The Shadows Call Page 8

  ‘Other people blame the presence of high EMF and even infrasound for hauntings. They claim that some people are hyper-sensitive to naturally – or man-made - sources that cause them to feel creeped out, as if they’re being watched, or even being touched.’

  ‘Touched?’

  ‘Yeah. Like a prickly sensation on the skin.’

  I didn’t comment. But I wondered if that was why I’d felt as if I’d brushed something electrical when swiping at the bigger figure.

  ‘But I think it’s a load of nonsense. OK, I’ll admit that some people do have negative reactions to both, but it doesn’t explain everything, does it?’

  ‘I don’t even know what EMF is,’ I said.

  ‘Electro magnetic fields.’ Sarah was on a roll. ‘They’re all around us. Do you know what infrasound is?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. It’s the inaudible sounds beyond our auditory range?’

  ‘Almost correct.’ Sarah laid her free hand on my forearm, and I felt a tingle. God, was she charged with EMF or what? ‘It’s low frequency sound cycling at less than twenty hertz per second. That’s below the normal lower range of human hearing so we’re usually unaware of it, but it can have an effect on our brain chemistry and even our bodies. Have you ever been near one of those Catherine wheels at a fireworks display? Sometimes you can feel the infrasound it makes in your gut, like a kind of buzzing sensation.’

  ‘I’ve never had the pleasure.’

  ‘Infrasound can be produced by various means,’ Sarah went on. ‘A ceiling fan oscillating back and forward as it spins can make it, or even constant traffic passing on a busy road.’

  There was no fan in the basement, but I had to concede that when I was in the pantry I was beneath the road, so there could have been something in it.

  Except, Sarah wasn’t buying it. ‘You need to be exposed to both for a prolonged period before you would be affected to the point of seeing hallucinations.’

  ‘How do you know all this stuff? Did you study it at Uni?’

  ‘Who said I went to university?’

  ‘I just thought, well you being a manager at work. I thought you’d need degrees and stuff.’

  ‘It’s called aspiration, Jack. I went to Art College, and did get my degrees. One day I intend to be a graphic designer, but I also need to earn a living in the meantime. In this economy you have to take what you can, and I’m thankful of the job at BathCo, even if I’m not prepared to stay on the sales floor. I’ve worked hard, earned my management position. But I won’t be staying: I hope to save enough money to set up a small business and go self-employed in a year or two.’

  ‘Admirable,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t answer my original question.’

  ‘The paranormal? I’ve just picked it up watching programmes on TV and reading and stuff. I’ve also been on a couple of investigations before, and have kept in touch with the event organizers on Facebook. They often post answers to people’s questions about their paranormal experiences.’

  ‘Experts are they?’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Jack. How can you be an expert in something you can’t hope to prove?’ Sarah gave me a contrite smile. Touché. ‘But they know as much, maybe even more, than any scientists, who won’t even study the paranormal for fear of being ridiculed by their closed-minded colleagues. At least paranormal investigators are trying to find answers.’

  ‘What’s the point, if you can’t hope to prove it?’

  ‘It’s the search for answers that’s important.’ Sarah finished her wine in one last gulp. ‘There’s an adage that to a believer no proof is necessary, to a sceptic no proof is possible. It’s never going to be enough for them, but they keep asking: we seek “scientific” proof to hopefully shut the naysayers up.’

  ‘So basically you’re pandering to the sceptics?’

  ‘They’ll always find an alternative – usually equally disproven – explanation for anything we present, but while they’re at it, I suppose it keeps them out of our hair. It lets us get on with seeking the truth.’

  ‘Sounds counterproductive to me, like politicians who won’t agree on any point.’

  ‘I’m not bothered what they think.’ She shrugged again. ‘A sceptic once laughed at my belief in the paranormal. When I hear the sound of hooves, he said, I think horse. I don’t think unicorn. So I said, but wouldn’t it be bloody great if it were a unicorn? It must be awful going through life without a sense of wonder or imagination. Aw, what the hell! They can enjoy their boring lives with their rigid rules and regulations. I’m interested in the possibility of something else, something mysterious and beyond us. Aren’t you, Jack? Haven’t you ever reached for the unattainable and tried to grasp hold of it?’

  Hell, yes.

  And right then I was very tempted.

  11

  Night Terrors

  I dreamed of Sarah that night. The dream was erotic, putting into action my waking desires, in a manner that Sarah hadn’t yet done in reality, but had perhaps been hinting at. In my fantasy she was a coy temptress who led me by my hand to bed, and then when she was under the sheets she was a whore, willing to try anything. Hell, it had been many years since I’d experienced an adolescent wet dream, but even deep in sleep I was aware of my ejaculation and took pleasure from it. In some deep corner of my mind I felt guilty, but in another I wallowed in the titillation and longed for the dream to last the entire night. But as is the way of dreams, it changed and not for the better.

  We were lying in bed together, and it didn’t escape my notice that the room bore little resemblance to the empty space I actually slept in. This dream room was sumptuous, with a huge divan bed and satin sheets and drapes, candlelight and soft music. Sarah was urging me to make love to her again, and I was happy to comply. I squirmed on top, parting her thighs with mine as I prepared to enter her, all the while running my hands up the sides of her narrow waist from flaring hips to where I could cup the outer swellings of her breasts. I peered down at her and her pouting lips were slightly open as she panted with desire. Her eyes were closed, and the dream so vivid I could see each individual eyelash tremble beneath my own exhalations. I leaned in and kissed her and her mouth was as soft as mist. She kissed back and our tongues entwined. That’s when the minutiae altered. It was subtle at first, but my subconscious mind noticed the change and immediately a sense of dread flooded my guts. I pulled back from her mouth, but Sarah followed me, her lips now ranging over my face, and now they weren’t so soft, but cold and slimy, and it was as if her need had changed from satisfying one hunger to another. In my mouth I tasted something unpleasant. I can’t be sure if I honestly tasted rot or if my subconscious mind told me so. The rotten taste brought bitter saliva to my mouth, and I almost gagged. I tried again to pull away, but Sarah’s hands were firmly around my head, digging sharp nails into my scalp. My ardor had fled, but Sarah wrapped her legs around my waist and bumped her pubis against mine, willing our conjoining to go on by force. I struggled to extricate myself, and now her pants had become grunts, then animalistic growls. The stench of decomposition wafted around us. Disgust flooded me, and I cried out, trying to break free. Sarah’s grip was unrelenting. She wouldn’t let me go.

  ‘I want you, Jack,’ she said, and her voice was a hoarse rasp, the sound of something bestial.

  Panic engulfed me, I tried to push her away, but she held on remorselessly. Her nails were now fisted in my hair, tearing at my scalp, her pubic mound battered at mine painfully, while her mouth now almost engulfed my face, sucking with enough tenacity to rip the flesh from my skull.

  I fought her. I prized at her fingers, but she clenched all the more and I could feel clumps of my hair ripping loose. She squirmed her groin against mine, serpentine, and in my mind’s eye her legs were far too long to be those of an ordinary woman but the long tentacle–like appendages of a creature from the deep. They wrapped around my legs, coiling, constricting, and I cried out in agony as my bones began to snap under the pressure. I tried to shri
ek again, but her mouth engulfed my entire head and I found I could barely breathe let alone scream.

  Abruptly the scenario changed once more. I’ve no words to describe how I extricated myself from that horrible embrace, but in my mind I was now standing. Sarah was on her back on the bed. It wasn’t a plush divan and satin sheets she lay on now but a patchy lawn, and sprinkled among the tufts of crushed grass were nuggets of glass and chunks of plastic and torn metal. She stank of smoke and petrol fumes. Sarah was no longer naked, but dressed in a red dress and black boots. She lay peering up at me, dreamy eyed as she again spoke those same words. ‘I want you, Jack.’

  ‘No, no, noooo…’ I moaned.

  ‘I want you.’

  I backed away one slow step at a time. But caught in the nightmare it made no difference because I gained no space between us.

  Sarah rose from the ground plank straight and was immediately before me.

  No.

  Not Sarah. As if it was wax under a blowtorch her face deformed, dripped, changed. Now her’s was a face of another woman. A face that I knew. But even that familiarity was fleeting because in the next instant her flawless skin split, open wounds gouging furrows into her brow and cheeks, across her nose, and almost detaching her bottom lip so that it hung like a torn rag against her jaw. Blood flooded from the awful wounds. Her teeth were broken stumps, bloody and sharp. A hand came up, reaching for my face, and I watched yellowed bones erupt from the flesh of her forearm. Her skin began to discolour, purpling, then growing a mottled brownish green. Again the stench of rot shrouded me, and I turned away in disgust. The hand touched my face, and despite reason howling at me to run, I turned back to the woman. Her fingertips caressed my cheek. And deep inside me I felt a pang of longing, of regret, but again the sensation was fleeting, because she hooked in her nails, digging them deep into my face.

  ‘I want you,’ she croaked, and mucus dotted with blood poured from her throat.

  ‘No!’ I pushed at her, and my hands sank almost to the wrists in a chest that was now a puss-filled cavity. ‘Get away from me! Get away!’

  ‘I…want…you.’

  I tore loose from her grip, falling backwards.

  The woman advanced now, step by careful step. Her pretty dress was now a discoloured rag, her boots were falling apart, flopping round boney ankles. As she approached her flesh continued to blister, then peel from her bones, so that she bent to look down at me with a skeletal grin. Her throat was now a loose wattle of decomposing flesh, her windpipe exposed, pinholes growing in it as it rotted at an unnatural rate. No way was it possible that she could form words now, and yet she spoke in a sputtering exhalation. ‘I…want…you.’

  When my thoughts had been consumed by eroticism some small part of me had recognised them as a dream, and yet now, as events had grown nightmarish I was fully engulfed, lost in this otherworld. Even in its absurdity I could not recognise its wrongness. To me a monstrous undead corpse stood over me, its clawed hands reaching to tear me apart, mouth opening so that it could bite down on my throat with its cracked and broken teeth. And yet something told me that something was not right. This was not how things had happened. This was a lie.

  I found my voice, but now my scream was more of denial than horror.

  The skeletal thing didn’t hear me, or if it did it ignored me, because it continued to lean in, to clutch me again in its embrace. I knew if it got its bony fingers in my hair again that it would drag me down with it to whatever grave it had crawled from.

  ‘No! Get away from me! Get away!’ I slapped at its grasping hands. My arms were no barriers to it though and it reached for me, taking hold of my head in both its palms. The exposed metatarsals of its fingertips drove into my flesh, ground into my skull with unrelenting strength, even though the ligaments and tendons, and the muscles required to form a grip, had already disintegrated to rotting fragments, adding to the miasma of stench shrouding us. I squirmed in agony, feeling the sharp bones dig deep into my brain, but I couldn’t get free. She lifted me from the ground as if I weighed nothing, pulling me close. The broken teeth chattered an inch from my face.

  ‘I want you to die.’

  Those words broke the spell…

  …I kicked free of her hold, freefalling momentarily as my mind tried to make sense of the sudden detachment from the nightmare to wakefulness. My body spasmed, as if jolted by a stun gun, and I jerked upright to a seated position, my legs kicking as I attempted to propel myself further from the dream. My sleeping bag entangled me for a moment more, and in those last intangible moments of nightmare I thought that those serpentine coils had again been thrown around me. I screamed, fought free of the sleeping bag and fell naked on the bare floorboards.

  It was cold, dusty and the rough boards chafed my skin. But I was glad to be back in the real world. I clawed my way a few feet across the floor, finally pushing the last clinging folds of my sleeping bag off my feet, and sat there shivering, bathed in cold sweat, my heart beating like jungle drums inside my head.

  It was still dark outside, though some meagre light etched the windows against the blackness. I blinked, wiping at my face, half expecting to find the torn skin where the skeletal thing had sunk in its claws. Sweat ran in rivulets off me. I jerked my gaze around, seeking but dreading to find that the monster had followed me out of my nightmare into the here and now.

  There was no lurking creature.

  No shadows that moved with a will of their own either.

  An unsteady laugh broke from me. In the echoing room it sounded tinny and not a little insane. I’d probably inhaled spores from that horrible fungus down in the basement, poisoning my dreams. I stopped laughing, pushing myself up to stand there, shaking not just from the sweat chilling on my skin, but from the adrenalin coursing through me, a lingering consequence of the nightmare.

  That’s all it was, I reassured myself. A fucking bad dream, a side effect of my bloody medication or hallucinogenic mold. Nothing about it was real. But I knew I was lying to myself. There had been some truth in those final words of the skeletal thing, except in the real world it hadn’t been a woman who’d uttered them.

  12

  Show and Tell

  Working at BathCo was as mundane as ever that week. Unlike my previous career as a teacher, it didn’t challenge my mind to sell bathroom suites and plumbing accessories. The company I worked for wasn’t even a genuine plumbing supplies store; we were simply a showroom, the baths and taps and stuff being delivered wholesale from overseas. It made me laugh when a customer came in looking for a replacement washer for a dripping tap and we couldn’t even sell him one. Hell, I wasn’t sure without checking on the internet what size of washer he actually required, and then had to send him elsewhere to buy one. We were the fast food equivalent of bathroom suite retailers. But that was the nature of the job, and I just had to get on with it. The only benefit I could see was the fact I got to spend more time with Sarah.

  Following our weird weekend we barely touched on the subject of ghosts or anything else. Perhaps it was because she’d picked up on the less than subtle vibes I’d been sending her way after she’d posed that question about grasping for the unattainable. She wasn’t normally the shy and retiring type, but she’d grown self conscious, began pushing at her scruffed up hair, pawed at the dust on her sweater, then made an excuse to get home. I offered to drive her, but she would have none of it, reminding me that I’d been drinking. The fact I’d barely touched my second glass and that she was responsible for downing the majority of the Pinot didn’t make a difference. She headed off with the promise she’d see me at work on the Monday. She came through with the promise but had kept her distance since. Thankfully when we did meet at the coffee machine in the staff room she hadn’t brushed me off, but she did blush a little. Handily by then I’d mostly expunged from memory the horrific nightmare I’d endured, but chose to recall the earlier dream that led to it, and what Sarah and I had got up to in that boudoir. I’d blushed too, and then we�
�d laughed and she’d put her hand on my forearm and allowed it to linger tantalizingly before she carried away her coffee. I smiled all day after that, despite the boredom of the job.

  After I finished on Tuesday, I was away early enough to visit a local carpet fitter and arranged for floor coverings for the parlour, the adjacent living room and my bedroom, plus the one next to it for when the kids stopped over. My bank balance decided that the other rooms could wait. Wednesday evening saw me at a used furniture depot where I ordered in the basics; hell, I wasn’t made of money. And I ordered two beds off the internet, a double for me, and bunks for the kids – some things just had to be new. I intended furnishing enough of the rooms to make them habitable, and decorating the other rooms as time went on.

  Thursday evening saw me wielding paintbrushes and rollers as I tidied up the walls of the parlour. Maybe it was because my mind was otherwise engaged, but I seen neither hide nor hair of shadow people or anything else weird. By the time Friday came round I’d put the oddities to the back of my mind, and was beginning to feel more comfortable in my new home.

  It was about seven o’clock on Friday evening when my mobile rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hi, Sarah.’ I’d seen her name come up on the screen.

  ‘Hi.’ She fumbled with her phone by the sound of things. ‘Ehm, I was just wondering what you were doing.’

  ‘Watching Emmerdale.’

  ‘I didn’t take you for a soap opera fan.’

  ‘I’m not. I still haven’t got satellite set up. I just put the TV on and Emmerdale was playing.’

  ‘You don’t have to make excuses,’ she said, and added a short laugh. ‘I watch Emmerdale too.’

  ‘You should come over and watch it with me.’ I made the invite sound like I was joking, but hoped she’d take it up any way.

  She laughed through her nose. But she didn’t let me down. ‘It’s why I was ringing: to see if you were going to be in.’