GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1)

by Noel Hynd

  Hughes did his best to dismiss it. He adjusted the volume on his radio since the sound kept fading. And he hurried along with his work, anxious to finish as quickly as possible.

  Yet the strange feelings persisted for Emmet Hughes. He had the sense that someone wanted him out of the basement. And he began to feel someone was observing him. At first, he checked all the windows. Then his focus returned to the steps. Someone, he felt, was watching him from the steps. But no one was on the steps. No other living soul was within the house.

  He broke a sweat. Nerves. Another five minutes, he thought, and he would be finished. Well, the sooner the better. The basement was rattling his nerves worse than any other place he had worked on in thirty years on Nantucket.

  He wondered if he was being crazy, but he had a short list of carpenter’s assistants who worked per diem on the island. He made a note that it might be worthwhile to hire one to accompany him tomorrow.

  “Ah, that’s silly,” he said to himself, “Waste of money.”

  At a few minutes before noon, Hughes was almost finished with his calculations. He looked over his charts on the floor. As he worked, the sound on his radio faded to nothing. Hughes turned. Why had the sound diminished? He wondered.

  Batteries. The batteries were worn down, he reasoned. He set back to work when it occurred to him that he had changed the batteries the previous day. There should have been nothing wrong with them.

  Then, suddenly, he was immersed in a sense of immense dread, a feeling that was both depressing and sickening. Hughes hurried with his fingers. He wanted to be out of that cellar. He worked rapidly. Then his eyes moved slightly to the side of the paper on which he calculated.

  There was a shadow forming on the floor—a long, unnatural shadow. Something like a human form, coming into focus from the bottom upward. Legs, arms, torso, shoulders…

  It—whatever it was—was between Hughes and the bare overhead light bulb, the bulb which cast the perplexing silhouette upon the cement floor. Hughes’ fear was so immediate that it almost seemed electric. And yet, as the shadow came into focus and as there was no denying that there was something hideous standing behind him, his sense of fear was so great that he didn’t dare turn.

  Slowly, more of the shadow became clear until it was bold and black, cast as firmly along the ground as if it were an actual living human being standing behind him.

  Hughes held his pen in one trembling hand. The other hand moved to his tool chest and settled upon an ice pick that he kept for winter work, a sturdy tool with a long, sharp, six-inch blade. It was the sharpest, most lethal instrument in his chest.

  He gripped it in his fist.

  Yet somehow, like a mouse cornered by a large snake, Emmet Hughes knew that the weapon would be of no use. Hughes knew he was going to die. The sense was instinctive. Not something upon which he had time enough to brood.

  And he knew he was going to die horribly.

  Slowly, he turned.

  There before him was the supernatural figure that cast the shadow. It made no motion until Emmet Hughes had fully turned to look at it.

  Hughes’ face paled. He was looking at something that seemed to have risen from Hell itself. Nothing in his past, nothing in his religion, nothing in his set of beliefs or in the experiences of a lifetime could have prepared him.

  His face went white with terror. His eyes widened as if they would burst and a scream, like a scream in a nightmare, formed in the depths of his soul, worked its way into his throat, lodged there, caught for several seconds, then worked its way up into the land of the living—much as it had for Beth DiMarco in an open field at night.

  And for Bruce Markley pulled fiendishly into a current. A scream that could curdle the blood of humans, yet far from any human ears. A scream that could raise the Devil, if the Devil needed to be, or wanted to be, raised.

  Sinking slowly to his knees, Hughes screamed like a hog in a slaughterhouse. He dropped the pen to the ground, raised the ice pick and swiped at the force that menaced him—but his fist and his weapon passed harmlessly through it. He made a desperate attempt to get to his feet and flee.

  But the black figure blocked his escape.

  Chapter Forty-five

  When Joe Fischer was on the brink of a deal, his normal steely, tenacious, grasping, persistent demeanor was replaced by something much colder. Thus it was that Fischer was in his office with a secretary by seven-thirty A.M. the Monday morning following Annette’s arrival in New York. He was putting into shape a draft of the deal memo for Message From Berlin.

  By eight forty-five the memo was complete on his computer screen and he printed hard copies. Fischer took a nine o’clock breakfast meeting with the producers. The meeting was at the Sherry Netherland. The producers brought their lawyer, and they and Fischer went over the memo phrase by phrase. Onto his draft of the memo, Fischer wrote all agreed-upon changes in wording.

  But there was little that needed to be changed. The producers were tickled to have Annette as their star, just as they had been pleased to hire Jonathan Reed to write the script six months earlier.

  “This proves the old adage,” Fischer insisted, “that one good Joe Fischer client deserves another. Or at least one begets another.”

  Immediately following breakfast, Joe faxed his copy of the memo—which included his handwritten changes—back to his office. By the time he walked there himself, his secretary had taken the changes and put them on the office computer, amending the original text by Blackberry.

  Fischer had six copies printed in his office, then sent them by messenger to the producers’ attorney’s office. There the producers read it. Then they signed it as the messenger waited. A check to Joe Fischer, acting as the agent for Annette Carlson, was made out for four hundred thousand dollars, Annette’s signing fee. The messenger took the check and the executed documents and was on his way.

  The Carlyle was the next stop. There Annette received all six copies of the memo. She signed them. One she kept. The rest returned to Fischer’ office along with the check. Fischer would issue Annette her money, less his fifteen percent, within three days. The producers received their copies of the memo later that afternoon.

  With all this accomplished, Annette Carlson was officially free to leave Manhattan. She felt wonderful. She was approaching real affluence for the first time in her life. Money wasn’t everything in life, but it was sure in the top five. Her outlook even felt brighter toward Nantucket and the disturbances in the house she owned.

  In the late morning, she walked out of her hotel and went window shopping on Madison Avenue. She walked several blocks uptown, then reversed herself and walked down Madison on the opposite side. In an antique shop, she saw a set of gold-rimmed crystal wineglasses that she liked. She nearly bought them. Then upon further thought, she considered the purchase foolish. Buy new glasses for the house? She was unloading the house, wasn’t she? She thanked the clerk in the store, who acted like he had recognized her, and went on her way.

  She checked out of the Carlyle shortly after one P.M. and took a taxi to La Guardia. As she rode to the airport, her thoughts from the previous night remained with her.

  Okay. It was now an official decision. She would sell the house. Take a loss, take a hike, and find another place. Best of all, she could hire movers to take her things out of the Cort Street house and put them in storage. She could walk away from that troubling island just that easily.

  Only one thing bothered her. The detective in Nantucket. Tim Brooks.

  She realized that she held a certain attraction to him. Funny.

  Here was a relationship that could not possibly work. She could be on the island no more than several weeks a year, and none if she sold the house. He was anchored there. Their worlds were so entirely different. And yet, she felt something. She felt something she had never felt before.

  Reality check! What was she really thinking about, anyway? They didn’t have any sort of real relationship. She trusted him. He helped her. S
he felt comfortable with him. He believed her when she explained what had gone on in the house.

  All well and good. But beyond that?

  She sighed.

  Love and romance in the modern world. Where was it? Hidden away and obstructed by barriers of travel, profession, and the risk of terminal disease. Sometimes she wished for a less complicated world, one more similar to the one in which she had grown up. Yet in that world, she reminded herself, there was no room to make more than a million dollars in six weeks filming a cable television production in Europe and the United States. She sighed again.

  On the Grand Central Parkway, her taxi driver weaved in and out of traffic. But as they neared the airport, Annette’s thoughts turned back to more immediate matters.

  It relieved her to realize that a solution in Nantucket could be as simple as selling and walking away. Once again, she felt great about life. She began to think about the upcoming production of Message From Berlin. Preparations would have to be made for travel. She would have to study her character’s role carefully and decide what she wanted to bring to it. There would be days spent on wardrobe and script approval.

  Twenty minutes later, Annette checked in for her flight to Nantucket then went through the ongoing security ordeals that had made air travel such a pain since Nine Eleven.

  But her timing was good. Boarding would be in fifty minutes. The flight would depart in an hour fifteen. She sat down in the waiting lounge next to an older couple who were waiting for the same airplane.

  Annette pulled a New York Times from her travel bag and scanned the headlines on the front pages. Two or three minutes had passed, and she was well into the newspaper, when she heard a gravelly voice next to her.

  “Hello,” said a man. He had gray hair and a neat mustache. He wore a seersucker jacket and a regimental tie. “We know you, don’t we?”

  Annette looked. The man and woman were gazing at her and smiling. An affluent, conservative couple, in their seventies. Probably fans, she thought at first. It took Annette a moment to place them.

  “Oh,” she said, lowering her paper. “Of course. Mr. and Mrs. Shipley. Right?” she asked.

  “Daniel and Martha Shipley,” he said, offering his hand.

  “We met at the closing. At the lawyer’s office in Nantucket.”

  “Yes,” Annette said. “Of course.”

  “This is the young lady who bought our house on Cort Street, Mother,” Daniel Shipley said to his wife of forty-six years.

  “I know that,” she scolded her husband. “She’s s famous movie star. I recognized her before you did.”

  “You did not!”

  “How are you, dear?” Mrs. Shipley asked, aiming her question directly at Annette. “Still making movies?”

  Mrs. Shipley spoke in a booming upper-class bellow that, in previous generations, might have been associated with ear trumpets. When such a voice contained a question like the previous one, it turned at least a dozen nearby heads in the waiting lounge.

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” Annette answered, speaking softly.

  “In New York on work?” Mrs. Shipley asked.

  “Yes. I had to meet a few business people.”

  “Must be exciting,” said Martha Shipley, leaning back, a nine-hundred-dollar Donna Karan dress in an orange plastic airport seat.

  “Sometimes it’s exciting,” Annette allowed. “Other times it’s very routine. Like any other business.”

  Mr. Shipley’s brown eyes were trained upon Annette—fixed and attentive like a terrier’s, never wavering.

  “I hope you’re enjoying our house,” Daniel Shipley said. “I know we did. For a long time.”

  Annette paused and then lied politely. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I spend as much time there as possible.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Daniel Shipley said, glancing back to his wife for a moment. “We did, too, didn’t we, Mother? Loved the place.”

  Martha Shipley smiled and nodded as if on cue. “It was very much of an island for us. A place of comfort and strength.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Annette answered.

  “Bought the house in 1974,” Daniel Shipley continued. “Raised our families there during summers. Kids grew up. We grew old. Many wonderful summers, though. Seventeen Cort Street served us very nicely.”

  “We were always comfortable,” Mrs. Shipley said. “We raised our children there.” Mrs. Shipley had a way of always adding a detail that had already been covered.

  “Well, I’m sure I’ll be as pleased as you were,” Annette said.

  “It’s nice to know the house is in good hands,” Mrs. Shipley said.

  Annette nodded. So did the Shipleys. Annette had the sense that they had by now expended all possible topics of mutual interest.

  Mrs. Shipley glanced at her watch. “Where is that airplane?” she asked.

  “The plane’s already here, Mother. It’s sitting right out there,” Daniel Shipley said, pointing at the ramp. The tail section of a small commuter jet was visible beyond the plate glass window. “We’re just waiting to board.”

  “Well, when will we board? What do you suppose is wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. But you want them to take on the right amount of fuel, don’t you?” Daniel Shipley asked his wife.

  “Well, I just think they could start on time.”

  Daniel Shipley looked to Annette for support. Annette forced another smile.

  Mrs. Shipley looked back to her.

  “Imagine. Somebody famous is living in our house,” Mrs. Shipley said to Annette. “You know, I mentioned your name to my sons. They’re grown boys now. In their thirties. One’s a lawyer in Denver. The other is in television in Burbank. Maybe you know him. He’s a ‘grip.’ Danny Shipley, Jr. I think a grip moves things around a set. I’ve never understood.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know him.”

  But as she answered, another question was taking shape in

  Annette’s head. Here was the opportunity. She wondered.

  “I was curious about something,” Annette began slowly. Both Shipleys looked at her. “You owned the Cort Street house for thirty years?”

  “Thirty-five,” Mrs. Shipley answered.

  “Ever had anything unusual happen in it?”

  The Shipleys looked at each other. “A tree fell down during the big hurricane in nineteen ninety-one,” Daniel Shipley said. “Huge old oak. Hit the west wall and covered the side lawn. Took a week to clean up.”

  “That’s not the type of thing I mean.”

  Mrs. Shipley frowned. “What did you mean?”

  “Oh…” Annette didn’t want to prime the response. “Unexplained events inside the house. Doors that wouldn’t stay shut. Furniture that wouldn’t stay in place. Noises?”

  Martha Shipley looked surprised at the question and shook her head. She looked to her husband.

  “Nothing at all like that,” she said.

  “I don’t remember anything, either,” Daniel Shipley added, searching his own memory. “The house was always very restful for us. A place of strength and comfort.”

  Annette sighed. “I’m sure,” she said, withdrawing from this line of conversation. She looked away. Then, almost involuntarily, she questioned further. “Did you ever think you had a ghost in the house?” Annette asked.

  “A ghost?” Mrs. Shipley laughed out loud. “Heavens! That’s really quite extraordinary.”

  Her husband shook his head and a mirthful glint came into his eye. “I don’t believe in such things,” he said. “But I wish we had had a ghost on some summer days when we had Mother’s in-laws visiting from Tennessee,” he said. “Maybe it would have scared the freeloaders out!”

  Daniel Shipley immediately caught his receipt for the comment.

  His wife elbowed him in the ribs. Both laughed.

  “No, dear. Nothing at all like that,” Mrs. Shipley finally said.

  Her husband shook his head also, reassuring Annette. “If there’s anything wrong, don�
��t let your imagination run away with you,” Martha Shipley counseled wisely. “It’s the wind. Or an imbalance in the floorboards. Or simple old-house noises. Expansion and contraction with the changing temperature.”

  “Of course,” Annette said.

  Two minutes before boarding time, Mrs. Shipley started looking for the powder room. Her husband chided her on always waiting till the last moment, then directed her to a nearby door with a picture of a woman on it.

  Mrs. Shipley gathered her purse, rose and hurried away. Mr. Shipley remained.

  He must have been in a talkative mood that day, or else the memories of those many years that passed at Cort Street put him in a reflective frame of mind. He started speaking about the days when his two sons were young, and how the boys used to walk up to the old Quaker cemetery, the one with flat rolling hills and no tombstones, and fly kites.

  “I had a daughter, too,” he said, out of the blue. He glanced to where his wife had disappeared. She was nowhere in sight. “My only regret is that the poor little gal never lived to see our house or live in it. She had childhood leukemia.”

  Mr. Shipley’s hand disappeared into his jacket. He found his wallet. He kept speaking.

  “You know this was back when they couldn’t do as much for a disease like that. She died in nineteen seventy-three, our little Sarah. Age seven. We bought the house on Cort Street the following year. Needed to get away for a time. My wife took the little girl dying real hard.”

  He paused.

  “She’d be a full-grown lady today, of course,” he continued. “Much like yourself. Older though, I’d guess. So don’t mind Mrs. Shipley if she acts a little foolish. She sees a pretty young woman like you and she thinks of what could have been.”

  Annette placed her hand on Mr. Shipley’s. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she said. “I understand, really.”

  Daniel Shipley rummaged methodically through a neat wallet. “Still think about our little girl sometimes. But I guess she’s with God.”

  He riffled through some pictures. He produced shots of his boys first. Then his hand steadied and went still.