Rachel considered. “Look, Mia, I do want to help your remains to be found, and if you want to help me, of course, I am very grateful…” She paused. “I do have to say that, for a young person who was brutally murdered, you seem to have a very positive outlook.”
“Some ghosts enjoy being ghosts… I mean what is not to enjoy? There’s no sickness, tiredness, having to study or work, no worries about money, or fears of growing old and dying horribly… You can go where you want and see what you want. It’s probably the closest you can get to being omnipotent. Being a ghost is great. It’s better than floating off to heaven or wherever. No one survives to come back to tell the tale once they have gone there; it might be awful.”
“So ghosts conjured up by mediums, and the spooks people see floating about, real ones, are only those who are stuck here, not ghosts who have gone to heaven… or wherever?”
“Correct. Once you’ve gone, you’ve gone. Like a hair in a flame, there’s no coming back. When spirits pass to heaven, when they find the answer, they become incommunicado.” She smiled again.
“So why do ghosts seek the answer, if no one knows what heaven is like?”
“Some mortals seek death when they don’t really know what it is like; same difference.”
Rachel seemed unconvinced. “Well, will you tell me who killed you?”
“May I be your spirit guide?”
“I suppose… well, yes, if you want to help me, I cannot see a problem with that.”
“We can work together to help the dead, and the living…”
“Yes, OK; fine.”
Mia seemed satisfied. “It was Kayleigh’s stepbrother, Sean. He wanted Kayleigh sexually… Oh, don’t get me wrong – they were not blood related – but she still didn’t feel it was right, so she refused him, and then he killed her. I found out about what was happening, confronted him, and then he killed me. That’s what you get for poking your nose in.” Mia sat back and grinned.
Rachel looked stunned, and ignored the smile on her face, which seemed quite inappropriate. “So he killed both of you?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that?”
Mia frowned. “Passion makes people do the most violent and desperate things. Anyway, take this as me helping you to solve a crime. Tell the police where the… my body is, and that Kayleigh’s stepbrother, Sean, did both murders. I’m sure they will be very grateful for your help.”
“Or they will think I am nuts, or that I did it.”
“He strangled me with such force that he crushed my windpipe; you wouldn’t have had the strength to do that.” She smiled again, as if speaking about buttercups and puppies.
Rachel stood up. “Well, I had better get this news to the police, hadn’t I?” She went to hurry off, then stopped. “How do I find you again Mia, should I need you?”
“Come here and call me, and I will come.”
“Er… okay. Look, tell me, what made you come to the shrine in the first place, when you were alive, I mean… Did you feel compelled to… forced to? Have you ever seen a hairy, big thing that looks like a slightly gormless ape? Like a macaque?”
Mia jolted visibly. A gormless ape? She composed herself, and fought the urge to wreak havoc on the pathetic piece of shit right then and there. “I believe a macaque is a monkey, not an ape! But in answer to your question, I’m afraid no, no… I haven’t seen anything like that. Sean suggested I come here; he said it might be a good thing for me to be closer to Kayleigh.” She forced a sickly smile.
Rachel frowned. “A macaque is an ape, because it is big, monkeys are smaller. Anyway, are you sure that it was Sean who told you? That nothing supernatural contacted you? You didn’t feel… like something odd was luring you here?”
Mia looked at Rachel. Fuck me, this cretinous meat sack is supposed to be a teacher. “A macaque is a monkey, it has a tail, apes do not have tails, and no – there was nothing that lured me here.”
“That’s a relief. Thank you, Mia.” Rachel wished she had not gone on about macaques, but what was done was done. “I had best get to the police station then, to report your body.”
“Yes, you do that.”
Rachel walked away.
‘Mia’ sat on the bench until totally satisfied that Rachel had left the area. Scratching its side frantically, it mulled over the conversation that had just taken place. Gormless ape? The creature had been described as a gormless ape. Foolish, stupid girl. If it hadn’t needed her, it would have destroyed her with one glance, and made her suffer and writhe in agonies till she perished with prayer gushing from her lips. It would get its revenge somehow.
It quickly turned as its attention was engaged by something.
Walking slowly towards the bench came a little spirit boy, aged about four. Gingerly, he was holding a ghostly flower in his hands; it looked like a large daisy. With a happy laugh, he walked towards the creature, clearly seeing a pretty teenage girl.
Nanny rounded the corner. “Percival… where are you? You mustn’t pick—” She stopped.
Both looking up, the creature and Nanny faced each other; Percival was oblivious, stooping to pick another spirit flower just ten feet from the beast, still in the form of Mia.
Nanny thrust her hand out to stop the gaggle of children behind her from advancing further.
“Stay here,” she barked at them. “P-Percy… come back to Nanny now.”
As she watched, the ‘girl’ smiled, and ‘her’ mouth split wider and wider to her ears, revealing rows of fine, needle-like teeth.
“Percy!” Nanny’s voice raised in urgency. “Please come back to Nanny, now!” she shouted, her call shrill and high, quavering with desperation.
The creature stood and took one step towards the stooping child. The smile had closed shut. “Have you a little flower for me, Percy?” It took another step.
“Yes, pretty flower for you,” said the child, as he walked towards the creature.
Nanny had no option. Thrusting the swaddled baby she had been carrying in her arms to the youth behind her, she ran towards the darkness, with every step she took seeming to push her four steps back in the opposite direction. “Look away, look away!” she screamed to the children behind her.
Calling and calling the child’s name, she ran and ran, feeling her long coat flap in the breeze and the hair pins holding her hat on working loose, one by one. Every fibre of her spirit compelled her to stop and run the opposite way, but she was a nanny, and her job was to save the souls of the innocents, even if she perished in the fire doing so.
Then she was there. In a swift tackle, she grabbed Percy and hugged him close to her in a huddled position on the ground, just inches from the diabolical thing. As the child struggled, she held him tighter, and a prayer escaped from her lips in a soundless motion.
The creature bent down and extended a spindly hand towards her, then stopped. Hanging loosely from her neck, Nanny’s cross glinted in the light; like a bright moon casting radiance on the darkest night, it blinded the beast temporarily.
Turning, it moved away in revulsion, as a human might react to a fresh pile of vomit. Enraged, it then swung back around to take them both. It gazed upon the female, saw the faith, wisdom and resoluteness of her soul, and knew that it had been recognised for what it was, even while masquerading as the dead girl.
The creature hesitated.
The struggle involved with taking a soul as strong as this would drain its energy; energy that it needed to carry out its plan. It could not allow itself to be distracted. Besides, the souls of the dead were not nearly as coveted as the souls of the living.
The beast took a step back and turned away from them. As it began its walk away along the path, it started off as a young woman, walking with ease, but, with each step, its gait began to jerk and move more erratically till it sank to ground level, as if its legs were made of ice and
had melted on a hot day. Abruptly, the arms pushed out of their sockets and lengthened to support the hunched torso.
Nanny glanced up and turned away in horror at what she saw, barely holding on to the complaining, protesting child. As she turned her eyes to the creature again, she saw a quick shuffle into the trees and a fleeting, grasping, upward movement, as the thing propelled itself into the tree canopy and was gone.
Loosening the child from her grip, she wiped his tears with her ever present handkerchief.
“Look, Nanny, flower dead,” Percy said, proffering a rotten, black flower towards her.
She saw her charges standing back with a look of horror on their faces, as all around the living woods where she sat, the grass had turned to blanched straw, and every flower and bud had blackened, wilted and rotted.
“Nasty lady killed the flower,” complained Percival as he ran back to the group, crushing the remnants of the spirit flower beneath his feet as he ran. Nanny remained on the ground in shock; thank goodness she wasn’t still mortal as the site of such an abomination would have left her sick, blind, or even dead.
With her hand to her breast, Nanny stood up. “Come on, children, let’s find another place to walk; it isn’t safe here.”
No one disagreed as they walked away, in the opposite direction to the creature, and in complete silence.
Chapter 42
At first, the police had not really taken it in when Rachel told them that Kayleigh’s stepbrother should be questioned about both her murder and Mia’s. Especially, as up to that point, Mia’s body had not been found, so the crime was recorded as a missing person case, not a homicide investigation. As part of the original inquiry, Kayleigh’s entire family had been called in, but Sean’s interview, like all the others, had passed without note. He had no criminal record and no history of violence, so they did not detain him further. It was only when Rachel told them where the body was to be found, and insisted he be questioned again, that they seemed to sit up and take note.
She wondered if, as she hadn’t been asked about Mia’s murder during the investigation, the police actually had no faith in her predictions, and this most recent information, plus their knowledge of the Jewish incident would simply confirm their own suspicions that she was mentally unstable. Part of her hoped that no remains would be found, as she wondered deep down if the spirit she saw in the woods really was Mia, and, who knew, she might still be alive somewhere. But, by the same token, she thought if a body was found, this would not only prove the spirit was Mia and bring the killer to justice, but also prove she wasn’t insane. Rachel was scared that if things kept happening to her, she might end up being taken by force in to some kind of mental institution for treatment; she really did not want that at all.
Well, it was up to the police now. It was best to leave it to them.
*
It took a whole week to get a forensic team out to the derelict Mountain View Hotel. People had driven by the place many times, as it stood on a main road, but no one really acknowledged it, as it had been empty for some five years. Taking into account its broken windows, rotten roof and driveway that was overgrown with weeds, it sat as a sad, rotting reminder of the area’s past. A few months ago, rumours had passed around that it had been bought by a private owner to turn into a private clinic, but nothing had happened since. No one even knew why the abandoned hotel bore the name it did, as it did not look on to any mountains, just a main road and the houses opposite.
The police were not sure what to make of Rachel’s ‘insight’ that the body of the dead girl could be found in the water tank. To be so exact as to not only name the building, but give where the remains could be found was quite extraordinary, and it had only been due to Ronald Easton’s insistence that made them take it seriously.
The hotel boasted two enormous, cylindrical water tanks on a raised platform behind the main building, and both were only accessible by climbing a long ladder, breaking through some padlocks and shifting the huge, heavy lids. Upon arrival, and after examining the tanks from the outside and seeing no disturbance to the immediate area, Detective Sergeant Milton – the officer in charge – contemplated that they should just return to the station. The most compelling evidence that Mia’s body was not inside one of the tanks was that no single person could have lifted one of the lids alone. In his estimation, the strength of, at the very least, six very powerful men would have been needed to remove the lid from each tank. Rachel had apparently been adamant in her statement that it was the stepbrother working alone. Three large padlocks stood guard on each tank, preventing anyone moving the lids; they were covered in dust and looked to have been undisturbed for some time.
But something niggled at the detective sergeant, and, in the end, he made the decision to open the tanks. It took almost two hours to cut through the locks and, with the help of six of their strongest officers, force the two weighty lids aside. They found nothing untoward inside the first tank they selected. It had clearly not been drained when the hotel was closed down, so was still almost completely full. When they managed to shift the lid on the second tank, Milton immediately peered inside the opening, using a torch to illuminate its contents.
The first thing that struck him was the overpowering, sweet, rotten stench of decay, and the second was the bloated, ashen, white head of a young girl that was bobbing half submerged in the water.
His next decision was whether to throw up in front of his colleagues, or try to hold it down until he could be alone.
Chapter 43
It had been two whole weeks since Mia’s swollen, waterlogged and half-rotten corpse was found. Rachel thought she would get some kind of satisfaction out of helping find the body, allowing the culprit to be arrested and Mia to be buried decently. But when news reached her that the teen had been retrieved from the water tank, she only felt deep sadness.
Rachel had heard, via Mr Easton, that the stepbrother – Sean Lovall – had been arrested and charged with the murders of Kayleigh Lovall and Mia Logan. Andy had been delighted by the news. Rachel suspected that his elation was less to do with them being a step closer to justice being done, than it was to do with them being a step closer to the £10,000 reward that had been put forward by Kayleigh’s parents.
During all this time, the entity in her home had become more and more troublesome. Since the Jewish incident, although it had not outright attacked her again, it was still being a nuisance, filling the kitchen with darkness every night, which made Rachel afraid to go in there. It was also setting off lots of electrical equipment after dark, and turning on the TV and radio in the early hours. She also had a suspicion that it was growing in strength; the light it emanated seemed to be brighter, and its silent-bass noise louder.
It had also started activating an old, cloth talking doll that Rachel had kept since childhood, which her mother had given to her when she was eight. By pulling the worn string in its back, the doll would cry, “Mama,” again and again; however, about fifteen years ago, it had stopped working, until now. Every night, at about midnight, Rachel would hear its eerie call echo around the flat, with its faltering voice calling to an unknown lost mother.
She had tried shouting at the entity, asking what it wanted, and tried closing her eyes under her bed covers and asking subconsciously why it had decided to attach itself to her, but there was nothing and no answers, only more problems. She had tried ignoring it, but it still grew more powerful.
Her only hope was Andy, and, because of this, she had begged him to do an exorcism on the flat. He had swerved her requests a few times, until last week when he said he would be prepared to rid her flat of the problem, but on two clear conditions. Firstly, that his new girlfriend, Debbie Simpkin, would be allowed to take photos of the whole affair, and, secondly, that he could send a write-up to the press about how he had ‘triumphed over evil’.
Tired of the whole business, she had agreed, and the date for the
entity removal had been set for an unremarkable Wednesday evening. The entity always manifested in her kitchen at about 11pm every night, so at 11.15pm on Wednesday it was going to happen, for better or worse.
Rachel prayed for the best, but feared the worst; that was the only way to be with Andy.
*
Rabbi Lieberman sat on the bench beside a bus stop, watching the cars whizz by on the busy high street. There were so many cars now, going so fast. He had died in 1952 and remembered, at the time, coveting a car owned by a neighbour: a Morris Oxford. Cars in those days had personality, not like today’s vehicles, which all looked the same for the most part. The rabbi liked cars and had enjoyed riding in them during his lifetime. Now, in his deathtime, he found it hard to remain inside a car in spirit form, especially fast cars, as when they drove off, his spirit usually ended up floating in mid-air long after the car had disappeared down the street.
A Jewish brother he knew, Joshua, spent most of his time frequenting a petrol station beside a busy thoroughfare. When cars stopped to take on fuel, he was known to sit in the back seat and enjoy the ride for a few miles, before returning back to the station to ride somewhere else in another car. Joseph Lieberman could not condone this action, as it seemed to be done only for the fellow’s sheer delight and took him away from religious study, which could not be encouraged. But he did envy Joshua for being able to keep his spirit inside the car when it was going fast, rather than ending up floating out as the rabbi had done. He also wondered what would happen if a mortal who could see the dead was driving and happened to glance in his rear-view mirror, only to see a Jewish gentleman in the back seat. It would cause an accident one day, he was sure.
As he looked up, he saw Nanny coming around the corner. Today, she had a small number of children with her and no babies. Rabbi Lieberman was glad; he didn’t much like babies. In his lifetime, newborns had been brought for him to bless and welcome into the faith. However, this was a task which he held very little love for; babies always screamed and often smelt horrendous.
Seeing Things Page 26