Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  “For whom?”

  U

  “For Ursula?” Miss Walter-David’s Christian name was Ursula.

  NU

  “U?”

  “You,” said Miss Walter-David. “You.”

  This was not a development Irene liked a bit.

  *

  There were two prospects in his chat room. Women, or at least they said they were. Boyd didn’t necessarily believe them. Some users thought they were clever.

  Boyd was primarily MSTRMND, but had other log-in names, some male, some female, some neutral. For each ISDN line, he had a different code name and e-address, none traceable to his physical address. He lived online, really; this flat in Highgate was just a place to store the meat. There was nothing he couldn’t get by playing the web, which responded to his touch like a harpsichord to a master’s fingers. There were always backdoors.

  His major female ident was CARESS, aggressively sexual; he imagined her as a porn site Cleopatra Jones, a black model with dom tendencies. He kept a more puritanical, shockable ident—SCHLGRL— as backup, to cut in when CARESS became too outrageous.

  These two users weren’t tricky, though. They were clear. Virgins, just the way he liked them. He guessed they were showing themselves nakedly to the room, with no deception.

  IRENE D

  URSULA W-D

  Their messages typed out laboriously, appearing on his master monitor a word at a time. He initiated searches, to cough up more on their handles. His system was smart enough to come up with a birth-name, a physical address, financial details and, more often than not, a .jpg image from even the most casually assumed one-use log-on name. Virgins never realized that their presences always left ripples. Boyd knew how to piggyback any one of a dozen official and unofficial trackers, and routinely pulled up information on anyone with whom he had even the most casual, wary dealings.

  IRENE D: Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?

  Boyd stabbed a key.

  Y

  IRENE D: For whom?

  U

  IRENE D: For Ursula?

  NU

  IRENE D: U?

  URSULA W-D: You.

  At least one of them got it. IRENE D—why didn’t she tag herself ID or I-D?—was just slow. That didn’t matter. She was the one Boyd had spotted as a natural. Something about her blank words gave her away. She had confidence and ignorance, while her friend—they were in contact, maybe even in the same physical room—at least understood she knew nothing, that she had stepped into deep space and all the rules were changed. IRENE D—her log-on was probably a variant on the poor girl’s real name—thought she was in control. She would unravel very easily, almost no challenge at all.

  A MESSAGE FOR U I-D, he typed.

  He sat on a reinforced swivel chair with optimum back support and buttock-spread, surveying a semicircle of keyboards and monitors all hooked up to separate lines and accounts, all feeding into the master monitor. When using two or more idents, he could swivel or roll from board to board, taking seconds to chameleon-shift. He could be five or six people in any given minute, dazzle a solo into thinking she—and it almost always was a she—was in a buzzing chat room with a lively crowd when she was actually alone with him, growing more vulnerable with each stroke and line, more open to his hooks and grapples, her backdoors flapping in the wind.

  I KNOW WHO U ARE

  Always a classic. Always went to the heart.

  He glanced at the leftmost screen. Still searching. No details yet. His system was usually much faster than this. Nothing on either of them, on IRENE or URSULA. They couldn’t be smart enough to cover their traces in the web, not if they were really as newbie as they seemed. Even a net-shark ace would have been caught by now. And these girls were fighting nowhere near his weight. Must be a glitch. It didn’t matter.

  I KNOW WHAT U DO

  Not DID, but DO. DID is good for specifics, but DO suggests something ongoing, -some hidden current in an ordinary life, perhaps unknown even to the user.

  U R NOT WHAT U CLAIM 2 B

  That was for sure.

  *

  U R NOT WHAT U CLAIM 2 B

  “You are not what you claim to be?” interpreted Miss Walter-David. She had become quickly skilled at picking out the spirit’s peculiar, abbreviated language. It was rather irritating, thought Irene. She was in danger of losing this sitter, of becoming the one in need of guidance.

  There was something odd about Master Mind. He—it was surely a he—was unlike other spirits, who were mostly vague children. Everything they spelled out was simplistic, yet ambiguous. She had to help them along, to tease out from the morass of whatever it was they wanted to communicate with those left behind, or more often to intuit what it was her sitters wanted or needed most to hear and to shape her reading of the messages to fit. Her fortune was built not on reaching the other world, but in manipulating it so that the right communications came across. No sitter really wanted to hear a loved one had died a meaningless death and drifted in limbo, gradually losing personality like a cloud breaking up. Though, occasionally, she had sitters who wanted to know that those they had hated in life were suffering properly in the beyond and that their miserable postmortem apologies were not accepted. Such transactions disturbed even her, though they often proved among the most rewarding financially.

  Now, Irene sensed a concrete personality. Even through almost coded, curt phrases, Master Mind was a someone, not a something. For the first time, she was close to being afraid of what she had touched.

  Master Mind was ambiguous, but through intent rather than fumble-thinking. She had a powerful impression of him, from his self-chosen title: a man on a throne, head swollen and limbs atrophied, belly bloated like a balloon, framing vast schemes, manipulating lesser beings like chess pieces. She was warier of him than even of the rare angry spirit she had called into her circle. There were defenses against him, though. She had been careful to make sure of that.

  “Ugly Hell gapes,” she remembered from Doctor Faustus. Well, not for her.

  She thought Master Mind was not a spirit at all.

  U R ALLONE

  “You are all one,” interpreted Miss Walter-David. “Whatever can that mean?”

  U R ALONE

  That was not a cryptic statement from the beyond. Before discovering her “gift,” Irene Dobson had toiled in an insurance office. She knew a typewriting mistake when she saw one.

  U R AFRAID

  “You are af—”

  “Yes, Miss Walter-David, I understand.”

  “And are you?”

  “Not anymore. Master Mind, you are a most interesting fellow, yet I cannot but feel you conceal more than you reveal. We are all, at our worst, alone and afraid. That is scarcely a great insight.”

  It was the secret of her profession, after all.

  “Are you not also alone and afraid?”

  Nothing.

  “Let me put it another way.”

  She pressed down on the planchette, and manipulated it, spelling out in his own language.

  R U NOT ALSO ALONE AND AFRAID

  She would have added a question mark, but the Ouija board had none. Spirits never asked questions, just supplied answers.

  *

  IRENE D was sharper than he had first guessed. And he still knew no more about her. No matter.

  Boyd rolled over to the next keyboard.

  U TELL HIM GRRL BCK OFF CREEP

  IRENE D: Another presence? How refreshing. And you might be?

  CARESS SISTA

  IRENE D: Another spirit?

  Presence? Spirit? Was she taking the piss?

  UH HUH SPIRT THAT’S THE STUFF SHOW THAT PIG U CAN STAND UP 4 YRSELF

  IRENE D: Another presence, but the same mode of address. I think your name might be Legion.

  Boyd knew of another net shark who used Legion as a log-on. IRENE D must have come across him too. Not the virgin she seemed, then. Damn.

  His search still couldn’t penetra
te further than her simple log-on. By now, he should have her mother’s maiden name, her menstrual calendar, the full name of the first boy she snogged at school, and a list of all the porn sites she had accessed in the last week.

  He should close down the room, seal it up forever and scuttle away. But he was being challenged, which didn’t happen often. Usually, he was content to play awhile with those he snared, scrambling their heads with what he had found out about them as his net-noose drew tauter around them. Part of the game was to siphon a little from their bank accounts: someone had to pay his phone and access bills, and he was damned if he should cough up by direct debit like some silly little newbie. But mostly it was for the sport.

  In the early days, he had been fond of co-opting idents and flooding his playmates’ systems with extreme porn or placing orders in their names for expensive but embarrassing goods and services. That now seemed crude. His current craze was doctoring and posting images. If IRENE D was married, it would be interesting to direct her husband to, say, a goat sex site where her face was convincingly overlaid upon an enthusiastic animal-lover’s body. And it was so easy to mock up mug shots, complete with guilty looks and serial numbers, to reveal an ineptly suppressed criminal past (complete with court records and other supporting documentation) that would make an employer think twice about keeping someone on the books. No one ever bothered to double-check by going back to the paper archives before they downsized a job.

  Always, he would leave memories to cherish; months later, he would check up on his net-pals—his score so far was five institutionalizations and two suicides—just to see that the experience was still vivid. He was determined to crawl into IRENE D’s skull and stay there, replicating like a virus, wiping her hard drive.

  URSULA W-D: Do you know Frank? Frank Conynghame-Mars.

  Where did that come from? Still, there couldn’t be many people floating around with a name like that. Boyd shut off the fruitless backdoor search, and copied the double-barrel into an engine. It came up instantly with a handful of matches. The first was an obituary from 1919, scanned into a newspaper database. A foolish virgin had purchased unlimited access to a great many similar archives, which was now open to Boyd. A local newspaper, the Ham&High. He was surprised. It was the World Wide Web after all. This hit was close to home—maybe only streets away—if eighty years back. He looked over the obit, and took a flyer.

  DEAD OF FLU

  URSULA W-D: Yes. She knows Frank, Madame Irena. A miracle. Have you a message from Frank? For Ursula?

  Boyd speed-read the obit. Frank Conynghame-Mars, “decorated in the late conflict,” etc. etc. Dead at thirty-eight. Engaged to a Miss Ursula Walter-David, of this parish. Could the woman be still alive? She would have to be well over a hundred.

  He launched another search. Ursula Walter-David

  Three matches. One the Conynghame-Mars obit he already had up. Second, an article from something called The Temple, from 1924—a publication of the Spiritualist Church. Third, also from the Ham&High archive, her own obit, from 1952.

  Zoinks, Scooby—a ghost!

  This was an elaborate sting. Had to be.

  He would string it along, to give him time to think.

  U WIL BE 2GETHER AGAIN 1952

  The article from The Temple was too long and close-printed to read in full while his formidable attention was divided into three or four windows. It had been scanned in badly, and not all of it was legible. The gist was a testimonial for a spiritualist medium called Madame Irena (no last name given). Among her “sitters,” satisfied customers evidently, was Ursula Walter-David.

  Weird. Boyd suspected he was being set up. He didn’t trust the matches. They must be plants. Though he couldn’t see the joins, he knew that with enough work he could run something like this—had indeed done so, feeding prospects their own mocked-up obits with full gruesome details—to get to someone. Was this a vengeance crusade? If so, he couldn’t see where it was going.

  He tried a search on MADAME IRENA and came up with hundreds of matches, mostly French and porn sites. A BD/SM video titled The Lash of Madame. Irena accounted for most of the matches. He tried pairing MADAME IRENA with + SPIRITUALIST and had a more manageable fifteen matches, including several more articles from The Temple.

  URSULA W-D: Is Frank at peace?

  He had to subdivide his concentration, again. He wasn’t quite ambidextrous, but could pump a keyboard with either hand, working shift keys with his thumbs, and split his mind into segments, eyes rolling independently like a lizard’s, to follow several lines.

  FRANK IS OVER HIS SNIFFLES

  Among the MADAME IRENA/MEDIUM matches was a Journal of the Society of Psychical Research piece from 1926, shout-lined FRAUDULENCE ALLEGED. He opened it up, and found from a news-in-brief snippet that a court case was being prepared against one Irene Dobson, known professionally as Madame Irena, for various malpractices in connection with her work as a spirit medium. One Catriona Kaye, a “serious researcher” was quoted as being “in no doubt of the woman’s genuine psychical abilities but also sure she had employed them in an unethical, indeed dangerous, manner.”

  Another match was a court record. He opened it: a declaration of the suit against Irene Dobson. Scrolling down, he found it frustratingly incomplete. The document set out what was being tried, but didn’t say how the case came out. A lot of old records were like that, incompletely scanned. Usually, he only had current files to open and process. He looked again at the legal rigmarole, and his eye was caught by Irene Dobson’s address.

  The Laburnums, Feldspar Road, Highgate.

  This was 26, Feldspar Road. There were big bushes outside. If he ran a search for laburnum.jpg, he was sure he’d get a visual match.

  Irene Dobson lived in this house.

  No, she had lived in this house. In the 1920s, before it was converted into flats. When it had a name, not a number.

  Now she was dead.

  Whoever was running this on Boyd knew where he lived. He was not going to take that.

  *

  “This new presence,” said Miss Walter-David. “It’s quite remarkable.”

  There was no new presence, no Caress. Irene would have felt a change, and hadn’t. This was one presence with several voices. She had heard of such. Invariably malign. She should call an end to the séance, plead fatigue. But Ursula Walter-David would never come back, and the husbandless woman had a private income and nothing to spend it on but the beyond. At the moment, she was satisfied enough to pay heavily for Irene’s service. She decided to stay with it, despite the dangers. Rewards were within reach. She was determined, however, to treat this cunning spirit with extreme caution. He was a tiger, posing as a pussycat. She focused on the center of the board, and was careful with the planchette, never letting its points stray beyond the ring of letters.

  “Caress,” said Miss Walter-David, a-tremble, “may I speak with Frank?”

  Caress was supposed to be a woman, but Irene thought the first voice—Master Mind—closer to the true personality.

  IN 52

  “Why 1952? It seems a terribly long way off.”

  WHEN U DIE

  That did it. Miss Walter-David pulled away as if bitten. Irene considered: it seemed only too likely that the sitter had been given the real year of her death. That was a cruel stroke, typical of the malign spirit.

  The presence was a prophet. Irene had heard of a few such spirits— one of the historical reasons for consulting mediums was to discern the future—but never come across one. Could it be that the spirits had true foreknowledge of what was to come? Or did they inhabit a realm outside time and could look in at any point in human history, future as well as past, and pass on what they saw?

  Miss Walter-David was still impressed. But less pleased.

  The planchette circled, almost entirely of its own accord. Irene could have withdrawn her fingers, but the spirit was probably strong enough to move the pointer without her. It certainly raced ahead of her push. She had
to keep the planchette in the circle.

  IRENE

  Not Irena.

  DOBSON

  Now she was frightened, but also annoyed. A private part of her person had been exposed. This was an insult and an attack.

  “Who’s Dobson?” asked Miss Walter-David.

  SHE IS

  “It is my name,” Irene admitted. “That’s no secret.”

  ISNT IT

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  HERE THERE EVERYWHERE

  “No, here and there perhaps. But not everywhere.”

  This was a strange spirit. He had aspirations to omnipotence, but something about him was over-reaching. He called himself “Master Mind,” which suggested a streak of self-deluding vanity. Knowledge wasn’t wisdom. She had a notion that if she asked him to name this year’s Derby winner, he would be able to furnish the correct answer (an idea with possibilities) but that he could reveal precious little of what came after death. An insight struck her: this was not a departed spirit, this was a living man.

  Living. But where?

  No.

  When?

  “What date is it?” she asked.

  *

  GOOD QUESTION

  Since this must be a sting, there was no harm in the truth.

  JAN 2001

  IRENE D: 1901?

  N 2001

  URSULA W-D: I thought time had no meaning in the world beyond.

  IRENE D: That depends which world beyond our guest might inhabit.