The Lost Son: A Supernatural Novel of Suspense

by Matt Shaw

  The second hyperlink followed, after pressing the ‘back’ button on the browser, wasn’t much good either. According to this person - your house is protected from ghosts if you surround yourself with positive energy. Clearly this doesn’t work. If it did work - the ghost would have moved out as soon as Emily and Jason had moved in as it was the happiest time of their lives, especially with it being so close to their wedding day which they were both still buzzing about.

  The third hyperlink from the main page offered little hope too. Surround your house with salt is bad for slugs but probably fine for spirits. Surely if salt, of all things, was bad for them - Josh wouldn’t have been so keen to play with a salt shaker.

  “This is ridiculous,” Emily moaned as she hit the back button once more.

  Ask it to leave - a suggestion on the next page. Emily sighed.

  A further scout around the pages on offer gave numerous explanations as to why the spirit may have remained in the house, instead of going over to the other side, but none of them offered sensible suggestions - at least ones Emily believed in - as to how to get rid of it.

  ...it is not uncommon for Full Moon Magic users like myself to pray to a tree for protection and guidance...

  “What the fuck,” Emily sighed once more. She closed the browser down and pushed her keyboard off the table out of frustration - only calming down when she realised she had actually broken it. “For God’s sake! Stupid woman!” she berated herself.

  She bent over and picked the keyboard up, along with the space bar which had slid a little further away from the keyboard. Thankfully, fixing it was simply a question of pushing the bar back onto the main board. She gave it a few test pushes and smiled to herself when she realised it was fixed.

  The door suddenly opened with no warning and Emily jumped as Annie stepped into the room.

  “You scared the shit out of me!” she said when she realised it was just Annie. “I thought you were at the pub with the others?”

  “I decided to stay and talk. Clearly you’re having issues at the moment,” said Annie as she sat down on the same seat she had taken earlier.

  “I’m fine,” said Emily, “just going through a rough patch.”

  “You’re talking about ghosts,” Annie pointed out, “clearly you’re not fine.”

  Emily came clean, “I was actually just Googling how to get rid of them. Pages and pages of rubbish. One person said you should ask a tree for protection. Another person mentioned salt.”

  “Like bath salts? Don’t they turn you into a zombie if you eat them?”

  “First of all - you are meant to put it around the house and not eat it. Secondly they didn’t mention bath salts in particular...Just salt. Thirdly...Zombies? Really?”

  “Oh you don’t believe in zombies but ghosts are okay?”

  Emily sat back in her chair with a sad expression on her face, “Am I losing my mind?”

  “If it were just you - I’d say yes you were but...You said Jason knows about the ghost too? Unless you think he could just be humouring you?”

  “He’s the one who showed me in the first place. He set up a Ouija board in the kitchen. Then there’s the time I came home and found him playing Scalextric with it.”

  “Scalextric?”

  “He found one in the loft. Apparently Josh directed him to it and wanted to play.”

  “I don’t know,” said Annie, “it sounds kind of sweet.”

  “Sweet? You don’t think it’s creepy. We asked for the salt, at the dinner table the other day, and it slid - by itself - across the table until it was within reach. That’s not sweet. That’s creepy. Am I the only one who finds it creepy? It’s not me who has lost my mind - it’s everyone else.”

  “It sounds useful to have around the place. Maybe it can learn to do your ironing?”

  “You know - I can’t even believe I’m having this conversation. This is all too damned ridiculous.”

  “Go home,” said Annie. “I’ll cover for you, it’s fine, you look tired.”

  “I’m tired because I feel as though I don’t have a home at the moment. As soon as I think it’ll be okay something happens and it freaks the shit out of me. I don’t like it. You know how weird it is to be sitting in your house wondering whether there’s the ghost of a little boy standing nearby - watching you? I hate it. I can’t even believe Jase is so calm about it all...”

  “He does write horror. He’s probably relieved the ghost hasn’t killed everyone yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “Figure of speech.”

  “Well that makes me feel so much better. Fuck!”

  “Look go home and talk to him. Clearly you’re not going to get any work done today. Go home, talk things through, tell him your point of view and see what he says. You never know, he might have had a change of heart and want to move out now too.”

  “I somehow doubt it. He gets so lonely at home, working by himself, I think he’s glad for the company - never mind how messed up it is!”

  Annie stood up and walked over to the coat rack in the corner of the room. She picked up Emily’s light coat and handed it to her, “Go home. Talk things through.”

  Emily sighed. Annie was right. She did need to talk things through and she certainly wasn’t going to be getting any work done today.

  “Thank you,” Emily said. She put her coat on. “Don’t tell the others, okay?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’d think I was pulling their legs,” said Annie, “I mean - no one would believe you’d be talking of ghosts.”

  “I meant about the pregnancy.”

  “Oh yes, that. I forgot about that. Congratulations,” said Annie. She gave Emily a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” said Emily.

  19.

  As Emily drove home her mind kept replaying the forthcoming argument she was about to have with Jason; she wants to move out and is adamant it’s the right thing to do whereas he wants to remain in the house to ‘give it a chance’. Part of her wished she could relax enough to give it a chance but it was impossible and she knew it was. She felt the whole thing to be unnerving.

  She couldn’t help but laugh when she thought back to what he said during one of the earlier conversations. He wanted to give it a few months, stress-free, to give the baby enough time to cook in the oven, figuratively speaking, to ensure there’s no miscarriage. She didn’t think to argue, at the time, that this living arrangement was hardly stress-free. She was stressed with the arguing with Jason, during a time which should be their happy moments as they celebrate their new marriage. She was stressed with the death of Roald. He was more of Jason’s dog but she still missed him, and loved him. On top of that - she was stressed with wondering whether every bang or knocking noise was a ghost watching her from where she couldn’t see it. If anything - she felt moving would be less stressful than what she was currently enduring.

  Her mind drifted back to contemplating the conversation she’d be having when she got home and her heart sank. Another row where nothing would really be solved. The two of them spinning around like a broken record repeating the same lines again and again. She pulled her car to the side of the road and turned the engine off. Maybe she didn’t have to go home? Maybe she could just stay here, on the side of the road, forever? Live in the back of the estate car?

  “Shit,” she muttered to herself when she realised how impractical that’d be. She fidgeted around, uncomfortably, in her chair wishing that Jason could see the situation through her eyes if only for a minute. She understood his point of view and, on some level found it quite sweet; befriending a little lost ghost who was living a lonely existence. The more you look at it though - it’s not practical and it’s certainly not normal. The dead and the living shouldn’t be sharing their lives. At least not like that. She closed her eyes as she desperately searched for an answer to her problems in the back of her mind and then it hit her - something she saw on one of the websites she had stumbled across; ghosts have unfinish
ed business which stop them from being able to cross over.

  With an idea formulating in her mind, Emily fired the engine up to the Mercedes and pressed her foot on the accelerator; a quick stop off at the pub where the locals had been quick to make them feel so uncomfortable.

  Josh had been killed in a tragic accident. Emily couldn’t help but wonder whether this was what was stopping him from crossing over - more to the point, the fact he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to his parents. She thought, perhaps, if she could get them back to the house and he could say goodbye, maybe tell them how much he loves them...Well...Maybe then he could cross over and, more importantly, leave the house she wanted to start her own family in.

  Emily felt a rush of excitement as her mind continued to think of a spiritless house. A nice un-haunted home in the country where she and Jason would raise their child. Maybe even children?

  Her initial excitement numbed a little when she stopped, a moment, to consider Jason. She knew he wouldn’t understand or go along with her plans to get the mum and dad to come and say goodbye. Certainly not all the time he had this unhealthy obsession with the dead boy. She momentarily contemplated discussing it with him - making him see it her way - but she knew, more or less as soon as the thought crossed her mind, it was pointless. There was no way he’d see it her way. After all, he had hardly been supportive of her views with regards to Josh in the first place so there was little chance of a change of attitude in this instance either.

  She knew what she needed to do. Make contact with the father, arrange to meet up. Discuss what had happened and break the news to him that his son was still in the house. Get them to come round when Jason was out - perhaps on an evening out with Travis? Get them to say their goodbyes and that would be it. By the time Jason got home - drunk no doubt - in the early hours of the morning there’d be no spirit to worry about. Just a pregnant, relieved wife.

  In her mind it all sounded relatively straight forward but she knew it wouldn’t be the case...

  * * * * *

  The pub wasn’t very busy despite the car park being near it’s capacity. Emily wasn’t exactly shocked at the pubs lack of custom considering it was afternoon and most people would have been at work and - those who were still at work - would have been long off their lunch breaks by now.

  The barman smiled at her as she approached. No doubt he didn’t recognise her in her smart work clothes.

  “Hi,” he said when she reached the bar where he was standing. A tall man, mid-fifties, he looked as though he owned the bar. Balding dark hair, a mustache and a belly on him which suggested he liked to drink as much beer as he sold. “What can I get you?” he asked.

  Emily sat on one of the stools which lined the bar, “Just a lemonade, please,” she said. She knew the chances of the barman being helpful were slim to none if she had just come out with her questions. It felt it would be easier to have a chat with him first, perhaps a little flirt and then slip into the conversation who she was and what she was looking for.

  The barman nodded and fetched her a clean glass before filling it with lemonade from one of the bar’s many taps. “Was beginning to think I wasn’t going to be seeing anyone else until this evening,” he said as he watched the glass slowly fill to the brim. He put it on the bar, “One pound eighty, please.”

  “Of course,” Emily pulled her purse from her handbag, which was slung over her shoulder, and handed over the exact change.

  “Thank you,” the barman said as he rang it through the till.

  “Always this quiet?” Emily asked not really caring about the answer.

  “Quieter than usual but not unheard of. Weekends and evenings - that’s when it gets busy. Especially in the summer months. People tend to enjoy a drink in the garden then. They come for one on their weekend off and end up staying all afternoon and well into the evening. Yep. Busy times.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Emily. She tried her best to sound interested but doubted her own ability to do so. Quietly, she took a sip from her drink.

  The barman continued, “So - late lunch?” he asked. Clearly Emily had managed to sound interested after all. Unless the barman was just desperate for company on a quiet work shift.

  “On my way home,” Emily replied. Another sip.

  “Local? Don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

  “A little way down the road,” Emily confirmed. This is it. She knew the time was coming to confront the man. Her heart skipped a beat. What if he reacted angrily? “I’m new in the village,” she continued. She wondered whether the barman would put two and two together to realise who she was but he just nodded.

  “Like it?”

  “Not as quiet as I had hoped,” she said.

  Emily bit her bottom lip, nervously, whilst looking down at her lemonade - running the following conversation through in her mind first. Eventually she looked up to the barman who hadn’t noticed her nervous pause as he was busying himself by moving glasses from one side of the bar to the other, “Do you know of a boy called Josh?”

  The barman froze. Slowly he turned to look at Emily. She raised her eyebrow as though impatiently waiting for an answer.

  “You moved into that house,” said the barman.

  Emily nodded, “We didn’t know. No one told us what had happened.”

  “Awful shame what happened. That boy had a promising future. Quietly confident, hard working...Great at football...Awful shame.”

  “Do you know whereabouts his parents moved?”

  The barman leaned on the bar, “Are you a journalist? Just leave them alone. It’s not even like it was recent...” The barman was clearly getting annoyed.

  “I’m not,” said Emily. “I live in the house they lived in. We keep getting mail for them and I just wondered if you had a forwarding address.”

  The barman shook his head, “Why would I? Just pass it back to the post office.”

  “They’ll just return to sender. It could be important. I just wanted them to get their post.”

  “Well, sorry, can’t help you.” The barman turned his back on Emily and began working on the other side of the bar - moving glasses around and doing general cleaning work.

  Emily went to say something but stopped herself. She realised he wasn’t going to help her out. She pushed her drink forward and thanked him for his time before she left the bar and walked back to where she had abandoned her car.

  “Shit!” she muttered no sooner had she slammed the car door shut. A couple of seconds went by, as she contemplated her next move, before she leaned forward and put the key in the ignition. A quick twist and the engine kicked into life with an accompanying plume of blue smoke from the exhaust. “Now what?” she asked herself out loud as though it would help her stumble across the answer.

  20.

  Jason was playing around with the scalextric set by the time Emily got home late in the afternoon. His car was racing around one side of the track and another car raced alongside it on the opposite side.

  “You okay?” he asked Emily when she appeared in the doorway. She could tell by his face he wasn’t happy with her. Probably from the argument they had earlier in the day, she thought.

  “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “You?”

  “Uh huh,” he grunted; a clear sign he wasn’t okay.

  “I’m sorry I was such a bitch this morning,” she continued regardless, “I didn’t mean it.”

  Jason didn’t even look up from watching his car loop around the track, “You didn’t mean to be a bitch or you didn’t mean to go back on your word about giving this living arrangement a proper try?” he asked.

  “Both?”

  Jason took his finger off the trigger causing the car to stop dead, “Really?” he asked.

  “Hi, Josh,” said Emily - her way of proving everything was fine now.

  Josh’s car also stopped dead in its tracks.

  “I’m going to have a quick shower and then I thought we could go for a walk, or something?” said Emi
ly.

  “Yeah - sure,” said Jason, trying unsuccessfully to hide his suspicion.

  “Give me twenty minutes or so,” she replied. She left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Jason didn’t move for a second. He just continued to look at the door as though he half expected her to come back in saying she was joking and was, in fact, leaving him. She didn’t come back. He shrugged. “Told you it’d be okay,” he pressed his finger down on his car’s controller and once more his car began to hurtle around the track.

  Meanwhile a quick search of the Internet Explorer history, whilst looking over her shoulder, soon revealed what Emily was looking for - the surname of the family who lived here before she and Jason moved in. It listed the surname, the name of both parents and even the company where the father had worked . Surely enough information, she thought, to track the mum and dad down. Not that she was about to try and do that in the house - not whilst Jason was in the house and there was a chance she was being watched. Quickly she closed the computer boxes down until she was back to the blank home screen page which Jason liked to leave it on - so it was ready to jump onto when he needed to research something, or more accurately, surf the social network sites.