Night After Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘But you didn’t feel that when you first went in? When the worst thing in there was elder wood.’

  ‘No. You’re right. I didn’t.’

  ‘Which suggests there’s something in there – something negative, let’s just call it negative – that wasn’t there when you first went in. Alone.’

  ‘That’s a cranky thing to say, Grayle.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You still connected with Marcus Bacton?’

  ‘You remember him?’

  ‘I course I remember him. And how you couldn’t use my story because his magazine was closing down. I never forget a crank.’ She looks suddenly forlorn. ‘And, yeah, I know when I go back to that cottage, with my ill-gotten gains from Hunter-Gatherer, it’ll probably mean bugger all. All that planting fruit trees, finding a nice guy to help pick the apples, that won’t happen. I might go back and they’ll break down my resolve, those bastards in the hunt. Or kill me. Like Alison.’

  She laughs, a little shrilly.

  ‘So don’t go back,’ Grayle says. ‘Learn a lesson from Knap Hall.’ She waves the honey jar. ‘Let’s see if they have one of these we can actually get into.’

  She finds Jo Shepherd in the live gallery, watching Ashley Palk talking to Cindy.

  Ashley going, ‘Let me say that I didn’t start out as a sceptic. As a wee girl, I was fascinated by the supernatural. And UFOs. Didn’t draw much distinction between them. I used to think it was an adult conspiracy. That adults knew the truth about the things that frightened us and when we grew up all would be clear.’

  Something of Ersula in Ashley, Grayle thinks.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Cindy says, ‘the older we get, the more uncertain everything becomes. There is always a period, during childhood, when everything seems quite clear.’

  ‘Children don’t believe in the same way, Cindy. A ghost is a special effect. They know that a special effects department can do anything now. So a ghost – in the way that ghosts are allegedly experienced – is a rather inferior special effect.’

  ‘But surely, part of the ghost experience is the sensation evoked by the encounter. Something special effects cannot yet replicate. Big Other, if you like.’

  Jo says, ‘I worked with him every week on the National Lottery, and I still don’t know to what extent he’s for real. I still don’t know if he’s just a transvestite or a proper transsexual. I don’t know what bits he has under his skirt. And I don’t really know what a shaman is.’

  ‘Someone who mediates between the tribe and its ancestors on a spiritual level.’

  ‘Like a medium?’

  ‘Only less cosy. You’re usually not thinking of ancestors in the sense of like your great-uncle, your grandma. Maybe localized energies to which we can turn in times of crisis. It’s not so crazy. Some people choose to see it more in terms of psychology than religion.’

  ‘Always a get-out, Grayle.’

  ‘But the point is that a shaman’s essentially a loner. Someone on the periphery. Often an outcast. Shunned because he’s neither one thing nor the other. Both feared and despised. Unless he works in light entertainment.’

  ‘Anyway, we’ll see a lot of him tonight. He gets to tell his ghost story.’

  ‘Live?’

  ‘Leo thinks he’s what we need right now.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  Grayle looks down at the seated Jo. The worst of what she just said is that Cindy live is not someone accessible. She won’t be able to consult Cindy at all tonight. Won’t be able to tell him about Poppy Stringer or Jess Taylor.

  Jo doesn’t look up.

  ‘I think it means that before the night’s out,’ she says heavily, ‘Cindy gets to talk to the dead.’

  55

  Old and twisty lane

  ‘AN IMPORTANT PART of their working lives, you see,’ he says softly, ‘was the management of death.’

  He pauses, looking from face to face, and a camera follows him around the semicircle. They’ve all been asked, in a Matthew Barnes recorded message, to wear dark clothes tonight. And have generally complied. This means you can see only their faces in the firelight, which makes you really look at these faces. Normally, when you first meet people, you observe their taste in clothes, hairstyles, adornments. In this light, it’s the real people, all faces naked, now that the woman with the sapphire in her nose has been removed.

  None of them as compelling as the face of the man talking. A man in… late middle-age? Grayle realizes she doesn’t know. He could be fifty, he could be approaching seventy. He’s outside of normal time. Or something.

  ‘I use the word “undertaker”,’ he says, ‘as distinct from the term “funeral director”. Always do more for you, they would, the old undertakers, than today’s funeral directors with their coffin-catalogues and their plush reception rooms with the pot plants and the pastel walls. And “undertaker” is so full of an unintended profundity.’

  His accent is Welsh at its cosiest, the Welsh of the old mining valleys in the south. But the Wales he’s talking about is the wilder Wales, further north and further west where, it seems, he ended up spending a significant part of his childhood.

  ‘So think of the Fychan brothers as farmers and undertakers. In the old way. They made coffins from local timber, and they carved headstones from local stone. They had their workshops in the outbuildings at the family farm. A hill farm, this was, on a ridge beyond Machynlleth. Most impressive against a blood-red dawn, when it would look like an extension of the rocks themselves.’

  Grayle sees a sardonic grin on Rhys Sebold’s thin, firelit face. A craggy face tonight; he still hasn’t shaved. Now his head is sunk into the blackness of his chest and it’s being slowly and sceptically shaken as the monk-faced man talks of the Fychan brothers and a relationship with death that went back generations.

  When Cindy smiles… that smile seems almost calculated to induce unease. He can be very funny, but his smile is rarely part of that.

  ‘My parents, see… they did not find it comfortable to spend too much time in the company of the Fychans. We kept our holiday caravan in the farthest corner of their field and my mother would not go alone past their buildings. Not even in full daylight. Which would have troubled the Fychans, had they known, for they were kindly people.’

  Ozzy Ahmed leans forward to put another log on the fire. It’s an oak log, heavier than he expected, Grayle figures, and he drops it. Raises an apologetic hand and leaves the log rocking on the hearth.

  The fallen monk smiles, in his accommodating way.

  ‘I suppose that what did it for my mother was hearing a story in the local pub. Or it might have been the post office. These were the days, you understand, when every village had a post office and a pub, and there was always time to chat. And my mother was told the story of how the Fychans were given notice of an impending client.’

  Usually Emrys, it was. Grayle’s heard this before. Emrys Fychan, who had been the sickly one in the family. Attacks of asthma – well, not good for a farmer, with the hay, or a carpenter, with the dust, so Emrys would do the books, the accounts, and the cooking. He never married, nor formed an attachment, so nobody was ever there when he awoke in the night. Usually to the sound of sawing.

  Cindy leans forward, and you can see the shadow of his arm, making the sawing motion, up and down.

  ‘A slow and rhythmic sawing in the little stone workshop across the yard. And a light in there. Well, the first time he hears it – little more than a boy, he is – up he gets and down the stairs he goes and makes a tentative journey through the summer night towards the window of the workshop, where a small light gleams – the softest white light. Well…’

  Ashley Palk is sitting in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, hands clasped around a knee. She’s enjoying this.

  Cindy opens up his hands.

  ‘… no one there, of course. And when he reaches the window there’s no light. And the sound of the sawing has ceased. Gone. And the work
shop door, of course, is locked. And so he returns – rather troubled as you might imagine – to his bed. And the next time he’s awakened it’s by an urgent banging on the farmhouse door. Samuel Jones, it is, the farrier, with the news of the sudden death of his father in the night.’

  He leans back.

  ‘In the course of one summer I would be told many such stories. Mostly by the Fychans themselves. A long-ago summer. It was only the second day of our holiday in the caravan when my father decided we should walk out over the hills to Staylittle. Not a particularly difficult walk on a fine summer morning, but here’s Idris Fychan at the gate – a big man, grey beard and a very old cap like a broken slate. And Idris is moving the air with his hands. “Not the day for it, Mr Lewis.” And my mother, who has made up a special picnic, laughs him away, and Idris sniffs and shrugs and looks a little sad. And, of course, my mother it is who slips down a crag, smooth as glass, and breaks an ankle, and me who is sent running back to the farm to summon an ambulance from Machynlleth.’

  He tells them how the holiday came to a premature end – for his parents, at least. How his mother who, he later learned, was pregnant at the time with his sister Carys, was taken home to Merthyr by his father. Travelling without Sydney, as he was then. His father, worried he would not be able to cope, had accepted the offer by the wife of Idris Fychan to look after the boy for a few days until things were organized.

  ‘Well, the few days turned into a few weeks. Until the end of the school holidays, in fact. I was twelve years old and learned more in those weeks than in all the rest of my schooling. And years later went back to the Fychans for more advanced tuition.’

  ‘In what?’ Rhys Sebold asks. ‘The telling of tall stories?’

  ‘Learning to be what I am. For my sins. And they are many.’

  The camera lingers in the honey light, exploring the wooden panels, the lofty inglenook and a solid chess table for the drinks. A nice shot of five silhouettes grouped around the monkish man as he rises and straightens his tweed skirt.

  ‘What I am,’ he says sadly, again.

  Grayle’s alone in her micro-cabin with a TV.

  No multi-views tonight. She’s been thrown out of the stable. A live broadcast needs too many people, working like a machine.

  They’ll come for her if and when they need her. It’s strange watching alone on a single screen in a prefabricated cupboard in a low-lit village above the house, the dirty lantern. Which is in here now. Odd how a single screen, after so many, concentrates the mind.

  The phone rings on the desk.

  ‘He was a little sod,’ Paul Swinton says. ‘Got beaten up a few times for it, but he couldn’t stop himself. Smart remarks, you know? He could always hurt big kids with his tongue more than they could hurt him with their fists.’

  ‘That’s talent,’ Grayle says.

  She tried to get Swinton earlier, before the programme started, but his phone was engaged and she ended up leaving her number on his machine. Is he calling back now, nearly ten thirty, just to show he’s not watching Ozzy?

  ‘We used to be big mates. I went to his wedding. I was almost his best man, but then he got Neil Gill, instead, who he used to write comedy scripts with, and we drifted apart. He was a big star, and I was just a maths teacher at his old school. He always hated maths.’

  ‘Mr Swinton,’ Grayle says, ‘we were very disturbed to read your email.’

  ‘I didn’t want to write it, but Dave Turner was a good man. One of the best, and there’s no way he liked little boys, not in that way. Not in any way, now I come to think of it, he was an old-fashioned teacher.’

  ‘You know why Ozzy Ahmed might’ve made that up about him?’

  ‘Like I say, I’ve had nothing to do with Austin for years.’

  ‘Anybody you can think of who might shed some light on it? See, we rely on the residents to tell the truth.’

  ‘He did lie. Quite a lot, no doubt about that. If he thought a lie was funnier than the truth, he’d lie.’

  ‘That kind of figures. But doesn’t make me happy.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re taking it seriously.’

  ‘More seriously than you know. If he’s lying about this, he could be lying about other things.’

  She has his confidence.

  ‘Have you spoken to Neil Gill? They don’t work together much any more, but I think they’re still mates.’

  ‘You know that for sure?’

  ‘I’m still in touch with Neil. He was at school with us. He should’ve been with us and the skull that night, but he had a cold. At least he said he had a cold. I think he just didn’t want to do it. He never liked that skull.’

  *

  Grayle notes that Ashley Palk is now regarding Cindy with what looks almost like affection.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Lewis. Are you on a retainer with the Welsh Tourist Board, or is it more informal?’

  The reply takes a while to come.

  ‘Ms Palk. All too clear, it is, that your knowledge of the new Wales is distressingly scant. In my experience, the Wales Tourist Board is wary of such primitive throwbacks as the Fychan brothers. Does not invite people to Wales to be intimidated. Wrongly, in my view, mind – a certain kind of English visitor relishes the sinister. But there we are.’

  He looks around.

  ‘The Fychans’ parlour was not unlike this room, in age, at least, though much smaller and more rudimentary. Walls of rubble stone, an ancient, faded rug over cracked flags. The house was reached by an old and twisty lane. Some say that spirit-paths are straight, but the Fychans found that it Often helps to disorient them.’

  ‘Who?’ Roger Herridge asks. ‘The spirits?’

  ‘The ashen husks of the departed are rarely to be welcomed.’

  ‘This is such bullshit,’ Rhys Sebold says.

  ‘But, Rhys, it’s why we’re here.’ Helen Parrish is on her cushion on the edge of the ingle with a small glass of white wine, distantly amused. ‘As nobody’s given us a clue about what’s supposed to haunt this house—’

  ‘NOTHING haunts this house except us.’

  ‘—should we not be not be trying to find out? Earning our money?’

  ‘Come on then.’ Rhys is up on his long legs. ‘Come on, then, spirits. Bring green bile from my lips. Spin my head. Possess me.’

  ‘Let’s not descend to the juvenile.’ Ashley uncrosses her legs, sits up, thoughtful. ‘Cindy, tell me, if your friends the Fychans were here now, what might they do to contact the spirits?’

  ‘But they wouldn’t, see. The shaman is not a medium. Consider it presumptuous, he would. Let the individual dead lie.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Rhys says irritably. ‘So much incredible bullshit.’

  ‘Let’s not condemn it all out of hand,’ Ashley says.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ Helen looks up, perhaps just slightly tipsy. ‘I thought you’d been condemning it all out of hand for over a decade.’

  ‘I’m always open to correction.’

  ‘Ashley,’ Ozzy Ahmed says silkily, ‘I didn’t know you were into correction. I myself—’

  Ashley raises hands for hush, looks around, face to face, ending at Cindy’s.

  ‘Should we make an effort?’

  ‘Never claimed to be a medium.’ Cindy straightens his skirt. ‘A little too cosy for me. Too drawing room.’

  ‘Table turning?’ Ashley turns her chair to face his. ‘Ectoplasm? Didn’t you once produce ectoplasm through the beak of… what’s his name?’

  ‘Kelvyn Kite. Left him in his box, up in my room. Has a tendency to be confrontational. That was comedy, Ashley. Not always useful in our situation.’

  ‘Well, let’s see what we can find.’

  Ashley comes elegantly to her feet and into the ingle, prodding a smouldering log to one side, a camera closing in on her hands reaching for the handle of a small iron door in the stone. Grayle doesn’t even remember a door in there.

  ‘I noticed when we came in from the dining room tonight…’ Ashley’s voice cr
isp from the personal mic as she messes with a metal latch, ‘… that the wee cupboard in here, the door was open. I think one of us was meant to notice, don’t you? Here we are.’

  As Ashley emerges, arms full, Grayle’s getting a sense of sequence, almost scripted drama. Which is not possible.

  Helen says, ‘God, what the hell is that?’

  Ashley brings it out, lowers it to the chess table.

  ‘Oh, that is a rather lovely one,’ Cindy murmurs.

  It fills Grayle’s screen: a wheel of what looks like grey stone, covered in glass or perspex. A pentagram in its centre. Curly letters around its perimeter. Isolated words.

  One says, NO.

  Another says, GOODBYE.

  ‘I want to smash it already,’ Rhys Sebold says.

  56

  The haunted

  THE GLIDING TRIANGLE on which you place your forefinger – the planchette – has a hole through which a captive letter or symbol can be viewed.

  Cindy watches little Ashley, so pert in her black knitted dress, touching it with an ovalled nail.

  ‘I’d say five people, maximum, can fit a fingertip on here.’

  ‘Making me the sixth,’ Rhys Sebold says. ‘How thoughtful of it.’

  ‘I’d be happy to stand down for you, Rhys,’ Ashley says.

  ‘You will not, Ms Palk. This was your idea. If you simply want to prove that it doesn’t work, well, fine. I’ll watch.’

  If, Cindy thinks, Mr Sebold can detach his gaze from her breasts.

  ‘There is actually a simple way to prove it doesn’t work,’ Ashley says. ‘Unfortunately, it only applies where you have the wee bits of paper in a circle, with a letter inscribed on each one. If the letters are visible to the participants, it will indeed begin to spell out credible messages. Turn the pieces of paper over, letters facing down, and its literacy is out the window.’