“Sciron.”
***
“V...vengeance?” The fear in Katie's voice was manifest. She was still sat on the settee, clutching Joshua to her. Her son was sobbing now, his tears leaving a dark stain on Katie's t-shirt. She was virtually paralysed with terror: her only movement the uncontrollable shaking that make her voice quake. The spectre had once again turned his back to her, blocking the way for the ghostly figures that appeared to be lurking in her hallway. They were quiet now, but the sense of unbridled hatred still permeated the room. If anything, their silence was more menacing than the tumult of before.
Bring him to us...give us peace.
“Bring who? I don’t know who you want!” pleaded Katie.
He is near now...bring him...my son will help.
“I’ll try! I promise, I really will try! Now, please, make them go away!”
The light in the doorway began to subside and with it the sense of dampness and the atmosphere of loathing. Rimmer’s ghost remained for a moment, then turned and looked at the wretched figure sat shivering before him. Her eyes, red now, appeared to beg him to spare her any more of this torment. Her tear-streaked face was a picture of abject terror and the small boy clinging to her was petrified with fright.
Sorry...they will come again; soon...you must bring him to us.
“But I don’t know who he is,” muttered Katie, unable to raise more than a hoarse whisper. “How can I bring him if I don’t know who you want? Why can’t...” Her voice tailed off as she realised that she was once again alone with her son. Joshua’s head came up; his hand found his mother’s face and gently turned her head so that she looked at him. His face was expressionless, uncomprehending. For a few seconds they sat staring at each other, then the mood was broken by the little boy opening his mouth in a gaping yawn and his balled fists rubbing his eyes.
Katie regained sufficient self-control to struggle to her feet, still holding Joshua, and heading for his bedroom. She paused at the living room door, suddenly nervous of her own hallway. Then, summoning up her last reserves of mental strength, she stepped into the small space and on towards Joshua’s bedroom. He already had his head on her shoulder, his breathing slower and deeper as he succumbed to his tiredness. By the time that Katie had laid him softly in his cot, he was fast asleep. Carefully covering him, she kissed her finger and touched it against his face, then turned and left the room.
Making her way, robot-like, into the kitchen, Katie filled the kettle without really being conscious of her actions. She reached up into the cupboard for a clean mug, but it slipped from her fingers and shattered on the worktop in front of her. Staring mutely at the broken china for a couple of seconds, she could contain her emotions no longer. Angrily sweeping the ceramic shards on to the floor with her hand, she burst into tears once more: not the silent weeping of previously, but an anguished, fervent lament.
As she stood, leaning on the worktop, head bowed, the tears ran down and dripped from the end of her nose, forming a pool on the surface in front of her. Transfixed by distress, she stared at the tiny puddle. Without warning, a sharp pain seared across her back.
“Oh, no...NO! Not now!”
***
Janice stood, shocked by the sight of her father in tears. He had always been one of the old school: outward displays of emotion were anathema to him. She had certainly never seen him cry before, even after the death of her mother. Now he was sat in the front seat of her car, his shoulders shaking and his breath coming in short sobs, seemingly unable to say anything more. She felt a tear welling up in her own eye, and dropped on to one knee to address him.
“Dad, what on earth is it? I’ve never seen you in such a state!” Her words seemed to help him to regain some of his composure; his breathing became more regular and he blinked to clear his eyes.
“Janice, my dear, this evening is going to be very difficult for both of us. Do you have a tissue? Thank you.” Cedric dabbed his eyes and dried his cheeks. “Please, go inside and check us in, while I try to make myself presentable.”
“But what is all this about?” The concern in his daughter’s voice caused Cedric to finally turn and look her in the eye.
“All in good time, Janice. All in good time. Now, please, do as I ask and sort out our rooms, would you. I’ll be in momentarily”
Without another word, Janice looked at him for a second or two before rising to her feet and moving to the back of the car. Extracting the folding handles from the two small suitcases, she took one in each hand and began towing them in the direction of the hotel reception. Half way to the door, she looked back, but Cedric gestured her inside with a dismissive wave of his hand. Once inside, Janice went up to the reception desk, only to find it deserted. Unable to find a call button or a bell, she called out.
“Hello! Can somebody help me?”
A young woman put her head around the door of the office behind the desk. She had a telephone handset in her hand.
“Just a mo and I’ll be with you.” She gestured towards the handset, as if Janice couldn’t guess what she was doing, and disappeared once more.
Janice stretched her back and looked around the hotel foyer. It was functional, utilitarian, with a low leather two seat settee either side of a glass coffee table as the only furniture. She could hear snatches of the receptionist’s conversation: she was clearly arranging to meet up with somebody after work. This annoyed Janice; she would never have considered keeping a client waiting whilst making a personal call. She was about to attract the woman’s attention once more when a familiar figure came through the front door.
“Jack! I wasn’t expecting to see you quite so soon.” The jollity in her voice belied her discomfort at seeing him before she had had a chance to freshen up. Her hair felt lank, she had no make-up on and, having been sat in the car for hours, she was sure that she must be in need of a dab of perfume.
Jack Rimmer looked at her. She was wearing a tight-fitting black polo-neck sweater and jeans tucked into calf-length suede boots. She thought that she was a mess: he thought that she looked stunning. He was reminded of Orsino’s line in the final act of Twelfth Night: “Here comes the Countess: now heaven walks on earth.”
“Hello, Janice,” he said, feigning an indifference that disguised his delight in seeing her again. “Where’s Cedric?”
“He’ll be along in a moment. He’s...er...fetching something from the car.” They stood, about six feet apart, just looking into each other’s eyes without either of them having the faintest idea what to say next. The awkwardness of the moment was broken by the receptionist, who had finally deigned to attend to her customers.
“Shall we have dinner?” asked Jack, the formalities completed. “About eight o’clock?”
“I’d love to,” she replied, wondering what she was going to do for the three hours until then. Getting ready wouldn’t take that long. “I’ll see what Dad wants to do.”
“I was hoping it would be just us, if that’s acceptable?” said Jack, desperately keeping a pleading tone out of his voice.
Her heart leapt. “That would be lovely.”
Wednesday Evening
Mike Simpson returned home after his shift, having firstly arranged to have a couple of days off and secondly withdrawn a substantial proportion of his bank balance. Despite his minimum-wage earnings, the fact that he never went out and, until that week, had been living for free meant that he actually had over four hundred pounds in his current account. He had taken two hundred and fifty: the maximum that his bank would allow in a single day. Still not knowing what role in the ghostly exposition he was playing, he was nonetheless determined to catch the first train to Preston the next morning. What he would do from there, he had no idea: he was relying wholly on spectral inspiration when he arrived at the Penwortham Triangle.
Pushing open the front door to their pebble-dashed semi, he put his head around the door of the living room, only to be waved away by his mother. She was sat with her friend Karen, and, despite t
he early hour, they were on their second bottle of Blue Nun. A gloomy Karen had turned up some forty-five minutes earlier, seeking a sympathetic ear from her best friend. Her night of passion the previous Friday had consisted of ninety seconds bent over her own kitchen table with her dress pulled up around her waist: assuming it to be an overture to a few hours’ sexual fervour she had willingly acquiesced. When the youth had groaned, stopped pumping, discarded his condom on her floor and left with a cursory “Thanks, grandma” she had been completely stunned. That feeling had quickly given way to disgust, largely with herself, followed by a deep shame. Feeling dirty and violated, she had sat on the tiles and cried for the best part of an hour before running a hot bath and soaking in it for even longer. It had taken her five days to pluck up the courage to talk to anybody about it; now she was sat on the settee with her head on her friend’s shoulder with tears running down her cheeks once more.
Oblivious to all of this, Mike went to his bedroom to check the train times to Preston. The National Railways website told him that the first train was at a quarter past six. Perhaps the second train, thought Mike. That left just after seven, arriving in Preston at half past nine. That one would do. Sensing a presence behind him, he turned around, expecting to be faced by a dripping spectre. He was almost disappointed when he saw his mother standing in the doorway.
“Can you sort your own tea out tonight, love?” she whispered. “Karen’s feeling a bit depressed. Here’s a fiver, why not go to the chippy?”
“Yeah, OK, Mum. Can I just have a quick word, though?”
A quizzical expression came across her face. “Can’t it wait until later?”
“Not really. You see, I’m taking a couple of days off work. I thought that I’d go and visit...er...an old school friend. I won’t be gone for long.” This time he could feel himself blushing deeply: lying to strangers was one thing but to his mother...that was different.
She didn’t believe him for a moment. She knew that he had no close friends, so she leapt to the erroneous conclusion that he had met a girl and wanted some privacy. “That’s fine, love. Just let me know where you are staying.”
“Do you and Karen want anything from the chippy?” he asked, thinking that his ruse had worked.
“No thanks, love. We’ll be fine. See you later.”
Mike thought for a moment. What had she said? Let her know where I’m staying...he hadn’t thought that about accommodation, nor what he needed to take with him. Those thoughts occupied the rest of his evening, following his trip to buy a bag of chips and pocketing the change. He never noticed the shadows that stalked his every move.
***
Jack had arranged to meet Janice at seven-thirty and was planning to take her to a restaurant away from the hotel. He had selected a Chinese establishment next to the covered market in Preston city centre, made the booking, and was about to head for the shower when there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” he snapped, frustrated by the interruption to his plan for the evening.
“Rimmer, it’s me.” Cedric Morgan’s voice sounded frail through the door. “Can I speak to you for a moment? I feel that it is somewhat of the essence.”
Intrigue got the better of Jack’s annoyance at being disturbed. He opened the door and beckoned Morgan inside.
“I’ve got an appointment this evening, and I need to get ready.” Jack said, gesturing towards the only chair in the room.
“With my daughter, perchance?” replied Morgan, although his voice betrayed no emotion at the prospect. “No matter. I must explain something to you.”
Taking Jack’s silence as permission to continue, he went on.
“I spent my working life in the service of my country, protecting her from the enemy within. I started in nineteen thirty-five, straight from a classics degree at Oxford. At the time, our efforts were concentrated on the Germans. We knew that there was a war coming: it was obvious to everybody except the politicians. But something else had come to my attention. A friend from university had been recruited by MI6, who handled all the foreign stuff. It was against the rules, but we had both been concerned by the number of Communist sympathisers at Oxford. You will remember the famous debate about King and Country in 1933, well, we were there. We were disgusted by the outcome of the debate, of course, but we considered the Communist students to be harmless, and Communism itself to be a passing phase limited to Russia.”
Jack listened with growing interest. That debate was something of an historical watershed, but here he was, talking to somebody that had actually been there. Morgan continued.
“Anyway, in the mid-thirties there were rumours circulating about wholesale mass murder in Russia and the other Soviet states. Officially, these rumours remained just that, with Leftist sympathisers denying that anything of the sort was going on in the Workers’ Paradise. Then MI6 started to get reports from inside Russia. It turned out that the rumours were true: Stalin was butchering people by the thousand. My friend showed me the reports. They made horrifying reading, Rimmer. It was a Great Terror indeed.
“Anyway, along came the war, starting with the invasion of Poland by both the Germans and the Soviets. Molotov’s non-aggression pact had taken everybody by surprise: the received wisdom was that the Nazis and the Communists were natural enemies. It made me realise that the Soviets were not above anything to further their aim of world domination. I decided that they must be as much our enemy as the Germans, and that they probably had far more sympathisers and agents on our soil. Fortunately, German agents were largely fairly inept and we picked them up quite frequently. That gave me time to concentrate on Communists. In those days, they had comprehensively infiltrated the unions, so all I had to do was to read newspaper reports of strikes or other industrial unrest, and I had my suspects.
“After the war, the Soviets became our official enemies for forty-five years. Let me ask you, Rimmer: who won the Cold War?” Before Jack could answer, Morgan went on.
“The Cold War was supposed to be an ideological conflict between Capitalism and Communism, wasn’t it? The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Capitalism had won, didn’t it? Well, I beg to differ. Ever heard of Cultural Marxism, Rimmer? It was thought up by an Italian, Antonio Gramsci. He was a Communist too, and he realised that relatively stable societies, like ours, were never going to see a revolution like that in Russia in 1917. He surmised that the only way to spread Communism was by stealth, by infiltrating the institutions of a country and then causing social breakdown. Do you know what? They have succeeded. The Left now control so much of our public life, from education to the judiciary and local government. Did you know that children never learn about the Great Terror? They are taught about Apartheid and slavery and the Holocaust. That is all right and proper, but they never get to hear about Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot’s Year Zero.
“Just look at the output of the BBC. It is so ‘politically correct’ it gives a warped view of life. Warped to the Left, of course. Do you know what political correctness is, Rimmer? It’s just a part of Cultural Marxism, that’s what. All those years of conflict, all my years in the service of my country against Communism were for nothing! They never came through the Fulda Gap in their T72 tanks, Rimmer, because they didn’t need to. Their fellow travellers were here all along, destroying our society from the inside.”
Morgan, who had been leaning further and further forward as he spoke, collapsed back into the chair. Flecks of spittle spread from the corners of his mouth and his cheeks were flushed. By now, Jack was wondering where this lecture was leading, eager for the dénouement so that he could get ready to go out.
“I needed to tell you this, Rimmer; to get it off my chest. There’s more to come, but that can wait until tomorrow. I’m not long for this world, you see, a matter of a few months at the most. But I have to make my peace, don’t you see?”
Jack didn’t see, but as the old man rose from the chair and headed for the door he was secretly pleased that the homily app
eared to have ended. Remembering Morgan’s reason for talking to him, Jack felt slightly ashamed at his impatience. The thought of Janice, however, soon overcame his guilt and he headed for the tiny en-suite bathroom.
***
“Are you sure that you’re all right?” Steve Melling’s concern for his wife was clear from the tone of his voice. They were in the living room of their flat: Katie sat on the settee with her legs curled under her and Steve standing with his back to the window. Joshua had been put to bed, but they could still hear him burbling to himself in his cot.
“Yes. I think that it was a false alarm. It’s been a couple of hours now, and nothing’s happened. I’m fine, really.” The tremor in Katie's voice belied her confidence, although she wasn’t sure what had scared her the most: the apparitions or the fear that she was going into premature labour.
“Steve,” she continued, “something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. Those other ghosts, they’re after somebody and they think that I can bring him here.”
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