The Spookshow - The Spookshow 1

by Tim McGregor

  “Easy,” he said.

  Her hand trembled as it rose to shield her eyes from the overhead light. “Turn it off,” she rasped.

  The car went dark as he shut the door and he felt her collapse onto him. “Are you hurt?” he asked. “Talk to me.”

  “I’m okay now.” Her voice was fragile and weak. “It’s passing.”

  He couldn’t see any detail inside the darkened car, just her outline. “I can’t tell if you’re injured or not.”

  “I’m fine. I just need a minute.”

  They sat there in the dim glow of the dashboard lights and he listened to her breathing. His own pulse calmed when he felt her head fall onto his shoulder. He didn’t want to stir or disrupt the moment. The sudden sense of peace was strange, a stark contrast to the appalling nightmare they had just fled in the old house.

  “Thanks for getting us out of there,” she said.

  He didn’t respond, didn’t move a muscle.

  She tilted her eyes up. “What’s wrong?”

  Mockler exhaled. He hadn’t realized that he had been holding his breath the whole time. “That,” he whispered, “was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  He didn’t find it very funny. “Billie, what the hell just happened?”

  It hurt to shrug. “I don’t know. It wanted to drag me into the pit.”

  “What did? What was it?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. Not without sounding completely insane to you.”

  “Try me.”

  Billie tried to look at her fingers but it was too dark. The tips of them stung, scraped raw along the floor. “It was the woman. The one who murdered her husband.”

  He felt his pulse tick back up the scale. “This is what you see? This is what you have to go through?”

  “Not always. This was something else.” Her ear was squished flat against his shoulder but she didn’t want to move just yet. She didn’t want to talk about this right now either. “Were you hurt?”

  “Me? No. I think my heart stopped for a full minute. But that’s all.”

  He stirred and, out of the blue, she felt his hand settle atop hers. It felt warm and safe and it sparked a jolt right through her. This was getting dangerous, she thought. This was trouble. Pull back. Despite the warning blips going off in her brain, she didn’t move. Just the opposite, she had the odd sensation of melting.

  “Billie,” he hushed. “I saw you dragged across the floor. But right now, away from that awful place, I still can’t believe it.”

  She wished he would just stop talking. She wanted to just sit here in the dark and draw out the moment and, she mused, pretend for a little while that the car was actually a little boat drifting out to sea with just the two of them.

  “Don’t think about it,” she suggested. “It will drive you crazy.”

  “How can I not think about it? I feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under me.”

  His grip locked harder onto her hand. It almost hurt and she wanted him to squeeze harder. “It’ll wear off,” Billie said. “In a few days, it’ll seem like it never happened. Ow.”

  He felt her flinch and realized too late that he had been crushing her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Her hand cooled as his lifted away. “Don’t let go,” she whispered.

  His hand returned and this time the electric charge jolted both ways, each able to decipher the pulse of the other.

  Trouble came when she tilted up to look at him and saw his face in the glow of the dash. His focus locked onto hers and it held there for what seemed to be a lifetime, neither of them knowing where to go to next. Tortuous indecision and tingly expectation. The nigh unbearable moments before a first kiss.

  This was all she had thought about. This pristine moment. Two months, she had pondered and dreamt and fretted and despaired over it. And now, somehow, it was actually going to happen.

  She flinched and recoiled, her right hand pushing his chest to break his momentum.

  “Stop.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her hand covered her mouth. “I just threw up.”

  The look in his eyes shifted into confusion. “Oh. Right.”

  She slid away as the cold slither of self-consciousness chilled her. “Oh God. That would have been disgusting.”

  He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. The moment passed from suddenly awkward to ludicrous and then he laughed. “Right. I kinda forgot that.”

  One trickle of laughter is infectious and her clammy embarrassment tilted into the farce of it all. “Me too.”

  “I guess that woulda been, uhm, unpleasant, huh?”

  “And wrong,” she added. “We can’t do that.”

  The moment, whatever it had been, vaporised into thin air. Both of them sobered quickly in the non-afterglow of an almost moment.

  Mockler rubbed his eyes and rattled his head, as if shaking it off. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Yeah,” she lied. “Me neither.”

  Silence crept in as each settled into their separate ends of the backseat like boxers retreating to their corners. The kiss that had never happened had, nonetheless, left a bad taste in the mouth.

  “You all right,” he asked, for what seemed the hundredth time that night.

  “Peachy,” she lied again.

  “Okay.” His hands raised up, as if throwing in the towel. He reached for the door handle. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Sure.”

  The car dipped a little as he swung out of the backseat and dipped again when he dropped under the wheel. Billie scrambled her brains for something, anything, to say but Mockler turned the ignition and slid the transmission into gear. He swung back onto the road and drove without another word and Billie fumed in the backseat, hating every minute of the awkward drive home.

  That moment, that tiny sliver of time and space that she had envisioned so many times had crashed on the rocks and gone belly-up in the worst possible way.

  And now it was gone.

  Forever.

  Was it possible to die from undiluted mortification? If it was, then Billie predicted that she had about ten seconds to live before the end came.

  14

  KYLE DROPPED ONTO the sofa, feeling the weight of the day settle over him. Scrounging around for the remote seemed like too much effort so he just sat before the darkened flat screen. The last three hours had been spent circling the downtown core looking for Kaitlin. He had started at all the usual places Kaitlin frequented and then expanded his search from there, cycling through the streets to any place that Kaitlin had ever mentioned in the past, no matter how remote. His efforts had amounted to a big fat zero. No one had seen his girlfriend in two days.

  Coasting home on the bike, he had kept his fingers crossed that he would walk into their apartment and find his missing girlfriend safely ensconced on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and a perfectly reasonable explanation for her strange disappearance. That hope evaporated the moment he walked in the door and found the place in the same state that he had left it. Empty.

  His eyes grew heavier by the moment and he dug for one last ounce of strength to propel himself into the bedroom. Then he heard the door click open.

  “Hello?” he muttered, sitting up.

  Kaitlin stood in the foyer.

  Kyle shot to his feet. “Kaitlin? Where have you been?”

  He rushed to her but stopped short. Something wasn’t right. His girlfriend’s clothes were muddied and torn, her hair a tangled mess. Kaitlin looked as if she had run an obstacle course. She remained still and her eyes looked over the apartment like she didn’t recognize the place.

  “What happened to you?” Her arms and hands were red with scratch marks, as if she’d clawed her way through a thorn bush. “Are you hurt?”

  Kaitlin’s eyes were glassy, as if drugged, and she had yet to even look at him. “Don’t touch me,” she said. />
  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where did you go?”

  “Out,” she mumbled and moved past him.

  She had lost her shoes somewhere. Her bare feet left muddy footprints on the tile floor as she drifted into the living room.

  Kyle stammered for a moment, unsure of what to do. A hundred different scenarios raced through his head, trying to understand what had happened to her. She had been abducted. Or she had been rufied at a bar and was still feeling the drug’s effect. He followed her into the living room. “Maybe we should go to the hospital.”

  Kaitlin rummaged through the mess on the coffee table. “Where is it?” she hissed.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The board!” She hurled the pillows from the sofa, plunged her hand between the cushions.

  “What are you talking about?” Kyle took her by the arm. “Stop it. Let’s get a cab, go the hospital—”

  “Get your hands off me!” She shoved him away and then dropped to her knees to peer under the sofa. “What did you do with it?”

  “What? Your fucking voodoo board? I didn’t do anything with it!”

  “Don’t lie to me.” She turned to the book case and tossed book after book to the floor.

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?” The look in her eye had gone from dim to manic. “Gone where?”

  “Billie took it,” he said. “She and Tammy came looking for you.”

  The fury came fast. “That bitch. Why did she take it? It doesn’t belong to her.”

  “She said you shouldn’t be messing with that stuff.”

  “That stupid bitch!” Kaitlin’s arms dropped and the fire within her seemed to go out. “She thinks she knows everything. She doesn’t know shit.”

  He approached her again but cautiously, the way one would a wild animal. “Sit down, honey. You need to calm down. Tell me what happened.”

  Kaitlin lowered herself slowly into the armchair. Books and knick-knacks were scattered around her dirty feet and a faraway look returned to her eyes. “I made a friend,” she said quietly.

  He leaned in, warning signals flashing at the mention of a “friend”. The person responsible for her disappearance. “What friend? Who is he?”

  “She.”

  “Okay,” he spoke slowly. “Who is she?”

  “She’s lonely,” Kaitlin said. “She’s going to come and stay with us now.”

  The notion sent a creep up his spine. “Who, Kaitlin? What’s her name?”

  “Evelyn.”

  “Evelyn who?”

  Kaitlin folded her hands in her lap. “She doesn’t like it where she is now. She wants to leave.”

  He’d heard enough. It was time to call the police. He should have called them the second she walked in the door. Kyle patted his pockets but his phone wasn’t there. “Kaitlyn, did this woman take you somewhere? Did she give you something?”

  “She did. She’s very generous.”

  Kyle patted down the sofa for his phone. It must have slipped out of his pocket. “What did she give you, honey? Was it a drug? Booze?”

  “She’s here,” Kaitlin whispered.

  “What?”

  “She’s coming up the steps now.”

  His blood ran cold when he heard the noise from the corridor. Footsteps out in the hallway. Kyle was already scared. Now he was outright terrified.

  A thin smile creased Kaitlin’s face. “She brought her friends too.”

  There was a click as the doorknob turned and then the apartment door creaked open. Kyle was only slightly aware of the warm sensation spreading through his crotch as his bladder let go.

  15

  ONE LONELY WINDOW was lit when Mockler pulled into his driveway and killed the engine. Going up the eroded porch steps, he looked at his watch and wondered if Christina was home yet. There was little point in wondering, she kept her own hours these days.

  Hitting the switch-plate in the kitchen, he dropped his keys and his ID into the bowl on the counter. Then he remembered the sidearm clipped on his belt. It was unusual for him to bring it home. He almost always left it at the precinct, preferring not to have it in the house. Hell, he didn’t even like wearing the damn thing but his sergeant had chewed him out the last time she caught him without it. He opened a cupboard and reached up, slipping the weapon into a bowl on the topmost shelf where the fancier dishes were kept. Out of sight and out of mind.

  Scrounging a beer from the fridge, he leaned back against the counter and tried not to let the sight of his own house depress him. There was a stack of packed cardboard boxes on the floor and another on a kitchen chair. The table was cluttered with glassware and the crumpled newspaper used to pack it in. A cupboard door stood open, the shelves within half-empty. It was a sad sight.

  Most of the house was in the same sorry state; packing boxes cluttering the floors, pictures taken down, items swaddled in newspaper. A home interrupted and put on hold. He hated it, the disruption it caused and the sense of instability. Mockler passed through the chaos of the living room and moved on through to the sunroom at the back of the house but he couldn’t escape the packing material or empty spaces. Change was happening and he didn’t like it and there was no refuge from it. He kept moving, pushing out the back door to the yard.

  Here, at least, there were no signs of disruption. Just a backyard that needed to be cleaned up now that autumn was here. The patio table was covered with dead leaves and the barbecue needed to be covered up. Mockler eased down onto the step and sipped his beer, grimacing over the fact that the only comfortable spot in the house was outside of it.

  The past few months had seen such a sea change in a house that he had once had such hopes for. The pall that he and Christina had lived under for so long had finally lifted. Much of it, he knew, he had brought into the house himself. Moving into the homicide unit had been a goal for a long time, one he had achieved eighteen months ago. The youngest member of the of the homicide unit in twenty years, the staff sergeant had informed him when she welcomed into the detail. It had felt good, crossing that goal line and he dove into the work, determined to earn his place on the team. To solve murders and ensure justice to the grieving and to apprehend the guilty for what they had done. That was the intent, at least, but six months into the new job, he began to question whether he was truly cut out for the work. Until then, he had always thought of himself as having thick skin, of being able to compartmentalize his life between work and home and keep the two apart. Working the homicide detail had shattered that illusion to the point where he wondered if his goal for the last decade had been a misstep all along. The misery of the job had gotten under his skin and, even worse, he was bringing it home with him. The job came with a price. The misery settled into his skin and then leeched into the home that he and Christina had made. It began to infect her as well. Christina had been prone to bouts of depression in the past but it was part of who she was and he accepted that. The bouts would last a couple days or even a week but they would eventually pass and Christina would become herself again.

  A year into the new position at work, Christina had fallen under a dark cloud and hadn’t come up for air again. The depression was so deep, so intractable that it scared him. Therapy hadn’t helped, the couples-counselling had zero effect and his own pathetic attempts to raise her spirits fell flat. He left his sidearm at the office, afraid to bring it into the house. At times, they shuffled around like zombies, barely aware of the other. The dream home they had bought three years ago became a plague house, the two of them sick with some illness that was eating them alive. No one spoke of the wedding plans anymore.

  Two months ago, something changed. Just as the humid swelter of summer was biting down, when the oppressive pall over them was at its worst, the clouds parted and the sun came out. Christina lifted out of her depression as if waking from a long sleep. His own dark thoughts and stifled heart altered also and the mood within the house brightened almost overnight. It was like throwing open the windo
ws after a long, stultifying winter. Fresh air and sunshine brought them back to life. And, for a little while, they were happy again.

  It just wasn’t the same as before. While he was relieved to see the smile return to Christina’s beautiful face, there was something different about it now. A wariness to her eyes, like she didn’t quite recognize him anymore. Give it time, he told himself, things would go back to the way they were. That had yet to happen. A light had gone out between them and, to any observant eye, was not rekindling. They faked it for a little while but when the fall winds came and the leaves started turning red, neither of them had the stomach to keep up the charade. So a decision was made.

  Compounding the problem was the question of Billie Culpepper, whom he had met in the summer when he had almost killed her in pursuit of a known criminal. He didn’t know what to make of her. Their paths kept crossing and an odd friendship had sprung up. Maybe it had been the affront of knocking her into a coma when they first met that allowed them to speak plainly to one another. Maybe he felt responsible for her, or that a debt was owed. Whatever it was, he found an easy comfort in her presence and would often spill stuff that he normally kept bottled up. She in turn shared weird insights into her own oddball life, stuff she also seemed to keep hidden from friends. It was like an odd no-bullshit zone had been established after putting the poor girl in the hospital. It didn’t make sense but he stopped questioning it after a while. Let it be.

  What had happened earlier tonight was a different matter altogether but he wasn’t sure which incident was more troubling. Almost kissing her or seeing her physically assaulted by some unseen force?

  A noise from inside the house made him turn around. A light went on. He heard Christina call his name.

  “Out here,” he hollered.

  The back door swung open. “Hey,” Christina said. “What’cha doing out here?”

  “I didn’t want to look at the mess in there,” he said.

  “Not much fun to come home to, is it?”

  “Nope.”

  Christina eased down onto the step beside him, careful not to spill the glass of wine she had poured. She tucked her hair back behind one ear and took a long sigh. As tired as she seemed, she was still radiant, still beautiful and he was grateful to see her. After the long months of depression that had worn her down over the previous year, she seemed like a completely new person.