by Allyson Bird
Once outside her home she nervously glanced up at the bedroom curtains, unlocked the door and sat on her stairs clutching the shopping bags and the wine. Her head was exploding with images of people and things that should not be there. What was happening to her? Was Maitland behind it all? Or was she going mad? Seated on the stairs she started a steady rocking motion to comfort herself. Then she pulled the skirt and the trousers out of the bag, wondering which to wear for protection—green is good isn’t it—the colour of life. That might help—will it?
Alice burst into tears. Was the whole of the ghost world trying to get her attention? She was terrified. She dared not look over her shoulder and that rotten smell was still there.
She went through the house, too terrified to sit still for long. Alice felt compelled to throw some of her most-valued possessions out in the trash can: the radio her mother had bought her; the porcelain figure of the little child she had treasured; the wedding cards that she said she would never throw away, until now.
“They all have to go,” she said sadly. Was this a precursor to her departure, and if so to where?
She almost threw out the manuscript that she had written, based on the Lancashire Witch Trials in seventeenth century England, but in the end some stronger impulse saved that.
Once done with the cleansing she felt exhausted. She heard the phone ring—that would be her husband—but she ignored it. She would sort this out herself. Alice opened the wine, poured a large glass, took it upstairs with her and sat down upon the bed. She briefly closed her eyes and sensed the great rushing of Maitland’s face coming towards hers at break-neck speed.
“Boo!”
With that simple, childish word coming out of nowhere Alice held her breath as she looked into the dressing table mirror. The weak sunlight of a February afternoon lit the room and in the mirror, for a brief second, she could see the form of a man dressed in black.
Once more she fled her house, leaving the door open behind her. She had no fear of the living, just of the dead—or her own madness. She tried to cross Delaware Road but found it difficult to do so, on account of a man in a dark overcoat standing so close to her, whose proximity scared her half to death.
Halfway there, Alice thought; but to where?
She backed away from the edge of the road and jumped instinctively as someone tugged at her arm.
“Are you all right, Miss? You don’t seem okay to me.” A cop was staring hard at her. She could see in his eyes that he was wondering if she were in trouble or if she were simply unwell and needed help in crossing the road.
“Can’t you see him, can’t you see the man?” she started.
“What man, Miss?”
“The man standing right next to you.”
The cop looked around behind him. “There’s only you and me here.”
Alice didn’t say anything as the tears once more streamed down her face. She had done a lot of crying that day. The cop helped her to cross the road and she wandered aimlessly into the park, and sat down on a bench. As the snow gathered and settled on her green coat she shivered until her lips turned blue with the cold. Far across the park, children were coming out of school, and Alice thought she saw her sister pick up Ellis and Ben. They never came across the park and so they would not see her. She closed her eyes and whispered a silent prayer.
She saw Walter Maitland just one more time.
Ellis and Ben never saw their mother again.
A body was found just north of town—or what was left of it after the dogs had been at it.
In the spring Maitland found a new ‘Alice’, for he had become nostalgic and realised that he missed the old one. Her name was Anne and she was an assistant in a drug store. She invited him over for dinner and whilst he sipped his red wine he thought about the new games he would devise for her. Maitland heard the rattle of knives in a kitchen drawer, just before he fell into unconsciousness.
In the kitchen, Anne made cinnamon coffee and nodded in agreement with the other woman, who spoke to her earnestly and then faded away into the shadows.
The Bone Grinder
“She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have,
Fell sick and died, In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.”
“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti.
The British rarely go into detail about death and it came as a shock to Christy when she went to Blackstock’s funeral parlour to pick up her mother’s ashes, that they weren’t ashes at all, just small bits of ground up bone—a light colour of brown—all that was left of the small, fragile old woman.
In her grief Christy couldn’t make her mind up where to put her mother’s bits of bone, until they were to be interred at St. Mary’s Church in Prestwich, Manchester. The remains came in a brown plastic container with a screw-on lid. The container was larger than she thought it would be, half the size of an upended bread bin. Christy would unscrew it every day to look at her mother, being very careful not to spill any of her out on the kitchen floor. There was no smell of death; just her mother’s leftover life.
Christy felt old at forty. Those two hours that she had stayed with her mother after she died had aged Christy, without doubt. As her mother took her last breath Christy was horrified to see the years rush into her mother’s lovely face and her tongue start to turn black around the edge. Christy had felt Death brush by her cheek, making her feel defenseless and afraid.
For a time she kept the brown container on the bookshelf in the living room…then in the garage. But it was chilling and impersonal in there, and at one point she even had it in the car, until the day she had to say farewell forever. Christy had heard of relatives who never gave up their dead, who could not stand for them to be mixed up with everyone else in the garden of remembrance. Her mother would have her own special place in St. Mary’s graveyard, under the oldest of oak trees which was bent and weather worn, its lower branches spread wide over its charges, as if gathering them together for safe keeping.
Macabre books and films had engrossed Christy after her mother’s death. She had never actually been to see The Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel, which was underneath the cemetery in the Czech Republic, but she had seen a programme about it on TV, and the memories had stayed with her.
In the nineteenth century an artist had been commissioned by the Schwarzenberg noble family to sort the bones out. He placed thousands of human bones in four neat mounds in each corner of the chapel, made a coat of arms for the family and hung in the centre of the nave a chandelier that contained every bone in the human skeleton.
After the programme that night Christy had the nightmare
She felt a heavy, shifting weight pressing her down. She could just about push her hand up between skulls and bones; the hideous mass of bones moved with a gravel sound when she did so. Once at the top she could see by the light of the grim, bone chandelier the avalanche of grisly remains that she had managed to free herself from. Christy struggled to hold back the bile in her throat. The compulsion to be sick was strong but her reverence for the dead was even stronger. She would not further defile the bones.
That nightmare was two years ago now.
Christy had since taken on the job of a Duty Manager at the Mortimer Hotel in Manchester, where a number of waitresses came and went from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, all working for minimum wage. Not all Eastern European women were sold into sex slavery it seemed, though Christy had read on the net about the impromptu slave market raided outside the coffee shop in Heathrow. Money had changed hands before the police had broken it up and they had taken the young girl away into protective custody. It seemed that the going rate was four thousand pounds per girl and the girls fell into it because of threats to their families. Passports were taken off some girls an
d given to others from non-EU countries like the Ukraine and Moldova.
Christy shivered and was relieved to think that her girls (the waitresses Janina, Marija, Ona, Gabriele, Evelina, and Auguste) were at least safe for the time being from prostitution. Others were not so lucky, and recently Kamile had left abruptly. Christy liked to believe that they went home—as some did—when they were homesick. Some girls left without giving notice but whilst they were there, they worked hard and complained little.
The Mortimer Hotel, with its sixty basic bedrooms, was mostly for businessmen and overnight visitors to Manchester—but not the sort of place to stay in for more than one night. For thirty quid one couldn’t expect much. Apparently the hotel had been renovated recently and Christy had taken the job a week or so after. She wasn’t crazy about the work but her husband, Paul, was pulling his weight and she wanted to get the credit cards down to a manageable level.
Occasionally the hotel was open to anyone off the street for Soul Night, or other such lacklustre event. Up until now Christy had only been working the day shift, where she’d heard some complaints about noise in the early hours on a Saturday morning. But her shift didn’t start until Monday, and the people who complained at the weekend had usually left by then. Betty, one of the old cleaners, had said something about complaints concerning unusual noises, and recently some filthy, bloody bandages had been left in the sink of room thirty-two. It was a cheap hotel after all.
On Monday morning Gabriele, one of the more able girls, had cooked limp bacon and underdone eggs again.
“Gabriele, you need to leave it in the pan longer, get it crispy, and cook it longer—do you know what I mean?”
The pretty Lithuanian girl smiled her most You-have-to-forgive-me-because-I’m-still-new-and-foreign sort of smile and Christy left it at that for the time being. The minimum wage wasn’t much to survive on, although the girls did live very cheaply up in the old attic bedrooms of the hotel. Unless Gabriele actually did cause an outbreak of food poisoning, Christy wasn’t going to get too arsey about it.
“Cook it for longer, longeeer, okay Gabriele?”
Gabriele nodded enthusiastically, “Okay Christy,”—and proceeded to dish out the undercooked bacon again.
Perhaps that is the way they cook bacon in Lithuania, thought Christy.
She spun on the spot, recalling that she had come into the kitchen for another reason.
“Where is Marija this morning?” Gabriele’s smile dropped quickly from her face and she shrugged.
“Have you seen her?”
“No Christy, perhaps she not wake-up.”
With a last, disappointed look at the breakfast Gabriele was taking out to a soon-to-be-unsatisfied guest in the dining room, Christy took the lift up to the fifth floor of the hotel. Here were the dingy and neglected staff bedrooms; the staff who usually rose early in the mornings. That is, if they hadn’t left for other jobs.
Perhaps that is what had happened to Marija, thought Christy.
Marija’s room was number fifty-eight, at the end of the dismal corridor that had not benefited from the meagre renovation programme. The carpet was a dark grey, covered with equally dark brown stains, and one in particular reminded her of the silhouette of John Hurt in his grotesque role as The Elephant Man.
Christy rarely ventured into this part of the hotel.
Before her time as a manager a young girl had committed suicide in one of the rooms. Christy didn’t know the details, nor which room it was. Perhaps it was the room she now approached.
She knocked on number fifty-eight. No answer. She knocked again. Still no answer. She took the passkey out of her pocket and unlocked the door. There wasn’t a particularly bad smell—just stale cigarette smoke mostly, and damp. Christy switched on the light.
A few posters adorned the walls. A cream-coloured lamp barely lit the travel posters, which offered paper promises of happiness in exotic destinations, such as Bali and the Maldives. An old wardrobe stood sentinel in the corner and a teak-coloured dressing table sat by one wall. On top of the dressing table was a three-panelled mirror—a trinity of three mirrors. Christy’s mother used to have one. She could angle the side mirrors to see different parts of herself. Christy had used the mirror to look at her naked body when entering puberty, at the time when most youngsters explored the quickly developing parts of their body.
The bed had been stripped and an old mattress lay uncovered. Here, the memories of everything that had ever happened on it were traced within the cover and deep in the heart of the springs. No clothes, nothing personal left over, nothing to suggest that a human being had ever been content in that room. How could they be? It was a room without windows situated in the upper part of the hotel. A tiny attic room, in which a window would have been welcome, to at least let through one ray of sunshine and offer its occupant some hope.
As Christy stood in front of the three panelled mirror she smoothed out her work clothes and tidied her hair, noting that she would need to colour out the grey soon.
She became aware of movement in the mirror.
A figure slowly appeared behind her left shoulder, black hair floating around a pale visage. It lingered long enough for Christy to recognise the look of despair and pain on its shriven face, and then it was gone.
Christy had never in her life been more afraid as in that moment. She ran to the door, stumbled, regained her balance and attempted to open the door, fingers trembling. It wouldn’t open and she could smell the cold, charnel house breath of something long dead and felt the icy touch of an insistent hand upon her shoulder. She fought to tell herself that it wasn’t happening, that there wasn’t anything there. She tried to block out the experience—as it was happening. For behind her, pulling her now by her waist as if it wanted to combine its icy death with her still warm life…was something.
“Stop this. Stop this.” The words more hissed than spoken from some unseen thing.
Christy struggled to turn around and push whatever it was that was holding her by the waist. She saw nothing, but then felt the reluctant letting go of invisible hands and heard a low, soft moan, now over near the dressing table. Another attempt at the door and this time it gave. She ran without closing it behind her, through the tepid light, and into the partial darkness of the stairwell.
On the next floor down Christy steadied herself in the well-lit corridor where the guest rooms were. Tight lipped and telling herself that it never happened, for the last half an hour of her shift she busied herself with paperwork at the front desk, close to the main entrance and the street.
As Christy left the Mortimer Hotel that evening she put up her umbrella. Nervous and still in denial, she welcomed the cold air. It was already dark and raining. She pulled the collar of her coat up around her neck to keep out the cold and hurried along the pavement, careful to dodge the puddles and keep as dry as possible. The rain ferociously pounded the road and sidewalks, as if demanding immediate entrance to the concrete. In the distance, just a little way past the street where her old mini was parked, she could hear raised voices.
Through the pelting rain she saw two figures: a man pulling at a woman’s arm and dragging her towards a car, where another man sat behind the steering wheel. The driver shouted something at the other man, which had the effect of heightening the tension between the three. The girl screamed and Christy started to dash forward, but held back as the girl was bundled into the car and driven off, away from Cooper Street. Christy was unable to get the number. She thought she could have been mistaken, but the girl looked like Kamile, the waitress who had left her job a few weeks earlier.
Christy fumbled in her pocket for her mobile phone and called the police, explaining what had happened. But they didn’t seem interested, stating simply that they would send a spare car around the area when they had one, which she knew meant never.
The next morning another girl, Janina, didn’t turn up for her shift and Christy nervously sent one of the maids to check her room. The maid found t
hat most of Janina’s clothes were still there. Christy phoned the police again. This time they came round straight away, took a few details, noted that the girl had not been in the country long, and went on their way.
Reluctantly, Christy phoned the agency for another girl. They agreed quickly but that didn’t satisfy her. Girls couldn’t go on disappearing day after day and just be replaced as if they were practically worthless. She would go and see if she could find Kamile and see if she wanted her old job back.
That evening Christy drove around the streets of Manchester trying to find Kamile, knowing it could be a useless effort and doubting that she would come back. The girls never came back. It was a bitter night and the rain of the previous evening had been replaced by a scattering of snow.
Not far from where she had seen her last time, Christy believed she saw Kamile again, talking to a man before getting into his car. Christy recognised him as one of the men who had hauled a girl into that same car the night before. This time Christy had a chance to follow. She tried to drive just far enough behind to keep up but not be too obvious. People, for all their evil acts, could be seen—and what you could see perhaps you could do something about. Christy liked Kamile and didn’t want her in any kind of trouble.
After a few minutes or so the abductor’s car pulled onto a road between two high gate posts. It was a familiar place to Christy, as the road led to the crematorium where they had burnt her mother’s body. Leaving her car a little way down the road, away from the main entrance, she looked for another way in.