by Matt Hilton
‘How totally absurd,’ I said as I turned back to my cowering prisoner. ‘There he was crying over a grazed palm, if only poor weak Jack knew what was in store for him. I killed him, buried him instead. He’s the fucking ghost now.’
I stood over Sarah.
My vision had grown accustomed to the darkness, but still all I could make out were the whites of her wet eyes, a faint glimmer off her pearlescent teeth.
‘Ghosts no longer frighten me,’ I told her. ‘Naomi’s vengeful spirit is as pitiful as Jack’s. That window she used as her portal in and out of here? The stupid bitch shattered it, thought she could protect you by throwing a few splinters of glass at me. Well, all she did in the end was close the only door she had in and out of here. She can’t help you now, Sarah. No one can.’
Alas, Sarah wasn’t one to take my word for it. Having terrorised her for so long, forced her to run and scream like a little girl, I’d neglected to remember that she was a tough, resilient woman who wasn’t about to take her death lying down.
I also forgot that she knew exactly my weakest spot.
From her position on the floor, she stamped out with her heel and drove it into my injured knee.
The sensation of your patella forcefully misaligning, the supporting tendons and ligaments popping and twanging, ripping free from the adjoining muscles isn’t easily described. Trust me, the word “agony” doesn’t even come close. All I’ll say is that the brain doesn’t form descriptions of it, preferring instead to smother everything under an explosion of magnesium white with the intensity of a nuclear detonation. In the next second everything goes pitch black. And if you’re even spared unconsciousness it gets worse. Scarlet fills your senses – all of them - and you don’t even hear the sound of your own pitiful howls. You know nothing else.
When some lucidity returned I was on the floor, cradling my knee, sobbing like a bitch. It was probably only a few seconds since Sarah forced my knee to bend in a direction it was never designed to, but it was enough time for her to gain her feet and run for the stairs.
Shit! Why hadn’t I seen this coming? Why hadn’t I had a prophetic vision of the shadow man squirming in the dirt tending to his torn knee and, even if I couldn’t stop it happening, I would have at least been prepared for the blinding pain doomed to torment me now.
Righteous fury was strong motivation. It got me up. I yelped with every ponderous step, but made it to the exit and into the short hall to the stairs. I went up them on one foot and my palms, holding out my inured leg like a dog taking a leak. Each time I fought gravity, tried to control the bouncing weight of my leg, the pain shot from my knee to my hip and it was almost enough to make me collapse on the stairs. I raged against the pain though, the monster inside fuelling me onwards, upwards. I had to stop Sarah or the monster would be stopped.
At the head of the stairs light from the hallway flooded in.
I was relieved to see something other than the flashes of agony pulsing through my mind.
Then the light was blocked.
The shadow man was back.
He halted my exit, one arm raised.
But then I knew.
It wasn’t the shadow man at all.
It was Sarah’s backlit silhouette filling the aperture. Behind her was Naomi’s ghost, guiding her hand. Sarah peered over her shoulder at the ghost, unafraid of the apparition, who for once didn’t present bloodied or torn up. Naomi nodded once, and Sarah nodded in agreement.
It hadn’t been a good idea leaving the claw hammer lying on top of Muir’s corpse so close to hand.
With a ghostly hand steadying hers, Sarah swung hard for my head, and I barely had time to close my eyes before the monster died.
After
Take it from one who knows.
Ghosts do exist.
So do the shadow people.
They’re not shades of the past but future echoes.
If I’d paid closer attention, I would have understood earlier that those shadows were the consequences of my actions yet to come, and I still had a chance to turn away from them.
All I had to do was take my damn pills on time.
But I hadn’t, and look where it had got me.
Back in the Cayton.
After my tumble down the stairs my repressed memories had been awakened in me. Before that I’d mostly held my dark side in check, now it gave strength to the beast that had lurked in some nighted corner of my mind, released it to orchestrate the madness and violence that would follow. When Sarah – supported by Naomi - smacked me round the head with the hammer, it had felled the monster in me well and good. But Jack Newman had proven more resilient than his beastly alter ego would have given him credit for. I survived, but life came with a caveat: I had to pay the price for the crimes committed in my name. The police had arrived even before Sarah could call them, following up on the criminal damage complaint from Catriona and Mark, because it was obvious to all who’d bust up his car. I was coming round by then and had fought them, professing my innocence, but it was a hopeless battle. Because I was deemed as nutty as fruit loaf, I escaped prison, but not incarceration. I was sectioned and don’t expect to be released from this secure mental unit anytime soon, if ever.
I have to pay penance, though the notion will only be fleeting.
I’ve admitted to my part in Naomi’s death.
I’ve also owned up to doing in Peter Muir, and then trying my hardest to murder Sarah.
My honesty hasn’t gained me much pity, and no reduction in my penalty, although the extenuating circumstances of my mental illness mean I haven’t been totally reviled.
Catriona paid me a visit, and though we were now fully divorced she was sad about how things turned out between us. She said she was glad I was finally getting the care I needed. She didn’t mention the kids and I didn’t ask: she didn’t want them to know what kind of creature I’d been. Best they had only happy memories of their dad to cling to. What she really meant was it was best that they forgot all about me.
It surprised me to find that Sarah didn’t hate me. She visited me once and told me that she had forgiven me. I told her that I’d let her smack of the hammer to my head go as well, but she didn’t find it funny. Recalling the moment she’d whacked me on the skull, she paused, grew reflective.
‘Was she real, Jack?’ she finally asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw her. She held my hand. Guided me.’
‘Just like Naomi, she always hoped to bash some sense into me,’ I said, but again I didn’t elicit a laugh.
‘It was her who manipulated our phones, wasn’t it? She was leaving messages trying to warn me of what was going to happen. “I WANT YOU”. That phrase was pertinent, wasn’t it? To what happened to her?’
I didn’t reply, but she could tell by my silence that the words did indeed hold relevance.
‘The EVPs, the banging in the cupboard, the slamming doors, the screaming your neighbours heard, even when I almost drowned in the bath: she was trying to warn me,’ she went on.
‘She was warning us all,’ I admitted. ‘When she showed herself to me, she was trying to jog my memory, so that I’d recognise what I was capable of. So that I’d stop.’
‘It’s a shame neither of us paid her the attention she was due.’
‘Yeah, it’s also a shame I didn’t recognised the shadow figures as the harbingers of future events. Otherwise I could’ve stopped things before it was too late.’
‘I wish you had.’ Tears shone in her eyes.
‘We’re all wise in hindsight,’ I said.
She brightened marginally. ‘You know I once said you should reach for the unattainable? Well I did it. I took the plunge. I’ve left BathCo and started my own graphic design business.’
‘Good. I’m happy for you.’
‘Do you really mean that, Jack?’
‘You were too good to be stuck in that dead end job. I hope the contracts come rolling in.’
‘They’ve already st
arted, I’m designing the graphics on a new website for -’ she stopped, the words catching in her throat.
‘Your Facebook friends,’ I finished for her. I sat back and folded my hands in my lap. I’d have thought Steve Walker’s nose would have been knocked out of joint with jealousy, seeing as Sarah was now far more experienced at this paranormal stuff than him. ‘How is Smarmy Steve, these days?’
Sarah understood it was time for her to leave. A thick plexi-glass window separated us, and when she touched her fingers to it in goodbye I didn’t bother touching mine to the other side. What was the point? Sarah smiled sadly, and then she was gone. One thing that gave me satisfaction was that she wouldn’t be as vengeful as my first girlfriend has proved.
Naomi Woodall’s ghost still troubles me. You’d think she wouldn’t have to. She’d done what she set out to do: saved Sarah King, and received the justice she deserved for her murder. Her spirit no longer lingers on our plain; she can pass on to wherever spirits at peace are supposed to go, but she can come back whenever she wants. Apparently the stained glass window hadn’t been the sole portal in and out of the other side.
My psychiatrists have tried to convince me that I’m deluded, and once the cocktail of lithium, benzodiazepines and antipsychotic drugs kick in and I can manage my “mixed affective episodes” once more, then I’ll again be my old sceptical self. Ghosts don’t exist, they promise. Dead means dead.
They should try telling that to Naomi.
Ghosts can visit at will, and the locked doors of a secure psychiatric unit won’t stop them. She’s proved that nightly since I arrived here. She doesn’t do much, just glares at me from the corner of the room, mouthing silent threats. Peter Muir is there alongside her, staring through the cracked lenses of his broken glasses. Blood constantly pulses from the indentations I put in his skull with the hammer. I know he wants to hurt me in return, but is biding his time. He wants me to suffer his ire first. He’s angry, and I can’t really blame him. He’s a vengeful ghost for sure. He also mouths silent words at me. Maybe if I had a digital recorder handy I’d hear their words, but I don’t. It doesn’t matter. I can do without hearing their bitching. I don’t expect forgiveness from either of them, but neither do I care and that’s what pisses them off the most.
There’s a reason they’re here: they know I’m not taking my meds. As soon as my nurse’s back is turned, I stick a finger down my throat and bring up my pills, flushing them down the toilet with the vomit. Who needs them when I understand what they subdue?
I’ve seen my shadow self. Before this I was always a puppet to his will, but this time his actions are fully orchestrated by me.
He runs through the halls of the Cayton, laying about him with what looks to be a shadow axe. Other shadows try to stop him – the future shadows of my doctors, nurses and orderlies - but they all fall under the axe’s sharp edge. He disappears after smashing his way through an exit door. He escapes.
Naomi and Muir don’t try to warn my doctors, it’s pointless. Even if they’re seen or their whispering voices are heard, who is going to believe their senses? Not one of the medical staff, for fear they’d end up on the other side of a locked door. Even if someone did pay attention to them, those spirits would be wasting their time: my freedom is ordained, it’s only a matter of time. From observing the precognitive actions of my shadow self I’ve learned that a fire axe hangs in the administration block. My shadow has shown me the way, and what must be done to ensure my escape. All I need do is find a way to that axe and cut my way out of here. Once it’s done, and those doctors and nurses stupid enough to try to stop me have fallen beneath the axe, I suppose a few more vengeful ghosts will haunt me. But that’s a penance I am prepared to pay.
Acknowledgements and Thanks.
During the writing of this novel I have used quotes from "Antigonish" by (William) Hughes Mearns (1875-1965).
Thanks to the teams from ‘Ghost North-East’ and ‘Near Dark Paranormal Investigations’ for allowing me to join them in their ghost hunting and paranormal investigations while I was researching this novel.
Thanks to Nicola Birrell-Smith for her exemplary work in designing the cover. Thanks also to Tracey Shaw, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Claire Lawler, Jonathan Davison, Kestrel Carroll, Lisa Elphick, Lynn Doyle, Lois Wacey, Bex Bagot, Dominic Adler and Warwick Kay for being enthusiastic readers and putting in their tuppence worth on this story. Huge thanks as ever to Luigi and Alison of Luigi Bonomi Associates (literary agents) who also made this book a much better read.
This novel is based on true events, and actual paranormal investigative practices and findings, but names, locations and dates have been changed, and some incidents added or exaggerated for extra drama.
About the Author
Matt Hilton quit his career as a police officer to pursue his love of writing tight, cinematic American-style thrillers. He is the author of the high-octane Joe Hunter thriller series, including his most recent novel ‘The Lawless Kind’ – Joe Hunter 9 - published in January 2014 by Hodder and Stoughton. His first book, ‘Dead Men’s Dust’, was shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers’ Debut Book of 2009 Award, and was a Sunday Times bestseller, also being named as a ‘thriller of the year 2009’ by The Daily Telegraph. Dead Men’s Dust was also a top ten Kindle bestseller in 2013. The Joe Hunter series is widely published by Hodder and Stoughton in UK territories, and by William Morrow and Company in the USA, and have been translated into German, Italian, Romanian and Bulgarian. As well as the Joe Hunter series, Matt has been published in a number of anthologies and collections, and has published three previous novels in the supernatural/horror genre, namely ‘Preternatural’, ‘Dominion’, and ‘Darkest Hour’.
www.matthiltonbooks.com
Other Books by Matt Hilton
Joe Hunter Books:
Dead Men’s Dust
Judgement and Wrath
Slash and Burn
Cut and Run
Blood and Ashes
Dead Men’s Harvest
No Going Back
Rules of Honour
The Lawless Kind
The Devil’s Anvil (Summer 2015)
Joe Hunter E-book short stories:
Six of the Best
Dead Fall
Red Stripes
Instant Justice and other Action-packed Tales
Horror:
Dominion
Darkest Hour
Preternatural
The Shadows Call
Booze and Ooze (Short Story)
One Twisted Voice (Collection of short stories)
Young Adult:
Mark Darrow and the Stealer of Souls
Collections:
Holiday of the Dead (writing as Vallon Jackson)
Even More Tonto Short Stories
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime Volume 9
Death Toll 2
Uncommon Assassins
True Brit Grit
Grand Central Noir
Blood Bath
Off the Record 2 – At the Movies
Dirk Ramm: Suited and Booted
Action: Pulse Pounding Tales Vol 1
Action: Pulse Pounding Tales Vol 2