by Gary Gibson
‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ said Susan, ‘what is it that Ashford’s brought you here for, exactly?’
‘Please,’ said Andrew, ‘tell me you’re not bloody ghost hunters!’ He laughed unconvincingly.
Bernard nodded slowly. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand the problem here. The preferred term is “parapsychologists.” Perhaps you should take up the matter with Mr Ashford and discuss it with him directly?’
‘If you could hold off on getting started until I speak to him,’ said Andrew, ‘I’d be enormously grateful.’
Bernard’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I think it’s best we get started as soon as –’
‘I beg to differ,’ Andrew snapped. ‘I –’
‘I think Doctor Wrigley is just concerned that Mr Ashford didn’t give us advance warning of your arrival,’ Susan said quickly.
‘I’ll give him a call myself,’ said Bernard, his gaze marginally less avuncular now. ‘That should help straighten things out.’
Andrew brushed an invisible hair from his jacket, suddenly ill at ease. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mister Bernard.’
‘Professor Bernard,’ the other man corrected him. ‘And the pleasure’s all mine.’
Once they had made their way back up to the second floor, Andrew turned to Susan. ‘I didn’t handle that very well, did I?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t speak on my behalf,’ said Susan, fighting down her anger. ‘I’m happy for you to project-manage my work, but what’s going to happen once other research teams turn up here? Are you going to scream and shout at them?’
He stared at her, his expression incredulous. ‘They’re ghost hunters. Surely you, of all people, understand how important reputation is in any field. We can’t be seen to be associated with them in any way, not even by proximity.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Susan, her expression increasingly frosty. ‘What Ashford does with his money is his business. If you have a problem with it, ask him yourself. You said you were going to.’
Andrew nodded, apparently oblivious to her anger. ‘I certainly intend to.’ He shook his head and chuckled. ‘My God, how does Ashford square superstitious nonsense like that with building a state-of-the-art research centre?’
Thursday July 2nd 2020
‘I promise you that Professor Bernard and his team will be entirely discreet,’ said Ashford, looking rumpled but tanned on the screen of Andrew’s laptop the next day. ‘They won’t get in your way. You can be assured of that.’
It was early morning in California and four in the afternoon in Britain. Andrew had chased Rajam into the furthest corner of the office, then inveigled Susan into sitting beside him when Ashford came online. She was, after all, as he reminded her for the umpteenth time, the reason they were all there.
‘But why?’ demanded Andrew, sounding more like a schoolboy whose school trip had been cancelled than a former Senior Researcher at CERN.
Ashford leaned forward, and Susan saw he was sitting on a verandah. Sunlight glinted from a sun-kissed shore that seemed impossibly exotic compared to rain-lashed England. ‘Professor Bernard spends more time debunking the paranormal than anything else. It’s the summer break, Andrew – he has conferences to attend, and university work to prepare for. This is the only time he has available. It has to be now.’
‘With the greatest respect,’ said Andrew, ‘if anyone else in the scientific community got wind of supernatural investigators wandering around what’s meant to be a modern scientific research centre, it’d harm the chances of our project being taken seriously. It would be-’ he paused, searching for the right word ‘-tainted.’
‘If I worried what other people thought of me, Andrew,’ said Ashford, ‘I’d never have achieved one damn thing in life. Results count, nothing else. If your quantum communications array does what we’re all hoping it can do, governments and telecommunications corporations all around the world will be too busy handing us enormous amounts of money to care less about whatever Professor Bernard finds or doesn’t find. In fact, I guarantee you Maxim isn’t going to find squat. That’s why he’s there – to prove there aren’t any ghosts.’
‘But how does that make sense?’ asked Susan. ‘Why hire someone to investigate a haunted house if you don’t believe it’s haunted?’
Ashford grinned. ‘Because Ashford Hall has been a magnet for wackos for years, and I want all that bullshit put to rest. There’s been whole books written about the place and the ghost that’s supposed to haunt it. Some kook even held a séance there when it was still a pile of ruins.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘I want Ashford Hall to be a centre for serious scientific research just as much as you do, Andrew. And if it means I have to hire Maxim to put a stop to all that crap, then so be it.’
‘Well,’ said Andrew, only partly mollified, ‘I suppose that’s something. But just to be clear, Mr Ashford, I’d still rather they weren’t here at all.’
Susan darted Andrew an angry look as if to say, what do you mean you’d rather?
Ashford must have seen Susan’s expression, because his gaze shifted towards her. ‘And how about you, Doctor MacDonald? Do you share Andrew’s feelings on the matter?’
‘My feeling is that it’s none of my business,’ she said, ‘as long as they don’t interfere with our ability to do our work. And I don’t see any reason to think they would.’
Ashford turned back to Andrew. ‘So if Susan feels that way, then there’s really no problem, is there?’
Andrew’s jaw worked as if he was eating something spectacularly sour. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said in a slightly strangled voice.
‘Of course,’ said Ashford, looking back at Susan, ‘all of this would be moot if you’d produced any tangible results.’ He smiled at her suddenly frozen expression. ‘I have been keeping tabs on your daily updates, you know.’
‘We’re considering the possibility our experiment is suffering from some kind of localised interference,’ she managed to say.
‘Any idea what that might be?’
‘I don’t know,’ Susan admitted, hating the finality of the words. ‘Not yet. We’re working on it, obviously.’
Ashford stared past his computer’s lens for what felt like a very long time. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Cards on the table. Business-wise, I’m taking a hit right now, and while my pockets are deep, they aren’t bottomless.’
‘Does that mean you aren’t going to finish building Ashford Hall?’ asked Andrew.
‘No, no,’ said Ashford, ‘that’s all going ahead. In fact, the renovators are due to make a last-minute push to get everything finished as soon as possible. No, I’m just reminding you that there’s only so long I can keep pouring money into your research without solid, reproducible results.’
‘Then... How long do we have?’ asked Susan.
‘Let’s see where we are a week from now,’ said Ashford. He smiled broadly. ‘Look, I’m still really excited about the work you’re doing. And even if you don’t achieve everything you hoped to, there’s at least a couple of things in there my guys say could be worked into solid patents.’ His hand reached out towards them. ‘Sayonara.’
Ashford disappeared from the screen and Andrew slammed the lid of his MacBook down. ‘Arrogant prick,’ he muttered.
‘The other day you were acting like you were on first name terms.’
‘Because he’s made of money,’ he replied tonelessly. ‘Endless amounts of money. Yet he’s as tight-fisted as the worst of them.’
‘I don’t know if I can figure this out in just a week,’ she told him.
Andrew laughed hollowly. ‘Starting to miss academia yet?’
‘More than I expected,’ she admitted. ‘What did you make of that story of his, about Bernard being here to disprove a ghost? I don’t get that.’
Andrew nodded. ‘I admit it sounded fishy to me.’
‘I know why,’ said Rajam.
Susan glanced around to see him squeezed into a corner by a desk, tapping a
t his own laptop. ‘Something you heard from your friend Angus?’
‘Bernard’s here because the security staff keep quitting,’ Rajam explained. ‘I met Angus at the Grey Lady for a pint last night and he told me all about it. Seems they were always hearing things moving around at night, or hearing disembodied voices. Apparently the agency that supplies them is having to recruit staff from further and further away from here, because nobody local’s willing to come near the place.’
Andrew gave him a bug-eyed stare. ‘Please tell me you don’t believe in any of this nonsense.’
‘Me?’ Rajam made a snorting sound. ‘Of course not. I haven’t seen or heard a bloody thing.’
‘In fairness,’ said Andrew, ‘you walk around in a haze of deafening House music. You wouldn’t notice a 747 landing on top of us.’
‘I haven’t heard anything either, I must admit,’ said Susan.
‘Well of course you haven’t,’ said Andrew, giving her a perplexed look. ‘Because there’s nothing to bloody hear.’
Friday July 3rd 2020
‘Whatever it is,’ Rajam said the next morning, ‘it’s nothing to do with the Beast.’ He nodded at his laptop. ‘Right, Bethany?’
Rajam sat perched on a stool next to the Beast, a collection of custom-built and precision-engineered widgets, mirrors and lasers mounted on a low table in a dedicated room next to the office he shared with Susan and Andrew. He had wedged his laptop onto one corner of the table, and had been running a series of diagnostic tests since he’d arrived that morning. A window on his screen showed his opposite number, Bethany, in California. She was in charge of maintaining an identical experimental setup codenamed Beauty.
There was a delay of about a second before Bethany’s reply. ‘Everything reads fine, Doctor MacDonald,’ she said to Susan, who sat on another stool next to Rajam’s. ‘I guess whatever the problem is, it’s nothing to do with either Beauty or Beast.’ She paused for a moment, then leaned closer to the lens before asking – ‘Doctor MacDonald, have you heard anything about the Chinese?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Well... there’s a rumour Xin Ping is putting together his own retrocausality experiment that sounds an awful lot like yours. I don’t know if it’s because they got wind of what we’ve been doing, or if they were already working on the same kind of thing.’
Susan fought the urge to swear out loud. ‘I didn’t know. But thanks for the heads-up, Bethany.’
Bethany smiled the cheery smile of someone who didn’t have the weight of a multimillion dollar experiment resting on her shoulders. ‘If there’s anything else you think we should try...?’
Susan shook her head. ‘Not that I can think of.’ What a shame, she thought, that they didn’t hand out Nobel prizes for groundbreaking experiments that almost worked.
‘Maybe it’s the ghost,’ Rajam said to Susan with a grin. ‘Maybe it’s the one causing our transmissions to decohere.’
‘Ghost?’ asked Bethany with renewed interest. ‘What ghost?’
‘He’s kidding,’ Susan said quickly. ‘Thanks for your help, Bethany.’ She closed the lid of Rajam’s computer and gave him a stern look.
‘What?’ Rajam demanded, looking hurt. ‘I was only joking.’
‘Try joking like that when Andrew’s around.’
Rajam winced. ‘Ouch. All right, so what now?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Apart from getting lunch, that is.’
‘Well,’ said Susan, ‘if this is anything like the movies, I go home and despair until a last-minute breakthrough drops into my head and saves the day.’
‘Nice idea,’ said Rajam. ‘Although the movies I watch have more kickboxing than conceptual breakthroughs.’
She stood, cuffing him lightly across the top of the head as she headed for the door. ‘And that, Rajam, is why you can never get a date.’
She left Rajam to get on with reconstructing the array components he’d pulled apart during their investigation. She opened her own laptop, only to find the battery charge was close to zero. She dug around in her backpack, but couldn’t find the power cord.
‘Rajam,’ she asked, looking back through the connecting door, ‘do we have any power cables lying about? I think I left mine at home.’
‘There’s a spare in my car,’ he said, putting a half-assembled component down. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘I could do with a walk. Give me your keys and I’ll go get it.’
She made her way back down the corridor to the top of the grand staircase, where the South, West and East Wings converged. She was about to make her way downstairs when she heard a loud bang coming from down the South Wing corridor.
She paused, her hand on the balustrade, but heard nothing more. Most likely it was the builders continuing their renovation work. The South Wing was the last part of the building to be finished. Despite their best efforts, it wouldn’t officially open until the autumn.
She found Rajam’s spare cable in the boot of his car, then realised she couldn’t see the builder’s van. If they weren’t here, then just who or what was making all the noise?
She went back inside, a prickle of uncertainty running up her spine as she looked up at the top of the staircase. Most likely one of the builders had gone off in the van to collect more supplies while the others got on with their work. Or possibly it was Bernard or one of the other parapsychologists, doing whatever it was they did.
Either of which was a perfectly reasonable explanation, yet the prickling in her skin only grew as she ascended the steps.
She heard another thump, like a sack of concrete being dropped somewhere down the South Wing corridor, then something that might have been a voice. She glanced back down at the reception desk, still unmanned despite the recruitment agency’s promises. Well-organised thieves could have a field day in a place like Ashford Hall, with all the state-of-the-art equipment still sitting around in shrink-wrap and waiting to be installed – especially if they didn’t know people were already working there.
She took a step down the corridor. ‘Hello?’ she called out, her voice echoing in the dusty silence.
Then she heard whistling and felt herself relax. It was probably Bernard or one of his assistants. Perhaps, she thought, this would be a good opportunity to say hello without Andrew present.
She made her way further down the corridor, passing more empty and unfinished labs and offices. A paint-stained ladder stood next to a wall, loops of fibre-optic cable as well as hammers and other tools lying next to it. She came to a balcony at the end, more stairs leading down to the lower floor and the gardens.
The whistling was coming from a door immediately to the left of the balcony, and it stopped when she stepped towards it.
‘Hello?’ she said again.
She looked inside the room, but there was no one there. She stared around, bewildered. A trick of the acoustics, she thought. New floorboards stood leaning against walls that were still scarred with graffiti from the days Ashford Hall had been a ruin. Plywood sheets had been laid over naked joists so that workmen could move around inside without putting their feet through the plaster beneath. She also saw a pair of shotgun mikes, mounted on angled boom poles in opposite corners.
She had stepped further into the room, balancing on one of the plywood sheets, when she heard a sharp, indrawn breath from just behind her shoulder...
She gasped and turned quickly enough that one of the plywood sheets slid out from under her feet. She lost her balance and fell onto all fours, her right foot slipping into a gap between two joists. Her shoe came loose, tumbling into the gap.
Shit. She stared around, her heart thundering in her chest. There was no one there.
And yet she’d heard something.
It’s the wind, dummy, she told herself. It finds its way inside old places like this.
Except, she remembered, this wasn’t really an old building at all. It was just built on the ruins of one.
She pushed one of the plywood
boards aside until she could see where her shoe had fallen. As she reached down for it she noticed something glinting faintly in the shadows deep between the joists. It looked like a piece of jewellery, resting against an old and rotten joist just where it met one of the walls.
She wondered how long it had been lying there, waiting to be found. She pulled her shoe back on, then leaned down again, reaching for the trinket. It took an effort to snag it, half-hidden as it was behind a brick.
She squatted on the plywood, examining her newfound treasure: a simple silver bracelet of the kind you’d find being sold for a few pounds in a high-street jewellers. She felt strangely disappointed it hadn’t turned out to be something more obviously valuable. She examined the bracelet more closely, finding it consisted of a slightly curved plate with a thin chain attached.
She stood back up and pushed the bracelet into her pocket to examine later.
‘Find something?’
Susan stiffened, and turned to see the short-haired woman who had been with Professor Bernard watching her with some curiosity from the doorway.
‘No,’ Susan lied immediately, then wondered why she had.
The woman nodded. ‘I thought perhaps you had,’ she said. Her accent sounded Polish.
‘Metka, isn’t it?’ asked Susan, making her way carefully across the plywood boards before extending a hand. ‘We met the other day.’
Metka nodded. ‘Doctor Wrigley seemed very upset.’
Susan allowed herself a small chuckle. ‘He’s really not that bad.’
Metka nodded at the joists. ‘You were looking for something?’
Susan smiled sheepishly. ‘I heard someone whistling. I came to see who it was and I slipped and lost my shoe. I thought it might be the builders, but...’
‘Ah.’ Metka nodded, then frowned. ‘Builders are not here today. No one is here.’