The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales

by Charles Christian

  Her eyes still have that far-away look in them. They always did unsettle me. They still make me nervous and I’m starting to motormouth as I hear myself asking, ‘What’s it been, about twelve years now since we last saw each other?’

  ‘4481 days,’ is all she says.

  So many wasted lives. So much precious time squandered. So many opportunities missed. Modern life sucks. Modern life sucks, but it’s the only life we get so best make the most of it.

  On impulse I lean across and kiss her. Her lips taste of cinnamon. ‘What are your plans for the rest of the day?’ I ask, sitting down at her table. ‘There’s a lot I need to say to you.’

  ‘Nothing now,’ she replies.

  Later we drive back to Nikita’s house. It’s on the beach at Half Moon Bay, with an enormous first-floor, bleached-wood deck and covered veranda overlooking the ocean. ‘You must be doing well if you can afford this,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not mine, I just rent it and its cheap,’ she replies, as she unlocks the door. ‘The owners have been trying to sell it for years. Problem with the geology or the survey reports or something.’

  Much, much later she whispers in my ear, ‘Are you still awake?’

  I am. But only just. The last few hours having been devoted to a sustained, urgent, hard, sweaty and pleasingly imaginative bout of making-up-after-breaking-up sexual activity.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, nuzzling my ear with her nose, ‘did you feel something just now, like the earth move?’

  I laugh. ‘I never took you for a Mills & Boon fan?’ I say, as I reach down to stroke her in a place that makes her sigh.

  ‘No seriously, I mean like an earth tremor,’ she replies. But then she begins to kiss my face, my lips, my throat, my chest, my stomach and we find something better to do with our mouths than talk.

  Later still, I’m sitting up in bed, looking out towards the ocean. Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong. The sky has disappeared - there is no moon, nor any stars to be seen. All I can see through the picture window at the far end of the room is a seething, swirling grey-green wall of water rushing straight towards us.

  Tsunami!

  I grab Nikita. ‘Quick,’ I say, shaking her, let’s get out of here! Now!’

  I wake up with a sudden start. I’ve been dreaming . . . having a nightmare, more like. I take a deep breath and lie back on the pillow. It is then a light bulb switches on inside my head. In the back of my mind I recall a story I filed at the time of the 1989 Oakland/Loma Prieta earthquake.

  Shit! So that’s why Nikki’s landlords have never been able to sell the property. It is the geology. The house sits at the Pacific Ocean end of the San Andreas Fault. The earth really did move for us. We were fucking our way through an earthquake.

  I look around and Nikita is lying peacefully asleep next to me and everything is as it should be in the bedroom. No. Everything is not as it should be.

  There’s someone else in the room, a figure standing silhouetted in the moonlight by the window. It’s Vonda. Even though she is looking out to sea I recognise her profile.

  ‘You can’t be here,’ I say.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she replies and turns towards me so I can see her full on. The part of the face I couldn’t see before and the whole right side of her body is hideously burned. With the still-bloodied shard of her right hand she gestures out towards the sea. ‘Modern life sucks,’ she says, ‘and nature always has the last laugh.’ Then she disappears.

  I stare out beyond the window. I can see the ocean and it is receding into the distance, exposing more and more of the shore.

  I shake Nikita awake. ‘Quick,’ I shout, we have to get out of here now. There’s a tidal wave coming!’

  We make it up onto the flat roof of the house before the wave strikes. A wall of water hits the ground floor and amid the roar of the ocean we hear the sound of breaking glass. The whole building shakes, but as the sea retreats, the house remains standing.

  As the first light of dawn creeps up over the Montara mountains, we’re cold and wet and frightened, but still alive. The bay is a scene of desolation, littered with debris sucked from the shoreline properties by receding waters.

  Nikki’s home? Although the ground-floor is gutted, there’s no real loss as those rooms are only used for storage and accommodation for the occasional guest. The first floor has survived pretty much intact. We still have electricity and water. The phones are out, but that’s more like down to the network crashing under the volume of emergency calls. And now even the sun’s threatening to come out.

  To my surprise - no, to my horror and astonishment - Nikita starts readying herself for work. ‘I must get into the office. I need to find out what happened to the late shift. Besides, they’ll be wondering what happened to me yesterday afternoon and now, after this quake, well....

  ‘Well, what?’ I ask, sensing that the shutters are once more coming down between us.

  There is a silence. ‘I need space to think,’ she says. ‘I thought I wanted this for so long, but now you’re here, I’m not sure I can cope. You bring chaos. You’re disruptive.’

  ‘You’re blaming me for the earthquake!’ I reply.

  ‘You know what I mean, Lex. You unsettle me. There are never any certainties when you’re around.’ She pauses, there are tears in her eyes. ‘I really must get to the office. They’ll be going frantic. I’ll call the insurers and letting agency from there as well. Can we talk about this when I get back tonight?’ she asks as she heads for the door. ‘You will still be here tonight?’ she adds.

  ‘Of course,’ I reply, not really knowing nor caring whether I would be.

  In the kitchen, on the relatively undamaged first floor, I find a Gaggia coffee machine and make myself a large mocha. I pick it up, head outside and walk towards the sea, making my way across a beach littered with wrecked freezers, broken furniture, abandoned surfboards, scattered clothing, sodden papers and spoiling food. In the distance I can hear the wail of house and car alarms, the sound of emergency services sirens, the barking of dogs and the howling of children.

  There is a Lexus 4x4 lying upturned on its roof, with petrol still dripping out of it to form a rainbow-hued pool beneath it on the sand. The Lexus is surrounded by several crates of oranges, their contents spilling out across the shore, and two 5-gallon tubs of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice-cream that are slowly melting in the morning sun.

  By the edge of the now-calm waters of the Pacific Ocean lies the upturned pine carcass of a shattered bed. It looks suspiciously like one of the beds that were in the ground floor guest rooms at Nikki’s house. I sit on it and wait for my mocha to cool. Immediately in front of me are three odd shoes that have washed up on the shore. They are Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars sneakers. There is a large black left shoe, a smaller denim blue right shoe and a much smaller child’s candy pink one.

  From the south I see a woman walking towards me, her feet leaving no prints in the sand as she approaches. There are streaks of neon blue in her hair. It’s Vonda. She sits down beside me and, with the unravaged side of her face, smiles.

  ‘Last night,’ I say, ‘when you came into the bedroom. You said I shouldn’t be there. Was that a warning about the tsunami or my relationship with Nikita?’

  ‘That,’ replies Vonda, ‘is a question only you can answer. You saved my life you know,’ she adds.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That night we spent together,’ Vonda says, ‘I realised afterwards that you’d removed my stash of pills. I’m not sure if I would have really used them but I was that close.’

  ‘Like I did you a favour,’ I reply. ‘Saved you from a comfortable death of an overdose, going to sleep never to wake up, so you can die a week later in the holocaust of a bomb blast.’

  She reaches across with her good arm and takes hold of my hand. Her grip is firm, dry, but cold. Ice cold. ‘You could have just had me and left that night. I wouldn’t have blamed you. Instead, you saved me from mysel
f. Besides, they were my decisions that led to my death.’

  ‘How d’you figure that out?’ I ask.

  ‘It was my decision to have another slice of toast that morning. It was my decision to watch the end of an old episode of Friends on breakfast-time TV, despite the fact it was a repeat I’d probably already seen ten times before. It was my decision, because I was running late, to take the bus rather than walk to work.’

  She laughs. ‘Imagine, I was trying to lose a few pounds. Now I weigh less than smoke drifting across water.’

  ‘It was even my decision,’ she continues, ‘out of some stupid feeling of solidarity for the oppressed peoples of the Third World, to sit at the rear of the bus, near the scared looking Asian kid with the large rucksack.

  ‘Modern life sucks, but we all get to choose our own way to heaven or to hell. You’d better answer that,’ she adds, letting go of my hand.

  I glance down and see the alert flashing on my phone. Incoming messages means the phone networks are back online.

  The first email I open is from Amanda Brierley. Ciao Lex, if you’re still alive could you be an angel and file some copy PDQ on how you survived the maelstrom in time for the breakfast news? If you’re not alive, commiserations and don’t bother replying to this message.

  When I look up again, Vonda has gone.

  It’s the day before Christmas Eve. I’m over 5000 miles from home. I’m surrounded by the wreckage of other people’s lives. There’s unfinished business to resolve with Nikita. And there are deadlines to meet.

  But there will always be people living their lives clinging to wreckage. There’ll always be unfinished business to resolve with a woman. And there’ll always be deadlines to meet. I finish my mocha and toss the empty cup away onto the beach to join all the other detritus in the sand.

  A flash of light catches my eye. It’s the sun reflecting off the mirrored surface of a CD lying on the shoreline. I pick it up and turn it over. It is Best of Both Worlds - the Robert Palmer anthology.

  I skim it out across the sea. The CD bounces once. It bounces twice. It bounces a third time, then slips beneath the waves.

  Confessions of a Teenage Ghost Hunter

  IT WAS ONE OF those autumn evenings that catch you out. When the clocks have just gone back to daylight-saving time and you forget how quickly a late afternoon can switch from bright sun to dusk and then total darkness. One of those evenings when, almost the moment the sun falls below the horizon, the temperature plummets and a fog starts to roll in across the open meadows and farmland.

  Georgia and I have been out walking the dog along the farm tracks and bridleways behind our house and are just cutting back through a spooky little copse called Websills Wood when the light starts to go. Then it happens.

  Perhaps it is only my imagination or the sudden chill in the air, but all the hairs on the nape of my neck begin to tingle and I just know we have to hurry back home and to safety and that, whatever else I do, I must never peer behind me. I can tell by the way Georgia has increased her pace that she is also aware something is amiss. Even our dog, Woolfgang (I know, why do we give dogs these names), is straining for home with more determination than usual. Pulling at the end of his leash and barely visible in the increasingly dense fog, Woolfie’s ears are slicked down onto a head that never once glances back in the direction of the wood.

  Later, as we sit by the fire at home, Georgia asks me what I’d felt when we were in the wood. ‘Go on,’ she says, ‘the honest truth, not some macho bullshit.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘the truth. I had this sensation, stupid though it now sounds, that I was being stalked by some foul fiend that would snatch my soul away to hell if I ever looked back and caught sight of it.’

  Georgia laughs. ‘A bit late to worry about that,’ she adds.

  ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘I noticed you went tense as if something had unsettled you.’

  ‘Just feminine intuition,’ she replies. ‘We women can always tell when our menfolk are worried.’

  There’s no answer to that, but I still push the point. ‘So what did you think I might be worried about? Come on, you be honest as well.’

  ‘Well, it crossed my mind that a dark, foggy night like this would be ideal cover for any mad axe-wielding, psycho serial killers who might be on the prowl’

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. ‘Serial killers! In the depths of the Norfolk countryside? You can wander along those tracks for miles, for days on end, and never meet a living soul. In the fog on a November evening, your serial killer is more likely to break his own neck falling down a rabbit hole. If there are any serial killers on the loose, you’ll find them lurking in the back streets of Norwich. There are plenty of places to hide and no shortage of people to kill. At least my fears have some foundation; you know those woods are supposed to be haunted by a headless monk.’

  Georgia throws a play-punch in my direction but it doesn’t make contact. ‘Haunted by a headless monk! You know the woman who told you that is away with the fairies. And where did this monk come from, since we’re miles from the nearest monastic ruins. But tell me,’ she continues, doing that eye fluttering women do when they are signalling they are interested in what you have to say yet simultaneously humouring you, ‘have you always had this thing about ghosties, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night? When did my little Alexis,’ (that’s me, by the way) she pats me on the knee as she says this, ‘first start to be fascinated by the supernatural?’

  ‘That would have been when I was a little kid, back home in Scarborough,’ I say. ‘The house was an old building with a Georgian frontage on a medieval core and with an interior that apparently ignored the normal rules of architecture and seemed more influenced by the principles of non-Euclidean geometry. There were concealed doorways leading down into catacomb-like cellars. There was a blocked-off passageway leading nowhere. My grandmother said it headed off towards the old castle on the headland and was once part of a network of secret tunnels used by smugglers.

  ‘And then there were the attics. The roof timbers were from old ships and according to one of my more eccentric aunts who claimed to have clairvoyant powers, she could hear the ghostly footsteps of long-dead sailors in their sea-boots.’

  ‘Oooo, spooky,’ says Georgia. ‘I can hear dead people.’ We both laugh.

  ‘This aunt,’ I add, ‘lived in a little house jammed packed with her collection of china teapots.’

  ‘Sounds like she had one too many teapots with a cracked lid,’ says Georgia. ‘But let’s get back to your ghosts, was that it? Did you ever hear these clumping sea boots?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But, there was this weird thing that used to go on with my bed. On certain nights I’d be woken by the sensation of someone or something shaking the foot of my bed. Of course there was never anything there for me to see, but it happened far too often for it to be my imagination or a bad dream. It used to wake me when I was young and it was still waking me when I was a teenager. My father suggested it was gusts of wind hitting the side of the house and shaking my room. Plausible, I’ll give you. But it also happened on still nights, when there was no wind.

  ‘It did cross my mind that perhaps it was my parents playing some kind of trick on me.’ Georgia gives me an incredulous look. ‘So on a couple of occasions I dusted the footboard of my bed with soot to see if whatever was shaking my bed was also leaving fingerprints.’

  ‘Soot? Fingerprints? What is this? CSI Crime Scene Investigation: The Childhood Years?

  ‘Yes, soot,’ I reply, refusing to be drawn by Georgia’s teasing. ‘We still had coal fires and a sweep would come to clean the chimneys a couple of times a year. I scrounged the soot from him. Said it was for a school science project. Didn’t do any good though. I never found any fingerprints.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with ghosts,’ says Georgia. ‘Their totally inconsiderate tendency to not possess fingerprints. Or fingers. Or any other corporeal presence. So, are there any more confessions of a teenage
ghost-hunter forthcoming tonight?’

  ‘How much do you want to hear? When I moved to Leeds, to go to university, I used to share a house with a medical student who also had an interest in the supernatural. We used to head out at night to stake out supposedly haunted graveyards looking for ghosts. We had cameras and a tape recorder. And plenty of flasks of coffee. But we never saw diddly-squat.

  ‘Although we both nearly caught pneumonia sitting out in the grounds of Calverley Old Hall trying to catch a glimpse of Sir Walter’s ghost. That’s Sir Walter Calverley, he was crushed to death, on the orders of the Court of Star Chamber in 1604, because he refused to confess to a crime he was suspected of committing. And then there was Ethel Preston.’

  ‘Ethel who?’ asks Georgia.

  ‘Ethel Preston has a spectacular memorial in the Lawnswood Cemetery. It’s from the Edwardian era, well anyway early Twentieth Century. It takes the form of a full-size house front door, complete with a few steps leading up to it and is topped by a portico. But the statue’s the thing. At the top of the steps, standing in front of the partially-opened door, is a life-size statue in white marble of Mrs P in her prime. And I can tell you, the first time I saw this statue in the fading light of a winter’s twilight I thought it was a ghost.’

  ‘So, who was she,’ Georgia asks, ‘and why such an elaborate memorial?’

  ‘There are two explanations,’ I reply. ‘The sanitised version is her ever-loving husband had it erected in her memory, to commemorate her loyalty and the fact she would always wait up for him on an evening, so she could greet him at the door when he returned from one of his business trips. The alternative version is Old Man Preston ran off with a chorus girl, so Mrs Preston — using her not-so-ever-loving-after-all husband’s money—had the tomb built as a taunt from beyond the grave to say that despite the fact he had abandoned her, even in death she was waiting for him to return.’