‘Who are you?’ she screamed. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ She tried to prise the fingers away but she could not. She slapped at the arm that held her. The bare flesh made a curious clapping sound, but there was no reaction to the beating.
Susan could not see a thing and her terror mounted till she felt she would be sick.
Was this even real? No, it wasn’t real; it just another dream.
The pull was gently insistent, so she allowed herself to be led out of the chamber, down the tunnels. A strange yet familiar sweet smell pervaded the earthy atmosphere. She recognised it as the smell of Becky’s hair.
‘Becky, is that you?’
There was no reply.
They moved down the tunnels at a pace, till she thought she saw light. At this the grip vanished and she stopped, rubbing the spot on her wrist where the hand had been. It felt cold to the touch.
She blinked, unsure whether she was awake or asleep now.
But the light was still there.
She inched her way down the black tunnel towards it.
Am I dead? Is this death?
But the tunnel suddenly spiked steeply upwards and there was a chink of light spearing through rocks, as bright as a star in the night sky. She pushed against the rock and earth and the hole widened and she felt the cool, refreshing touch of a breeze on her cheeks, the sweet scent of heather and grass filling her nose. She cried out in joy and punched a hole large enough for her to clamber out of the tunnel, and she flopped out onto the damp grass, her chest heaving to her sobbing.
She sat upright. The cliffs and the sea were some distance away. She wiped her face with the palm of her hand and shakily pulled herself to her feet, setting off immediately in the direction of the house.
She pushed at the door. It swung open.
Susan held up the axe she found in the yard and entered the house. But all was silent. She padded quietly through the various rooms, till she came across the large swathe of blood on the floor, and put her hand to her mouth when she saw the splashes of red that had dripped down the wall opposite.
But there was no one inside and so she went out to the yard, round the back to the shed. A small fibreglass boat had been dragged out front and left there.
‘Hector!’ she shouted. Her words were lost on the wind.
She opened the shed door, and by the rusting old diesel-fired generator she saw the mounds of canvas, lined up like something she’d seen in TV pictures from a war zone. She carefully peeled one of the flaps back and dropped it down again when she saw Helen’s white hand under there.
‘Oh my God!’ she gasped. She went outside, having checked the remaining bundles. Annabel’s and Alex’s bodies were also there, but Hector, thankfully, was missing from the gruesome haul.
‘Hector! Hector!’ she yelled.
But then her thoughts turned to Silas Blake and she dashed back to the house, searched the rack of keys for the one to the lighthouse door, but it was missing. She all but ran down the path towards the coast and the promontory on which the lighthouse stood.
Breathlessly she paused before the old lighthouse door. Turned the iron handle. Surprisingly, it was unlocked.
‘Silas!’ she called up the flight of stairs. ‘Silas, are you there?’
‘Susan…’ came a weak voice from the shadows.
She snapped her head round to the sound. There, cuddled up beneath a mound of sacking was Hector. He looked pale and drawn, dark bags beneath his eyes. She went over to him, and as he sat up the sacking fell away to reveal his bloodied shirt.
‘What happened?’ she said, lifting back the cloth to examine the wound. She grimaced on seeing it.
‘My father shot me…’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I was coming to save you. The dinghy sank and he thought I’d drowned, but I managed to swim to the jetty and hid there till he’d gone. I went to the house afterwards and got the key for the lighthouse. I was afraid he might still come looking for me.’ He looked down at the wound. ‘Is it bad?’ he said gravely. ‘It feels bad.’
‘Not as bad as it looks,’ she said. ‘We’ll patch it up in a while. Get you to a hospital as soon as we can.’
‘Where’s Paul and my father…?’
‘Don’t worry about them,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s a boat back at the house. Can we use that to get to the Maid of the Storm?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess so. Can you row?’
‘I once hired a boat on the Serpentine,’ she confessed lamely.
‘It’s not going to be easy, what with the swells we’ve got.’
‘I’ll manage somehow. Can you pilot the Maid of the Storm if I get us to it?’
‘I can try.’
‘We have to tell the police about Sylvester Copeland. Tell them about all this. But before we do anything else I’m going to check on Silas,’ she said urgently, and leapt up the stairs before he could say another word.
She found the room he’d been kept in and pushed open the door. The smell of damp and decay was overwhelming, but the room was empty. Her eyes narrowed, and she was drawn to the tin mug and plate of bread on the table. She went closer. The bread was a black, mouldy, stain-like mush and she frowned.
‘He’s not in here,’ said Hector at her back. She hadn’t heard him mount the stairs.
‘So where is he?’ she said quickly.
‘He’s dead…’ he said quietly.
She closed her eyes. She was too late. ‘Where is his body?’
‘Down in the cellar.’
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘Why are you bothered? You can’t do anything for him.’
But something was nagging at her, forcing her. She had to see him. ‘Take me there.’
He expelled a forlorn breath and said, ‘Follow me.’
He led her down the stairs, to the ground floor where he’d been hiding. He pulled away a cracked sheet of linoleum to reveal a wooden trapdoor fastened with a hefty iron bolt.
‘He’s down there,’ he said, lifting the hatch. Steep wooden steps plunged down into the moist, foul-smelling darkness.
She descended into the gloom, the steps wet and glistening. The cellar was a large, square room, the walls constructed of immense blocks of algae-green stone. Stuffed against one wall was yet another canvas bag. She approached cautiously. ‘That’s Silas?’
‘Yes,’ he said, choosing not to follow her down into the cellar.
She crouched down and teased away the canvas sheet. Underneath was a skeletal head, its sockets empty, the remnants of skin pulled taught across it, its mouth open in a wide, silent scream. ‘You’re mistaken. This can’t be Silas,’ she said.
‘That’s Silas alright. I was forced to help put him down there.’
‘But this body has been here ages…’
‘He’s been dead about eighteen months. At first Helen was reluctant to have him killed, though my father badgered her to do it. So they kept him locked up here as a prisoner in the lighthouse for about a year. In that room upstairs. Eventually father got his way. Brought him down here, murdered him, and then dumped him there. Helen had been on at my father to remove his body from the lighthouse, dump it at sea now it’s well rotted, but he hung back. He got some sort of pleasure out of seeing how she hated having his body here.’
Susan lifted the canvas sheet away. Silas was dressed in the same suit she’d seen him in, but it was filthy and rotted. Her fingers went inside one of his pockets and pulled out a gold pocket watch on a chain. She covered her mouth with her fingers, gagged. It was the one she’d seen him use.
It all made sense to her now. Everything.
Silas had been dead for eighteen months. What she’d seen hadn’t been the real Silas at all. All along it had been his spirit, his soul. That’s why she never heard him when he visited her, like he appeared to come out of thin air. She shook her head. Now it made sense why nobody seemed to notice Silas in the house when they first got to Connalough Point, when he was standing right in front of them by the
fireplace. Helen hadn’t been introducing Silas, but referring to the portrait of him. Neither Paul nor Helen had seen him.
Silas Blake, she realised, had enlisted her to help, because she was the only one he could approach, the only one with the true gift of speaking with the dead. And by uncovering their murderers she had set all the victims’ souls free, Silas included.
That’s why she had seen two Becky’s on the night of the séance. One had been the idealised version she always kept in her head, dragged out by Annabel’s hypnotism; the other really had been her daughter. Which explained why she saw Eddie Hull, too. Paul had murdered them both. Neither soul could move on till the true nature of their deaths had been revealed.
Susan Carmichael sank to the wet floor, her head in her hands.
Everything she’d experienced – the dreams, the visions, sensing someone was there, being guided to Iris Donovan’s jewellery – it was all real. Perhaps her skills, her sensitivity, had been heightened by the island’s mysterious and inexplicable powers. She’d never know for certain.
She touched her wrist.
Then it truly had been her daughter that led her out of the burial chamber.
Yes, it all made perfect sense now.
Annabel wasn’t the soul fixer.
Susan Carmichael had been the real soul fixer all along.
* * * *
Dear Reader,
Thank you for purchasing ‘THE SOUL FIXER’.
If you enjoyed this novel, I would be grateful if you could take the time to let other people know and put a review on Amazon. I personally read them all and take every review very seriously. As readers your thoughts and insights are extremely valuable.
If you liked this novel, you might also be interested in THE WOMAN FROM THE BLUE LIAS, a similarly chilling supernatural-based thriller.
Yours,
Daniel M. Mitchell
By D. M. Mitchell
Max
Silent
Mouse
The Soul Fixer
The Domino Boys
The King of Terrors
The House of the Wicked
The Woman from the Blue Lias
Pressure Cooker
The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
Also highly recommended and available on Kindle:
‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’
by Gordon Reid.
A Victorian murder/mystery set in Wales. The brilliant new debut crime novel by one of the UK’s most intelligent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction.
Table of Contents
Copyright
1: The Luxury of Regret
2: Blame
3: Weak
4: Silas Blake
5: Cloak-and-Dagger
6: Short Notice
7: Raw, Elemental Forces
8: The Thud of the Axe
9: The Soul Fixer
10: In Good Health
11: Empty Chambers
12: A Vile, Hated Man
13: Deliciously Wicked
14: The Digger Man
15: Black Souls
16: Family Ties
17: One of Many
18: A Foolish Thing to Do
19: A Private Vision of Hell
20: Sorry
21: Beautiful Boy
22: Death Warrant
23: Hell Awaits
24: The Nights Are the Worst
25: Rats in a Trap
26: An Agonised Shiver
27: Perfect Sense
THE SOUL FIXER (A psychological thriller) Page 21