Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Two of the relatives closest to Andrew were dead. It was almost as if his uncle had planned their fates from beyond the grave. But Mark couldn’t bring himself to suspect that such a kind, conciliatory old man would want to bring harm to his family.

  Cheryl had been burned bald and blackened, which had presumably saved the crematorium some time. Her flat had been gutted and rendered into an empty shell that brought vulgarity to the precious Mayfair street. The coroner noted that the former Mrs. Bayer had been drinking heavily and would not have been able to exercise clear judgment, and although he was puzzled by the striped burns on her hands, a verdict of death by misadventure was passed.

  With no assignments to work on, Mark took the next morning off to go and visit Joan and Warren, his parents. Over lunch in their favorite restaurant, a monstrously overdecorated trattoria in Highgate, North London, he attempted to confront them about the codicils to Uncle Andrew’s will, but they neatly deflected his questions. If they knew the truth, it seemed they were not about to tell him.

  He was starting to suspect everyone. Even those closest to him were now behaving differently in the aftermath of his uncle’s death. As Mark questioned his parents, he started to see how aggrieved they became when discussing Andrew’s wealth, and how disappointed they were with what they had been left.

  Everyone except Mark had been left amounts of money, but his mother had also inherited a somewhat peculiar emerald necklace, and his father had been presented with an art deco diamond skull cuff link and tie pin set. However, it was obvious that his parents had been hoping for more; Andrew’s spectacular Buckinghamshire house, perhaps. Surely they took precedence over his childlike second wife? Wasn’t blood thicker than youthfulness?

  Mark looked from Warren to Joan as they forked sweetbreads and osso bucco into their mouths, and saw them in a different, less flattering light.

  Uncle Gabriel had a nineteen-year-old son studying at Cambridge. Jake Bayer had been left a brand-new Kawasaki motorcycle by his uncle, to replace the one he had had stolen the previous year. Gabriel had never approved of his son’s love of motorbikes. Now that Jake was fatherless, he found that he was allowed to ride the glistening machine.

  On impulse, Jake set off to visit his girlfriend in Manchester, and powered up the Ml hoping to catch her before she went out for the night. He, too, had become infected by the thought that the other side of the family was profiting more heavily from his uncle’s death. He had lost his father (not that they had ever been close) and had been given the admittedly beautiful Kawasaki Ninja Performance Edition machine, which his uncle had bought in readiness for his twenty-first birthday. But that was all he’d been bequeathed. His Aunt Joan and Uncle Warren had been left valuable jewels, and Andrew’s second wife had inherited a huge mansion. It seemed unfair. Of course, his cousin Mark had been left nothing, but the guy was a loser, trying to build a tiny graphic design company in a recession, refusing help from anyone.

  The lowering skies were brownish grey and the black road ahead was slick with rain, so he decelerated and concentrated on the traffic around him. With his father gone, Jake was the most senior male on his side of the family, and responsibility was expected of him.

  A few hundred yards ahead, the articulated supermarket truck that had been pacing the Kawasaki for two junctions also decelerated sharply. According to the signs, one of the lanes was closed for the next mile. Most of the main truck haulage between London and Manchester was conducted on this route, and you had to remain watchful in wet weather.

  Damn, the truck was coming close.

  Jake loosened the throttle, watching the fast approach of the truck’s back-plate, and knew he would have to slow down fast. It was okay, though, because there was nothing behind him. He checked the wing mirrors expecting to see a clear straight stretch of glistening blacktop. Instead, he saw his uncle’s face. He was saying something, trying to warn him.

  Shocked, Jake slammed on his brakes.

  When he looked in the mirrors again, Uncle Andrew had been replaced by the steel grille of another truck, just feet from his rear fender and approaching at an insane speed.

  The two great trucks slammed into each other, with Jake at their center. The motorcycle flipped onto its side and was crushed as flat as a milk bottle top.

  It proved impossible to fully separate Jake Bayer from the Kawasaki. His head was found under the wheel arch of the second truck. His left foot turned up two days later on the slip road of a Little Chef restaurant.

  *

  JOAN BAYER

  As soon as Mark heard of his cousin’s death, he became convinced that this string of accidents was no longer coincidental. But the main question which haunted him was this; even if Uncle Andrew had somehow planned for his family to be hurt, why would he want to harm his young stepson? It seemed as if the items specified by the will were somehow cursed to inflict damage on their inheritors. But how could that be possible? Uncle Andrew had loved his family.

  Mark tried to discuss the matter with his brother Ben, who clearly thought he was crazy. He knew there was no point in going to the police. He tried talking to his parents again, but the deflection he had encountered before now turned to outright hostility. Everyone was bitter and confused by this inexplicable and disastrous turn of events. Mark sat in his gloomy office and tried to figure out an answer. His brother had been left money. Surely, if there really was a curse he would be spared—after all, how could a gift as universal and as abstract as cash ever hurt him?

  Over the next few weeks, the aftershocks of death continued to ripple through the Bayer family. Jake’s girlfriend was devastated by her loss, and discreetly dropped out of school. Autumn crushed the life from London’s trees and winter set in hard. It felt as if nothing could be healed.

  Andrew’s mother finally went to see the family lawyer about contesting the will. She felt that as Andrew’s sister, she should have been left considerably more, so Lycus Gerolstein agreed to put her case to the rest of the family. However, they unanimously refused to grant her an extra tranche of cash from her brother’s inheritance fund, and as a consequence, the divisions between them all grew deeper. Mark was at a loss to understand what was happening. He had always thought of his family as—well, typically English. They were scattered across countryside and city, eminently sensible, rather too respectable, slightly dull, slightly superior, but now they seemed vindictive, bitter, mean-spirited.

  Mark’s mother had changed more than anyone. Status and power had suddenly become ridiculously important to her. With his own salary running out and no new clients offering work, Mark had been forced to move back to his parents’ house in Chiswick. That evening, he came home just as the first of the real winter storms was breaking, and found Joan preparing for her husband’s annual office dinner. Shaking out his umbrella and leaving it against the banisters on the first floor hall, he knocked and entered his mother’s dressing room.

  He barely recognized Joan anymore. She had lost weight and Botoxed away her wrinkles. With her newly auburn hair swept up and the antique emerald necklace at her throat, she suddenly seemed like every other hungry social-climber who attended London’s glitzy winter events. Now she spoke of little else than what had befallen the family, who had got what, and why they were not entitled to have it.

  “Your uncle had always had his favorites,” she told him, trying on new lipstick and popping her mouth at the mirror. “Catherine only married him for his money, everyone knows that. And she got exactly what she wanted. She’s been left that house, which must be worth a couple of million. He even left her children the attached land, and they’re not even his!”

  Mark was miserable. He wanted his world to return to how it had been before the death of his uncle. He was sick of hearing about money. But their lives were broken and there was no going back.

  “Well,” said Joan with a final snap of her handbag, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew had kept a few other funds tucked away. He was always clever with his cash.
Perhaps we should hire Lycus to look into the matter. He must know where everything is, he was as thick as thieves with your uncle.” She turned to her son, as if suddenly becoming aware that he was in the room. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us tonight?”

  “No, I’m trying to build a business plan,” he told her.

  “It’s so unfair. You were supposed to be his favorite nephew. I think it’s disgraceful, the way he’s treated you.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “I’m meeting him there.” She rose and looked about her. “Where did I put my jacket?”

  “I think I saw it downstairs.”

  Joan kissed him and went out into the corridor. Mark put on his headphones and went to work on his laptop.

  His mother stood in front of the hall mirror and tried to work out what was wrong with her reflection. It was the necklace; it refused to hang straight. The emerald pendant at its center was crooked, and the settings of the diamonds around it felt razor-sharp on her delicate skin. Annoyed, she unclipped the clasp at the back and attempted to realign the chain.

  In the mirror, something was coagulating in the shadows behind her right shoulder, as if the very darkness was knitting itself into a shape. The penumbral figure was speaking to her. The flesh of Joan’s neck prickled. She reached out a hand to the glass.

  “Andrew?”

  And then, just as quickly, it dissipated like smoke beneath her touch. Above her head an apocalyptic peal of thunder sounded, and the house trembled.

  Mark’s furled umbrella slipped from its position against the banisters and fell down into the hall. Its metal tip shot under the back of Joan’s necklace, catching it, the handle yanking the chain down hard. Joan was wearing new high heels that slipped on the tiled floor and pulled her over. As she fell, the umbrella, now caught in the necklace, twisted as she landed on it, tightening the chain into a noose. The metal jewel settings sliced into her soft neck, neatly severing her carotid artery. She frantically tried to pull herself upright, but the umbrella twisted like a garrote and the jewels bit deeper. Her blood pooled in a scarlet mirror across the floor. For a brief moment she saw Andrew reflected, then she died.

  *

  OLIVIA BAYER

  “Well, I continued working upstairs,” Mark told the skeptical policeman who was covertly checking his pupils to see if he’d been taking drugs.

  “You mean to tell me that your mother was struggling to catch her breath just one floor below and you didn’t hear a thing?”

  “No, I had my headphones on. I didn’t know anything about it until I went downstairs to get a drink.”

  “And how much later was that?”

  “I don’t know, twenty minutes, half-an-hour.”

  “And you didn’t even get up close to check on her?”

  “Why would I? There was blood everywhere. I could clearly see she was dead.” He knew that the image of his mother lying on the black and white tiles in a nimbus of her own blood would stay with him forever.

  The officers who quizzed Mark after his mother’s death were quick to rule him out of any involvement in what the forensics team termed a bizarre accident, because his computer log showed that he was at his terminal during the time of death, and it was clear that Joan Bayer had died alone. Mark’s story perfectly matched the sequence of events, but the officers agreed that they had never heard of anyone dying in such a bizarre manner.

  From this date on, Mark’s father stopped speaking to his son. Mark moved out a few days after the funeral, and rented a tumbledown flat-share in Whitechapel. The strange story of the Bayer family deaths had been kept out of the press until now, but this latest addition to the roll call of the deceased received its first passing mention in the tabloids.

  Mark had now begun to believe that some kind of embodiment of evil was hunting down his relatives, but although he tried to talk about it, none of the surviving family members were prepared to listen to him. Reading up about wills on the internet, he was shocked to discover how many inheritance settlements caused the breakdown of family relationships. Eventually he was forced to reach the only logical conclusion—that this terrible chain of events was simply the kind of bad luck that followed the sudden loss of a family patriarch.

  Mark was now seriously broke, and because he had lately been preoccupied, he lost the support of his only freelance client. He was on the verge of asking his brother Ben for a loan from the money he had been left, but at the last minute decided not to request any assistance. He could not explain why he decided on this. He simply couldn’t help feeling that everything Andrew left to his family had been irrevocably tainted.

  Olivia, Uncle Andrew’s twenty-one-year-old daughter from his first marriage, was a loner. She rarely spoke to any other members of the family. She loved the sea and lived in Brixham, Devon. As a consequence, her uncle had left her his twenty-two-foot Fletcher speedboat. She took it out even on the coldest days, roaring along the blue coastline for an hour at first light if the tides were favorable.

  One morning, Olivia inexplicably failed to pump the petrol fumes from the tanks and nearly turned the boat into a fireball that would have killed her instantly. She was been an experienced mariner. It seemed so unlike her to make such a mistake.

  Shaken by her own neglectfulness, she pumped out the tank and set off at speed, forgetting to untie the aft rope from its mooring capstan. Twenty yards out, the Fletcher slammed to a jarring halt, catapulting her backwards into the freezing water, and the racing propeller blade bounced down, ploughing into her screaming face, mincing it into fish-chum. By the time the harbor rescue team pulled her out, there was nothing left above the ragged stump of her neck.

  Olivia Bayer’s father had also left her money, and this was now inherited by Catherine, Uncle Andrew’s second wife. There were just four direct descendants of the Bayer family left alive: Mark and his brother Ben; their father, Warren; and Catherine.

  *

  WARREN BAYER

  Mark had taken to meeting up regularly with Lycus Gerolstein, his uncle’s lawyer, because they shared a morbid curiosity about the family’s ill-fortune. As winter dragged on, they sat together in the little coffee shop on Wardour Street, trying to come to terms with each new twist of fate.

  “I’ve done some more digging,” said Lycus one morning, opening his briefcase and pulling out a sheaf of papers. “As you know, your uncle was admitted to the Harley Street Clinic on three separate occasions. Each time, he had been suffering from blackouts and memory loss. During the recovery periods he temporarily lost the power of speech. The dates on each of the codicils match these periods. It’s my belief that your uncle was in no fit state to sign anything. He wouldn’t have known what he was doing.”

  “Then why were the revisions accepted?”

  “We had no choice. His signature was on each of them, which made them legally binding documents. You understand, of course, that I am required to remain in a neutral position throughout this process.”

  “Do you know who else was present when the codicils were signed?”

  “His second wife Catherine was there on the first occasion. Gabriel, his brother, was certainly present two months later, when your uncle was admitted once more.” Lycus hesitated.

  “And the third?” prompted Mark.

  “Your father,” said Lycus with an air of apology. “Warren went to the hospital with Andrew and stayed there overnight with him.”

  Warren Bayer was late for the meeting at his head office in Clerkenwell. The tube platform at Angel was uncomfortably crowded, but he had not been able to find a taxi in the rain. As he watched the red dot-matrix board revise the train arrival times, he touched the diamond skull-head cuff links Andrew had left him. Lately he had been burying himself in his work, trying to forget the tragedy that surrounded him. It was easier to place his grief at the death of his wife to one side than it was not to hate his own son for being in the house and doing nothing as she lay dying.

  Just a few short months a
go they had all lived in a state of distant equilibrium, but now the ruptures were tearing them all apart. Every action was subject to examination, every phone call a reason for suspicion. He hated the way he found himself behaving. It was just so damnably un-English.

  Warren checked his watch. He was going to be late. The atmosphere on the platform seemed dense and stifling. A buffet of warm air announced the arrival of the train.

  He studied the travel poster opposite, a fierce sienna photograph of a Middle Eastern desert. He looked hard at the center of the poster. A blackish-green spot was appearing, as if mold was starting to come through from the wall behind. The black pattern grew, forming itself into the vague shape of a man. He looked around to see if anyone else was noticing the phenomenon forming on the poster, but the other passengers were going about their business as usual.

  Fascinated, Warren failed to hear the announcement that the next train would not stop. He looked back at the expanding shape, and it seemed for a moment that Andrew was there, calling to him, trying to tell him something, if he could only get a little nearer…

  The sound of the arriving train rose in his ears, and there was Andrew in his shiny midnight-blue suit and white straw hat, stepping from the poster, desperately trying to communicate. In shock, Warren raised out his hands and stretched forward just as the hurtling underground train hit him, shattering both his wrists, splintering bone, tearing sinew and muscle.

  He was spun around and cartwheeled in between the platform and the train, his severed hands with their cuffs and cufflinks still intact, sparkling in the shadows beneath the platform like forbidden treasures.