by Sam Stone
‘Why this is so exciting! Two handsome young men to make the evening fun. And this thing … this … Airship? I have never seen a ship on dry land like this before. It’s fascinating. Why I think all of the guests may find it quite a talking point. My goodness it actually flies too doesn’t it? Do come in Mr Crewe, I will tell Isaac to set another place at the table. The ball guests will be arriving soon and we have a wedding to celebrate.’
‘If I may?’ said Martin. ‘I did bring something more appropriate to wear for the evening.’ (Another point in Martin’s favour that really couldn’t hurt where Mother’s approval was concerned. At least he would be dressed appropriately for the evening and she couldn’t justify her continued disapproving frown.)
‘You can use my room to change,’ Pepper said.
It was all so formal, polite and yes … that awful thing … proper, that it irritated me somewhat. Part of me had wanted something different to happen. It amazed me how society people, when they were faced with something extreme and out of the ordinary, always reacted as though it was the most normal thing in the world. As if to say ‘No. I’m not accepting this’ was too awful to conceive.
I followed Pepper and Martin back up the external steps and onto the balcony.
‘So, Martin. What is that metal around the hull?’ I asked.
‘It’s tin. A little armour plating if you will …’
‘Tin?’ said Pepper. ‘Canned-food-tin?’
‘Well not quite, but sort of. This has been treated in such a way that it’s far stronger than the cans of course. You wouldn’t be able to put a knife through this and open it! But it is still as light. A very resourceful material when weight is an issue. Plus it also helps collect energy to send into the sun panels. It’s not quite strong enough to run the ship yet – I’m still working on that – but it does run the lighting and heating system on board.’
‘I want to know what the new dials do …’ I said linking his arm. Strangely being this friendly with Martin always felt a little more natural than touching Pepper did. I wasn’t sure why, but I was aware of it as we walked back to our rooms. Martin felt more like … a brother to me than Pepper for some reason. Even though I could trust Pepper just the same.
I loved Martin’s inventions. I always liked to know exactly how they worked. Though sometimes he kept some of his secrets to himself.
‘The new dials on the control box are a surprise. But I promise to show you when we need them. Now, tell me about your problem here …’
I was about to start explaining everything about the ghost and the vanishing bedroom when Mother came up onto the balcony.
‘Kat. I think it will be far more appropriate if you came downstairs now and joined the family to greet the arriving guests. I’m sure Mr Pepper will be able to help Mr Crewe change for dinner.’
‘Yes Mother,’ I sighed.
Sometimes it was just no fun being female.
12
‘This is where the room was?’ asked Martin.
It was very late when I met Pepper and Martin at the end of the landing, in the very spot where I had seen the door and the mysterious nephilim child. The party had gone well, the guests had long since left and the Pollitt family and servants had all retired.
‘After that, the phantom tried to suffocate Kat,’ Pepper explained.
‘It’s dangerous then,’ Martin said.
I explained its lack of matter, but how I had still felt ‘something’ as I fought it.
‘Ectoplasm,’ Martin said and then, when Pepper and I looked bemused, he went on to explain all that he knew. ‘It’s a kind of substance that is generated by spirits when they try to communicate with the living. I did a study on it last year. Went to many a séance. Most were frauds to be honest though … then there was this one spirit that came through. I won’t bore you with the details but it left behind a mass of this stuff all over the medium that channelled it. Like a clear, sticky gel.’
‘It felt like that,’ I said. ‘But the next day there was nothing on my hands.’
‘It dissipates after a few hours,’ Martin said. ‘Which is why I couldn’t use it as I had wanted to.’
‘What could you use it for?’ I asked.
‘Ectoplasm is pure energy, Kat. It’s the fuel the spirits use to cross the dimension between life and death. Can you imagine being able to harness that power?’
‘You’ve lost us both on that one,’ Pepper said. ‘Dimension?’
‘Think of it as another world … that runs and lives parallel to ours.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.
‘It’s a theory I have really. About life and death that may explain our relationship with religion. Death is merely just another place. It is ethereal and we are corporeal. But once our physical body has worn out we join that realm and as we move onto the other dimension this one becomes closed to us.’
‘But then how does that truly explain spirits and phantom, ghosts if you like?’ I asked.
Martin explained his thoughts as simply as he could. He believed that sometimes the dimensions became thin and sometimes we could see the other one, or at least some people could. I didn’t fully understand his theory, but it gave me food for thought. What I did understand was that sometimes these ghosts or spirits didn’t want to cross over into the other realm and clung onto this one, even though they couldn’t really live in it anymore.
Martin studied the wall once more. ‘There is no sign at all of a door. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Sometimes our eyes refuse to see what our hearts know is real.’
‘I did see it though,’ I whispered.
‘I think this child is probably a ghost. The fact that you heard its tears may mean you are gifted in mediumship, Kat. You’re one of the few genuine people who can see into that other dimension.’
‘The child is dead then?’ I said.
It was horrible to imagine even for a moment that the child I had spoken to wasn’t alive. He had seemed so … vital. Even though he was a nephilim and had boasted of trying to drown his own sister, I felt that the boy had been truly unhappy. I’d been drawn to help him, but something had tried to stop me, which made me wonder if something else was holding the child captive for its own designs. Perhaps the boy wasn’t evil at all. The jury was still out on that one though. And it wasn’t like me to feel any sympathy for anything that was associated with a demon or the Darkness.
‘I think perhaps what I’m saying,’ Martin continued. ‘Is that you could probably bring this door forth anytime you wanted. It might not exist in the real world. But it does in the ethereal one.’
‘Do you think that I might have crossed into this world when I walked over the threshold?’ I asked, feeling decidedly uneasy as I recalled the lack of external normal sounds when I was in the room.
‘I think that you crossed over, but maybe not physically. I really can’t be sure though.’
‘It felt real …’ I said.
I had seen many things over the past few years but I was struggling to come to terms with Martin’s theories. Although I was willing to experiment with idea that I could possibly control this newfound skill and open the door again, I wasn’t really sure it was possible. It still felt as though some other force had made it happen, and I was merely the person that was chosen for the revelation.
I looked at the wall long and hard. Then ran my fingers over where I thought the door had been. I tried to concentrate, I really did. But I felt nothing which only confirmed to me that I didn’t possess any particular power to see through our world into another.
‘It’s useless,’ I said after a while. ‘All I see is the wall.’
‘Maybe we need to recreate the events of the evening,’ Pepper suggested.
‘How are we going to do that?’ I asked.
‘You were relaxed and sleepy,’ Martin prompted.
I shook my head. ‘No. I was jerked awake by a scream. I was in full battle mode. Gun in hand. I wasn’t sleepy or even gr
oggy.’
We all fell silent and contemplated the dilemma. There was no way we could possibly recreate the scenario. Especially if it had not occurred by accident, or a series of events, but was by the design of something we did not understand.
‘I’ll have another look in the daylight,’ Martin suggested.
I left Martin and Pepper at the door to Pepper’s room and walked silently down the corridor but as I reached my door I heard the muffled sobs once more.
The servants had made up a bed for Martin in Pepper’s room and so I hurried back and knocked on their door as quietly as I could. There was no answer, but the sobs were louder now and so I gave up and hurried back towards the corridor’s end.
I stared at the wall. It was just a wall, but as I pressed my ear against it I could hear muted tears. I felt impotent and frustrated again. The child was locked in there. Had he really tried to murder his sister as he said? Or was that some form of bravado? Suddenly I began to believe that it was. I recalled again the smiling face, it had been a contrived expression. He had been trying to make himself appear frightening. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that he wasn’t a monster.
I glanced back towards Pepper’s room. Neither of the men had emerged, which was strange because there hadn’t been enough time for them to fall asleep. I went back. Knocked louder. There was still no answer and so I decided to try the door instead. The handle turned in my fingers, but as the door opened I realised that this wasn’t Pepper’s room at all.
I found myself face to face once more with the nephilim child, sitting in the large bed, tears in his eyes.
‘Oh it’s you!’ he said.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked. I stood awkwardly in the corridor looking inwards.
‘I never expected to see you again,’ said the boy.
‘I’ve been trying to get back in.’
‘I’m sorry if my eyes scared you.’
He was different this time somehow. The child felt relieved that I was there it seemed.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I felt an intense wave of compassion. He looked so lost. So forlorn. Why hadn’t I realised that last time?
I stood on the threshold, warily considering whether to cross again. Outside of the room I could hear the sounds of the sleeping occupants of the house. The steady creak of the timbers cooling in the night air.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I wasn’t armed. I had no way at all of defending myself if something went wrong. But as I looked over the threshold I met the boy’s eyes. The tears were drying on his cheeks.
‘You didn’t really try to drown your sister did you?’ I asked.
The boy looked down at his hands, then shook his head. ‘Of course not. I would never do that. I love her.’
I made the decision and crossed the threshold. Sound disappeared again but my senses were far more acute this time, and I was determined to take any clues I could back to Pepper and Martin. This room had a hollow feel to it. Like the open eves of a church, or the echo found in old ruins. The emptiness was palpable, and impossible. The room was full of furniture. There was a soft carpet beneath my feet. Thick curtains covered the windows. This vacant atmosphere couldn’t be real. Or could it?
I blinked.
The oil lamp suddenly extinguished and darkness filled the room. I stopped walking.
I blinked again. The light returned and the boy was staring at me, wide-eyed and curious again, as though he were seeing me for the first time.
I blinked once more. The room now looked like a bare attic space. The bed was still there, but empty and the sheets were rotten, and moth-eaten. The boy was gone.
I opened and closed my eyes and once more the child and room reappeared.
‘What’s happening?’ I said.
‘You see me don’t you?’ The boy pleaded.
‘Yes. Of course.’
I walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge to wedge myself in this present. ‘How long have you been here?’
The boy looked up with his strange amber eyes and smiled at me. ‘You’re nice. You aren’t at all like he said you would be …’
‘Who said?’
‘Callon. He is angry with me.’
‘Callon?’
‘He’s my father,’ said the boy.
‘Oh? I thought your father was Michel …’ I said because part of me still wanted to believe that this child was one of Amelia and Michel Beaugard’s. But of course he wasn’t. It had been a ridiculous notion.
The door behind me remained open and I wasn’t afraid of the child at all. I felt strangely safe, unlike two nights ago when my strength evaporated in this very room. But things had changed. The boy had changed somehow as though the thing that had tainted him was gone. Had been taken away. But that thought was too peculiar, and impossible to consider. Other than his eyes he seemed perfectly normal.
‘What are you?’ I asked suddenly. ‘Spirit? Demon?’
The boy frowned. ‘I’m Dando.’
The thought occurred to me that the room and the light were all echoes that were somehow reaching out to me. I was seeing something that no longer existed in my world. And it scared me more than the demon that had tried to suffocate the life out of me because it meant that what Martin had said about dimensions, may actually be true. And if we could see into that other world, then surely they could see us. Who knew what a malignant phantom was capable of if it found a way into our world.
I felt cold suddenly. A dark shadow fell across the bed and Dando yelped.
‘You’d better leave!’ he hissed. But I knew already it was too late.
I turned around to face the demon that had been haunting Pollitt Plantation.
A thick miasma shifted and turned as the creature began to take shape. On impulse I reached out and grabbed Dando’s hand. I was afraid for him and, even though my rational mind said it was impossible, I would try to take him from this awful hell-hole back into the real world.
Dando’s small fingers trembled in my hand, but they felt warm and I was reassured that he wasn’t the same as this monster.
‘Father …’ the boy gasped.
So this was Callon. A demon from some terrible realm. How had he found his way here? How had he managed to couple with a human female in order to make this poor confused boy?
Dando slid from the covers and cowered against me. His body burned like a small furnace, pushing away the awful, icy cold that Callon’s shadow induced.
‘What do you want with this child?’ I said, hoping that perhaps there was a chance to reason with it. ‘Why are you keeping him here?’
‘Get out!’ roared Callon, his voice like thunder.
‘Not without him …’ I said.
‘I can’t leave,’ the boy whispered. ‘It’s not possible.’
Callon’s features were slowly taking shape. His face was a charred and blackened skull. Empty eye sockets lit by a yellow, burning light of pure evil. His form took on a more solid substance. Shaped in the height and form of a man, with two arms, two legs, I could see how at a distance he could be mistaken for one. But the smell that came from him – like pig skin which had been roasted on a spit for far too long – caught under my nostrils and made me gag. He smelt and looked burnt, but a cold aura rolled from him like a frozen mist.
I shrank back with the boy. I had seen some demon forms, but none were quite like this. How could this thing possibly inhabit our world? How could it ever be able to convince any woman to see it as a potential lover?
I glanced back at Dando. He was frowning but no longer seemed afraid of the figure. When my eyes returned to Callon, I saw a man before me. A beautiful man that reminded me so much of Orlando Pollitt that I was stunned. This was how he seduced. He could change his image like any other demon. But I knew from experience that it took energy for them to sustain a human form, or a glamour. What did this monster feed on in order to be able to look like this?
I slid forward on the bed, pulling the child
with me.
Yes, children and babies were slowly becoming my weakness when faced with demons it seemed. I weighed up my options for a moment. The door to the landing was still open. I could grab Dando and run for it. It was likely that Callon would try to stop us however.
I recalled the heavy pressure, the suffocating feeling that this monster had forced on me just two nights ago. I hadn’t been able to fight him. I didn’t think I could now and so my options for surviving this encounter were rapidly diminishing.
‘You need to leave,’ the boy whispered in my ear. ‘You can’t take me. They trapped me here. I can’t ever go back.’
I pulled him onto my knee. He was so small and frail and I hugged him as though I were his mother. The urge to protect him was so strong that my other instincts were at odds with it.
‘I’m not leaving you here,’ I said.
Callon laughed. ‘That was what his mother said too. But she had to settle with what was left after the ritual.’
‘Ritual? What ritual? Did someone sacrifice this boy to you?’
Callon’s handsome face crumpled. He was clearly finding the glamour difficult to sustain, or maybe I could see through it as much in this place as I could in my own world. His hideous visage, accompanied by the charred odour, fell back over his form like a black curtain dropping over a stage. The stretched skin was slick, as though smeared with burned goose fat, and it dripped from him with a steady thud, like a tap that hadn’t been turned off properly.
I stood up with the boy clasped in my arms and moved towards the door. Callon blocked me.
‘He can’t leave here …’ he said.
‘Do you want him to suffer like this?’ I asked. ‘Surely if he’s your son …’
Callon’s form deteriorated further. This time back into thick black smoke. It billowed in impotent fury and beat against me with failing strength. The pressure I’d felt before wasn’t there. It was as though his energy and resources were depleted.