Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Boyd had run searches on “Irene Dobson” and his own address, independent and cross-matching. Too many matches were coming up. He wished more people had names like “Frank Conynghame-Mars” and fewer like “Irene Dobson.” “Boyd Waylo,” his birth-name, was a deep secret; his accounts were all in names like “John Barrett” and “Andrew Lee.”

  Beyond the ring of monitors, his den was dark. This was the largest room in what had once been a Victorian town house, and was now divided into three flats. Was this where “Madame Irena” had held her séances? His raised ground-floor flat might encompass the old parlor.

  He was supposed to believe he was in touch with the past.

  One of the Irene Dobson matches was a .jpg. He opened the picture file, and looked into a small, determined face. Not his type, but surprising and striking. Her hair was covered by a turban and she wore a Chinese-style jacket, buttoned up to the throat. She looked rather prosperous, and was smoking a black cigarette in a long white holder. The image was from 1927. Was that when she was supposed to be talking to him from?

  WHAT DATE 4 U

  IRENE D: January 13, 1923. Of course.

  Maybe he was supposed to bombard her with questions about the period, to try and catch her out in an anachronism. But he had only general knowledge: Prohibition in America, a General Strike in Britain, talking pictures in 1927, the Lindbergh flight somewhere earlier, the stock market crash a year or two later, Thoroughly Modern Millie and PG. Wodehouse. Not a lot of use. He couldn’t even remember who was prime minister in January 1923. He could get answers from the net in moments, though; knowing things was pointless compared with knowing how to find things out. At the moment, that didn’t help him.

  Whoever these women were—or rather, whoever this IRENE D was, for URSULA W-D plainly didn’t count—he was sure that they’d have the answers for any questions he came up with.

  What was the point of this?

  He could get to IRENE D. Despite everything, he had her. She was in his room; she was his prey and meat, and he would not let her challenge him.

  ICU

  *

  ICU

  I see you.

  Irene thought that was a lie, but Master Mind could almost certainly hear her. Though, as with real spirits, she wondered if the words came to him as human sounds or in some other manner.

  The parlor was almost completely dark, save for a cone of light about the table.

  Miss Walter-David was terrified, on the point of fleeing. That was for the best, but there was a service Irene needed of her.

  She did not say it out loud, for Master Mind would hear.

  He said he could see, but she thought she could conceal her hand from him.

  It was an awkward move. She put the fingers of her left hand on the shivering planchette, which was racing inside the circle, darting at the letters, trying to break free.

  I C U ID

  I C UR FRIT

  She slipped a pocketbook out of her cardigan, opened it one-handed and pressed it to her thigh with the heel of her hand while extracting the pencil from the spine with her fingernails. It was not an easy thing to manage.

  U R FRIT AND FRAUD

  This was just raving. She wrote a note, blind. She was trusting Miss Walter-David to read her scrawl. It was strange what mattered.

  “This is no longer Caress,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Have we another visitor?”

  2TRU IM SNAKE

  “Im? Ah-ha, ‘I’m’ Snake? Yet another speaker of this peculiar dialect, with unconventional ideas about spelling.”

  Miss Walter-David was backing away. She was out of her seat, retreating into darkness. Irene offered her the pocketbook, opened to the message. The sitter didn’t want to take it. She opened her mouth. Irene shook her head, shushing her. Miss Walter-David took the book, and peered in the dark. Irene was afraid the silly goose would read out loud, but she at least half-understood.

  On a dresser nearby was a tea tray, with four glasses of distilled water and four curls of chain. Bicycle chain, as it happened. Irene had asked Miss Walter-David to bring the tray to the Ouija table.

  “Snake, do you know things? Things yet to happen?”

  2TRU

  “A useful accomplishment.”

  NDD

  “Indeed?”

  2RIT

  There was a clatter. Miss Walter-David had withdrawn. Irene wondered if she would pay for the séance. She might. After all, there had been results. She had learned something, though nothing to make her happy.

  “Miss Walter-David will die in 1952?”

  Y

  Back to Y. She preferred that to 2TRU and 2RIT.

  “Of what?”

  A pause.

  PNEU

  “Pneumonia, thank you.”

  Her arm was getting worn out, dragged around the circle. Her shoulder ached. Doing this one-handed was not easy. She had already set out the glasses at the four points of the compass, and was working on the chains. It was important that the ends be dipped in the glasses to make the connections, but that the two ends in each glass not touch. This was more like physics than spiritualism, but she understood it made sense.

  “What else do you know?”

  U R FRAUD

  “I don’t think so. Tell me about the future. Not 2001. The useful future, within the next five or ten years.”

  STOK MRKT CRSH 29

  “That’s worth knowing. You can tell me about stocks and shares?”

  Y

  It was a subject of which she knew nothing, but she could learn. She had an idea that there were easier and less obtrusive fortunes to be made there than in Derby winners. But she would get the names out of him, too.

  “Horse races?”

  A hesitation.

  Y

  The presence was less frisky, sliding easily about the circle, not trying to break free.

  “This year’s Derby?”

  *

  A simple search (Epsom + Derby + winner +1923 - Kentucky) had no matches; he took out Kentucky, and had a few hits, and an explanation. Papyrus, the 1923 winner, was the first horse to run in both the Epsom and Kentucky Derby races, though the nag lost in the States, scuppering a possible chance for a nice long-shot accumulator bet if he really was giving a woman from the past a hot tip on the future. Boyd fed that all to IRENE D, still playing along, still not seeing the point. She received slowly, as if her system were taking one letter at a time.

  Click. It wasn’t a monitor. It was an Ouija board.

  That was what he was supposed to think.

  IRENE D: I’m going to give you another name. I should like you to tell me what you know of this man.

  OK

  IRENE D: Anthony Tallgarth. Also, Basil and Florence Tallgarth.

  He ran multiple searches and got a cluster of matches, mostly from the ‘20s—though there were birth and death announcements from the 1860s through to 1968—and, again, mostly from the Ham&High. He picked one dated February 2, 1923, and opened the article.

  TYCOON FINDS LOST SON

  IRENE D: Where is Anthony? Now.

  According to the article, Anthony was enlisted in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman, under the name of T.A. Meredith, stationed at Portsmouth and due to ship out aboard the H.M.S. Duckett. He had parted from his wealthy parents after a scandal and a quarrel— since the brat had gone into the Navy, Boyd bet he was gay—but been discovered through the efforts of a “noted local spiritualist and seeress.” A reconciliation was effected.

  He’d had enough of this game. He wasn’t going to play anymore.

  He rolled back in his chair, and hit an invisible wall.

  IRENE D: I should tell you, Master Mind, that you are bound. With iron and holy water. I shall extend your circle, if you cooperate.

  He tried reaching out, through the wall, and his hand was bathed with pain.

  IRENE D: I do not know how you feel, if you can feel, but I will wager that you do not care for that.

&
nbsp; It was as if she was watching him. Him!

  IRENE D: Now, be a good little ghosty and tell me what I wish to know.

  With his right hand lodged in his left armpit as the pain went away, he made keystrokes with his left hand, transferring the information she needed. It took a long time, a letter at a time.

  IRENE D: There must be a way of replacing this board with a typewriter. That would be more comfortable for you, would it not?

  FO, he typed.

  A lash at his back, as the wall constricted. She had understood that. Was that a very 1923 womanly quality?

  IRENE D: Manners, manners. If you are good to me, I shall let you have the freedom of this room, maybe this floor. I can procure longer chains.

  He was a shark in a play pool, furious and humiliated and in pain. And he knew it would last.

  *

  Mr. and Mrs. Tallgarth had been most generous. She could afford to give Master Mind the run of the parlor, and took care to refresh his water-bindings each day. This was not a task she would ever entrust to the new maid. The key to the parlor was about Irene’s person at all times.

  People would pay to be in contact with the dead, but they would pay more for other services, information of more use in the here and now. And she had a good line on all manner of things. She had been testing Master Mind, and found him a useful source about a wide variety of subjects, from the minutiae of any common person’s life to the great matters which were to come in the rest of the century.

  Actually, knowing which horse would win any year’s Derby was a comparatively minor advantage. Papyrus was bound to be the favorite, and the race too famous for any fortune to be made. She had her genie working on long-shot winners of lesser races, and was sparing in her use of the trick. Bookmakers were the sort of sharp people she understood only too well, and would soon tumble to any streak of unnatural luck. From now on, for a great many reasons, she intended to be as unobtrusive as possible.

  This morning, she had been making a will. She had no interest in the disposal of her assets after death, when she herself ventured beyond the veil, for she intended to make the most of them while alive. The entirety of her estate was left to her firm of solicitors on the unusual condition that, when she passed, no record or announcement of her death be made, even on her gravestone. It was not beyond possibility that she mightn’t make it to 2001, though she knew she would be gone from this house by then. From now on, she would be careful about official mentions of her name; to be nameless, she understood, was to be invisible to Master Mind, and she needed her life to be shielded from him as his was from hers.

  The man had intended her harm, but he was her genie now, in her bottle.

  She sat at the table, and put her hands on the planchette, feeling the familiar press of resistance against her.

  “Is there anybody there?”

  YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

  “Temper temper, Master Mind. Today, I should like to know more about stocks and shares …”

  *

  Food was brought to him from the online grocery, handed over at the front door. He was a shut-in forever now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had stepped outside his flat; it had been days before IRENE D, maybe weeks. It wasn’t like he had ever needed to post a letter or go to a bank.

  Boyd had found the chains. They were still here, fixed into the skirting boards, running under the doorway, rusted at the ends, where the water traps had been. It didn’t matter that the water had run out years ago. He was still bound.

  Searches told him little more of Irene Dobson. At least he knew someone would have her in court in four years time—a surprise he would let her have—but he had no hopes that she would be impeded. He had found traces of her well into the 1960s, lastly a piece from 1968 that didn’t use her name but did mention her guiding spirit, Master Mind, to whom she owed so much over the course of her long and successful career as a medium, seer, and psychic sleuth.

  From 1923 to 1968. Forty-five years. Real time. Their link was constant, and he moved forward as she did, a day for a day.

  Irene Dobson’s spirit guide had stayed with her at least that long.

  Not forever. Forty-five years.

  He had tried false information, hoping to ruin her—if she was cast out of her house (though she was still in it in 1927, he remembered), he would be free—but she always saw through it and could punish him.

  He had tried going silent, shutting everything down. But he always had to boot up again, to be online. It was more than a compulsion. It was a need. In theory, he could stop paying electricity and phone bills— rather, stop other people paying his—and be cut off eventually, but in theory he could stop himself breathing and suffocate. It just wasn’t in him. His meat had rarely left the house anyway, and as a reward for telling her about the extra-marital private habits of a husband whose avaricious wife was one of her sitters, she had extended his bindings to the hallway and—thank heavens—the toilet.

  She had his full attention.

  IRENE D: Is there anybody there?

  Y DAMNIT Y

  <>

  *

  Wait

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of the novels Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay inevitable, Blonde on a Stick, and Loss of Separation.

  He has written more than 100 short stories, some of which are collected in Use Once Then Destroy and the forthcoming Open Heart Surgery.

  Williams has won the Littlewood Arc prize and the International Horror Guild Award, and is a three-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award. His first edited anthology, Gutshot: Weird West Tales, recently appeared from PS Publishing.

  “‘Wait’ came about directly after a visit to Poole’s Cavern in Buxton, Derbyshire,” the author explains. “At the end of the system is a boulder choke. A radar scan in 1999 established that a greater network of chambers lies beyond it.

  “It was quite awe-inspiring to think that we were feet away from a place that has not been seen by human eyes since the glaciers carved it out two million years ago.

  “And then I began to think about means of access and how every entrance can also be an exit…”

  THE SNOW HAD NEVER really gone away. It swirled in his head, in memories of Julie’s cheap little ornament. And here was the same whitened motorway turnoff. Here the same crystallized countryside swelling against the verge. He had to stop the car at the accident site, although he had persuaded himself over the three-hour duration of his drive up here that he would not.

  He parked in a lay-by and walked back. The telegraph post was no longer there. The car had almost torn it out of the ground, and might have done so had it not destroyed the passenger side of the car first.

  Julie had not stood a chance.

  The doctors he spoke to reassured him that she was unlikely to have felt anything, the impact was so swift, so massive. There was nothing to suggest an accident had taken place here.

  Don had received a face full of broken glass, but he was otherwise unmarked. He could walk. He could get in and out of bed. He could turn his head. Everything that Julie could not. Even the cuts on his face had healed without leaving obvious scars. The scar he needed to heal was inside him. That was partly the reason for this trip. To confront the moment of his wife’s death, and to carry on to the place they had meant to be journeying. To find a way forward.

  They had been a scant ten minutes away from Sheckford, that awful day. Now Don went back to the car and switched on the engine. He pulled out into the road. A blade of sunshine sliced through clouds and turned the snow golden. Apart from the streak of red far off in the distance, on one of the hills surrounding the town.

  A lorry thundered by him, dragging up a great fan of slush that covered his windscreen, blinding him for a moment. His heart racing, he cleared the filth from the glass, his head full of collisions and the feel of all those icy pebbles of windscreen assaulting his face. The shock of cold air as his car was
bisected. No scream. No sounds at all.

  Now the red was gone from the hill. Or maybe it was a different hill, a different angle, an illusion formed by the sun and the strange refracted light coming off the crystals of snow and ice.

  Maybe it was in his own eyes.

  The doctor had explained to him that all that exploded glass had to go somewhere. There would have been some splinters he wouldn’t even feel. The force of the impact would have sent them into his flesh so fast, so smoothly, that there would have been no blood. There was the likelihood that he would carry minute slivers of glass around in his flesh for the rest of his life. Some survivors of bomb blasts, he was told, had suffered hundreds of tiny splinters of glass passing right through their bodies.

  He was a year further away from her. He was a year closer to her.

  Don would not let himself get distracted again. He completed his journey concentrating fully on his driving, checking his speed, his rearview mirrors and keeping his hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel. He let out a long, low sigh when he arrived at the hotel car park and turned the engine off. He listened to it ticking like some horrible countdown. Keep busy. Keep moving.

  He got out of the car and strode past a woman holding a leash, calling into a clump of bushes for a dog that would not come. From the sounds of her, she’d been calling for some time. A red glove came up and rubbed at her face, perhaps in an attempt to coax the worry from it.

  He checked into the hotel and tossed his suitcase onto the bed. The exact room they would have taken a year previously.

  Why are you doing this to yourself?