The Evil Within

by S M Hardy

  Jed handed us both a glass then went and recharged his own. ‘You don’t remember what happened?’ he asked, dropping down on the sofa recently vacated by the Garvins.

  ‘Just everything suddenly went black and I felt like I was drowning.’

  Emma rested her glass upon her knee and tapped the side of it with the nail of her forefinger. ‘You’ve never had this happen before?’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘I don’t know how to break this to you,’ Emma said.

  ‘Am I having a breakdown?’

  That brought a smile to her face, the first real one since I’d come round.

  ‘No, dear boy, you’re not,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to have to start facing a few home truths and, judging by your previous reaction, I don’t think you’re going to like hearing them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just passed us a message from beyond the grave.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Had my legs not felt like jelly and my hand throbbed like shit I would probably have got to my feet and left. I think I almost would have preferred it if they had told me I’d had a seizure or was going mad, though perhaps it was a kind of madness. I’d always thought psychics were conmen preying on the vulnerable and anyone who actually believed in that kind of hogwash was either desperate, deluded or stark raving bonkers. Now they were asking me to believe in the very same thing.

  ‘I know you don’t want to accept it, but if all you’ve seen and heard over the past few days hasn’t convinced you that you can communicate with the dead, I don’t know what will,’ Emma said.

  ‘It’s never happened before,’ I said, leaning back in the chair and crossing my arms.

  ‘Before you came to Slyford, you mean,’ Jed said with a grunt.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Emma asked. ‘Having a connection to the dead doesn’t just snap on like flicking a switch.’

  ‘Quite sure, thank you, and if it’s all the same to you I’d rather it didn’t happen again.’

  ‘You can’t just switch it off, either,’ Jed commented.

  We sat there in an uneasy silence for a while, and in the end I had to ask the question despite myself, even if only to break the difficult atmosphere between us.

  ‘You said I gave you a message from beyond the grave – what did you mean? What did I say?’

  ‘So now you want to know?’ Jed grumbled.

  Emma gave him another of her looks and Jed suddenly found the bottom of his glass very interesting.

  ‘I warn you, it was harrowing.’

  Jed leant forward in his chair and picked up a small oblong object from the coffee table. ‘Emma usually records any messages I have to give. She wasn’t expecting anything tonight so she missed the first few seconds.’ He pressed a button on the side and a reedy, young voice filled the room.

  ‘… hide. He found me. Had to run. Make him stop. Make him go away.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ a woman said, I think it was probably Darcy, and someone told her to shush.

  ‘He’s coming. He’s coming.’

  Then there was ragged breathing over the whir of the machine.

  ‘Do you think that’s it?’ A faint whisper.

  ‘I don’t think so; look at him,’ Emma’s voice and then several gasps.

  ‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Darcy again, I think.

  Then a man’s voice. Loud, angry and sounding like he was out of breath. ‘Where are you? Little brat. Think I’m stupid, do you? When I find you, I’ll show you who’s stupid. I’ll show you.’

  I shivered, getting a really bad feeling. I recognised the words or at least the sentiment.

  ‘When I find you, I’m going to make you sorry. I’m going to make you very sorry indeed. Little bitch.’ More heavy breathing.

  ‘You have to make him stop,’ another voice, but this one I recognised. Peter Davies. ‘He’s going to hurt more children. You have to find him and make him stop.’

  Another gasp. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ the woman’s voice I’d heard when I came to my senses, then another low, barely distinguishable voice snapping at her to, I think, shut up.

  ‘Jim, Jim, can you hear me?’ That was Emma, and a loud click then silence.

  I took a swig of my drink. ‘Are you telling me that I said all those things?’

  ‘You didn’t just say them, Jim, you physically changed. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Your face changed, not a lot, but enough that if I hadn’t recognised the voice I’d have seen something of Peter Davies in you,’ Emma said.

  ‘What about the other man?’

  She grimaced. ‘Him, I didn’t recognise.’ She glanced at Jed and he shook his head.

  I sat staring into my glass while Jed poured us all another slug of whisky. If he was trying to take the edge off how we were feeling I think he was deluding himself. I doubted I’d ever feel the same again.

  ‘Who do you think the man was?’ Emma asked no one in particular.

  ‘No idea,’ Jed answered.

  ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

  ‘He must be, people don’t get psychic messages from the living.’

  ‘If he were, why would the reverend tell us we had to stop him?’

  I sat listening to them, trying to make sense of what to me was nonsensical. The first voice, the little girl, was that Krystal Morgan? Had the second voice been that of the man who’d killed her? Then it dawned on me. I was beginning to believe in all this. I was beginning to believe someone had killed Krystal Morgan and for whatever reason someone somewhere was trying to make me discover who and why.

  I got up and walked to the window. The curtains hadn’t been closed and I could see myself and the room behind me reflected upon the glass. I took a sip of whisky, still staring at the reflection. Emma was leaning forward in her chair, deep in conversation with Jed. I don’t think they’d even noticed I’d left my seat. The room really did appear to glow in the lamplight; all that was needed was a roaring fire in the grate and it’d look like a magical Christmas scene.

  I felt small, cold fingers slip into mine. I let out a shuddery breath, not looking down but instead at the reflection of the little girl standing next to me. She smiled up at me as I watched our reflections. I didn’t dare look to my side: I was afraid if I did, she might disappear. I was afraid if I did, I might just see a small figure standing beside me.

  I saw Emma look our way, but then her attention returned to Jed. She clearly hadn’t seen my ghostly friend. The child rested her head against my arm, gave my fingers a squeeze and slowly faded away until all that was left was the memory of her soft, cold hand in mine and her heartbreaking smile.

  I was about to turn away when there was a movement outside. I leant forward, my nose almost touching the glass and a face loomed up at me out of the dark. I staggered back a step and straight into Jed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you see that? I thought I saw something.’ My pounding heart began to slow, and I moved forward to once more peer outside. There was nothing but darkness. It was Jed’s reflection, that was all. It must have been. A little voice inside my head told me different, but I refused to listen. It was an illusion, a trick of the light. Then I remembered the cold fingers wrapped in mine.

  I walked back to the couch and sat down.

  We talked all night. Emma made coffee and toast and we carried on talking. At least they did. I said very little. I didn’t tell them about the reflection of the child, nor did I tell them about the face looming at me out of the darkness. I’d more or less convinced myself it was indeed Jed’s reflection as he came up behind me. More or less, but not completely. For one thing I was pretty sure the face didn’t have a beard. Could it have been Jed’s reflection combined with mine?

  It was a question I would never be able to answer. Still, I was more than glad that by the time I left to walk home the sun was coming up and it was light outside, although as ever a pall of mist floated off the fields and gardens
flanking the lane.

  When I arrived at the cottage I went straight up the stairs to bed, stopping only briefly to use the bathroom and clean the patina of whisky and coffee off my teeth. I closed the curtains, undressed and crawled under my duvet. As weary as my body was, my mind was still buzzing.

  The whole of the previous evening felt surreal. Jed was the one who spoke to the dead, not me.

  Eventually sleep found me, and boy did I sleep. At one point I woke long enough to look at my clock, which read three o’clock and in a dozy haze I read it as three in the morning. It didn’t register it was light outside and before I did my head had fallen back on my pillow and my eyes had closed as exhaustion took me again.

  The next time I woke I was interrupted from my sleep by an irritating sound that wouldn’t go away. I pulled the duvet up over my head, but still it went on and on until my mind began to clear and with a start I sat up.

  My bedside clock read eleven-twenty and it took a few moments for me to realise it was dark and therefore eleven-twenty at night. Still the noise went on and on and eventually the sleep-induced fug began to slip from my brain and I began to listen. It was scratching. A rapid scrabbling of claws against wood. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and listened some more. The scratching was coming from the hallway. Something was scratching at my bedroom door. I pulled on my jeans and padded across the room barefoot to stand in front of the door.

  Claws continued to attack the wood in an urgent clatter and the red lead hanging in the cupboard under the stairs came to mind. I reached for the light switch, the clatter of claws became frantic and another of my senses kicked in. What was that smell?

  My hand dropped to my side and the realisation of what I had almost done made my chest tighten. I could smell gas.

  The scratching stopped. I threw open the door, but there was nothing there, nothing except the thick reek of gas filling the hallway. I ran down the stairs and flung open the front door and then swung along the corridor to the kitchen.

  I stubbed my toe as I blundered past the table and chairs in the dark, but I barely felt it; I had too many other things to worry about. The oven door was open, and the gas was on full, as were all four burners. I switched them off and opened the back door – the unlocked back door – and stepped outside into the sweet night air.

  After filling my lungs I went back inside, walking through every room trying to open windows but gave up as they were all screwed shut. When I reached the lounge the door was closed when I always left it ajar. My hand touched the doorknob and from the kitchen I heard a dog yap.

  ‘What the fuck?’ I ran back to the kitchen. There was nothing there, but then I heard a dog bark, this time from out in the garden. I hurried outside – still there was nothing.

  My head was beginning to ache. Whether it was an after effect of the whisky from the night before, my deep sleep or the gas, I wasn’t sure, nor did I really care. If I’d flicked that light switch, if the scratching at that precise moment hadn’t become more insistent, making me pause, I didn’t like to think what might have happened with all the gas in the house. These days the inhalation of the gas itself didn’t kill you, it was well-meaning neighbours ringing on your doorbell or switching on lights and the associated sparks of electricity that did.

  I stood barefooted on the grass considering my own mortality, the ghostly scratching and why someone had turned on the gas and who that someone could be, all the time hoping the dog would bark again and a real live terrier would bound into the garden.

  When I went back inside the kitchen the stink of gas had almost gone. I wiped the grime off my feet and pounded back upstairs to find some shoes and open my bedroom window to clear the last remnants of the odour.

  Back downstairs the hallway was clear so I closed the front door and flipped the latch, not that it appeared to make much difference. Someone had obviously come and gone as they pleased. On my way back to the kitchen I hesitated by the living-room door.

  I had been about to go in when the dog had interrupted me again with its barking. Why had it done that? I rested my hand on the doorknob. This time there was no ghostly yapping or scrabble of claws. Maybe because the danger had passed. The thought scared me. Had an assailant been hiding in the room? Had he slipped outside while I was back in the kitchen or out in the garden? The door was still shut – would he or she have bothered to take the time to close it behind them? With some trepidation I turned the handle and let the door swing open.

  The ache in the centre of my forehead began to throb. The door to the liquor cabinet was open and just inside it next to the whisky glasses was a large candle flickering away. I wasn’t sure there would have been enough gas in the hallway for the flame to have caused an explosion had I opened the door earlier, but if I hadn’t woken when I had and gas had begun to seep into that room, who knows what would have happened. There was one thing of which I was pretty much certain. Someone had either tried to kill me or was giving me a serious message. I was clearly no longer welcome in Slyford St James.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It occurred to me as I slumped down at the kitchen table that I shouldn’t have still been in the village. Last night I’d intended to leave. Was it really only last night? It felt like a million years ago. Fate had, however, conspired against me. Fate? No, not fate, something altogether different.

  I got up to put on the kettle and stared out into the garden, not that I could see much in the dark. Then I remembered the night before and the face outside the window, and quickly moved across the kitchen to lock and bolt the back door. It didn’t help. I still didn’t feel safe.

  What on earth was happening to me?

  I made myself a mug of coffee, despite the urge for something stronger, and plonked myself down at the kitchen table. I’d heard the evidence and I’d seen … What had I seen?

  I thought I’d seen the reflection of the ghostly image of a child standing by my side. I’d felt her touch. Was it Krystal? Was it the same child I’d followed through the woods to the churchyard? I pushed back my chair and began to pace. I couldn’t have done. It was madness. I was having a breakdown. Everything pointed to it.

  What about the dog barking?

  My imagination, that was all. I’d never heard a dog before I saw the lead in the cupboard.

  It woke you from your sleep.

  I dreamt it.

  It woke you from your sleep.

  I slumped back down on the chair. It had woken me, or at least something had.

  It woke you before too much gas seeped into the bedroom, then distracted you when you were about to make a life-threatening mistake. It saved your life.

  It did seem that way.

  All right – let’s forget about ghostly apparitions and messages from beyond for a moment and concentrate on what happened tonight.

  One thing was for sure the dead couldn’t hurt me – or could they? I sat up straight in the chair. Shit! Things had physically moved when no one else could have possibly been in the cottage. Peter Davies had made me tea, for God’s sake, so maybe they could. I closed my eyes and breathed in deep, trying to calm my agitation. Consider the facts, I told myself. Someone, whether living or dead, had damn well tried to harm me – but who and why?

  I’d start with the living. I didn’t know anyone in the village other than Jed, Emma, George at the pub and the people Emma had introduced me to last night, and although I knew I could sometimes piss people off, last night I hadn’t spoken to anyone for long enough. Except …

  Who was the man in the study? And where had he suddenly disappeared to? He would have had to have stood up and passed between Emma and me within not much more than a split second. Dear Lord, I was definitely losing it. It was no good. This place was not good – not for me, anyway.

  Tomorrow I’d pack up my bags and leave. Or should I say today – it was past midnight.

  He said the village needed you.

  Did it matter what a figment of my imagination had said?

 
He said Jed and Emma needed you. He said you were here in the village for a reason.

  Maybe he did – someone else had other ideas on the subject, otherwise why the gas? Why the lighted candle?

  Don’t you want to find out why?

  No, not really.

  My inner voice fell silent.

  Not if it was going to get me killed.

  More silence.

  Fuck it – I was talking to myself and expecting answers – how mad was that?

  Someone tried to kill you – that wasn’t a figment of your imagination.

  Wasn’t it? Did I have a shred of evidence? Maybe I’d turned on the gas. Maybe subconsciously I was trying to kill myself.

  Now, you are talking crazy – you know that isn’t true.

  I jumped to my feet and hurried through to the living room. The candle was where I’d found it. I’d blown it out, but from the wax that had pooled around it I would have said it had been burning for some while, though probably no more than an hour, possibly less. How long would it have taken the cottage to fill with gas? No time at all, I supposed, not with the oven and all four hobs turned on full.

  I had been fast asleep. Could I have walked in my sleep?

  That is crazy.

  And actually, it was. I’d have had to have come downstairs, blown out the pilot light, turned on the gas. Then I’d have to have gone into the living room, found a candle from somewhere, and I certainly couldn’t remember ever seeing that thick, stubby lump of wax before, and light it. And for that I would have needed matches.

  I glanced around the room. No matches. I went back to the kitchen. Still no matches, only one of those gas lighter thingies that lights the gas with a spark. I patted my pockets, empty except for a few coins and a five-pound note.

  I couldn’t have lit the candle; I didn’t have anything to light it with. I slumped down onto a chair, my legs weak. Were the dead capable of such a thing? I glanced towards the cooker. Could the dead …? I didn’t complete the thought. I didn’t need to. Maybe the dead could harm the living. I hoped not, or at least that I’d never find out. I wasn’t sure if I felt better or worse as the realisation slowly dawned on me that, yes, someone really had tried to kill me. A person; a real, honest-to-God living person. On the floor right in front of the cooker was a dead match, a dead match and a footprint. I crouched down to take a better look. It was faint, but it was undeniably a print of the sole of a boot or maybe even a wellington, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t one of mine. I raced upstairs to my bedroom. I checked my walking boots, trainers, my shoes. There was nothing even close to the print in the kitchen.