging her fingertips into the nerves either side of my kneecap. I jumped about three feet in the air.

  ‘Oh, sorry! Was that your bad knee?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s OK. You didn’t hurt me.’ I quickly gave her knee a squeeze and now it was her turn to leap. ‘Just made me jump.’

  We laughed together, and I felt better about it. Sarah was first to mellow. ‘So Naomi tried to bite your fingers?’

  ‘Yeah. Her teeth were all bloody and she snapped at my hand like a rabid dog. I got such a fright I fell off the top step. I wasn’t lying about that. I smacked my head on the doorjamb on the bathroom door. But before I blacked out I was sure I heard her laughing at me. Not in an amused way either.’

  ‘She sounded nasty?’

  ‘Yeah, as if she took pleasure in seeing me hurt.’

  Sarah sunk back into the cushions. Warm air wafted up and I was enveloped in her scent. Ordinarily she smelled of soap, but this time I got the faintest hint of sweat. She hadn’t showered after work, but had come straight over. It only then occurred to me that she had been in work doing stock take; holding the fort where I’d refused to go in. Bitterly I thought that she’d spent more time in Daniel’s company than mine the last few days. I squinted sideways at her. But she misconstrued my envious look.

  ‘You think that Naomi’s being a little vengeful?’

  ‘No. Why would she be?’

  ‘You said she was killed in a car crash, that you were the one driving.’

  ‘Yeah, but I wasn’t to blame.’

  Sarah didn’t say anything. She wanted to hear the full story, but I wasn’t prepared to divulge the minutiae just yet.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault she died.’ I clamped up on the last word.

  Silence reigned for a minute.

  ‘I get that it’s painful. But maybe all it takes to put her at rest is to talk about it. I’m not going to be judgmental, Jack.’

  I shook my head.

  Naomi rested her hand on my knee once more. The time for fooling around had passed. ‘It’s too much to ask just now; I get that. We don’t have to talk about the crash itself. But what about her? What was Naomi like? As a person I mean.’

  ‘Not as pretty as you,’ I said diplomatically.

  Sarah smiled, gave my knee a gentle squeeze. ‘You know that isn’t what I mean.’

  I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I hadn’t ever been in a position where a woman was happy to talk about my ex girlfriend. Whenever Naomi’s name was raised with Catriona, it was usually uncomfortable at best, a screaming match at worst. ‘We were just kids,’ I said. ‘Naomi was a kid. I’m sure if she’d got the opportunity to mature she’d have been a very different person.’

  ‘She was immature?’

  ‘No. That’s not really fair. Not immature, just that she was a young woman with a young woman’s ideals and dreams.’ I laughed uncomfortably. ‘Sometimes we were at cross purposes.’

  ‘You argued?’

  ‘Not much, but yeah…sometimes. To be honest, I was probably young and immature myself. When I think back I can’t give you a good example. It was all inane stuff. Like what movies we liked, stuff like that.’

  ‘No change there, then,’ Sarah teased.

  ‘That’s not exactly true, is it? We’re both in agreement about Emmerdale on TV.’

  ‘Not the best of examples,’ Sarah said, ‘but yeah, we do have some things in common.’

  ‘The difference between you and Naomi is your willingness to roll with the differences. You’re a total believer in all of this paranormal stuff. I’m surprised with me having this sceptical streak you haven’t run a mile.’

  ‘It’s not really something that should come between us. It’s not like a staunch religion where you’re forbidden to have relations with someone outside your faith. And any way, it’s actually healthy to be sceptical about it all. Otherwise you begin to believe everything you see or hear is a sign from the other side. Sadly a lot of the evidence presented as paranormal is mundane, everyday stuff, with a natural explanation. When people present evidence along those lines it just makes the scientists laugh. That’s why I prefer scepticism. If we can be totally sceptical, try to come up with a logical explanation but fail, then what we might have is the real deal.’ She nodded as if coming to some kind of self-agreement. ‘See, the thing with the paranormal is, once you come up with a logical explanation – whatever that might be – then it’s no longer paranormal. It’s just the norm. I like that much of the phenomena can’t be explained: where would the mystery be if we understood it?’

  ‘So you’d prefer never to learn if there’s a life after death?’

  ‘Sooner or later we’ll all find out the truth, Jack. We all die. If we then ascend to some other realm or dimension, then we’ll know the answer. If we don’t, if we simply cease to exist then, well, it won’t matter will it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know for sure? Wouldn’t it give you comfort if you knew that we did go on after this life? It’d take away the fear of death.’ I was growing quite philosophical, and I scrubbed at my jaw with my left hand. It’s what intelligent people did during contemplation, I’d noticed.

  ‘It depends. If we go on to some kind of heaven, then fair enough. But what if we don’t? What if we just go to some other plane of existence where we have to live our lives over again, with no memory of the last? What’d be the point of that? Or what if we were stuck here?’ She looked around the room and didn’t seem overly impressed by the prospect of hanging around my parlour for all eternity. ‘It’s something I’ve always wondered about spirits that haunt prisons and old ruins and draughty castles and stuff. Why would you hang around horrible places like that if you still have a sense of free will? Who’d want to live forever if we don’t have free will in the after life? If we can become trapped in a place we hated in life, I think I’d prefer if there was no afterlife, that we did just disappear into nothingness.’

  ‘So your reason for seeking the truth about ghosts is to reassure yourself that you aren’t going to get stuck somewhere nasty?’

  ‘Can you imagine an eternity of hanging around at flippin’ BathCo? Thank God I plan on leaving that dump. Hell, it’s bad enough being there thirty-eight hours a week, let alone til the end of time.’

  We both had a chuckle. I could imagine Daniel haunting our showroom, rattling bath plugs and turning on and off dry taps: he spent so much time there in life, it wouldn’t surprise me if he chose to stick around after he popped his clogs.

  Sobering, I was right back to the subject of my dead ex again. ‘Supposing what I’ve seen is real, why would Naomi choose to hang around me? Not only that, but why now? Why wait more than ten years to show herself?’

  ‘Unresolved business,’ Sarah suggested. ‘Maybe she just needs to send you a message before she can find rest.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t figure out: what’s the message?’

  ‘It could be that she loves you and needs you to know that.’

  ‘She has a funny way of showing it. Causing me to crash my car, trying to bite my fingers off, knocking me out when I fell down the bloody stairs.’

  Her eyebrows rose. ‘Did you finish on bad terms?’

  ‘She was killed in a car accident.’

  ‘Yeah, but how were the two of you at the end? Did you get to say goodbye?’

  I couldn’t answer. Not at first. I still hadn’t told the entire truth about how we’d ended up smashing through that garden wall with enough force that Naomi went through the windscreen and into the garden. Sarah surprised me by touching her fingers to the corner of my right eye. I hadn’t realised I was crying.

  ‘Were you
having one of your arguments?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what it was about,’ I said, wiping the smeared tears from my cheeks. ‘Bloody Leonardo DiCaprio.’

  ‘Did Naomi fancy him or something?’

  ‘That’s the stupid part. I wanted to watch Gangs of New York, but she made me go to some chick flick: Sweet Home-bloody-Alabama! We kind of fell out and Naomi kicked off big style.’ I touched my face; I could almost recall the burning sensation where her nails had raked my cheek.

  ‘She attacked you?’ Sarah eyes were huge.

  I flicked an embarrassed grimace. ‘I probably asked for it. I was being a dick.’

  ‘And that’s how you lost control of the car?’

  ‘Yeah. There was nothing I could do to stop it. The worst thing was Naomi wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. It wasn’t pretty: she got cut up bad, broke loads of bones. Took me years to shake the image from my mind.’

  Exhaling deeply, Sarah sank back in the settee. When she looked at me again it wasn’t in sympathy. ‘And now she’s back and trying to hurt you. To me, Naomi does sound like a vengeful spirit. I think she blames you for her death, Jack, and wants to punish you in some way.’

  ‘Why punish me when she caused the crash? It wasn’t my fault!’

  ‘Sadly she might not see things the same way.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘That’s all I need; another vengeful woman tormenting me. I thought Catriona was bad enough.’

  26

  Trust Your Senses

  I was expecting a trio of dudes like those Lone Gunmen off the X-Files TV show, or geekish lads with greasy hair and T-shirts with strategically torn holes, baggy jeans. I was wrong. Two of them were a couple, sharply dressed and middle-aged, the man looking like a retired professional sportsman, the woman his WAG. The third was a young woman who could have been aged anything from her mid-twenties up to late forties. She dressed like an older woman but had a seamless complexion and clear eyes; her voice was mellifluous. She was only about five feet tall and slim built, mousy hair in pigtails, kind of frail.

  ‘Steve and Brianne Walker,’ the bloke said, sticking out his hand to shake. His wife offered a smile from beyond his shoulder as he crushed my hand in his mitt. Steve held my gaze, an eyetooth glinting against his perma-tan, a silvery wink of light a similar colour to his expensively cut hair. It was as if he peered into my soul, judging me.

  ‘Jack Newman,’ I said, trying not to wince.

  The small woman was named Hilary. An unfashionable name these days, so I began to think of her in terms of my upper age-range estimate. She laced her fingers and shrugged by way of greeting.

  Steve – he even looked like a Steve – gave Sarah a hug. His hands lingered on her hips even after he took a step back. I shared a glance with Brianne and thought she was probably as jealous as I was. Before the atmosphere grew too bitter, Steve had moved into the house, eyes darting everywhere, as if he could tell where the hotpots were without direction.

  As Brianne and Hilary followed him inside, I stage whispered to Sarah: ‘Is he a psychic or something?’

  Sarah only chuckled. Then she followed the group to the parlour while I was left to close the front door. Steve had parked his car – a big Range Rover - on the front street. Being a Sunday night he wouldn’t be troubled by traffic wardens. I guessed their ghost hunting equipment was locked in the car, because they’d brought nothing in with them. When I joined them in the parlour, Brianne and Hilary were perched on my settee. Steve had his elbow propped on the fireplace, posing like the lord of the manor. Sarah stood in front of the TV. Without preamble Steve nodded at the propped open door. ‘How about removing that wedge, Jack? Let’s see if the spirits will perform for us.’

  I’d grown used to having the door propped open. When I removed the wedge and pressed it closed I suddenly felt hemmed in, claustrophobic. Steve moved me aside, tried the handle. The door opened easily.

  ‘Sarah told me you had trouble with the door. As if it resisted you,’ he said. He pronounced her name “Sah-rah”, making her sound almost as pompous as him.

  ‘Yeah.’ I related the incident in full, explaining it only opened after I threatened to kick it down.

  Steve grunted, as if he’d heard it all before. Without asking for anything to happen he opened and closed the door a few times. He then leaned his shoulder against it, trying deliberately to jam it in the frame. I was silently pleased when it opened without hindrance to a gentle twist of the knob. Not because it partly validated my story, but that he hadn’t found a way to debunk it. I was beginning to dislike Steve and he’d only been in my house minutes. Hell, I’d hated him on first sight.

  ‘There’s supposed to be a shadow figure you’ve witnessed, too,’ Steve went on.

  I narrated the few times I’d seen the shadow man. I told him how the figure had been in this very room after the incident with the jammed door and that it had lunged at me. I caught a blink of surprise from Sarah. Had I told her that or not? I couldn’t recall. Maybe she was simply adding to the gravitas for Steve’s sake.

  ‘Normally shadow people are elusive beings that try to avoid human contact. Shadow Man is sometimes belligerent, and those that see him believe he means them harm.’ Steve turned down his mouth. ‘There’s no way of saying which it was, I guess. Odd though that a shadow person interacted with you like that.’

  “Shadow people”. “Shadow Man”. “Hat Man”. These were all terms I’d grown used to from my discussions, and her video show-and-tell, with Sarah. But to hear them coming from this relative stranger sent fresh qualms up my spine. Going by what Steve said, it was apparent that he classified shadow people as harmless entities, but Shadow Man was to be feared. ‘There was also a shadow woman,’ I pointed out.

  I told them all about our trip down to the basement and how I watched a woman flee from a man. I was pretty certain that the male figure was the same one I’d seen in the parlour and on the top landing the first day I looked the property over. Sarah added to the story here and there, but made it clear she had neither seen nor heard the figures at any time. It was apparent that they’d already discussed what had been going on in the house, because Steve and his companions had already come with some ideas in mind.

  Hilary was the equipment technician. She explained that they had brought night vision cameras, digital recorders, motion sensors, and something she called a lux metre. The other stuff was commonplace, but I hadn’t a clue about the lux metre.

  ‘Basically it’s a shadow detector. It measures the ambient light and can tell if there’s any disturbance to it. I couple it with an infrared trap camera. If the lux metre detects a shift in the atmosphere, the camera shoots a series of pictures. We’ve had good results from it before on other shadow people cases.’ Hilary ended her explanation with an almost embarrassed flicker of a smile, a quick shrug.

  ‘You’ve carried out other investigations like mine?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Not with this level of activity,’ Hilary admitted, glancing at Steve as if she’d spoken out of place.

  ‘Alleged activity,’ Steve said, and raised a finger to emphasise the point.

  ‘I’m not making anything up,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not suggesting you are.’ It sounded exactly like that to me. ‘It’s just that the human memory is very untrustworthy and prone to elaboration. We sometimes hear reports that are so outlandish they’re laughable. I prefer facts over fabrications.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’ My throat had grown tight. I looked quickly at Sarah for support, but she only shook her head softly at me.

  ‘That’s not what I said, Jack: I’m saying that your mind might have added detail that was not originally there.’ Steve gave me a patronising nod. There, his gesture said, that’s you told.

  ‘If you think I’m talking crap, why bother investigating the place at all?’

  ‘I don’t think that; I think there’s enough going on here that we might find some proof. If we do I’l
l happily put my name to it. But I must warn you…’

  I just looked him in the eye.

  ‘If I can debunk your story I will. If there’s nothing here I will say so.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Brianne and I have a reputation in the field of paranormal investigation and are keen to maintain it.’

  I made myself a silent bet Steve had a reputation all right, but it was one of smug arrogance, and rarely mentioned to his face. I nodded at his challenge. ‘Let’s hope you find something,’ I said.

  Steve grinned. The rules were out of the way. He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s get stuck in then. You want to join the investigation, Jack? I’m sure Sarah will be keen to get some more experience.’

  Sarah smiled eagerly. I noticed Steve’s gaze lingered on her a beat too long. Brianne gave a little cough and his attention slid slowly to her. His grin didn’t slip, just hardened. What a prat, I thought.

  ‘I’d like to be involved,’ I said. What I didn’t add was that I wasn’t about to let Steve out of my sight, not when he was going to be in darkened rooms with Sarah. My girlfriend was going to require protection from the smarmy son of a bitch.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Steve announced. ‘That way we can be sure you aren’t playing any pranks while the investigation is underway.’

  What a cheeky bastard!

  Again I sought support from Sarah, but she was too far beneath the big brave Steve’s thrall to take my side. I caught a smile from Hilary; as if she knew the conclusion I’d come to about their leader, and secretly agreed with me. Steve led the way to collect their gear. Brianne and Sarah followed, Hilary hung back long enough to whisper, ‘He’s all bluff. He’s actually supposed to be all right when you get to know him.’

  ‘He’s a big-headed twat.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she smiled. ‘I haven’t fully got to know him yet either.’

  Hilary winked, then sped off after her colleagues.

  I instantly liked Hilary.

  It took an hour or two to get all the equipment up and running. There was more in their kit than Hilary had mentioned. They also came armed with K2 metres for measuring electromagnetic fields, and something called an SB-7 – allegedly a way to speak with spirits in real time – that was like a detuned radio that rapidly scanned through white noise. In addition to the infrared cameras, lux metre and trap cameras, they also set up extra full spectrum digital cameras that Hilary told me could capture in photographs “things beyond the capacity of human vision”. Digital voice recorders were left in rooms where no other recording medium was placed. They covered the house from top floor to basement, setting up an electronic dragnet. I was impressed: if there was anything spooky in my house they had to catch it.