by kindels
"But, but what if we don't survive it, whatever it is?" I blurted out.
"David, calm down, please. I'll admit we've seen and heard some pretty scary things so far, but nothing that's taken place has appeared to put any of us in any immediate danger of harm, has it?"
"What about Forbes?"
"I said a while ago that if whatever the thing is, the auras, perhaps, or something else, if it or they wanted to harm Forbes, they've had every opportunity to do so and, yet, apart from using him as some kind of conduit, they don't appear to want to harm him in any physical way."
"A conduit?"
"Yes, David. I've just been thinking and I have the feeling that something is trying to use Forbes to communicate with us, or with you, perhaps, as you were the one who heard the music outside."
"But I only heard a few bars."
"Yes, but you heard something. I didn't, which makes me believe that whatever is going on here concerns you in some way as well as Forbes."
"But how can it? I'd never heard of Forbes until I received his phone call the other day, and I've certainly never been involved with the Jack Reid case, and I'd sure as hell know if I was related to him, so, I say again, how can I be connected with this madness?"
"I wish I could tell you, David. For now, we must wait and see what happens when William awakes and also hope that Miles Prendergast can come up with some information that might assist us in our cause."
Kate was correct, of course. There was little we could do except monitor Forbes, and hope that Prendergast could help by identifying something in Forbes's past that might link him with Jack the Ripper. As Forbes would sleep for at least another two to three hours, thanks to the sedative I'd administered to him, and as Kate didn't expect any word from Prendergast for at least that length of time also, I suggested the two of us should try and blow the cobwebs from our minds by taking a walk outside. Kate readily agreed and, a few minutes later, we stepped from the chill atmosphere of the croft into a warmer than usual breeze, carried from the south by a gentle zephyr of a wind that gently pushed thin whispers of cloud across the sky, and gave the whole of my little island domain a warmth and freshness that had been, sadly lacking in the previous two or three storm-ridden days. With each step that carried us further from the croft, I felt my mind clearing and the fog, that had addled my brain, slowly began to lift.
"It's like a different world out here," I said to Kate, who walked at my side, enjoying the fresh air and the breathtakingly beautiful scenery of Skerries Rock. Small it may have been, but the panoramic views it afforded to the visitor were without equal in the United Kingdom, I'd swear to it.
"It really is quite magnificent," she agreed. "It's a shame I've had to come see it under such circumstances. I could quite enjoy taking a few days break here, David, away from the hustle and bustle of civilisation."
"Then, as soon as all this is over, you must do just that, Kate, and I won't take no for an answer. First chance you get, you must come and spend a week, or two if you feel like it, and you can simply relax and enjoy my home as it was meant to be enjoyed."
"Thank-you David. I'll be happy to take you up on your offer; but, for now, we must try and solve the enigma that is William Forbes and his strange 'possession', for want of a better word."
The mere mention of Forbes snapped us both back to the reality of our current situation. As one, we turned and headed back towards the croft, Kate pausing just long enough to wave futilely to the unseen crew of a trawler that headed out towards the open ocean, about a mile off the coast of Skerries Rock.
As we re-entered my home, we both felt that a subtle change had taken place. Neither of us could say exactly what had happened, but the atmosphere felt different somehow. As soon as we saw William Forbes, however, we could see a distinct change. He was in a sitting position on the sofa, his eyes wide open, slightly bloodshot, and unblinking. His mouth lay open, as though he'd stopped in the middle of speaking and been frozen in time. His whole body appeared rigid, unmoving, and only the steady rise and fall of his chest betrayed the presence of life within the statue-like figure.
"William," Kate said quietly. "Can you hear me?"
No answer.
"William," she tried again.
"William, it's me, David," I said, a little louder than Kate's words.
As we watched, Forbes slowly, inexorably began to turn his head to the left until his face looked directly at us. The whole movement of his head had taken place as though in ultra-slow motion, and appeared more frightening because of it. His mouth remained wide open and then, terrifyingly, without so much as a single movement of his lips, a voice that sounded nothing like that of the William Forbes we knew, emanated from deep within his throat.
"Release me."
Kate and I stared at each other. The voice that boomed from somewhere within William Forbes took us both by surprise.
"Release me," it repeated. "Release me now."
Deep and resonant, the voice sounded cultured, educated, but neither of us could escape the overwhelming 'edge' to that voice, a malevolence that pervaded each carefully spoken word. Kate was the first to react to it.
"Who are you?" she asked. "What do you want with William Forbes?"
"Release me!" the voice sounded impatient.
"I said, who are you?" Kate snapped back.
Without warning, the body of William Forbes began to shake and tremble, his head returned to a face-front position, and a screeching, tormented wave of sound erupted from his open mouth. The sound filled the room, and Kate and I both covered our ears with our hands, such was the decibel level. The screams bounced off the walls and reverberated around the room, intensifying the sound level. Forbes continued to shake from head to toe, his body a seething mass of uncoordinated movement that appeared in danger of shaking the teeth from his mouth.
"What's happening," I shouted at Kate in order to make myself heard over the terrible keening that continued to assault our eardrums.
"I don't know, but look," she shouted back at me and I returned my gaze to the shaking man on the sofa.
>From the mouth of William Forbes, a strange, mist-like vapour had begun to escape. The mist rose until it hung over the body of my houseguest and began to take shape, taking a semblance of human form, and then, just as it appeared to be taking a definite shape, in the blink of an eye it inexplicably vanished, literally into thin air. The screaming stopped just as abruptly, leaving an uneasy silence.
Where a second before the 'thing' had hovered in space above Forbes's head, there was nothing; there remained nothing in the room but Forbes, Kate, and me, and the solid, rhythmic tick, tock, tick, tock of the grandfather clock.
Kate and I continued staring at the space the apparition had occupied, wondering what exactly we'd just witnessed, so the pair of us were thus totally taken by surprise when the voice of William Forbes, the voice we recognised as the 'real' Forbes, snapped us back to the present.
"Hello, you two," he said innocently. "What on earth's the matter? You look terrible. Has something happened while I've been asleep?"
Neither of us spoke. We continued to stare at Forbes, and now Kate and I were the ones who stood open-mouthed in amazement.
Chapter Twenty-five
Who is it?
Ten minutes after Forbes had woken, the three of us were sipping hot tea, seated around the kitchen table. Although Kate and I would probably have benefited from another large shot of something stronger, I decided that Forbes would be best suited to tea, allowing time for the large dose of the sedative to dissipate from his bloodstream.
Incredibly, as his first words on waking had intimated, he had no recollection or knowledge of the terrible events that had occurred while he slept. As for the physical manifestations that he'd undergone, he expressed nothing but incredulity.
"You mean to say that I actually changed in appearance, and spoke in a strange voice?" he asked after Kate and I had jointly given him a brief resume of recent proceedings.
"But if it wasn't me, then you're hinting that it really was Jack the Ripper, aren't you? You think I'm possessed by his spirit."
"William, I really don't know what to tell you. I've never encountered such a manifestation as this. The mist, the strange, almost human shape it formed, makes me think we're dealing with a spirit of sorts, yes, but despite my profession, and I think I told you this earlier, I do not and never have believed in ghosts, per se. Whatever this is, it's something so powerful and so different from anything that I've thought possible that I'm having to look at it with a totally open mind, and must form my opinions as we go along."
"But, how could my face change? You both saw it, didn't you? You said I looked like a different man."
"Which, indeed, you did," I answered. "I've never been so terrified in my life, to be honest. The sound of that voice coming from your mouth, the screaming and the demands it made were just unearthly, not of this world, there's no other way to describe it."
"But I didn't say much?"
"Just 'release me' and 'release me now'."
"But, if it wasn't The Ripper, then who could it be, and what did it mean by 'release me'?"
"I don't know, William," said Kate, "but it was just after it spoke those words that the mist, the fog, or whatever it was, emerged from within your body, your mouth to be precise. I'm wondering if it was commanding you, not us, to release it, and that somehow, you did just that."
"But, how could I?" asked Forbes. "You've just said I was virtually catatonic and the thing, whatever it was, appeared to be in total control of my body and my mind, which it must have been for me to have no recollection of the event."
"You were, and I don't know how you could have let this thing loose. Perhaps it gave the command, and somehow your brain or your mind mentally released it, set it free from whatever held it inside you. I know, it all sounds far-fetched, I agree, but I have no rational explanation to provide at present. I'm sorry, William."
"You just said, 'whatever' was holding it inside William," I said. "You previously mentioned that you thought there might be two 'auras' surrounding him. Is it possible that one of those auras was in some way holding the other, malevolent one in check and that it has now been released to cause untold havoc on us?"
"You may well be correct, David. I need to try and think this through."
"You also said that all of this began as I listened to that tune from the dream, the Mary Kelly song," Forbes added, obviously anxious to try and find a solution to what must have been an even more frightening scenario for him than it was for us. "Why should a piece of Victorian music trigger such a reaction?"
"But it wasn't just any piece of Victorian music, was it William?" I said. "It was the actual song that Mary Jane Kelly was heard singing shortly before her death. Surely it has some special significance to whatever's going on here."
Kate held her hand up, stalling me from saying anything further.
"Just hang on a minute," she said. "Maybe we've been looking at all of this from the wrong angle."
"How so?"
"David, from the start you and I have both been under the impression, perhaps understandably influenced by William's assumptions, that Jack the Ripper, or some incarnation of his soul or spirit, is behind all of this. That may still be correct, but remember the second aura? What if, and I know it's a big 'if', but what if that second aura is not another malevolence, but is in fact connected with one of The Ripper's victims?"
"I say, Kate, you think it's Mary Kelly, don't you?" Forbes exclaimed.
"I'm accepting it as a possibility, William. I've said all along that there are forces around us that we don't understand. I think we should be prepared to consider all the possibilities and scenarios that this mystery presents. You've assumed all along that Jack the Ripper was out to 'get' you. If we take that as a possibility, then why shouldn't we also examine the possibility that Mary Kelly is trying to stop him from doing just that? The dream, the song, they all relate not just to The Ripper, but to the victims as well. You talked of the skeletal hands reaching out from the windows on that awful street. They could represent The Ripper's victims, and then the song only came to you when the figure of The Ripper appeared to block your path towards the light. Jack the Ripper didn't sing that song, William, but Mary Kelly did!"
"Kate, if what you're saying is true," I interrupted, "then who, if anyone, was asking for 'release' from within William? That sure as hell wasn't the voice of a young woman, so I'd find it difficult to believe that was the voice of Mary Kelly."
"David, you have to understand that we're dealing with some kind of supernatural phenomenon here. We can't assume anything. Who's to say that the voice we heard wasn't Mary Kelly, and that the fact that she is using William as a conduit is making the voice sound more masculine than feminine?"
"But the voice we heard was educated, cultured. Wasn't Mary Kelly supposed to be an illiterate Irish girl with little or no education?"
Forbes provided me with the answer to my question.
"There is, in fact, so little in the way of solid fact known about Mary Kelly, David. No one can even be sure that Mary Kelly was her real name. She was also known as Marie Jeanette, and probably one or two other names when she wanted to stay out of the local magistrate's court. Some say she was Irish and came from a small farm in that country, others say that she lived in Wales with her family before travelling to London, where she supposedly worked respectably for a while, before ending up in a brothel and finally ending upon the streets as a common prostitute. She may well have received an education of sorts and, as Kate says, we're dealing with the unknown here, so why should her spirit, if that's what it is, speak to us in her own human voice. She is dead, after all, isn't she?"
"Well said, William," Kate smiled at him. "I think you're beginning to get the gist of all this."
"I'm trying," Forbes replied.
"Okay then," I rejoined the conversation. "So Mary Kelly is trying to stop Jack the Ripper from taking over William's body and mind, or at least from getting some kind of foothold on the reality of our world, is that it?"
"It's a possibility," said Kate.
I sighed, a long, hard sigh.
"Kate, I know you won't commit to anything you're not sure of, but all you talk of is 'possibilities'. I don't mind a spot of speculation from time to time. We really don't have much to go on here, do we?"
"I'm sorry, David, really. I wish I could be more forthright about the whole affair, but I'm almost as much in the dark as you are. All I have is a little more overall experience with these kinds of phenomena, and a little more recent knowledge of 'things that go bump in the night'. What I'd really like to find out right now is what, if anything, attempted to materialise in this room a while ago, and if something was indeed 'released', then where the heck is it now?"
"Yes, you're right of course, Kate. We should be making that a priority," I said, eager to do something to try and resolve the mystery that surrounded us, and to alleviate my own fears that something terrible, and awfully dangerous, had been unleashed upon my island home.
William Forbes made as though to open his mouth to speak, but the words froze on his lips as the three of us almost jumped out of our skins.
The telephone was ringing!
Chapter Twenty-six
Something and Nothing
"Are you going to answer it or not?" Kate asked, as the phone rang and rang, as we all stared at the jangling instrument on the hall table. We'd all responded, in shock, to the sound of the phone as it stampeded into the middle of our conversation a few seconds earlier, so intensely had we immersed our thoughts in the eerie and
quite terrifying subject under discussion.
Her words stung me into action and I moved to answer the incessant ringing.
"Hello?" I spoke into the mouthpiece as I grabbed the phone from its cradle.
A stranger's voice replied, spoke a few words to me, and I asked the caller to hold on a moment. I held the phone out to Kate.
"It's Miles Prendergast!"
Kate quickly took the phone from me, and sat down as she engaged in an animated conversation with her learned friend. Forbes and I were both anxious to hear what Prendergast had to say; but, in the meantime, I thought it prudent to allow Kate some privacy, so I beckoned Forbes to follow me into the kitchen, where I made the two of us a pot of strong coffee.
A mere two minutes passed; we could hear the sound of Kate's voice, indistinct, as it carried through the croft, and both of us sat silently, sipping coffee and waiting for news from her friend, Miles Prendergast. A shadow fell across the room and, perhaps due to all that had recently occurred, we both jumped at the sudden paling of the light. It was nothing, just the effect of a cloud formation blotting out the sunlight for a few seconds. We relaxed, only slightly, although enough to finish our drinks and, together, we carried on waiting. Forbes began drumming his fingers on the table. It rapidly became annoying and I asked him to desist.
"Sorry, David," he said apologetically.
"I'm sorry too. I know you're anxious for news of Prendergast's inquiries. I shouldn't have snapped like that."
"Please, don't apologise. We're all under enormous pressure, and I know you and Kate are doing all you can to help me. I just wish we could discover something concrete, some valid reason for all that's happened to me and, that now, seems to be happening to you too."
"I must say, I'm mystified as to why I should have heard that music, William. Perhaps I really did imagine it; it could have just been the wind after all."
"But you recognised it, didn't you, when I hummed it to you, and when you heard the song on the Internet? That can't have been your imagination."