Sanctuary & Other Ghost Stories

by Tom Kasey

  The host nodded, his eyes fixed on the liqueur in his glass. He glanced down at the dying fire, then across at the stranger, and nodded again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I thought you might.’

  He drained the last of the brandy, put down the glass and rose to his feet.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you to your room. It’s not,’ he added, ‘in the east wing.’

  The stranger smiled and stood up, finished his drink, and followed.

  And in the morning the stranger woke. The snow had stopped falling and the sun shone down brilliantly from a cloudless sky. Two days before Christmas. Cold and crisp: ideal weather for a walk. He pulled open the bedroom door, though not without some difficulty, and made his way cautiously down the stairs. His coat, still damp, he retrieved from the dining room and placed over his shoulders. The front door beckoned.

  Outside, he glanced down the drive and saw the flashing blue lights on the roof of a police patrol car and, beyond it, a fire engine which almost obscured the dark shape of his Ford, the front buckled and bent from its violent impact with the old oak. He straightened up and walked briskly down the drive, his feet making no sound on the thick snow.

  At the end of the drive he stopped and looked across the lane, puzzled at what he was seeing, at what the rescue services were doing. A team of men were using heavy cutting equipment to get inside the vehicle, and he couldn’t understand why. He was still standing there when an ambulance drew silently to a halt beside the wrecked car. A few minutes later, and with practised economy of movement, he watched the ambulance crew lift a body from the ground beside the car and transfer it into the back of their vehicle.

  Then the stranger looked back the way he had come, up the drive over the unmarked snow towards the ruined old house which sat, still and silent, uninhabited and uninhabitable. And as he looked, the old front door swung open, and the company from the night before silently filed out and gazed down at him.

  The host stepped forward from the group, smiled briefly and then beckoned to him to return.

  Finally the stranger understood. He looked once more at the wreck of his car, then turned and for the last time walked back up the drive to the house.

  If you enjoyed this, try Tom Kasey’s fast-paced novel Trade-Off:

  Trade-Off

  by

  Tom Kasey

  Friday

  When Kathy Morrell woke up, she was eight days short of her twenty-seventh birthday and had exactly seventeen minutes of life remaining.

  At first she thought it was the glare that had awoken her, but she was wrong. Her first waking sensation had been the lights, banks of them located high above her recumbent body, so brilliant that looking up at them quite literally hurt her eyes. But although the lights were all she could see and all she was aware of for the first few seconds after consciousness returned, they weren’t what had interrupted her sleep.

  Her return to wakefulness was due simply to chemistry, to a change in the relative concentrations of the gases she was breathing, and had been breathing continuously for just over four days. The oxygen and nitrous oxide mixture had been carefully regulated by the automatic monitoring systems to keep her deeply unconscious during her transportation to this, her final destination. Around thirty minutes earlier, the system had begun to reduce the concentration of nitrous oxide, with a corresponding increase in the proportion of nitrogen, and her drugged brain had slowly returned to life.

  For several minutes Kathy just lay still, tentatively exploring her memory and wondering why on earth she felt so ravenously hungry. The nitrous oxide had left her with a blinding headache which showed no immediate signs of abating, and she guessed that if she tried to sit up or stand the pain would probably knock her back down again. So she lay still, collected her thoughts and tried to work out the answer to a single, very simple, but very important question – just where the hell was she?

  She dug back through her memories. She remembered dining alone in the hotel restaurant, and the dark-haired man, also unaccompanied, sitting at the adjoining table. She remembered his polite request, and her casual acceptance of his company for coffee and liqueurs. They had talked, exploring each other’s lives as her eyes studied his face, and the coffee cups and the liqueur glasses were filled and refilled, and the restaurant emptied around them.

  Kathy remembered Richard’s tentative, almost shy, offer to walk her up to her suite on the tenth floor, and the lingering embrace at the door which had led them, with an inevitability which they had obviously both recognized, through the doorway and straight into the bedroom, shedding clothes and inhibitions on the way.

  Richard had been good, very good, and she felt herself moistening with the recollection. But that, she realized with a puzzled frown, was the last thing she could recall. She had no memory of him leaving her suite, and no memory of what she had done after they had lain close together in the afterglow, no memory of anything after that.

  Well, that wasn’t precisely correct, she realized. She remembered snuggling up to him, remembered him stroking her long blonde hair, remembered the cigarette he had offered her, and which she had taken.

  She was going to give up, she’d told him, but there were times – and without question that moment on that evening qualified as one of them – when smoking a cigarette was simply the only possible thing to do.

  The cigarette. Kathy remembered that Richard hadn’t joined her, hadn’t taken one for himself, which had struck her as odd. Yes, she realized. The absolute last thing she had any recollection of was lying back in her bed, smoking the stranger’s cigarette.

  At that moment, Kathy Morrell had a little over eight minutes left to live.

  She glanced carefully around her, moving her eyes only and taking care to keep her head as immobile as possible. The one place she wasn’t, she was absolutely certain, was in the queen-sized bed in her tenth-floor hotel suite.

  She was lying in what appeared to be a casket or box, almost coffin-shaped. The inside was padded, the cover had a large glass faceplate through which the lights above her still blazed, and she was lying on a thin mattress or pad.

  She noted without any real surprise that she was quite naked. She had no recollection of dressing after her love-making with the dark-haired stranger, so her nakedness was probably what she would have expected. But where on earth was she?

  She wondered if she had been taken ill, and was in a hospital or clinic somewhere but, she rationalized, if that were the case her surroundings would be quite different. She would have been on a gurney or in a bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors and other medical staff. And, she added to herself, she would be wearing something – a gown or nightdress or some other garment – or maybe just covered with a sheet for modesty. She certainly wouldn’t have been left lying naked in some kind of a box.

  For the first time Kathy felt unease, and began the slow process of sitting upright. But she discovered immediately that she couldn’t, because of restraints – padded fabric bands or straps – positioned around her wrists and forehead. A few seconds of exploration revealed other bands around her hips and ankles. She was locked in the box, pinned to the base.

  The box jerked suddenly and Kathy sensed movement. She also became aware, almost subliminally, of a faint but definite vibration through the floor of the casket. And then she relaxed, because she knew she must be in a hospital. She’d seen patients being fed into CAT scanners and other equipment before, on TV, and she was suddenly sure that she was undergoing some form of test. She couldn’t imagine what for – she was almost never ill – and as soon as they’d finished the examination she’d get the whole situation straightened out.

  A couple of minutes later the box jerked again, and she felt the vibration increase in intensity. Obviously they were getting ready to position her in the scanner, or whatever the hell the machine was. Then she noticed that the lid of the casket was lifting off, hoisted into the air by a type of mechanical arm.

  ‘Hello,’ she
called out. ‘Anyone there?’

  There had to be someone in the room. Someone had to be operating the machinery that she could hear.

  ‘Hey! Anybody there?’ Kathy called again.

  The sounds she could hear were much louder. A piercing, howling, almost-human scream suddenly cut through the air, and her body tensed involuntarily, then relaxed slightly. A piece of machinery, she thought, and in need of a good dose of lubrication.

  She began to discern other sounds, and tried to fit them all into a scenario that made sense. The hissing of something like a hydraulic system was clear enough, and a strange grinding vibration that she felt through the base of the casket almost more than she heard it. And loudest of all were the screams from what she guessed were inadequately lubricated wheels.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted again, but without any real conviction. If there had been anyone there, they would have heard her the first time and responded.

  The casket jerked again and moved about six feet forward. Kathy felt the fabric straps tighten about her body, and then the casket tilted upwards, pivoting from the foot until it stopped at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the horizontal. For the first time she had an unobstructed view of the whole of the room in front of her.

  Nothing that she saw made sense, not at first. The room was about two storeys high, and as far as she could see lined entirely with steel. Ranged on the ceiling were banks of lights, shining down. About five feet in front of her was another casket, lying horizontal and empty, and beyond that was something else.

  Knowing is prerequisite to seeing. The human brain takes a considerable time to identify any object which is totally unfamiliar, and adult humans never expect to see anything that they haven’t seen before. That was why Kathy just lay there staring and squinting into the glare for almost ten seconds before she started to scream.

  It looked like a machining table in a carpenter’s shop. A flat bed of steel, about eight feet long and three feet wide, with equipment she didn’t and couldn’t recognize positioned along one side of it. Directly behind the equipment was what looked to Kathy like a booth, pretty much like a cashier’s booth on the turnpike, with small glass windows.

  But it wasn’t the table, the equipment or the booth that provoked her scream. It wasn’t even the viscous red splashes and smears that covered most of the machinery and a good section of the floor around the table. It was the pinkish-white object on the table, and what was happening to it. It was the realization of what that object was, and of what was about to happen to her.

  That was why she screamed.

  Table of Contents

  One: Sanctuary

  Two: Consort of Baal

  Four: Spirit of Joy

  THREE: CURTAIN CALL