A camera.
He gave it the middle-finger before following Lorna up the ladder and into the loft, the torch tucked beneath his armpit as he climbed.
“You’d better be right about this,” Lorna said as she moved aside to allow Peter room. “A loft seems like an awfully silly place to bury the body of a baby, especially when the Hathaways had such a bloody great big garden.”
Peter pulled himself up into the cold room and retracted the ladders, not that the master’s ghost would need them if he wanted to continue the pursuit. “I’ve already been here,” Peter said, and technically he had, albeit in a dream. “I’m right about this. The dead baby is over there.”
He flicked on the torch, and saw the last thing he expected to see.
“Are those tangy cheese Doritos?” Lorna said, motioning to the mountain of orange foil bags.
Peter twitched nervously. “I…I think they are!” My arch-nemesis, we meet again. I kicked you once, and yet here you are, taunting me with your powdery goodness. Well not today, old friend. Never again. “Clear them aside,” he said. “We don’t have time for this now. We’ve got a dead baby to unbury.”
As quickly as they could, they moved the mountain of corn snacks. Peter did most of the moving with his eyes shut tight, lest he succumb to temptation. He could feel Lorna’s eyes upon him as they worked, for she must have thought him a right muppet. Who gets addicted to Doritos?
Everyone! Everyone is the answer to that question.
“It’s right here,” Peter said, tossing the last orange bag aside. He felt around the floorboards, searching for a loose panel. “Here, hold this.” He handed the torch to Lorna, who trained it on the floor so that Peter could see what he was doing.
“Anything?” Lorna looked worried. What if he was wrong? What if she had placed her faith in this complete stranger, only to discover that she would have been much better off trying to bribe the undead master with promises of bi-weekly blowjobs and a perpetually clean mansion?
Just then, one of the boards lifted a few millimetres. “AH!” Peter said. “This is it! This is where it’s buried.”
“Hurry up,” Lorna said. “I’m freezing my tits off here.”
“You will be!” said a voice from the darkness behind.
Lorna swept the torch around in a wide arc. There, emerging through the loft hatch as if he was standing on some sort of spectral elevator, was Roger Hathaway. “I see you found the loft,” he said, scanning the place. “How very clever of them to put it on the uppermost floor, don’t you think. It’s so you always know where to find it.”
“Stay the fuck away from us!” Lorna screeched, and for a moment Peter was strangely proud of her. They had only, that night, discovered the existence of real ghosts, and here she was, already swearing at one.
Now the master’s ghost was hovering a foot or so above the floorboards, sneering. “There is no escape for you,” he said. “You are mine now, and you will die here in this loft, in this house, and I won’t take no for answer.”
“NO!” Peter said.
It’s not too late to make the blowjob deal, Lorna thought.
“YES!” Roger said. “Now stay still, for this might sting a little.” He went to move forwards, the ectoplasm dripping from his person like some celebrity stepping out of a gunge-tank on a Saturday morning kids’ show.
Peter continued to pull at the recalcitrant floorboard, knowing that it was either now or never.
“PETER!” Lorna screeched. She had closed her eyes, and was expecting the worst to happen when…
“Ugh!” The master stopped moving toward them, his arms stretched out either side of him like some ethereal Jesus sans cross. His face was contorted into something approximating panic. “What the—”
Two shapes, much smaller than the master, materialised either side of him and were pulling his arms outwards; a third gossamer figure appeared behind the master and seemed to have him in some sort of WWE chokehold.
“Rose!” Peter gasped. “Veronica! Belle!” He couldn’t believe it, and neither, judging from the look on his face, could the master. He wore the expression of someone that had just tasted their first scotch bonnet pepper.
Lorna slowly opened one eye. “Is that—”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “It is.”
“Do it, Peter,” said Rose Hathaway. She was struggling to keep her husband under control.
“Why do you talk in italics?” Peter asked. “You know what, never mind.” He prised the loose floorboard up, his fingers bleeding by the time he was done. There, nestled in a blanket, lay an unseen shape, though it was roughly baby skeleton size, which was, on this occasion and not many others, a good thing.
“Hurry!” Belle Hathaway screamed as her father flung her across the room as if she were a rag-doll. Luckily, Veronica and Rose managed to cling on and keep him on the other side of the loft, which was, Peter thought, the best place for him.
Reaching into the small hidey-hole, Peter retrieved the filthy blanket and placed it down on the floorboards in front of his knees.
“Don’t you open that!” bellowed Roger. “Don’t you DARE open…oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re going to, aren’t you?”
Peter, ignoring the pleas of the master, began to unravel the blanket. Lorna watched through her fingers, like a child watching a horror movie, or its parents having intercourse for the very first time.
“PETER!” Rose screamed. Roger had slipped between her arms and pushed the remaining daughter aside.
“Don’t you fucking open it!” Roger surged up into the air, his entire body darkening. The air in the room thickened, making it almost impossible for Peter and Lorna to breathe.
Peter saw bones, a skull, and what looked like a small porcelain doll, buried amongst the blanket. He reached in and snatched up the tiny skeleton. Thrusting it into the air, he said, “Go to HELL Hathaway!” If he’d had more time, he perhaps would have come up with something more ingenious and memorable, but time was of the essence. Besides, this wasn’t some Schwarzenegger film. There was no chopper to get to, just a tent at the bottom of the hill.
“Bugger!” said the master. A blinding light filled the loft. Lorna switched the torch off, for there was no point in wasting the batteries. Roger Hathaway’s wraithlike body came apart; his face stretched; his perfectly-waxed moustache fell off his face and crawled away to a corner. In special-effects terms, it would have won an award. After a few moments of utter chaos, of bright lights and pained screams, everything fell completely silent. The darkness returned, and Lorna flicked the torch back on.
“Is he gone?” she asked, breathlessly.
Peter glanced around the room, unaware that he was still holding the baby skeleton up like some sort of sick trophy. “I’d like to say yes,” he said, “but usually in these situations, he’ll pop out for one last scare. That’s how it works, anyway.”
Fortunately, this was real life and not some shitty movie or sub-par novel. Roger Hathaway was gone. Peter could feel it. The atmosphere all around was less dense; it was no longer like swimming through a vat of honey.
“Look!” Lorna said, gripping onto Peter’s arm for the umpteenth time that night.
At the far side of the loft, three white shapes hovered, their outlines merging and separating as they moved toward where Peter and Lorna sat surrounded by Tangy Cheese Doritos multipacks.
Peter watched their approach, and it was then that his hand almost froze. Glancing toward the tiny skeleton he saw another light, this one much brighter, emerge from its ribcage. It loitered momentarily before floating casually across the room, where it met up with the approaching three shapes.
“Thank you, Peter,” said the voice of Rose Hathaway, for she had no lips now, nor a face to speak of.
Peter saluted. God only knows why.
The four shapes – Belle, Veronica, Rose, and Baby Hathaway – faded like farts on a tube-train, and pretty soon there was no evidence that they had ever been there to begin with.
Peter nodded. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said, climbing to his feet and dusting himself down.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we just let the perpetrator of this horrible crime leave the house,” Peter said. “Do you know what the British justice system is like? We could be looking at five-to-ten for aiding and abetting. And that’s if they believe our story in the first place, I mean—”
“You’re such a pessimist,” Lorna said. Peter wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw a smile curling at the corners of her lips. “Have some faith.”
“Faith?” Peter said as he arrived at the loft stairs. “That was what got me into this mess in the first shagging place. Hey, I wonder if we’re still getting paid for this. Technically we should. It’s not our fault that the place was actually haunted.”
“That’s more like it,” Lorna said. “Chin up, don’t let the bastards get you down, and so on and so forth.”
Peter sighed. He hoped she was right. How was he going to pepper Ed with headbutts if he was behind bars for the murder of six-and-a-half celebrities?
28
The canvas studio was silent. A crowd of people, Callum Edmonds, Lovecraft and Lovecraft, Derrick Strunt, Samantha Bollinger, Noddy Holder, and a couple that wouldn’t even make it onto the end credits due to being utterly nondescript, watched in awe as the events unfolded on the monitors. What had they just witnessed? The impossible? Something that would be talked about for years to come? Proof that there was indeed an afterlife; that the Lutz family hadn’t just been off their tits on acid when all hell was breaking loose in the Amityville house; that the Enfield poltergeist wasn’t just a coincidental draught, a dodgy voice-box, and a case of bad plumbing.
Ghost were real.
Not only were they real, but a lowly ITV7 crew had caught four of the spooky bastards on tape.
“Please tell me we got all that on tape,” Callum said, barely able to breathe.
“Of course we did,” Nev said. “Right Trev?”
Trev flicked a few switches on the console in front of him. “Erm, on a scale of one to ten, how pissed off would you all be if I told you that when the system rebooted, it wasn’t set to automatically record?”
“Pretty pissed off,” Callum said.
“Oh,” Trev said.
“Oh,” Nev added.
Callum Edmonds kicked Noddy Holder in the shin and said something in what sound like Aramaic.
“Ow, yer bastard!” Noddy said, stamping hard on the producer’s foot with a size twelve glittery platform.
“Ow!” Callum said, hopping around the tent as if the grass beneath his feet were molten lava. This went on for a few minutes, one person stamping on the other, until the huge doors to the house swung open on multiple screens, and the author and the ex-swimmer appeared between the door-frame, looking tired, beat-up, and ready for home. Inside the studio tent, everything fell silent once again.
“Do we have any Doritos left?” Callum said, smacking his lips and glancing about the place.
*
The morning breeze was beautiful as it brushed past them. The previous night’s rain had left, in its wake, the wonderful scent of freshly-mown grass. Under any other circumstances, Peter would have felt relaxed, at peace with the world, but it was hard to let it all go when you’d just almost being ripped apart by an evil spirit in a swanky suit.
“What do we do now?” Lorna said. She sounded exhausted; her eyes were barely open.
“I guess we see if we can leave this place,” Peter said. “I mean, usually it’s ladies first, and all that, but…”
“You can fuck right off,” Lorna said, playfully jabbing him in the arm. “We go together.”
“Okay, together,” Peter concurred.
“I just have one question,” said Lorna.
“Shoot.”
“Since when did writers become celebrities?” She grinned. “I mean, you make shit up for a living, and you’re all pissed up most of the time. That doesn’t make you famous; that makes you Sarah Palin.”
“Can we just do this?” Peter said, turning to face the open door.
Lorna exhaled deeply. “Okay, I’m ready.” She gripped his hand tightly. So tight that his knuckles whitened and his pinky fingernail fell off.
“One…” said Peter, “…two…three.”
They took a step forward.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Peter poured a glass of lemonade and returned to his desk, aware that a flashing cursor awaited him, and that the only way to make it go away was to bleeding well type something. Ever since the events at Hell House, he’d struggled to commit one word to paper. The psychologist assured him that it wouldn’t last forever, that his mojo would return once he’d come to terms with what had happened there in that mansion at the edge of the forest.
Come to terms with it? Nobody believed a word of it. A maniac had somehow got into the house was the official verdict. Tabloid headlines ranged from the tautogrammatical – “Hell House Homicide Horror!” – to the absurd – “Hathaway Hell House Killer Gets Away With Murder, Abducted by Aliens After Buggering Sheep in Field!” It wasn’t enough that each of their stories matched up; people just didn’t believe (or want to believe) in ghosts, evil or otherwise. Like most things, you had to be there to truly understand what had happened, and unfortunately his and Lorna’s word, and the word of the dozen or so ITV7 crew-people that had been there that morning a little over six months ago, didn’t count for shit.
“Do you think today’s the day?” said a voice from the hallway. Peter glanced up to see Lorna Giffard, still steaming from the shower, a white towel covering only her bottom half. She was smiling. God, he loved that smile.
Peter turned back to the screen, watched the cursor blink once or twice before starting to type. When the words were there, tangible things and not just thoughts in his head, he smiled.
SURVIVING HELL HOUSE
By Peter Kane
“You know what?” he said, turning his attention back to the only woman who had ever truly understood him. “I think it is.”
THE END
Celebrity Hell House Page 17